Tag Archives: Garden of Eden

Emotions, Etheric Body, Evolution, Feelings, Gestalt, Inner universe, Lessons, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Uncategorized, Unknown

Is “good” an absolute?

April 22, 2016 zzzesus

When discussing the nature of good and bad, we are on tricky ground indeed, for many — or most — of man’s and woman’s atrocities to man and woman have been committed in misguided pursuit of “the good.”

Whose good? In our arena of events, obviously, one man’s and woman’s good can be another’s disaster. Adolf Hitler pursued his version of “the good” with undeviating fanatical intent. He believed in the superiority and moral rectitude of the Aryan race. In his grandiose, idealized versions of reality, he saw that race “set in its proper place,” as natural master of humankind.

He believed in heroic characteristics, and became blinded by an idealized superman version of an Aryan strong in mind and body. To attain that end, Hitler was quite willing to sacrifice the rest of humanity. “The evil must be plucked out.” That unfortunate chant is behind the beliefs of many cults — scientific and religious — and Hitler’s Aryan kingdom was a curious interlocking of the worst aspect of religion and science alike, in which their cultish tendencies were encouraged and abetted.

The political arena was the practical working realm in which those ideals were to find fruition. Hitler’s idea of good was hardly inclusive, therefore, and any actions, however atrocious, were justified.

How did Hitler’s initially wishy-washy undefined ideals of nationalistic goodness turn into such a world catastrophe? Hitler’s daydreams became more and more grandiose, and in their light, the plight of his country seemed worsened with each day’s events. He counter its humiliations over and over in his mind, until his mind became an almost completely closed environment, in which only certain ideas were allowed entry.

All that was not Aryan, really , became the enemy. The Jews took the brunt ,largely because of their financial successes and their cohesiveness, their devotion to a culture that was not basically Aryan. They would become the victims of Hitler’s fanatical ideal of Germany’s good.

Hitler preached on the great value of social action as opposed to individual action. He turned children into informers against their own parents. He behaved nationalistically, as any minor cult leader does in a smaller context. The Jews believed in martyrdom. Germany became the new Egypt, in which their people were set upon. I do not want to simplify here, and certainly I am nowhere justifying the cruelties the Jews encountered in Germany. We do each create our own reality, however, and en masse we create the realities of our nationalities and our countries — so at that time the Germans saw themselves as victors, and the Jews saw themselves as victims.

Both reacted as groups, rather than as individuals, generally speaking now. For all of their idealism, both basically believed in a pessimistic view of the self. It was because Hitler was so convinced of the existence of evil in the individual psyche, that he set up all of his existence of evil in the in the individual psyche, that set up all of his rules and regulations to build up and preserve “Aryan purity.” The Jews’ idea was also a dark one, in which their own rules and regulations were set to preserve the soul’s purity against the forces of evil. And while in the Jewish books [of The Old Testament} Jehovah now and then came through with great majesty to save his chosen people, he also allowed them to suffer great indignities over long periods of time, seeming to save them only at the last moment — and this time, seemed, he did not sane them at all. What happened?

Despite himself, and despite his followers, Hitler brought to flower a very important idea, and one that changed our history. All of the most morbid of nationalistic fantasies that had been growing for centuries, all of the most grandiose celebrations of war as a nation’s inalienable right to seek domination, focused finally in Hitler’s Germany.

The nation served as an example of what could happen in any country if the most fanatical nationalism was allowed to go unchecked, if the ideas of right were aligned with might, if any nation was justified in contemplating the destruction of others.

We must realize that Hitler believed that any atrocity was justified in the light of what he thought of as the greater good. To some extent or another, many of the ideals he held and advocated had long been accepted in world communities, though they had not been acted upon with such dispatch. The nations of the world saw their own worst tendencies personified in Hitler’s Germany, ready to attack them. The Jews, for various reasons — and again, this is not the full story — the Jews acted as all of the victims of the world, both the Germans and the Jews basically agreeing upon “man’s nefarious nature.” For the first time the modern world realized its vulnerability to political events, and technology and communication accelerated all of war’s dangers. Hitler brought many of man’s and woman’s most infamous tendencies to the surface. For the first time species the species understood that might alone did not mean right, and that in larger terms a world war could have no real victors. Hitler might well have exploded the world’s first atomic bomb.

