Monday, December 01, 2008
PROBABILITIES, THE NATURE OF GOOD AND EVIL, AND RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM
Development is therefore considered in a one-line direction only, in Christian terms. Seldom, for example, is it thought of in horizontal terms. The idea of evolution in its popular meaning promulgated this theory, as through gradual progression in a one-line direction, man emerged from the ape. Christ could just as well have disappeared sideways.
The inner reality of the message was told in terms that man at the time could understand, in line with his root assumptions. Development unfolds in all directions. The soul is not ascending a series of stairs, each one representing a new and higher point of development.
Instead, the soul stands at the center of itself, exploring, extending its capacities in all directions at once, involved in issues of creativity, each one highly legitimate. The probable system of reality opens up the nature of the soul to you. It should change current religion's ideas considerably. For this reason, the nature of good and evil is a highly important point.
On the one hand, quite simply and in a way that you cannot presently understand, evil does not exist. However, you are obviously confronted with what seem to be quite evil effects. Now it has been said often that there is a god, so there must be a devil - or if there is good, there must be evil. This is like saying that because an apple has a top, it must have a bottom - but without any understanding of the fact that both are a portion of the apple.
We go back to our fundamentals: You create reality through your feelings, thoughts, and mental actions. Some of these are physically materialized, others are actualized in probable systems. You are presented with an endless series of choices, it seems, at any point, some more or less favorable than others.
You must understand that each mental act is a reality for which you are responsible. That is what you are in this particular system of reality for. As long as you believe in a devil, for example, you will create one that is real enough for you, and for the others who continue to create him.
Because of the energy he is given by others, he will have a certain consciousness of his own, but such a mock devil has no power or reality to those who do not believe in his existence, and who do not give him energy through their belief. He is, in other words, a superlative hallucination As mentioned earlier, those who believe in a hell and assign themselves to it through their belief can indeed experience one, but certainly in nothing like eternal terms. No soul is forever ignorant.
Now those who have such beliefs actually lack a necessary deep trust in the nature of consciousness, of the soul, and of All That Is. They concentrate upon not what they think of as the power of good, but fearfully upon what they think of as the power of evil.
The hallucination is created, therefore, out of fear and of restriction. The devil idea is merely the mass projection of certain fears - mass in that it is produced by many people, but also limited in that there have always been those who rejected this principle.
Some very old religions understood the hallucinatory nature of the devil concept, but even in Egyptian times, the simpler and more distorted ideas became prevalent, particularly with the masses of people. In some ways, men in those times could not understand the concept of a god without the concept of a devil.
Storms, for example, are highly creative natural events, though they can also cause destruction. Early man could see only the destruction. Some intuitively understood that any effects are creative, despite their appearances, but few could convince their fellow men.
The light-and-darkness contrast presents us with the same kind of picture. The good was seen as light, for men felt safer in the day. The evil was therefore assigned to nightfall. Within the mass of distortions, however, hidden beneath the dogma there was always a hint of the basic creativity of every effect.
There are, then, no devils waiting to carry anyone off, unless you create them yourself, in which case the power resides in you and not in the mock devils. The Crucifixion and attendant drama made sense within your reality at the time. It arose into the world of physical actuality out of the inner reality from which your deepest intuitions and insights also spring.
The race brought forth the events, then, that would best convey in physical terms this deeper nonphysical knowledge of the indestructibility of the soul. This particular drama would not have made sense to other systems with different root assumptions than your own.
The symbolism of ascent or descent, or of light and dark, would be meaningless to other realities with different perceptive mechanisms. While your religions are built around an enduring kernel of truth, the symbolism used was craftily selected by the inner self in line with its knowledge of those root assumptions you hold as valid in the physical universe. Other information, in dreams for example, will also be given to you
with the same symbolism, generally speaking. The symbolism itself, however, was simply used by the inner self. It does not inherently belong to inner reality.
Many probable systems have perceptive mechanisms far different from your own. In fact, some are based upon gestalts of awareness completely alien to you. Quite without realizing it, your ego is a result of group consciousness, for example; the one consciousness that most directly faces the exterior world, is dependent upon the minute consciousness that resides within each living cell of your body; and as a rule you are only aware of one ego - at least at a time.
