Tag Archives: Civilization

Everything in nature is intentional and useful

Everything in nature is intentional; therefore dreams must fulfill important roles in people’s lives — but how, in ordinary terms?

Even if we don’t consciously remember our dreams, we do get the message. Part of it will appear in our daily experience in one way or another — in our conversation or daily events.

Because dreams are such a perfect combination of stimuli from the inner environment and the exterior environment, other events are often used to trigger inner dream messages, just as the opposite occurs. And in a gathering of three people watching the same TV drama, say, each of them might be interpreting different portions of the program so that those portions correlate with their individual dreams of the night before, and serve to bring them their dream messages in ways they can accept.

Great discrimination is used to do that; for example, one newspaper item is noticed over others because a certain portion of that item represents some of the dream’s message. Another portion might come from a neighbor — but from the dreamer’s interpretation of the neighbor’s remarks, that further brings home the dream message. In such cases the individual will scarcely be aware that a dream is involved.

We might dream of going away on a long trip by car, only to find that a tire blew when we were driving too fast. We may never remember the dream. One way or another, however, we will hit upon some kind of situation — a portion of a TV drama, perhaps — in which a tire is blown. Or we will see an item of that nature in the internet, or we will hear a story, told directly or indirectly about the same kind of dilemma. The magnitude of the physical stimuli with which we are surrounded makes it possible, of course, for any given day. Even then, we might not recall the dream, but the situation itself as it comes to our attention might make us check our tires, decide to put off our trip, or instead lead us to inner speculation about whether we are going too fast in a certain direction for our own good at this time. But we will get the dream’s message.

Psychological objects

Objects just originate in man’s and woman’s imagination, there’s always a strong connection between objects and man’s and woman’s dreams. They act as symbols of inner reality, so it’s only natural that whether he/she is aware of it or not, man/woman perceives objects in such a fashion that they also stand for symbols that first originate in his/her dreams.

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This also has to do with large events, that we might for convenience’s sake think of for now as psychological objects — that is, events seen and recognized by large numbers of people in the same way that objects are.

The Christ drama is a case in point, where private and mass dreams were then projected outward into the historical context of time, and then reacted to in such a way that various people became exterior participants — but in a far larger mass dream that was then interpreted in the most literal of physical terms. Even while it was, it also got the message across, though the inner drama itself was not recalled; and as the dream merged with historical events, and it was interpreted by so many, its message also became distorted — or rather, it mixed and merged with other such dreams, whose messages were far different.

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Look at our nuclear-reactor troubles at the plant by Fukushima (Japan). The entire idea of nuclear power was first a dream — an act of the imagination of the part of private individuals — and then through fiction and the arts, a dream on the part of many people. Instantly, probabilities spun out from that dream in all directions, vast potential and dangers.

It was hardly a coincidence that this particular situation arrived in the social climate first of all portrayed in a movie.

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Nuclear power stands for power, plain and simple. Is it good or bad? It stands in man’s and woman’s dreams as belonging to God: the power of the universe. Man and woman has always considered oneself, in our terms as set apart from nature, so he/she must feel set apart from nature’s power — and there must be a great division in his/her dreams between the two. Nuclear energy in fact, then, comes as a dream symbol, and emerges into the world as something to be dealt with.

Fundamentalists think of nuclear power as a force that God might use, say, to destroy the world. That event in Japan means one thing to them. Some of the scientists equate nuclear power with man’s and woman’s great curiosity, and feel that they wrest this great energy from nature, smarter than their fellow men — so they read those events in their own way. The probabilities are still surging, of course, and in private and mass dreams people try out all kinds of endings for that particular story.

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All in all, millions of people are involved, who will be affected of course to one extent or another.

There is a tie-in, and it’s that the Christ drama happened as a result of man’s and woman’s dream, at least, of achieving brotherhood — a quiet, secure sense of consciousness, and a morality that would sustain him/her in the physical world.

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The Christ drama did splash over into historical reality. Man’s and woman’s fears of not achieving brotherhood, or not achieving a secure state of consciousness, or a workable morality, result in his/her dreams of destruction, however they are expressed. And indeed, the present physical event as it exists now at the energy plant Fukushima can easily be likened to — and is — a warning dream to change man’s and woman’s actions.

The people of Jonestown died of an epidemic of beliefs

The case was startling, because of the obvious suicidal acts. The poison was after all, left as evidence. Had the same number of people been found dead of a vicious disease — aids or whatever– the virus involved would have been the villain.

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We think of viruses as physical, and of thoughts as mental. We should know that thoughts also have their physical aspects in the body, and that viruses have their mental aspects in the body. At times we ask why an ailing body does not simply assert itself and use its healing abilities, throwing off the negative influence of a given set of beliefs and thoughts.

When we think of thoughts as mental and viruses as physical, the question is understandable. It is not just that thoughts influence the body, as of course they do; but each one of them represents a triggering stimulus, bringing about hormonal changes and altering the entire physical situation at any given time.