In a strange fashion, however, Hitler knew that he was doomed from the very beginning, and so did Germany as far as Hitler’s hopes for it were concerned. He yearned for destructions of his earlier ideals. This meant that he often sabotaged his own efforts, and several important Allied victories were the result of such sabotaging. In the same way, Germany did not have the [atomic] bomb for the same reasons.

Now, however, we come to Hiroshima, where this highly destructive bomb was exploded (on August 6, 1945) — and for what reason? To save life, to save American lives. The intent to save American lives was certainly “good” — at the expense of the Japanese this time. In that regard, America’s good was not Japan’s, and an act taken to “save life” was also designed to take individual lives.

At what expense is “the good” to be achieved — and whose idea of the good is to be the criterion? Man’s and woman’s pursuit of the good, to some extent now, fathered the Inquisition and the Salem witch hunts. Politically, many today believe that Russia/Iran is “the enemy,” and that therefore any means may be taken to destroy that country. Some people within the United States believe fervently that “the establishment” is rotten to the core, and that any means is justified to destroy it. Some people believe that homosexuals and lesbians are “evil,” that somehow they lack the true qualities of humanness [and therefore need not be treated with normal respect]. These are all value judgements involving our ideas of the good.

Very few people start out trying to be as bad as possible. Al least some criminals feel that in stealing they are simply righting society’s wrongs. I am not saying that is their only motive, but in one way or another they manage to justify their activities by seeing them in their own version of the good and the right.

We must realize that fanatics always deal with grandiose ideals, while at the same time they believe in man’s and woman’s sinful nature, and the individual’s lack of power. They cannot trust the expression of the self, for they are convinced of its duplicity. Their ideals then seem even more remote. Fanatics call others to social action. Since they do not believe that the individual is ever effective, their groups are not assemblies of private individuals come reasonably together, pooling individual resources. They are instead congregations of people who are afraid to assert their individuality, who hope to find it in the group, or hope to establish a joint individuality — and that is an impossibility.

True individuals can do much through social action, and the species is a social one, but people who are afraid of their individuality will never find it in a group, but only a caricature of their own powerlessness.

Hitler’s espousal of a German-Aryan super-race is an excellent example of how a leader can subvert history to his own ends. Anthropologists do not assign any validity to “Aryan” as a racial term. In Nazi eyes, Aryans were the non-Jewish, Caucasian, “Nordic” descendants of the prehistoric peoples who originally spoke the hypothetical parent language of the Indo-European language family. The Aryans flooded into India, the Middle East, and Europe from southern Russia.

Dreams, Evolution, Gestalt, Lessons, METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Time, Uncategorized

The American experiment with democracy is heroic, bold, and innovative

April 19, 2016 zzzesus

In historic terms as we understand them, this is the first time that all of the inhabitants of a country were to be legally considered equal citizens one with the other. That was to be, and is, the ideal. In practical terms, of course, there often are inequalities. Treatment in the marketplace, or in society, often shows great divergence from that stated national ideal. Yet the dream is a vital portion of American national life, and even those who are unscrupulous must pay it at least lip service, or cast their plans in its light.

In the past, and in large areas of the world now, many important decisions are not made by the individual, but by the state, or religion, or society. In this century several issues came to the forefront of American culture: The exteriorization of organized religion, which became more of a social rather than a spiritual entity, and joining of science with technology and moneyed interests. William James’ books would be good background material here, particularly the sections dealing with democracy and spiritualism. In any case, on the one hand each individual was to be equal with each other person. Marriages, for example, were no longer arranged. A man no longer need follow his father’s vocational footsteps. Young adults found themselves faced with a multitudinous number of personal decisions that in other cultures were made more or less automatically. The development of transportation opened up the country, so that an individual was no longer bound to his or her native town or region. All of this meant that man’s and woman’s conscious mind was about to expand its strengths, its abilities, and its reach. The country was — and still is — brimming with idealism.

