You cannot prove scientifically that [your] world was created (pause) by a god who set it into motion, but remained outside of its dominion. Nor can you prove scientifically that the creation of the world was the result of a chance occurrence-so you will not be able to prove what I am going to tell you either. Not in usual terms. I hope however to present, along with my explanations, certain hints and clues that will show you where to look for subjec-tive evidence. Period. You live your lives through your own subjective knowing, to begin with, and I will try to arouse within your own consciousnesses memories of events with which your own inner psyches were intimately involved as the world was formed-and though these may appear to be past events, they are even now occurring. Before the beginning of the universe, we will postulate the existence of an omnipotent, creative source. (Pause.) We will hope to show that this divine subjectivity is as present in the world of your experience as it was before the beginning of the universe. Again, I refer to this original subjectivity as All That Is. I am making an attempt to verbalize concepts that almost defy the edges of the intellect, unless that intellect is thoroughly reinforced by the intuition's strength. So you will need to use your mind and your own intuitions as you read this book. All That Is, before the beginning contained within itself the infinite thrust of all possible creations. All That Is possessed a creativity of such magnificence that its slightest imaginings, dreams, thoughts, feelings or moods attained a kind of reality, a vividness, an intensity, that almost demanded freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Freedom to be what? The experience, the subjective universe, the "mind" of All That Is, was so brilliant, so distinct, that All That Is almost became lost, mentally wandering within this ever-flourishing, evergrowing interior landscape. Each thought, feeling, dream, or mood was itself indelibly marked with all of the attributes of this infinite subjectivity. Each glowed and quivered with its own creativity, its own desire to create as it had been created. Before the beginning there existed an interior universe that had no beginning or ending, for I am using the term "before the beginning" to make matters easier for you to assimilate. In parentheses: (That same infinite interior universe exists now, for example.) All That Is contained within itself the knowledge of all existences, with their infinite probabilities, and "as soon as" All That Is imagined those numberless circumstances, they existed in what I will call divine fact. All That Is knew of itself only. It was engrossed with its own subjective experiences, even divinely astonished as its own thoughts and imaginings attained their own vitality, and inherited the creativity of their subjective creator. [Those thoughts and imaginings] began to have a dialogue with their "Maker" (all very emphatically). Thoughts of such magnificent vigor began to think their own thoughts-and their thoughts thought thoughts. As if in divine astonishment and surprise, All That Is began to listen, and began to respond to these "generations" of thoughts and dreams, for the thoughts and dreams related to each other also. There was no time, so all of this "was happening" simultaneously. The order of events is being simplified. In the meantime, then, in your terms, All That Is spontaneously thought new thoughts and dreamed new dreams, and became involved in new imaginings-and all of these also related to those now-infinite generations of interweaving and interrelating thoughts and dreams that "already" existed (with many gestures and much emphasis). So beside this spontaneous creation, this simultaneous "stream" of divine rousing, All That Is began to watch the interactions that occurred among his own subjective progeny. He listened, began to respond and to answer a thought or a dream. He began to purposefully bring about those mental conditions that were requested by these generations of mental progeny. If he had been lonely before, he was no longer. Your language causes some difficulty here, so please accept the pronoun "he" as innocuously as possible. "It" sounds too neutral for my purpose, and I want to reserve the pronoun "she" for some later differentiations. In basic terms, of course, All That Is is quite beyond any designations having to do with any one species or sex. All That Is, then, began to feel a growing sense of pressure as it1 realized that its own ever-multiplying thoughts and dreams themselves yearned to enjoy those greater gifts of creativity with which they were innately endowed. It is very difficult to try to assign anything like human motivation to All That Is. I can only say that it is possessed by "the need" to lovingly create from its own being; to lovingly transform its own reality in such a way that each most slight probable consciousness can come to be ; and with the need to see that any and all possible orchestrations of consciousness have the chance to emerge, to perceive and to love. We will later discuss the fuller connotations of the word "love" as it is meant here, but this chapter is a kind of outline of other material to come. All That Is, then, became aware of a kind of creative tumult as each of its superlative thoughts and dreams, moods and feelings, strained at the very edges of their beings, looking for some then-unknown, undiscovered, as of then unthought-of release. I am saying that this mental progeny included all of the consciousnesses that [have] ever appeared or will appear upon your earth-all tenderly couched: the first human being, the first insect-each with an inner knowledge of the possibilities of its development. All That Is, loving its own progeny, sought within itself the answer to this divine dilemma. When that answer came, it involved previously unimaginable leaps of divine inspiration, and it occurred thusly: All That Is searched through the truly infinite assortment of its incredible progeny to see what conditions were needed for this even more magnificent dream, this dream of a freedom of objectivity. What door could open to let physical reality emerge from such an inner realm? When All That Is, in your terms, put all of those conditions together it saw, of course, in a flash, the mental creation of those objective worlds that would be needed-and as it imagined those worlds, in your terms, they were physically created. [All That Is] did not separate itself from those worlds, however, for they were created from its thoughts, and each one has divine content. The worlds are all created by that divine content, so that while they are on the one hand exterior, they are on the other also made of divine stuff, and each hypothetical point in your universe (pause) is in direct contact with All That Is in the most basic terms. The knowledge of the whole is within all of its parts-and yet All That Is is more than its parts. Divine subjectivity is indeed infinite. It can never be entirely objectified. When the worlds, yours and others, were thus created, there was indeed an explosion of unimaginable proportions, as the divine spark of inspiration exploded into objectivity. The first "object" was an almost unendurable mass, though it had no weight, and it exploded, instantaneously beginning processes that formed the universe-but no time was involved. The process that you might imagine took up eons occurred in the twinkling of an eye, and the initial objective materialization of the massive thought of All That Is burst into reality. In your terms this was a physical explosion-but in the terms of the consciousnesses involved in that breakthrough, this was experienced as a triumphant "first" inspirational frenzy, a breakthrough into another kind of being (most intently). The earth then appeared as consciousness transformed itself into the many facets of nature. The atoms and molecules were alive, aware- they were no longer simply a part of a divine syntax, but they spoke themselves through the very nature of their being (gesturing). They became the living, aware vowels and syllables through which consciousness could form matter. But in your terms this was still largely a dream world, though it was fully fashioned. It had, generally speaking, all of the species that you now know. These all correlated with the multitudinous kinds of consciousnesses that had clamored for release, and those consciousnesses were spontaneously endowed by All That Is with those forms that fit their requirements. You had the birth of individualized consciousness as you think of it into physical context. Those consciousnesses were individualized before the beginning, but not manifest. But individualized consciousness was not quite all that bold. It did not attach itself completely to its earthly forms at the start, but rested often within its "ancient" divine heritage. In your terms, it is as if the earth and all of its creatures were partially dreaming, and not as focused within physical reality as they are now. For one thing, while individualized consciousness was within the massive subjectivity of All That Is, it enjoyed, beside its own uniqueness, a feeling of supporting unity, a comforting knowledge that it was one with its source. So in the beginning of [your] world, consciousness fluctuated greatly, focusing gently at the start, but not quite as willing to be as fully independent as its first intent might seem. You had the sleepwalkers,-' early members of your species, whose main concentration was still veiled in that earlier subjectivity, and they were your true ancestors, in those terms. For one thing, early man needed to rely upon his great inner knowledge. All of the species began by emphasizing a great subjective orientation that was most necessary as they learned to manipulate within the new physical environment.

Let us return to our tale or origins. We are sitting here on a specific autumn evening. I am obviously dictating this book, speaking through Ruburt, while Joseph sits on the couch across from a very specific coffee table, taking down my words. This is the year 1979, and the idea of time and of dates seems to be indelibly mixed into [everyone's] psychology. You can remember last year, and to some extent recall the past years of your lives. It appears to you that your present consciousness wanders backward into the past, until finally you can remember no longer-and on a conscious level, at least, you must take the very event of your birth under secondhanded evidence. Few people have conscious memory of it. For the purposes of our discussion, I must necessarily couch this book to some degree in the framework of time. I must honor your specifics. Otherwise you would not understand what I am trying to say. Even though this book is being dictated within time's tradition, therefore, I must remind you that basically (underlined) that tradition is not mine-and more, basically (underlined), it is not yours either. I used the term "before the beginning," then, and I will speak of earth's events in certain sequences. In the deepest of terms, however, and in ways that quite scandalize the intellect when it tries to operate alone, the beginning is now. That critical explosion of divine subjectivity into objectivity is always happening, and you are being given life "in each moment" because of the simultaneous nature of that divine subjectivity. We will nevertheless call our next chapter "In the Beginning," laying certain events out for you in serial form. I hope that in other portions of this book certain mental exercises will allow you to leap over the tradition of time's framework and sense with the united intellect and intuitions your own individual part in a spacious present that is large enough to contain all of time's segments.

A few notes. When Ruburt forgot to worry because "he wasn't working," his natural playful creativity bubbled to the surface, and today he wrote poetry. Poetry, however, did not fit into his current ideas about work, and so that excellent creativity was hardly counted at all. In a fashion-in a fashion-the [universe] began in the same way that Ruburt's story this evening began: with the desire to create-out of joy, not from a sense of responsibility. Many of the ideas in our current book will be accepted by scientists most dubiously, though some, of course, will grasp what 1 will be saying. It is of course very difficult for you, because (pause) the deepest truths cannot be physically proven. (Pause.) Science is used to asking quite specific questions, and as Ruburt wrote recently (in God of Jane) it usually comes up with very specific answers-even if those answers are wrong (with some humor). "Wrong" answers can fit together, however, to present a perfect picture, an excellent construct of its own-and why not? For any answers that do not fit the construct are simply thrown away and never appear. So in a fashion we are dealing with what science has thrown away. The picture we will end up presenting, then, will certainly not fit that of established science. However, if objective proof of that nature is considered the priority for facts, then as you know science cannot prove its version of the [universe's] origin either. It only sets up an hypothesis, which collects about it all data that agree, and again ignores what does not fit. Moreover, science's thesis meets with no answering affirmation in the human heart-and in fact arouses the deepest antipathy, for in his heart man well knows his own worth, and realizes that his own consciousness is no accident.5 The psyche, then, possesses within itself an inner affirmation, an affirmation that provides the impetus for physical emergence, an affirmation that keeps man from being completely blinded by his own mental edifices. There is furthermore a deep, subjective, immaculately knowledgeable standard within man's consciousness by which he ultimately judges all of the theories and the beliefs of his time, and even if his intellect is momentarily swamped by ignoble doctrines, still that point of integrity within him is never fooled. There is a part of man that Knows, with a capital K. That is the portion of him, of course, that is born and grows to maturity even while the lungs or digestive processes do not read learned treatises on the body's "machinery,"6 so in our book we will hope to arouse within the reader, of whatever persuasion, a kind of subjective evidence, a resonance between ideas and being. Many people write, saying that they feel as if somehow they have always been acquainted with our material-and of course they have, for it represents the inner knowing within each individual. (Pause.) In a fashion, creative play is your human version of far greater characteristics from which your universe itself was formed. There are all kinds of definite, even specific, subjective evidence for the nature of your own reality-evidence that is readily apparent once you really begin to look for it, particularly by comparing the world of your dreams with your daily life. In other words, subjective play is the basis for all creativity, of course-but far more, it is responsible for the great inner play of subjective and objective reality.

In the beginning, there was not God the Father, Allah, Zoroaster, Zeus, or Buddha.1 In the beginning there was instead, once more, a divine psychological gestalt-and by that I mean a being whose reality escapes the definition of the word "being," since it is the source from which all being emerges. That being exists in a psychological dimension (long pause), a spacious present, in which everything that was or is or will be (in your terms) is kept in immediate attention, poised in a divine context that is characterized by such a brilliant concentration that the grandest and the lowliest, the largest and the smallest, are equally held in a multiloving constant focus. Your conceptions of beginnings and endings make an explanation of such a situation most difficult, for in your terms the beginning of the [universe] is meaningless-that is, in those terms (underlined) there was no beginning (intently). The [universe] is, as I explained, always coming into existence, and each present moment bring its own built-in past along with it. You agree on accepting as fact only a small portion of the large available data that compose any moment individually or globally. You accept only those data that fit in with your ideas of motion in time. As a result, for example, your archeological evidence usually presents a picture quite in keeping with your ideas of history, geological eras, and so forth. The conscious mind sees with a spectacular but limited scope. It lacks all peripheral vision. I use the term "conscious mind" as you define it, for you allow it to accept as evidence only those physical data available for the five senses-while the five senses, of course, represent only a relatively flat2 view of reality, that deals with the most apparent surface. The physical senses are the extensions of inner senses3 that are, in one way or another, a part of each physical species regardless of its degree. The inner senses provide all species with an inner method of communication. The c-e-1-l-s (spelled out), then, possess inner senses. Atoms perceive their own positions, their velocities, motions, the nature of their surroundings, the material that they compose. [Your] world did not just come together, mindless atoms forming here and there, elements coalescing from brainless gases-nor was the world, again, created by some distant objectified God who created it part by part as in some cosmic assembly line. With defects built in, mind you (with some humor), and better models coming every geological season. The universe formed out of what God is. The universe is the natural extension of divine creativity and intent, lovingly formed from the inside out (underlined)-so there was consciousness before there was matter, and not the other way around. In certain basic and vital ways, your own consciousness is a portion of that divine gestalt. In the terms of your earthly experience, it is a metaphysical, a scientific, and a creative error to separate matter from consciousness, for consciousness materializes itself as matter in physical life. Your consciousness will survive your body's death, but it will also take on another kind of form-a form that is itself composed of "units of consciousness." You have a propensity for wanting to think in terms of hierarchies of consciousness, with humanity at the top of the list, in global terms. The Bible, for example, says that man is put in dominion over the animals, and it seems as if upgrading the consciousnesses of animals must somehow degrade your own. The divine gestalt, however, is expressed in such a way that its quality (pause) is undiluted. It cannot be watered down, so that in basic terms one portion of existence is somehow up or down the scale from another. It is all Grade A (with amusement). You limit the capacity of your conscious mind by refusing to allow it to use a larger scope of attention, so that you have remained closed and ignorant about the different, varied, but rich experiences of other species: They do appear beneath you. You have allowed a certain stubborn literal-mindedness to provide you with definitions that served to categorize rather than illuminate other realities beside your own. In the beginning, then, there was a subjective world that became objective. Matter was not yet permanent, in your terms, for consciousness was not yet as stable there. In the beginning, then, there was a dream world, in which consciousness formed a dream of physical reality, and gradually became awake within that world. Mountains rose and tumbled. Oceans filled. Tidal waves thundered. Islands appeared. The seasons themselves were not stable. In your terms the magnetic fields themselves fluctuated- but all of the species were there at the beginning, though in the same fashion, for as the dream world broke through into physical reality there was all of the tumultuous excitement and confusion with which a mass creative event is achieved. There was much greater plasticity, motion, variety, giveand- take, as consciousness experimented with its own forms. The species and environment together formed themselves in concert, in glorious combination, so that each fulfilled the requirements of its own existence while adding to the fulfillment of all other portions of physical reality (all very intently, and with many gestures). That kind of an event simply cannot fit into your concepts of "the beginning of the world," with consciousness arising out of matter almost as a second thought, or with an exteriorized God initiating a divine but mechanistic natural world. Nor can this concept fit into your versions of good and evil, as I will explain later in this book. God, or All That Is, is in the deepest sense completed, and yet uncompleted. Again, I am aware of the contradiction that seems to be presented to your minds. In a sense, however (underlined), a creative product, say, helps complete an artist, while of course the artist can never be completed. All That is, or God, in a certain fashion, now (underlined)-and this is qualified-learns as you learn, and makes adjustments according to your knowledge. We must be very careful here, for delusions of divinity come sometimes too easily, but in a basic sense you all carry within yourselves the undeniable mark of All That Is-and an inbuilt capacity-capacity-to glimpse in your own terms undeniable evidence of your own greater existence. You are as close to the beginning of [your] world as Adam and Eve were, or as the Romans, or as the Egyptians or Sumerians. The beginning of the world is just a step outside the moment. I have a purpose in this book-for this is dictation-and that purpose is to change your ideas of yourselves, by showing you a truer picture of your history both in terms of your immortal consciousness and your physical heritage.

When I speak of the dream world, I am not referring to some imaginary realm, but to the kind of world of ideas, of thoughts, of mental actions, out of which all form as you think of it emerges. In actuality this is an inner universe rather than an inner world. Your physical reality is but one materialization of that inner organization. All possible civilizations exist first in that realm of inner mind. In the beginning, then, the species did not have the kinds of forms they do now. They had pseudoforms- dream bodies, if you prefer-and they could not physically reproduce themselves. Their experience of time was entirely different, and in the beginning the entire earth operated in a kind of dream time. In your terms, this meant that time could be quickened, or lengthened. It was a kind of psychological time. Again, forms appeared and disappeared. (Pause.) In your terms of time, however, the dream bodies took on physical forms. Physical reproduction was impossible. That did not happen to all of the species at once, however. For a while, then, the earth had a mixed population of species who had completely taken on physical forms, and species who had not. The forms, however, whether physical or not, were complete in themselves. Birds were birds, and fish fish. In the beginning there were also species of various other kinds: combinations of man-animal and animal-man, and many other "crossbreed" species, some of fairly long duration in your terms. This applies to all areas. There were dream trees, with dream foliage, that gradually became aware within that dream (with gentle emphasis), turning physical, focusing more and more in physical reality, until their dream seeds finally brought forth physical trees. There may be other terms I could use, in some ways more advantageous than the term, "the dream world." I am emphasizing this dream connection, however, because the dream state is one familiar to each reader, and it represents your closest touchstone to the kind of subjective reality from which your physical world emerges. The dream state appears chaotic, shadowy, suspicious, or even meaningless, precisely because in life you are so brilliantly focused in daily reality that dreams appear to be sta-ticky objective background noise, left over from when you sleep. But that is how physical experience would seem to someone not focused in it, or inexperienced with its organization. Again, the world came into being in the same way that any idea does. The physical world expands in the same way that any idea does. I am speaking for your edification of the world you recognize, of the earth you know, but there are probable earths, of course, as real as your own. They coexist with your own, and they are all in one way or another connected. Each one carries hints and clues about the others. In the terms used by science, there was no evolution in linear terms, but vast (long pause) explosions of consciousness, expansions of capacities, unfoldings on the parts of all species, and these still continue. They are the inner manipulations with which consciousness presents itself. Later in the book I will discuss some of these, but they represent intuitive leaps of new understandings. The pattern of animal behavior, for example, is not at all as set and finished as you suppose. Your physical experience is a combination of dream events interlaced with what you call objective acts. Were it not for your myths, you would have discovered no "facts."

You can only locate or pinpoint an event that falls one way or another into the range of your perception. You cannot really locate or pinpoint microscopic or macroscopic events with any precision. You cannot pinpoint "invisible" events, for even as your sophisticated instruments perceive them, they have not met them in the same time scheme. I want to deal briefly with such ideas, so that later we can discuss the location of the universe. Any event that you perceive is only a portion of the true dimensionality of that event. The observer and the object perceived are a part of the same event, each changing the other. This interrelationship always exists in any system of reality and at any level of activity. In certain terms, for example, even an electron "knows" it is being observed through your instrument. The electrons within the instrument itself have a relationship with the electron that scientists may be trying to "isolate" for examination. Quite apart from that, however, there is what we will call for now the collective unconscious of all of the electrons that compose the entire seemingly separate event of the scientists observing the electron. In your range of activity you can adequately identify events, project them in time and space, only by isolating certain portions of much larger and much smaller events, and recognizing a highly specific order of events as real. Light can be defined as a wave or as a particle,2 and the same is true in many other instances. Consciousness, for example, can be defined as a wave or as a particle, for it can operate as either, and appear as either, even though its true definition would have to include the creative capacity to shape itself into such forms. You cannot pinpoint the beginning of the universe-for (suddenly louder) that beginning is simultaneously too vast and too small to be contained in any of your specifications. While everything seems neat and tidy within those specifications, and whole, you operate with brilliant nonchalance in the theater of time and space. Time and space are each the result of psychological properties. (Pause.) When you ask how old is the universe, or how old is the world, then you are taking it for granted that time and space are somehow or other almost absolute qualities. You are asking for answers that can only be found by going outside of the context of usual experience-for within that experience you are always led back to beginnings and endings, consecutive moments, and a world that seems to have within it no evidences of any other source. The physical world as you know it is unique, vital to the importance of the universe itself. It is an integral part of that universe, and yet it is also quite its own reality. That reality is dependent upon the perceptions of each kind of life that composes it. It is a creation of consciousness, rising into one unique kind of expression from that divine gestalt of being- and that divine gestalt of being is of such unimaginable dimensions that its entire reality cannot appear within any one of its own realities, its own worlds. Space, again, is a psychological property. So is time. The universe did not, then, begin at some specified point in time, or at any particular location in space-for (louder) it is true to say that all of space and all of time appeared simultaneously, and appear simultaneously. You cannot pinpoint the location of consciousness. When you are dreaming you cannot pinpoint your dream location in the same way that you can determine, say, the chair or the bureau that may sit on the floor by the bed in which you dream. That inner location is real, however, and meaningful activity can take place within it. Physical space exists in the same manner, except that it is a mass psychologically shared property-but at one "time" in the beginning this was not so. In the beginning, physical space had the qualities that dream space has to you now. It seemed to have a more private nature, and only gradually, in those terms, did it become publicly shared. What was such a world like, and how can you possibly relate it to the world that you know?

I call the building blocks of matter CU's-units of consciousness. They form physical matter as it exists in your understanding and experience. Units of consciousness also form other kinds of matter that you do not perceive.1 CU's can also operate as "particles" or as "waves." Whichever way they operate, they are aware of their own existences. When CU's operate as particles, in your terms, they build up a continuity in time. They take on the characteristics of particularity. They identify themselves by the establishment of specific boundaries. They take certain forms, then, when they operate as particles, and experience their reality from "the center of" those forms. They concentrate upon, or focus upon, their unique specificiations. They become in your terms (underlined) individual. When CU's operate as waves, however, they do not set up any boundaries about their own self-awareness-and when operating as waves CU's can indeed be in more than one place at one time. I understand that this is somewhat difficult material to comprehend. However (pause), in its purest form a unit of consciousness can be in all places at the same time (forcefully). It becomes beside the point, then, to say that when it operates as a wave a unit of consciousness is precognitive, or clairvoyant, since it has the capacity to be in all places and all times simultaneously. Those units of consciousness are the building blocks for the physical material of your body, for the trees and rocks, the oceans, the continents, and the very manifestation of space itself as you understand it. These CU's can operate as separate entities, as identities, or they can flow together in a vast, harmonious wave of activity, as a force. Period. Actually, units of consciousness operate in both ways all of the time. No identity, once "formed," is ever annihilated, for its existence is indelibly a part of "the entire wave of consciousness to which it belongs." Each "particleized" unit, however, rides the continual thrust set up by fields of consciousness, in which wave and particle both belong. Each particleized unit of consciousness contains within it inherently the knowledge of all other such particles- for at other levels, again, the units are operating as waves. Basically the units move faster than light,2 slowing down, in your terms, to form matter. (Pause.) These units can be considered, again, as entities or as forces, and they can operate as either. Metaphysically, they can be thought of as the point at which All That Is acts to form [your] world- the immediate contact of a never-ending creative inspiration, coming into mental focus, the metamorphosis of certainly divine origin that brings the physical world into existence from the greater reality of divine fact. Scientifically, again, the units can be thought of as building blocks of matter. Ethically, the CU's represent the spectacular foundations of the world in value fulfillment, for each unit of consciousness is related to each other, a part of the other, each participating in the entire gestalt of mortal experience. And we will see how this applies to your attitudes toward specieshood, and man's relationship with other conscious entities and the planet he shares with them. In the beginning CU's, then, units of consciousness, existing within a divine psychological gestalt, endowed with the unimaginable creativity of that sublime identity, began themselves to create, to explore, and to fulfill those innate values by which they were characterized. Operating both as waves and particles, directed in part by their own creative restlessness, and directed in part by the unquenchable creativity of All That Is, they embarked upon the project that brought time and space and your entire [universe] into being. They were the first entities, then. I want you to try and imagine a situation in which (long pause) there exists a psychological force that includes within its capabilities the ability to act simultaneously on the most microscopic and the most macroscopic levels; that can form within itself (long pause, eyes closed) a million separate inviolate unique identities, and that can still operate as a part of those identities, and as a larger unit that is their source-in which case it is a wave from which the particles emerge. That description fits our units of consciousness. They built your world from the inside out. As physical creatures, they focused upon what you think of as physical identities: separate, individual differences, endowing each physical consciousness with its own original variations and creative potentials, its own opportunity for completely original experience, and a viewpoint or platform from which to participate in reality -one that at that level could not be experienced in the same way by any other individual (all very intently). This is [the] privileged, always new7, private and immediate, direct experience of any individual of any species, or of any degree, as it encounters the objective universe. At other levels, while each individuality is maintained, it rides the wavelike formations of consciousness. It is everywhere at once, and the units of consciousness that make up your cells know the positions of all other such units, both in time and in space. In the beginning, then, these units operated both as identities or particles, and as waves. The main concentration was not yet physical in your terms. What you now think of as the dream state was the waking one, for it was still the recognized form of purposeful activity, creativity, and power. The dream state continues to be a connective between the two realities, and as a species you literally learned to walk by first being sleepwalkers. You walked in your sleep. You dreamed your languages. You spoke in your dreams and later wrote down the alphabets-and your knowledge and your intellect have always been fired, sharpened, propelled by the great inner reality from which your minds emerged. Physical matter by itself could never produce consciousness. One mind alone could not come into being from chance alone; one thought could not leap from an infinite number of nerve ends, if matter itself was not initially alive with consciousness, packed with the intent to be. A man who believes life has little meaning quickly leaves life- and a meaningless existence could never produce life (intently). Nor was the universe created for one species alone, by a God who is simply a supervision of the same species-as willful and destructive as man at his worst. Instead, you have an inner dimension of activity, a vast field of multidimensional creativity, a Creator that becomes a portion of each of its creations, and yet a Creator that is greater than the sum of its parts: a Creator that can know itself as a mouse in a field, or as the field, or as the continent upon which the field rests, or as the planet that holds the continent, or as the universe that holds the world-a force that is whole yet divisible, that is one and the inconceivably many, a force that is eternal and mortal at once, a force that plunges headlong into its own creativity, forming the seasons and experiencing them as well, glorifying in individuation, and yet always aware of the great unity that is within and behind and through all experiences of individuality: a force from [which] each moment pasts and futures flow out in every conceivable direction. In your terms of time, however, we will speak of a beginning, and in that beginning it was early man's dreams that allowed him to cope with physical reality. The dream world was his original learning ground. In times of drought he would dream of the location of water. In times of famine he would dream of the location of food. That is, his dreaming allowed him to clairvoyantly view the body of land. He would not waste time in the trial-and-error procedures that you now take for granted. In dreams his consciousness operated as a wave. In those early times all species shared their dreams in a way that is now quite unconscious for your kind, so that in dreams man inquired of the animals also-long before he learned to follow the animal tracks, for example. Where is there food or water? What is the lay of the land? Man explored the planet because his dreams told him that the land was there. People were not nearly as isolated as it now appears, for in their dreams early men communicated their various locations, the symbols of their cultures and understanding, the nature of their arts. All of the inventions that you often think now happened quite by chance-the discovery of anything from the first tool to the importance of fire, or the coming of the Iron Age or whatever-all of that inventiveness was the result of the inspiration and communication of the dream world. Man dreamed his world and then created it, and the units of consciousness first dreamed man and all of the other species that you know. There is a point here that I want to emphasize before we go too far, and it is this: The dream world is not an aimless, nonlogical, unintellectual field of activity. It is only that your own perspective closes out much of its vast reality, for the dreaming intellect can put your computers to shame. I am not, therefore, putting the intellectual capacities in the background -but I am saying that they emerge as you know them because of the dreaming self's uninterrupted use of the full power of the united intellect and intuitions. The intellectual abilities as you know them (pause) cannot compare to those greater capacities that are a part of your own inner reality.