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Our physical body is, as an entity, the fleshed-out version –the physically alive version — of the body of our thoughts. It is not that our thoughts have a chemical reality besides their recognizable mental aspects. I will use an analogy. It is not the best, but I hope it will get the point across: It is as if our thoughts turned into the various appendages of our body. They have an invisible existence within our body as surely as viruses do. Our body is composed not only of the stuff within it that, say, X-rays or autopsies can reveal, but it also involves profound relationships, alliances and affiliations that nowhere physically show. Our thoughts are as physically pertinent to our body as viruses are, as alive and self-propagating, and they themselves form inner affiliations. Their vitality automatically triggers all of the body’s inner responses. When we think thoughts they are conscious. We think in sentences, or paragraphs, or perhaps in images. Those thoughts, as clearly as I can explain this, rise from inner components of which we are unaware.

When the thought, is thought, it is, say, broken down again to those components. Our thoughts have an emotional basis, also. The smallest cell within our body contributes to that emotional reality, and reacts instantly to our thoughts.

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In those terms, thoughts move far quicker of course than viruses. The action of the virus follows the thought. Each thought is registered biologically. Basically, when we have an immunity to a disease we have a mental immunity.

We think of viruses as evil, spreading perhaps from country to country, to “invade” scores of physical mechanisms. Now thoughts are “contagious.” We have natural immunity against all thoughts that do not fit in with our own purposes and beliefs, and naturally, we are “inoculated” with a wholesome trust and belief in our own thoughts above others. The old ideas of Voodooism recognized some of these concepts, but complicated and distorted them with fears of evil, psychic invasion, psychic killing, and so forth. We cannot divide, say, mental and physical health, nor can we divide a person’s philosophy from his bodily condition.

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While I say all of this about thoughts and viruses, remember the context of the discussion, for new information and insights are always available to an individual from sub-conscious and the body does indeed send its own signals.

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The people who died at Jonestown believed that they must die. They wanted to die. How could their thoughts allow them to bring about their [bodily deaths]? The question makes sense only if we do not realize that our thoughts are as physically a part of our body as viruses are.

Animals do not “think” of long lives or short lives…

But of a brilliant present, which in a way, compared to our framework, has no beginning or end. Time in those terms, does not exist for them — and in the deepest of terms, a life’s quality on a human scale cannot be judged primarily in terms of its length, either. Time is in the present for an animal, in a way its life was eternal to it, whether it lived 10 months or 10 years, or whatever.

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There is no such thing as a cat consciousness, basically speaking, or a bird consciousness. In those terms, there are instead simply consciousnesses that choose to take certain focuses.

I want to avoid tales of the transmigration of the souls of men to animals, say — a badly distorted version of something else entirely. If there is no consciousness ‘tailored’ to be a cat’s or a dog’s then there is no prepackaged, predestined, particular consciousness that is meant to be human, either.

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The cellular announcement is made that the strong possibility exist, for the birth and death of each cell is known to all cells in the world. Cellular communication is too fast for us to follow.

The quality of identity is far more mysterious than we understand, for we assign an identity in a blanket fashion, say, to each living thing. A dead cat for example exists in the following manner: ‘The units of consciousness that organized to form his/her identity as we knew it, still form that pattern — but not physically. The cat exists as itself in the greater living memory of its own ‘larger’ selfhood. Its organization from which it came.

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That identity remains vital, known to itself whether or not it is reactivated in our terms. This is not necessarily always the case — and there is great variation — but the cat identifies with ‘the larger organization’ of the litter [that is, with his brothers and sisters, all of whom may be also dead], and the consciousnesses of that litter are together. They may be forming a gestalt, where the litter’s consciousnesses will merge to form a new identity.

 

We could not live without viruses

Nor could our biological reality as we know it exist without viruses.

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Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule we think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. These — and I am putting it as simply as possible — take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. Viruses that are “deadly in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.

As an example from another field, consider poisons. Belladona can be quite deadly, yet small doses of it were known to aid the body in disease conditions.

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The viruses in the body have a social, cooperative existence. Their effects become deadly only under certain conditions. The viruses must be triggered into destructive activity, and this happens only at a certain point, when the individual involved is actively seeking either death or a crisis situation biologically.

The initial contagion in such cases is always emotional and mental. Social conditions are usually involved, so that an individual is, say, at the lower end of a poor social environment, a seeming victim of it, or in a situation where his individual values as a social member is severely weakened.

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In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. So of course the resulting diseases are infectious. To that degree they are social diseases. It is not so much that a virus, say, suddenly turns destructive — though it does — as it is that the entire cooperative structure within which all the viruses are involved becomes insecure and threatened.