That idealism, however, ran smack into the dark clouds of Freudian and Darwinian thought. How could a country be governed effectively by individuals who were after all chemicals run amok in images, with neuroticism built-in from childhood — children of a tainted species, thrown adrift by a meaningless cosmos in which no meaning could be found?

Organized religion felt threatened; and if it could not prove that man/woman had a soul, it could at least see to it that the needs of the body were taken care of through suitable social work, and so it abandoned many of the principles that might have added to its strength. Instead it settled for platitudes that equated cleanliness with virtue — hence, or course, our deodorant advertisements, and many other aspects of the marketplace.

In public mind, it made little difference whether the devil or tainted genes condemned the individual to a life in which it seemed he/she could have little control. He or she began to feel powerless. He/she began to feel that social action itself was of little value, for if man’s or woman’s evil were built-in, for whatever reasons, then where was there any hope?

There was some hope, at least, in looking for better living conditions personally. There was some hope in forgetting one’s doubts in whatever exterior distractions could be found. Idealism is tough, and it is enduring, and no matter how many times its is seemingly slain, it comes back in a different form. So those who felt that religion had failed them looked anew to science, which promised — promised to — provide the closest approximation to heaven on earth: Mass production of goods, two cars in every garage, potions for every ailment, solutions for every problem. And it seems in the beginning that science delivered, for the world was changed from candlelight to electric light to neon in the flicker of an eye, and man and woman could travel in hours distances that to his father or grandfather took days on end.

And while science provided newer and newer comforts and conveniences, few questions were asked. There was, however, no doubt about it: Exterior conditions had improved, yet the individual did not seem any happier. By this time it was apparent that the discoveries of science could also have a darker side. Life’s exterior conveniences would hardly matter if science’s knowledge was used to undermine the very foundations of life itself.

The various potions taken faithfully by the public were now often found to have very unfortunate side effects. The chemicals used to protect agriculture had harmful effects upon people. Such situations bothered the individual far more than the threat of nuclear disaster, for they involved his contact with daily life: The products that he/she bought, the medicines that he/she took.

Some people looked, and are looking, for some authority — any authority — to make their decisions for them, for the world seems increasingly dangerous, and they, because of their beliefs, feel increasingly powerless. They yearn toward old ways, when the decisions of marriage were made for them, when they could safely follow in their father’s or mother’s footsteps, when they were unaware of the lure of different places, and forced to remain at home. They have become caught between science and religion. Their idealism finds no particular outlet. Their dreams seem betrayed.

Those people look to cults of various kinds, where decisions are made for them, where they are relieved of the burden of an individuality that has been robbed of its sense of power by conflicting beliefs. At one time the males might have been drafted into the army, and, secretly exultant, gone looking for the period before full adulthood — where decisions would be made for them, where they could mark time, and where those who were not fully committed to life could leave it with a sense of honor and dignity.

In the past also, even in our country, there were convents and monasteries for those who did not want to live in the world as other people did. They might pursue other goals, but the decisions of where to live, what to do, where to go, how to live, would be made for them. Usually such people were joined by common interests, a sense of honor, and there was no retaliation to be feared in this century.

Cults, however, deal primarily with fear, using it as a stimulus. They further erode the power of the individual, so that he is frightened to leave. The group has power. The individual has none, except that the power of the group is vested in its leader. Those who died in Guyana, for example, were suicidal inclined. They had no cause to live for, because their idealism became so separated from any particular actualization that they were left only with its ashes.

The leader of Jonestown was at heart an idealist. When does an idealist turn into a fanatic? When can the search for the good have catastrophic results, and how can the idealism of science be equated with the near-disaster at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, and with the potential disasters that in our terms exist in the storage of nuclear wastes, or in the production of nuclear bombs?

People who live in tornado country carry the reality of a tornado in their minds and hearts as a psychological background.

