Dreams-Part-6
welcome everybody to our last class on a home with the auto fee on the dreams we have been discussing this complex phenomena that we call dreaming and this is an extra class to what we had originally scheduled so that we can finish the book because we have added some information from other books so so far we have seen that what we call dreams may have many different sources some of them are not relevant from from a spiritual point of view they are just the result of external influences physiological influences or just I mean the imagination of our consciousness but we have seen that some other dreams are actually the the remembrance of real experiences that we have on the inner planes now when we wake up and if we remember a dream what we remember may be the result of a mixture of all these elements so it is important to learn how to discern the different elements in a in a dream we have been talking about the different sources of of these dreams and today in the last class we will see some examples of how all these dreams from different sources come together in a single memory so what they did in the this is the result of some experiments that they did at the turn of this the Leadbeater was a member he he stayed the author of this book he was clairvoyant and some other people too so they were actually researching into how these things happen so today we are going to see some of these experiments that that they did experiments on the dream state the object specially in view in the investigation part of which I am about to describe was to discover whether it was possible to impress the ego of an ordinary person during sleep sufficiently to enable him to recollect the circumstance when he woke and it was also desired as far as possible to find out what are the obstacles that usually stand in the way of such recollection so coming back here to the chart we are talking about the by the ego yet we are talking about the array of consciousness which when it is manifesting through the body it becomes the personal ego the idea of I am this body when we go to sleep that way of consciousness retreats to the astral body that you see there on the chart and that is still a personal manifestation of these sense of eyeness when that sense of unease is expressing itself through the spiritual principles like at the level of the causal body as I'm just summarizing what we have seen him in the past then this is a spiritual sense of inés so during dream we have the Ray of consciousness that is the vehicle for for this consciousness is the astral body and what they try to do is to see if they could communicate with consciousness while it was in the astral body and see how that communication would be remembered when a person wake up so these are the steps of the experiment that they they devised steps of the experiment choice of two subjects at different stages of development sprinkling water on face moving the astral body away from the physical body presentation of picture of a tropical landscape a in normal conditions and B with the protective shell around waking up and evaluating memory brought back so these are the basic steps as Ledbetter describes them you will understand more clearly what they mean but they took two different people one person was probably a servant at the time you know in they were in England and probably very little educated and cultivated person and the other person because of the way it is described was probably a member of the society or something like that and they they talk to these people these people agreed on conducting this experiment and then they compare what happened with with them and they try different things in different circumstances so it's just like like a scientist would do the first experiment tried was with an average man of small education and rough exterior whose astral form as seen floating above his body was externally little more than a shapeless wreaths of mist so remember we said that as evolution goes on the the astral body comes from being just a loose kind of mist to a well-organized body and this is the idea of evolution is just like the idea of growing up in a child we wouldn't say that a child is an imperfect human being we only we simply recognize that the child is an early stage of development but is as respectable as any other human being so the person that is still not very developed it's just like a like a child that soul may have studied the process of evolution far later than other souls so it's just the same kind of relationship unfortunately our mind tends to discriminate and make judgments of things and and then take all these distinctions in in a way that is not the intended way so when looking at the emotional body of a person it is or the the mental body or even more the cost it is clear to the clairvoyant in more or less in what stage of development this person is if it is just a bud like in a flower or a fully blown flower so in this case the first experiment was in a person that was in the early relatively speaking earlier stages of evolution and when you mean evolution do you mean from lifetime to lifetime or within that one life yeah no I would say from in you know the evolution of humanity is very long we have been evolving for eons in the Theosophical view and at this point we are all more or less in the same stage of evolution but within that stage there are differences so this would be the stage of evolution of a of a soul in the overall evolution of humanity as a whole in the Theosophical teaching series said that we are only halfway through our evolution although there are some people that have gone already through the whole evolution and these are enlightened beings and masters and there are some people that are behind the average evolution in humanity and again this is for reasons of when the souls begin to evolve on and some other resources - and you've talked about that through our spiritual practice that's what we do is one of the one of the byproducts of it is to put order into our bodies our emotional body in our mental body yes yes we we have discussed that that the spiritual practice helps in bringing all these bodies into into shape and into a more complex organization so that they can serve a say a good vehicle of consciousness it was found that the consciousness of the body on the bed was dull and heavy both as regards the