In some systems the "individual" is quite aware of having more egos than one, in your terms. The entire psychological organization is in a way richer than your own. A Christ who was not aware of this would not appear in such a system, you see. There are kinds of perception with which you are not familiar, worlds in which your idea of light does not exist, where almost infinite gradations of thermal qualities are absorbed in terms of sensation, not of light.
In any of these worlds, the Christ drama could never appear as it appeared within your own. Now the same thing applies to each of your great religions, though as I have said in the past, the Buddhists come closer, generally speaking, to a description of the nature of reality. They have not understood the eternal validity of the soul, however, in terms of its exquisite invulnerability, nor been able to hold a feeling for its unique character. But Buddha, like Christ, interpreted what he almost knew in terms of your own reality. Not only of your own physical reality, but your own probable physical reality.
The methods, the secret methods behind all of the religions, were meant to lead man into a realm of understanding that existed apart from the symbols and the stories, into inner realizations that would take him both within and without the physical world that he knew. There are many manuscripts still not discovered, from old monasteries par-ticularly in Spain, that tell of underground groups within religious orders who kept these secrets alive when other monks were copying old Latin manuscripts.
There were tribes who never learned to write in Africa and Australia who also knew these secrets, and men called "Speakers" who memorized them and spread them upward, even throughout northern portions of Europe, before the time of Christ.
Offhand, the work involved could take five years, for there were several versions, and a group of leaders, each going in different directions, who taught their people. The world was far more ripe for Christianity than people suppose, because of these groups. The ideas were "buried" already throughout Europe.
Many important concepts were lost, however. The emphasis was on practical methods of living - quite simply - rules that could be understood, but the reasons for them were forgotten.
The Druids obtained some of their concepts from Speakers. So did the Egyptians. The Speakers predated the emergence of any religions that you know, and the religions of the Speakers arose spontaneously in many scattered areas, then grew like wildfire from the heart of Africa and Australia. There was one separate group in an area where the Aztecs dwelled at a later date, though the land mass was somewhat different then,
and some of the lower cave dwellings at times were under water.
Various bands of the Speakers continued through the centuries. Because they were trained so well, the messages retained their authenticity. They believed, however, that it was wrong to set words into written form, and so did not record them. They also used natural earth symbols, but clearly understood the reasons for this. The Speakers, singly, existed in your Stone Age period, and were leaders. Their abilities helped the cavemen survive. There was little physical communication, however, in those days between the various Speakers, and some were unaware of the existence of the others.
Their message was as "pure" and undistorted as possible. It was for this reason however, through the centuries, that many who heard it translated it into parables and tales. Now, strong portions of Jewish scriptures carry traces of the message of these early Speakers, but even here, distortions have hidden the messages.
Since consciousness forms matter, and not the other way around, then thought exists before the brain and after it. A child can think coherently before he learns vocabulary - but he cannot impress the physical universe in its terms. So this inner knowledge has always been available, but is to become physically manifest - literally made flesh. The Speakers were the first to impress this inner knowledge upon the physical system, to make it physically known. Sometimes only one or two Speakers were alive in several centuries. Sometimes there were many. They looked around them and knew that the world sprang from their interior reality. They told others. They knew that the seemingly solid natural objects about them were composed of many minute consciousnesses.
They realized that from their own creativity they formed idea into matter, and that the stuff of matter was itself conscious and alive. They were intimately familiar with the natural rapport existing between themselves and their environment, therefore, and knew that they could alter their environment through their own acts.
Generally speaking, once a Speaker always a speaker, in your terms. In some incarnations, the abilities might be used so powerfully that all other aspects of the personality remained in the background. At other times the capacities might be timidly used. The Speakers possess an extraordinary vividness of feeling and thought pro-jection.
They can impress others with greater import through their communications. They can move from inner to outer reality with easy ability. They know instinctively how to use symbolism. They are highly creative on an unconscious level, constantly forming psychic frameworks beneath normal consciousness that can be used both by themselves and others in dream and trance states. They often appear to others in the dream condition, and they help dreamers in the manipulation of inner reality. They form images with which the dreamers can relate, images that can be used as bridges and then as gateways into kinds of consciousness more separated from your own.
The symbolism of the gods, the idea of the gods on Olympus, for example, the crossing-over point at the River Styx - that kind of phenomenon was originated by the Speakers. The symbolisms and frameworks of religion, therefore, had to exist not only in the physical world but also in the unconscious one. Outside of your own framework,
houses as such or dwellings as such are not needed, and yet in trance encounters or dream encounters with other realities, such structures are frequently seen. They are transformations of data into terms that will be meaningful to you.