To one extent or another, all of the vents of their lives happen punctuated or accented by the possibility of disaster. They feel that at any time they might be caused to face the greatest challenge, to rely upon their strongest resources, their greatest forbearance, and faced by a test of endurance. They use — or they often use — such a psychological and physical backdrop to keep those qualities alive within themselves, for they are the kind of people who like to feel pitted against a challenge. Often the existence of probabilities and their acceptance does provide a kind of exterior crisis situation that individually and en masse is a symbol of independence and inner crisis. The crisis is met in the exterior situation, and as the people deal with that situation they symbolically deal with their own inner crises. In a way those people trust such exterior confrontations, and even count upon a series of them, of varying degrees of severity, that can be used throughout a lifetime for such purposes.

Those who survive feel that they have been given a new lease on life, regardless of their circumstances: They could have been killed and were not. Others use the same circumstances as excuses for no longer hanging on to a wish for life, and so it seems that while saving face they fall prey to the exterior circumstances.

Dreams, Emotions, Energy, Evolution, Feelings, Gestalt, HYPNOSIS, Lessons, Metaphysics, Physical Life, Thoughts, Unknown

Psychological Fallout

April 15, 2016 zzzesus

Characteristics of a cult; There are fanaticism, a closed mental environment, the rousing of hopes toward an ideal that seemed unachievable because of the concentration upon all of the barriers that seemed to stand in its way.

Most cults have their own specialized language of one kind of another — particular phrases used repetitively — and this special language further serves to divorce the devotees from the rest of the world. This practice was also followed by those at Jonestown. Loyalty to friends and family was discouraged, and so those in Jonestown had left strong bonds of intimacy behind. They felt threatened by the world, which was painted by their beliefs so that it presented a picture of unmitigated evil and corruption. All of this should be fairly well recognized. The situation led to the deaths of hundreds.

The Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant situation potentially threatened the lives of many thousands, and in that circle of events the characteristics of a cult are less easy to discern. Yet they are present. We have scientific cults as well as religious ones.

Religion and science both loudly proclaim their search for truth, although they are seemingly involved in completely opposing systems. They both treat their beliefs as truths, with which no one should tamper. They search for beginnings and endings. The scientists have their own vocabulary, which is used to reinforce the exclusive nature of science. Now I am speaking of the body of science in general terms here, for here is in a way a body of science that exists as a result of each individual scientist’s participation. A given scientist man act quite differently in his family life and as a scientist. He/she may love his/her family dog, for example, while at the same time think nothing of injecting other animals with diseased tissue in his/her professional capacity.

Granting that, however, cults interact, and so there is quite a relationship between the state of religion, when it operates as a cult, and the state of science when it operates as a cult. Right now our cultish religions exist in response to the cultish behavior of science. Science insists it does not deal with values, but leaves those to philosophers. In stating that the universe is an accidental creation, however, a meaning less chance conglomeration formed by an unfeeling cosmos, it states quite clearly its belief that the universe and man’s existence has no value. All that remains is what pleasure or accomplishment can somehow be wrested from man’s individual biological processes.

A recent article in a national magazine speaks about the latest direction of progress in the field of psychology, saying that man and woman will realize that his/her moods, thoughts, and feelings are the result of the melody of chemicals that swirl in his/her brain. That statement devalues man’s and woman’s subjective world.

The scientists claim a great idealism. They claim to have the way toward truth. Their “truth” is to be found by studying the objective world, the world of objects, including animals and stars, galaxies and mice — but by viewing these objects as if they are themselves without intrinsic value, as if their existence have no meaning.

Now those beliefs separate man and woman from his/her own nature. He/she cannot trust oneself — for who can rely upon the accidental bubbling of hormones and chemicals that somehow form a stew called consciousness — an unsavory brew at best, so the field of science will forever escape opening up into any great vision of the meaning of life. It cannot value life, and so in its search for the ideal it can indeed justify in its philosophy the possibility of an accident that might kill many many people through direct or indirect means, and kill the unborn as well.