grocer and the etheric parts of the frame the former responded to some extent to external stimuli for example the sprinkling of two or three drops of water on the face called up in the brain though somewhat tart idli a picture of a heavy shower of rain while the etheric part of the brain was as usual a passive channel for an endless stream of disconnected thoughts but it rarely responded to any of the vibrations they produced so remember that when we discussed the factors in the production of dreams we saw that there was a physiological activity here at the level of the physical body that you can see in the chart a physiological activity that was automatic and that had that the tendency to generate images out of physical sensations so if you are sleeping and you have a pain in your arm that may generate a dream that somebody or a dog is biting your arm for example or something like that so they did this experiment they sprinkle these two or three drops of water and the body generated this this dream of a rain remember that one of the characteristics of the body also was to exaggerate the the physical stimuli now they say it took a while for the physical brain to generate that rain and the etheric part of the brain that is always a receptor of all these thought forms that are around and they said that you could see that thoughts coming and going out but the theory part of the brain was kind of asleep in the sense of not really responding to this this stream of thoughts the ego floating above was in an undeveloped and semi-unconscious condition but the astral envelope though shapeless and ill-defined showed considerable activity the floating astral can at any time be acted upon with an ease that can scarcely be imagined by the conscious thought of another person so when looking at the astral body you have always these two aspects in a human being the body itself the vehicle of consciousness and the consciousness of the person so in a baby for example you can see that the bodies they are but the baby may be asleep in the body in the sleep not necessarily sleeping but in this kind of unconscious state and if something happens to the body the body may respond without the baby being really awake or aware so this is more or less what they saw that happened to or the state of this person on the astral plane the the consciousness itself was quite dormant in the indi astral body but the astral body itself would respond to influences from the outside so normally the way it responds is by generating the kind of or reproducing the kind of emotions that are floating so to say around so if there are some some energy emotional energy related to anger then when it touches the astral body the astral body will reproduce this anger or the same with with love or the same with any other other feeling and this happens during our day too many times we enter in in a place and then we get sad or we get happy or we enter in contact with people and we reproduce that kind of atmosphere when we are identified with the emotions then we think that I am sad I am angry or I am happy while all that our astral body is doing is just reproducing the external atmosphere so part of the spiritual work is to be able to separate ourselves from the emotions not not separating in the sense of disassociating but separating in the sense of being able to observe the emotions as something that happens to us and not us being us the emotions but anyway what they observed is that even though the consciousness on the astral plane was asleep in this person the astral body responded to the external stimuli the experiment was made with drawing the astral to some little distance from the physical body on the bed with the result however that as soon as it was more than a few yards away considerable uneasiness was manifested in both the vehicles and it became necessary to desist from the attempt as evidently any further withdrawal would have caused the man to awake probably in a state of great whole terror so we have seen that the astral body when it is well developed can travel anywhere in the in the world the more it is developed the easier is for the astral body to travel but when it is in the early stages there is still this connection between the physical and the astral and there is this instinctive fear from the elementals the physical elemental and the astral elemental so that if the two are separated there is this instinctive fear that brings it back to the body this is partly based on certain truth in the sense that not so much the astral body but if the etheric body is separated from the physical then death could could happen there is like a link the silver core sometimes called between the etheric body and the physical body and the etheric body cannot go too far from the body is actually like physically connected the astral body on the other hand can travel anywhere but there is this instinctive reaction when consciousness is not fully developed to have to be afraid of separating the astral body from the physical and that's what they saw so as soon as they saw that the body would become a little restless then they stopped trying a certain scene was chosen a view of the most magnificent character from the summit of a mountain in the tropics and a vivid picture of it was projected by the operator into the dreamy consciousness of the Eagle which assimilated and examined it though in a dull apathetic and unappreciative kind of way after the scene had been held before his view for some time the man was awakened the object being of course to see whether he recollected it as a dream his mind however was an absolute blank on the subject he had brought back no memory whatever from the deep from the state of sleep so when the inner planes one can generate thoughts and thoughts had generate a form so if a person that knows that has a certain work on what we would call yoga the yoga and especially of meditation if a person works on meditation and visualization and all that can acquire a good ability to reproduce on the inner planes any image for example so one of them did this presented that image to the ego and the response was not necessarily very very good mainly because the ego is is half asleep in this person they saw that the ego was half asleep so when this this image was presented consciousness looked at it but perhaps how a small kid would look at some you know