This inner universe (pause) is a gestalt formed by fields of awareized energy that contains what we will call "information" for now-but we will have some comments later, for this is not the kind of information you are used to. Each unit of consciousness inherently possesses within itself all of the information available to the whole, and its specific nature when it operates as a particle rests upon that great "body" of inner knowledge. Any one such particle can be where it "is," be what it is, and be when it is only because the positions, relative positions, and situations of all other such particles are known. In the deepest terms, again, your physical world is beginning at each point at which these units of consciousness assert themselves to form physical reality. Otherwise, life would not be "handed down" through the generations. Each unit of consciousness (or CU) intensifies, magnifies its own intent to be-and, you might say, works up from within itself an explosive spark of primal desire that "explodes" into a process that causes physical materialization. It turns into what I have called [an] EE unit,1 in which case it is embarked upon its own kind of physical experience. These EE units also operate as fields, as waves, or as particles, as the units of consciousness do-but in your terms they are closer to physical orientation. Their die is cast, so to speak: They have already begun the special kind of screening process necessary that will bring about physical form. They begin to deal with the kinds of information that will help form your world. There are literally numberless steps taken before EE units combine in their own fashion to form the most microscopic physical particles, and even here the greatest, gentlest sorting-out process takes place as these units disentangle themselves at certain operational levels (underlined) from their own greater fields of "information," to specialize in the various elements that will allow for the production of atoms and molecules impeccably suited to your kind of world. First, again, you have various stages of, say, pseudomatter, of dream images, that only gradually-in those terms-coalesce and become physically viable, for there are endless varieties of "matter" between the matter that you recognize and the antimatter of physicists' theories. Form exists at many other levels than those you recognize, in other words. Your dream forms are quite as real as your physical ones. They simply fit into their own environment at another level of activity, and they are quite reminiscent of the kinds of forms that you had in the beginning of [your] world. While you and all of the other species were what I have called sleepwalkers, your bodies by then were physically capable. In a manner of speaking, you did not know how to use them properly as yet. Now, from a waking state, you do not understand how your dream bodies can seem to fly through the air, defy space and even time, converse with strangers and so forth. In the same way, however, once, you had to learn to deal with gravity, to deal with space and time, to manipulate in a world of objects, to simply breathe, to digest your food, and to perform all of the biological manipulations that now you take for granted (all most emphatically). You could not afford to identify too completely with such bodies until you learned how to survive within them, so in the dream state (pause) the true processes of life began as these new bodies and earthtuned consciousnesses saw themselves mentally exercising all portions of the body. Behind all that was the brilliant comprehension and cooperation of all of the units of consciousness that go to compose the body, each adding its own information and specific knowledge to the overall bodily organizations, and each involved in the most intricate fields of relationships, for the miracle of the body's efficiency is the result of relationships that exist among all of its parts, connecting it to other levels of existence that do not physically appear. Units of consciousness (CU's), transforming themselves into EE units, formed the environment and all of its inhabitants in the same process, in what you might call a circular manner rather than a serial one. And in those terms, of course, there are only various physical manifestations of consciousness, not a planet and its inhabitants, but an entire gestalt of awareized consciousness. In those terms (underlined), each portion of physically oriented consciousness sees reality and experience from its own privileged viewpoint, about which it seems all else revolves, even though this may involve a larger generalized held than your own, or a smaller one. So to rocks, say, you can be considered a portion of their environment, while you may consider them merely a portion of your environment. You simply do not tune into the range of rock consciousness. Actually (pause), many other kinds of consciousness, while focused in their own specific ways, are more aware than man is of earth's unified nature-but man, in following his own ways, also adds to the value fulfillment of all other consciousnesses in ways that are quite outside of usual systems of knowledge. If you remember that beneath all, each unit of consciousness is aware of the position of each other unit, and that these units form all physical matter, then perhaps you can intuitively follow what I mean, for whatever knowledge man attains, whatever experience any one person accumulates, whatever arts or sciences you produce, all such information is instantly perceived at other levels of activity by each of the other units of consciousness that compose physical reality- whether those units form the shape of a rock, a raindrop, an apple, a cat, a frog or a shoe. Manufactured products are also composed of atoms and molecules that ride upon units of consciousness transformed into EE units, and hence into physical elements. What you have, really, is a manifested and an unmanifested consciousness, but only relatively speaking. You do not perceive the consciousness of objects. It is not manifest to you because your range of activities requires boundaries to frame your picture of reality. All of your manufactured objects also originated in the realm of dreams, first obviously being conceived of mentally, and in the same way man produced his first tools. He was born with (long pause) all of those abilities-abilities by which he is now characterized-and with other abilities that in your terms still wait for development. Not that he has not used them so far, but that he has not focused upon them in what you consider the main lines of civilized continuity. Hints of those abilities are always present in the dream state, and in the arts, in the religions, and even in the sciences. They appear in politics and business, but as the largely unmanifcst intuitive background, which is largely ignored. We will return to these later in the book. Man's dreams have always provided him with a sense of impetus, purpose, meaning, and given him the raw material from which to form his civilizations. The true history of the world is the history of man's dreams, for they have been responsible in one way or another for all historic developments. They were responsible for the birth of agriculture, as well as industry, the rise and fall of nations, the "glory" that was Rome, and Rome's destruction. (Pause.) Your present technological advances can almost be dated from the [invention of] the printing press, to Edison's inventions, which were flashes of intuition, dream-inspired. But if what I am telling you is true, then it is obvious that when I say that your physical world originated in the world of dreams, I must mean something far different from the usual definition of dream reality. Again, I could choose another term, but I want to emphasize each person's intimate contact with that other reality that does occur in what you think of as the state of dreaming (all very intently). That analogy will help you at least intuitively understand the existence of situations such as suffering, and poverty, that otherwise seem to have no adequate explanations (as Jane and I were discussing today). I hope also to account for behavior on the part of nature that certainly seems to imply the survival of the fittest in a tooth-and-claw fashion, or the punishing acts of a vengeful God on the one hand and the triumph of an evil force on the other. For now in our tale of beginnings, however, we still have a spasmodic universe that appears and disappears-that gradually, in those terms, manifests for longer periods of time. What you really had in the beginning were images without form, slowly adopting form, blinking on and off, then stabilizing into forms that were as yet not completely physical. These then took on all of the characteristics that you now consider formed physical matter. As all of this occurred, consciousness took on more and more specific orientations, greater organizations at your end. At the "other end," it disentangled itself from vaster fields of activity to allow for this specific behavior. All of these units of consciousness, again, operate as entities (or particles, or as waves or forces). In those terms, consciousness formed the experience of time- and not, of course, the other way around.

The year 1980 exists in all of its potential versions, now in this moment. Because mass events are concerned there is not a completely different year, of course, for each individual on the face of the planet- but there are literally an endless number of mass-shared worlds of 1980 "in the wings," so to speak. It is not quite as simple a matter as just deciding what events you want to materialize as reality, since you have, in your terms, a body of probabilities of one kind or another already established as the raw materials for the coming year. It would be quite improbable for you, Joseph (as Seth calls me), to suddenly turn into a tailor, for example, for none of your choices with probabilities have led toward such an action. In like manner, England in all probability next year will not suddenly turn into a Mohammedan nation. But within the range of workable probabilities, private and mass choices, the people of the world are choosing their probable 1980s. I am taking my time here, for there are some issues that I would like to clear up, that are difficult to explain. Any of the probable actions that a person considers are a part of that person's conscious thought. Just underneath, however, people also consider other sets of probabilities that may or may not reach conscious level, simply because they are shunted aside, or because they seem to meet with no conscious recognition. I want you to try and imagine actual events, as you think of them, to be (pause) the vitalized representations of probabilities-that is, as the physical versions of mental probabilities. The probabilities with which you are not consciously concerned remain psychologically peripheral: They are there but not there, so to speak. Your conscious mind can only accept a certain sequence of probabilities as recognized experience. As I have said, the choices among probabilities go on constantly, both on conscious and unconscious levels. Events that you do not perceive as conscious experience are (pause) a part of your unconscious experience, however, to some extent. This applies to the individual, and of course en masse the same applies to world events. Each action seeks all of its own possible fulfillments. All That Is seeks all possible experience, but in such a larger framework in this case that questions of, say, pain or death simply do not apply, though [certainly] they do on the physical level. Great expectations, basically, have nothing to do with degree, for a grass blade is filled with great expectations. Great expectations are built upon a faith in the nature of reality, a faith in nature itself, a faith in the life you are given, whatever its degree-and all children, for example, are born with those expectations. Fairy tales are indeed often-though not always- carriers of a kind of underground knowledge, as per your discussion about Cinderella (also see the 824th session for Mass Events), and the greatest fairy tales are always those in which the greatest expectations win out: The elements of the physical world that are unfortunate can be changed in the twinkling of an eye through great expectations. Your education tells you that all of that is nonsense, that the world is defined by its physical aspects alone. When you think of power you think of, say, nuclear energy, or solar energy-but power is the creative energy within men's minds that allows them to use such powers, such energies, such forces. The true power is in the imagination which dares to speculate upon that which is not yet (intently). The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probabilities. All of the possible versions of 1980 will happen. Except for those you settle upon, all of the others will remain psychologically peripheral, in the background of your conscious experience-but all of those possible versions will be connected in one way or another. The important lessons have never really appeared in your societies: the most beneficial use of the directed will, with great expectations, and that coupled with the knowledge of Framework 1 and 2 activities. Very simply: You want something, you dwell upon it consciously for a w'hile, you consciously imagine it coming to the forefront of probabilities, closer to your actuality. Then you drop it like a pebble into Framework 2, forget about it as much as possible for a fortnight, and do this in a certain rhythm. In our book, I will be doing my best to explain the origin of your universe, and in such a way that most of the pertinent questions are answered, but man's present concept of reality is so limited that I must often resort to analogies. In the most basic of terms, as 1980 happens the energy that comes into your universe is as new7 as if (in your terms) the world were created yesterday-a point that will be rather difficult to explain. All of the probable versions of 1980 spin off their own probable pasts as well as their own probable futures, and any consciousness that exists in 1980 was (again in those terms) a part of what you think of as the beginning of the world. (To me.) Your mother did not simply choose to believe, in her old age, in a different past than the one that was accepted by the family- she effectively changed probabilities. She was not deluded or obsessed. Her memory in that regard, now, was not defective: It was the memory of the probable woman that she became.2 Like the entire American hostage affair (in Iran), any physical event serves as a focus that attracts all of its probable versions and outcomes. The hostage situation (now in day 53) is a materialized mass dream, meant to be important and vital on political and religious platforms of reality, meant to dramatize a conflict of beliefs, and to project that conflict outward into the realm of public knowledge. Everyone involved was consciously and unconsciously a willing participant at the most basic levels of human behavior, and it is of course no coincidence that 1980 is immediately foreshadowed by that event. What will the world do with it? Your TV and news systems of communication are a part of the event itself, of course. It is in a way far better that these events occurred now, and in the way that they have, so that the problems appear clearly in the world arena. They are actually thus of a far less violent nature than they might otherwise have been. Religious beliefs will be examined as they have not been before, and their connections and political affiliations. The Arab world still needs the West, and again, it is better that those issues come to light now, while they must to some extent consider the rest of the world. Do not personally give any more conscious consideration, either of you, to events that you do not want to happen. (Long pause.) Any such concentration, to whatever degree, ties you in with those probabilities, so concentrate upon what you want, and as far as public events are concerned, take it for granted that sometimes even men are wiser than they know.

You were (pause) each present at the beginning of the world, then, though you may be present in the world now in a somewhat different fashion. Remember that each unit of consciousness is a fragment of All That Is, a divine portion. Then perhaps what I am about to explain will make more sense. For some time, in your terms, the sleepwalkers remained more or less at that level of activity, and for many centuries they used the surface of the earth as a kind of background for other activ ity. Their real life was what you would now call the dreaming one. They worked mentally while asleep, constructing in their individual minds and in their joint mental endeavors (long pause) all of the dazzling images that would later become a mental reservoir from which men could draw. In that multidimensional array, consciousness mentally learned to form itself into EE units, atoms and molecules, electrons and chromosomes. It mentally formed the patterns through which all physical life could flow. The world then came into physical existence. Those units of consciousness are indestructible and vitalized, regardless of the forms they take, and while men's forms were dream images, consciousness spun forms into physical material. Consciousness possesses the most unimaginable agility without ever losing any potency. Those units of consciousness, for example, can mix and combine with others to form a million different sequences of memory and desire, of neural achievement and recognition, [of] structure and design. You read your own consciousness now in a kind of vertical fashion, identifying only with certain portions of it, and it seems to you that any other organization of perception, any other recognition of identity, would quite necessarily negate your own or render it inoperable. In the beginning of the world there were numberless groupings, however, and affiliations of consciousness, many other organizations of identity that were recognized, as well as the kind of psychological orientation you have now- but [your] kind of orientation was not the paramount one. While, generally speaking, earth's species existed from the beginning in the forms by which you now knowr them, consciousness of species was quite different, and all species were much more intimately related through various kinds of identification that have since gone into the underground of awareness. Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what you think of as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. In that regard the earth's entire environment was built mentally, atom by conscious atom-each atom, again, being initially formed by units of consciousness. I said that these units could operate as entities, and as forces, so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and psychic properties, purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite mind as that mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. Those entities, in your terms so ancient, left fragments of themselves in trance (underlined), so to speak, that form the rocks and hills, the mountains, the air and the water, and all of the elements that exist on the face of the earth. Those entities are in trance, in those terms, but their potency is not diminished, and there is constant communication among them always. There is also constant communication between them and you at other levels than those you recognize, so that there is an unending interplay between each species and its environment. There is no place where consciousness stops and the environment begins, or vice versa. Each form of life is created along with each other form-environment and organism in those terms creating each other. After forms were fully physical, however, all species operated as sleepwalkers for many centuries, though on the scale that existed then the passage of time was not considered in the same fashion. During that period the work of wedding nonphysical consciousness to matter was accomplished. Effects of gravity, for example, were stabilized. The seasons took on the rhythms best suited to the creatures in various locations. The environment and the creatures accommodated each other. Up until then, the main communications had followed the characteristic patterns of units of consciousness (long pause), each unit knowing its relationship to all others upon the planet. Creatures relied upon inner senses while learning to operate the new, highly specific physical ones that pinpointed perception in time and place. This pinpointing of perception was of vital importance, for with the full arousal of consciousness in flesh, intersections with space and time[had to be] impeccable. Dream bodies became physical, and through the use of the senses tuned . to physical frequencies-frequencies of such power and allure that they would reach all creatures of every kind, from microbe to elephant, holding them together in a cohesive web of space-and-time alignment. In the beginning, man's dreams were in certain terms of immediate physical survival. They gave man information-a kind that of necessity the new physical senses could not contain. Those senses could only perceive the immediate environment, but man's dreams compensated for that lack, and filled out his consciousness by giving it the benefit of that larger generalized information to which it had once had an easy access. When he was asleep man could take advantage of the information banks contained in the units of consciousness that composed his very flesh. Now (underlined): When he dreamed-when he dreamed (underlined)-man actually returned to a state prior to waking, from which his physical life itself had emerged-only now he was a new creature, a new kind of consciousness, and so were all of the other species. In dreams all of the species familiarized themselves with their old affiliations, and they read their own identities in different fashions. "They remembered how it was." They remembered that they formed each other. This tale, I admit, is far more difficult to understand than a simple story of God's creation of the world, or its actual production in a meaningless universe through the slippery hands of chance-and yet my story is more magnificent because elements of its truth will find resonance in the minds and hearts of those open enough to listen. For men's minds themselves are alive with the desire to read properly, and they are aware of their own vast heritage. It is not simply that man has a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him is not, but that in those terms everything [he knows], regardless of size or degree, is made of "soul stuff." Each portion has its own identity and validity- and no portion is ever annihilated or destroyed. The form may change. (All with a rolling intensity:) I must of necessity tell this story in serial terms, but the world and all of its creatures actually come together like some spontaneously composed, ever-playing musical composition in which the notes themselves are alive and play themselves, so that the musicians and the notes are one and the same, the purpose and the performance being one, with each note played continuing to strike all of its own probable versions, forming all of its own probable compositions while at the same time taking part in all of the themes, melodies, and notes of the other compositions-so that each note, striking, defines itself, and yet also exists by virtue of its position in the composition as a whole. The conscious mind cannot handle that kind of multidimensional creativity, yet it can expand into a kind of new recognition when it is carried along, still being itself, by its own theme. In a way, your world follows its own theme in creativity's composition. You want to know where you came into the musical production, so to speak. (Pause.) I use a musical analogy here, if a simple one, to point out that we are also dealing with frequencies of perception. You are tuned into earth's orchestration [you might say], and your perception of time is simply the result of habits-habits of perception that you had to learn in the beginning of the world. And you learned those habits as your physical senses gradually became more alert and specific. You "timed" yourselves-but greater perceptions always appeared in the background of your consciousnesses and in the dream state. It is the great activity of the dream state that allows you, as psychological and physical creatures, to recognize and inhabit the world that you know (louder).

During this period that we have labeled as belonging to the dreamers, certain subjective actions took place as the "structure" of earthly tuned consciousness formed the phenomena of "the self." What was needed was a highly focused, precisely tuned physical self that could operate efficiently in a space and time scheme that was being formed along with physical creatures-a self, however, that in one way or another must be supported by realms of information and knowledge of a kind that was basically independent of time and space. A knowledge indispensable, and yet a knowledge that could not be allowed to distract the physical focus. In one way or another, that inner information had to connect each consciousness on the face of the planet. Earthly creatures must be able to react in a moment, yet the inner mechanisms that made such reactions possible were based upon calculations that could not be consciously kept in mind. In your time scheme, for example, you could never move as quickly as you do if you had to consciously work all the muscles involved in motion-or in speech, or in any such bodily performance. You certainly could not communicate on such a physical level if you first had to be aware of all of speech's mechanisms, working them consciously before a word was uttered. Yet you had to have that kind of knowledge, and you had to have it in a way that did not intrude upon your conscious thoughts. Basically there are no real divisions to the self, but for the sake of explanation we must speak of them in those terms. First of all you had the inner self, the creative dreaming self-composed, again, of units of consciousness, awarei/.cd energy that forms your identity, and that formed the identities of the earliest earth inhabitants. These inner selves formed their own dream bodies about them, as previously explained, but the dream bodies did not have to have physical reactions. They were free of gravity and space, and of time. As the body became physical, however, the inner self formed the body consciousness so that the physical body became more aware of itself, of the environment, and of its relationship within the environment. Before this could happen, though, the body consciousness was taught to become aware of its own inner environment. The body was lovingly formed from EE units through all the stages to atoms, cells, organs, and so forth. The body's pattern came from the inner self, as all of the units of consciousness involved in this venture together formed this fabric of environment and creatures, each suited to the other. So far in our discussion, then, we have an inner self, dwelling primarily in a mental or psychic dimension, dreaming itself into physical form, and finally forming a body consciousness. To that body consciousness the inner self gives "its own body of physical knowledge," the vast reservoir of physical achievement that it has triumphantly produced. (Pause.) The body consciousness is not "unconscious," but for working purposes in your terms, [the body] possesses its own system of consciousness that to some extent, now (underlined), is separated from what you think of as your own normal consciousness. The body's consciousness is hardly to be considered less than your own, or as inferior to that of your inner self, since it represents knowledge from the inner self, and is a part of the inner self's own consciousness-the part delegated to the body. [Each] cell, then, as I have often said, operates so well in time because it is, in those terms, precognitive. It is aware of the position, health, vitality, of all other cells on the face of the planet. It is. aware of the position of each grain of sand on the shores of each ocean, and in those terms it forms a portion of the earth's consciousness. At that level environment, creatures, and the elements of the natural world are all united-a point we will return to quite often. Your intellect as you think of it operates so clearly and precisely, so logically (with amusement), sometimes so arrogantly. because the intellect rides that great thrust of codified, "ancient," "unconscious" power-the power of instant knowing that is a characteristic of the body consciousness (all very intently). Thus far in our discussion, we still have only an inner self and a body consciousness. As the body consciousness developed itself, perfected its organization, the inner self and the body consciousness together performed a kind of psychological double-entendre. The best analogy I can think of is that up to that time the self was like a psychological rubber band, snapping inward and outward with great force and vitality, but without any kind of rigid-enough psychological framework to maintain a physical stance. The inner self still related to dream reality, while the body's orientation and the body consciousness attained, as was intended, a great sense of physical adventure, curiosity, speculation, wonder-and so once again the inner self put a portion of its consciousness in a different parcel, so to speak. As once it had formed the body consciousness, now it formed a physically attuned consciousness, a self whose desires and intents would be oriented in a way that, alone, the inner self could not be. (All with emphatic rhythm:) The inner self was too aware of its own multidimensionality, so in your terms it gave psychological birth to itself through the body in space and time. It knew itself as a physical creature. That portion of the self is the portion you recognize as your usual conscious self, alive within the scheme of seasons, aware within the designs of time, caught transfixed in moments of brilliant awareness, with civilizations that seem to come and go. That is the self that is alert in the dear preciseness of the moments, whose physical senses are bound to light and darkness, sound and touch. That is the self that lives the life of the body. It is the self that looks outward. It is the self that you call egotistically aware. The inner self became what I refer to as the inner ego. It looks into that inner reality, that psychic dimension of awareness from which both your own consciousness and your body consciousness emerged. You are one self, then, but for operating purposes we will say that you have three parts: the inner self or inner ego, the body consciousness, and the consciousness that you know. These portions, however, are intimately connected. They are like three different systems of consciousness operating together to form the whole. The divisions-the seeming divisions-are not stationary, but change constantly. To one extent or another, these three systems of consciousness operate in one way or another in all of the species, and in all particles, in the physical universe. In your terms, this means that the proportions of the three systems might vary, but they are always in operation, whether we are speaking of a man or a woman, a rock or a fly, a star or an atom. The inner self represents your prime identity, the self you really are. (Very rapidly:) "Earth is a nice place, but I wouldn't want to live there." A twist on an old quote, I believe-but the fact is, you are physical creatures because you do like to live on earth, you do like the conditions, you do enjoy overall the particular kind of challenge and the particular kind of perception, knowledge and understanding that the earthly environment provides. (All very intently:) That environment, in your terms, certainly includes suffering. If joy has always been one of the characteristics of earth experience, so has suffering, and the subject will be covered in this book. Here, however, I only want to mention one facet, and that is the importance of physical sensation, of whatever kind-for the life of the body provides you, among all things, with a life of sensation, of feeling, a spectrum that must include the experience of all possible sensations within its overall range. Now as you will see, all creatures, regardless of their degree, can and do choose, within their spheres of reality, those sensations that they will experience-but to one extent or another (underlined) all, sensations are felt. We will later discuss the part of the mind and its interpretation, for example, of painful stimuli, but I want to make the point that those attracted to physical life are first and foremost tasters of sensation. Outside of that, basically, there are all kinds of mental distinctions made [among] stimuli. The body is made to react. It is made to feel life and vitality by reacting to an environment that is not itself, by encountering what you might call natural stress. The body maintains its equilibrium by reacting against gravity, by coming in contact with other bodies, by changing its own sensations, by glorifying in the balance between balance and off-balance. The body consciousness is therefore given a> superb sense of its own reality, a sureness of identity, a sense of innate safety and security, that allows it to not only function but to grow in the physical world. It is endowed with a sense of boldness, daring, a sense of natural power. It is perfectly formed to fit into its environment -and the environment is perfectly formed to have such creatures. The entities, or units of consciousness-those ancient fragments that burst into objectivity from the vast and infinite psychological realms of All That Is-dared all, for they joyfully abandoned themselves in space and time. They created new psychological entities, opened up an area of divine creativity that "until then" had been closed, and therefore to that [degree] extended the experience and immense existence of All That Is. For in so abandoning themselves they were not of course abandoned, since they contained within themselves their inherent relationship with All That Is. In those terms All That Is became physical also, aroused at its divine depth by the thrusting of each grass blade through the soil into the air, aroused by each birth and by each moment of each creature's existence. All That Is, therefore, is immersed within your world, present in each hypothetical point, and forms the very fabric from which each portion of matter is created.

