Only after such a basis [is established] will the idea of reincarnation achieve its natural validity, and only when it is understood that the subconscious, certain layers of it, is a link between the present personality and past ones, will the theory of reincarnation be accepted as fact.
Man sees not not even half of the whole entity which is himself/herself.
Scientists have glimpsed the complications of the human body. They have scarcely glimpsed the complicated realities of the mind.
I am encouraging each human to focus joint energies in this direction. We will be dealing with symbols, yet we will learn that symbols are reality, for we are symbols of ourselves that live and speak. We do not think of ourselves as symbols [but] there is no symbol that does not have its individual life.
I speak of other theoretical realities. I challenge each human now to be as creative in another reality as we are in this one. And if it seems to us, because of our beliefs, that we are limited here, then I joyfully challenge each human to create a city, an environment, and perhaps a world, in which no such limitations occur. What kind of world would we create?
This knowledge speaks to us from the known and unknown desire that gives us our own birth, and that speaks to us from the tiniest, least-acknowledged thought that flies like a pigeon within our skulls. And in this moment of our reality, and in the desire of our being, do we even create All That Is. Bow down before no man, no woman, and no belief–but know we are indeed the creators.
For some of us the city will have theater. For some of us it will not. For those of us who like theater, it will be like none we have ever seen. In it the actors and actresses will take the parts of beliefs–of fleshed beliefs–and the morality play, so to speak, will deal with the nature of beliefs and how they are enacted through the centuries as well as through the hours. that theater then will serve many purposes, even as each of us are exquisite performers, and have chosen the roles and beliefs that we have taken.
Now there are books programming out-of-body activity; millions of us are told that when we leave our body we will meet this demon or that demon, or this or that angry god. So, instead, we will form a free city to which those travelers can come, and where those who enter can read books about Buddhism if they prefer, or play at being Catholic. There will also be certain beloved traps set about the city, that will be of an enlightening nature. Now, you think there is nothing intrinsically impossible about building a platform in [dream} space? I am suggesting, then a platform in inner reality. It is as valid–far more valid–as an orbiting city in the sky, in physical terms, and it challenges our creative abilities much more. Humans need a good challenge, and its fun! Not because we should do it, but because we desire it. It is a great creative challenge that we can throw down to ourselves from our future.
A beloved trap is one that we set for oneself. And so our city will be full of them. When we are tired of playing a Catholic priest, for example, we will fall into our own trap–in which our beliefs [as such a one] are suddenly worked out to their logical perfection, and we see what they mean.
Now when children walk down streets, they count the cracks in the sidewalks. And so our city will have its own kind of tricky walks! There will be sidewalks within, and above and below sidewalks. But it is for each individual to decide which one he or she will follow.
“You make your own sidewalks,
And I make my own sidewalks.”
And so our city will simply have alternate sidewalks, and they will be beloved traps, set by each self.
A true teacher allows us to learn from oneself. We enjoy the great vitality and exuberance of our reality, and our city will have joy and exuberance. Now joy sounds quite acceptable, but our city will also have fun–which in many spiritual circles is not so acceptable.
We can colonize an entire inner level of reality. To do so, we must give our best with dedication and joyful creativity. This will not be an imaginary city. It will have a greater reality than any physical city that we know, and it can, in its own way, shine with brighter lights in inner reality than any nighttime city display. I hope we will work at developing skills, in terms of the, dream-art-scientist.
It is true that dream locations do not exist within our heads in the same way the physical streets exist within the place of cities. While we are within the context of a dream, however, the location appears to be immediate. In dreams we may walk down avenues which do not exist in physical terms. We receive data we would call sensual if we were awake. We hear, touch, taste, smell, and operate in a manner that we would call physical if we were awake. We walk, talk, act, work, play, while our actual bodies are at rest.
I can find any Main Street at any time I choose: for all practical purposes it is a permanent feature of any city. But I cannot return to a dream location anytime I choose. Can we say, then that dream locations are different from physical places in that we cannot return to them? Not quite, since in recurring dreams many of us do visit the same streets and houses with which we have become familiar in other dreams. If we cannot find dream locations when we are in the waking state, neither can we find physical locations when we are dreaming. There is good reason to suppose that we can return to various dream locations simply by suggesting we will do so before we go to sleep. So the dream world may possess an organized structure also, just as the physical world does, and one in which we all know our way very well–while we are sleeping.
