1 result for (book:notp AND session:753 AND stemmed:symbol)
[... 11 paragraphs ...]
If you are reading this book, you have already become weary with official concepts. You have already begun to sense those greater dimensions of your being. You are ready to step aside from all conventionalized doctrines, and to some extent or another you are impatient to examine and experience the natural flowing nature that is your birthright. That birthright has long been clothed in symbols and mythologies.
Consciousness forms symbols. It is not the other way around. Symbols are great exuberant playthings. You can build with them as you can with children’s blocks. You can learn from them, as once you piled alphabet blocks together in a stack at school. Symbols are as natural to your minds as trees are to the earth. There is a difference, however, between a story told to children about forests, and a real child in a real woods. Both the story and the woods are “real.” But in your terms the child entering the real woods becomes involved in its life cycle, treads upon leaves that fell yesterday, rests beneath trees far older than his or her memory, and looks up at night to see a moon that will soon disappear. Looking at an illustration of the woods may give a child some excellent imaginative experiences, but they will be of a different kind, and the child knows the difference.
(10:09.) If you mistake the symbols for the reality, however, you will program your experience, and you will insist that each forest look like the pictures in your book. In other words, you will expect your own experiences with various portions of your psyche to be more or less the same. You will take your local laws with you, and you will try to tell psychic time with a wristwatch.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]