For many centuries (pause) the structure of the Roman Catholic church held [Western] civilization together, and gave it its meanings and its precepts. Those meanings and precepts flowed through the entire society, and served as the basis for all of the established modes of knowledge, commerce, medicine, science, and so forth. The church's view of reality was the accepted one. I cannot stress too thoroughly the fact that the beliefs of those times structured individual human living, so that the most private events of personal lives were interpreted to mean thus and so, as were of course the events of nations, plants, and animals. The world's view was a religious one, specified by the church, and its word was truth and fact at the same time. Illness was suffered, was sent by God to purge the soul, to cleanse the body, to punish the sinner, or simply to teach man his place by keeping him from the sins of pride. Suffering sent by God was considered a fact of life, then, and a religious truth as well. Some other civilizations have believed that illness was sent by demons or evil spirits, and that the world was full of good and bad spirits, invisible, intermixed with the elements of nature itself, and that man had to walk a careful line lest he upset the more dangerous or mischievous of those entities. In man's history there have been all kinds of incantations, meant to mollify the evil spirits that man believed were real in fact and in religious truth. It is easy enough to look at those belief structures and shrug your shoulders, wondering at man's distorted views of reality. The entire scientific view of illness, however, is quite as distorted (with amused emphasis). It is as laboriously conceived and inter-wound with "nonsense." It is about as factual as the "fact" that God sends illness as punishment, or that illness is the unwanted gift of mischievous demons. Now: Churchmen of the Middle Ages could draw diagrams of various portions of the human body that were afflicted as the result of indulging in particular sins. Logical minds at one time found those diagrams quite convincing, and patients with certain afflictions in certain areas of the body would confess to having committed the various sins that were involved. The entire structure of beliefs made sense within itself. A man might be born deformed or sickly because of the sins of his father. The scientific framework is basically, now, just as senseless, though within it the facts often seem to prove themselves out, also. There are viruses, for example. Your beliefs become self-evident realities. It would be impossible to discuss human suffering without taking that into consideration. Ideas are transmitted from generation to generation-and those ideas are the carriers of all of your reality, its joys and its agonies. Science, however, is all in all (underlined) a poor healer. The church's concepts at least gave suffering a kind of dignity: It did (underlined) come from God-an unwelcome gift, perhaps-but after all it was punishment handed out from a firm father for a child's own good. Science disconnected fact from religious truth, of course. In a universe formed by chance, with the survival of the fittest as the main rule of good behavior, illness became a kind of crime against a species itself. It meant you were unfit, and hence brought about all kinds of questions not seriously asked before. Did those "genetically inferior," for example, have the right to reproduce?' Illness was thought to come like a storm, the result of physical forces against which the individual had little recourse. The "new" Freudian ideas of the unsavory unconscious led further to a new dilemma, for it was then-as it is now- widely believed that as the result of experiences in infancy the subconscious, or unconscious, might very well sabotage the best interests of the conscious personality, and trick it into illness and disaster. In a way, that concept puts a psychological devil in place of the metaphysical one. If life itself is seen scientifically as having no real meaning, then suffering, of course, must also be seen as meaningless. The individual becomes a victim of chance insofar as his birth, the events of his life, and his death are concerned. Illness becomes his most direct encounter with the seeming meaninglessness of personal existence (all quite intently). You affect the structure of your body through your thoughts. If you believe in heredity, heredity itself becomes a strong suggestive factor in your life, and can help bring about the precise malady in the body that you believed was there all along, until finally your scientific instruments uncover the "faulty mechanism," or whatever, and there is the evidence for all to see. There are obviously some conditions that in your terms are inherited, showing themselves almost instantly after birth, but these are of a very limited number in proportion to those diseases you believe are hereditary-many cancers, heart problems, arthritic or rheumatoid disorders. And in many cases of inherited difficulties, changes could be effected for the better, through the utilization of other mental methods that we will certainly get to someday. There are as many kinds of suffering as there are kinds of joy, and there is no one simple answer that can be given. As human creatures you accept the conditions of life. You create from those conditions the experiences of your days. You are born into belief systems as you are born into physical centuries, and part of the entire picture is the freedom of interpreting the experiences of life in multitudinous fashions (all intently). The meaning, nature, dignity or shame of suffering will be interpreted according to your systems of belief. I hope to give you along the way a picture of reality that puts suffering in its proper perspective, but it is a most difficult subject to cover because it touches most deeply upon your hopes for yourselves and for mankind, and your fears for yourselves and for mankind. You have taught yourselves to be aware of and to follow only certain portions of your own consciousnesses, so that mentally you consider certain subjects taboo. Thoughts of death and suffering are among those. In a species geared above all to the survival of the fittest, and the competition among species, then any touch of suffering or pain, or thoughts of death, become dishonorable, biologically shameful, cowardly, nearly insane. Life is to be pursued at all costs-not because it is innately meaningful, but because it is the only game going, and it is a game of chance at best. One life is all you have, and that one is everywhere beset by the threat of illness, disaster, and war -and if you escape such drastic circumstances, then you are still left with a life that is the result of no more than lifeless elements briefly coming into a consciousness and vitality that is bound to end. In that framework, even the emotions of love and exaltation are seen as no more than the erratic activity of neurons firing , or of chemicals reacting to chemicals. Those beliefs alone bring on suffering. All of science, in your time, has been set up to promote beliefs that run in direct contradiction to the knowledge of man's heart. Science has, you have noted, denied emotional truth. It is not simply that science denies the validity of emotional experience, but that it has believed so firmly that knowledge can only be acquired from the outside, from observing the exterior of nature. I spoke about the quality of life, and it is true to say that in at least many centuries past, if men and women may have died earlier, they also lived lives of fuller, more satisfying quality- and I do not want to be misinterpreted in that direction. Now, it is also true that in some of its aspects religion has glorified suffering, elevated it to [be] one of the prime virtues- and it has degraded it at other times, seeing the ill as possessed by devils, or seeing the insane as less than human. So there are many issues involved. Science, however, seeing the body as a mechanism, has promoted the idea that consciousness is trapped within a mechanical model, that man's suffering is mechanically caused in that regard: You simply give the machine some better parts and all will be well (amused). Science also operates as magic, of course, so on some occasions the belief in science itself will seemingly-work miracles: The new heart will give a man new heart, for example. Illness is used as a part of man's motivations. What I mean is that there is no human motivation that may not at some time be involved with illness, for often it is a means to a desired end-a method of achieving something a person thinks may not be achieved otherwise. One man might use it to achieve success. One might use it to achieve failure. A person might use it as a means of showing pride or humility, of looking for attention or escaping it. Illness is often another mode of expression, but nowhere does science mention that illness might have its purpose, or its groups of purposes, and I do not mean that the purposes themselves are necessarily derogatory. Illnesses are often misguided attempts to attain something the person thinks important. [Sickness] can be a badge of honor or dishonor-but there can be no question, when you look at the human picture, that to a certain extent, but an important one, suffering not only has its purposes and uses, but is actively sought for one reason or another. Most people do not seek out suffering's extreme experience, but within those extremes there are multitudinous degrees of stimuli that could be considered painful, that are actively sought. Man's involvement in sports is an instant example, of course, where society's rewards and the promise of spectacular bodily achievement lead athletes into activities that would be considered most painful by the ordinary individual. People climb mountains, willingly undergoing a good bit of suffering in the pursuit of such goals. I do not want any of this to appear too simplistic, but we must begin somewhere in this kind of discussion. . . . This is far from the entire story [of illness], but it is enough for this evening's saga. When you can, encourage your fine wife to follow your example in determining not to worry. It should be the first commandment.

A continuation of our discussion on suffering. I feel sometimes as if I am expected to justify life's conditions, when of course they do not need any such justification. Your beliefs close you off from much otherwise quite-available knowledge concerning man's psychology-knowledge that would serve to answer many questions usually asked about the reasons for suffering. Other questions, it is true, are more difficult to answer. Men and women are born, however, with curiosity about all sensations, and about all possible life experiences. They are thirsty for experience of all kinds. Their curiosity is not limited to the pretty or the mundane. Men and women are born with a desire to push beyond the limits- to, in quotes (amused and loudly): "explore where no man has ever gone before"-a bastard version of the introduction [to a famous television program], I believe. Men and women are born with a sense of drama, a need of excitement. Life itself is excitement. The quietest mood rides the thrust of spectacular molecular activity. You forget many of your quite natural inclinations, feelings, and inner fantasies as you mature into adults, because they do not fit into the picture of the kind of people, or experience, or species you have been taught to believe you are. As a result, many of the events of your lives that are the natural extensions of those feelings appear alien , against your deepest wishes, or thrust upon you, either by outside agencies or by a mischievous subconscious. The thoughts of children give excellent clues as to mankind's nature, but many adults do not remember any childhood thoughts except those that fit, or seem to fit, in with their beliefs about childhood. Children play at getting killed. They try to imagine what death is like. They imagine what it would be like to fall from a wall like Humpty-Dumpty, or to break their necks. They imagine tragic roles with as much creative abandon as they imagine roles of which adults might approve. They are often quite aware of "willing" themselves sick to get out of difficult situations-and of willing themselves well again They quickly learn to forget their parts in such episodes, so that later, when as adults they find themselves ill they not only forget that they caused the illness to begin with, but unfortunately they forget how to will themselves well again. As I said, there are all ranges of suffering, and I am beginning this discussion, which I will continue now and then in between regular book dictation, in a very general manner. In times past in particular, though the custom is not dead, men purged themselves, wore ashes and beat themselves with chains, or went hungry or otherwise deprived themselves. They suffered, in other words, for religion's sake. It was not just that they believed suffering was good for the soul-a statement which can or cannot be true, incidentally, and I will go into that later-but they understood something else: The body will only take so much suffering when it releases consciousness. So they hoped to achieve religious ecstasy. Religious ecstasy does not need physical suffering as a stimu lus, and such a means in the overall (underlined) will work against religious understanding. Those episodes, however, represent one of the ways in which man can actively seek suffering as a means to another end, and it is beside the point to say that such activity is not natural, since it exists within nature's framework. Discipline is a form of applied suffering, as discipline is usually used. People are not taught to understand the great dimensions of their own capacity for experience. It is natural for a child to be curious about suffering, to want to know what it is, to see it-and by doing so he (or she) learns to avoid the suffering he does not want, to help others avoid suffering that they do not want, and to understand, more importantly, the gradations of emotion and sensation that are his heritage. [As an adult] he will not inflict pain upon others if he understands this, for he will allow himself to feel the validity of his own emotions. If you deny yourself the direct experience of your own emotions, but muffle them, say, through too-strict discipline, then you can hurt others much more easily, for you project your deadened emotional state upon them-as in the Nazi war camps [men] followed orders, torturing other people-and you do that first of all by deadening your own sensitivity to pain, and by repressing your emotions. Man's vulnerability to pain helps him sympathize with others, and therefore helps him to more actively alleviate whatever unnecessary causes of pain exist in society. I have but one more point to make: Each person's experience of a painful nature is also registered on the part of what we will call the world's mind. Each, say, failure, or disappointment, or unresolved problem that results in suffering, becomes a part of the world's experience: This way or that way does not work, or this way or that way has been tried, with poor results. So in that way even weaknesses or failures of suffering are resolved, or rather redeemed as adjustments are made in the light of those data. In that regard, each person lives his or her life privately, and yet for all of humanity. Each person tries out new challenges, new circumstances, new achievements from a unique viewpoint, for himself or herself, and for the entire mass of humanity as well.

Again, your world was not created, then, by some exteriorized, objectified God who created it from the outside, so to speak, and set it into motion. Many [religious] theorists believe, for example, that such a God created the world in such a fashion, and that the process of decay began at almost the same hypothetical moment that the creation ended. Such an idea is much like some scientific ones, that see the universe running down, [with energy] being dissipated and order gradually disintegrating into chaos. Both versions conceive of a finished creation, though one is a divine production and the other is a result of nothing more than happenstance. All in all, however, we are speaking of a constant creation, even though I must explain it in serial terms. We are discussing a model of the universe in which creation is continuous, spontaneously occurring everywhere, and everywhere simultaneously, in a kind of spacious present, from which all experiences with time emerge. In this model there is always new energy, and all systems are open, even though they may seem to operate separately. Once again, also, we are considering a model that is based upon the active cooperation of each of its parts, which in one way or another also participate in the experience of the whole. In this model, changes of form are the result of creative syntheses. This model is seen to have its origin (long pause, eyes closed) within a vast, infinite, divine subjectivity-a subjectivity that is within each unit of consciousness, whatever its degree. A subjective divinity, then, that is within creation itself, a multidimensional creativity of such proportions that it is itself the creator and its creations at the same time. This divine psychological process-and "process" is not the best word here-this divine psychological state of relatedness forms from its own being worlds within worlds. Your universe is not the only one. Nothing exists isolate in nature, and to that extent the very existence of your universe presupposes the existence of others. These were, and are, and will be, created in the same fashion as that I have explained-and again, all such systems are open, even though operationally they may appear not to be. There are literally infinite numbers of sequences, faultlessly activated, that make the existence of your own world possible. I admit that it is sometimes inconceivable to me that a human being can imagine his world to be meaningless, for the very existence of one human body speaks of an almost unbelievable molecular and cellular cooperation that could hardly result through the bounty of the most auspicious works of chance. In a manner of speaking, your universe and all others spring from a dimension that is the creative source for all realities-a basic dream universe, so to speak, a divine psychological bed where subjective being is sparked, illuminated, stimulated, pierced, by its own infinite desire for creativity. The source of its power is so great that its imaginings become worlds, but it is endowed with a creativity of such splendor that it seeks the finest fulfillment, for even the smallest of its thoughts and all of its potentials are directed with a good intent that is literally beyond all imagining. That good intent is apparent within your world. It is obvious in the cooperative ventures that unite, say, the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, the relationship of bee to flower. And your beliefs to the contrary, you have closed your minds to man's own cooperative nature, to his innate desire for fellowship, his natural bent for taking care of others, and (with elaborate, if gentle emphasis) for altruistic behavior. But we will discuss those matters later in our book.

The waking state as you think of it is a specialized extension of the dream state, and emerges from it to the surface of your awareness, just as your physical locations are specified extensions of locations that exist first within the realm of mind. The waking state, then, has its source in the dream state, and all of the objects, environment, and experience that are familiar to you in the waking state also originate in that inner dimension. When you examine the state of dreams, however, you do it as a rule from the framework of waking reality. You try to measure the dimension of dream experience by applying the rules of reality that are your usual criteria for judging events. Therefore, you are not able to perceive the true characteristics of the dreaming state except on those few occasions when you "come awake" within your dreams-a matter we will discuss later on in this book. But in a manner of speaking, it is true to say that the universe was created in the same fashion that your own thoughts and dreams happen: spontaneously and yet with a built-in amazing order, and an inner organization. You think your thoughts and you dream your dreams without any clear knowledge of the incredible processes involved therein, yet those processes are the very ones that are behind the existence of the universe itself. Also, in a manner of speaking, you are yourselves the ancient dreamers who dreamed your world into being. You must understand that I am not saying that you are passive, fleeting dreamers, lost in some divine mind, but that you are the unique creative manifestations of a divine intelligence whose creativity is responsible for all realities, which are themselves endowed with creative abilities of their own, with the potential and desire for fulfillment-inheritors indeed of the divine processes themselves. Spontaneity knows its own order. I have said that many times. The world's parts come spontaneously together, with an order that basically defies the smaller laws of cause and effect, or before and afterward. In that regard, again, your dreaming state presents you with many clues about the source of your own lives and that of your world. Computers, however grand and complicated, cannot dream, and so for all of their incredible banks of information, they must lack the kind of unspoken knowing knowledge that the smallest plant or seed possesses. Nor can any amount of information "possessed" or processed by any computer compare with the unspoken knowing knowledge that is possessed by the atoms and molecules that compose such an instrument. The computer is not equipped to perceive that kind of knowing. It is not equipped for such an endeavor because it cannot dream. In dreams the innate knowledge of the atoms and molecules is combined and translated. It serves as the bed of perceptual information and knowledge from which the dreaming state arises in its physical form. You are subjectively "alive" before your birth. You will be subjectively alive after your death. Your subjective life is now interpreted through the specialized state of consciousness that you call the waking one, in which you recognize as real only experience that falls within certain space and time coordinates. Your greater reality exists outside those coordinates, and so does the reality of the universe. You create lives for yourselves, changing them as you go along, as a writer might change a book, altering the circumstances, changing the plots. The writer only knows that he or she creates without understanding the spontaneous order with which the creativity happens. The processes occur at another level of consciousness (underlined). In the most basic of ways, the world is formed from the inside out, and from dreaming reality into the physical one-and those processes happen at another level of consciousness (quietly emphatic).

While men had their dream bodies alone they enjoyed a remarkable freedom, of course, for those bodies did not have to be fed or clothed. They did not have to operate under the law of gravity. Men could wander as they wished about the landscape. They did not yet identify themselves to any great degree (underlined) as being themselves separate from either the environment or other creatures. They knew themselves to be themselves, but their identities were not as closely allied with their forms as is now the case. The dream world was bound to waken, however, for that was the course it had set itself upon. This awakening, again, happened spontaneously, and yet with its own order. In the terms of this discussion the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man's did. The animals became physically effective, therefore, while to some degree man still lingered in that dream reality. The plants awakened before the animals-and there are reasons for these varying degrees of "wakefulness" that have nothing to do basically with the differentiations of specieshood as defined by science from the outside, but have to do with the inner affiliations of consciousness, and with species or families of consciousness. Those affiliations fell into being as all of the consciousnesses that were embarked upon physical reality divided up (long pause) the almost unimaginable creative achievements that would be responsible for the physically e f f e c t i v e world. Again, the environment as you think of it is composed of living consciousness. Ancient religions, for example, speak of nature's spirits, and such terms represent memories dating from prehistory. Part of consciousness, then, transformed itself into what you think of as nature-the vast sweep of the continents, the oceans and the rivers, the mountains and the valleys, the body of the Jand. The creative thrust of the physical world must rise from that living structure. (With emphasis:) In a matter of speaking (underlined), the birds and the insects are indeed living portions of the earth flying, even as, again in a matter of speaking (in parentheses) (with a smile and again with an emphasis upon the word "matter"), bears and wolves and cows and cats represent the earth turning itself into creatures that live upon its own surface. And in a matter of speaking, again, man becomes the earth thinking, and thinking his own thoughts, man in his way specializes in the conscious work of the world-a work that is dependent upon the indispensable "unconscious" work of the rest of nature, a nature that sustains him (all very intently). And when he thinks, man thinks for the microbes, for the atoms and the molecules, for the smallest particles within his being, for the insects and for the rocks, for the creatures of the sky and the air and the oceans. Man thinks as naturally as the birds fly. He looks at physical reality for the rest of physical reality: He is earth coming alive to view itself through conscious eyes-but that consciousness is graced to be because it is so intimately a part of earth's framework. What was it like when man awakened from the dream world?

At the time of this awakening man did experience, then, some sense of separation from his dream body, and from his own inner reality-the world of his dreams -but he was still far more aware of that subjective existence than you are now. The practical nature of his own dreams was also more apparent, for again, his dreams sent him precise visions as to where food might be located, for example, and for some centuries there were human migrations of a kind that now you see the geese make. All of those journeys followed literal paths that were given as information in the dream state. [But] more and more man began to identify himself with his exterior environment. He began to think of his inner ego almost as if it were a stranger to himself. It became his version of the soul, and there seemed to be a duality-a self who acted in the physical universe, and a separate spiritlike soul that acted in an immaterial world. This early man (and early woman) regarded the snake as the most sacred and basic, most secretive and most knowledgeable of all creatures. In that early experience it seemed, surely, that the snake was a living portion of the earth, rising from the bowels of the earth, rising from the hidden source of all earth gods. Men watched snakes emerge from their holes with wonder. The snake was then-in your terms, now (underlined)-both a feminine and masculine symbol. It seemed to come from the womb of the earth, and to possess the earth's secret wisdom. Yet also, in its extended form particularly, it was the symbol of the penis. It was important also in that it shed its skin, as man innately knew he shed his own bodies. All units of consciousness, whatever their degree, possess purpose and intent. They are endowed with the desire for creativity, and to increase the quality of existence. They have the capacity to respond to multitudinous cues. There is a great elasticity for action and mobility, so that, for example, in man his conscious experience can actually be put together in an almost limitless number of ways. The inner and outer egos do not have a cementlike relationship, but can interrelate with each other in almost infinite fashions, still preserving the reality of physical experience, but varying the accents put upon it by the inner areas of subjective life. Even the bare-seeming facts of history are experienced far differently according to the symbolic content within which they are inevitably immersed. A war, in your terms, can be practically experienced as a murderous disaster, a triumph of savagery- or as a sublime victory of the human spirit over evil. We will return to the subject of war later on. I want to mention here, however, that man is not basically endowed with "warlike characteristics." He does not naturally murder. He does not naturally seek to destroy his own life or [the lives of] others. There is no battle for survival-but while you project such an idea upon natural reality, then you will read nature, and your own experiences with it, in that fashion. Man does have an instinct and a desire to live, and he has an instinct and a desire to die. The same applies to other creatures. In his life [each] man is embarked upon a cooperative venture with his own species, and with the other species, and dying he also in that regard acts in a cooperative manner, returning his physical substance to the earth. Physically speaking, man's "purpose" is to help enrich the quality of existence in all of its dimensions. Spiritually speaking, his "purpose" is to understand the qualities of love and creativity, to intellectually and psychically understand the sources of his being, and to lovingly create other dimensions of reality of which he is presently unaware. (Pause.) In his thinking, in the quality of his thoughts, in their motion, he is indeed experimenting with a unique and a new kind of reality, forming other subjective worlds which will in their turn grow into consciousness and song, which will in their turn flower from a dream dimension into other ones. Man is learning to create new worlds. In order to do so he has taken on many challenges. You all have physical parents. Some of you have physical children as well-but you will all "one day'also be the mental parents of dream children who also waken in a new world, and look about them for the first time, feeling isolated and frightened and triumphant all at once. All worlds have an inner beginning. All of your dreams somewhere waken, but when they do they waken with the desire for creativity themselves, and they are born of an innocent new intent. That which is in harmony with the universe, with All That Is, has a natural inborn impetus that will dissolve all impediments. It is easier, therefore, for nature to flourish than not. You are aware of such activities now as automatic speaking and automatic writing, and of sleepwalking. These all give signs in modern times of some very important evidence in man's early relationship with the world and with himself. Sleepwalking was once, in that beginning, a very common experience- far more so than now-in which the inner self actually taught the physical body to walk, and hence presented the newly emerged physically oriented intellect from getting in its own way, asking too many questions that might otherwise impede the body's smooth spontaneous motion. In the same fashion man is born with an inbuilt propensity for language, and for the communication of symbols through pictures and writing. He spoke first in an automatic fashion that began in his dreams. In a fashion (underlined), you could almost say that he used language before he consciously understood it (quietly). It is not just that he learned by doing, but that the doing did the teaching. Again, lest there be a sharply inquiring intellect, wondering overmuch about howr the words were formed or what motions were necessary, his drawing was in the same way automatic. You might almost say-almost-that he used the language (pause) "despite himself." Therefore, it possessed an almost magical quality, and the "word" was seen as coming directly from God.