very nice picture that you can present to the kid he may not be really interested unless you show the picture of a toy or something like that so this person was not particularly interested in this beautiful landscape and then when they woke the person up he'd said that he didn't remember having dreamed having had any dream at all now they chose the scene for a specific reason right I don't know they chose say you know an inspiring or what they thought it was an inspiring scene okay it was suggested that the constant stream of thought forms from outside flowing through his brain might make it unreceptive to influences from its higher principles so after the man had again fallen asleep a magnetic shell was formed around his to prevent the entrance of this stream and the experiment was tried again his brain began very slowly and dreamily to evolve out of its scenes of the man's life out of itself Oh out of itself scenes of the man's life it but when he was again woken up the result was the same no memory of the scene though he had some vague idea of having dreamed of some event in his past so remember we said that there are thought forms constantly running through the Teddy brain part of the brain and so they thought well maybe the image that the ego was was watching on the astral plane could not be impressed on the brain on the physical brain because the brain was distracted with all these these images going around so they generated this kind of shells that we can talk about it at the end of the meeting if we have time this idea of the shell but it's basically a shell of Astral matter to prevent external thoughts from coming into the field of consciousness and and then in that case the the brain itself began to to jet because the brain was not occupied in anything began to generate some images that were the result of past experiences and when the person woke up he didn't remember the scene the tropical landscape but he did have some vague memory of having had a dream something related to his life so they shall help a little for the brain to retain at least some vague memory now remember we are talking about a person that is still quite undeveloped so then we will see another kind of person and and you can see that the difference is but even this other developed person was by far not very skillful in retaining dreams we are going to see that the next subject taken was a man of good moral life educated and intellectual with broad anthropic ideas and exalted ambitions remember we said that the astral body there is a process of organizing the bodies that the organization of a body depends on the activity of the higher body so for example the how they feel we are discovering in medicine that how the physical body is and the health depends a lot on the thoughts and emotions that a person has so the the idea is that the thoughts and emotions have an impact on the physical body in a similar way the thoughts that a person has have an impact on the astral body so when a person begins to develop the mind that intellectual development has an influence on the astral body now a person may be become very intellectual but that doesn't mean that that person will be spiritual it can be a very materialistic person because the mind is shaped by the activity on the spiritual bodies that are above the mental body so only when a person begins to awaken the spiritual consciousness then then the mind begins to be shaped by the spiritual consciousness so there is this kind of chain a person that is intellectual regardless of whether he is spiritual or not normally has a an astral body that is more organized and this is why he also said that and also this person had some philanthropic ideas meaning he ideals broadly so meaning he he wanted to help humanity so the spiritual nature was awakening him also to some extent in his case the denser body responded instantaneously to the water test by a very respectable picture of a tremendous thunderstorm and that in turn reacting on the etheric part of the brain called up by association a whole series of vividly represented scenes when this disturbance was over the usual stream of thoughts began to flow through but it was observable that a far greater portion of them awoke a response in his brain although that the responsive also also that responsive vibrations were much stronger and then in each case a train of associations was started which sometimes excluded the stream from outside for quite a considerable time so the first thing they noticed is that the brain was far more sensitive or the body in general far more sensitive in this case immediately generated these these images it's not that there is any any you know virtue in generating this image of it Thunderstone the point here the body always does that the body just turns a physical stimuli as we said into some image but they noticed the sensitivity how fast it did it and then also the world the the physical brain and the etheric brain were far more active and whenever these thought forms from the outside would would come into the influence the sphere of influence of this consciousness then it would awaken a response again in the other case these thought forms were going through the etheric brain but the person wasn't even responding so you can see that the general characteristic is that as a person grows in in development it becomes far more sensitive then that becomes a problem itself because the the body and the brain and the aesthetic part of the body they become too active so that that that very activity becomes an obstacle for the spiritual influence so eventually once the sensitivity is developed the person has to work on being able to generate a state of like silent awareness and this more passive attitude of the vehicle of consciousness so that they are ready to respond to the spiritual consciousness but anyway the point here is that this person was far more sensitive far more responsive and whenever some associations of thoughts were generated in the brain the activity was good enough to explode external thoughts the astral vehicle in this subject was far more definite in its ovoid outline and the body of the denser astral matter within it was a very fine reproduction of his physical form and while desire was decidedly less active the ego itself possessed a much higher grade of consciousness the astral body in this case could be