After death, for example, an individual may continue to create these - masses of individuals may - until they realize that the frameworks are no longer necessary. The Speakers were not confined in their activities, therefore, to waking consciousness. In all periods of your time they went about their duties both in the waking and sleep state. Much of the most pertinent information, in fact, was memorized by trainees during the dream condition, and passed on in the same manner. These unwritten manuscripts therefore were also illustrated, so to speak, by dream journeys or field trips into other kinds of reality. Such training still goes on. The particular psychic or story framework may vary. For example, conventional images of the Christian God and the saints may be utilized by the Speakers, with all of this highly vivid. The dreamer may find himself then in a magnificent harem, or instead in a brilliantly illuminated field or sky. Some Speakers confine their abilities to the dream state; and, waking, are largely unconscious of their own abilities or experience.
Now it is meaningless to call such dreams or dream places hallucinations, for they are representations of definite "objective" realities that you cannot perceive as yet in their own guise. The Egyptian religion was largely based upon the work of the Speakers, and great care was given to their training. The outward manifestations given to the masses of the people became so distorted, however, that the original unity of the religion finally decayed.
However, efforts were being made then to map inner reality in ways that have not been attempted since. It is true that in the dream state and in some other levels of existence close to your own, there is strong individual play in the creation of images, and a magnificent use of symbolism, but all of this takes place, again, in an "objective" definite environment, an environment whose characteristics make such phenomena possible - a field of activity, then, with its own rules. Now the Speakers are familiar with those rules, and often serve as guides. They have at times worked within organizations as in Egypt, where they worked through the temples and became involved with the power structures. As a rule, however, they are far more solitary.
Because of the true simultaneous nature of time, they are, of course, speaking to all of your ages at once through their various manifestations. On occasion they also serve as mediators, introducing to each other two incarnations of one personality, for example.
The rules within physical reality say that objects appear to be stationary and permanent. The rules of other realities are often far different, however. The nature of mental activities will follow different lines, and "continuity" in terms of time will not exist. Perceptual organization will exist by the use of different psychological groupings.
From the outside, such systems would seem meaningless to you even if you were able to perceive them. You would not be able to observe the pivot points about which actions occurred. The very definite rules of that system then would be quite obscure to you.
Now the Speakers are familiar with the rules within many systems. Still, however, most of these systems in larger terms are somewhat connected with your own kind of reality. There are an infinite number of inner universes. Only the very highest, most developed gestalt consciousness can be aware of anything like their totality. In this larger context, then, the Speakers must be called local. There is something like a chart mapping many of the nearby systems of reality, and I hope some day in your terms to make this available. In order to do so, Ruburt must be trained somewhat more intensely. There are points of coincidence where under certain conditions entry may be made from one of these systems to the other. They need not exist separately in space as you know it, of course.
These are called coordination points, where one camouflage merges into the other. Some of these are geographical in your system, but in all cases, a tuning-in of consciousness is a necessary preliminary. Such entries can only be made in an out-of-body condition. Each individual in his dreams has access to the information possessed by the Speakers. There are adjacent states of consciousness that occur within the sleep pattern, that cannot be picked up by your EEG's - adjacent "corridors" through which your consciousness travels.
The higher centers of intuition are activated while physically oriented portions of consciousness remain with the body. The "absent" portion of the self cannot be traced through brain patterns, though the point of its departure and the point of its return may show a particular pattern. The "time out" itself, however, will not be detected in any way, the tracings showing only whatever characteristic pattern was being given immediately before departure.
Now this happens in every night's sleep. Two areas of activity are involved, one very passive and one acutely active. In one state this portion of consciousness is passive, receiving information. In the next stage it is active as it takes part through action - the concepts given it are then vividly perceived through participation and examples. This is the most protected area of sleep. The rejuvenating characteristics enter in here, and it is during this period that the Speakers act as teachers and guides.
This information is, then, often interpreted on return by other layers of the self such as the body consciousness and subconscious, where it is formed into dreams that will have meaning to these areas of the self and where general teaching, for example, may be translated into practical advice involving a particular matter.
There are several very definite stages of sleep, and they all perform various services for the personality. They are also signals for different layers of consciousness, realization, and activity. They are accompanied by some physical variations, and there are some variations having to do with age.