Now: a few remarks on the eye episode. You were presented-or rather you presented yourself-with a prime example of the abilities of the natural person. I said something once to the effect that so-called miracles were simply the result of nature unimpeded, and certainly that is the case. You are presented now, in the world, with a certain picture of a body and its activities, and that picture seems (underlined) very evidential. It seems to speak for itself. Instead you are presented, of course, with a picture of man's body as it reflects, and is affected by, man's beliefs. Doctors expect vision to [begin to] fail, for example, after the age of 30, and there are countless patient records that "prove" that such disintegration is indeed a biological fact. Your beliefs tell you, again, that the body is primarily a mechanism- a most amazing machine, but a machine (louder), without its own purpose, without any intent, a mindless assembly plant of assorted parts that simply happened to grow together in a certain prescribed fashion. Science says that there is no will, yet it assigns to nature the will to survive-or rather, a will-less instinct to survive. To that extent it does admit (underlined) that the machine of the body "intends" to insure its own survival- but a survival which has no meaning beyond itself. And because [the body] is a machine, it is expected to decay after so much usage. In that picture consciousness has little part to play. In man's very early history, however, and in your terms for centuries after the "awakening," as described in our book, people lived in good health for much longer periods of time-and in certain cases they lived for several centuries.1 No one had yet told them that this was impossible, for one thing. Their sense of wonder in the world, their sense of curiosity, creativity, and the vast areas of fresh mental and physical exploration, kept them alive and strong. For another thing, however, elders were highly necessary and respected for the information they had acquired about the world. They were needed. They taught the other generations. In those times great age was a position of honor that brought along with it new responsibility and activity. The senses did not fade in their effectiveness, and it is quite possible biologically for all kinds of regenerations of that nature to occur. (To me:) You spoke today, or this evening, about some [world] statesmen who are not young at all, and men and women who do not only achieve (pause), but who open new horizons in their later years. They do so because of their private capacities, and also because they are answering the world's needs, and in ways that in many cases a younger person could not. In your society age has almost been considered a dishonorable state. Beliefs about the dishonor of age often cause people to make the decision-sometimes quite consciously-to bring their own lives to an end before the so-called threshold is reached. Whenever, however, the species needs the accumulated experience of its own older members, that situation is almost instantly reversed and people live longer. Some in your society feel that the young are kept out of life's mainstream also, denied purposeful work, their adolescence prolonged unnecessarily. As a consequence some young people die for the same reason: They believe that the state of youth is somehow dishonorable. They are cajoled, petted, treated like amusing pets sometimes, diverted with technology's offerings but not allowed to use their energy. There were many unfortunate misuses of the old system of having a son follow in his father's footsteps, yet the son at a young age was given meaningful work to do, and felt a part of life's mainstream. He was needed. The so-called youth culture, for all of its seeming (underlined) exaggerations of youth's beauty and accomplishments, actually ended up putting down youth, for few could live up to that picture. Often, then, both the young and the old felt left out of your culture. Both share also the possibility of accelerated creative vitality- activity that the elder great artists, or the elder great statesmen, have always picked up and used to magnify their own abilities. There comes a time when the experiences of the person in the world click together and form a new clearer focus, provide a new psychological framework from which his or her greatest capacities can emerge to form a new synthesis. But in your society many people never reach that point-or those who do are not recognized for their achievements in the proper way, or for the proper reasons. . . . Man's will to survive includes a sense of meaning and purpose, and a feeling for the quality (underlined) of life. You are indeed presented with an evidential picture that seems to suggest most vividly the "fact" of man's steady deterioration, and yet you are also presented with evidence to the contrary, even in your world. if you look for it. Your Olympics,2 on television, present you with evidence of the great capacity of the young human body. The contrast between the activity of those athletes, however, and the activity of the normal young person is drastic. (Pause.) You believe that the greatest training and discipline must be used to bring about such activity-but that seemingly extraordinary physical ability simply represents the inherent capacities of the human body. In those cases, the athletes through training are finally able to give a glimpse of the body's spontaneous abilities. The training is necessary because it is believed necessary (all with emphasis). Again, in our material on suffering (see the 895th session, for instance), I mentioned that illness serves purposes-that it has a facesaving quality in your society-so here I am speaking of the body's own abilities. In that light, the senses do not fade. Age alone never brought about any loss of physical agility, or of mental ability, or of desire. Death must come to every living person, yet the time and the means are basically up to each individual. Meaningful work is important at any age. You cannot content the aged entirely with hobbies any more than you can the young, but meaningful work means work that also has the exuberance of play, and it is that playful quality that contains within itself great propensities of a healing and creative nature. In a fashion, now, your eyes improved their capacities, practically speaking, in a playful manner. The senses want to exceed themselves. They also learn "through experience." You have been painting more lately. Your eyes became more involved to that extent. Your eyes enjoy their part in that activity (intently), as the ears, say, enjoy hearing. It is their purpose. Your own desire to paint joined with and reinforced your eyes' natural desire to see. When [most of] you think of physical symptoms, of course, you regard your body with a deadly seriousness that to some extent impedes inner spontaneity. You lay your limiting beliefs upon the natural person.

The world as you know it exists as it does because you are yourself a living portion of a vast "conscious grid" of perception. Every c-e-l-l (spelled), in those terms, is a sender and a receiver. All of the larger divisions of life-the mammals, fish, birds, and so forth- are an integral part of that living gridwork. The picture of the world is not ony the result of those messages transmitted and received, however, but is also caused by the relationships between those messages. In your terms, then (underlined), all of life's large classifications were present "at the beginning of the world." Otherwise there would have been vast holes in that grid of perception that makes possible the very sensations of physical life. In a manner of speaking (underlined), the physical universe is "transposed" upon another reality that must be its source. The world was and is created in dimensions outside of time, and outside of space as you understand it (intently). Other realities quite as legitimate as your own, quite as vital, quite as "real," coexist with your own, and in the terms of your understanding, "in the same space"-but of course in terms of your experience those spaces and realities would appear to be quite separate. No systems are closed, however, so that basically (underlined) the living grid of perception that causes one world or reality is also "wired into" all other such systems. There is a give-and-take between them. The grids of perception that compose your world give you the world picture as you (underlined) experience it because your physical senses put you in a certain position within the entire grid. Animals, for example, while part of your experience, are also "tuned into" that grid at another level. The large classifications of mammals, fish, birds, men, reptiles, plants, and so forth, are [each] an integral part of that larger perceptive pattern-and that pattern (underlined) in those terms had to be complete even in the beginning of your time. In various periods that "gridwork" might "carry more traffic" along certain circuits than at other periods, so that there has been some creative leeway allowed, particularly on the parts of the species that make up your larger classifications. There were always birds, for example, but in the great interplay of "interior" and exterior communication among all portions of this vast living system, there was a creative interplay that allowed for endless variations within that classification, and each other one. Your technological communication system is a conscious construct- a magnificent one-but one that is based upon your innate knowledge of the inner, cellular communication between all species. Saying that, I am not robbing the intellect of its right to congratulate itself upon that technology. The large classifications of life give you the patterns into which consciousness forms itself, and because those patterns seem relatively stable it is easy to miss the fact that they are filled out, so to speak, in each moment with new energy. Man does not in his physical development pass through the stages supposedly followed by the hypothetical creature who left the water for the land to become a mammal-but each species does indeed have written within it the knowledge of "its past." Part of this, again, is most difficult to express, and I must try to fill out old words with new meanings. (Pause.) The reincarnationai aspects of physical life, however, serve a very important purpose, providing an inner subjective background. Such a background is needed by every species. Reincarnation exists, then, on the part of all species. Once a consciousness, however, has chosen the larger classification of its physical existences, it stays within that framework in its "reincarnationai" existences. Mammals return as mammals, for example, but the species can change within that classification.1 This provides great genetic strength, and consciousnesses in those classifications have chosen them because of their own propensities and purposes. The animals, for example, seem to have a limited range of physical activity in conscious terms, as you think of them. An animal cannot decide to read a newspaper. Newspapers are outside of its reality. Animals have a much wider range, practically speaking, in certain other areas. They are much more intimately aware of their environment, of themselves as separate from it, but also of themselves as a part of it (intently). In that regard, their experience deals with relationships of another kind. These grids of perception "do not exist forever" in your dimension of time, for your dimension of time cannot hold anything that is outside it. Once a world exists, however, it becomes imprinted or stamped upon eternity, so that it exists in time and out of it "at once." When you ask: "When did the world begin?" or "What really happened?" or "Was there a Garden of Eden?", you are referring to the world as you understand it, but in those terms there were earths in the same space before the earth you recognize existed,2 and they began in the manner that I have given you in the early chapters of this book. The patterns for worlds-the patterns-continue in your time dimension, though in that time dimension those worlds must disappear, again, to continue "their existence outside of time." The patterns are filled out again. In the case of earth the grid of perception is simply used differently, certain areas becoming prominent in some eras, and less prominent in others. Using your idea of time, I can only say that when the entire gestalt of consciousnesses that formed a particular earth have formed its reality to the best of their abilities, fulfilling their individual and mass capacities as far as possible, then they lovingly turn over that grid to others, and continue to take part in existences that are not physical in your terms. And that has happened many times. Your tale about the Garden of Eden, then, is a legend about earth's last beginning. Each world is so cunningly constructed, again, that each consciousness, regardless of its degree, plays a vital part. And each of your actions, however inconsequential, becomes connected in one way or another-in one way or another-to each other reality and each other world (all with much emphasis). Now in a manner of speaking-though I see that little time has passed in this living room where I speak with Ruburt's permission-we have transcended time to some extent this evening, for in what I have said there are indeed hints and illusions- cadences-that can, if you are ready, give you a feeling for existence as it is outside of time's context. Even to try and verbally present such material necessitates alterations involving perception, for while that gridwork appears quite stable to your senses, giving you a reliable picture of reality, this is also because you have trained yourselves to pick up certain signals only. Others at other levels are (underlined) available. You can (underlined) tune into cellular consciousness, for example. Since this material must be comprehensible, Ruburt and I together form our own pathway of perceptions-he from his end and me from mine, so that we thread back and forth as if (underlined) through the wiring of some vast computer-but a computer that is alive.

The emergence of action within a time scheme is actually one of the most important developments connected with the beginning of your world. The Garden of Eden story in its most basic sense refers to man's sudden realization that now he must act within time. His experiences must be neurologically structured. This immediately brought about the importance of choosing between one action and another, and made acts of decision highly important. This time reference is perhaps the most important within earth experience, and the one that most influences all creatures. In experience or existence outside of time (pause), there is no necessity to make certain kinds of judgments. In an out-of-time reference, theoretically speaking now, an infinite number of directions can be followed at once. Earth's time reference, however, brought to experience a new brilliant focus-and in the press of time, again, certain activities would be relatively more necessary than others, relatively more pleasant or unpleasant than others. Among a larger variety of possible actions, man was suddenly faced with a need to make choices, that within that context had not been made "before." Speaking in terms of your time, early man still had a greater neurological leeway. There were alternate neurological pathways that, practically speaking, were more available then than now. They still exist now, but they have become like ghostly signals in the background of neurological activity. This is, again, difficult to explain, but free will operates in all units of consciousness, regardless of their degree-but (whispering) it operates within the framework of that degree. Man possesses free will, but that free will operates only within man's degree-that is, his free will is somewhat contained by the frameworks of time and space. He has free will to make any decisions that he is able to make (intently). This means that his free will is contained, given meaning, focused, and framed by his neurological structure. He can only move, and he can only choose therefore to move, physically speaking, in certain directions in space and time. That time reference, however, gives (underlined) his free will meaning and a context in which to operate. We arc speaking now of conscious decisions as you think of them. You can only make so many conscious decisions, or you would be swamped and caught in a constant dilemma of decision making. Time organizes the available choices that are to be made. The awakening mentioned earlier, then, found man rousing from his initial "dreaming condition," faced suddenly with the need for action in a world of space and time, a world in which choices became inevitable, a world in which he must choose among probable actions-and from an infinite variety of those choose which events he would physically actualize. This would be an almost impossible situation were the species-meaning each species-not given its own avenues of expression and activity, so that it is easier for certain species to behave in certain manners. And each species has its own overall characteristics and propensities that further help it define the sphere of influence in which it will exert its ability to make choices. Each species is endowed also, by virtue of the units of consciousness that compose it, with an overall inner picture of the condition of each other species (pause), and further characterized by basic impulses so that it is guided toward choices that best fulfill its own potentials for development while adding to the overall good of the entire world consciousness. This does not curtail free will any more than man's free will is curtailed because he must (underlined) grow from a fetus into an adult instead of the other way around. The differences among all species are caused by this kind of organization, so that areas of choice are clearly drawn, and areas of free activity clearly specified. The entire gestalt of probable actions, therefore, is already focused to some degree in the species' differentiations. In the vast structure of probable activity, however, far more differentiation was still necessary, and this is provided for through the inner passageways of reincarnational existence. Each person, for example, is born with his or her uniquely individual set of characteristics and abilities, likes and dislikes. Those serve to organize individual action in a world where an infinite number of probable roads are open-and here again, private impulses are basically meant to guide each individual toward avenues of expression and probable activities suited best to his or her development. They are meant, therefore, as aids to help organize action (pause), and to set free will more effectively into motion. Otherwise, free will would be almost inoperble in practical terms: Individuals would be faced by so many choices that any decisions would be nearly impossible. Essentially, the individual would have no particular leaning toward any one action over any other. "By the time" that the Garden of Eden tale reached your biblical stories, the entire picture had already been seen in the light of concepts about good and evil that actually appeared, in those terms, a long time later in man's development. The inner rein-carnational structure of the human psyche is very important in man's physical survival. Children- change that to "infants"- dream of their past lives, remembering, for example, how to walk and talk. They are born with the knowledge of how to think, with the propensity for language. They are guided by memories that they later forget. In time's reference, the private purposes of each individual appear also in the larger historical context, so that each person forms his corner of his civilization-and all individuals within a given time period have private and overall purposes, challenges that are set, probable actions that they will try to place within history's context.

Subject: Viruses as part of the body's overall health system, and viruses as biological statements. Viruses serve many purposes, as I have said before.1 The bodycontains all kinds of viruses, including those considered deadly, but those are usually not only harmless, or inactive, but beneficial to the body's overall balance. The body maintains its vitality not only through the physical motion and agility that you perceive, but by microscopic agility, and actions within microseconds, that you do not perceive. There is as much motion, stimulation, and reaction in the interior bodily environment as the body meets through its encounters with the exterior environment. The body must now and then "flush its systems out," run through its repertoire, raise its temperature (pause), activate its hormonal actions more strongly. In such ways it keeps its system of immunities clear. That system operates always. To some extent, it is a way that the body distinguishes between self and nonself. In certain fashions (underlined), that system also keeps the body from squandering its energies, preserving biological integrity. Otherwise it would be as if you did not know where your own house began or ended, and so tried to heat the entire neighborhood. So some indispositions "caused by viruses" are accepted by the body as welcome triggers, to clean out that system, and this applies to your present indispositions. More is always involved, however, for those viruses that you consider communicable do indeed in one way or another represent communications on a biological level. They are biological statements, literally social communications, biologically made, and they can be of many kinds. When a skunk is frightened, it throws off a foul odor indeed, and when people are frightened they react in somewhat the same fashion at times, biologically reacting to stimuli in the environment that they consider alarming. They throw off a barrage of "foul viruses"-that is, they actually collect and mobilize from within their own bodies viruses that are potentially harmful, biologically trigger these, or activate them, and send them out into the environment in self-protection, to ward off the enemy (more vigorously). In a fashion this is a kind of biological aggression. The viruses, however, also represent tensions that the person involved is getting rid of. That is one kind of statement. It is often used in a very strong manner in times of war, or great social upheaval, when people feel frightened. Now, your friend had been to the Olympics (last month, at Lake Placid, New York), and he was charged by the great physical vitality that he felt watching that athletic panorama. [Because of that, and for other personal reasons], he could find no release for the intense energy he felt, so he got rid of it, protected himself, and threw out his threatening biological posture: the viruses. (With a smile:) Your bodies had not received any such goodies in some time, so they exuberantly used them as triggers to regenerate the immune systems. Many people had such reactions as your friend's, coming from the Olympics, in that they did not know how to use and release their own energies-as if they themselves felt put in an inferior position in comparison to such achievements. There are all kinds of biological reactions between bodies that go unnoticed, and they are all basically of a social nature, dealing with biological communications. In a fashion viruses-in a fashion-again, are a way of dealing with or controlling the environment. These are natural interactions, and since you live in a world where, overall, people are healthy enough to contribute through labor, energy, and ideas, health is the dominating ingredient-but there are biological interactions between all physical bodies that are the basis for that health, and the mechanisms include the interactions of viruses, and even the periods of indisposition, that are not understood. All of this has to do with man's intent and his understanding. The same relationships, however, do not only exist between human bodies, of course, but between man and the animals and the plants in the environment, and is part of the unending biological communication that overall produces the vitality of physical experience. One note to Ruburt on vitamins: They are most effectively used for periods of two or three weeks, where they act as stimuli and reminders to the body. Then drop their use for two or three weeks, so that the body then produces by itself those elements you have reminded it you want. Any steady use of vitamins is not to your overall benefit, for you give the body what it needs too easily, and its ability to produce such material on its own becomes sluggish. Certain "diseases" are protections against other diseases, and the body on its own is its own excellent regulator. Obviously those abilities operate best when you trust them. The body's systems know what diseases are in the air, so to speak, and will often set up countermeasures ahead of time, giving you what you experience as an indisposition of one kind or another-but an indisposition that is actually a statement of prevention against another condition. There is great traffic flow in a city: A body knows how to leap out of the way in a moment's time from an approaching car. In the interior physical environment there is far greater traffic flow. There are decisions made in periods of time so brief you cannot imagine them- reactions that are almost over before they begin, reactions so fast you cannot perceive them as the body responds to its inner reality, and to all the stimuli from the exterior environment. The body is an open system. As solid as it seems to you, there are constant chemical reactions between it and the world, electromagnetic adjustments, alterations of balance, changes of relationships-alterations that occur between the body and its relationship with every other physical event, from the position of the planets and moon and the sun, to the position of the smallest grain of sand, to the tiniest microbe in anyone's intestine (intently). All of those adjustments are made without your conscious notice, and yet fit in with your overall purposes and intents.

Any real discussion of genetic heritage must also bring up questions involving free will and determinism,2 and to some extent those issues must also lead to questions concerning the nature of the reasoning mind itself. Reasoning, as you are familiar with it, is the result of mental or psychic processes functioning in a space-time context, and in a particular fashion. To some extent, then, reasoning-again, as you are familiar with it (underlined)-is the result of a lack of available knowledge. You try to "reason things out," because the answer is not in front of you. If it were, you would "know," and hence have no need to question. The reasoning mind is a uniquely human and physical phenomenon. It depends upon conscious thinking, problem-solving methods, and it is a natural human blossoming, a spectacular mental development in its own framework of activity. Your technology is one of the results of that reasoning mind. That "reasoning" is necessary, however, because of the lack of a larger, immediate held of knowledge. Thoughts are mental activity, scaled to time and space terms so that they are like mental edifices built to certain dimensions only. Your thoughts make you human (underlined). Other creatures have their own kinds of mental activity, however. They also have different kinds of immediate perceptions of reality. All species are united by their participation in emotional states, however. It is not just that all species of life have feeling, but that all participate in dimensions of emotional reality. It has been said that only men have a moral sense, that only men have free will-if indeed free will is possible at all. The word "moral" has endless connotations, of course. Yet animals have their own "morality," their own codes of honor, their own impeccable senses of balance with all other creatures. (Pause.) They have loving emotional relationships, complicated societies,3 and in a certain sense at least-an important one- they also have their arts and sciences. But those "arts and sciences" are not based upon reasoning, as you understand it. Animals also possess independent volition, and while 1 am emphasizing animals here, the same applies to any creature, large or small: insect, bird, fish, or worm; to plant life; to cells, atoms, or electrons. They possess free will in relationship to the conditions of their existence (underlined). The conditions of existence are largely determined by genetic structure. Free will must then of course function in accordance with genetic integrity. Genetic structure makes possible physical organisms through which life is to be experienced, and to a large extent that structure must determine the kind of action possible in the world, and the way or ways in which volition can be effectively expressed. The beaver is not free to make a spider web. In human beings the genetic structure largely determines physical characteristics such as height, color of eyes, color of hair, color of skin-and, of course, more importantly, the number of fingers and toes, and the other specific physical attributes of your specieshood. So physically, and on his physical attributes alone, a man cannot use his free will to fly like a bird, or to perform physical acts for which the human body is not equipped. The body is equipped to perform far better, in a variety of ways, than you give it credit for, however-but the fact remains that the genetic structure focuses volition. The genetic apparatus and the chromosomal messages actually contain far more information than is ever used. That genetic information can, for example, be put together in an infinite number of ways. (Long pause.) The species cares for itself in the event of any possible circumstance, so that the genetic messages also carry an endless number of triggers that will change genetic combinations if this becomes necessary. Beyond that, however, genetic messages are coded in such a way that there is a constant give-and-take between those messages and the present experience of any given individual. That is, no genetic event is inevitable. Now besides this physical genetic structure, there is an inner bank of psychic information that in your terms would contain the "past" history-the reincarnational history-of the individual. This provides an overall reservoir of psychic characteristics, leanings, abilities, knowledge, that is as much a part of the individual's heritage as the genetic structure is a part of the physical heritage. A person of great intelligence may be born from a family of idiots, for example, because of that reincarnational structure. Musical ability may thus appear complete-with great technical facility, regardless of family background, genetically speaking, and again, the reincarnational bank of characteristics accounts for such events. That inner reincarnational psychic structure is also responsible for triggering certain genetic messages while ignoring others, or for triggering certain combinations of genetic messages. In actuality, of course -say that I smiled-all time is simultaneous, and so all reincarnational lives occur at once. Perhaps an analogy will help. An actor throwing him self or herself into a role, even momentarily lost in the part, is still alive and functioning as himself or herself in a context that is larger than the play. The character in the play is seemingly alive (creatively) for the play's duration, perception being limited to that framework, yet to play that role the actor draws upon the experience of his own life. He brings to bear his own understanding, compassion, artistry, and if he is a good actor, or if she is, then when the play is over the actor is a better person for having played the role. Now in the greater framework of reincarnational existences you choose your roles, or your lives, but the lines that you speak, the situations that you meet, are not predetermined. "You" live or exist in a larger framework of activity even while you live your life, and there is a rambunctious interplay between the yous in time and the you outside of time. The you inside of time adopts a reasoning mind. It is a kind of creative (underlined) psychological face that you use for the purposes of your life's drama. This psychological face of our analogy has certain formal, ceremonial features, so that you mentally and psychologically tend to perceive only those data that are available within the play's formal structure. You cannot see into the future, for example, or into the past. You reason out your position. Otherwise your free will would have no meaning in a physical framework, for the number of choices available would be so multitudinous that you could not make up your mind to act within time: With all the opportunities of creativity, and with your own greater knowledge instantly available, you would be swamped by so many stimuli that you literally could not physically respond, and so your particular kinds of civilization and science and art could not have been accomplished-and regardless of their flaws they are magnificent accomplishments, unique products of the reasoning mind. Without the reasoning mind the artist would have no need to paint, for the immediacy of his mental vision would be so instant and blinding, so mentally accomplished, that there would be no need to try any physical rendition of it. So nowhere do I ever mean to demean the qualities or excellence of the reasoning mind as you understand it. You have, however, become so specialized in its use, so prejudiced in its favor, that your tendency is to examine all other kinds of" consciousness using the reasoning mind as the only yardstick by which to judge intelligent life. You are surrounded everywhere by other kinds of consciousness whose validity you have largely ignored, whose psychic brotherhood you have dismissed-kinds of consciousness in the animal kingdom particularly, that deal with a different kind of knowing, but who share with you the reality of keen emotional experience, and who are innately aware of biological and psychic values, but in ways that have escaped your prejudiced examination. To some extent that emotional reality is also expressed at other levels-as your own is-in periods of dreaming, in which animals, like men, participate in a vast cooperative venture that helps to form the psychological atmosphere in which your lives must first of all exist.