Viruses mutate. Such is often the case. It seems quite scientific to believe in inoculations against such dangerous diseases — and certainly, scientifically, inoculations seem to work. People in our time right now are not plagued by smallpox, for example. Some cultures have believed that illnesses were caused by demons. Medicine men, through certain ceremonies, would try to rid the body of the demons — and those methods worked also. The belief system was tight and accepted, and it only began to fail when societies encountered “civilized views.”

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If we call the demons “negative beliefs,” however, then we have taken strides forward. People continue to die of diseases. Many of our scientific procedures, including inoculations, of themselves “cause” new diseases. It does not help a patient inoculated against smallpox and polio if [eventually] he/she dies as a result of his negative beliefs.

What I have said about viruses applies to all biological life. Viruses are “highly intelligent” — meaning that they react quickly to stimuli. They are responsive to emotional states. They are social and usually spread through person-to-person contact. This is why many people try to limit their exposure to these viruses by wearing things like a surgical-mask,” for example. By wearing face masks, and other things similar, people can reduce their chances of getting the virus and spreading it on to others. Their spread determines their scale of life. This usually varies considerably, and some can be inactive for centuries, and revive. They have extensive memory patterns, biologically imprinted. Some can multiply in the tens of thousands within seconds. They are in many ways the basis of biological life, but we are aware of them only when they show “a deadly face.”

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We are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle.

Paranoia and its manifestations

Paranoia is extremely interesting because it shows the ways in which private beliefs can distort events that connect the individual with other people. The events are “distorted.” yet while the paranoid is convinced that those events are valid, this does not change other people’s perception of the same happenings.

Paranoia is most commonly associated with intoxication and withdrawal symptoms from drugs, including alcohol and cocaine. However, paranoia is seen in a wide range of people for many different reasons. Paranoia can be a feature of another mental illness, like anxiety or depression, but most commonly occurs in psychotic disorders like schizophrenia and paranoid personality disorder. The more severe the mental illness is, the less likely the said person is going to realize that they are experiencing paranoia instead of threat from people, or even the world.

Alternatively, elderly people suffering from illnesses like dementia can experience paranoia as a symptom of their illness. This is due to the way the brain is altered throughout the illness. Paranoia will usually start with suspicious delusions that the person suffering from Alzheimer’s experiences; they may imagine that their family members are stealing from them, or that someone is following them. As family members, it can make it difficult to interact with the person with Alzheimer’s (you can take a look at these tips on Alzheimer’s Communication if you’re struggling with this) and it can be even more difficult to calm the person down than those suffering from mental illness or drug abuse. Unfortunately, treating paranoia in those with Alzheimer’s is hard due to the alterations of the brain constantly.

Whatever the case, paranoia takes many different forms and impacts many different people. Paranoia does not care for whoever it takes a hold on, and it’s not something that is easily fought off.

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What I want to emphasize here is the paranoid’s misinterpretation of innocuous personal or mass events, and to stress the ways in which physical events can be put together symbolically, so that from them a reality can be created that is almost part physical and part dream.

We must of course interpret events in a personal manner. We create them. Yet there is also a meeting ground of more or less shared physical encounters, a sense plateau that offers firm-enough footing for the agreement of a mass-shared world. With most mental aberrations, we are dealing with people whose private symbols are so heavily thrust over prime sense data that even those data sometimes become almost invisible. These individuals often use the physical world in the way that most people use the dream world, so that for them it is difficult to distinguish a private and a publicly-shared reality.

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Many such people are highly creative and imaginative. Often, however, they have less of a solid foundation than others in dealing with a mass-shared reality, and so they attempt to impose their own private symbols upon the world, or to form a completely private world. I am speaking in general terms now, and in those terms such people are leery of human relationships. Each person forms his or her own reality, and yet that personal reality must also be shared with others, and must be affected by the reality of others.

As creatures dwelling in time and space, our senses provide us with highly specific data, and with a cohesive-enough physical reality. Each person may react to the seasons in a very personal manner, and yet we all share those natural events. They provide a framework for experience. It is up to the conscious mind to interpret sense events as clearly and concisely as possible. This allows for the necessary freedom of action for psychological and physical mobility. We are an imaginative species, and so the physical world is colored, charged, by our own imaginative projections, and powered by the great sweep of the emotions. But when we are confused or upset, it is an excellent idea to return our attention to the natural world as it appears at any given moment — to sense its effect upon us as separate from our own projections.

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We form our own reality. Yet if we are in the Northeast in the wintertime, we had better be experiencing a physical winter, or we are far divorced from primary sense data.

The paranoid has certain other beliefs. Let us take a hypothetical individual — one who is convinced he has a healthy body, and is proud of mental stability. Let us call this friend Paul.

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Paul [for his own reasons] may decide that his body is out to get him and punish him, rather than say, the FBI. He may symbolically pick out an organ or a function, and he will misinterpret many body events in the same way that another may misinterpret mass events. Any public service announcements, so-called, publicizing symptoms connected with his sensitive area, will immediately alarm him. He will consciously and unconsciously focus upon that [art of the body,] anticipating its malfunction. Our friend can indeed alter the reality of his body.

