Tag Archives: Garden of Eden

The so-called miracles are simply the result of nature unimpeded

We all present ourselves with a prime example of the abilities of the natural person. We are presented now, in the world, with a certain picture of a body and its activities, and that picture seems very evidential. It seems to speak for itself.

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Instead we are presented, of course, with a picture of man’s and woman’s body as it reflects, and are affected by, man’s and woman’s beliefs. Doctors expect vision to begin to fail, for example, after the age of 30, and there are countless patient records that “prove” that such disintegration is indeed a biological fact.

Our beliefs tell us, again, that the body is primarily a mechanism — a most amazing machine, but a machine, without its own purpose, without any intent, a mindless assembly plant of assorted parts that simply happened to grow together in a certain prescribed fashion. Science says that there is no will, yet it assigns to nature the will to survive — or rather, a wiliness instinct to survive. To that extent it does admit that the machine of the body “intends” to insure its own survival — but a survival which has no meaning beyond itself. And because the body is a machine, it is expected to decay after so much usage.

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In that picture consciousness has little part to play. In man’s and woman’s very early history, however, and in our terms for centuries after the “awakening,” as described in my blogs, people lived in good health for much longer periods of time — and in certain cases they lived for several centuries. No one had yet told them that this was impossible, for one thing. Their sense of wonder in the world, their sense of curiosity, creativity, and the vast areas of fresh mental and physical exploration, kept them alive and strong. For another thing, however, elders were highly necessary and respected for the information they had acquired about the world. They were needed. they taught the other generations.

In those times great age was a position of honor that brought along with it new responsibility and activity. The senses did not fade in their effectiveness, and it is quite possible biologically for all kinds of regenerations of that nature to occur.

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Some statesmen and stateswomen who are not young at all, and men and women who do not only achieve, but who open new horizons in their later years. They do so because of their private capacities, and also because they are answering the world’s needs, and in ways that in many cases a younger person could not.

In our society age has almost been considered a dishonorable state. Beliefs about the dishonor of age often cause people to make the decision — sometimes quite consciously — to bring their own lives to an end before the so-called threshold is reached. Whenever, however, the species needs the accumulated experience of its own older members, that situation is almost instantly reversed and people live longer.

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Some in our society feel that the young are kept out of life’s mainstream also, denied purposeful work, their adolescence prolonged unnecessarily. As a consequence some young people die for the same reason: They believe that the state of youth is somehow dishonorable. They are cajoled, petted, treated like amusing pets sometimes, diverted with technology’s offerings but not allowed to use their energy. There were many unfortunate misuses of the old system of having a son follow in his father’s footsteps, yet the son at a young age was given meaningful work to do, and felt a part of life’s mainstream. He was needed.

The so-called youth culture, for all of its seeming exaggerations of youth’s beauty and accomplishments, actually ended up putting down youth, for few could live up to that picture. Often, then, both the young and the old felt left out of our culture. Both share also the possibility  of accelerated creative vitality — activity that the elder great artists, or the elder great statesmen, have always picked up and used to magnify their own abilities. there comes a time when the experiences of the person in the world click together and form a new clearer focus, provide a new psychological framework from which his or her greatest capacities can emerge to form a new synthesis. But in our society many people never reach that point — or those who do are not recognized for their achievements in the proper way, or for the proper reasons.

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Man’s and woman’s will to survive includes a sense of meaning and purpose, and a feeling for the quality of life. We are indeed presented with an evidential picture that seems to suggest most vividly the “fact” of man’s and woman’s steady deterioration, and yet we are also presented with evidence to the contrary, even in our world, if we look for it.

Our Olympics, on television, present us with evidence of the great capacity of the young human body. That contrast between the activity of those athletes, however, and the activity of the normal young person is drastic. We believe that the greatest training and discipline must be used to bring about such activity — but that seemingly extraordinary physical ability simply represents the inherent capacities of the human body. In those cases, the athletes through training are finally able to give a glimpse of the body’s spontaneous abilities. The training is necessary because it is believe necessary.

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Again, in our blog on suffering, I mentioned that illness serves purposes — that it has a face-saving quality in our society — so here I am speaking of the body’s own abilities. In that light, the senses do not fade. Age alone never brought about any loss of physical agility, or of mental ability, or of desire. Death must come to every living person, yet the time and the means are basically up to each individual. Meaningful work is important at any age. We cannot content the aged entirely with hobbies any more than we can the young, but meaningful work means work that also has the exuberance of play, and it is that playful quality that contains within itself great propensities of a healing and creative nature.

In a fashion, now, our eyes improved their capacities, practically speaking, in a physical manner. The senses want to exceed themselves. They also learn “through experience.” If we have been painting more, our eyes become more involved to that extent. Our eyes enjoy their part in that activity as the ears, say, enjoy hearing. It is their purpose. Our own desire to paint may be joined with and reinforced our eyes natural desire to see.

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When most of us think of physical symptoms, of course, we regard our body with a deadly seriousness that to some extent impedes inner spontaneity. We lay our limiting beliefs upon the natural person.

Our dream’s fits in here in its own fashion, for we see that the ship of life, so to speak, rides very swiftly and beautifully also beneath the conscious surface, traveling through the waters of the psyche. We are progressing very well at under-the-surface levels. There are few impediments. We have clear sailing, so to speak, and the dreams are meant as an inner vision of our progress.

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One has only to read Chapter 5 of genesis to learn what great ages are given to Adam and nine of his descendants up to Noah, or the time of the Flood. Did Adam really live for 930 years, or Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, for 912? (Why isn’t Eve’s age given in the Bible?) Enoch, the fifth elder listed after Seth, lived for a mere 365 years, but sired Methuselah, who at 969 years is the oldest individual recorded in the Bible. Methuselah was the father of Lamech (777 years), who was the father of Noah (950 years).

In Genesis 11, the listing of Abraham’s ancestors begins after the Flood with the oldest son of Noah, Shem, living some 600 years. Generally, Abraham’s forebears didn’t live as long as Adam’s descendants had, although after Shem their ages still ranged from 148 years to 460. Abraham himself was “only” 175 years old at his death.

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During the little time we’d spent thinking about such matter, I have considered the Biblical accounts of such great ages to be simply wrong, badly distorted, or perhaps epochal– that is. Abraham’s ancestors may be listed in the correct genealogical sequence, but with many gaps among the individuals named. Also, a given father-son relationship may have actually been one between a father and a great-great-grandson, for example. There are other epochal lists in the Bible.

In those early days men and women did live to ages that would amaze us today — many living to be several hundred years old. This was indeed due to the fact that their knowledge was desperately needed, and their experience. They were held in veneration, and they cast their knowledge into songs and stories that were memorized throughout the years. Beside this, however, their energy was utilized in a different fashion than ours is: They alternated between the waking and dream states, and while asleep they did not age as quickly. Their bodily processes slowed. Although this was true, their dreaming mental processes did not slow down. There was a much greater communication in the dream state, so that some lessons were taught during dreams, while others were taught in the waking condition. There was a greater and greater body of knowledge to be transmitted as physical existence continued, for they did not transmit private knowledge only, but the entire body knowledge that belonged to the group as a whole.

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The bible is a conglomeration of parables and stories, intermixed with some unclear memories of much earlier times. The Bible that we recognize — or that is recognized — is not the first, however, but was compiled from several earlier ones as man and woman tired to look back, so to speak, recount his and her past and predict his or her future. Such Bibles existed, not written down but carried orally, as mentioned some time ago in my earlier blogs, by the Speakers. It was only much later that this information was written down, and by then of course much had been forgotten. This is apart from the fact of tampering, or downright misinformation, as various factions used the material for their own ends.

Awakening Man and Woman experience some sense of separation from the dream body

In the beginning, awakening man and woman did experience, some sense of separation from his and her dream body, and from his and her own inner reality — the world of his and her dreams — but he/she were still far more aware of that subjective existence than we are now.

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The practical nature of his or her own dreams were also more apparent, for again, his or her dreams sent him and her precise visions as to where food might be located, for example, and for some centuries there were human migrations of a kind that now we see the geese make. All of those journeys followed literal paths that were given as information in the dream state. But more and more man and woman began to identity himself and herself with his and her exterior environment. He and she began to think of his and her inner ego almost as if it were a stranger to himself and herself. It became his or her version of the soul, and there seemed to be a duality — a self who acted in the physical universe, and a separate spirit-like soul that acted in an immaterial world.