Such matters may at first seem far divorced from a discussion of the so-called spirit world. However, perhaps you can now see that we are much more than creatures composed of physical matter. Our intimate direct experience transcends physical reality as we know it. We are a mixture of corporeal substance and something else that we can only approach through subjective experience, a something that makes us what we are, and without which consciousness would be meaningless.
It makes no difference what we call this portion of our personalities, spirit, or soul, or mind. The point is that the most vital aspects of the self are not physically materialized.
It is true, however, that clues to the existence of this portion of the human personality can be found in physical matter. Our emotions can be tampered with through the addition or subtraction of chemicals and hormones. To some extent our personalities can be manipulated. Even a subtle alteration in physical make-up will effect a change in our inner selves. But the fact remains that very significant experiences upon which our consciousness and identities depend are not physical in the usual terms.
If this reality of ourselves is not contained within matter but only connected to it, then it is quite legitimate to say that we operate and exist in both physical and non-physical dimensions. At times we are more closely allied with the corporeal universe than at other times. In dreams, for example, we are less closely bound to the physical world than we are in the waking state. Our sensual apparatus is turned down low to the idling stage. We are maintained within the physical universe, but we limit our operations within it. It becomes as unreal to us as the dream state becomes when we are awake.
It is at least conceivable that the I of our dreams is but another aspect of our own identity; an I that continues now to exist as itself despite the ego’s manipulation of the physical universe; and an I that will continue to exist after the alliance with physical matter is finished.
Consciousness is precisely that part of ourselves which does not exist as an object within the physical universe, and it is composed of those thoughts and emotions and dreams in which we realize ourselves most intimately.
God may know itself through a million or a thousand million other worlds, as so may I–but because this world is, and because I am alive in it, it is more than appearance, more than a shackle to be thrown aside. It is a privilege to be here, to look out with this unique focus, with these individual eyes; not to be blinded by cosmic vision, but to see this corner of reality which I form through the miraculous connections of soul and flesh.
Cherish the gifts of the gods. Don’t be so anxious to throw your individuality back into their faces, saying, ‘I’m sick to death of myself and of my individuality; it burdens me.’ Even one squirrel’s consciousness, suddenly thrown into the body of another of its kind, would feel a sense of loss, encounter a strangeness, and know in the sacredness of its being that something was wrong. Wear your individuality proudly. It is the badge of our godhood. We are god living a life–being, desiring, creating. Through honoring oneself, we honor whatever it is God is, and become a conscious co-creator.
They speak out against desire while propelled by the overwhelming desire to lose themselves. They luxuriate in a kind of cosmic masturbation, titillating their psychic organisms into pitches of mindless excitement; cavorting in orgasms of self-surrender. They bask in a sort of universal steam bath that drives all impurities of individuality or creativity from their souls, leaving them immerses, supposedly forever, in a bliss beyond description; in which, indeed, their own experience disappears.
Thank God that some god managed to disentangle itself from such psychic oneness, if that’s what it’s supposed to be. Thank God that some god loved itself enough to diversify, to create itself in a million different forms; to multiply, to explode its being inward and outward. Thank God that some god loved its own individuality enough to endow the least and the most, the greatest and the smallest, with its own unique being.
The gurus say: ‘Give it all up.’ One of those we read about today counsels: ‘When you want to do one thing, do another instead. Do not do what you want to do, but what you should do.’ Never trust the self that you are, the gurus say, but the self that you should be. And that self is supposed to be dead to desire, beyond wanting or caring; yet paradoxically, this non-feeling leads to bliss. The gurus say that All That Is is within us, yet tell us not to trust oneself. If All That Is didn’t want appearances, we wouldn’t experience any! Yet appearances, the gurus say, are untruths, changing and therefore false.