Paul will interpret such body events in a negative fashion, and as threatening, so that some quite normal sensations will serve the same functions as a fear of policemen, for example. If he keeps this up long enough, he will indeed strain a portion of the body, and by telling others about it he will gradually begin to affect not only his personal world, but that part of the mass world with which he has contact: It will be known that he has an ulcer, or whatever. In each case we are dealing with a misinterpretation of basic sense data.

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When I say that a person misinterprets sense data, I mean that the fine balance between mind and matter becomes overstrained in one direction. There are, then, certain events that connect the world. Though when everything’s said and done these events come from outside of the world’s order, nevertheless they appear as constants within it. Their reality is the result of the most precise balancing of forces so that certain mental events appear quite real, and others are peripheral. We have dusk and dawn. If in the middle of the night, and fully awake, we believe it is sunrise in physical terms, and cannot differentiate between our personal reality and the physical one, then that balance is disturbed.

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The paranoid organizes the psychological world about his/her obsession, for such it is, and he/she cuts everything out that does not apply, until all conforms to his/her beliefs. An examination of unprejudiced sense data at any point would at any time bring him/her relief.

Paranoia can be a very serious mental condition, that if untreated, may develop into something that inhibits an individual’s quality of life severely. An individual who is either suffering from this or knows someone who is may seek out help and assistance to possibly treat this. Forms of treatment could be the traditional rote of therapy and a doctor, or it might be through alternative medicines such as CBD gummies and other alternative healing therapies, that might be helpful.

Regradless of what option is chosen as a route for possible treatment, it is advised to seek out the advice of a medical professional like a doctor, so as to get some sound advice and treatment if an individual suffering from paranoia should ever need it in the future.

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Organized religion has committed many important blunders

Yet for centuries Christianity provided a context accepted by large portions of the known world, in which experience could be judged against very definite “rules” — experience once focused, chiseled, and yet allowed some rich expression as long it stayed within the boundaries set by religious dogma.

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If a man or woman was sinner, still there was a way of redemption, and the immortality of the soul went largely unquestioned, of course. There were set rules for almost all kinds of social encounters and religious experiences. There were set ceremonies accepted by nearly all for death and birth, and the important stages in between. Church was the authority, and the individual lived out his or her life almost automatically structuring personal experience so that it fit within the accepted norm.

Within those boundaries, certain kinds of experience flourished, and of course others did not. In our society there is no such overall authority. The individual must make his or her own way through a barrage of different value systems, making decisions that were largely un-thought of when a son/daughter followed his or her father’s trade automatically, for example, or when marriages were made largely for economic reasons.

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So our present experience is quite different than that of those forefathers who lived in the medieval world, say, and we cannot appreciate the differences in our [present] subjective attitudes, and in the quality, as well as the kind of, social intercourse that exists now. For all its many errors, at its best Christianity proclaimed the ultimate meaning for each person’s life. There was no question but that life had meaning, whether or not we might agree as to the particular meaning assigned to it.

Men’s and women’s dreams were also different in those times, filled far more with metaphysical images, for example, more alive with saints and demons — but overall one framework of belief existed, and all experience was judged in its light. Now, we have far more decisions to make, and in a world of conflicting beliefs, brought into our living room through internet, newspapers and television, we must try to find the meaning of our life, or the meaning of life.

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We can think in terms of experiments. We may try this or that. We may run from one religion to another, or from religion to science, or vice versa. This is true in a way that was impossible for the masses of the people in medieval times. The improved methods of communication alone mean that we are everywhere surrounded by varying theories, cultures, cults, and schools, In some important areas this means that the mechanics of experience are actually becoming more apparent, for they are no longer hidden beneath one belief system.

Our subjective options are far greater, and yet so of course is the necessity to place that subjective experience into meaningful terms. If we believe that we do indeed form our own reality, then we instantly come up against a whole new group of questions. If we actually construct our own experience, individually and en-masse, why does so much of it seem negative? We create our own reality, or it is created for us. It is an accidental universe, or it is not.

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Now in medieval times organized religion, or organized Christianity, presented each individual with a screen of beliefs through which the personal self was perceived. Portions of the self that were not perceivable through that screen were almost invisible to the private person. Problems were sent by God as punishment or warning. The mechanics of experience were hidden behind that screen.

The belief of [Charles] Darwin and of [Sigmund] Freud alike have formed together to give us a different screen. Experience is accepted and perceived only as it is sieved through that screen. If Christendom saw man and woman as blighted by original sin, Darwinian and Freudian views see them as part of a flawed species in which individual life rests precariously, ever at the beck and call of the species’ needs, and with survival as the prime goal — a survival, however, without meaning. The psyche’s grandeur is ignored, the individual’s sense of belonging with nature eroded, for it is at nature’s expense, it seems, that he or she must survive. One’s greatest dreams and worst fears alike become the result of glandular imbalance, or of neuroses from childhood traumas.