drawn away to a distance of several miles from the physical without apparently producing the slightest sense of disquiet in either of them so if the form of the astral body was different there is more of an outline inside this dis avoid outline is what we call the aura and inside the aura you can see like the astral counterpart of the physical body that has the shape of the person and all this was far more defined meaning that the the astral body is is getting closer to be a true vehicle of consciousness and the ego was far more aware in in the astral body and then there was the possibility of separating the astral body from their physical without producing fear when the tropical landscape was submitted to his ego he at once seized upon it with the greatest appreciation admiring and dwelling upon its beauties in the most enthusiastic manner after letting him admire it for a while the man was woken up but the result was somewhat disappointing he knew that he had had a beautiful dream but was quite unable to recall any details the few illusive fragments that were up or most in his mind being remnants of the ramblings of his own brain so again the responsiveness is far more was far more but when it came to remembering then it was also not very good they thought that the his brain was going to be able to remember more of this and that wasn't the case and this is many many times our case too we may remember why we may wake up with a vague remembrance that we have had a beautiful dream or a bad dream and not remember any anything in particular and as he said that a few fragments that he would remember was not really from what his consciousness was perceiving on the astral plane but what his brain was doing and we are going to see a better example of that in shortly with him as with the other man the experiment was then repeated with the addition of a magnetic shell thrown around his body thrown round the body and in this case as in the other the brain at once began to evolve pictures of its own the ego received the landscape with even greater enthusiasm than at first recognizing it at once as the view he had seen before and surveying it point by point with quite aesthetic admiration of its many beauties so again the shell protects its like to keep out the noise you know the mental and emotional noise so that the that consciousness can focus better and they saw that in both cases when there is too much noise outside and noise again in the sense of mental and emotional thought forms or energies they are that the brain simply responds to these passing thought forms when they were kept away or out by the shell then the brain itself being idle began to generate image images on its own eventually in a spiritual person this activity of generating images some begin to diminish more and more until most enlightened beings they say that they don't dream because of these particular characteristic their brains physical and etheric they are astral bodies they they don't generate these automatic activities they are passive vehicles for the spiritual consciousness but while he was thus engaged in contemplation of it the etheric brain down below was amusing itself by recalling pictures of his school life the most prominent being a scene on a winter day when the ground was covered with snow and he and a number of his playmates were snowballing one another in the school playground so this is something quite typical consciousness and the astral plane may be doing something in part in particular and the brain is reproducing automatically in this case a thick part of the brain reproducing automatically thinks I'll come from memory so we have these two activities going on in parallel when we wake up those two activities maybe blend into one which is exactly what happened here as we are going to see when the man was woken up as usual the effect was exceedingly curious he had a most vivid remembrance of standing upon the summit of a mountain admiring a magnificent view and he even had the main features of the scenery quite clearly in his mind but instead of the gorgeous tropical ver der which leant upon richness to the real prospect he saw the surrounding country entirely covered with a mantle of snow so you see here how the two elements were mixed he remembered the landscape but it was a landscape in in a snowy place because that was what the brain was doing so this is a very interesting and we are going to see a little more of this but this is very interesting to notice but before I say that let's see how the experiment finished and it seemed to him that even while he was drinking with deep delight the loveliness of the panorama spread out before him he suddenly found himself by one of the rapid transitions so frequent in dreams snowballing with boyhoods long-forgotten companions in the old school yard of which he had not thought for years so this is something that is very common in dreams I mean in one of our earlier talks this was actually a question I think Larry asked why how can that when this illogical transitions happen in dreams we don't realize that it was illogical you know we like this person this person was in an isolated place in the summit of a mountain and suddenly he's playing with with all you know boy boys were his friends and then we think that how come I didn't realize these this aspect that is so illogical well the reason is that we as consciousness were never they are the the remembrance that we we have is the mixture of these two things what we as consciousness were doing at this time was in this case contemplating this landscape then when when we wake up and this is mixed with what the brain was doing then we we get this logical kind of dream that was not really experienced by our consciousness what the brain was doing so knowing how this works is it's very important when we try to interpret our dreams because it's frequent that we have a dream that is otherwise quite logical and we have some chaotic elements we cannot understand what they mean where they come from and they may be accidents in the dream there may be something that has nothing to do with a real dream we may have had a very meaningful dream and then all these chaotic elements is the mixing up with what the brain was doing at the time so with experience we can learn how to separate these things and to separate the the the deeper dream the more meaningful