Is my body an appearance, hence an untruth amid the truth which is changeless? Ah dear body, then, how lovely and blessed our untruth, which is senate and feels desire though the hollowest of bones. How blessed, bodies, leaping alive from the microscopic molecules that combine to walk down the autumn streets; assemble to form the sweet senses’ discrimination that perceives, for a time, the precise joy and unity of even one passing afternoon. The body’s untruth then, is holier than all truths, and if the body is an untruth then I hereby proclaim untruth, and truth and all the gurus’ truths as lies.
I have read nothing about the two together, which surely be some very interesting material on such a possible relationship. Paradoxically, our perceptions while out-of-body can be more tenuously connected to temporal reality than usual, yet more acute at the same time. However, our use if naive realism must often govern what we allow ourselves to experience while consciousness is separated from the body. I also think some out-of-body travels, apparently to “alien” nonphysical realities, may actually be based instead upon interior bodily states or events. But there are times when the projecting consciousness, free of frameworks like naive realism, at least approaches truly different realities, or probabilities.
Equally insistent are the puzzles posed by the missing intermediate forms in the fossil record: Where are all the remnants of those creatures that linked birds, reptiles, cats, monkeys, and human beings? The hypothetical evolutionary tree of life demands that such in-between forms existed; it seems that by now paleontologists should have unearthed enough signs of them to make at least a modest case for their belief systems; the lack of scientific evidence is embarrassing. Since my mind works that way, I could make minutely detailed drawings of a graduated series of such entities (gradualism being a basic premise in Charles Darwin’s theory), but would the creatures shown have been viable? Could they actually have existed for the necessary millennia while evolving into the species whose fossil remains have been discovered, or that live today? Evolutionists are serving goodly portions or speculation along with inadequate theory–or, really, hypothesis.
It is truer to say that heredity operates from the future backward into the past, than it is to say that it operates from the past into the present. Neither statement would be precisely correct in any case, because our present is a poised balance affected as much by the probable future as the probable past.
In our terms–the phrase is necessary–the moment point, the present, is the point of interaction between all existences and reality. All probabilities flow through it, though one of our moment points may be experienced as centuries, or as a breath, in other probable realities of which we are a part.
All kinds of time–backward and forward–emerge from the basic unpredictable nature of consciousness, and are due to’series’ of significances.
…Enormous time spans (in the millions of years, say) will not aid in the chance formation of even the chemical precursors to life–the protein or nucleic acid molecules–but will instead make their creation even less likely. For with time, the even distribution or equilibrium of matter increases, moving it away from the ordered sequences necessary to support life. Scientifically, in the closed system of our universe, the second law of thermodynamics and entropy eventually conquer all.
Nor can solar energy be thought of as the agent that directly turned nonliving matter into its living counterpart; in those terms, life required its inter-mediate molecules, which sunlight is not able to construct. Life needs protein in order to “be”, and to sustain it through metabolism–then it can use solar energy! Darwin’s theory that life arose by chance poses a basic contradiction: What made the protein that sustains the processes of life, before that life was present to make the protein?
Many times in laboratory studies, substances called proteinoids (often misleadingly defined in dictionaries as “primitive proteins”) have been observed forming from amino acids, which are sub units of proteins. Some researchers think of proteinoids as the forerunners of the protein that life needs to ride true biological proteins and do not lead to life. I strongly object to being told that dead matter turns itself into living matter. Just how does this transformation come about?
…Its origins, and its amazing variety of forms, both “living” and “nonliving.” Our own limitations may have something to do with our attitudes. Be careful about believing science or religion when either one tells us it can explain our world, for each of those disciplines ignores too much. No matter what the source of this camouflage reality may be, our conscious lack of knowledge and understanding as we manipulate within it, through naive realism or any other system of belief or perception, ought to make us humble indeed; all arrogance should be transcended as we become more and more aware of the limitless beauty, complexity, and mystery that surrounds us, and of which we are a part. I don’t think it all came through chance. The mind can ask too many questions to be satisfied with mechanistic explanations, and nurturing that characteristic of dissatisfaction alone may be one of the most valuable contributions.