That possibility is indeed written in the scientific program. There are plans, though faulty ones, of procedures to be taken in case of accident — so in our world that probability exists, and is not secret. As a group the scientists rigorously oppose the existence of telepathy or clairvoyance, or of any philosophy that brings these into focus. Only lately have some begun to think in terms of mind affecting matter, and even such a possibility disturbs them profoundly, because it shatters the foundations of their philosophical stance.

The scientists have long stood on the side of “intelligence and reason,” logical thought, and objectivity. They are trained to be unemotional, to stand apart from their experience, to separate themselves from nature, and to view any emotional characteristics of their own with an ironical eye. Again, they have stated that they are neutral in the world of values. They became, until recently, the new priests. All problems, it seems, could be solved scientifically. This applied to every avenue of life: to health matters, social disorders, economics, even to war and peace.

How did such scientific gentlemen and gentlewomen, with all of their precise paraphernalia, with all of their objective and reasonable viewpoints, end up with a nuclear plant that ran askew, that threatened present and future life? And what about the people who love nearby?

Dreams, Emotions, Energy, Evolution, Feelings, Gestalt, Inner universe, Lessons, METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thoughts, Uncategorized

Human deals with a kind of dual selfhood

April 14, 2016 zzzesus

In that Human presently thinks of Human as an uneasy blend of body and mind. Human identifies primarily with what I call a limited portion of Human consciousness. That portion human equates with mind or intelligence. Human identifies with events over which he/she is aware of having some control.

Human thinks of acts, for example, and acting and doing, but he does not identify Human with these inner processes that make acting and doing possible. Human identifies with what he/she thinks of as Human logical thought, and the abilities of reasoning. These seem to suggest that Human possesses and elegant, cool separation from nature, that the animals for example do not. Human does not identify, with the processes that make Human logical thinking possible. Those processes are spontaneous and ‘unconscious,’ so it appears that anything outside of Human conscious control must be undisciplined or chaotic, and lacking in all logic.

Both religion and science are based upon such beliefs. Anything that happens spontaneously is looked upon with suspicion. The word seems to suggest elements out of control, or motion that goes from one extreme to another. Only the reasoning mind, it seems, has any idea of order, discipline, or control.

Human is therefore set against Human nature in Human’s own mind, and Human thinks Human must control it. The fact is that man’s and woman’s consciousness can indeed become aware of — aware of — those spontaneous processes. But he/she oneself has largely closed the door of comprehension, so that he only identifies with what he/she thinks of as his/her rational mind, and tries to forget as best he/she can those spontaneous processes upon which the mind rides so triumphantly

Human has often become frightened of Human’s own creativity, then, since he or her has not trusted its source.

Electrical Reality, Emotions, Evolution, Feelings, Gestalt, HEALING, Inner universe, Lessons, Metaphysics, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Uncategorized

The people of Jonestown died of an epidemic of beliefs

April 9, 2016 zzzesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Electrical Reality, Emotions, Energy, Evolution, Feelings, HEALING, Inner universe, Lessons, METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES, Metaphysics, Physical Life, Thoughts, Uncategorized, Unknown

We could not live without viruses

April 7, 2016 zzzesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emotions, Evolution, Feelings, Inner universe, Lessons, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Uncategorized

Organized religion has committed many important blunders

March 30, 2016 zzzesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolution, Lessons, Metaphysics, Physical Life, Thoughts, Uncategorized

Resurrection and then…

March 25, 2016 zzzesus

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

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

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

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

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

Dreams, Emotions, Evolution, Inner universe, Lessons, Metaphysics, Physical Life, Thought, Uncategorized, Unknown

The animals do have imagination

March 24, 2016 zzzesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Electrical Reality, Emotions, Evolution, Feelings, HEALING, Inner universe, Lessons, Metaphysics, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Uncategorized, Unknown

The myth of creation of the universe, and the creation of public and private events.

March 15, 2016 zzzesus

The Cinderella fairy tale. According to the definition, this fairy tale is a myth. Surely it may seem that such a children’s tale has little to do with any serious discussion concerning anything so profound as the creations of the known world. And most certainly, it may appear, no scientifically pertinent data about the nature of events can possibly be uncovered from such a source.