The reasoning mind represents human mental activity in a space and time context, as mentioned earlier. Again, it is involved with the trial-and-error method. It sets up hypotheses (pause), and its very existence is dependent upon a lack of available knowledge-knowledge that it seeks to discover. In the dreaming state the characteristics of the reasoning mind become altered, and from a waking viewpoint it might seem distorted in its activity. What actually happens, however, is that in the dreaming state you are presented with certain kinds of immediate knowledge. It often appears out of context in usual terms. It is not organized according to the frameworks understood by the reasoning portions of your mind, and so to some extent in dreams you encounter large amounts of information that you cannot categorize. The information may not fit into your recognizable time or space slots. There are, in fact, many important issues connected with the dreaming state that can involve genetic activation of certain kinds: information processing on the part of the species, the insertion or reinsertion of civilizing elements-and all of these are also connected with the reincarnational aspects of dreaming. I have not touched upon some of these subjects before, since I wanted to present them in that larger context of man's origins and historic appearance as a species. I also wanted to make certain points, stressing the importance of dreams as they impinge upon and help form cultural environments. Dreams also sometimes help in showing the pathways that can be taken to advantage by an individual, or by a group of individuals, and therefore help clarify the ways in which free will might most advantageously be directed. So I hope to cover all of these subjects. Let us first of all return momentarily to the subject of tbe reasoning mind, its uses and characteristics. It seems to the reasoning mind that it must look outside of itself for information, for it operates in concert with the physical senses, which present it with only a limited amount of information about the environment at any given time. The physical eyes cannot see today the dawn that will come in the morning. The legs today cannot walk down tomorrow's street, so if the mind wants to know what is going to happen tomorrow, or what is happening now, outside of the physical senses' domain, then it must try through reason to deduce the information that it wants from the available information that it has. It must rely upon observation to make its deductions accordingly. In a fashion, it must divide to conquer. It must try to deduce the nature of the whole it cannot perceive from the portions that are physically available. Children begin to count by counting on their fingers. Later, fingers are dispensed with but the idea of counting remains. There have been people throughout history who mentally performed mathematical feats that appear most astounding, and almost in a matter of moments. Some, had they lived in your century, would have been able to outperform computers. In most cases where such accomplishments show themselves, they do so in a child far too young to have learned scientific mathematical procedures to begin with, and often such feats are displayed by people who are otherwise classified as idiots (idiot savants), and who are incapable of intellectual reasoning. Indeed, when a child is involved, the keener his use of the reasoning mind becomes the dimmer his mathematical abilities grow. Others, children [or adults] who would be classified as mentally deficient, can tell, or have been able to tell, the day of the week that any given date, past or present, would fall upon. Others have been able, while performing various tasks, to keep a precise count of the moments from any given point in time. There have been children, again, with highly accomplished musical abilities, and great facility with music's technical aspects- all such accomplishments before the assistance of any kind of advanced education. Now, some of those children went on to become great musicians, while others lost their abilities along the way, so what are we dealing with in such cases? We are dealing with direct knowing. We are dealing with the natural perceptions of the psyche, at least when we are speaking in human terms. We arc dealing with natural, direct cognition as it exists before and after (pause) man's experience with the reasoning mind. Some of those abilities show themselves in those classified as mentally deficient simply because all of the powers of the reasoning mind are not activated. In children under such conditions, the reasoning mind has not yet developed in all of its aspects sufficiently, so that in a certain area direct cognition shines through with its brilliant capacity. Direct cognition is an inner sense. In physical terms you might call it remote sensing. Your physical body, and your physical existence, are based upon certain kinds of direct cognition, and it is responsible for the very functioning of the reasoning mind itself. Scientists like to say that animals operate through simple instinctive behavior, without will or volition: It is no accomplishment for a spider to make its web, a beaver its dam, a bird its nest, because according to such reasoning, such creatures cannot perform otherwise. The spider must spin his web. If he chooses not to, he will not survive. But by that same reasoning- to which, of course, I do not subscribe-you should also add that man can take no credit either for his intellect, since man must think, and cannot help doing so. Some pessimistic scientists would say: "Of course," for man and animal alike are driven by their instincts, and man's claim to free will is no more than an illusion. Man's reasoning mind, however, with its fascinating capacity for logic and deduction, and for observation, rests upon (pause) a direct cognition-a direct cognition that powers his thoughts, that makes thinking itself possible. He thinks because he knows how to think by thinking (intently), even though the true processes of thought are enigmas to the reasoning mind. In dreams the reasoning mind loosens its hold upon perception. From your standpoint vou are almost faced with too much data. The reasoning mind attempts to catch what it can as it reassembles its abilities toward waking, but the net of its reasoning simply cannot hold that assemblage of information. Instead it is processed at other levels of the psyche. Dreams also involve a kind of psychological perspective with which you have no physical equivalent-and therefore such issues are most difficult to discuss. The reasoning mind is highly necessary, effective, and suitable for physical existence, and for the utilization of free will, which is very dependent upon perception of clearly distinguishable actions. In the larger framework of existence, however, it is simply one of innumerable methods of organizing data. A psychological filing system, if you prefer. Your dreaming self possesses pyschological dimensions that escape you, and they serve to connect genetic and reincarnational systems. You must, again, realize that the self that you know is only a part of your larger identity-an identity that is [also] historically actualized in other times than your own. You must also understand that mental activity is of the utmost potency. You experience your dreams from your own perspective, as a rule. (Long pause.) I am simply trying to give you a picture of one kind of dream occurrence, or to show you one picture of dream activity of which you are not usually aware. If you are having a dream as yourself from your own perspective, another reincarnational self may be having the same dream from its perspective-in which, of course, you play a minor role. In your dream, that reincarnational self may appear as a minor character, quite on the periphery of your attention, and if the dream were to include an idea, say, for a play or an invention, then that play or invention might appear as a physical event in both historic times, to whatever degree it would be possible for the two individuals living in time to interpret that information. But culture throughout the ages was spread by more than physical means. Abilities and inventions were not dependent upon human migrations, but those migrations themselves were the result of information given in dreams, telling tribes of men the directions in which better homelands could be found.

Man's first encounter with physical reality in life is his experience with the state of his own consciousness. He is aware of a different kind of being. He encounters his consciousness first, and then he encounters the world-so I am saying, of course, that each person has an identity that is larger than the framework of consciousness with which you are usually familiar in life. When you are born, you understand that you have a new consciousness. You explore its ramifications. It is your primary evidence that you exist in flesh. Basically, each person must confront the experience of reality through a direct encounter with it. This encounter takes place through the use of the physical senses, of course, as they are used to perceive and interpret physical data. The very utilization of those senses, however, is dependent upon the nature of your consciousness itself, and that consciousness is aware of its power and action through the exercise of its own properties. Those "properties" are the faculties of the imagination, creativity, telepathy, clairvoyance, and dreaming, as well as the functions of logic and reason. You know that you dream. You know-that you think. Those are direct experiences. (Pause.) Anytime you use instruments to probe into the nature of reality, you are looking at a kind of secondary evidence, no matter how excellent the instruments may be. The subjective evidence of dreaming, for example, is far more "convincing" and irrefutable than is the evidence for an expanding universe, black holes, or even atoms and molecules themselves. Although instruments can indeed be most advantageous in many ways, they still present you with secondary rather than primary tools of investigation-and they distort the nature of reality far more than the subjective attributes of thoughts, feelings, and intuitions do. The human consciousness has not, therefore, developed the best and most proper "tool" with which to examine the nature of reality. It is because you have used other methods that much evidence escapes you-evidence that would show that the physical universe exists in quite different terms than is supposed. You are taught not to trust your subjective experience, which means that you are told not to trust your initial and primary connection with reality. Evidence for reincarnation is quite available. There are enough instances of it, known and tabulated, to make an excellent case; and beside this there is evidence that remains psychologically invisible in your private lives, because you have been taught not to concentrate in that direction. There is enough evidence to build an excellent case for life after death. All of this involves direct experience-episodes, encountered by individuals, [that are] highly suggestive of the af terdeath hypothesis; but the hypothesis is never taken seriously by your established sciences. There is far more evidence for reincarnation and life after death than there is, for example, for the existence of black holes. (With amusement:) Few people have seen a black hole, to make the most generous statement possible, while countless people have had private reincarnational experiences, or encounters that suggest the survival of the personality beyond death. Those experiences are usual. They have been reported by peoples of all kinds and in all ages, and they represent a common-sense kind of knowledge that is frowned upon by the men of learned universities. Throughout this book we will often be talking about experiences that are encountered in one way or another by most people, but are not given credence to on the part of the established fields of knowledge. Therefore, dreams will be considered throughout the book in various capacities as they are related through genetics, reincarnation, culture, and private life. We will also be considering the matter of free will and its role in invidual value fulfillment.

If there were no idiots among you, you would soon find that geniuses were absent also. Those human abilities that you consider to be characteristic of your species are, again, dependent upon the existence of infinite numbers of variations that appear in the aggregate, to give you often obviously opposing states. What you think of then as the average intelligence is a condition that exists because of the activity of constant variables, minute variations that give you at one end of the scale the idiot, and at the other the genius. Both are necessary to maintain that larger "norm" of mental activity. I am using the word "norm" here for your convenience, though I disagree with the ways in which the term has been used, when it has been set up as a rule (underlined) of measurement, psychologically speaking. The genetic system2 is not closed, therefore. The genes do not simply hold information, without any reference to the body's living system. It does not exist, then-the genetic structure-like some highly complicated mechanism already programmed, started and functioning "blindly," so that once it is set into operation there is no chance for modification. Particularly in your own species there is a great give-and-take between human genetic systems, the environment, and cultural events-and by cultural events I mean events having to do with of politics, economics, and so forth. Genetic events are not irrefutable in a deterministic fashion. They represent strong inclinations toward certain bodily or mental activity, certain biological preferences. They lead toward the activation of certain events over others, so that the probabilities are "loaded" in certain directions. (Pause.) Genetic events are (underlined) then events, though at a different level of activity than you are used to thinking of. We are speaking of chromosomal messages. These are not written within the chromosomes as words, might be written upon paper, but the information and the chromosomes are a living unit. The information is alive (intently). We are speaking about a kind of biological cuneiform, in which the structures, the very physical structures, of the cells contain all of the knowledge needed to form a physical body-to form themselves. This is indeed knowledge in biological form, and biologically (underlined) making its clearest living statement. The cells [with their] genetic packages, like all cells, react to stimuli. They act. They are aware of all of the body's events biologically. In ways impossible to verbalize, they are also aware of the environment of the body as it is perceived at biological levels. I have said before that in one way or another each living cell is united with each other living cell through a system of inner communication. "Programmed" genetic activity can be altered by conditions in the environment. I am not simply saying that genetic activity can be changed, for example, through something like a nuclear accident, but that highly beneficial alterations can also take place in genetic behavior, as in your terms the genetic structure not only prepares the species for any contingency, but also prepares it by triggering those characteristics and abilities that are needed by the species at any given time, and also by making allowances for such future developments (all quite forcefully). Your genetic structure reacts to each thought that you have, to the state of your emotions, to your psychological climate. In your terms, it contains the physical history of the species in context with the probable future capabilities of the species. You choose your genetic structure so that it suits the challenges and capabilities of the species. You choose your genetic structure so that it suits the challenges and potentials that you have chosen. (Long pause.) It represents your physical reference point, your bodily framework. It is your personal physical property. It is a portion of physical matter that you have identified, filled out with your own identity. It is like a splendid ship, the body, that you have chosen ahead of time for a splendid challenging adventure-a ship that you have personally appointed that is equipped to serve as much as possible as a physical manifestation of your personhood. Some people, in beginning such a venture, will indeed insist upon an excellent vessel, with the most sophisticated mechanisms, equipped with grand couches and a banquet room. Others would want much more excitement, much more zest, and order then instead a less grand vessel, but one that went faster. Some would set goals for themselves that demanded that their powers of seamanship be tested. The analogy may be a simple one, yet each person chooses the living vessel of the body, with his or her own intents and purposes in mind. In physical reality, if you will forgive me, life is the name of the game-and the game is based upon value fulfillment. That means simply that each form of life seeks toward the fulfillment and unfolding of all of the capacities that it senses within its living framework, knowing that in that individual fulfillment each other species of life is also benefited. (9:45.) In no way do I mean to demean the indisputable value of geniuses, or their great contributions to the quality of life- but the quality of life is, again, also benefited by the existence of idiots. Not only because both ends of the scale are necessary for genetic reasons, but also because idiots themselves are in no way considered failures or defects by nature. Those terms are human judgments. Idiots also serve their role by moderating the sometimes fierce hold that the reasoning mind can (underlined) have upon human activity. The idiot is often able to experience in his or her own reality a freer, more generous, more faithful flow of emotional states, unhampered by reason's sometimes stern dictates, and it is important that such a moderating tendency does operate genetically. The reasoning mind, as you have used it thus far, roughly (underlined) since the birth of Christianity, has used-instead of used, confined-has confined its reasoning abilities to a very narrow spectrum of reality. It has seen the value of life largely only as that life conforms to its own standards. (Pause.) That is, the reasoning mind, as you have used it, considers that only reasoning creatures are capable of understanding life's values. Other forms of life have almost seemed beside the point, their value considered only insofar as they were of service to man. But man's life is obviously dependent upon the existence of life's other species, and with him those species share certain values. Life is sacred-all life-and again, all life seeks value fulfillment, not simply physical survival. Ruburt read an article about the development of a strain of mice without thymus [glands]. Since the thymus is very important in the necessary process of maintaining bodily resistance to disease, these particular mice have little resistance. They are bred and sold for experimental purposes. The intent of such procedures is to promote the quality of human life, to study the nature of diseases, and hopefully apply what is learned to some of the lives of human beings. Mice are not considered human. They are not. So like any animal, they are thought of as dispensable, sacrificed to a fine humanitarian end. Perhaps at first that prejudice of the reasoning mind might escape you, since after all mice are far divorced from your own species. (Louder:) There were Jews sacrificed to the same end not too long ago, and the reasoning was largely the same, though in that case you were dealing with your own species. Jews were considered almost not human, however, and whenever such atrocities against your own species are concerned, you indulge in the same kind of twisted reasoning (underlined). Because the Jews were considered less than human- or, at best, human defects-they were thought of as justifiable sacrifices on the altar of "the genetic betterment of mankind." You cannot improve the quality of your own lives by destroying the quality of any other kinds of life. There is no genetic master race. The very classification of the species into races to begin the overall picture of the similarities. Ruburt was incensed by the article that he read, and he said indignantly that such procedures involve a biological immorality. I usually avoid terms like "morality" or "immorality," since their definitions vary according to the individual. The proceedings, however, do involve a biological violation, a going against nature's flow and intent, a process in which a form of life is made to go against its own value fulfillment, and it is because of such attitudes involving other kinds of life that the horrors of the Jewish war camps were made possible.

The genetic system is an inner, biological, "universal" language. In your terms that language speaks the flesh-and it speaks the flesh equally in all races of mankind. There are no inferior or superior races. Now dreams also provide you with another universal kind of language, one that unites all peoples to one nationalities or alliances. The cataloging of separate races simply involves you in organizations of variances played upon a common theme-variances that you have used for various purposes. Often those purposes led you to overexaggerate the differences between groups, and to minimize man's biological unity. (Long pause.) The most important aspects of individuality are those subjective characteristics that on the one hand distinguish each person from the other, and that on the other hand are each like sparkling psychological mosaics, giving separate, exquisite individual versions of that larger pattern from which mankind emerges. The security, the integrity, and the brilliance of each individuality rises in these terms from that universal genetic language, and also from the inner subjective universal language of dreams. There are great connections between the two, and both are spoken together. Let us become more practical, and see how these issues merge in your reality. Some of this requires a great honesty on your own parts, as you try to recall some feelings and daydreams that you have tried to put away or forget or disown. Why are some people, then, born with conditions that are certainly experienced as genetically defective, granting even the overall value of such variances on the part of the species? For, again, I must stress the fact that in its way nature makes no such judgments, regardless of the beliefs of your science or religions. Science seems to be of the opinion that the individual is important only insofar as (louder:) he or she serves the purposes of the species' survival-and I am not saying that. I am saying that the existence of each individual is (underlined) important to the value fulfillment of the species. And moreover, I am stating that the value fulfillment of the individual and the species go hand in hand. I am also stating that the species is itself aware of those conditions that lead to its own value fulfillment, and that of its members. No species basically (underlined) biologically considers its own existence with other species except in a cooperative manner-that is, there is no basic competition between species. When you think that there is, you are reading nature wrong. Whatever man's conscious beliefs, on a biological structure of all other species. In man, the probabilities of development are literally numberless. No computer could count the combinations of characteristics possible. It is highly important, then, that the species retain flexibility, and not become locked into any one pattern, however advantageous (intently)-and I am referring to physical or mental patterns. Within the framework of established specieshood, there must be every kind of leeway-leeways that are biologically activated, so that variances are constantly active. Those genetic variances may appear as defective or eccentric. They may appear as the handicapped. They may appear as superior characteristics of one kind or another, but they must be biologically stated as the variations from the genetic norm. By themselves, whether they appear as superior or defective conditions, they necessitate a different kind of adaptability, a change of subjective or physical focus, the intensification of other abilities that perhaps have been understressed. Yet granting all this, why, again, would some individuals choose situations that would be experienced as defective conditions? For this, we need to examine some human feelings that are often forgotten. Now I have often said that suffering of itself is not "good for the soul." It is not a virtue, yet certainly many individuals seem to seek suffering. Suffering cannot be dismissed from human experience as a freak matter of distorted emotions or beliefs. Suffering is a human condition that is sought for various reasons. There are gradations of suffering, of course, and each person will have his or her definitions of what suffering is. Many people do indeed equate a certain kind of suffering with excitement. Sportsmen^ race-car drivers, mountain climbers-all seek suffering to one extent or another, and find the very intensity of certain kinds (underlined) of pain pleasurable. You might say that they like to live dangerously. Some s-e-c-t-s (spelled) have believed that spiritual understanding came as the result of bodily agony, and their selfinflicted pain became their versions of pleasure. It is usually said that animals, and also man, avoid pain and seek pleasure-and so any courting of pain, except under certain conditions, is seen as unnatural behavior. It is not unnatural. It is an eccentric (pause) behavior pattern. Many children daydream not only of being kings or queens, or given great honors, they also daydream about being tragic figures. They daydream of cruel deaths. They glory in stories of wicked stepmothers. They imagine, in fact, every situation that they can involving human experience. To an extent adults do the same thing. They are drawn to cinema or television dramas that involve tragedies, sorrows, great dramatic struggles. This is because you are alive as the result of your great curiosity for human experience. You are alive because you want to participate in human drama. While I admit that many people will not agree with me (smile), I know from experience that most individuals do not choose one "happy" life after another, always ensconced in a capable body, endowed by nature or heritage with all of the gifts most people seem to think they desire. Each person seeks value fulfillment, and that means that they choose various lives in such a fashion that all of their abilities and capacities can be best developed, and in such a way that their world is also enriched. Some people will choose "defective" bodies purposely in order to focus more intensely in other areas. They want a different kind of focus. (Long pause.) They want to sift their characteristics through a certain cast. Such a choice demands an intensification. It is made on the part of the individual and on the parts of the parents as well, so that a certain group of people will relate to the world in a highly characteristic way. In almost all such cases (pause), such people will be embarked upon subjective issues and questions also that might not be considered otherwise. They will ask questions on their own parts that need to be raised, not only for themselves but for the society at large. Those questions help bring out psychological maturities and insights about the nature of the species in general. Many such conditions also serve to keep man's sympathies alive. I make a distinction between sympathy and pity, for a lively sympathy leads toward construction, toward the utilization of abilities, even to social discourse, while pity can be deadening. Your overreliance upon physical norms, and your distorted concepts concerning survival of the fittest, help exaggerate the existence of any genetic defects, of course. Many religious dog punishment. The survival of the species is far more dependent upon your subjective activities than your physical ones-for it is your subjective behavior that is responsible for your physical acts. Science of course looks at it the other way around, as if your physical acts are the result of a robot's mechanical, formalized behavior-a robot miraculously programmed by the blind elements of an accidental universe formed by chance. The robot is programmed only to survive at anyone's or anything's expense. It has no real consciousness of its own. Its thoughts are merely mental mirages, so if one of its parts is defective then obviously it is in deep trouble. But man is no robot, and each so-called genetic defect has an internal part to play in the entire picture of genetic reality. The principle of uncertainty must operate genetically, or you would have been locked into overspecializations as a species. There are states of consciousness, one within the other, and yet each connected, of course, so that genetic systems are really systems of consciousness. They are intertwined with reincarnational systems of consciousness. These are further entwined with the consciousness that you recognize. The present is the point of power. Given the genetic makeup that you now have, your conscious intents and purposes act as the triggers that activate whatever genetic or reincarnational aspects that you need. The state of dreaming provides the connecting links between these systems of consciousness.

In a way I hope to explain, then, the genetic system also reacts to those beliefs and events that are paramount in any given civilization. Events can trigger genetic activity-not simply through, say, chemical reactions, but through individual and mass beliefs about the safety or lack of it in the world at large. There are also what I will call genetic dreams, which are inspired directly by genetic triggering. These help form and direct consciousness as it exists in any given individual from before birth. The fetus dreams. As its physical growth takes place in the womb, so the shaping of its consciousness is also extended by genetic dreams. These particular fetus-oriented dreams are most difficult to describe, for they are actually involved with forming the contours of the individual consciousness. Such dreams provide (pause) the subjective understanding from which thoughts are developed, and in those terms complete thoughts are possible before the brain itself is fully formed. It is the process of thinking that helps bring the brain into activity, and not the other way around (all quite intently). Such thoughts are like, now (underline "like, now"), electrical patterns that form their own magnets. (Long pause.) The ability to conceptualize is present in the fetus, and the fetus does conceptualize. The precise orientation of that conceptualizing, and the precise orientation of the thinking patterns, wait for certain physical triggers received from the parents and the environment after birth, but the processes of conceptualization and of thought are already established. This establishment takes place in genetic dreams (again, all intently). Infants think long before they can speak. Thought must come before language. Language is thought's handmaiden. The ability to use language is also genetically built-in, through the precise orientation, again, with the physical triggering of the parents' native language. Children learn such languages mentally long before they are physically capable of speaking them; but again, in genetically inspired dreams, children-or rather, infants-practice language. Before such infants hear their parents speak, however, they are in telepathic communication, and even in the fetus genetic dreams involve the coding and interpretation of language. Those dreams themselves inspire the physical formations necessary to bring about their own actualizations. Genetic dreams of one kind or another continue throughout your lives, whether or not you are consciously aware of them. They were of prime importance in "man's evolution," as you think of it. They were the source of dreams, mentioned earlier, that sent man on migrations after food, that led him toward fertile land. Those dreams are most closely related to survival in physical existence, and whenever that survival seems threatened such dreams arise to consciousness whenever possible. They are the dreams that warn of famines or of wars. Such dreams, however, can also be triggered often, as in your own times, when the conscious mind is convinced that the survival of the species is threatened-and in such cases the dreams then actually represent man's fears. Overanxiety, then, can confuse the genetic system, and in a variety of ways. The existence of each of the species is dependent upon trust, indeed a biological optimism, in which each species feels the freedom to develop the potentials of its members in relative safety, within the natural frameworks of existence. Each species comes into being not merely feeling a natural built-in trust in its own validity, but is literally propelled by exuberance in its ability to cope with its environment. It knows that it is uniquely suited to its. place within life's framework. The young of all species exhibit an unquenchable rambunctiousness. That rambunctiousness is built in. Animals know that their own lives spell out life's meaning. They feel their relationship with all other forms of life. They know that their existences are vitally important in the framework of planetary existence. Beyond that, they identify themselves with the spirit of life within them so fully and so completely that to question its meaning would be inconceivable. Not inconceivable becavise such creatures cannot think, but because life's meaning is so selfevident to them. Whenever man believes that life is meaningless, whenever he feels that value fulfillment is impossible, or indeed nonexistent, then he undermines his genetic heritage. He sepa rates himself from life's meaning. He feels vacant inside. Man for centuries attached faith, hope, and charity to the beliefs of established religions. Instead, these are genetic attributes, inspired and promoted by the inseparable unity of spirit in flesh. (Pause.) The animals are quite as familiar with faith, hope, and charity as you are, and often exemplify it in their own frameworks of existence to a better extent. Any philosophy that promotes the idea that life is meaningless is biologically dangerous. It promotes feelings of despair that directly hamper genetic activity. Such philosophies are extremely disadvantageous creatively, since they dampen the emotional spirits and exuberance, and sense of play, from which creativity itself emerges. Such philosophies are also deadening on an intellectual basis, for they must of necessity close out man's great curiosity about the subjective matters that are his main concern. If life has no meaning, then nothing else really makes any difference, and intellectual curiosity itself also ends up withering on the vine. The intellectual ideas of societies, therefore, also have a great effect upon which genetic systems are triggered, and which ones are not. You have genetic systems, then, carrying (long pause) information that is literally incalculable.1 Now: Through your technologies, through your physical experience, you are also surrounded by an immense array of communication and information of an exterior nature. You have your telephones, radios, televisions, your earth satellites-all networks that process and convey data. Those inner biological systems and the exterior ones may seem quite separate. They are intimately connected, however. The information you receive from your culture, from your arts, sciences, fields of economics, is all translated, decoded, turned into cellular information. Certain genetic diseases, for example, may be activated or not activated according to the cultural climate at any given time, as the relative safety or lack of it in that climate is interpreted through private experience. In one way or another, the living genetic system has an effect upon your cultural reality, and the reverse also applies. All of this is further complicated by the purposes and intents of the generations in any historical period, and the reincarnational influences. Value fulfillment always implies the search for excellence- not perfection, but excellence. Excellence (pause) in any given area-emotional, physical, intellectual, intuitional, scientific-is reflected in other areas, and by its mere existence serves as a model for achievement. This kind of excellence need not be structured, then, into any one aspect of life, though it may appear in any aspect, and wherever it appears it is an echo of a spiritual and biological directive, so to speak. There are different historical periods, in your terms, where the species has showed what it can do-and what is possible in certain specific directions when the genetic and reincarnational triggers are touched and opened full blast, so that certain characteristics appear in their clearest, most spectacular light, to serve as individual models and as models for the species as a whole. Again, such times are closely bound with reincarnational intents that direct the genetic triggering, and that meet in the culture the further stimulus that may be required. The time of the great masters in the fields of painting and sculpture is a case in point (humorously and louder)-so you see, I am getting to one of your favorite questions,2 and we will continue the discussion at our next session.