This early man and woman regarded the snake as the most scared and basic, most secretive and most knowledgeable of all creatures. In that early experience it seemed, surely, that the snake was a lying portion of the earth, rising from the bowels of the earth, rising from the hidden source of all earth gods. Men and women watched snakes emerge from their holes with wonder. The snake was then — in our terms, now — both a feminine and masculine symbol. It seemed to come from the womb of the earth, and to possess the earth’s secret wisdom. Yet also, in its extended form particularly, it was the symbol of the penis. It was important also in that is shed its skin, as man and woman innately knew he and she shed his and her own bodies.

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All units of consciousness, whatever their degree, possess purpose and intent. They are endowed with the desire for creativity, and to increase the quality of existence.They have the capacity to respond to multitudinous cues. There is a great elasticity for action and mobility, so that, for example, in man and woman his or her conscious experience can actually be put together in an almost limitless number of ways.

The inner and outer egos do not have a cement-like relationship, but can interrelate with each other in almost infinite fashions, still preserving the reality of physical experience, but varying the accents put upon it by the inner areas of subjective life. Even the bare-seeming facts of history are experienced far differently according to the symbolic content within which they are inevitably immersed. A war, in our terms, can be practically experienced as a murderous disaster, a triumph of savagery — or as a sublime victory of the human spirit over evil.

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We will return to the subject of war in later blogs. I want to mention here, however, that man and woman are not basically endowed with “warlike characteristics.” He or she do not naturally murder. He or she do not naturally seek to destroy his or her own life or the lives of others. There is no battle for survival — but while we project such an idea upon natural reality, then we will read nature, and our own experiences with it, in the fashion.

Man and woman do have an instinct and a desire to live, and he and she has an instinct and a desire to die. The same applies to other creatures. In his and her life each man and woman are embarked upon a cooperative venture with his or her own species, and with the other species, and dying he or her also in that regard acts in a cooperative manner, returning his and her physical substance to the earth. Physically speaking, man’s and woman’s “purpose” are to help enrich the quality of existence in all of its dimensions. Spiritually speaking, his or her “purpose” are to understand the qualities of love and creativity, to intellectually and psychically understand the  sources of his or her being, and to lovingly create other dimensions of reality of which he and she are presently unaware. In his and her thinking, in the quality of his or her thoughts, in their motion, he or she are indeed experimenting with a unique and a new kind of reality, forming other subjective worlds which will in their turn grow into consciousness and song, which will in their turn flower from a dream dimension into other ones. Man and woman are learning to create new worlds. In order to do so he or she have taken on many challenges.

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We all have physical parents. Some of us have physical children as well — but we will all “one day” also be the mental parents of dream children who also waken in a new world, and look about then for the first time, feeling isolated and frightened and triumphant all at once. All worlds have an inner beginning. All of our dreams somewhere waken, but when they do they waken with the desire for creativity themselves, and they are born of an innocent new intent. that which is in harmony with the universe, with All That Is, has a natural inborn impetus that will dissolve all impediments. It is easier, therefore, for nature to flourish than not.

We are aware of such activities now as automatic speaking and automatic writing, and of sleepwalking. These all give signs in modern times of some very important evidence is man’s and woman’s early relationship with the world and with himself and herself.

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Sleepwalking was once, in that beginning, a very common experience — far more so than now — in which the inner self actually taught the physical body to walk, and hence presented the newly emerged physically oriented intellect from getting in its own way, asking too many questions that might otherwise impede the body’s smooth spontaneous motion.

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In the same fashion man and woman are born with an inbuilt propensity for language, and for the communication of symbols through pictures and writing. He and she spoke first in an automatic fashion that began in his and her dreams. In fashion, we could almost say that he and she used language before he or she consciously understood it. It is not just that he and she learned by doing, but that the doing did the teaching. Again, lest there be a sharply inquiring intellect, wondering overmuch about how the words were formed or what motions were necessary, his or her drawing was in the same way automatic. We might almost say — almost — that he and she used the language “despite himself or herself.” therefore, it possessed an almost magical quality, and the “word” was seen as coming directly from God.

 

The Garden of Eden represents a distorted version of awakening as a physical creature

Man and woman becomes fully operational in his and her physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him and her. He or she now encounters his or her experience from within a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws. He or she must use physical muscles to walk from place to place. He and she sees himself and herself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension, as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment, but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.

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The sense of separation is, in those terms, initially almost shattering. Yet man or woman is to be the portion of nature that views itself with perspective. He and she is to be the part of nature that will specialize, again, in the self-conscious use of concepts. He and she will grow the flower of the intellect — a flower that must have its deep roots buried securely within the earth, and yet a flower that will send new psychic seeds outward, not only for itself but for the rest of nature, of which it is a part.

But man and woman looked out and felt himself and herself suddenly separate and amazed at the aloneness. Now he and she must find food, where before his or her dream body did not need physical nourishment. Before, man and woman had been neither male nor female, combining the characteristics of each, but now the physical bodies also specialized in terms of sexuality. Man and woman has to physically procreate. Some lost ancient legends emphasized in a clearer fashion this sudden sexual division. By the time the Biblical legend came into being, however, historical events and social beliefs were transformed into the Adam and eve version of events.

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On the one hand, man and woman did indeed feel that he or she had fallen from a high estate, because he and she remembered that earlier freedom of dream reality — a reality in which the other creatures were still to some degree immersed. Man’s and woman’s mind, incidentally, at that point had all the abilities that we now assign to it: the great capacity for contrast of imagination and intellect, the drive for objectivity and for subjectivity, the full capacity for the development of language — a keen mind that was as brilliant in any caveman or cavewoman, say, as it is in any man or woman on a modern street.

But if man or woman felt suddenly alone and isolated, he or she was immediately struck by the grand variety of the world and its creatures. Each creature apart from himself or herself was a new mystery. He and she was enchanted also by his and her own subjective reality, the body in which he and she found himself or herself, and by the differences between himself and herself and others like him or her, and the other creatures. He and she instantly began to explore, to categorize, to point out and to name the other creatures of the earth as they came to his or her attention.

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In a fashion, it was a great creative and yet cosmic  game that consciousness played with itself, and it did represent a new kind of awareness, but I want to emphasize that each version of All That Is is unique. Each has its purpose, though that purpose cannot be easily defined in our terms. Many people ask, for example: “What is the purpose of my life?” Meaning: “What am I meant to do?” but the purpose of our life, and each life, is in its being. That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of our life, which simply by being is bound to fulfill its purposes.

Man’s and woman’s dream body is still with him and her, or course, but the physical body now obscures it. The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can — as man and woman quickly found out as he or she transformed his and her experience largely from one to the other. In the dream body man and woman feared nothing. The dream body does not die. It exists before and after physical death. In their dream bodies men and women had watched the spectacle of animals “killing” other animals, and they saw the animals’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.

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They saw the earth was simply changing its forms, but that the identity of each unit of consciousness survived — and so, although they saw the picture of death, they did not recognize it as the death that to many people now seems an inevitable end.

Men and women saw that there must be an exchange of physical energy for the world to continue. They watched the drama of the “hunter” and the “prey,” seeing that each could contribute so that the physical form of the earth could continue — but the rabbit eaten by the wolf survived in a dream body that men and women knew was its true form. When man and woman “awakened” in his or her physical body, however, and specialized in the use of its senses, he or she no longer perceived the released dream body of the slain animal running away, still cavorting on the hillside. He and she retained memory of his and her earlier knowledge, and for a considerable period he or she could now and then recapture that knowledge. He and she became more and more aware of his or her physical senses, however: Some things were definitely pleasant and some were not. Some stimuli were to be sought out, and others avoided, and so over a period of time he or she translated the pleasant and the unpleasant into rough versions of good and evil.

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Basically, what made him and her feel good was good. He and she was gifted with strong clear instincts that were meant to lead him or her toward his or her own greatest development, to his and her own greatest fulfillment, in such a way that he and she also helped to bring about the highest potential of all of the other species of consciousness. His or her natural impulses were meant to provide inner directives that would guide him and her in just such a direction, so that he or she sought what was the best for himself and herself and for others.