In our next chapter I will speak of these in some detail. For now it is sufficient to realize that specific steps, definite alterations, occur as consciousness is shifted from the exterior to the interior reality, and that these changes are not random; that consciousness leaves through a very predictable route to its many destinations. Through the ages the Speakers have taught dreamers how to manipulate in these other environments. They have taught them how to bring back information that could be used
for the good of the present personality. According to the intent, present purpose, and development, an individual may be aware of these travels to varying degrees. Some have excellent recall, for example, but often misinterpret their experience because of conscious ideas.
It is very possible for one dreamer who is a Speaker, to go to the aid of another individual who is having some difficulties in an inner reality within the dream state. The idea of guardian angels of course is highly connected here. A good Speaker is as effective within one reality as he is within the other, creating psychic frameworks within physical reality as well as within interior environments. Many artists, poets, and musicians are Speakers, translating one world in terms of another, forming psychic structures that exist in both with great vitality - structures that may be perceived from more than one reality at once.
There are also various states of consciousness in waking life, upon which you do not focus, and of which you are usually quite unaware. Each state knows its own conditions and is familiar with a different kind of reality.
"You" presently have a once-centered consciousness, in that "you" close off from your experience these other stages of consciousness in which other portions of your entire identity are intimately involved. These other stages of consciousness create their own realities as you create your own. The realities are, therefore, byproducts of consciousness itself. If you could become aware of these, they might appear to be other places to you, rather than realms or fields of different kinds of activities. If you probe into these realms you will be forced to perceive them with the root assumptions of your own system, translating feelings of warmth and comfort, for example, into images of warm shelters or buildings, or feelings of fear into images of demons.
On occasion even in waking life a personality may spontaneously shift gears, so to speak, and suddenly find itself for a second or perhaps a few moments within another such realm. Disorientation usually occurs. There are those who do this quite deliberately with training, but often they do not realize that they are interpreting the experiences they have with the values of their "home" consciousness.
All of this is not as esoteric as it might seem. Almost every individual has had bizarre experiences with consciousness, and knows intuitively that their greater experience is not limited to physical reality. Most dreams are like animated postcards brought back from a journey that you have returned from and largely forgotten. Your consciousness is already oriented again to physical reality; the dream, an attempt to translate the deeper experience into recognizable forms. The images within the dream are also highly coded, and are signals for underlying events that are basically not decipherable.
The Speakers help you in the formation of dreams which are indeed multidimensional artistic productions of a kind - dreams existing in more than one reality, with effects that dissect various stages of consciousness that are real, in your terms, to both the living and the dead and in which both the living and the dead may participate. It is for this reason that inspirations and revelations are so often a part of the dream condition.
Divorced from physical focus, you are in a better position to hear the Speakers, to
translate their instructions, to practice with the creation of images, and to be guided in the methods of maintaining the health of the physical body. In the most protected areas of sleep, the apparent barriers between many layers of reality vanish. You are aware, for example, of some probable realities. You choose which probable acts you want
to actualize in your system. You follow other probable acts through in the dream state. You do this individually, but you also do it en masse on national and global levels.Consciousness at different levels or stages perceives different kinds of events. In order to perceive some of these you have only to learn to change the focus of your attention from one level to another. There are minute chemical and electromagnetic alterations that accompany these stages of consciousness, and certain physical changes within the body itself in hormone production and pineal activity.
You usually glide from wakefulness through to sleep without ever noticing the various conditions of consciousness through which you pass, yet there are several. First, of course, with various degrees of spontaneity, there is the inward turn of consciousness away from physical data, from worries and concerns of the day. Then there is an undifferentiated level between wakefulness and sleep where you act as a receiver - passive but open, in which telepathic and clairvoyant messages come to you quite easily.
Your consciousness can seem to float. There are varying physical sensations, sometimes of growing large, sometimes of falling. Both sensations are characteristic of moments in which you almost catch yourself, almost become aware of this undifferentiated area, and then translate some of its experiences into physical terms. The sensation of largeness, for example, is a physical interpretation of the psychic expansion. The feeling of falling is an interpretation of a sudden return of consciousness to the body.
This period can last for only a few moments, for half an hour, or can be returned to. It is a cushioning, supportive, and expansive stage of consciousness. Suggestions given during this time are highly effective. Following this period there is an active state, that can occur, of pseudodreaming, where the mind busies itself with physical concerns that have managed to cling through the first two stages.