Your established fields of knowledge do not grant any subjective reality to c-e-l-l-s (spelled). Cells, however, possess an inner knowledge of their own shapes, and of any other shapes in their immediate environment- this apart from the communication system mentioned earlier that operates on biological levels between all cells. toward action, a sense of their own balance, and a sense of being individual while being, for example, a part of a tissue or an organ. The cell's identification biologically is highly connected with this [very] precise knowledge of its own shape, or sometimes shapes. Cells, then, know their own forms. In highly complicated cellular structures like yourselves , with your unique mental properties, you end up with a vital inborn sense of shape and form. The ability to draw is a natural outgrowth of this sensing of shape, this curiosity of form. On a quite unconscious level you possess a biological selfimage that is quite different from the self that you see in a mirror. It is a knowledge of bodily form from the inside out, so to speak, composed of cellular shapes and organizations, operating at the maximum. The simple cell, again, has a curiosity about its environment, and on your much more advanced cellular level your own curiosity is unbounded. It is primarily felt as a curiosity about shapes: the urge to touch, to explore, to feel edges and smooth places. There is particularly a fascination with space itself, in which, so to speak, there is nothing to touch, no shapes to perceive. You are born, then, with a leaning toward the exploration of form and shape in particular. Remember that cells have consciousness, so while I say these leanings are biologically entwined, they are also mental properties. Drawing in its simplest form is, again, an extension of those inclinations, and in a fashion serves two purposes. Particularly on the part of children, it allows them to express forms and shapes that they see mentally first of all. When they draw circles or squares, they are trying to reproduce those inner shapes, transposing those images outward into the environment-a creative act, highly significant, for it gives children experience in translating inner perceived events of a personal nature into a shared physical reality apparent to all. When children draw objects they are successfully, then, turning the shapes of the exterior world into their personal mental experiences-possessing them mentally, so to speak, through physically rendering the forms. (Long pause.) The art of drawing or painting to one extent or another always involves those two energy is required, and for great art an intensification and magnification of both elements. The species chooses the best conditions in which to display and develop such a capacity to the utmost, taking into consideration all its other needs and purposes. The particular, brilliant, intensified flowering of painting and sculpture that took place, say, in the time of Michelangelo (1475-1564) could not, in your probability, have occurred after the birth of technology, for example, and certainly not in your own era, where images are flashed constantly before your eyes on television and in the movies, where they are rambunctiously present in your magazines and advertisements. You are everywhere surrounded by photography of all kinds, but in those days images outside of those provided by nature's objects were highly rare. People could physically only see what was presently before their eyes-no postcards with pictures of the Alps, or far places. Visual data consisted of what the eye could see-and that was indeed a different kind of a world, a world in which a sketched object was of considerable value. Portraits [were] possessed only by the priests and nobility. You must remember also that the art of the great masters was largely unknown to the poor peasants of Europe, much less to the world at large. Art was for those who could enjoy it-who could afford it. There were no prints to be passed around,4 so art, politics, and religion were all connected. Poor people saw lesser versions of religious paintings in their own simple churches, done by local artists of far lesser merit than those [who] painted for the popes. The main issue, however, in that particular era, was a shared belief system, a system that consisted of, among other things, implied images that were neither here nor there-neither entirely earthly nor entirely divine-a mythology of God, angels, demons, an entire host of Biblical characters that were images in man's imagination, images to be physically portrayed. Those images were like an entire artistic language. Using them, the artist automatically commented upon the world, the times, God, man, and officialdom. Those mythological images and their belief system were shared by all-peasants and the wealthy-to a large degree. They were, then, highly charged emotionally. Whether an embodied in flesh, or as natural men, he commented on the relationship between the natural and the divine. In a fashion, those stylized figures that stood for the images of GocT, apostles, saints, and so forth, were like a kind of formalized abstract form, into which the artist painted all of his emotions and all of his beliefs, all of his hopes and dissatisfactions. Let no one make God the Father look like a mere human, for example! He must be seen in heroic dimensions, while Christ could be shown in divine and human attributes also. The point is that the images the artists were trying to portray were initially mental and emotional ones, and the paintings were supposed to represent not only themselves but the great drama of divine and human interrelationship, and the tension between the two. The paintings themselves seemed to make the heavenly horde come alive. If no one had seen Christ, there were pictures of him. This was an entirely different kind of art than you have now. It was an attempt to objectify inner reality as it was perceived through a certain belief system. Whether the artist disagreed with certain issues or not, the belief system was there as an invisible framework. That intense focus that united belief systems, that tension between a sensed subjective world and the physical one, and the rarity of images to be found elsewhere, brought art into that great flowering. Later, as man insisted upon more objectivity of a certain kind, he determined that images of men should look like men-human beings, with weaknesses and strengths. The heroic mold began to vanish. Artists decided to stick to portraying the natural world as they saw it with their natural eyes, and to cast aside the vast field of inner imagery. Some of da Vinci's sketches already show that tendency, and he is fascinating because with his undeniable artistic tendencies he also began to show those tendencies that would lead toward the birth of modern science. His notebooks, for example, dealt with minute observations made upon aspects of nature itself. He combined the forces of highly original, strong imagination with very calculated preciseness, a kind of preciseness that would lead to detailed sketches of flowers, trees, the action of water-all of nature's phenomena. Now: Drawing of that nature flourishes in your times in an beginnings- in, for example, the highly complicated plans of engineers; the unity of, say, precise sketching and mathematics, necessary in certain sciences, [with] the sketching [being] required for all of the inventions that are now a part of your world. In your world, technology is your art. It is through the use of technology and science that you have sought to understand your relationship with the universe. (Pause.) Science has until recently provided you with a unified belief system that is only now eroding-and if you will forgive me (smile), your space voyages have simply been physical attempts to probe into that same unknown that other peoples in other times have tried to explore through other means. Technology has been responsible for the fact that so many people have been able to see the great paintings of the world, either directly or through reproductions-and more people are familiar with the works of the great masters than ever were in their lifetimes. The species uses those conditions, however, so that the paintings of the great masters can serve as models and impetuses, not simply for the extraordinary artwork involved, but to rearouse within man those emotions that brought the paintings into being. Man always does best, or his best, when he sees himself in heroic terms. While the Roman Catholic Church gave him a powerful, cohesive belief systejn (pause), for many reasons those beliefs shifted so that the division between man and God became too great. (Pause.) Man the sinner took over from man the child of God. As a result, one you see in art particularly, man became a heroic figure, then a natural one. The curiosity that had been directed toward divinity became directed toward nature. Man's sense of inquiry led him, then, to begin to paint more natural portraits and images. He turned to landscapes also. This was an inevitable process. As it occurred, however, [man] began to make great distinctions between the world of the imagination and the world of nature, until finally he became convinced that the physical world was real and the imaginative world was not. So his paintings became more and more realistic. Art became wedded, then, to phenomena directly before the data than he had before. Imaginative interpretations seemed like pretensions. Art largely ended up-in those terms, now-as the handmaiden of technology: engineering plans, mathematical diagrams, and so forth. What you call abstract art tried to reverse that process, but even the abstract painters did not believe in the world of the imagination, in which there were any heroic dimensions, and the phase is largely transitory. I did mean to mention that man's use of perspective in painting was a turning point (early in the 15th century), in that it foreshadowed the turning of art away from its imaginative colorations toward a more specific physical rendering-that is, to a large degree after that the play of the imagination would not be allowed to "distort" the physical frame of reference. All of this involved the triggering of innate abilities at certain points in time by the species at large, and on the parts of certain individuals, as their purposes and those of the species merged. People have a biologically built-in knowledge that life has meaning. They share that biologically ingrained trust with all other living creatures. A belief in life's meaning is a necessity on the part of your species. It is vital for the proper workings of genetic systems. It is a prerequisite for individual health and for the overall vitality of any given "stock." Your greatest achievements have been produced by civilizations during those times when man had the greatest faith in the meaningfulness of life in general, and in the meaningfulness of the individual within life's framework. You are, I hope, coming toward a time of greater psychological synthesis, so that the intuitions and reasoning abilities work together in a much more smooth fashion, so that emotional and intuitive knowledge regarding the meaningfulness of life can find clearer precision and expression, as the intellect is taught-as the intellect is taught-to use its faculties in a far less restricted manner. No matter what science says about certain values being outside of its frame of reference, science implies that those values are therefore without basis. The reasoning qualities of the mind are directed away from any exploration that might bring about any acceptable scientific evidence for such values, therefore. The fact is that man lives by those values that science ignores. For that reason, science-after its first great adventurous era-had its own flaws built in, and so it must expand its definitions of reality or become a tin-can caricature of itself, a prosti its early claims of investigating the nature of truth or reality. It could become as secondary to life as, say, the Roman Catholic Church is now, losing its hold upon world dominance, losing its claim of being the one official arbiter of reality. There are, overall, some processes important in man's development, and in the development of the species. Efforts, methods that work against value fulfillment phase themselves out, for in the long run they do not work. There is nothing wrong with technology. Man has an innate inclination toward the use of tools, and technology is no more than an extension of that capacity. (Pause.) When men use tools in accord with (pause) the "dictates" of value fulfillment, those tools are effective. Your technology, however, as it stands, has to some important degree-but not entirely-been based upon a scientific philosophy that denies the very idea of value fulfillment. Therefore, you end up with a technology that threatens to work no longer. You end up with affairs of great national and world concern, such as the Three Mile Island episode, and other lesser-known near-nuclear accidents. The control panels of the nuclear plants, many of them, were designed as if consciousness did not enter into the picture at all, as if the plants were [to be] run by other machines, not men- with controls that are not handily within reach, or physically inaccessible, as if the men who drew up the plans had completely forgotten what the species [is] like mentally or physically. Now, the overall purpose supposedly is the utilization of energy- a humanitarian project meant to bring light and warmth to millions of homes. But that intent was sabotaged because the philosophy behind it denied the validity of the very subjective values that give man his reason for living. Because those values were forgotten, life was threatened. There are grass-roots organizations-cults, groups of every people together, once again, search for intellectual reasons to back up their innate emotional knowledge that life has meaning. These groups represent (long pause) the beginnings of new journeys quite as important to the species as any sea voyage ever was as man searched for new lands. Seeds are blown by the wind, and so reproduce their kind. Many people speculate about the physical journeys of early man from one continent to another. It is said that in "the struggle to survive" man was literally driven to expand his physical boundaries. The true motion of the species, however, has always been psychological, or psychic if you prefer, involving the exploration of ideas. And again, the survival of the species in those terms is basically dependent upon its belief in the meaningfulness of its existence. (Emphatically:) These new cults and groups, however-these new cults and groups, therefore-therefore-are following the paths of genetic wisdom, opening up new areas of speculation and belief. And if some of their present beliefs are ludicrous in the light of the intellect's reason, in the end-because [such groups] are following the dictates of value fulfillment, however feebly-they are significant. It is easy for the intellect, as you are used to using it, to see only the antics of such groups, and they can appear ridiculous in that light. A scientist who would threaten the very survival of life on the planet in order to increase life's conveniences (underlined) is, however, truly displaying ludicrous behavior (with irony). The trouble with most ideas concerning evolution is that they are all one-sided-all loaded, of course, at man's end at the expense of the other species, and [with] all thinking in terms of progress along very narrow consecutive lines. Such ideas have much to do with the way you think of yourselves, and what you consider human characteristics, and the light in which you view those who vary in one way or another from those norms. Man needs the feeling that he is progressing, but technological progress alone represents a comparatively shallow level unless it is backed up by a growth of emotional understanding- a progression of man's sense of being at one with himself and with the rest of the natural world. There are people who are highly intellectually proficient, whose reasoning abilities are undisputed, and yet their considerable lack of, say, emotional or spiritual development remains largely invisible as far as your assessments are concerned. Such people are not considered retarded, of course. I will always be speaking about a balance between intuitional and reasoning abilities and, I hope, [be] leading you toward a wedding of those abilities, for together they can bring about what would certainly appear in your world to be one completely new faculty, combining the very best elements of each, but in such a fashion that both were immeasurably enhanced. I also want to emphasize that your present beliefs limit the full and free operation of your intellects, as far as your established fields of knowledge are concerned, for science has placed so many taboos, limiting the areas of free intellectual inquiry. I am not, however, promoting dependence upon feelings above the intellect, or vice versa. The fact remains that when you assess your fellows, you put a far greater stress upon intellectual achievement than emotional achievement. Some of you may even question what emotional achievement is, but it is highly important spiritually and biologically. Some people, who would rate quite high on any hypothetical emotional-achievement test, might very possibly under certain conditions be labeled as retarded, according to the dictates of your society. The species is at least embarked upon its journey toward emotional achievement, as it is upon the development of its intellectual capacities, and ultimately the two must go hand in hand. A brilliant mathematician or scientist, or even an artist, or an accepted genius in any field, can be an emotional incompetent, but no one considers him as retarded. I am not speaking now of eccentric behavior on the part of, say, creative people or anyone else, but of a lack of understanding of emotional values. Now as far as the species is concerned, all variations are necessary- and it is as if (underlined) in one instance a member of the species-for its own reasons, but also on behalf of the whole- decides to specialize in one particular area, to isolate certain and brilliance, while nearly completely ignoring certain other areas. In your society, however, the capacities of the reasoning mind have been considered in opposition to the intuitive abilities, so that your ideas of what a person is or should be largely ignore the idea of emotional achievement, emotional understanding. Other people may be sophisticated, brilliantly aware of their own feelings and those of other people, intuitively knowledgeable in the handling of relationships, even, as adults, exquisite parents-yet they may be labeled as retarded if they do not live up to certain artificial intellectual standards. They are actually in the same position at the other end as the people mentioned earlier. It is as if certain members of the species, for their own reasons, and again on the part of the whole, specialized this time in the use of emotional capacities. But those people are usually considered retarded. I will have more to say about that particular issue, for I am speaking about certain cases only. Mankind is a species that specializes in the use of the imagination, and without the imagination language would be unnecessary. Man from his particular vantage point imagines images and events that are not before his eyes. The applied use of the imagination is one of the most distinguishing marks of your species, and the imagination is your connection between the inner worlds of reality and the exterior world of your experience. It connects your emotions and your reason. All species are interconnected, so, as I said earlier, when you think you think for yourselves, you also specialize in thinking for the rest of nature, which physically sustains you. I want to discuss reason and imagination, then, and those subtle variations that unite the two. Through doing so, I hope to give a truer picture of your own dimension, and to continue our discussion about the gifts and seeming defects that are genetically inspired.

Remember that these units of consciousness of which I have been speaking are not neutral, mathematical, or mechanistic. They are the smallest imaginable "packages" of consciousness that you can imagine, and despite any ideas to the contrary, basically consciousness has nothing to do with size. If that were the case, it would take more than a world-sized globe to contain the consciousness of simply one cell. So your physical life is the result of a spectacular spontaneous of consciousness. Your experience of the world is largely determined by your imaginations and your reasoning abilities. These did not develop through time, as per usual evolutionary beliefs. Both imagination and reason belonged to the species from the beginning, but the species has used these qualities in different ways throughout what you think of as historic time. There is great leeway in that direction, so that the two can be combined in many many alternate fashions, each particular combination giving you its own unique picture of reality, and determining your experience in the world. Your many civilizations, historically speaking, each with its own fields of activity, its own sciences, religions, politics and art-these all represent various ways that man has used imagination and reason to form a framework through which (underlined) a more or less cohesive reality is experienced. Man, then, has sometimes stressed the power of the imagination and let its great dramatic light illuminate the physical events about him, so that they were largely seen through its cast. Exterior events in those circumstances become magnets attracting the dramatic force of the imagination. Inner events are stressed over exterior ones. The objects of the world then become important not only for what they are but because of their standing in an inner world of meaning. In such cases, of course, it becomes quite possible to go so far in that direction that the events of nature almost seem to disappear amid the weight of their symbolic content. In recent times the trend has been in the opposite direction, so that the abilities of the imagination were considered highly suspect, while exterior events were considered the only aspects of reality. You ended up with a true-or-false kind of world, in which it seemed that the answers to the deepest questions about life could be answered quite correctly and adequately by some multiple-choice test. Man's imagination seemed then to be allied with falsehood, unless its products could be turned to advantage in the materialistic existence. In that context, the imagination was tolerated at all only because it sometimes offered new technological inventions. I have taken two contrasting examples of the many ways in which the powers of the imagination and those of the reasoning abilities can be used, There are endless varieties, however-each subjectively and genetically possible, and many, of course, that you have not yet developed as a species. Ruburt (Jane) today received a letter from a man who would certainly be labeled a schizophrenic. Ruburt was distressed-not only by the individual's situation, but by the philosophic implications. Why on earth, he thought, should someone form such a reality? Now on the question of "mental disorders," it is highly important that individual integrity be stressed, rather than the blanket definitions that are usually accorded to any group of symptoms. In many such circumstances, however, such individuals are combining the imagination and the reasoning abilities in ways that are not in keeping with their historic periods. (With some irony:) It would not be entirely out of keeping, though somewhat exaggerated a statement, to claim that men who stockpile nuclear weapons in order to preserve peace are insane. In your society, such activities are, in a way that completely escapes me, somehow under the label of humanitarianism! Such plans are not considered insane ones-though in the deepest meaning of that word, they are indeed. There are many reasons for such actions, but an overemphasis upon what you think of (underlined) as the reasoning abilities, as opposed to what you think of as the imaginative abilities, is at least partially to blame. In the case of the man who wrote Ruburt, we have a mixture of those characteristics in which interior events-the events of the imagination-cast too strong a light upon physical events as far as the socially accepted blend is concerned. Again, I am not speaking about all cases of mental disorder here. I do, however, want to make the point that your prized psychological norm as a species means that you must also be allowed a great leeway in the use of the imagination and the intellect. Otherwise, you could become locked into a rigid conscious stance, one in which both the imagination and the intellect could advance no further. It is vitally important that you realize the great psychological diversity that is present within your psychological behavior- and those varieties of psychological experience are necessary. They give you vital psychological feedback, and they exercise the reaches of your abilities in ways that are overall most advantageous. The man who wrote wants to live largely in his own world. He hurts no one. He supports himself a good deal of the time. His view of reality is eccentric from most viewpoints. He adds a flavor to the world that would be missing otherwise, and through his very eccentricity, to some extent he shows other people that their rigid views of reality may indeed have chinks in them here and there. I do not mean to idealize him either, or others of his kind, but to point out that you can use your imaginations and intellects in other fashions than you do. In fact, such fashions are not only genetically possible, but genetically probable-a matter I will discuss later in the book. The imagination, of course, deals with the implied universe, those vast areas of reality that are not physically manifest, while reason usually deals with the evidence of the world that is before it. That statement is generally true, but specifically, of course, any act of the imagination involves reasoning, and any [act] of reason involves the imagination.

There are sometimes almost insurmountable difficulties involved on my part in trying to explain the origin of your world. You think of your universe as having certain dimensions, and you want an explanation based more or less upon the proposition that those dimensions themselves made possible the origin- which must, however, have emerged from other larger dimensions of actuality than those contained in your universe itself. The terms of reality, within your universe cannot hold or contain that vaster context in which such master events happen. Therefore, I must follow to some extent (underlined) the traditional references that you use to define events to begin with. While I am doing that I am also trying to introduce you, intuitively at least, to a larger framework, in which events straddle the reality that you know. Nevertheless, we will begin with issues in which it is very possible that contradictions may seem to occur, since your own definitions of an event are so simple that they ignore larger ramifications-ramifications that would reconcile any seeming contradictions in an overall greater unity of structure and action. Your imaginations will be of high value here, for they can often perceive unities that are not evident to the intellect-which you have trained to deal specifically with the evidence of the here and now. There are phases of relatedness, rhythms and harmonies of consciousness from whose infinite swells the molecular "music" of your universe is sounded. Your place in those rhythms is highly vital. (Long pause.) You exist in a kind of original interval-though, if you can, think of the word "interval" without the connotations of continuing time. It is as if an infinite number of orchestras were playing simultaneously (long pause), and each note sounded was also played in all of its probable positions with each other note possible, and in combination with all of the probable versions of the entire piece being played. Between the notes sounded there would be intervals, and those unsounded intervals would also be part of a massive unstated rhythm upon which the development of the entire sounded production was dependent. The unsounded intervals would also be events, of course, cues for action, triggers for response. Your stated universe emerged out of that kind of interval, emerging from a master event whose true nature remains uncaptured by your definitions-so there will be places in our book where I may say that an event known to you is true and untrue at the same time, or that it is both myth and fact. And in so doing I hope to lead you toward some psychic comprehension of a kind of event far too large for your usual categories of true and false. [Perhaps], then, you will let your imaginations play upon the usual events of your world, and glimpse at least in part that greater brilliance that illuminates them, so that it leads you intuitively to a feeling for the source of events and the source of your world. The units of consciousness that I have mentioned are (underlined) that, and they do behave as I have said. They are also in other terms entities, fragments of All That Is, if you prefer-divine fragments of power and majesty, containing (pause) all of the powers of consciousness as you think of it, concentrations without substance in your terms. There are many other universes besides your own, each following its own intervals, its own harmony. Your ideas of historic time impede my explanations. In those terms (pause), your world's reality stretches back far further than you imagine, and in those terms-you need the qualifications-your ancestors have visited other stars, as your planet has been visited by others. Some such encounters intersected in space and time, but some did not. There are endless versions of life. There are, then, other species like (underlined) your own, and in the vast spectrums of existence that your reality cannot contain, there have been galactic civilizations that came together when the conditions were right. Time's framework does not exist as you think it does. Intervals of existence are obviously not the same. In ways impossible to explain, there are what I can only call inner passageways throughout the universe. You know how one association can suddenly in your minds connect you with a past event so clearly strong-enough memory is like a ghost event. So there are processes that work like associations, that can provide passageways through the universe's otherwise time-structured ways. These passageways are simply a part of the greater nature of events that you do not perceive. At times your species has traveled those passageways, and many of your myths represent ghost memories of those events. There is a rhythm, again, to all existence, and so in your terms your species returned to its home planet, to renew its roots, refresh its natural stock, to return to nature, to find solace again amid the sweet ancient heritage of dusk and dawn. The planet has seen many changes. It has appeared and disappeared many times. It flickers off and on-but because of the intervals of your attention, each "on" period seems to last for millions of years, of course, while at other levels the earth is like a firefly, flickering off and on. I do not mean by such a description to minimize the importance of physical life, for All That Is endows each portion of its own transformed reality with a unique existence that is duplicated nowhere else, and each spark of consciousness is endowed with a divine heritage that is never extinguished-a spark that is apparent in all other corners of the universe.

I will use your yesterday's visitor as the point around which to build a discussion. First of all, the term "schizophrenia" is of basically little value. Many people tabbed with that label should not be. There are socalled classic cases of schizophrenia-and borderline ones, socalled- but in any case the label is highly misleading and negatively suggestive. What you are dealing with in many instances are exhibitions of various, sometime quite diverse personality patterns of behavior- patterns that are, however, not as assimilated, or as smoothly operative as they are in the person you call normal. The patterns are seen in an exaggerated fashion, so that in some such cases at least you can gain glimpses of mental, emotional, and psychic processes that usually remain psychologically invisible beneath the more polished or "finished" social personality of the usual individual. The person labeled schizophrenic, momentarily or for varying periods of time, lacks a certain kind of psychological veneer. This is not so much a basic lack of psychological finish as it is the adoption of a certain kind of (pause) psychological camouflage. Such people-in a fashion, now-play a game of quite serious hide-and-seek with themselves and with the world. They believe in the dictum: "Divide and conquer." It is as if, for reasons I hope to discuss, they refuse to put themselves together properly, refuse to form one fairly united self. The idea behind this is: "If you cannot find me, then I cannot be held accountable for my actions-actions which are bound in one way or another to betray me." The self becomes operationally scattered or divided, so that if one portion of it is attacked, the other portions can rise up in defense. Such persons use the various elements of the personality as spies or soldiers, scattering their forces (pause), and forced under those conditions to set up elaborate communication systems to keep those portions of the self in contact with each other. In times of stress, they set up an even greater isolation of one of communication, of course, so that it must be used constantly. The communications themselves are often a kind of psychological or symbolic code, such as might indeed be used in military intelligence. If the messages were to be clearly deciphered and understood, then of course the game would be over, for the one to understand the message would be the united self who [had] felt the need of such camouflaged self-troops (hyphen) to begin with. Such a person does feel under seige. Often such people are highly creative, with good reserves of energy, but caught between highly contrasting beliefs, either of good and evil, or power and weakness. They are usually extremely idealistic, but for various reasons they do not feel that the abilities of the idealized self can be actualized. I am making generalizations here, but each individual case should be looked at in its own light. Such people as a rule, however, have an exaggerated version of the self (pause), so idealized that its very existence intimidates practical action. They are afraid of making mistakes, terrified of betraying this sensed inner psychological superior. Usually, such an idealized inner self comes from the acceptance of highly distorted beliefs-again, concerning good and evil. You end up with what can amount to two main inner antagonists: a superior self and a debased self. The qualities considered good are attracted to the superior self as if it were a magnet. The qualities that seem bad (underlined) are in the same fashion attracted to the debased self. Both of them, relatively isolated psychological polarities, hold about equal sway. All other psychological evidences that are ambiguous, or not clearly understood by either side, group together under their own psychological banners. This is a kind of circular rather than linear arrangement, however, psychologically speaking. Such people are afraid of their own energy. It becomes assigned on the one hand as a possession of the superior self-in which case it must be used for great adventures, heroic deeds. On the other hand, the person feels unable to use energy in a normal fashion, since in the ordinary world no venture could live up to the superior self's exaggerated ideals. The person then becomes frightened of pitting himself against feels that in the light of such comparisons he can only debase himself. He requires undue amounts of praise and attention from others, since he obviously will get little from himself. In a fashion, to an extent he will refuse to be accountable for his actions- therefore taking them out of the frame of judgment within which other people must operate. He then can avoid putting his "talents and superior abilities" to the test, where he feels he would certainly fail. He half realizes that the superior self and the debased self are both of psychological manufacture. His abilities are not really that grand. His failures are not nearly that disastrous. The belief in these highly contrasting elements of personality keep him in a state of turmoil, however, so that he feels powerless to act in any concerted fashion. The term "schizophrenia," however, covers multitudinous experiences- some such people are quite satisfied with their condition, find their own niches, are able to support themselves, or have means of support. Others live in an atmosphere of constant fear of their own condition, while at the same time they are excited, as soldiers might be in combat. Some can be quite functional in society, and the condition in any case is highly variable, covering people who are simply social misfits to those who are in deep psychological trouble. With most people, there is a kind of psychological paved road upon which impulses travel before they meet (pause) an intersection with the conscious mind, which then determines whether or not the impulse will be followed or acted upon. (Long pause.) In the kinds of cases we are discussing, however, instead of a paved road you have a dangerous, rocky field that might be filled with mines ready to explode at any time. Remember, we are dealing with a scattered force, various elements of the personality sent out to do different tasks-and in a fashion they are caught between the superior self and the debased self. There is, then, no clear line for action to follow. It must also be camouflaged. Instead of clear impulses toward action that intersect directly with consciousness, you have bursts of impulses that emerge as orders to act, coming from another source, or from other sources. These may appear as voices telling an individual as perceptions that would be called hallucinatory. In this way the individual need not take responsibility for such actions. They do not seem to be coming from himself or from herself. The terrible possibility of failure is there to that extent, in that situation, momentarily relieved. There is always an overall order to the personality, even though it is in the background, so that in any given case all of the separate "selves," or other sources with whom the individual feels in contact, would together point toward the totality, or unity, that lies beneath. The outstanding mental phenomena, therefore, show in isolated fashions those elements of the personality that are not to be assimilated in the usual smooth fashion. There are countless instances where "schizophrenic episodes" occur in otherwise normal personalities, where for learning purposes and periods of growth the personality sorts its parts out, and helps them enlarge their frameworks. The personality can indeed put itself together in multitudinous fashions. There is great leeway in the use of inner and outer perceptions, and the manners in which these are mixed and matched to form an acceptable picture of reality at any given time. Physical perception gives you a necessary kind of feedback, but it is also based upon learning processes, so that from a young age you learn to put the pieces of the world together in acceptable fashions. In a way, under certain conditions, some schizophrenic situations can give you righter glimpses of inner psychological mobility, a mobility that was focused and directed as you grew through childhood. Schizophrenia represents a kind of learning disability in that particular respect.