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In some ways the overall consciousness of United States continually becomes involved with — entwined with — the consciousness of adversaries like Russia and Iran: Such consciousnesses, once created, continue to grow and to complicate themselves in new ways within our concept of “time.” Obviously, on an even larger scale of activity, the consciousnesses of all the nations of our world contribute to the challenges, and dilemmas swirling around the Middle East situation.

Surface of Awareness

The waking state as we think of it is a specialized extension of the dream state, and emerges from it to the surface of our awareness, just as our physical locations are specified extensions of locations that exist first within the realm of mind.

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The waking state, then, has its source in the dream state, and all of the objects, environment, and experience that are familiar to us in the waking state also originate in that inner dimension.

When we examine the state of dreams, however, we do it as a rule from the framework of waking reality. We try to measure the dimension of dream experience by applying the rules of reality that are our usual criteria for judging events. Therefore, we are not able to perceive the true characteristics of the dreaming state except on those few occasions when we “come awake” within our dreams — a matter we will discuss later in a future blog. But in a manner of speaking, it is true to say that the universe was created in the same fashion that our own thoughts and dreams happen: spontaneously and yet with a built-in amazing order, and an inner organization. We think our thoughts and we dream our dreams without any clear knowledge of the incredible processes involved therein, yet those processes are the very ones that are behind the existence of the universe itself.

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Also, in a manner of speaking, we are ourselves the ancient dreamers who dreamed our world into being. You must understand that I am not saying that we are passive, fleeting dreamers, lost in some divine mind, but that we are the unique creative manifestations of a divine intelligence whose creativity is responsible for all realities, which are themselves endowed with creative abilities of their own, with the potential and desire for fulfillment — inheritors indeed of the divine processes themselves. Spontaneity knows its own order.

The world’s parts come spontaneously together, with an order that basically defies the smaller laws of cause and effect, or before and afterward. In that regard, again, our dreaming state presents us with many clues about the source of our own lives and that of our world.

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Computers, however grand and complicated, cannot dream, and so for all of their incredible banks of information, they must lack the kind of unspoken knowing knowledge that the smallest plant or seed processes. Nor can any amount of information “possessed” or processed by any computer compare with the unspoken knowing knowledge that is possessed by the atoms and molecules that compose such an instrument. The computer is not equipped to perceive that kind of knowing. It is not equipped for such an endeavor because it cannot dream. In dreams the innate knowledge of the atoms and molecules is combined and translated. It serves as the bed of perceptual information and knowledge from which the dreaming state arises in its physical form.

We are subjectively “alive” before our birth. We will be subjectively alive after our death. Our subjective life is now interpreted through the specialized state of consciousness that we call the waking one, in which we recognize as real only experience that falls within certain space and time coordinates. Our greater reality exists outside those coordinates, and so does the reality of the universe. We create lives for ourselves, changing them as we go along, as a writer might change a book, altering the circumstances, changing the plots. The writer only knows that he or she creates without understanding the spontaneous order with which the creativity happens. The processes occur at another level of consciousness.

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In the most basic of ways, the world is formed from the inside out, and from dreaming reality into physical one — and those processes happen at another level of consciousness.

Our body consciousness is like the consciousness of any animal. The love of excitement and activity with which man and woman and animals are innately endowed. Animals enjoy being petted, stroked, and loved. They react in their own ways to suggestion, and in the regard our body consciousness responds to our conscious treatment of it. think of our body, for the purpose of this discussion, as a healthy animal. Animals and our own body consciousnesses have little concept of age. In a fashion almost impossible to describe, those consciousnesses — of body and the animals — are ‘young’ in each moment of their existences. i am taking it fro granted that you understand that I am referring to the ‘mental attitude’ of animals and of the body consciousness, for they do possess their own mental attributes — psychological colorations — and above all, emotional ‘states’.

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I largely oppose science’s mechanistic model of the body wearing down within certain age limits, abetted as that model is by the power of the beliefs that say it will. I will have much to say about how the out-of-place stresses we impose upon ourselves through our fearful projections into the future adversely affect our body consciousnesses, which are focused in the present. telepathy, “molecular mentality,” and cellular consciousness are deeply involved in all of this.

In the beginning, while men and women had their dream bodies alone they enjoyed a remarkable freedom, of course, for those bodies did not have to be fed of clothed. They did not have to operate under the law of gravity. Men and women could wander as they wished about the landscape. They did not yet identify themselves to any great degree as being themselves separate from either the environment or other creatures. They knew themselves to be themselves, but their identities were not as closely allied with their forms as is now the case.

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The dream world was bound to waken, however, for that was the course is had set itself upon. This awakening, again, happen spontaneously, and yet with its own order. In the terms of this discussion the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man and woman did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man and woman’s did. The animals became physically effective, therefore, while to some degree man and woman still lingered in that dream reality.

The plants awakened before the animals — and their reasons for these varying degrees of ‘wakefulness” that have nothing to do basically with the differentiations of species-hood as defined by science from the outside, but have to do with the inner affiliations of consciousness, and with species or families of consciousness. Those affiliations fell into being as all of the consciousnesses that were embarked upon physical reality divided up the almost unimaginable creative achievements that would be responsible for the physically effective world.

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Again, the environment as we think of it is composed of living consciousness. Ancient religions, for example, speak of nature’s spirits, and such terms represent memories dating from prehistory. Part of consciousness, then, transformed itself into what we think of as nature — the vast sweep of the continents, the oceans and the rivers, the mountains and the valleys, the body of the land. The creative thrust of the physical world must rise from that living structure.

In a matter of speaking, the birds and the insects are indeed living portions of the earth flying, even as, again in a matter of speaking, bears and wolves and cows and cats represent the earth turning itself into creatures that live upon its own surface. And in a matter of speaking, again, man and woman becomes the earth thinking, and thinking his and her own thoughts, man and woman in his and her way specializes in the conscious work of the world — a work that is dependent upon the indispensable “unconscious” work of the rest of nature, a nature that sustains him and her. And when he or she thinks, man and woman thinks for the microbes, for the atoms and molecules, for the smallest particles within his or her being, for the insects and for the rocks, for the creatures of the sky and the air and the oceans.

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Man and woman thinks as naturally as the birds fly. He and she looks at physical reality for the rest of physical reality: He and she is earth coming alive to view itself through conscious eyes — but that consciousness is graced to be because it is so intimately a part of earth’s framework.

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What was it like when man and woman awakened from the dream world?

For centuries the Roman Catholic church held [Western] civilization together

The roman Catholic church gave western civilization its meanings and its precepts.Those meanings and precepts flowed through the entire society, and served as the basis for all of the established modes of knowledge, commerce, medicine, science, and so forth.

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The church’s view of reality was the accepted one. I cannot stress too thoroughly the fact that the beliefs of those times structured individual human living, so that the most private events of personal lives were interpreted to mean thus and so, as were of course the events of nations, plants, and animals. The world’s view was a religious one, specified by the church, and its word was truth and fact at the same time.

Illness was suffered, was sent by God to purge the soul, to cleanse the body, to punish the sinner, or simply to teach man and woman his/her place by keeping him or her from the sins of pride. Suffering sent by God was considered a fact of life, then, and a religious truth as well.

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Some other civilizations have believed that illness was sent by demons or evil spirits, and that the world was full of good and bad spirits, invisible, intermixed with the elements of nature itself, and that man and woman had to walk a careful line lest he/she upset the more dangerous or mischievous of these entities. In man’s and woman’s history there have been all kinds of incantations, meant to mollify the evil spirits that man believed were real in fact and in religious truth.

It is easy enough to look at those belief structures and shrug our shoulders, wondering at man’s and woman’s distorted views of reality. The entire scientific view of illness, however, is quite as distorted. It is as laboriously conceived and inter-wound with “nonsense.” It is about as factual as the “fact” that God sends illness as punishment, or that illness is the unwanted gift of mischievous demons.

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Churchmen and churchwomen of the Middle Ages could draw diagrams of various portions of the human body that were afflicted as the result of indulging in particular sins. Logical minds at one time found those diagrams quite convincing, and patients with certain afflictions in certain areas of the body would confess to having committed the various sins that were involved. The entire structure of beliefs made sense within itself. A man or woman might be born deformed or sickly because of the sins of his or her father.