If these are too vigorous, the individual may awaken. This is a vivid, intense, but usually brief stage. Another undifferentiated layer follows, this time marked quite definitely by voices, conversations, or images, as consciousness tunes in more firmly to other communications. Several of these may compete for the individual's attention. At this point the body is fairly quiet. The individual will follow one or another of these inner stimuli to a deeper level of consciousness, and form into light dreams the communications he is receiving.
Somewhere during this time he will go into a deeply protected area of sleep, where he is at the threshold to other layers of reality and probabilities. At this point his experiences will be out of all context to time as you know it. He may experience years though only minutes have passed. He will then return toward physical reality in an area marked as REM sleep by your scientists, where physically oriented dream productions will be created, putting the knowledge he has gained into use. The cycle would then be
repeated. Almost the same kinds of fluctuations and stages occur even when you are waking, however, though you are even less aware of them because then the egotistical self acts quite purposefully to blanket out these other areas of experience.
The precise stages are present beneath waking awareness, however, and with the same chemical, electromagnetic, and hormonal fluctuations. You simply are not aware of what your consciousness is doing. You cannot yourselves keep track of it for five full moments of your time. The dimensions of it can only be sensed by those determined enough to take the time and effort required to journey through their own subjective realities. Yet intuitively each individual knows that a part of his experience escapes from him all the time. When you suddenly cannot remember a name that you should know, you have in essence the same kind of feeling of which you are always subconsciously aware.
The purpose of the Speakers is to help you correlate and understand this multidimensional existence, and to bring as much as possible of it to your conscious attention. Only by learning to feel, or sense, or intuitively perceive the depths of your own experience can you glimpse the nature of All That Is. By becoming more aware of your consciousness as it operates in physical life, you can learn to watch it as it manipulates through these other less familiar areas. Probable realities are only probable to you because you are not aware of them.
These stages of consciousness are all a part of your own reality. A knowledge of them can be most useful. You can learn to "shift gears," stand aside from your own experience, and examine it with much better perspective. You can prepare questions or problems, suggesting that they be solved for you in the sleep state. You can suggest that you will speak with distant friends, or convey important messages that you cannot convey verbally, perhaps. You can bring about reconciliations, for example, at another layer of reality though you cannot do so in this one.
You can direct the healing of your body, telling yourself that this will be accomplished by you at one of the other levels of sleep conscious
ness, and you may ask for the aid of a Speaker to give you any necessary psychological guidance that is needed to maintain health. If you have particular conscious goals and if you are reasonably certain that they are beneficial ones, then you can suggest dreams in which they occur, for the dreams themselves will hasten their physical reality.Now unconsciously you do many of these things. You often go back In time, so to speak, and "relive" a particular event so that it has a different ending, or say things that you wish you had said. A knowledge of one state of consciousness can help you in other states. In a light trance the meaning of dream symbols will be given if you ask for them. The symbols may then be used as methods of suggestion that will be tailored for you personally. If you discover, say, that a fountain in a dream represents refreshment, then when you are tired or depressed, think of a fountain. In another layer of reality, of course, you will be creating one.
In the most protected areas of sleep you are dealing with experience that is pure feeling or knowing, and disconnected from both words or images. As mentioned, these experiences are translated into dreams later, necessitating a return to areas of
consciousness more familiar with physical data. Here a great creative synthesis and a great creative diversification takes place, in which any given dream image has meaning to various layers of the self - on one level representing a truth you have lived and on other levels representing this truth as it is more specifically applied to various areas of experience or problems. There will be a metamorphosis, therefore, of one symbol turning into many, and the conscious mind may only perceive a chaos of various dream images, because the inner organization and unity is partially hidden in the other areas of consciousness through which the reasoning mind cannot follow.
The unconscious and subconscious areas, however, are aware of much more of this information than the ego, for it receives only the minute residue of dream material as a rule. The Speakers therefore may appear within dreams as historical characters, as prophets, as trusted old friends, or in whatever guise will impress the particular personality.
In the original experience, however, the true nature of the Speaker is apparent. The production of dreams is as "sophisticated" an endeavor as is the production of the objective life of a given individual. It is simply living on different terms.
These various stages of consciousness and fluctuations of psychic activity can also be examined through direct experience from the waking state. In the following chapter we will let you become more aware of these ever-active portions of your own reality.
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