dream and the main story of the dream from the other elements that are mixed up as we wake up conclusion the object specially in view and the investigation part of which I am about to describe was to discover whether it was possible to impress the ego of an ordinary person during sleep sufficiently to enable him to recollect the circumstance when he awoke and it was also desired as far as possible to find out what are the obstacles that usually stand in the way of such recollection I know of a group of friends that they did a kind of experiment like this and one of them was living in a in a in a different state this was when I was in Argentina in a different state and it was before their cellphones and all that and they needed to contact this person but then they did they didn't know how to contact them so they went to sleep thinking of going on contacting the person and the next day this person called one of them and said that he had had a dream of these two people because two of them said to go to sleep and try to communicate to him so he said that he had actually dred had a dream with the two of them he didn't remember what the dream was about but then he thought oh I should call him so it is possible if people are sufficiently awakened on the astral plane to contact people just as we do you know by on the physical plane as we said on the astral plane space is not really an issue we are close to people depending on our affinities not on the physical distance and this this this other friend was sensitive enough to be able to impress the physical brain with the memory of of having mental to at least a vague memory of having met this other two friends on the astral plane so the point that they wanted to see in this experiment is similar to that if it is possible to communicate with a person on the astral plane so that that person would remember when when waking up and if not what the obstacles were surely these experiments show very clearly how the remembrance of our dreams become so chaotic and in in consequent as it frequently is incidentally they also explain why some people never dream at all and why many others are only now and then under a collocation colocation of favourable circumstances able to bring back a confused memory of nocturnal adventure so if their body or this the consciousness itself is not very sensitive then when the person wakes up there are not necessarily any recollections of dreams now the fact that a person doesn't recollect dreams is not only because of this there may be many circumstances they there may even be physical circumstances if the consciousness of a person may be quite active on the astral plane but if the body is not healthy in certain aspects or is too tired or different circumstances the body may not be able to remember anything but as a general rule the less receptive consciousness is the less the person may remember dreams and at the same time as the bidder says when there are favourable circumstances like like the shells that they created around then it's easier to bring back a memory to the brain so many times the difficulty is also based on how much noise is they are on the astral plane we see further from them that if a man wishes to reap in his waking consciousness the benefit of what his ego may learn during sleep it is absolutely necessary for him to acquire control over his thoughts to subdue all lower passions and to attune his mind to higher things if he will take the trouble to form during waking life the habit of sustained and concentrated thought he will soon find that the advantage the advantage lie gained sorry he will soon find that the advantage like gains thereby is not limited to the daytime in its action we we talked about this that if during the the way to train ourselves is or the time to do it is during the day there is this phrase I think from the Bible that pair of I'm paraphrasing but says hurry to work while it is still day because the night comes and then nobody can do anything else so the idea is that it is when we are awake that we can generate a certain cause that will be reproduced when we are asleep and in a similar way it is when we are alive in our physical life that we can generate certain causes that will be ripped in the afterlife so the it is said that they the physical plane is the world of causes and then the inner planes are the world of effects we can still have activity on the inner planes but how much activity we can have depends on what we do on the physical plane so if we begin to try to work on ourselves during our waking life trying to train our brain to be receptive to be in this state of silent awareness if we train our ourselves to keep our desires under control in the sense of being able to drop desires are healthy and being able to let desires that are healthy you know just fulfill themselves if we train ourselves in this way then we can do the same when we are asleep when there is some experience that is important we know how to count down the brain how to quiet the brain just as we do in meditation if we practice meditation so that the memory can be impressed in the physical brain this is this is what Leadbeater says is is part of the results of the spiritual practice not that not only on the on our daily life that we are more in control we are calmer but also what happens on the inner planes let him learn to hold his mind in check to show that he is master of that also as well as of his lower passions let him patiently labor to acquire absolute control of his thoughts so that he will always know exactly what he is thinking about NY he will find that his brain thus trained to listen only to the promptings of the ego will remain praising why assent when not in use and will decline to receive and respond to casual currents from the surrounding ocean of thought he will then no longer be impervious to influences from the less material planes where inside is keener and judgment truer than they can ever be down here so again for example if we are driving to go to work or walking whatever we do when we get there and we look back for the most part we are not aware of what happened between leaving the house and getting to work and if we remember anything we can see that the brain was just reproducing all kind of thoughts and although thoughts are not really thoughts that we produced in the Theosophical view that the