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Yet in the midst of these beliefs each individual seeks to find a context in which his or her life has meaning, a purpose which will rouse the self to action, a drama in whose theme private actions will have significance.

There are intellectual values and emotional ones, and sometimes there are needs of an emotional nature that must be met regardless of intellectual judgments. The church provided a cosmic drama in which even the life of the sinner had value, even if only to show God’s compassion. In our society, however, the sterile psychic environment often leads to rebellion: People take steps to bring meaning and drama into their lives, even if intellectually they refuse to make the connection.

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When God went out the window for large masses of people, fate took His(or her) place, and volition also became eroded.

A person could neither be proud of personal achievement nor blamed for failure, since in large measure his or her characteristics, potentials, and lacks were seen as the result of chance, heredity, and of unconscious mechanisms over which the or she seemingly had little control. The devil went underground, figuratively speaking, so that many of his or her mischievous qualities and devious characteristics were assigned to the unconscious. Man and woman was seen as divided against oneself — a conscious figurehead, resting uneasily above the mighty haunches of unconscious beastliness. He or she believed oneself to be programmed by his or her heredity and early environment, so that it seemed he must be forever unaware of his own true motives.

Not only was he or she set against oneself, but he or she saw oneself as a part of an uncaring mechanistic universe, devoid of purpose, intent, and certainly a universe that cared not a whit for the individual, but only for the species. Indeed, a strange world.

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It was in many respects a new world, for it was the first one in which large portions of humanity believed that they were isolated from nature and God, and in which no grandeur was acknowledged as a characteristic of the soul. Indeed, for many people the idea of the soul itself became unfashionable, embarrassing, and out of date. Here I use the words “soul” and “psyche” synonymously That psyche has been emerging more and more in whatever guise it is allowed to as it seeks its vitality, its purpose and exuberance, and as it seeks out new contexts in which to express a subjective reality that finally spills over the edges of sterile beliefs.

The psyche expresses itself through action, of course, but it carries behind it the individual — and it automatically attempts to produce a social climate or civilization that is productive and creative. It projects its desires outward onto the physical world, seeking through private experience and social contact to actualize its potentials, and in such a way that the potentials of others are also encouraged. It seeks to flesh out its dreams, and when these find no response in social life, it will nevertheless take personal expression in a kind of private religion of its own.

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Basically, religion is an activity through which man and woman attempts to see the meaning of his or her life. It is a construction based on deep psychic knowledge. No matter what the name it might go by, it represents man’s and woman’s connection with the universe.

Mechanics of Experience

Our world and everything in it exists first in the imagination. We have been taught to focus all of our attention upon physical events, so that they carry the authenticity of reality for us. Thoughts, feelings, or beliefs appear to be secondary, subjective — or somehow not real — and they seem to rise in response to an already established field of physical data.

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We usually think, for example, that our feelings about a given event are primarily reactions to the events itself. It seldom occurs to us that the feelings themselves might be primary, and that the particular event was somehow a response to our emotions, rather than the other way around. The all-important matter of our focus is largely responsible for our interpretation of any event.

For an exercise, imagine for awhile that the subjective world of our thoughts, feelings, inner images and fantasies represent the “rock-bed reality” from which individual physical events emerge. Look at the world for a change from the inside out, so to speak. Imagine that physical experience is somehow the materialization of our own subjective reality. Forget what we have learned about reactions and stimuli. Ignore for a time everything we have believed and see our thoughts as the real events. Try to view normal physical occurrences as the concrete physical reactions in space and time to our own feelings and beliefs. For indeed our subjective world causes our physical experience.

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In titling this discussion I used the word “mechanics,” because mechanisms suggest smooth technological workings. While the world is not a machine — its inner workings are such that no technology could ever copy them — this involves a natural mechanics in which the inner dimensions of consciousness everywhere emerge to form a materialized, cohesive, physical existence. Again, our interpretation of identity teach us to focus awareness in such a way that we cannot follow the strands of consciousness that connect us with all portions of nature. In a way, the world is like a multidimensional, exotic plant growing in space and time, each thought, dream, imaginative encounter, hope or fear, growing naturally into its own bloom — a plant of incredible variety, never for a moment the same, in which each smallest root, leaf, stem, or flower has a part to play and is connected with the whole.

Even those of us who intellectually agree that we form our own reality find it difficult to accept emotionally in certain areas. We are, of course, literally hypnotized into believing that our feelings arise in response to events. Our feelings, however, cause the events we perceive. Secondarily, we do of course then react to those events.