For one thing, [the] Cinderella [tale] has a happy ending, of course, and is therefore highly unrealistic, according to many educators, since it does not properly prepare children for life’s necessary disappointments. Fairy godmothers are are definitely a thing of the storyteller’s imagination, and many serious, earnest adults will tell that daydreaming or wishing will get us nowhere.

In the Cinderella story, however, the heroine, though poor and of low estate, manages to attain a spectacular ball, and meet the prince, initiates a series of magical events, none following the dictates of logic. The fairy godmother, suddenly appearing, uses the normal objects of everyday life so that they are suddenly transformed, and we have a chariot from a pumpkin, and other transformations of like nature.

The tale has always appealed to children because they recognize the validity behind it. The fairy godmother is a creative personification of the personalized elements in the Conscious-mind-2 — a personification therefore of the inner ego, that rises to the aid of the mortal self to grant its desires, even when the intents of the mortal self may not seem to fit into the practical framework of normal life. When the inner ego responds in such a fashion, even the commonplace, ordinary, seemingly innocuous circumstances suddenly become charged with a new vitality, and appear to “work for” the individual involved. If you are reading this blog you are already too old to clearly remember the constant fantasies of our early childhood. Children however know quite well, automatically, that they have a strong hand in the creation of events that then seem to happen to them.

They experiment very often, and quite secretly, since their elders are at the same time trying to make the children conform to a given concrete reality that is more or less already mass-produced for them.

Children experiment with the creation of joyful and frightening events, trying to ascertain for themselves the nature of their control over their own experience. They imagine joyful and terrifying experiences. They are in fact fascinated by the effects that their thoughts, feelings, and purposes. If they create “bogeymen or bogeywomen,” then they can cause them to disappear also. If their thoughts can cause them to become ill, then there is no real reason for them to fear illness, for it if their own creation. Their learning process is nipped in the bud, however. By the time we are adults, its certainly seems that we are a subjective being in an objective universe, at the mercy of others, and with only the most superficial control over the events of our lives.

The tale of Cinderella becomes a fantasy, a delusion, or even a story about sexual awakening, in Freudian terms. The disappointments we have faced indeed make such a tale seem to be a direct contradiction to life’s realities. To some extent or another, however, the child in us remembers a certain sense of mastery only half realized, of power nearly grasped, then seemingly lost forever — and a dimension of existence in which dreams quite literally came true. The child in us sensed more, of course: It sensed its own greater reality in another framework entirely, from which it had only lately emerged — yet with which it was intimately connected. It felt itself surround, then by the greater realities of Conascious-mind-2.

The child knew “that it came from somewhere else — not by chance but by design. The child knew that in one way or another its most intimate thoughts, dreams, and gestures were as connected with the natural world as blades of grass are to a field. The child knew it was unique and utterly original event or being that on the one hand was its own focus, and that on the other hand belonged to its own time and and season. In fact, children let little escape them, so that, again, they experiment constantly in an effort to discover not only the effect of their thoughts and intents and wishes upon others, but the degree to which others influence their own behavior. To that extent, they deal rather directly with probabilities in a way quite foreign to adults behavior.

In a fashion, they make quicker deductions than adults, and often truer ones, because they are not conditioned by a past of structured memory. Their subjective experience then brings them in rather direct contact with the methods by which events are formed.

Children understand the importance of symbols, and they use them constantly to protect themselves — not from their own reality but from the adult world. They constantly pretend, and they quickly learn that persistent in any one area will result in a physically-experienced version of the imagined activity. They also realize that they do not possess full freedom, either, for certain pretended situations will later happen in less faithful versions than the imagined ones. Others will seem almost entirely blocked, and never materialize.

Before children are acquainted with conventional ideas of guilt and punishment, they realize that it is easier to bring about good events, through wishing, than it is to bring about unhappy ones. The child carries with him or her the impetus and supporting energy provided him or her at birth from Conscious-mind-2, and he or she knows intuitively that desires conducive to his development “happen” easier than those that are not. His or her natural impulses naturally lead him or her toward the development of his body and mind, and he is aware of a cushioning effect and support as he acts in accordance with those inner impulses. The child is innately honest. When he gets sick he or she intuitively knows the reason why, and he or she knows quite well that he or she brought about the illness.

