1 result for (book:notp AND session:796 AND stemmed:do)
[... 11 paragraphs ...]
While the large proportion remain relatively hidden, however, the average person often meets with dream fragments just below the normal threshold of consciousness — not recognizing them as what they are — experiencing instead the impulse to do this or that on a given day; to eat this or that, or to refrain from something else. An easy enough example is the case where an individual with no memory [of such a dream] decides to cancel a plane trip on a given day, and later discovers that the plane crashed. The impulse to cancel may or may not seem to have an acceptable, rational explanation; that is, for no seeming reason, the individual may simply, impulsively, feel a premonition. On the other hand the impulse might appear as a normal, logical change of plan.
[... 12 paragraphs ...]
First of all, there are verbal difficulties having to do with the definition of life. It appears that there is living matter and nonliving matter, leading to such questions as: “How does nonliving matter become living?”
[... 8 paragraphs ...]
I have referred to them at various times as animal medicine men, for man did learn from them. The impact of many of my statements of the past goes unrecognized, or perhaps the words sound pat, but there are other conditions of life that you do not perceive, sometimes because your time sequences are too different. Before the smallest cell appeared, in your terms, there was the consciousness that formed the cell.
(Long pause.) Words do nearly forsake me, the semantic differences are so vast. If I say to you: “Life came from a dream,” such a statement sounds meaningless. Yet as your physical reality personally is largely dependent upon your dreaming state, and impossible without it, so in the same way the first cell was physically materialized and actual only because of its own inner reality of consciousness.
In those terms there was a point where consciousness impressed itself into matter through intent, or formed itself into matter. That “breakthrough” cannot be logically explained, but only compared to, say, an illumination — that is, a light everywhere occurring at once, that became a medium for life in your terms. It had nothing to do with the propensity of certain kinds of cells to reproduce, but with an overall illumination that set the conditions in which life as you think of it was possible — and at that imaginary hypothetical point, all species became latent.
[... 17 paragraphs ...]