THE MAGICAL APPROACH, AND THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN “CONSERVATION” AND SPONTANEOUS DEVELOPMENTS

—good evening, and dictation. Beginning of the next chapter (11), which will be entitled: “The Magical Approach (very long pause, eyes closed), and the Relationships Between ‘Conservation’ (very long pause) and Spontaneous Developments”—and give us a moment.

(Pause.) In a fashion dreams allow for a curious mixture of learning processes, while at the same time serving to introduce surprising developments. Period. That is, dreams promote the conservation of knowledge. They are an aid in the development of skills. They conserve available information by weaving it through the other structures of your experience.

At the same time dreams have their startling qualities, promoting the insertion of unexpected developments, in which case they appear to deal with the breaking down of conserving principles. In this fashion they also mirror your more exterior behavior, conserving what you know already, and yet introducing new patterns, new spontaneous orders that would sometimes seem to run against conservative issues. They reinforce the past, for example, when you dream of past situations. They also seem to undermine the integrity of the past by showing it to you in an unfamiliar light, mixing it with present and future tints.

(8:49.) Many people might wish that I would add many more methods to help you study dreams and their nature. In such a manner also dreams suggest nature’s spontaneous order throughout the centuries, and allow you to look at the species in a truer light. Your lives, for that matter, are dependent upon the curious relationships that are involved. Colon: You would not get by for one day if the conserving principles and the unexpected did not exist exactly as they do. There is so much you must learn and remember in life, and so much you must spontaneously forget—otherwise, action itself would be relatively meaningless.

You perform far more actions in a day than you recall. You do not know how many times you lift your arms, speak a sentence, think a thought. With the kind of consciousness you possess, an overreliance upon conserving principles could then end up in a reduction of life’s processes.

(9:01.) In private living and in so-called evolutionary terms, however, life necessitates the intrusion of surprising events, unforeseen actions, leaps of insight or behavior that could not come alone from any accumulation of knowledge or simple conservation of energy, but seem to suggest entirely different new developments.

As “the times change” you tire of the old ways. Even your dreams begin to reach out into new avenues. The relationships between nature’s natural conservative behavior and nature’s need for innovation are stretched. More and more remarkable events begin to occur, both in private and mass experience, in physical and mental behavior, in the events, say, of both stars and man.

People want, then, to throw aside old structures of belief. They yearn, often without recognizing it, for the remembered knowledge of early childhood, when it seems that they experienced for a time a dimension of experience in which the unexpected was taken for granted, when “magical events” occurred quite naturally. They begin to look at the structure of their lives in a different fashion that attempts to evoke from nature, and from their own natures, some graceful effortlessness, some freedom nearly forgotten. They begin to turn toward a more natural and a more magical approach to their own lives. At such times the conserving elements in nature and in society itself do not seem as strong as they did before. Surprising events that were earlier covered up or ignored seem to appear with greater frequency, and everywhere a new sense of quickness and acceleration gradually alters the expectations of people in regard to the events of their own lives, and to the behavior they expect from others. You are in such times now.

Old honored explanations suddenly appear withered. Unpredictable remarkable events seem more possible. The kind of work done in dreams to some extent is changed. They become more active, more intrusive. Predictable behavior, even of the natural elements, is harder to take for granted. Man begins to sense more and more at such times the vaster dimensions of behavior upon which that appearance of conservation resides.

(9:50.) Now: Ruburt is that kind of courier. There are many in all areas of life, and this involves not only an excitement on the part of your own species, but the same kind of curiosity and excitement on the part of other species as well. Again, most difficult to explain—but those connections that exist between all species and the environment are themselves affected. The horizontal communications stretch and expand to allow for later developments in terms of probabilities, for consciousness always knows itself in more than one context, and it is possible for nature to experience itself in ways that would seem to be most improbable when the properties of conservation and learning are at their (underlined) strongest spring.