The scientific framework is basically, now, just as senseless, though within it the facts often seem to prove themselves out, also. There are viruses, for example. Our beliefs become self-evident realities. It would be impossible to discuss human suffering without taking that into consideration. Ideas are transmitted from generation to generation — and those ideas are the carriers of all of our reality, its joys and its agonies. Science, however, is all in all a poor healer. The church’s concept at least gave suffering a kind of dignity: It did come from God — and unwelcome gift, perhaps — but after all it was punishment handed out from a firm father for a child’s own good.

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Science disconnected fact from religious truth, of course. In a universe formed by chance, with the survival of the fittest as the main rule of good behavior, illness became a kind of crime against a species itself. It meant we were unfit, and hence brought about all kinds of questions not seriously asked before.

Did those “genetically inferior,” for example, have the right to reproduce? Illness was thought to come like a storm, the result of physical forces against which the individual had little recourse. The “new” Freudian ideas of the unsavory unconscious led further to a new dilemma, for it was then — as it is now — widely believed that as the result of experiences in infancy the subconscious, or unconscious, might very well sabotage the best interests of the conscious personality, and trick it into illness and disaster.

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In a way, that concept puts a psychological devil in place of the metaphysical one. If life itself is seen scientifically as having no real meaning, then suffering, of course, must also be seen as meaningless. The individual becomes a victim of chance insofar as his/her birth, the events of his or her life, and his or her death are concerned. Illness becomes his most direct encounter with the seeming meaninglessness of personal existence.

We affect the structure of our body through our thoughts. If we believe in heredity, heredity itself becomes a strong suggestive factor in our life, and can help bring about the precise malady in the body that we believed was there all along, until finally our scientific instruments uncover the “faulty mechanism,” or whatever, and there is the evidence for all to see.

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There are obviously some conditions that in our terms are inherited, showing themselves almost instantly after birth, but these are of a very limited number in proportion to those diseases we believe are hereditary — many cancers, heart problems, arthritic or rheumatoid disorders. And in many cases of inherited difficulties, changes could be effected for the better, through the utilization of other mental methods.

There are as many kind of suffering as there are kinds of joy, and there is no one simple answer that can be given. As human creatures we accept the conditions of life. We create from those conditions the experiences of our days. We are born into belief systems as we are born into physical centuries, and part of the entire picture is the freedom of interpreting the experience of life in multitudinous fashions. The meaning, nature, dignity or shame of suffering will be interpreted according to our systems of belief. I hope to give the way a picture of reality that puts suffering in its proper perspective, but it is a most difficult subject to cover because it touches most deeply upon our hopes for oneself and for mankind, and our fears for ourselves and for mankind.

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We have taught ourselves to be aware of and to follow only certain portions of our own consciousnesses, so that mentally we consider certain subjects taboo. Thoughts of death and suffering are among those. In a species geared above all to the survival of the fittest, and the competition among species, then any touch of suffering or pain, or thoughts of death, become dishonorable, biologically shameful, cowardly, nearly insane. Life is to be pursued at all costs — not because it is innately meaningful, but because it is the only game going, and it is a game of chance at best. One life is all we have, and that one is everywhere beset by the threat of illness, disaster, and wa — and if we escape such drastic circumstances, then we are still left with a life that is the result of no more than lifeless elements briefly coming into a consciousness and vitality that is bound to end.

In that framework, even the emotions of love and exaltation are seen as no more than the erratic activity of neurons firing, or of chemicals reacting to chemicals. Those beliefs alone bring on suffering. All of science, in our time, has been set up to promote beliefs that run in direct contradiction to the knowledge of man’s and woman’s heart. Science has, we have noted, denied emotional truth. It is not simply that science denies the validity of emotional experience, but that it has believed so firmly that knowledge can only be acquired from the outside, from observing the exterior of nature.

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I spoke about the quality of life, and it is true to say that in at least many centuries past, if men and women may have died earlier, they also lived lives of fuller, more satisfying quality — and I do not want to be misinterpreted in the direction.

Now, it is also true that in some of its aspects religion has glorified suffering, elevated it to be one of the prime virtues — and it has degraded it at other times, seeing the ill as possessed by devils, or seeing the insane as less than human. So there are many issues involved.

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Science, however, seeing the body as a mechanism, has promoted the idea that consciousness is trapped within a mechanical model, that man’s and woman’s suffering is mechanically caused in that regard: We simple give the machine some better parts and all will be well. Science also operates as magic, of course, so on some occasions the belief in science itself will seemingly work miracles: The new heart will give a man or woman new heart, for example.

Illness is used as a part of man’s and woman’s motivations. What I mean is that there is no human motivation that may not at some time be involved with illness, for often it is a means to a desired end — a method of achieving something a person thinks may not be achieved otherwise.

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One man or woman might use it to achieve success. One might use it to achieve failure. a person might use it as a means of showing pride of humility, of looking for attention or escaping it. Illness is often another mode of expression, but nowhere does science mention that illness might have its purpose, or its groups of purposes, and I do not mean that the purposes themselves are necessarily derogatory. Illnesses are often misguided attempts to attain something the person thinks important. Sickness can be a badge of honor or dishonor — but there can be no question when we look at the human picture, that to a certain extent, but an important one, suffering not only has its purposes and uses, but is actively sought for one reason or another.

Most people do not seek out suffering’s extreme experience, but within those extremes there are multitudinous degrees of stimuli that could be considered painful, that are actively sought. Man’s and woman’s involvement in sports is an instant example, of course, where society’s rewards and the promise of spectacular bodily achievement lead athletes into activities that would be considered most painful by the ordinary individual. People climb mountains, willingly undergoing a good bit of suffering in the pursuit of such goals.

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Determining not to worry should be the “first commandment.”

I hope I have touched upon a question that’s loaded with ethical and legal dilemmas; many of these have grown out of recent scientific advances in genetics. some moral philosophers, medical geneticists, physicians, lawyers, and religious leaders believe that those who carry genes for serious genetic diseases do not have the right to reproduce. Others of similar background maintain just the opposite — that the right to recreate one’s kind is inalienable. Questions abound involving amniocentesis (examination of the fluid in the womb to detect genetic defects in the fetus); therapeutic abortion; artificial insemination; reproduction by in vitro fertilization; embryo transfer (surrogate motherhood); the responsibilities of the legal, medical and religious communities; whether mentally retarded, genetically defective people should receive life-prolonging medical treatment, and so forth. Years are expected to pass before our legal system alone catches up with the scientific progress in genetics — but ironically, continuing advances in the field are bound to complicate even further the whole series of questions.

Dreamers subjective actions form the phenomena of “the self.”

During this period that we have labeled as belonging to the dreamers, certain subjective actions take place as the “structure’ of earthly tuned consciousness formed the phenomena of “the self.”

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What was needed is a highly focused, precisely tuned physical self that could operate efficiently in a space and time scheme that is being formed along with physical creatures — a self, however, that in one way or another must be supported by realms of information and knowledge of a kind that was basically independent of time and space. A knowledge indispensable, and yet a knowledge that could not be allowed to distract the physical focus.

In one way or another, that inner information had to connect each consciousness on the face of the planet. Earthly creatures must be able to react in a moment, yet the inner mechanisms that made such reactions possible were based upon calculations that could not be consciously kept in mind. In our time scheme, for example, we could never move as quickly as we do if we had to consciously work all the muscles involved in motion — or in speech, or in any such bodily performance. We certainly could not communicate on such a physical level if we first had to be aware of all of speech’s mechanisms, working them consciously before a word was uttered. Yet we had to have that kind of knowledge, and we had to have it in a way that did not intrude upon our conscious thoughts.

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Basically there are no real divisions to the self, but for the sake of explanation we must speak of them in those terms. First of all we had the inner self, the creative dreaming self — composed, of units of consciousness, awareized energy that forms our identity, and that formed the identities of the earliest earth inhabitants. These inner selves formed their own dream bodies about them, as previously explained, but the dream bodies did not have to have physical reactions. They were free of gravity and space, and of time.

As the body became physical, however, the inner self formed the body consciousness so that the physical body became more aware of itself, of the environment, and of its relationship within the environment. Before this could happen, though, the body consciousness was taught to become aware of its own inner environment. The body was lovingly formed from electromagnetic energy units through all the stages to atoms, cells, organs, and so forth. The body’s pattern came from the inner self, as all of the units of consciousness involved in this venture together formed this fabric of environment and creatures, each suited to the other.