source comes from the outside the outside thoughts that are always floating there in the mental and and astral planes impact our our field of consciousness and they they generate a response to similar kind of thoughts that are are within our memory so if there is a thought of anger outside it will impact our emotional body and we generate will generate a train of thought of we being angry at whoever we are angry at the moment you know we use our own elements so if when we live during the day this is what our brain does then when we are going to sleep the brain is doing the same is responding to all this and connected thought forms and that as we saw that noise makes it difficult for for us to to remember what we do on the inner place so again developing this awareness being being aware of what our mind is doing developing the skill of quiet quiet in the mind whenever we want to all this is a great help to be able to begin to bring a memory from from the inner planes because as we saw in a previous in some previous classes there are different experiences that may happen on the inner planes at the beginning of evolution or the earlier stages of evolution relatively speaking earlier because we are talking about already eons of evolution but relatively speaking we saw that consciousness on the astral plane is almost asleep as on the physical plane then as the person wakes up this person is on the astral plane but in a kind of bubble and and the ego is thinking making up a world of its own just as it happens on the physical plane when we are daydreaming or when anything happens and our mind always relates whatever is happening to our own life so these two activities are not particularly relevant to remember being asleep or remember the the imaginations of consciousness on the astral plane they don't have any particular usefulness but us the person grows then that person begins to have an activity on the astral plane a real activity relating to real people to real situations and what the astral plane that person may may learn things that are deeper view than on the physical plane so again when this happens it is useful to remember these experiences and for that reason is important to train our body to start retaining some of that memory this takes years and as we saw in the previous classes there are people who may be very active doing very useful work on the astral plane and having done that for years and still their brain not remembering what happened there but gradually little by little the brain begins to respond first fragments are you remembering something here or now something then you know a few times a year and little by little this becomes something more or you usual the remembrance another point very strongly brought out in our further investigations is the immense importance of the last thought in a man's mind as he sinks to sleep this is a consideration which never occurs to the vast majority of people at all yet it affects them physically mentally and morally this is very evident in some people more than another although it's true in everybody but some people are very very impressionable by by what happened before going to sleep and unfortunately before going to sleep many times we watch the news that normally the news are all about bad things you know there is very little in the news that is about the good things that are going on in the world or we watch some movies which again are normally about drama or violence or this or that and if we go to sleep on with those thoughts in mind in our mind and in our emotion in the memory of our emotional body that will affect our experience in on the astral plane or at least how there are remembrance of what happens on the astral plane so it is always important to try to go to sleep we with a high state of consciousness as much as possible there are for example Pythagoras and this is something recommended many times in Theosophical literature too Pythagoras used to recommend to do a kind of review of the day before going to sleep so to see what happens to be aware of the different circumstances how we reacted and that is a kind of clearing out of the lower consciousness putting some order in in the personal consciousness so that when the person goes to sleep there is not so much chaos in the personal consciousness it is there is in the in consciousness this question of closure you know if for example sometimes happens you leave the house and you left something undone something that you normally do and then you have that memory they are that you left something undone so in the same way if we go to sleep and we we didn't give closure to some aspects of our day that lingering memory may bring consciousness back to that that situation once and again and that may disturb something else that consciousness could do could be doing on the astral plane so it is part of a spiritual practice to try to clear the the personal consciousness before going to sleep I like many times going to sleep in with a sense of dying to the day the day is over die to it and leave it behind and it's over you know and tomorrow is a new day and that's also a spiritual practice recommended sometimes to go to sleep as if as if it were a little death of course some people are scared of death or that could produce some depression so then that wouldn't be a good exercise but if you have a more philosophical feeling about it it's a good exercise I think we have seen how passive and how easily influenced man is during sleep if he enters that state with his thought fixed upon high and holy things he thereby draws around him the elementals created by like thought in others his rest is peaceful his mind opened to impressions from above and closed to those from below for he has set it working in the right direction this is another characteristic of the astral plane as what we discussed in previous classes in this series that we are closed on the astral plane two things for which we have affinity so if you go to sleep angry then you are closed to angry influences you are trapped those kind of influences if you go to sleep in a better state in a state of peace or whatever it is then you are close to anything that is peaceful or elevated and we attract these kinds of influences so this is another reason why we should try to go to to sleep in a good frame of mind of course life is life and this may not be