To me, even “ordinary” linear knowledge as it accumulates through the next century or two, not to mention over longer spans of time, is certain to severely modify or make obsolete many concepts about origins and evolution that today are dispensed by those in authority–and which most people accept unthinkingly.
For some years now, organized religion as a whole has been suffering from loss of faith and members, stripped of its mysteries by science, which, with the best of intentions, offer in religion’s place a secular humanism–the belief that one doesn’t need blind faith in a god in order to be morally concerned for the common welfare; paradoxically, however, this concern is most of the time expressed in religious terms, or with religious feeling. Yet science too has experienced many failures in theory and technology, and knows a new humility; at least partly because of these failures, anti-intellectualism has grown noticeably in recent years. How technology and religion have found a way to coexist, helping each other and others to grow and develop. Science frequently tries to explain the gaps that religion has been unable to explain, and religion has done so in kind of science. This tandem has maintained both parts of the spectrum from the smallest atom to the biggest technology companies.
I certainly am not turned on to realize that a major religion, for instance, teaches the “facts” of man’s basically corrupt and sinful nature; surely a religion in the best sense can offer beliefs superior to those! At the same time, I take note of the latest efforts of biological researchers to explain how, millions of years ago, a primitive DNA molecule could begin to manufacture the protein upon which life “rides,” and thus get around the contradiction: What made the protein that sustains the processes of life, before that life was present to make the protein? The scientist involved hope the new hypothesis will survive further tests and become “fact,” thus giving clues to the riddles of origins and evolution. How does one deal with new facts that undermine old facts, in whatever field of endeavor? Do we say that reality has changed? Upon examination, facts give.
For how can you look at ourselves with self-respect, with dignity or with joy, if we believe that we are the end product of forces in which the fittest survive? Being the fittest implies those given most to what would appear to be murderous intent–for we must survive at the expense of our fellows, be you leaf, frog, plant or animal.
We do not survive through cooperation, according to that theory, and nature is not given a kind or creative intent, but a murderous one. And if we see ourselves as the end result of such a species, then how can we expect goodness or merit or creativity for oneself, or from others? How can we believe that we live in a safe universe when each species exists because it survives through claw, if it must hunt and kill out of murderous intent, as implied in the theories of evolution and of reality itself?
So when we think of our beliefs and who we are, we must also think of our species, and how we are told our species came to be. For your private beliefs are also based upon those theories, and the beliefs, culturally, of our times.
It is seldom that we really question our biological origins, what they mean, and how we interpret them. Are we physically composed of murderous cells, then each spontaneously out to get the others? If so, our physical being is more miraculous a product. If our cells did not cooperate so well, we would not be reading these words.As you read this, the cooperative, creative adventure within our bodies continues, and in terms of continuity reaches back prehistorically and into future. Because consciousness creates form with joy, there is no murder that you have not projected out of misunderstanding and ignorance of the nature of the consciousness.
Roots do not struggle to exist. One species does not fight against the others to live. Instead creativity emerges, and cooperatively the environments of the world is known and planned by all the species. What appears to be struggle and death to us at those levels is not, now, for the experience of consciousness itself is different there, as is the experience or our own cellular composition.
Our bodies knows how to walk. The knowledge is built in and acted upon. The body knows how to heal itself, how to use its nourishment, how to replace its tissues–yet in our terms the body itself has no access to the kind of information the mind possesses. Being so ignorant, how does it perform so well?
If it were scientifically inclined, the body would know that such spontaneous performance was impossible, for science cannot explain the reality of life itself in its present form, much less its origins. Consciousness within the body knows that its existence is within the body’s context, and apart from it at the same time.
While postulating that life is basically meaningless or goal-less [DNA doesn’t care what its host looks like], science fights awfully hard to convince everyone that it’s right–thus attaching the most rigid kind of meaning or direction to its professional views! At the same time, in mathematical and biological detail much too complicated to go into, the author of many a scientific work favor of evolution has ended up by undermining, unwittingly, I’m sure, the very themes he or she so devoutly believes in.
The brain’s great creative neocortex is held especially accountable for problems that may lead to humanity’s self-destruction.