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So far in our discussion, then, we have an inner self, dwelling primarily in a mental or psychic dimension, dreaming itself into physical form, and finally forming a body consciousness. To that body consciousness the inner self gives “its own body of physical knowledge,” the vast reservoir of physical achievement that it has triumphantly produced. The body consciousness is not “unconscious,” but for working purposes in our terms, the body possesses its own system of consciousness that to some extent, now, it separated from what we think of as our own normal consciousness. The body’s consciousness is hardly to be considered less than our own, or as inferior to that of our inner self, since it represents knowledge from the inner self, and is a part of the inner self’s own consciousness — the part delegated to the body.

Each cell, then operates so well in time because it is, in those terms, precognitive. It is aware of the position, health, vitality, of other cells of the face of the planet. It is aware of the position of each grain of sand on the shores of each ocean, and in those terms it forms a portion of the earth’s consciousness.

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At that level environment, creatures, and the elements of the natural world are all united — a point we will return to quite often. Our intellect as we think of it operates so clearly and precisely, so logically, sometimes so arrogantly, because the intellect rides that great thrust of codified,  “ancient,” “unconscious” power — the power of instant knowing that is a characteristic of the body consciousness.

Thus far in our discussion, we still have only an inner self and a body consciousness. As the body consciousness developed itself, perfected its organization, the inner self and the body consciousness together performed a kind of psychological double-entendre.

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The best analogy I can think of is that up to that time the self was like a psychological rubber band, snapping inward and outward with great force and vitality, but without any kind of rigid-enough psychological framework to maintain a physical stance. The inner self still related to dream reality, while the body’s orientation and the body consciousness attained, as was intended, a great sense of physical adventure, curiosity, speculation, wonder — and so once again the inner self put a portion of its consciousness in a different parcel, so to speak. As once it had formed the body consciousness, now it formed a physically attuned consciousness, a self whose desires and intents would be oriented in a way that, alone, the inner self could not be.

The inner self was too aware of its own multidimensionality, so in our terms it gave psychological birth to itself through the body in space and time. It knew itself as a physical creature. That portion of the self is the portion we recognize as our usual conscious self, alive within the scheme of seasons, aware within the designs of time, caught transfixed in moments of brilliant awareness, with civilizations that seem to come and go. That is the self that is alert in the dear preciseness of the moments, whose physical senses are bound to light and darkness, sound and touch. that is the self that lives the life of the body.

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It is the self that looks outward. It is the self that we call egotistically aware. The inner self became what I refer to as the inner ego. It looks into that inner reality, that psychic dimension of awareness from which both our own consciousness and our body consciousness emerged.

We are one self, then, but for operating purposes we will say that we have three parts: the inner self or inner ego, the body consciousness, and the consciousness that we know.

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These portions, however, are intimately connected. They are like three different systems of consciousness operating together to form the whole. The divisions — the seeming divisions — are not stationary, but change constantly.

To one extent or another, these three systems of consciousness operate in one way or another in all of the species, and in all particles, in the physical universe. In our terms, this means that the proportions of the three systems might vary, but they are always in operation, whether we are speaking of a man or a woman, a rock or a fly, a star or an atom. The inner self represent our prime identity, the self we really are.

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“Earth is a nice place, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” a twist on an old quote, I believe — but the fact is we are physical creatures because we do not like to live on earth, we do like the conditions, we do enjoy overall the particular kind of challenge and the particular kind of perception, knowledge and understanding that the earthly environment provides.

That environment, in our terms, certainly includes suffering. If joy has always been one of the characteristics of earth experience, so has suffering, and the subject will be covered in future blogs. Here, however, I only want to mention one facet, and that is the importance of physical sensation, of whatever kind — for the life of the body provides us, among all things, with a life of sensation, of feeling, a spectrum that must include the experience of all possible sensations within its overall range.

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Now as we will see, all creatures, regardless of their degree, can and do choose, within their spheres of reality, those sensations that they will experience — but to one extent or another all sensations are felt. We will later discuss the part of the mind and its interpretation, for example, of painful stimuli, but I want to make the point that those attracted to physical life are first and foremost tasters of sensation. Outside of that, basically, there are all kinds of mental distinctions made among stimuli. The body is made to react. It is made to feel life and vitality by reacting to an environment that is not itself, by encountering what we might call natural stress. The body maintains its equilibrium by reacting against gravity, by coming in contact with other bodies, by changing its own sensations, by glorifying in the balance between balance and off-balance.

The body consciousness is therefore given a superb sense of its own reality, a sureness of identity, a sense of innate safety and security, that allows it to not only function but to grow in the physical world. It is endowed with a sense of boldness, daring, a sense of natural power. It is perfectly formed to fit into its environment — and the environment is perfectly formed to have such creatures.

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The entities, or units of consciousness — those ancient fragments that burst into objectivity from the vast and infinite psychological realms of All That Is — dared all, for they joyfully abandoned themselves in space and time. They created new psychological entities, opened up an area of divine creativity that “until then” had been closed, and therefore to that degree extended the experience and immense existence of All That Is. For in so abandoning themselves they were not of course abandoned, since they contained within themselves their inherent relationship with All that Is. In those terms All That Is became physical also, aroused at its divine depth by the thrusting of each grass blade through the soil into the air, aroused by each birth and by each moment of each creature’s existence.

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All That Is, therefore, is immersed within our world, present in each hypothetical point, and forms the very fabric from which each portion of matter is created.

For eons men and women where in the dreaming state

Men and women slept long hours, as did the animals — awakening, so to speak, to exercise their bodies, obtain sustenance, and later, to mate. It was indeed a dreamlike world, but a highly charming and vital one, in which dreaming imaginations played rambunctiously with all the probabilities entailed in this new venture: imagining the various forms of language and communication possible, spinning great dream tales of future civilizations replete with their own built-in histories — building, because they were now allied with time, mental edifices that automatically created pasts as well as futures.

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These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that creatures and environment together formed great environmental realities. Valleys and mountains, and their inhabitants, together dreamed themselves into being and coexistence.

The species — from our viewpoint — lived at a much slower pace in those terms. The blood, for example, did not need to course so quickly through the veins and arteries, the heart did not need to beat as fast. And in an important fashion the coordination of the creature in its environment did not need to be as precise, since there was an elastic give-and-take of consciousness between the two.

In ways almost impossible to describe, the ground rules were not as firmly established. Gravity itself did not carry its all-pervasive sway, so that the air was more buoyant. Man and woman was aware of its support in a luxurious, intimate fashion. He/she was aware of himself or herself in a different way, so that, for example, his and her identification with the self did not stop where his or her skin stopped. He and she could follow it outward into the space about his or her form, and feel it merge with the atmosphere with a primal sense-experience that we have forgotten.

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During this period, incidentally, mental activity of the highest, most original variety was the strongest dream characteristic, and the knowledge man and woman gained was imprinted upon the physical brain: what is now completely unconscious activity involving the functions of the body, its relationship with the environment, its balance and temperature, its constant inner alterations. All of these highly intricate activities were learned and practiced in the dream state as the conscious units translated their inner knowledge through the state of dreaming into physical form.

Then in our terms man and woman began, with the other species, to waken more fully into the physical world, to develop the exterior senses, to intersect delicately and precisely with space and time. Yet man and woman still sleeps and dreams, and that state is still a firm connective with his or her own origins, and with the origins of the universe as he or she knows it as well.

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Man and woman dreamed his or her languages. He and she dreamed how to use his or her tongue to form the words. In his or her dreams he/she practiced stringing the words together to form their meanings, so that finally he or she could consciously begin a sentence without actually knowing how it was begun, yet in the faith that he/she could and would complete it.

All languages have as their basis the language that was spoken in dreams. The need for language arose, however, as man woman became less a dreamer and more immersed in the specifics of space and time, for in the dream state his/her communications with his or her fellows and other species was instantaneous. Language arose to take the place of that inner communication, then. There is a great underlying unity in all of man’s and woman’s so-called early cultures — cave drawings and religions — because they were all fed by that common source, as man and woman tired to transpose inner knowledge into physical actuality.