possible every day but we should keep this in mind and if and try to make an effort in that direction to set up the conditions as best as possible sometimes karma may may put us in situations where we cannot do much about something and that's perfectly fine it's not that we have to be able to do it while we have to do is to try because that trying generates a karmic seed that put us in situations where we can actually do it so the the point in all this is to know in what direction we may may want to go and do the best we can in the current situation and then things will unfold in that direction if on the country he falls asleep with impure and earthly thoughts floating through his brain he attracts to himself all the gross and evil creatures who come near him while his sleep is troubled by the wild surgeons of passion and desire which render him blind to the sights death to the sounds that come from higher planes all this is based on the idea of elementals and thought forms we cannot really explore really in depth in this class we we have talked about this in some other series one I think the first one that we did on the power of thought we talked about this quite in-depth but this is the same concept we get in touch with the same energy that we are vibrating all ernst Theosophists should therefore make a special point of raising their thoughts to the loftiest level of which they are capable before allowing themselves to sink into slumber for remember through what seems at first but the portals of dream and trance may perchance presently present presently be gained into those grander realms where a lone true vision is possible so this is part of what we were talking being aware on the astral plane may give rise to a higher activity but again this all depends on on the evolution of consciousness there are some traits that we can practice to stimulate stimulate awareness on the astral plane and lucid dreaming and all this and that doesn't necessarily mean that our activity on the astral plane will be relevant we may have a lucid dream which means merely that we train bring to remember what happened on the astral plane but we may be in on the astral plane in our little bubble creating and recreating scenes having fun but just having fun in our imagination nothing that is really relevant as real life on the astral plane so always the informant of consciousness is first and then learning or reshaping the vehicles of consciousness so that we can retain the memory is the the second aspect but if we start training ourselves into this then go into the inner planes may become spiritually relevant activity and and this is why it is important to work in this direction if one guides his soul persistently upward its inner senses will at least begin to unfold the light within the shrine will burn brighter and brighter until at last the full continuous consciousness comes and then he will dream no more so this this is idea we were talking about the the dreams that are produced by the brain and the automatic response of the astral body etc they disappear and the person remembers things done on the inner planes but those are not dreams they are really experiences at the moment when we remember those experiences fragmented and all that they look like dreams but from a technical point of view they are not dreams in the sense of they are not imaginations produced by our brain or inner vehicles of consciousness to lie down to sleep will no longer mean for him to sink into oblivion but simply to step forth radiant rejoicing strong into that fuller nobler life where fatigue can never come where the soul is always learning even though all his time be spent in service for the service is that of the great masters of wisdom and the glorious task they set before him is to help ever to the fullest limit of his power in their never-ceasing work for the aiding and the guidance of the evolution of humanity and this is related to the idea of the invisible helpers that we discussed briefly in one of the classes and as I said there is a whole book about this if you are interested in the subject written by Leadbeater is only visible helpers you can read that book but then if you are a person that is interested in furthering the spiritual growth of people of humanity in general then on the astral plane it's also another field of activity where where we can do that so this is the end of the book there are some as I as I said several times we have not gone through everything in the book because that would take too long I just chose whatever I thought was more relevant to to discuss according to the time we have if you are really interested in the subject go and read the whole book we have a couple of minutes let me talk briefly about the idea of of shells and the bitter explains this better in some other other books in this one there is just a brief mention but they DISA matter especially not so much physical matter although this is also possible but then you need a special training but the the subtle matter of the astral plane and the mental plane they follow our imagination they follow our will just us you know how do we move our arm we just will to move it and then our that will generate say a nervous reaction that is transmitted to the arm and then they are moved so there is a will wheeling of something that produces emotion in the same way really to to manipulate astral mother or mental mother even if we don't see it it produces a result and the result is more or less effective according to how trained our will is but that is that we can imagine generating a shell around us so that it can protect us from the idea of the from different influences so before going to sleep if you want to keep out these streams of thoughts that flow through the etheric brain you could try to generate a shell of etheric matter now you have to be careful not to generate a shell of astral matter or at least not of the highest roll matter because then when if you generate a shell of astral matter when you go to the astral plane you will be enclosed in that shell and the way how how to generate one shell or the other is by knowing that you want to generate a shell of etheric matter not astral and that knowing sorts out the kind of matter so I'm saying this just for your general information it needs some more information for for you to be able to practice it but is it is