For our psychology lesson (with gentle amusement), continued from before. Communications between various scattered portions of the self often appear, again, in such situations as automatic writing, speaking, the hearing of voices, or through what the person believes to be telepathic messages from others. The supposedly telepathic messages can be attributed to contemporaries- enemies, gods, devils, or what have you. Spacemen are a recent addition. In most cases, what you have here are expressions of strong portions of the self that are more or less purposefully kept in isolation. They may appear or disappear, psychologically speaking. They present a kind of chain of command- one that is not usually permanent for any long period, however. Particularly when the voices or communications give orders to be obeyed, they represent powerful, otherwise repressed, images and desires, strong enough to form about themselves their own personifications. Some may seem relatively genuine in terms of presenting a fairly well-rounded representation of a normal personality. That is a fairly rare occurrence, however. with lesser versions (dash)-fragmentary expressions of impulses and desires that are dramatically presented only in snatches, heard by the person as a voice, or perceived as a presence. In many situations, the main personifications are instead of a ritual nature, taking advantage of psychological patterns already present in the culture's art or religion or science. You end up with Christs, spacemen, various saints or spirits, or other personality fabrications whose characteristics and abilities are already known. You have schizophrenic models, in other words, and the particular model chosen in any case, at any given time-for the models change-gives indications quite clearly of the person's basic problems and dilemmas. Such cultural models are present in society to begin with, because in one way or another they express in an exaggerated form certain portions of man's psychological reality that he does not as yet understand. This applies to the "good" schizophrenic models and to the "bad" ones-that is, to the gods as well as to the demons. Such (pause) "communications" with the gods or demons, St. Pauls or Hitlers, represent in such instances dramatized, exaggerated personifications of the portion of the personality that is at the head of the chain of command at the moment. In the first place, reality is primarily a mental phenomenon, in which the perceptions of the senses are organized and put together in ways that perfectly "mimic" in physical terms a primary (long pause) nonphysical experience. This is tricky to express, because the application of a psychological awareness through the auspices of the flesh automatically makes certain transformations of data necessary. Devils and demons have no objective existence. They have always represented, again, portions of mankind's own psychological reality that to some extent he had not assimilated-but in a schizophrenic kind of expressionTprojected instead outward from himself. Therefore, it does not seem he must be held accountable for acts that he considers debasing, or cruel. He isolates himself from that responsibility by imagining the existence of other forces-the devils or demons of the nether world. On an individual basis, the schizophrenic carries through those cultural patterns. The contrasts between, say, the superior self or the idealized self, and the debased self, may vary, They may be brilliantly apparent or somewhat blurred. In many such instances there will also be at least a short spurt of intense but scrambled, perhaps garbled, creative activity, in which the individual tries to recognize these various elements, as mankind himself has attempted many times in the creative, sometimes garbled creation of his own religions (with soft irony). Here you can have anything from banal rubbish to the most excellent creative product, but in the schizophrenic framework it will be of brief duration, experienced outside of the framework of usual day-to-day living, concentrated. Period. The Christ image is often used because it so perfectly represents the combination of the grandiose self, as per the all-knowing son of God, and the martyred victim who is crucified precisely because of his lofty position. The Christ figure represents the exaggerated, idealized version of the inner self that the individual feels incapable of living up to. He feels he is being crucified by his own abilities. He may-or of course she may-on other occasions receive messages from the devil, or demons, which on their part represent the person's feelings about the physical self that seems to be so evil and contradictory in contrast to the idealistic image. Again, there is great variety of behavior here. Such people, however, in their fashion refuse to accept standardized versions of reality. Even though they are so uncertain of themselves that their psychological patterns do follow those of culture, religion, science, or whatever, they try to use those patterns in their own individual ways. They are actually in the process of putting their own personalities together long after most people have settled upon one official version or another-and so their behavior gives glimpses of the ever-changing give-and-take among the various elements of human personality. Most of the declared instances of telepathy or clairvoyance that happen in schizophrenic situations are instead the individual's attempts to prove to himself or herself that the idealized qualities of omnipotence or power are indeed within grasp- this, of course, to compensate for the basic feeling of powerlessness in more ordinary endeavors. In some situations, however, clairvoyance, vivid out-of-body experiences, and other excursions beyond the officially accepted realm of reality. These are often complicated, however, since the individuals' belief patterns are of such an exaggerated blend to begin with, so that such episodes are usually accompanied by phantom figures from religion or mythology. The individuals may feel forced to have such experiences, simply because, again, they do not want to face responsibility for action, for the reasons given earlier. In your terms of time, man has always projected unassimilated psychological elements of his own personality outward, but in much earlier times he did this using a multitudinous variety of images, personifications, gods, goddesses, demons and devils, good spirits and bad. Before the Roman gods were fully formalized, there was a spectacular range of good and bad deities, with all gradations [among them], that more or less "democratically" represented the unknown but sensed, splendid and tumultuous characteristics of the human soul, and have stood for those sensed but unknown glimpses of his own reality that man was in one way or another determined to explore. It was understood that all of these "forces" had their parts to play in human events. Some stood for forces of nature that could very well be at times advantageous, and at times disadvantageous- as, for example, the god of storms might be very welcome at one time, in periods of drought, while his powers might be quite dreaded if he overly satisfied his people. There was no chasm of polarity between the "good gods and the bad ones." Jehovah and the Christian version of God brought about a direct conflict between the so-called forces of good and the socalled forces of evil by largely cutting out all of the intermediary gods, and therefore destroying the subtle psychological giveand- take that occurred between them-among them-and polarizing man's own view of his inner psychological reality. There were no schizophrenics in the time of the pagans, for the belief systems did not support that kind of interpretation. This does not mean that certain behavior did not occur that you would now call schizophrenic. It means that generally speaking such behavior fit within the psychological picture of reality. It [did so] because many of the behavior patterns associated, now, behavior patterns that are part and parcel of man's heritage, and that harken back to activities and abilities that at one time had precise social meaning, and served definite purposes. These include man's ability to identify with the forces of nature, to project portions of his own psychological reality outward from himself, and then to perceive those portions in a revitalized transformation-a transformation that then indeed can alter physical reality. The next natural step would be to reassimilate those portions of the self, to acknowledge their ancient origins and abilities, to return them so that they form a new coating, as it were, or a new version of selfhood. It is as if (pause) man could not understand his own potentials unless he projected them outward into a godhead, where he could see them in a kind of isolated pure form, recognize them for what they are, and then accept them-the potentials-as a part of his own psychological reality (all very intently). As a species, however, you have not taken the last step. Your idea of the devil represents the same kind of process, except that it stands for your idea of evil or darkness, or abilities that you are afraid of. They also stand for elements of your own potential. I am not speaking of evil possibilities, but that man must realize that he is responsible for his acts, whether they are called good or evIIT You make your own reality, Man's "evil" exists because of his misunderstanding of his own ideals, because of the gap that seems to exist between the ideal and its actualization. Evil actions, in other words, are the result of ignorance and misunderstanding. Evil is not a force in itself.

Some years ago, Ruburt had an experience in which he glimpsed in the center of the living room a strange form. He sensed that the form was composed of energy that was definitely predisposed to come to his assistance, or to do his bidding. He also realized that at least to some extent this energy had accumulated as a result of his own good intentions, and his desire to help others. He called this "Helper,"1 and he never saw the form clearly again. The form represented (long pause) the personified, accumulated positive energies that were working to his advantage at that time, that provided him protection, but that also automatically worked to the benefit of his life and projects. The very idea of protection, however, as you know, implies a threat-so if you believe in threats you had better have protection. It was not necessary for Ruburt to see the form again- merely to sense the reality of that powerful energy, and realize that it worked on his behalf. In a fashion the form also represented the innocent and powerful inner self, or spontaneous self, or naturally magical self-the terms are synonymous. advantage, and in that regard the form stood for the great power of natural, positive desire and thought patterns. (To me:) You have the same kind of "form." These represent the greater source-selves out of which your present persons spring. I told you that you possessed far more knowledge about your own lives, and the lives of others, than you were intellectually aware of.2 You act on that knowledge, for one thing, when you are born physically, when you grow. The squirrel acts on that kind of knowledge when it buries nuts-as you saw, again, on a recent TV program-and the squirrel's greater knowledge includes the knowledge of its species as well. Helper represents the part that possesses such knowledge. In practical terms, it is very important to understand that such knowledge and protection do exist, that all of your problems need not be solved through conscious reasoning alone- and, indeed, few problems can be solved exclusively (underlined) in that fashion. Your work is protected, not only because it is one of your projects, but also because in a fashion it becomes its own kind of entity-a well-intended one that exists in a rather concentrated form, distilled from your own best aspirations. Hence it is also filled with energy, and also becomes a collector of it. I do not want to become involved in a confusion of terms. The mind's powers are far greater than those generally assigned to rational thought alone, as per our last (private) sessions. Rational reasoning, overdone, can for example actually limit practical use of the intellect's faculties, and therefore serve to dim some of the mind's scope. In a fashion, again, Helper represents the true capacity of the mind's functioning, the kind of instant comprehension that is behind both the intuitions and the intellect's activities. You are dealing, then, with the spacious intellect, the knower. That k-n-o-w-e-r (spelled) is instantly aware of all your needs, and is the portion of the universe that is personally disposed in your direction, because its energies form your own person. That protection always couches your existence. It means that you live "in a state of grace."3 You can be unaware of that state. You can deny it or refuse it, but you are within it regardless. It forms the very fabric of your individual beings. Value nature, spontaneously, automatically seeks those conditions that are suited to its own fulfillment, and to the fulfillment of others. In the most basic of terms, no one's fulfillment can (underlined) be achieved at the expense of another's. Fulfillment does not happen that way. Your very lives seek the best directions for fulfillment. Our work seeks its own best directions for fulfillment. When you realize this, then you can accept seeming setbacks, or seeming contradictions, with a calm detached air, realizing that such factors appear as they do only in the light of your present intellectual knowledge-a knowledge that must be limited to current events-and that in the larger picture known to you at other levels, such seeming contradictions, or seemingly unfortunate situations, or whatever, will be seen to be to your advantage. You do not have all the facts, you see, at that intellectual level, so if you base all of your judgments-all of your judgments-at that level alone, then you can be quite shortsighted. We are dealing with the psychology of experience, however, so you yourselves alter the situation according to your own reactions. If you feel threatened by certain situations, and lacking protection, then you will take certain steps that might not be taken otherwise, so your actions are vastly different according to whether or not you realize that you are indeed being protected. If you build up feelings of threat, then at your level you also react to those. The protection exists, but in such cases you do not allow yourselves to take full advantage of it.

The ideas for inventions, tools or products exist mentally, to be brought into activation whenever they are required, say, by circumstances, or by the environment. Various tribes in different parts of the earth would suddenly begin using new tools, say, not because there might be any physical communication among them, or cultural exchanges, but because separate conditions in their own environments triggered mental processes that activated the particular images of the tools required for a given job at hand. The information, which was nonphysical, was then transformed into practical knowledge either from inner visual imagery by itself, or through the state of dreaming. Dreams have always served as such a connective. You know more about your life than you think you do-and far more about your life and society than you are intellectually aware of. Early man was in that same position, and his inventions-his tools, his artistry, and so forth-came into being from the inner, ever-present realm of the mind, triggered by his unconscious but quite real estimation of his position within the universe at large, and in regard to his own environment. In a fashion-and forgive me for using one of my favorite qualifications again-but in a fashion, cultures do not evolve in the kind of straightforward manner that is usually supposed. Of course, cultures change, but man instantly began to fashion culture, as for example beavers instantly began to form dams. They did not learn how to form dams through trial and error (humorously). They did not for untold centuries build faulty dams, for example. They were born, or created, dam makers. Man automatically began to form culture. He did not start with the rudiments of culture, as is thought. He did not learn (pause) through trial and error to think clear thoughts. He thought quite clearly from the beginning. He did learn through trial and error various ways of best translating those thoughts into physical action. The first cultures were as rich as your own. In your terms, reading and writing are great advantages, but it is also true that in the past the mind was also used to record information, and transmit it with an artistry that you do not now use. Memory was so perfected that men at one time were indeed living histories, and carried within their minds their genealogies and backgrounds and the knowledge of their peoples, which were then passed on to their children. It is true that reading and writing have certain advantages over such procedures, but it is also true that knowledge possessed in that old fashion became a part of a man, and a society, in a much more personal, meaningful manner. It was, of course, a different kind of knowing. At its best it did not lead to rote renditions of remembered material, but to dramatic renderings of it through music, poetry, dancing. In other words, its rendition was accompanied by creative physical expression. It is true that, practically speaking, a man's mind, or a woman's, could not hold all of the information available now in your world-but much of that information does not deal with basic knowledge about the universe or man's place within it. It is lifegiving. Man did not have to learn by trial and error what plants were beneficial to eat, and what herbs were good for healing. The knower in him knew that, and he acted on the information spontaneously. The knower is of course always present, but the part of your culture that is built upon the notion that no such inner knowledge exists, and those foolish ideas of rational thought as the only provider of answers, therefore often limit your own use of inner abilities. You will end up with, if all goes well, a kind of "new" illuminated consciousness, an intellect who realizes that the source of its own light is not itself, but comes from the spontaneous power that provides the fuel for its thoughts.

Now-master events, then, involve "work" or action whose main thrust exists outside of time, yet whose effects are felt within time. Such effects may (underlined) appear suddenly within time's context, rather than slowly emerge, say, into that framework. It is, of course, that kind of outside-of-time activity that in your terms explains the origin of your universe. There are dimensions of activity, then, that do not appear within time's structure, and developments that happen quite naturally, following different laws of development than those you recognize. It is not just that highly accelerated versions of time can occur at other levels of actuality (long pause), but that there are dimensions in which those [versions] are no impediments to the natural "flow" of events into expression. Your closest approximation will be, again, your experience with time in the dream state-or instances in which complicated problems are suddenly solved for you in dreams or in other before you. There are "durations," then, that have nothing to do with time as you understand it: psychological motions that manipulate time but are apart from it. Any sudden emergence of a completed universe would then imply an unimaginable and a spectacular development of organization-that it did not just appear from nowhere, but as the "completed physical version" of an inner highly concentrated endeavor, the physical manifestation of an inspiration that then suddenly emerges into physical actuality. That kind of activity, that kind of "work," exists behind all of the structures and organizations and experiences with which you are familiar. The world of ideas everywhere permeates physical reality, but ideas, even when they are unexpressed, possess their own organizations, correspondences, their own spheres of motion and development. Master events emerge from that reality of idea, now, from which all ideas originate, uniting these through the use of natural correspondences. Every physical manifestation that you know has its nonphysical counterpart, in which it is always couched, from which it came, and to which it will return. Your historical time is, say, but one species of time that dwells upon the earth. There are many others. Time itself emerges from idea, which is itself timeless (long pause), so in those terms there was no point where time began, though such a reference becomes necessary from your own viewpoint. It is probably almost impossible for man to see that he forms the idea of historical context through his own associations and focuses. The heavy, specialized use of socalled rational thought has often caused him to narrow even his neurological recognition of other kinds of experience that might enlarge his view. In dreams there is greater leeway in that regard. Consciousness becomes more familiar with its own inner motion, and even with the kinds of work and actions it performs outside of its usual waking prejudices. The story of the Creation, as Biblically stated, is the symbolic representation of a master event-a legend that became its own event, of course, forming about it whole arts and cultures, religions and disciplines. The same applies to Christianity itself, for all of the seemingly historical events connected with the official (underlined) Christ did not happen in physical reality. They happened at another level of actuality, and were inserted into your time framework-touching a character here, a definitely known historical event there, mixing and merging with the events of the time, until the two lines of activity were so entwined that you could not unravel one without unraveling the other (all very intently). History happened in certain definite forms because of a belief in events that did not, in your world of facts, occur. The main, brilliant thrust of those inner events, therefore, splashed out upon the human landscape, propelling peoples and civilizations. The Christ story in the beginning was not nearly as singular and neat as it might now seem, for the finally established official Christ figure was one settled upon from endless versions of a god-man, with which man's psyche has long been involved: He was the psychic composite, the official Christ, carrying within his psychological personage echoes of old and new gods alike-a figure barely begun, comma, to be filled out in time, although originating outside of it (again, all very intently). ~ Such master events cause (underlined) physical events, but they do not emerge originally from them {all repeated as given, and once more very intently. Paul (Saul of Tarsus) had his vision. Now the vision (in which Paul not only saw the light of Christ, but heard his voice) happened in the world of fact. It occurred-but Paul did not see, or communicate with (long pause), a person of divine heritage, sent by his father to earth, who lived the life of the official Christ, and who was crucified. Paul had a vision in response to the needs, desires, and dictates of his own psyche as it was connected to the world of his time, following the patterns of stories about Christ that he had heard that had begun to release within him a great yearning that was, in that vision, then, expressed.4 Christianity for many centuries served as an amazingly creative organizational framework, that expressed the vast complexity of the soul's reality. It also in its way managed to even focus some of man's less handsome attributes toward ends that were less reprehensible than in the past. Master events of that particular nature bring about a completely new interpretation of historic events. Their intensity, power, and seemingly impelling are drawn from the psyche's deepest resources.

Time overlays are versions of master events, in that they occur in such a fashion that one "face" of an overall event may appear in one time, one in another, and so forth. Time overlays are the time versions of certain events, then. These time overlays always exist. (Pause.) They may become activated, however, by certain associations made in your present, and therefore draw into your present time some glimpses either from the future or the past. So-called present time is thickened, then, by a psychological realization on deep levels of the psyche that all events are interrelated, and that the reincarnational experiences of any given individual provide a rich source of experience from which each person at least unconsciously draws. Such usually unconscious knowledge is of great benefit to the species itself, so that at certain levels, at least, the knowledge of the species is not imprisoned within any given generation at once, but flows or circulates within the overall larger reincarnational picture. Probabilities are very much involved here, of course, and it is easier for particular events to fall within one time sequence than another. I do not want you to feel that you are fated to experience certain events, however, for that is not the case. There will be "offshoots" of the events of your own lives, however, that may appear as overlays in your other reincarnational existences. There are certain points where such events are closer to you than others, in which mental associations at any given time may put you in correspondence2 0 with other events of a similar nature in some future or past incarnation, however. It is truer to say that those similar events are instead time versions of one larger event. As a rule you experience only one time version of any given action. Certainly it is easy to see how a birthday or anniversary, or particular symbol or object, might serve as an associative connection, rousing within you memories of issues or actions that might have happened under similar circumstances in other times. Actually, that kind of psychological behavior represents the backbone of social organization as far as the species is concerned, and it is the usually hidden but definite past and future memories of reincarnational relationships that cement social organizations, from small tribes to large governments. To a certain extent, of course, you have been or will be each related to the other. In that light all of the events of time rub elbows together. You brush against the elbow of a future or past event every moment of your lives. In the culture that you know, such information remains hidden from you. Your main belief systems lead you to feel that your present life is singular, unsupported by any knowledge of prior experience with existence, and fated to be cut off or deadended without a future. Instead, you always carry the inner knowledge of innumerable available futures (emphatically). Your emotional life at certain levels is enriched by the unconscious realization that those who love you from past or future are connected to you by special ties that add to your emotional heritage and support. As many have supposed, particularly in fiction, love relationships do indeed survive time, and they put you in a special correspondence. Even if you were aware of reincarnational existences, your present psychological behavior would not be threat ened but retain its prominence-for only within certain space and time intersections can physical actions occur. The more or less general acceptance of the theory of reincarnation, however, would automatically alter your social systems, add to the richness of experience, and in particular insert a fresh feeling for the future, so that you did not feel your lives dead-ended. Earlier I mentioned several times that we must reach a point at which you are able to see around the corner of seemingly contradictory material,2 1 and this is one of those occasions. (Long pause.) Time overlays present you with a picture in which you have free will-yet each event that you choose will have its own time version. Now those time versions may be entirely different one from the others, and while you certainly initiate your own time version, in terms of usual understanding there is no true place or time in which that version can be said to actually originate. Such a time version suggests an occurrence in time, of course, and yet the event may leave only a ghostly track, so to speak, being hardly manifest, while in another life the time version may be of considerable prominence-while in your own experience it represents a fairly trivial incident of an ordinary afternoon. The inner core of events, however, is held together by just that kind of activity. You are at every hand provided an unending source of probable events from past and future, from which to compose the events of your lives and society. Again, let me remind you that all time exists simultaneously. In an experience last evening in the dream state, Ruburt received fresh evidence by viewing for himself portions of two other lives-merely snatches of environment, but so dearly filled with precious belongings and loved ones, so alive with immediacy- that he was shocked to realize that the full dimensions of existence could continue so completely in such detail and depth at the same time as his present life. It seemed that he could step from any one such existence to the other as you might walk from one room to the other, and he knew that at other levels of the psyche this was indeed possible- and, of course, at other levels of the psyche those psychological doors are open. Ruburt has had partic because as it is usually described, it seemed that people used it to blame as the source of current misfortune, or as an excuse for personal behavior whose nature they did not otherwise understand, and it has been so maligned. Its reality, however, serves to generate activity throughout time's framework as you understand it, to unite the species, to reinforce structures of knowledge, to transmit information, and perhaps most of all to reinforce relationships involving love, brotherhood, and cooperation between generations of men and women that would otherwise be quite separate and apart from each other. Through such relationships, for example, say, the cavemen and the people of the 22nd century rub elbows, where in strict terms of time the species would seem to be quite disconnected from its "earlier" or "later" counterparts. Through such behavior the overall value fulfillment purposes and intents of the species are kept in focus, and those necessary requirements then planted in whatever space or time [is] required. Again, free will still operates in all such ventures. Now while it seems that your world contains more and more information all the time, your particular brand of science is a relatively narrow one, in that it accepts as valid only certain specific areas of speculation. The areas outside of its boundaries become taboo, so that the realm of the unknown is no longer the material universe or the mysteries of space, but the interior universe and the mysteries of the mind as these are experienced or suspected to exist outside of those official areas. To that degree, the unknown is more feared by science than it ever was by religion. Religion was hampered-and is-by its own interpretation of good and evil, but it did not deny the existence of other versions of consciousness, or differing kinds of psychological activity and life. Reincarnation suggests, of course, the extension of personal existence beyond one time period, independently of one bodily form, the translation or transmission of intelligence through nonphysical frameworks, and implies psychological behavior, memory and desire as purposeful action without the substance of any physical mechanism-propositions that science at its present stage of development simply could not buy, and for which it could find no evidence, for its methods would automatically preclude the type of experience that such evidence would require. People can become quite frightened, then, of any kind of experiences of a personal nature that imply reincarnational life, for they are then faced with the taboos of science, or perhaps by the distorted explanations of some religions or cults. You therefore protect yourselves from many quite natural upthrusts that would on their own give you experience with your own reincarnational existences, and you are often denied psychological comfort in times of stress that you might otherwise receive. I do not necessarily mean that full-blown pictures of other existences would necessarily come into your mind, but that in one way or another you would receive a support or change of mood as those loved by you in other lives [in] one way or another sensed your need and responded. The entire nature of events, then, exists in a different way than you have supposed, only small portions slicing into the reality that you recognize-yet all underneath connected to a vast psychological activity. You might compare events to psychological consonants that underlay or underlie the more unusual features of physical psychological environment. Again, master events are those that most significantly affect your system of reality, even though the original action was not physical but took place in the inner dimension. Most events appear both in time and out of it, their action distributed between an inner and outer field of expression. Usually you are aware only of events' exterior cores. The inner processes escape you. Those inner processes, however, also give many clues as to some native abilities that you have used "in the past" as a species. Those inner processes do sometimes emerge, then. Here is an example. One morning last weekend (Saturday) Ruburt found himself suddenly and vividly thinking about some married friends. They lived out of town, separated in time by a drive of approximately [half an hour]. Ruburt found himself wishing that the friends lived closer, and he was suddenly filled with a desire to see them. He imagined the couple at the house, and surprised himself by thinking that he might indeed call them later in the day and invite them down for the evening, even though he and Joseph had both decided against guests that weekend. Furthermore, Ruburt did not like the idea of making an invitation on such short notice. Then he became aware that those particular thoughts were intrusive, completely out of context with his immediately previous ones, for only a moment or so earlier he had been congratulating himself precisely because he had made no plans for the day or evening at all that would involve guests or other such activities. Very shortly he forgot the entire affair. Then, however, about fifteen minutes later he found the same ideas returning, this time more insistently. They lasted perhaps five minutes. Ruburt noticed them and forgot them once again. This time, however, he decided not to call his friends, and he went about his business. In about a half hour the same mental activity returned, and, finding himself struck by this, Ruburt mentioned the episode to Joseph and again cast it from his mind. By this time it was somewhat later in the day. Ruburt and Joseph ate lunch, and the mail arrived. There was a letter written the morning before (on Friday) by the same friends that had (on Saturday), and specifically asked if they could visit that same afternoon. From the way the letter was written, it seemed as if the friends-call them Peter and Polly-had already started on their journey that (Saturday) morning, and would stop in Elmira on their return much later toward evening. There was no time to answer the letter, of course. Peter and Polly would be on the road, it seemed, unreachable by phone, though they had included the number of their answering service, and had also written that they would call before leaving-yet no such call had been received. It would be simple enough, of course, to ascribe Ruburt's thoughts and feelings to mere coincidence. He remembered the vividness of his feelings at the time, however. It looked as if Peter and Polly were indeed going to arrive almost as if Ruburt had in fact called and invited them. That evening the visit did take place. Actually, some work had prevented the couple from leaving when they intended. Instead, they called later from their home to say that they were just beginning their trip, and would stop on their way. Ruburt was well prepared for the call by then, and for the visit. Now the visit and Ruburt's earlier feelings and thoughts were part of the same event, except that his subjective experience gave him clues as to the inner processes by which all events take place. More is involved than the simple question: Did he perceive the visit precognitively? More is involved than the question: Did he perceive his information directly from the minds of his friends, or from the letter itself, which had already been mailed, of course, and was on its way to Ruburt at the time? What you have is a kind of inner backbone of perception-a backup program, so to speak, an inner perceptive mechanism with its own precise psychological tuner that in one way or another operates within the field of your intent. This is somewhat like remote sensing, or like an interior (pause) radar equipment that operates in a psychological field of attention, so that you are somewhat aware of the existence of certain events that concern you as they come into the closer range of probabilities with which you are connected. In a certain fashion you "step into the event" at that level. You accept or reject it as a probability. You make certain adjust become part of the inner processes-affecting, say, the shape or size or nature of the event before it becomes a definite physical actuality. For centuries that is the main way in which man dealt with the events of his life or tribe or village.3 Your modern methods of communication are in fact modeled after your inner ones. Ruburt's thoughts almost (underlined) blended in enough to go relatively unnoticed. They were almost (underlined) innocuous enough to be later accepted as coincidence. They did have, however, an extra intentness and vitality and peculiar insistence- qualities that he has learned are indicative (pause) of unusual psychological activity. The point is that in most such cases the subjective recognition of an approaching event flows so easily and transparently into your attention, and fits in so smoothly with the events of the day, as to go unnoticed. You help mold the nature and shape of events without realizing it, overlooking those occasions when the processes might show themselves. When they do, you might question: Could it be possible that you really were perceiving an action ahead of time? Later, some people more stubborn than others might try to "prove" that some events are definitely precognitively perceived-but the point is that all events are precognitively perceived (intently), and that you actually step into an event, become part of it, reject it, accept the certain version you have "picked up," or exert yourself to make certain changes that affect the nature of the event itself. Even the conscious mind contains much more information about the structure of events than you realize you possess. The physical perceiving apparatuses of all organizations carry their own kinds of inner systems of communication, allowing events to be manipulated on a worldwide basis before they take on what appears to be their final definitive physical occurrences in time and space. Individually and globewide, value fulfillment is in a fashion the purpose of all events. (Long pause.) Value fulfillment, again, is the impetus that drives the wheels of nature, so to speak. As the origin of your world did indeed emerge from the "world of dreams," so the true root of all events lie in such subjective activities, and the answers to individual challenges and problems are always within your grasp, ready to appear in physical actuality! In the next chapter I hope to show you the importance of value fulfillment in your own life, and give you clues that will allow you to take better advantage of your own subjective and objective opportunities for such development.