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The body learned to maintain its stability, its strength and agility, to achieve a state of balance in complementary response to the weather and elements, to dream computations that the conscious mind alone could not hold. The body learned to heal itself in sleep in its dreams — and at certain levels in that state even now each portion of consciousness contributes to the health and stability of all other portions. Far from the claw-and dagger universe, we have one whose very foundation is based upon the loving cooperation of all its parts. That is given — the gift of life brings along with it the actualization of that cooperation, for the body’s parts exist as a unit because of inner relationships of a cooperative nature: and those exist at our birth when we are innocent of any cultural beliefs that may be to the contrary.

If it were not for this most basic, initial loving cooperation, that is a given quality in life itself, life would not have continued. Each individual of each species takes that initial zest and joy of life as its own yardstick. Each individual of whatever species, and each consciousness, whatever its degree, automatically seeks to enhance the quality of life itself — not only for itself but for all of reality as well.

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This is a given characteristic of life, regardless of the beliefs that may lead us to misinterpret the actions of nature, casting some of its creatures in a reprehensible light.

In a fashion those ancient dreamers, through their immense creativity, dreamed all of life’s creatures in all of their pasts, presents, and futures — that is, their dreams opened up the doors of space and time to entities that otherwise would not have been released into actualization, even as, for example, the units of consciousness were once released from the mind of All That Is.

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All possible entities that can ever be actualized always exist. They have always existed and they always will exist. All That Is must, by its characteristics, be all that it can ever be, and so there can be no end to existence — and, in those terms, no beginning. But in terms of our world the units of consciousness, acting both as forces and as psychological entities of massive power, planted the seeds of our world in a dimension of imaginative power that gave birth to physical form. In our terms those entities are our ancestors — and yet they are not ours alone, but the ancestors of all the consciousnesses that make up our world.

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It is easy to live — so easy that although we live, rest, create, respond, feel, touch, see, sleep and wake, we do not really have to try to do any of those things. From our viewpoint they are done for us.

They are done for us in Framed-Mind-2 — and further discussions of Framed-Mind-2, incidentally, will be inter-wound throughout my blogs. Our beliefs often tell us that life is hard, however, that living is difficult, that the universe, again, is unsafe, and that we must use all of our resources — not to meet life with anything like joyful abandon, or course, but to protect ourselves against its implied threats; threats that we have been taught to expect.

But our beliefs do not stop there. Because of both scientific and religious ones, in Western civilization we believe that there are threats from within also. As a result we forget our natural selves, and become involved in a secondary, largely imaginary culture: beliefs that are projected negatively into the future, individually and en masse. People respond with illnesses of one kind or another, or through exaggerated behavior.

Living is easy. It is safe and reliable because it is easy.

We were each present at the beginning of the world

Though we may be present in the world now in a somewhat different fashion. Remember that each unit of consciousness is a fragment of All That Is, a divine portion. Then perhaps what I am about to explain will make sense.

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For some time, in our terms, the sleepwalkers remained more or less at that level of activity, and for many centuries they used the surface of the earth as a kind of background for other activity. Their real life was what we would now call the dreaming one. They worked mentally while asleep, constructing in their individual minds and in their joint mental endeavors all of the dazzling images that would later become a mental reservoir from which men and women could draw. In that multidimensional array, consciousness mentally learned to form itself into electromagnetic energy units, atoms and molecules, electrons and chromosomes. It mentally formed the patterns through which all physical life could flow. The world then came into physical existence. Those units of consciousness are indestructible and vitalized, regardless of the forms they take, and while men’s and women’s forms were dream images, consciousness spun forms into physical material.

Consciousness possesses the most unimaginable agility without ever losing any potency. Those units of consciousness, for example, can mix and combine with others to form a million different sequences of memory and desire, of neutral achievement and recognition, of structure and design.

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We read our own consciousness now in a kind of vertical fashion, identifying only with certain portions of it, and it seems to us that any other organization of perception, and other recognition of identity, would quite necessarily negate our own or render it inoperable. In the beginning of the world there were numberless groupings, however, and affiliations of consciousness, many other organizations of identity that were recognized, as well as the kind of psychological orientation we have now — but our kind of orientation was not the paramount one. While, generally speaking, earth’s species existed from the beginning in the forms by which we now know them, consciousness of species was quite different, and all species were much more intimately related through various kinds of identification that have since gone into the underground of awareness.

Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what we think of as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. In that regard the earth’s entire environment was built mentally, atom by conscious atom — each atom, again, being initially formed by units of consciousness. I said that these units could operate as entities, and as forces, so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and psyche properties purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite mind as that mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. Those entities, in our terms so ancient, left fragments of themselves in trance, so to speak, that form the rocks and hills, the mountains, the air and the water, and all of the elements that exist on the face of the earth.

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Those entities are in trance, in those terms, but their potency is not diminished, and there is constant communication among them always.

There is also constant communication between them and us at other levels than those we recognize, so that there is an unending interplay between each species and its environment.

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There is no place where consciousness stops and the environment begins, or vice versa. Each form or life is created along with each other form — environment and organism in those terms creating each other. After forms were fully physical, however, all species operated as sleepwalkers for many centuries, though on the scale that existed then the passage of time was not considered in the same fashion. During that period the work of wedding nonphysical consciousness to matter was accomplished. Effects of gravity, for example, were stabilized. The seasons took on the rhythms best suited to the creatures in various locations. The environment and the creatures accommodated each other.

Up until then, the main communications had followed the characteristic patterns of units of consciousness, each unit knowing its relationship to all others upon the planet. Creatures relied upon inner senses while learning to operate the new, highly specific physical ones that pinpointed perception in time and place. This pinpointing of perception was of vital importance, for with the full arousal of consciousness in flesh, intersections with space and time had to be impeccable.

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Dream bodies became physical, and through the use of the senses tuned to physical frequencies — frequencies of such power and allure that they would reach all creatures of every kind, from microbe to elephant, holding them together in a cohesive web of space-and-time alignment.

In the beginning, man’s and woman’s dreams were in certain terms of immediate physical survival. They gave man and woman information — a kind that of necessity the new physical senses could not contain. Those senses could only perceive the immediate environment, but man’s and woman’s dreams compensated for that lack, and filled out his and her consciousness by giving it the benefit of that larger generalized information to which it had once had an easy access. When he or she was asleep man and woman could take advantage of the information banks contained in the units of consciousness that composed his or her very flesh.

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Now: When he or she dreamed — man and woman returned to a state prior to waking, from which his or her physical life itself had emerged — only now he or she was a new creature, a new kind of consciousness, and so were all of the other species. In dreams all of the species familiarized themselves with their old affiliations, and they read their own identities in different fashions. “They remembered how it was.” They remembered that they formed each other.

This tale, I admit, is far more difficult to understand than a simple story of God’s creation of the world, or its actual production in a meaningless universe through the slippery hands of chance — and yet my story is more magnificent because elements of its truth will find resonance in the minds and hearts of those open enough to listen. For men’s and women’s minds themselves are alive with the desire to read properly, and they are aware of their own vast heritage. It is not simply that man and woman has a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him or her is not, but that in those terms everything he or she knows, regardless of size or degree, is made of “soul stuff.” Each portion has its own identity and validity — and no portion is ever annihilated or destroyed. The form may change.

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I must of necessity tell this story in serial terms, but the world and all of its creatures actually come together like some spontaneously composed, ever-playing musical composition in which the notes themselves are alive and play themselves, so that the musicians and the notes are one and the same, the purpose and the performance being one, with each note played continuing to strike all of its own probable versions, forming all of its own probable compositions while at the same time taking part in all of the themes, melodies, and notes of the other compositions — so that each note, striking, defines itself, and yet also exists by virtue of its position in the composition as a whole.

The conscious mind cannot handle that kind of multidimensional creativity, yet it can expand into a kind of new recognition when it is carried along, still being itself, by its own theme.

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In a way, our world follows its own theme in creativity’s composition. We want to know where we came into the musical production, so to speak. I use a musical analogy here, if a simple one, to point out that we are also dealing with frequencies of perception. We are tuned into earth’s orchestration [we might say], and our perception of time is simply the result of habits — habits of perception that we had to learn in the beginning of the world. And we learned those habits as our physical senses gradually became more alert and specific.

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We “timed” ourselves — but greater perceptions always appeared in the background of our consciousness and in the dream state. It is the great activity of the dream state that allows us, as psychological and physical creatures, to recognize and inhabit the world that we know.

The Inner Gestalt

The inner universe is a gestalt formed by fields of awareized energy that contains what we will call “information” for now — but we will have some comments later in this blog, for this is not the kind of information we are used to.