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We have been taught that our feelings must necessarily be tied to specific physical happenings. We may be sad because a relative has died, for example, or because we have lost a job, or because we have been rebuffed by a lover, or for any number of other accepted reasons. We are told that our feelings must be in response to events that are happening, or have happened. Often, of course, our feelings “happen ahead of time,” because those feelings are the initial realities from which events flow.

A relative might be ready to die, though no exterior sign has been given. The relative’s feelings might well be mixed, containing portions of relief and sadness, which we might then perceive — but the primary events are subjective.

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It is somewhat of a psychological trick, in our day and age, to come to the realization that we do in fact form our experience and our world, simply because the weight of evidence seems to be so loaded at the other end, because of our habits or perception. The realization is like one that comes at one time or another to many people in the dream state, when suddenly they “awaken” while still in the dream, realizing first of all that they are dreaming, and secondarily that they are themselves creating the experienced drama.

To understand that we create our own reality requires that same kind of “awakening” from the normal awake state — at least for many people. Some of course have this knack more than others. The realization itself does indeed change “the rules of the game” as far as we are concerned to a rather considerable degree.

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As long as we believe that either good events or bad ones are meted out by a personified God as the reward or punishment for our actions, or on the other hand that events are largely meaningless, chaotic, subjective knots in the tangled web of an accidental Darwinian world, then we cannot consciously understand our own creativity, or play the role in the universe that we are capable of playing as individuals or as a species. We will instead live in a world where events happen to us, in which we must do sacrifice to the gods of one kind or another, or see ourselves as victims of an uncaring nature.

While still preserving the integrity of physical events as we understand them, [each of] us must alter the focus of our attention to some extent, so that we begin to perceive the connections between our subjective reality at any given time, and those events that we perceive at any given time. We are the initiator of those events.

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This recognition does indeed involve a new performance on the part of our own consciousness, a mental and imaginative leap that gives us control and direction over achievements that we have always performed, though without our conscious awareness.

Early man had such an identification of subjective and objective realities. As a species, however, we have developed what can almost be called a secondary nature — a world of technology in which we also now have our existence, and complicated social structures have emerged from it. To develop that kind of structure necessitated a division between subjective and objective worlds. Now, however, it is important that we realize our position, and accomplish the manipulation of consciousness that will allow us to take true conscious responsibility for our actions and our experience.

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We can “come awake” from our normal waking state, and that is the natural next step for consciousness to follow — one for which our biology has already equipped us. Indeed, each person does attain that recognition now and then. It brings triumphs and challenges as well. In those areas where we are not, remind ourselves that we are involved in a learning process; we are daring enough to accept the responsibility for our actions.

Look clearly, at the ways in which our private world causes our daily experience, and how it merges with the experience of others.

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Because of our individual and joint intuitive understanding and intellectual discrimination, we were able from an early age to clearly perceive the difficulties of our fellows. This helped incite stimuli that made us question the entire framework of our civilization. We are able to do something few people can: leap intuitively and mentally above our own period — to discard intellectually and mentally, and sometimes emotionally, the short-sighted, unfortunate religious scientific, and social beliefs of our fellows.

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Many of those old beliefs still have an emotional hold, however, and some helpful beliefs have also been overdone, or carried on too long. Because we can see so clearly the failings of our age, we each have a tendency to exaggerate them, or rather to concentrate upon them, so that we do not have an emotional feeling of safety. We react by setting up defenses.

Resurrection and then…

According to ordinary teaching Christ’s resurrection from the dead took place on Easter Sunday, the third day following his crucifixion (on Friday), while his ascension into heaven transpired at an indefinite time — up to 40 days later, as stated in the writings of St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles (AA 1:10). Christ’s resurrection and ascension took place of the same day is contrary to popular belief.

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Telescope the two events into one or refer to them together, as if the distinction didn’t exist . Implying that the ascension was the main issue in the Christ story, rather than the resurrection, or telling us that the two events are so intertwined thematically as to be treated as one.

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Of the four Gospels (according to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John), some scholars believe that Luke and John can be read as stating that Christ’s resurrection and ascension took place on the same day. Yet in Acts, Luke postulates the 40-day interval between the two events. (Originally Luke composed his Gospel and Acts as one treatise; the two were separated early in the second century.) Out of such contradictions as those implied in Luke’s case, however, confusion and opposing opinions reign when one studies the Gospels and related material. Christ himself left no written records, nor are there any eyewitness or contemporary accounts of his life. Most authorities still believe that the Gospels were written between A.D. 65 and 110. Since Christ was presumably crucified around A.D. 30, this means that some 35-40 years passed before the advent of Mark’s account. There are many consistencies in the Gospels, but also according to Matthew and John are now being questioned. A study of the New Testament books alone can quickly lead one into a maze of questions: Why isn’t the resurrection itself described? Why are there so few references to the ascension? Matthew doesn’t mention it at all in his Gospel, for example; and Paul alludes to it only once (1 Timothy 3:16) in his writings. Is the Gospel according to Luke merely schematic, rather than chronological? If time (as much as 40 days) did elapse between Christ’s resurrection and ascension, where was he physically during all of that period, other than on the few occasions cited in the Gospel and in Acts, when on various occasions he revealed himself to the women who discovered his empty tomb, to the apostles, and to some others? Sometimes Christ appeared as an apparition — “We could not have a world in which the newly risen dead mixed with the living. An existence in a spiritual realm had to follow such a resurrection.”

