1 result for (book:notp AND session:776 AND stemmed:tree)
[... 14 paragraphs ...]
Take the English sentence: “I observe the tree.” If that original language had words, the equivalent would be: “As a tree, I observe myself.”
(Long pause at 10:03.) Or: “Taking on my tree nature, I rest in my shade.” Or even: “From my man nature, I rest in the shade of my tree nature.” A man did not so much stand at the shore looking down at the water, as he immersed his consciousness within it. Man’s initial curiosity did not involve seeing, feeling, or touching the object’s nature as much as it involved a joyful psychic exploration in which he plunged his consciousness, rather than, say, his foot into the stream — though he did both.
If that language I speak of had been verbal, man never would have said: “The water flows through the valley.” Instead, the sentence would have read something like this: “Running over the rocks, my water self flows together with others in slippery union.” That translation is not the best, either. Man did not designate his own as the only kind of consciousness by any means. He graciously thanked the tree that gave him shade, for example, and he understood that the tree retained its own identity even when it allowed his awareness to join with it.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
(Long pause at 10:26.) You are robbed, then, or you rob yourselves, of one of the most basic kinds of expression, since you can no longer identify yourselves with the forces of nature. Man wanted to pursue a certain kind of consciousness, however. In your terms, over a period of time he pulled his awareness in, so to speak; he no longer identified as he did before, and began to view objects through the object of his own body. He no longer merged his awareness, so that he learned to look at a tree as one object, where before he would have joined with it, and perhaps viewed his own standing body from the tree’s vantage point. It was then that mental images became important in usual terms — for he had understood these before, but in a different way, from the inside out.
[... 18 paragraphs ...]