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Each unit of consciousness inherently possesses within itself all of the information available to the whole, and its specific nature when it operates as a particle rests upon that great “body” of inner knowledge. Any one such particle can be where it “is,” be what it is, and be when it is only because the positions, relative positions, and situations of all other such particles are known.

In the deepest terms, our physical world is beginning at each point at which these units of consciousness assert themselves to form physical reality. Otherwise, life would not be “handed down” through the generations. Each unit of consciousness intensifies, magnifies its own intent to be — and, we might say, works up from within itself an explosive spark of primal desire that “explodes” into a process that causes physical materialization. It turns into Electromagnetic Energy unit, in which case it is embarked upon its own kind of physical experience.

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These electromagnetic energy units also operate as fields, as waves, or as particles, as the units of consciousness do — but in our terms they are closer to physical orientation. Their die is cast, so to speak: They have already begun the special kind of screening process necessary that will bring about physical form. They begin to deal with the kinds of information that will help form our world. There are literally numberless steps taken before electromagnetic energy units combine in their own fashion to form the most microscopic physical particles, and even here the greatest, gentlest sorting-out process takes place as these units disentangle themselves at certain operational levels from their own greater fields of “information,” to specialize in the various elements that will allow for the production of atoms and molecules impeccably suited to our kind of world.

First, we have various stages of, say, pseudo-matter, of dream images, that only gradually — in those terms — coalesce and become physically viable, for there are endless varieties of “matte” between the matter that we recognize and the anti-matter of physicists’ theories.

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Form exists at many other levels than those we recognize, in other words. Our dream forms are quite as real as our physical ones. They simply fit into their own environment at another level of activity, and they are quite reminiscent of the kinds of forms that we had in the beginning of our world.

While we and all of the other species were what I call sleepwalkers, our bodies by then were physically capable. In a manner of speaking, we did not know how to use them properly as yet. Now, from a waking state, we do not understand how our dream bodies can seem to fly through the air, defy space and even time, converse with strangers and so forth. In the same way, however, once, we had to learn to deal with gravity, to deal with space and time, to manipulate in a world of objects, to simply breathe, to digest our food, and to perform all of the biological manipulations that now we take for granted.

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We could not afford to identify too completely with such bodies until we learned how to survive within them, so in the dream state the true processes of life began as their new bodies and earth-tuned consciousnesses saw themselves mentally exercising all portions of the body. Behind all that was the brilliant comprehension and cooperation of all of the units of consciousness that go to compose the body, each adding its own information and specific knowledge to the overall bodily organizations, and each involved in the most intricate fields of relationships, for the miracle of the body’s efficiency is the result of relationships that exist among all of its parts, connecting it to other levels of existence that do not physical appear.

Units of consciousness, transforming themselves into electromagnetic energy units, formed the environment and all of its inhabitants in the same process, in what we might call a circular manner rather than a serial one. And in those terms, of course, there are only various physical manifestations of consciousness, not a planet and its inhabitants, but an entire gestalt of awareized consciousness. In those terms, each portion of physically oriented consciousness sees reality and experience from its own privileged viewpoint, about which it seems all else revolves, even though this may involve a larger generalized field than our own, or a smaller one.

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So to rocks, say, we can be considered a portion of their environment, while we may consider them merely a portion of our environment. We simply do not tune into the range of rock consciousness. Actually, many other kinds of consciousness, while focused in their own specific ways, are more aware than man and woman is of the earth’s unified nature — but man and woman, if following his or her own ways, also adds to the value fulfillment of all other consciousness in ways that are quite outside of usual systems of knowledge.

If we remember that beneath all, each unit of consciousness is aware of the position of each other unit, and that these units form all physical matter, then perhaps we can intuitively follow what I mean, for whatever knowledge man and woman attains, whatever experience any one person accumulates, whatever arts or sciences we produce, all such information is instantly perceived at other levels of activity by each other units of consciousness that compose physical reality — whether those units form the shape of rock, a raindrop, an apple, a cat, a frog or a shoe. manufactured products are also composed of atoms and molecules that ride upon units of consciousness transformed into electromagnetic energy units, and hence into physical elements.

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What we have, really, is a manifested and an un-manifested consciousness, but only relatively speaking. We do not perceive the consciousness of objects. It is not manifest to us because our range of activities requires boundaries to frame our picture of reality.

All of our manufactured objects also originated in the realm of dreams, first obviously being conceived of mentally, and in the same way man and woman produced his and her first tools. He /she was born with all of those abilities — abilities by which he is now characterized — and with other abilities that in our terms still wait for development. Not that he or she has not used them so far, but that her or she has not focused upon them in what we consider the main line of civilized continuity. Hints of those abilities are always present in the dream state, and in the arts, in the religions, and even in the sciences. They appear in politics and business, but as the largely un-manifest intuitive background, which is largely ignored.

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Men’s and women’s dreams have always provided him or her with a sense of impetus, purpose, meaning, and given him or her the raw material from which to form his and her civilizations. The true history of the world is the history of man’s and woman’s dreams, for they have been responsible in one way or another for all historic developments. They were responsible for the birth of agriculture, as well as industry, the rise and fall of nations, the “glory” that was Rome, and Rome’s destruction. Our present technological advances can almost be dated from the invention of the printing press, to Edison’s inventions, which were flashes of intuition, dream-inspired. But if what I am telling you is true, then it is obvious that when I say that our physical world originated in the world of dreams, I must mean something far different from the usual definition of dream reality. Again, I could choose another term, but I want to emphasize each person’s intimate contact with that other reality that does occur in what we think of as the state of dreaming.

That analogy will help us at least intuitively understand the existence of situations such as suffering, and poverty, that otherwise seem to have no adequate explanations. I hope also to imply the survival of the fittest in a tooth-and-claw fashion, or the punishing acts of a vengeful God on the one hand and the triumph of an evil force on the other.

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For now in our tale of beginnings, however, we still have a spasmodic universe that appears and disappears — that gradually, in those terms, manifest for longer periods of time. What we really had in the beginning were images without form, slowly adopting form, blinking on and off, then stabilizing into forms that were as yet not completely physical. These then took on all of the characteristics that we now consider forward physical matter.

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As all of this occurred, consciousness took on more and more specific orientations, greater organizations at our end. At the “other end,” it disentangled itself from vaster fields of activity to allow for this specific behavior. All of these units of consciousness again, operate as entities (or particles, or as waves or forces). In those terms, consciousness formed the experience of time — and not, of course, the other way around.

Awakenings of the Species

The building blocks of matter can be called Conscious units or units of consciousness. They form physical matter as it exists in our understanding and experience. Units of consciousness also form other kinds of matter that we do not perceive.

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Conscious units can also operate as “particles” or as “waves.” Whichever way they operate, they are aware of their own existences. When conscious units operate as particles, in our terms, they build up a continuity in time. They take on the characteristics of particularity. They identify themselves by the establishment of specific boundaries.

They take certain forms, then, when they operate as particles, and experience their reality from “the center of” unique specifications. They become in our terms individual.

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When conscious units operate as waves, however, they do not set up any boundaries about their own self-awareness — and when operating as waves conscious units can indeed be in more than one place at one time.

I understand that this is somewhat difficult material to comprehend. However, in its purest form a unit of consciousness can be in all places at the same time. It becomes beside the point, then, to say that when it operates as a wave a unit of consciousness is precognitive, or clairvoyant, since it has the capacity to be in all places and all times simultaneously.

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Those units of consciousness are the building blocks for the physical material of our body, for the trees and rocks, the oceans, the continents, and the very manifestation of space itself as we understand it.

These conscious units can operate as separate entities, as identities, or they can flow together in a vast, harmonious wave of activity, as a force. Actually, units of consciousness operate in both ways all of the time. No identity, once “formed,” is ever annihilated, for its existence is indelibly a part of “the entire wave of consciousness to which it belongs.”

