1 result for (book:notp AND session:786 AND stemmed:mind)
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There are alterations taken into your calculations, so astronauts know ahead of time that they can expect to encounter weightlessness, for example. Your ideas and experiences with space and matter, however, are determined by your own sense apparatus. What is matter to you might be “empty space” for beings equipped in an entirely different fashion. Your conscious mind as you understand it is the “psychological structure” that deals with conditions on a physical basis. Sense data are served up, so to speak, more or less already packaged. The greater inner reality of the psyche, however, is as extensive as outer space seems to be.
When information “falls” into your conscious mind from those vaster areas, then it also is changed as it travels through various levels of psychological atmosphere, until it finally lands or explodes in a series of images or thoughts. Period.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
In the dream state, with your body more or less safe and at rest, and without the necessity for precise action, these psychological intrusions become more apparent. Many of your dreams are like the tail end of a comet: Their real life is over, and you see the flash of their disappearance as they strike your own mental atmosphere and explode in a spark of dream images. They are transformed, therefore, as they travel through your own psychological atmosphere. You could not perceive them in your own state — nor can they maintain their native state as they plunge through the far reaches of the psyche. They fall in patterns, forming themselves naturally into the dream contents that fit the contours of your own mind. The resulting structure of the dream suits your reality and no other: As this intrusive matter falls, plummets, or shifts through the levels of your own psychological atmosphere, it is transformed by the conditions it meets.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
(9:44.) Dreams patter down into psychological puddles. They follow the contours of your psychological reality. They make ever-moving psychic patterns in your mind, rippling outward. The rain that hits your backyard as warm drops, soft and clear, may be hail in areas far above your rooftop, but it changes its form as it falls — again, according to the conditions that it encounters. So these “alien intrusions” do the same, and the dreams are like the raindrops, for at other “higher” levels they may have quite a different form indeed.
There are gullies, hills, mountains, valleys, large continents, small islands upon the earth, and the falling rain fits itself to those contours. Your own thoughts, dreams, intents, emotions, beliefs — these are the natural features of your mind, so that information, impinging upon your mental world, also follows those contours.
[... 21 paragraphs ...]
Creativity connects waking and dreaming reality, and is in itself a threshold in which the waking and dreaming selves merge to form constructs that belong equally to each reality. You cannot begin to understand how you form the physical events of your lives unless you understand the connections between creativity, dreams, play, and those events that form your waking hours. In one respect dreams are a kind of structured unconscious play. Your mind dreams in joyful pleasure at using itself, freed from the concerns of practical living. Dreams are the mind’s free play. The spontaneous activity, however, is at the same time training in the art of forming practical events.
Probabilities can be juggled, tried out without physical consequences. The mind follows its natural bents. It has far more energy than you allow it to use, and it releases this in great “fantasies” — fantasies from which you will choose facts that you will experience. At the same time dreaming is an art of the highest nature, in which all are proficient. There are structured dreams as there are structured games in waking life. There are mass dreams “attended by many.” There are themes, both mass and private, that serve as a basis or framework. Yet overall, the mind’s spontaneous activity continues because it enjoys its own activities.
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