Parents and physicians believe, instead, that the child is a victim, ill for no personal reason, but indisposed because of elements attacking him or her — either the outside environment, or [something] working against him or her from within. The child may be told: “You have a cold because you got your feet wet.” Or: “You caught the cold from Johnny or Buffy.” He may be told that he has a virus, so that it seems his or her body itself was invaded despite his or her will. He or she learns that such beliefs are acceptable. It is easier to go along than to be honest, particularly when honesty would often involve a kind of communication his parents might frown upon, or the expression of emotions that are quite unacceptable.

Mother’s little man or brave little girl can then stay at home, for example, courageously bearing up under an illness is the result of feelings that the parents would consider quite cowardly, or otherwise involves emotional realities that the parents simply would not understand. Gradually it becomes easier for the child to accept the parents’ assessment of the situation. Little by little the feelings and bodily reality, erode.

The child who gets the mumps with a large number of his classmates, however, knows he or she has his or her private reasons for jointing into such a mass biological reality, and usually the adults who “fall prey” to a flu epidemic has little conscious awareness of his or her own reason for such a situation. He or she doesn’t understand the mass suggestions involved, or his or her own reasons for accepting them. He or she is usually convinced instead that his or her body has been invaded by a virus despite his or her own personal approval or disapproval — despite his or her own personal approval or disapproval. He is therefore a victim, and his sense of personal power is eroded.

When a person recovers from such an ordeal, he or she usually grants his or her recovery to be the result of the medication he has been given. Or he or she may think that he was simply lucky — but he or she does not grant himself or herself to have any real power in such an affair. The recovery seems to occur to him or her, as the illness seemed to happen to him or her. Usually the patient cannot see that he or she brought about his or her own recovery, and was responsible for it, because he or she cannot admit that his or her own intents were responsible for his or her own illness. He or she cannot learn from his or her own experience, then, and each bout of illness will appear largely incomprehensible.

The individual some how could perceive the nature of reality on his or her own by virtue of innate capacities that belonged to the individual by right — capacities that were a part of man’s and woman’s heritage. In other words, there is a slim chance of opening doors of knowledge that had been closed, and we can decide to take that chance.

We can see that each person have chosen the events of his or her life in; one way or another, and the each person was not the victim but the creator of those events that were privately experienced or jointly encountered with others.

The physical senses do not so much perceive concrete phenomena, but actually had a hand in the creation of events that were then perceived as actual.

4th Dimension, Dreams, Electrical Reality, Evolution, Inner universe, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thoughts, Time, Uncategorized

The Main Myth

March 13, 2016 zzzesus

The main myth through which we interpret our experience, is the one that tells us that all perception and knowledge must come to us through the physical senses.

This is the myth of the exteriorized consciousness — a consciousness that we are told is open-ended only so far as objective reality is concerned. It seems to be closed “at the other end,” which in those terms would represent our birth.

The consciousness of that myth can indeed have no origin, for the myth precludes anything but a physically-oriented and physically-mechanized consciousness. Not only could that consciousness have no existence before of after death, but obviously it could have no access to knowledge that was not physically acquired. It is this myth that hampers our understanding most of all, and that closes us off from the greater nature of those events with which we are most intimately concerned. That myth also makes our own involvement with mass events sometimes appear incomprehensible.

There seems to be no reason for many of them, simply because the intricate inner communication systems of consciousness go utterly unrecognized, generally speaking.

I am speaking largely to a Western audience, and so here I am using terms for a particular reason, to explain concepts in a way that will be understood. The inner ego is perfect as a term to suit my purposes. “Unconscious” is indeed conscious — and by conscious I mean that its reasoning is not irrational. Its methods are not chaotic, and its characteristics are not only equal to those of the known ego, but indeed are more resilient and knowledgeable.