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Each “particalized” unit, however, rides the continual thrust set up by fields of consciousness, in which wave and particle both belong. Each particalized unit of consciousness contains within it inherently the knowledge of all other such particles — for at other levels, again, the units are operating as waves. Basically the units move faster than light, slowing down, in our terms, to form matter. These units can be considered, again, as entities or as forces, and they can operate as either. Metaphysically, they can be thought of as the point at which All That Is acts to form our world — the immediate contact of a never-ending creative inspiration, coming into mental focus, the metamorphosis of certainly divine origin that brings the physical world into existence from the greater reality of divine fact. Scientifically, again, the units can be thought of as building blocks of matter. Ethically, the conscious units represent the spectacular foundations of the world in value fulfillment, for each unit of consciousness is related to each other, each participating in the entire gestalt of mortal experience. And we will see how this applies to our attitudes toward species, and man’s and woman’s relationship with other conscious entities and the planet we share with them.

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In the beginning conscious units, then, units of consciousness, existing within a divine psychological gestalt, endowed with the unimaginable creativity of that sublime identity, began themselves to create, to explore, and to fulfill those innate values by which they were characterized. Operating both as waves and particles, directed in part by their own creative restlessness, and directed in part by the unquenchable creativity of All That Is, they embarked upon the project that brought time and space and our entire universe into being. They were the first entities, then.

I want us to try and imagine a situation in which there exists a psychological force that includes within its capabilities the ability to act simultaneously on the most microscopic and the most macroscopic levels; that can form within itself a million separate inviolate unique identities, and that can still operate as a part of those identities, and as a larger unit that is their source — in which case it is a wave from which the particles emerge. That description fits our units of consciousness.

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They built our world from the inside out. As physical creatures, they focused upon what we think of as physical identities: separate, individual differences, endowing each physical consciousness with its own original variations and creative potentials, its own opportunity for completely original experience, and a viewpoint or platform from which to participate in reality — one that at that level could not be experienced in the same way by any other individual. This is the privileged, always new, private and immediate, direct experience of any individual of any species, or of any degree, as it encounters the objective universe.

At other levels, while each individuality is maintained, it rides the wavelike formations of consciousness. It is everywhere at once, and the units of consciousness that make up our cells know the positions of all other such units, both in time and in space.

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In the beginning, then, these units operated both as identities or particles, and as waves. The main concentration was not yet physical in our terms. What we now think of as the dream state was the waking one, for it was still the recognized form of purposeful activity, creativity, and power. The dream state continues to be a connective between the two realities, and as a species we literally learned to walk by first being sleepwalkers. We walked in our sleep. We dreamed our languages. We spoke in our dreams and later wrote down the alphabets — and our knowledge and our intellect have always been fired, sharpened, propelled by the great inner reality from which our minds emerged.

Physical matter by itself could never produce consciousness. One mind alone could not come into being from chance alone; one thought could not leap from an infinite number or nerve ends, if matter itself was not initially alive with consciousness, packed with the intent to be. A man or woman who believes life has little meaning quickly leaves life — and a meaningless existence could never produce life. Nor was the universe created for one species alone, by a God who is simply a supervision of the same species — as willful and destructive as man or woman at his or her worst.

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Instead, we have an inner dimension of activity, a vast field of multidimensional creativity, a Creator that becomes a portion of each of its creations, and yet a Creator that is greater than the sum of its parts: a Creator that can know itself as a mouse in a field, or as the field, or as the continent upon which the field rests, or as the planet that holds the continent, or as the universe that holds the world — a force that is whole yet divisible, that is one and the inconceivably many, a force that is eternal and mortal at once, a force that plunges headlong into its own creativity, forming the seasons and experiencing them as well, glorifying in individuation, and yet always aware of the great unity that is within and behind and through all experiences of individuality: a force from which each moment pasts and future flow out in every conceivable direction.

In our terms of time, however, we will speak of a beginning, and in that beginning it was early man’s and woman’s dreams that allowed him or her to cope with physical reality. The dream world was his or her original learning ground. In times of drought he or she would dream of the location of water. In times of famine he or she would dream of the location of food. That is, his or her dreaming allowed him or her to clairvoyantly view the body of land. He or she would not waste time in the trail-and-error procedures that we now take for granted. In dreams his or her consciousness operated as a wave.

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In those early times all species shared their dreams in a way that is now quite unconscious for our kind, so that in dreams man and woman inquired of the animals also — long before he or she learned to follow the animal tracks, for example. Where is there food or water? What is the lay of the land? Man and woman explored the planet because his/her dreams told him that the land was there.

People were not nearly as isolated as it now appears, for in their dreams early men and women communicated their various locations, the symbols of their cultures and understanding, the nature of their arts. All of the inventions that we often think now happened quite by chance — the discovery of anything from the first tool to the importance of fire, or the coming of the Iron Age or whatever — all of that inventiveness was the result of the inspiration and communication of the dream world. Man and woman dreamed his or her world and then created it, and the units of consciousness first dreamed man or woman and all of the other species that we know.

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There is a point here that I want to emphasize before we go too far, and it is this: The dream world is not an aimless, non-logical, unintellectual field of activity. It is only that our own perspective closes out much of its vast reality, for the dreaming intellect can put our computers to shame. I am not, therefore, putting the intellectual capacities in the background — but I am saying that they emerge as we know them because of the dreaming self’s uninterrupted use of the full power of the united intellect and intuitions.

The intellectual abilities as we know them cannot compare to those greater capacities that are a part of our own inner reality.

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It makes little difference whether we watch the news or not — but it makes all the difference in the world what we think of world events.

The perspective from which we watch events is vital, and it it true that communication now brings to the conscious mind a far greater barrage than before. But it is also a barrage that makes man and woman see his and her activities, and even with the growth of the new nationalism in the Third World, those nations begin from a new perspective, in which the eyes of the world are indeed upon them.

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Our country faces the results of its own policies — its greed as well as its good intent, but it is out in the open in a new way. The world will be seen as one, but there may be changes in the overall tax assessments along the way, as those who have not paid much, pay more.

The results of fanaticism are also out in the open. Never before, in our terms, has the private person been able to see a picture of the mass world in such a way, or been forced to identify with the policies of his or her government. That in itself is a creative achievement, and means that man or woman is not closing his or her eyes to the inequities of his or her world.

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Units of consciousness do help form different kinds of physical realities. There are many dimensions that are as physical, so to speak, as our own world, but if we are not focused in them we would not at all be aware of their existence, but perceive only empty space.

Nothing in the universe is ever lost, or misled, or wasted, so the energy of our own thoughts, while they are still our own thoughts, helps to form the natural attributes of physical realities that we do not perceive. So our own world formed by units of consciousness. Its natural elements are the glistening remnants of other units of consciousness that we do not see.

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According to Albert Einstein, no material particle in our universe can be accelerated from rest to quite the speed of light, which is about 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum. Supposed faster-than-light particles are thought to be possible within the context of Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

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We have taught ourselves to respond to certain neural patterns, and to ignore alternate ones that now simply operate as background activity. That background activity, however, supports a million forces: the neural stimuli that we accept as biologically real. Those other background stimuli are now quite difficult for us to identify, but they are always there in the [hinterland] of our waking consciousness, like dream chatter way beneath our usual associations.

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Neurologically, we tune into only a portion of our body’s reality and are ignorant of the great, tiny but tumultuous communications that are ever flying back and forth in the microscopic but vital cellular world.

Electrons in our terms are precognitive, and so is our cellular consciousness. Our body’s relative permanence in time is dependent upon the electron’s magnificent behavior as it deals with probabilities. The cell’s stability, and its reliability in the bodily environment, is dependent upon its innate properties of instant communication and instant decision, for each cell is in communication with all others and is united with all others through fields of consciousness, in which each entity of whatever degree plays a part.

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At one level our cells obey the rules of time, but on other levels they defy it. All of these communications are a part of the human parcel of reality, and they all exist beneath what we think of as normal consciousness. Events are not built up initially from physical particles. They are the result of psychological activity.

“In the beginning” we were only aware of that psychological activity. It had not “as yet” thickened itself into form. The form was there, but it was not manifest. I do not particularly like the analogy, but it is useful: Instead of small particles, we had small units of consciousness gradually building themselves into large ones — but a smaller unit of consciousness, is not “less than” a larger unit, for each unit of consciousness contains within itself the innate heritage of All That Is.

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We think of the conscious mind, as we know it, as the only kind of consciousness with a deliberate intent, awareness of itself as itself, and with a capacity for logic and the appreciation of symbolism. That only seems true because of our particular range of activity, and because we can only pinpoint events within a particular psychological spectrum.

Fields of consciousness in physics is called “energy and momentum,” not consciousness.