Man explored the physical world in the dreaming state long before he explored it physically. Such dreams gave him the assurance that other lands existed outside of his own, and spurred him onward into those physical expeditions in which the species has always taken a particular delight. A man or woman might [be] while dreaming suddenly in strange territory, looking at the sky from a different viewpoint, with, say, a familiar river nowhere in sight, and with a mountain where ordinarily a plain might be. This was in a way as startling an experience as it would be to you to find yourselves on some distant planet. (You do, for that matter, explore space in the same fashion, and on at least some occasions your own "visitors from outer space" are dream travelers from other dimensions of reality. Period.) In such a fashion man learned the location of the oceans upon the earth-or at least was given the assurance that such large bodies of water existed, along with clues as to their locations, and the placement of the stars overhead. Also in the same manner dreams were an aid in navigation, so that they served to let sailors know when land was near before it could be physically perceived-and there is no human activity to which dreams and group dreams have not contributed. They were of great aid, of course, in human politics, so that through dreams the intents of tribal leaders, say, were known to the others. Some people within the tribe specialized in such dreams, and again, dream content was and is directed by the individual intents, purposes and interests of the dreamer. In a certain manner dreaming, then, helped sharpen such individual tendencies while still directing them toward the public value fulfillment. The person interested most in herbs and plant life would also find that nightly dreams mirrored that daytime preoccupation, so that nightly dream excursions might find the dreamer examining strange herbs in another location than the native one. Or he might be given knowledge as to how the herbs could best be used for healing purposes. People are natural mimics, as are some animals and birds, so when tribal members related their dreams, they did not just tell them but acted them out with great mobility, carefully mimicking whatever animals or people or elements of land they may have encountered. The origins of drama began in just that fashion. Tribal leaders were usually chosen only after long "dream investigations," in which the new leader's name cropped up, say, time and time again in the people's dreams. They expected to receive counsel from their dreams. Such information was then aired and shared, studied and examined along with all physical considerations that applied before important decisions were made (all intently). You do still continue such activity, again, [although] you have turned your conscious minds away from those directions. Most of it does not become conscious because you do not want it to. In some areas, however, with the acceleration of physical travel, certain kinds of dreams (long pause) have become more highly pertinent. Families in your society are often broken up, parents and children living quite apart in other portions of the country or in different countries entirely, so dreams that connect you with such relatives have risen to the fore, so to speak. People often keep track of changes in hometowns that they may not have visited for twenty years except in the dream state, when they familiarize themselves with the alterations that have happened, visit beloved streets and houses, or view old classmates. Very few people make any attempt to check out such information in physical terms. There is an entire global dream network, in other words, that goes quite unrecognized-one of spectacular organization in which exchanges of information occur that give you the basis for the formation of recognized physical events. If small families kept track of their own family dreams, for example, they could discover unsuspected correlations and sense the interplay of subjective and objective drama with which they are always psychologically involved. Notice what kind of information you seek out from the newspapers, for example. Do you read the front page and ignore sports, or vice versa? Do you read the gossip column? The obituary? Do you seek out stories of lurid crime, or look for further incidents of political chicanery? The answers will show you the kind of material you look for most often. You will to some extent specialize in the same kind of information when you dream. You will organize the contents of your mind and the information available to you according to your own intents and purposes. One person's dreams, therefore, while his or her own, will still fit into an important notch in the dreams of a given family. One person might, because of his or her own interests, seek largely from dreams warnings of difficulty or trouble, and therefore be the family's dream watchguard-the one who has, say, the nightmares for everyone else. That person will also serve a somewhat similar role in the waking state, as a member of a family. The question in such instances is the reason for such a person's overconcern and alarm in the first place-why the intense interest in such possible catastrophes, or in crime or whatever?-and the answer lies in an examination of the person's feelings and beliefs about the nature of existence itself. As far as group dreaming is concerned, however, there are still some people who have always served as watchdogs in that regard, while others even in the dream state operate as healers or teachers or explorers or whatever. There is no craft that was not first conceived of by an individual dreamer, who later transferred it to the social world of activity. In the dreaming state, then, the needs and desires of families, communities and countries are well known. The dream state serves as a rich source for the world's knowledge, and is also therefore responsible for the outgrowth of its technology. This is a highly important point, for "the technological world out there" was at one time the world of dreams. The discoveries and inventions that made the industrial world possible were always latent in man's mind, and represented an inner glittering landscape of dreams-the intuitive and the conscious manipulation of material that was at one time latent. Value fulfillment will always provide inner directions that remind man constantly of the best ways in which such technology can be used. The need to possess such knowledge is uppermost in man's mind now, and so it also becomes a vital dream topic or subject. In the dream state, then, to one extent or another man seeks solutions to the problems of his age.

Dreams occur at so many levels of reality that it is quite impossible to describe their true scope. For one thing, that scope includes levels that are consciously unknown to you. (Long pause.) Dreams serve as backup systems also, for example, in the important communications between various peoples or nations-and, particularly when physical communication is cut off between such groups, dreams provide the continuation of information's flow from one part of the species to another. There are dreams of different import, some triggered genetically, that serve as sparks for particular kinds of behavior- dreams, in other words, that literally span the centuries in that regard, coiled latently in the very chromosomes; and no level of consciousness is without some kind of participation in dream states. In that regard even electrons, for example, dream. Dreaming touches upon both microscopic and macroscopic events, or realities, and is not simply a human characteristic, appropriately appearing within your own range or within your own species. It is instead one area of subjective experience that is everywhere prevailing within the universe. As I have mentioned many times, animals then dream, as do plants, insects, and all forms of life. All molecular constructions exhibit that certain kind of introspective activity, as if the inner working of some giant computer was intimately in touch not only with its own programming and the probabilities connected with it, but with a deep psychological awareness of the activities of the electrons and various visible and invisible particles that form its own physical construction. You are bound to have, then, many larger dream formations that can only be called group dreams-subjective events in which your own dreams happen, and in which your own dreams take part. You expect all of the elements of the certain kind of permanency and order. It should be no surprise, then, that this same kind of "fitting together" includes subjective life also-or that, say, your private dreams are also fragments in a vaster dream reality. They are as important to the operation of that reality as electrons are to your physical one (long pause), providing inner pathways for the accumulation of wisdom and pleasure. There are certain kinds of dreams in which the various species then communicate, and in which the energies of the environment and its inhabitants merge. These include a kind of horizontal psychological extension, the translation of one kind of dream into another kind-the transference of information from one system to another, in which the symbols themselves come alive. I can only hope to evoke some feeling within you that is reminiscent of your own actual behavior at those hidden levels of dreaming activity, but they have remained highly pertinent in the development of all species with their environments, keeping the intents and purposes of one alive in the other. I have told you that in actuality, now, no genetic knowledge is gone from the earth. It does not vanish. It is retained in latent form within a kind of backup system, so that in terms of probabilities each species carries within its own genetic patterns the blueprints and specializations of each other's genetic sequence. Those sequences follow the pursuits of value fulfillment so smoothly that they can be reactivated whenever the conditions are fortunate-for even the animals are not concerned with simple survival alone, nor the plants, but with what I can only call (long pause) emotional qualities: qualities that seek a full appreciation and creative extension of those conditions of consciousness that stamp each species as itself and yet join it with all others. In a fashion your own dreams operate or appear as electrons in other realities. That is, they change their form, their subjective force or direction, and become part of the working mechanics of the universe. The same applies to your own thoughts. They are not "wasted" after you have thought them (with humor), or simply discarded. They do not become extinct either, but go on to serve other functions in the universe than those with which you are presently aware. This all involves a lush multitudinous creativity. The pleasure principle can probably be likened most to the latent appreciation of beauty that is everywhere apparent if you look for it: the ecstasy of each form of life for the wonders of its own existence, in which love's values go beyond themselves, and yet a condition in which each species or life form "realizes" that its own fulfillment adds immeasurably to the existence of all other forms.

The same curious mixture of nonpredictable and predictable activity operates in genetic patterning also, in which the genetic systems are largely set up to achieve the retention of specific characteristics, and yet can also demonstrate behavior that seems (underlined) to be genetically unfaithful, distorted, or to introduce alterations that might appear to be travesties upon genetic integrity. Those odd genetic happenings, however, as I have tried to explain, often provide a resiliency and a widening of probabilities that are most necessary for overall genetic balance. Dream actions can indeed-and often do-affect genetic alterations, acting as triggers for altered cellular action. There is a give-andtake between the seemingly separate mental and physical aspects of your lives at every level of experience, and at every level within nature's seeming boundaries. There are decisions in which each individual plays a part that are made in fields of activity that you usually do not even realize exist. Period. Do you have that sentence? The people of a nation can at any given moment decide to activate or experience a particular event almost entirely in the physical realm, or to separate its elements in such a way that half of it is experienced physically and the other half in dream reality. Transformations of energy occur of course constantly, so that, say, a probable physical storm can instead appear as an economic one. It can appear as an emotional storm on the part of large numbers of people. It can instead appear as a series, say, of frightening dreams. Period. At each point of its existence such an event can weave in and out of such manifestations, largely dissipating itself. Period. An adverse physical situation, such as an illness, may turn into "a frightening dream," yet in all such cases the necessary standards of self-integrity are maintained. The same alterations apply of course for fortunate events, which may be experienced through full physical expression, or through a series of manifestations that might also involve social or economic happenings, or the occurrence of splendid weather conditions, dash-the insertion of excellent, almost perfect summerlike days, or whatever. The predictable and nonpredictable serve, then, to form the boundaries of physical experience. The more open you are to such ideas the greater the flow of your experience can be. As Ruburt himself often mentioned in his own book, The God of Jane, you should never accept as fact a theory that contradicts (underlined) your own experience. Man's experience (underlined) includes, for example, all kinds of behavior for which science has no answers. That is well and good. Science cannot be blamed for saying that its methods are not conducive to the study of this or that area of experience-but science should at least be rapped on the knuckles smartly if it automatically rejects such behavior as valid, legitimate or real, or when it attempts to place such events outside of the realm of actuality. Science can justly be reprimanded when it tries to pretend that man's experience (underlined) is limited to those events that science can explain. It is instead, of course, quite possible that your predictable world exists not in spite of but because of those surprising, unpredictable, unofficial occurrences. Period. There is a kind of larger spontaneous order of which the seemingly unpredictable elements of your world provide their own clues. By taking notice of seemingly unpredictable events, by changing your focus, you can indeed begin to sense the larger patterns of such a reality. And that reality leaves many traces in your own experience. It everywhere provides hints and clues as to its own actual that have not been given any official recognition. Within the patterns of human experience, then, lies evidence of man's greater ability: He rubs shoulders with his own deeper understanding whenever he remembers, say, a precognitive dream, an out-of-body-whenever he feels the intrusion or infusion of knowledge into his mind from other than physical sources. Such a creature could not be the puppet of a genetic engineering accidentally manufactured in a universe that was itself meaningless. Period. If man paid more attention to his own subjective behavior, to those feelings of identification with nature that persistently arise, then half of the dictates of both the evolutionists and the creationists would automatically fall away, for they would appear nonsensical.4 It is not a matter of outlining a whole new series of methods that will allow you to increase your psychic abilities, or to remember your dreams, or to perform out-of-body gymnastics. It is rather a question or a matter of completely altering your approach to life, so that you no longer block out such natural spontaneous activity.

The entire picture of physical life as you understand it must be of course experienced from your own viewpoint, but its complexity, its order and magnificence of structure and design should be understood as composing but one example of the infinite number of realities, each constructed by the propensities and characteristics of its own nature and the nature of its own consciousness. The word "unconscious" is in a fashion meaningless. There are endless versions [of consciousness], of course, with their own worlds, forming organizations of meaning and purpose. Some of these mingle with your own and vice versa. The "inner structure" is one of consciousness, and the deeper questions can eventually only be approached by granting the existence of inner references. The nature of time, questions concerning the beginning or ending of the universe-these cannot be approached with any certainty by studying life's exterior conditions, for the physical references themselves are merely the manifestations of inner psychological activity. You are aware of the universe only insofar as it impinges upon your perception. What lies outside of that perception remains unknown to you. It seems to you, then, that the world began-or must have begun- at some point in the past1 (a one-minute pause at 9:18), but that is like supposing that one piece of a cake is the whole cake, which was baked in one oven and consumed perhaps in an afternoon. The inner references of reality involve a different kind of experience entirely, with organizational patterns that mix and merge at every conceivable point. You tune your consciousness while you sleep as one might tune a piano, so that in waking reality, it clearly perceives the proper notes and values that build up into physical experience. Those inner fields of reference in which you have your existence are completely changing themselves as your experience is added to them, and your own (long pause) identity was couched in those references before birth as you understand it. - You are one conscious version of yourself, creating along with all of your contemporaries the realities of the times. When I use the term "contemporaries," I refer to all of the species. You read your consciousness in certain fashions, but it is quite possible to read the consciousness of the world in other ways also. If you read it sideways, so to speak, you would still end up with an orderly universe, but one in which the nature of identity would be read completely differently, stressing adjacent subjective communications of a conscious kind that form other kinds or patterns of subjectivity and psychological continuity. These result in the formation of "personalities" or entities who are aware of their own identities by following different pathways than your own, while also in their way contributing to the formation of your universe even as you do. (Very slowly.) Your numbering of the species is highly capricious. Again, you recognize as alive only those varieties of life that fall within certain ranges of attention. You objectify and diversify. The lines drawn between the self and what is nonself, between an organism and its environment, are highly arbitrary on your part. There are psychological patterns, therefore, that completely escape your notice because they do not follow the conventions that you have established. These combine what you diversify, so that you have hidden psychological values or psychological beings that combine the properties of the environment and the properties of selfhood in other combinations than those you know. They would seem to be the spirits of nature,2 as you would be more or less bound to interpret them from your viewpoint. They would certainly be psychological relatives, but with their own time schemes, languages, and psychological affiliations. These do exist along with the kinds of consciousness that you recognize within the structure of physical life. When you dream, however, you often come in contact with these cousins of consciousness. It is not simply that they communicate with you, or you with them, so much as it is that in sleep the conventional properties that you have learned are somewhat loosened and abandoned. You see "the lights around the corner," so to speak. You see a species of consciousness, a species that must remain unexplained in any normal explanations of evolution, and these hint at the communications that exist at all levels (intently), protecting not only the genetic references necessary to your own kind, but the com- binations of other forms of organization that exist adjacent to your own, yet connected to them. You have often misread such references, and many of your legends of good and evil spirits, monsters and strange varieties of artificial creatures, appear in folklore. At one time, however, you encountered such other formations in a different light, of course, seeing many similarities between their behavior and yours-certain characteristic ways of perceiving at least some experience that elicited your response and recognition. At one time, then, you were more open in a fashion to the kinds of consciousness that you admitted into your circle of reality. At one time, in those terms, you did not draw the lines as finely as you do now. Instead you included such cousins of consciousness into your midst, accepting a kind of comradeship- for to some extent at least you could see the different versions of humanity that resulted from a change of focus, an adjacent affiliation of humanized energy with the environment. Quite simply, you felt that in certain terms you had other brothers and sisters in the world that were like you but unlike you, that put together the contents of the universe in their own fashions. Such species, of course, can nowhere appear within the dictates of evolution or be perceived as realities except under those conditions when you relax your usual conventions of perception and behavior. Nevertheless, encounters between you occur frequently- in the dream state as stated, in alterations of your usual focus, and in your arts, where you are less arbitrary in your definitions. As you began to bring your own physical reality into harder, clearer focus, you stopped with your own view of human consciousness, shutting off completely and rather arbitrarily those other elements in order to more clearly frame and define the boundaries of physical order. It seems to you now that such personalities (long pause) are not physically perceivable, but at one time you could bring them into the range of your perception. You ended your classifications where you did, however, preferring to see man as the king of intelligence. This meant that you abruptly drew the line where it now seems it must have been drawn. You continued that companionship, however, at other levels of activity, levels that are still open and that must be taken into consideration whenever we approach any discussion of dreaming and the dreaming world.

I have not given you a multitude of methods or suggestions, telling you how to decipher or understand your own dreams, though I have mentioned such topics often in this book and others. I have not given you complicated methods concerning out-ofbody travel, and yet all of our books, by changing your attitudes, will help you bring about changes in yourselves that will automatically enhance such activities. They will begin to take their natural places within your world. No methods will help you otherwise. I do not want you to think that the answers to your questions lie prepackaged in the dream state, either, relatively inaccessible except to those (long pause) who possess unique talents or some secretive knowledge of the world of the occult. Many people, long before the time of printing or reading, learned to read nature very well, to observe the seasons, to feel out "the seasons of the soul." The answers, therefore, lie as close as your own back-door steps, for at the thresholds of your beings you automatically stand in the center of knowledge. You are never at the periphery of events. Regardless of your circumstances, your condition in life, your training or your aptitudes, at your own threshold you stand at the center of all realities-for at your center all existences intersect. You are everywhere part of them, and they are of you. Each portion of the universe carries the knowledge of all other parts, and each point of a reality is (underlined) that reality's center. You are, then, centered in the universe. Again, even your dreams and thoughts go out to help form new worlds. Such considerations should naturally spark within you far vaster and yet far more intimate insights-insights in whose light the hazy rhetoric of speakers within each of you can rise to the surface of ordinary consciousness without being considered blabbermouths or mad men and women, or fools, without having to distort their information simply to bring it to your attention. The speakers are those inner voices that first taught you physical languages. You could be equally correct in calling them the voices of electrons or the voices of the gods, for each is a representation of All That Is, overflowing like a fountain both with knowledge and with love. When you stand at your physical doorstep you look inward at an incredible glowing psychological venture. I am not using symbols in such statements, and hidden within them are important homey clues. Period. Each spoon that you touch, each flower that you rearrange, each syllable that you speak, each room you attend to, automatically brings you in touch with your natural feeling for the universe-for each object, however 'homey or mundane, is alive with changes and comprehension. I do not, therefore, want you to concentrate your efforts in memorizing methods of perceiving other realities, but to realize that such insights are everywhere within your grasp. If you understand that, then you will rearrange the organization of your own thoughts quite by yourself. You will begin to read your own thoughts as easily as you now read a book. It is far more important to read your own thoughts than it is to learn to read the thoughts of others, for when your own feelings are known to you, you easily see that all other feelings are also reflected in your own. When you look away from the world you are looking at it more closely. When you read sentences like the last one you are somewhat freeing your own minds, opening greater organizations. Your life is one dream that you are remembering. You are remembering it and creating it at once, watching it grow from the attention of your own love and knowledge, and as you seem to stand at its center, so you stand at the center of all of your dreams, which tEen spin themselves seemingly outward. Your physical universe began, again, then, from a dreaming center.

You have lived in a world in which you believed you must struggle to survive-and so you have struggled. You have believed that the natural contours of nature were somehow antagonistic to your own existence, so that left in the hands of nature alone you would lose your way. You have believed that in the very framework of your psychology. In your experiences, therefore, all of these things have largely proven true. Nothing taught that you were creatures. I have been trying to lead you into a new threshold of perception, where the old myths of evolution can be seen as outmoded, ancient or forsaken castles amid a forest of beliefs-a forest that is indeed itself a magically formed one. (Very long pause.) The forest is the world of your imagination, surely, the imagination of your minds, and yet given force and power by the innate creativity that rises up from an inner world that represents much more truly the origins of man and beast. That world has been largely hidden by the camouflages shed by science and religion alike, but in your times the landscape began to appear so dark and threatening, so for bidden and alien to your own desires, that its end seemed all the more inevitable and swift. I hope I have given you in this book a far more gallant and true picture, that represents the origin of your life, structure and being and thought. The inner world of reality, the world of dreams, presents a model of existence in which new energy, vitality, and being is everywhere apparent, ready to come forward to form new transformations, new combinations of energy and desire. That inner psychological universe is a psychic gestalt, propelled, formed, sustained or driven by value fulfillment, love and desire, by the loving values that have no limit (intently). The universe does not give up on itself, or on any of its creatures. It is ruled by a different set of principles, a different set of values, and by inner cooperative exuberance. You may need some time before the old beliefs become less prominent, and finally fall into their proper decay-a decay, incidentally, that does indeed have its own kind of majesty, energy, and beauty. But the inner natural leanings of all of consciousness within the realms of your being now yearn for constructive change, clearer vision, to experience again their inherent sense of corporal spirituality, physical and psychic grace. They want to sense again the effortless motion that is their natural birthright. I hope that this book to some extent or another puts each of you in touch with your own inner psychological motion, your creative breath, so that you are invigorated and sense within your own minds and spirit a new promise, a new intent, and the exhilaration of earthly and spiritual strength. You dwell in a state of natural grace that is quite alive and vital whether or not science decrees that consciousness possesses its own intent. Nature is supernatural all the while, of course.

End of chapter. End of session. End of book.