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In my opinion, I am not saying that Christ did rise from the dead or ascend into heaven, but I am referring to Christianity’s interpretation of its own creative Christ story. I maintain that Christ wasn’t crucified to begin with, in the facts of history, there was no crucifixion, resurrection, or ascension. In terms of history, there was no biblical Christ. In the terms of the biblical drama, however, Christ was crucified.

It was the Jewish tradition that nourished the new religion in its early stages. Christ, as we know, was a common name, so when I say that there was a man named Christ involved in those events, I do not mean to say that he was the biblical Christ. His life was one of those that were finally used to compose the composite image of the biblical Christ.

The animals do have imagination

Yet man and woman is so gifted that he or she directs his or her experiences and forms his or her civilizations largely through the use of his or her imaginative abilities.

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We do not understand this point clearly at all, but our social organizations, our governments — these are based upon imaginative principles. The basis of our most intimate experience, the framework behind all of our organized structures, rest upon a reality that is not considered valid by the very institutions that are formed through its auspices.

It is now bearing Easter, and the yearly commemoration of what is considered historic fact: the [resurrection and] ascension of Christ into heaven. Untold millions have in one way or another commemorated that occasion through the centuries. Private lives have merged with public sentiment and religious fervor. There have been numberless villages festivals, or intimate family gatherings, and church services performed on Easter Sundays now forgotten. There have been bloody wars fought on the same account, and private persecutions in which those who did not agree with one or another’s religious dogmas were quite simply killed “for the good of their souls.”

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There have been spiritual rebirths and regenerations — and ungodly slaughter as well, as a result of the meaning of Easter. Blood and flesh have certainly been touched, then, and lives changed in that regard.

All of those religious and political structures that we certainly recognize as valid, arising from the “event” of Christ’s ascension, existed — and do exist — because of an idea. The idea was the result of a spectacular act of the imagination that then leapt upon the historical landscape, highlighting all of the events of the time, so that they became illuminated indeed with a blessed and unearthly light.

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The idea of man’s and woman’s survival of death was not new. The idea of a god’s “descent” to earth was ancient. The old religious myths fit a different kind of people, however, and lasted for as many centuries in the past as Christianity has reached into the future. The miraculous merging of imagination with historical time, however, became less and less synchronized, so that only r-i-t-e-s remained and the old gods seized the imagination no longer. The time was ripe for Christianity.

Because man and woman has not understood the characteristics of the world of imagination, he has thus far always insisted upon turning his or her myth into historical fact, for he considers the factual world alone as the real one. A man and woman, literally of flesh and blood, must then prove beyond all doubt that each and every other [human being} survive death — by dying, of course, and then by rising, physically-perceived, into heaven. Each man does survive death, and each woman, but only such a literal-minded species would insist upon the physical death of a god-man as “proof of the pudding.”

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Again, Christ was not crucified. The historical Christ, as he is thought of, was a man illuminated by psychic realities, touched with the infinite realization that any one given individual was, by virtue of his or her existence, a contact between All That Is and humankind.

Christ saw that in each person divinity and humanity met — and that man and woman survived death by virtue of his or her existence within the divine. Without exception, all of the horrors connected with Christianity’s name came from “following the letter rather than the spirit of the law,” or by insistence upon literal interpretations — while spiritual, imaginative concepts beneath were ignored.

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Again, man and woman directs his or her existence through the use of his or her imagination — a feat that does distinguish him or her from the animals. What connects people and separates them is the power of idea and the force of imagination. Patriotism, family loyalty, political affiliations — the ideas behind these have the greatest practical applications in our world. We project ourselves into time like children through freely imagining our growth. We instantly color physical experience and nature itself with the tints of our unique imaginative processes. Unless we think quite consistently — and deeply — the importance of the imagination quite escapes us, and yet it literally forms the world that we experience and the mass world in which we live.

The theory of evolution, for instance, is an imaginative construct, and yet through its lights some generations now have viewed their world. It is not only that we think of ourselves differently, but we actually experience a different kind of self. Our institutions change their aspects accordingly, so that experience fits the beliefs that we have about it. We act in certain ways. We view the entire universe in a fashion that did not exist before, so that imagination and belief intangibly structure our subjective experience and our objective circumstances.

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In all of the other imaginative constructs, for example, whatever their merits and disadvantages, man and woman felt themselves be a part of a plan. The planner might be God, or nature itself, or man or woman within nature or nature within man or woman. There might be many gods or one, but there was a meaning in the inverse. Even the idea of fate gave man and woman something to act against, and roused him or her to action.

