1 result for (book:notp AND session:791 AND stemmed:organ)
[... 7 paragraphs ...]
Putting this as simply as possible, your actual experience is far too vast for you to physically follow. Your particular kind of consciousness is the result of specialized focus within a particular area. You imagine it to be “absolute,” in that it seems to involve an all-exclusive state that includes your identity as you think of it — only you give it boundaries like a kingdom. It is, instead, a certain kind of organization that is indeed inviolate even while it is itself a portion of other kinds of consciousnesses, with their own points of focus. Your body itself is composed of self-aware organizations of consciousness that escape your notice and deal with perceptual material utterly alien to your own ways.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
There are organizations of consciousness, however, that leapfrog the species, that produce no arts or sciences per se — yet these together form the living body of the earth and the physical creatures thereon. Their products are the seas upon which you sail your ships, the skies through which your airplanes fly, the land upon which your cities sprawl, and the very reality that makes your culture, or any culture, possible.
Man is a part of that trans-species consciousness also, as are the plants and animals. Also, part of man’s reality contributes to that trans-species organization, but he has not chosen to focus his practical daily consciousness in that direction, or to identify his individuality with it. As a result he does not understand the greater natural mobility he himself possesses, nor can he practically perceive the natural psychological gestalts of which he is a part, that form all of your natural — meaning physical — world.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
Any section of the land has an identity, so to speak, and I am not talking symbolically. Such identities represent the combined organizations of consciousness of land, man, and animal, within any given realm. Simply enough put, there are as many kinds of consciousnesses as there are particles, and these are combined in infinite fashions. (Long pause.) In the dream state some of that experience, otherwise closed to you, forms the background of the dream drama (A one-minute pause.) Your consciousness is not one thing like a flashlight, that you possess. It is instead a literally endless conglomeration of points of consciousness, swarming together to form your validity — stamped, as it were, with your identity.
(Intently:) Whether dispersed, concentrated in a tight grouping, appearing “alone” or flying through other larger swarms, that particular organization represents your identity.
[... 10 paragraphs ...]
Death operates in the same fashion. The animals in particular realize this because they organize time differently from you. Dreaming provides all the conditions of life and death, therefore — a fact that often frightens the waking self. But here is a creative mixture: the perceptive organizations from which prosaically tuned conscious life emerges. Here are the raw materials for all the daily events you recognize privately and on a world scale.
[... 12 paragraphs ...]