My take on Imagination, Dreams and Psyche’s Reality
This text emphasizes the inherent limitations of language when it comes to interpreting the complexities of the human psyche. It explores how the conventional structures of language, primarily geared toward practical communication and daily functioning, fall short in expressing the depth and intricacies of emotional experiences, imagination, and the realm of dreams.
Limitations of Language in Understanding the Psyche
- Symbolism and Depth: The text highlights that the language of the psyche operates on a level of symbolism that surpasses the simplistic constructs of alphabets and words in daily language. It suggests that this symbolic language encompasses a multitude of emotional states and nuanced feelings that are challenging to encapsulate using everyday vocabulary.
- Imagination and Reality: It challenges the conventional dichotomy between imagination and reality. While mundane language dictates a clear separation between the two, the text urges a reevaluation. It proposes that the imagination, often dismissed as detached from reality, actually serves as a gateway to a different framework of experiencing truth—one that extends beyond the factual boundaries set by conventional language.
- Dreams as Symbolic Translations: The discussion on dreams is particularly illuminating. It presents dreams not as random or unreal occurrences but as symbolic translations of profound experiences from the psyche. It suggests that dreams serve as narratives, bridging the gap between the deeper dimensions of the psyche and the conscious self, thereby offering insights into the psyche’s workings that elude conventional language.
Encouragement to Transcend Language Barriers
Overall, the text encourages readers to transcend the limitations imposed by everyday language. It invites individuals to explore the expansive realm of the psyche, imagination, and dreams, advocating for a deeper understanding that transcends the confines of language-based logic. By doing so, it suggests that individuals can unlock a richer, more profound comprehension of the self and reality, beyond what is conventionally perceived and articulated through language.
In essence, the text challenges the traditional boundaries of linguistic expression and urges individuals to embrace the complexities of the human psyche, acknowledging the inadequacy of everyday language while advocating for a deeper, more holistic understanding of the self.
Imagination, Dreams and Psyche’s Reality, a Seth session
Your daily language deals with separations, divisions, and distinctions. To some extent your language organizes your feelings and emotions. The language of the psyche, however, has at its command many more symbols that can be combined in many more ways, say, than mere letters of an alphabet.
In daily language, objects have certain names. Obviously the names are not the objects, but symbols for them. Even these symbols, however, divide you as the perceiver from the rest of the world, which becomes objectified. You can yourself understand far more about the nature of the psyche, for example, than you think that you can. To do this, however, you must leave your daily language behind at least momentarily, and pay attention to your own feelings and imagination. Your language tells you that certain things are true, or facts, and that certain things are not. Many of your most vivid and moving feelings do not fit the facts of your language, so you disregard them.
These emotional experiences, however, often express the language of the psyche. It is not that an understanding of your psyche is beyond you: It is usually that you try to understand or experience it in one of the most difficult ways — through the use of daily language.
The imagination belongs to the language of the psyche. For this reason it often gives experiences that conflict with the basic assumptions upon which daily language is based. Therefore the imagination is often considered suspect.
… 1 paragraph …
(Pause at 10:12.) Mundane language tells you, as you think with its patterns, that your imagination is running away with you, for obviously you are one thing and the sky is another. You and sky do not equate — or (amused) as friend Spock would say: “It is not logical.”
The feeling swiftly fades after bemusing you briefly. You might be spiritually refreshed, yet as a rule you would not consider the feeling to be a statement of any legitimate reality, or a representation of your psyche’s existence.
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Instead, such an event is a direct expression of the psyche’s knowledge. It senses its quite legitimate identification with nature, exercises its mobility, and feels its own emotional power leap. Your emotions in such a case would be momentarily magnified — raised, say, to a higher power. There are multitudinous such examples that could be given, as in each day your psyche presents evidence of its own greater being — evidence that you are taught to overlook, or to dismiss because it is not factual.
What is imaginary is not true: You are taught this as children. The imagination, however, brings you into connection with a different kind of truth, or a different framework in which experience can be legitimately perceived. The larger truths of the psyche exist in that dimension.
… 1 paragraph …
You cannot treat thoughts and imagination in such a literal manner, nor in a large respect should you try to “guard your thoughts” as if they were herds of animals that you wanted to keep purely bred. Your thoughts do form your reality.
If you do not fear them, however, they create their own balances. The psyche dwells in a reality so different from the world you usually recognize that there good and evil, as you think of them, are also seen to be as operationally or relatively true as the difference between the perceiver and the object perceived.
… 4 paragraphs …
In the life of the psyche a dream is no more or less “true,” whether or not it is duplicated in waking life. Dream events happen in a different context — one, you might say, of the imagination. Here you experience a valid reality that exists on its own, so to speak; one in which the psyche’s own language is given greater freedom.
… 2 paragraphs …
When you meet with any fact, you encounter the tail end of a certain kind of creativity. The psyche, however, is responsible for bringing facts into existence. In that reality a so-called fact is equally true or equally false. The dream that you remember is already a translation of a deeper experience.
It is cast for you so that it bridges the perception of the psyche and the perception of the dreaming self. Dreams serve as dramas, transferring experience from one level of the psyche to another. In certain portions of sleep, your experience reaches into areas of being so vast that the dream is used to translate it for you.
That reality represents your origin, and is the natural environment in which the psyche resides. Your beliefs, cultural background, and to some extent your languages, set up barriers so that this dream dimension seems unreal to you. Even when you catch yourselves in the most vivid of dream adventures, or find yourselves traveling outside of your bodies while dreaming, you still do not give such experiences equal validity with waking ones.
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Session 782, July 5, 1976 9:56 P.M. Monday
All images are artificial generated by Dirk Bosman and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0