The idea of a meaningless universe, however, is in itself a highly creative imaginative act. Animals, for example, could not imagine such an idiocy, so that the theory shows the incredible accomplishment of an obviously ordered mind and intellect that can imagine itself to be the result of non-order, or chaos — [we have] a creature who is capable of “mapping” its own brain, imagining that the brain’s fantastic regulated order could emerge from a reality that itself has no meaning. Indeed, then, the theory actually says that the ordered universe magically emerged — and evolutions must certainly believe in a God of Chance somewhere, or in Coincidence , for their theories would make no sense at all otherwise.

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The world of the imagination is indeed our contact with our own source. Its characteristics are the closest to those in Conscious-mind-2 that we can presently encounter. Our experience of history, of the days of our life, is invisibly formed by those ideas that exist in the imagination only, and then are projected upon the physical world. This applies to our individual beliefs about oneself and the way we see oneself in our imagination. We are having wars between the Jews and the Arabs and the Christians once again, because emphasis is put upon literal interpretations of spiritual truths.

In each person the imaginative world, its force and powers, merges into historical reality. In each person, the ultimate and unassailable and unquenchable power of All That Is is individualized, and dwells in time. Man’s and woman’s imagination can carry him or her into those other realms — but when he or she tries to squeeze those truths into frameworks too small, he or she distorts and bends inner realities so that they become jagged dogmas.

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The latest growth of fundamentalist has arisen as a countermeasure against the theories of evolution. We have, then, an overcompensation, for in the Darwinian world there was no meaning and no laws. There were no standards of right or wrong, so that large portions of the people felt rootless.

The [fundamentalists] returned to an authoritarian religion in which the slightest act must be regulated. They gave release, and they are giving release, to the emotions, and thus rebelling against scientific intellectualism. They will see the world in black-and-white terms, and thus escape a slippery, thematic universe, in which man’s and woman’s feelings seemed to give him or her no foothold at all.

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Unfortunately, the fundamentalists accept literal interpretations of intuitive realities in such a way that they further narrow that channels through which their psychic abilities can flow. The fundamental framework, in this period of time, for all of its fervor, is not rich — as for example Christianity was in the past, with its numerous saints. It is instead a fanatical Puritan vein, peculiarly American in character, and restrictive rather than expansive, for the bursts of emotion are highly structured — that is, the emotions are limited in most areas of life, permitted only an explosive religious expression under certain conditions, when they are not so much spontaneously expressed as suddenly released from the dam of usual repression.

The imagination always seeks expression. It is always creative, and underneath the frameworks of society it provides fresh incentives and new avenues for fulfillment, that can become harnessed through fanatical belief. When this happens our institutions become more repressive, and violence often emerges as a result.

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If we look for signs of God’s vengeance we will find them everywhere. An avalanche or a flood or an earthquake will not be seen as a natural act of the earth’s natural creativity, but instead as a punishment from God for sin.

In evolution man’s and woman’s nature is amoral, and anything goes for survival’s sake. There is no possibility of any spiritual survival as far as most evolutionists are concerned. The fundamentalists would rather believe in man’s and woman’s inherent sinful nature, for at least their belief system provides for a framework in which he or she can be saved. Christ’s message was that each man is good inherently, and is an individualized portion of the divine — and yet a civilization based upon that precept has never been attempted. The vast social structures of Christianity were instead based upon man’s and woman’s “sinful” nature — not the organizations and structures that might allow him or her to become good, or to obtain the goodness that Christ quite clearly perceived man or woman already possessed.

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It seems almost a sacrilege to say that man and woman are good, when everywhere we meet contradictions, for too often man and woman certainly appears to act as if his or her motives were instead those of a born killer. We have been taught not to trust the very fabric of our being. We cannot expect ourselves to act rationally or altruistically in any consistent manner if we believe that we are automatically degraded, or that our nature is so flawed that such performance is uncharacteristic.

We are a part of nature that has learned to make choices, a part of nature that naturally and automatically produces dreams and beliefs about which we then organize our reality. There are many effects which we do not like, but we possess a unique kind of consciousness, in which each individual has a hand in the overall formation of a world reality, and we are participating at a level of existence in which we are learning how to transform the imaginative realm of probabilities into a more or less specific, physically experience world.

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In a way we choose from an infinite, endless, incomputable number of ideas, and sculpt these into the physical fragments that compose normal experience. We do this in such a way that the timeless events are experienced in time, and so that they mix and merge to conform to the dimensions of our reality. Along the way there are accomplishments that are also great failures — but these are failures only in comparison with the glittering inner knowledge of the imagination that holds for us those ideals against which we judge our acts.

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Those ideals are present in each individual. They are natural inclinations toward growth and fulfillment.