The ego skims the topmost surface of reality and awareness. This is not the result of any inherent egotistical quality. It is true that the ego’s responsibility is with the relationship between the self and the physical environment. It must necessarily focus within the confines of physical reality. Nevertheless, it is fully capable of perceiving far more than Western man/woman allows it to perceive. Fear, ignorance, and superstition limit its potentials and. therefore, limit even its effectiveness within the physical universe.

The ego itself cannot directly experience certain intuitions and psychological experiences, but it can experience them insofar as it can become aware of them on an intellectual basis. When training forces the ego to become too rigid and to limit its perceptions of other realities, then the intuitions will not be accepted by the ego because intuitional experience will not fit into the framework of reality that it accepts as valid.

The ego in that case will therefore fight against what it then considers an unknown threat to survival. Struggles are initiated then that are entirely unnecessary. We want to bring intuitional comprehension to a point where the ego will accept it. In our dream experiments, this is one of the purposes we hope to achieve. The ego is not equipped to delve directly into non physical realities, but if it is trained to be flexible, it will accept such knowledge from other wider horizons of the self.

And the ego must have its feet upon solid earth. It is marked and out of its element outside of the normal environment of physical existence. To some extent, its distrust of the dream experience is necessary for the overall balance of the personality. Physical reality is, after all, a rock to which the ego must cling: from it, the ego achieves its prestige and reason for existence. This provides necessary balance and control, and results in the sturdy anchorage of the personality in the environment in which is must presently survive. You have here one of the main reasons why you must request the subconscious to enable you to recall dreams. The ego would see no reason for such a memory and on general principles attempt to repress them.

Again, however, this excellent balance and these fine controls exist. The ego will accept knowledge derived from the dream state as a man/woman might accept a message from a distant land in which he/she does not care to dwell and whose environment would both mystify and astonish him/her.

In our dream experiments, then, we will allow you to bring such messages to the ego. We will attempt to map this exotic country in such a way that the ego can understand what is there in terms of resources that can be used for its own benefit.