Conscious-mind-1 and 2 obviously represent not only different kinds of reality in normal terms, but two different kind of consciousness. To make this discussion as simple as possible for now, think of these two frameworks or states of consciousness as being connected by “undifferentiated areas” in which sleep, dreaming, and certain trance states have their activity. Those undifferentiated areas are involved in the constant translation of one kind of consciousness into the other, and with energy transferences. We constantly process those data that come to us in our private life, and that information includes bulletins from all over the world, through our news broadcasts and so forth.

The inner ego has access, to a much vaster amount of knowledge. It is aware not only of its own private position, as we are of ours, but it is also familiar with the mass events of its reality. It is intimately involved in the creation of our own private experience.

The inner ego reasons, but its reasoning is not restricted to the cause-and-effect limitations that we apply to the reasoning process. The action of the inner ego within the wider sphere of Conscious-mind-2 explains many events and seeming coincidences that otherwise seem to make no sense within our world. Many realities within Conscious-mind-2 cannot suitably be explained as facts to us in Conscious-mind-1, simply because they involve psychological thickness that cannot be translated into facts as we think of them. These often appear in the symbolic language of the arts instead, and many of our dreams are translations in which the events of Conscious-mind-2 appear in symbolic form.

On any given day the events of our private lives fit within the larger patterns of world events, in which they have their context. On any given night the intimate events of our dream lives also exist in the greater context of the world’s dreams — in which they have their reality.

The consciousness that we have, as generally described in psychology, is in a strange fashion like the bright shiny surface that responds to sun or rain or temperature, and to its surroundings; but for all of that a psychological fruit that has no pulp or pits, but contains at its heart a vacancy. In those terms we experience only one half of our consciousness: the physically-attuned portion. Fruit trees have roots, but we assign no ground of being to this consciousness.

Jung’s collective unconscious was an attempt to give our world its psychological roots, but Jung could not perceive the clarity, organization, and deeper context in which that collective unconscious has its own existence. Reality as Conscious-mind-2 is organized in a different fashion than it is in the Conscious-mind-1 world, and the processes of reasoning are far quicker. In Conscious-mind-1 the reasoning processes work largely by deduction, and they must constantly check their own results against the seemingly concrete experience of physical events. The reasoning of the inner ego is involved with the creative invention of those experiences. It is involved with events in a context of a different kind, for its deals intimately with probabilities.

[Each of ] us, with our beliefs and intents, tell the inner ego which of an infinite number of probable events we want to encounter. In dream state events from both frameworks are processed. The dream state involves not only a state of consciousness that exists between the two frameworks of reality, but also involves, in those terms, a connecting reality of its own. I would like to emphasize that to one degree or another all species of plant and animal life “dream.” The same applies to the “psychological activity” of atoms and molecules, and any “particle.”

There are intensities of behavior, then, in which the activity, the inside activity, of any being or particle is directed toward [the] physical force [that is] involved in the cooperative venture that causes our reality. There are variances, however, when such activity instead into interior nature of reality. We have an inner system of communication, then, in which the cells of all living things are connected. In those terms there is a continuum of consciousness.

To really understand our own connection with the events we encounter privately, and in relationship to others, we must first become acquainted with that medium in which events themselves are formed.

What part, for example, does chance play in our life? Is it chance if we arrive too late to board a plane, for example — to find later that the plane crashed? Perhaps our late arrival was caused by “a chance meeting” with a friend at the last moment, or by a misplaced ticket, or by a traffic jam that seemingly had nothing to do with us at all.

We may have become a part of the drama of a natural disaster, or avoided it as a result of other seemingly chance occurrences. What appears to us as chance or coincidence, however, is actually the result of the amazing organizations and communications active in the psychological reality of Conscious-mind-2. Again, we form our reality — but how? And how do private existences touch each other, resulting in world events?

This will not be a dry, intellectual exploration, because the intent itself will begin to trigger within our lives the emergence of hints and clues as to our own immersion in Conscious-mind-2’s creativity.

CITY OF VANGUARD