possible to generate a shell of etheric matter or a shell of the lower matter of the astral plane so that it keeps away the lower vibrations on the astral plane but if you generate a shell of matter with mixed matter from the astral plane when you go to the astral plane you will be enclosed in your bubble and not be able to really relate to the outside so I wouldn't recommend anybody to try if you want to know more about this the better explains this in several books I think in the hidden side of things there is some he writes a little about these shells so you can read their mark but I just wanted to mention it now if you go to sleep knowing that you want to be protected from outside influences you could go to sleep with that thought and protect yourself with a shell of that intent in that yes but you need to know you need to actually for example if you want to generate it's usually easier to generate a shell in the in the periphery of each body so you have to harden your aesthetic double and imagine this your etheric double around the body and imagine hardening it and if you want to generate a shell of Astral matter then you have to visualize more or less at periphery of the astral body which in the philosophical literature there is a description of how far from the body it normally is and then you have to will to use only the lower matter of the astral plane and naturally visualize generating this shell the intention may help but it may be something vaguer unless it's a very strong intention I guess it could help but otherwise going to sleep with good feelings that generates a vibration that is itself protecting david says corrected you you might have said Pablo meant at the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th is one this yeah this turn of the 19th century I I meant that turn from the 19th to 20 so the early 1900s is when this experiment late when they did this experiment but they were part of the libido was in the London lodge in the 1880 90s so at the turn of the 19th towards the 20th century any other question and about what we have discussed as you see what we call dreaming is quite complex that's why I'm always little reluctant to books that interpret dreams they are helpful to some extent they can interpret the symbolic dreams or can help you in some aspects but then there are so many other factors however knowing about them does help for you to interpret your dreams so actually you start if if you start paying attention to your dreams you will begin to remember them more and more and you can actually start recognizing all these different elements Thank You Diana yes well all I'm doing is just you know sharing what the books say I mean of course there is always a little of the experience that we have in this but I don't know if many people are aware of of the depth of the Theosophical teachings that is a good thing and a bad thing this aspect of the death because the problem is that they are deep and some people may feel intimidated by them and some people they just don't need such a depth in the knowledge that they are seeking but at the same time if you are a person that is interested in understanding these things deeper I think it's a you know it would be a shame if if we just forget about all this and if we just approach all these subjects in in a more superficial way when potentially we can do far more so again I'm not claiming that the Theosophical teachings are the only ones are the best ones but this is a quality of of our teachings that they are normally quite deep kind of scientific and if you really want to understand the processes they are a great source of information yes any other comment or question we before we we close marinus asking a question we will let you know yeah I think mine is asking and correct me if I didn't understand she's saying that even if we don't try to do this consciously this kind of things happen naturally so the person may naturally grow in into bring in some of these changes in daily life and in the dreams and then like making this connection kind of connection is that yeah so she says this may be built into nature and yes that is exactly the Theosophical concept all these things happen naturally because they are built in nature the problem is that the natural work is very slow when we see how slow evolution is how many eons everything takes to develop a little organism from another one it takes millions of years because the natural pace is always very slow so when talking about the the cycles of evolution according to the Theosophical view we have billions of years of evolution ahead of us if we just go naturally with nature now human beings have a a creative aspect because we are said to be a divine spark so whenever we put our consciousness our intention into something we accelerate those processes far more than is possible by by just natural impulse so all these things will happen naturally human to humanity in the net next few billion years so to say you know in the next round if you know anything about the Theosophical cycles of evolution but we don't need to wait for that we we can do all this faster and the reason to do it faster is is not to win any race or competition but is that there is a world far deeper and amazing and blissful world out there while we are caught in this little petty conflictive life and this is part of our experience but if we put our mind to it we can transcend this stage of evolution far faster than nature will ever ever take us if we don't then we will eventually get there after you know many many lifetimes so yes that is correct that's the the idea part of the idea of the aasif is to make people aware of this so that they can do it more consciously alright anything else well thank you everybody for joining us to all this class I'm going to send the link as usual and maybe perhaps the last exercise for you if you if you want to practice it was a pleasure to share this with you we are going to do another at home with the Asif II probably in the fall we will choose some other book feel free to suggest books normally I try to take smaller books so that they are manageable in a relatively short number of classes if you have any Theosophical book in mind send me suggestions and then I'll see what I can do and I hope to see you in in this or any other webinars in the future thank you everybody and have a great week