Dreams-Part-2
welcome everybody to our home with theosophy this is our second class we have some new people so welcome last in our last meeting we went through an introduction that is not really part of the leaders book it was taken from another book that he wrote the astral plane because what we are going to explore about the dreams as we are going to see has a lot to do with what happens on the astral plane so we we try to review the main aspects of that subject that will be needed to understand our present topic so today we are going to start exploring this this particular subject and as we normally do we will go through what Leadbeater explained I bring some excerpts from his book and then I will make some comments you feel free to ask questions or make comments as we perceive and then at the end we always will have some some time also for for exchange so if you want to wait to the end that's also good I have today with with me marina she's going to to read the excerpts for you so let us begin with the with the first slide mechanism of consciousness let us first consider rather carefully the mechanism physical etheric and astral by means of which impressions are conveyed to our consciousness the bitter had a quite scientific mind and the way he approached things was in in that particular way so normally when we read about dreams people go directly to the X perience of dreaming but as we are going to see the experience of dreaming or what we remember when we wake up off of that experience is not necessarily exactly what happened there are many things that affect our perception so if we are going to have a correct understanding of that experience that we call dreams then we need to know what are the different possibilities that may affect this this experience of dreaming or it's also its memory as we are going to see there are certain aspects that relate to our body not only to the physical body but also to to our subtle bodies that may affect the experience of dreaming or its recollection so it is important to to begin to keeping this in mind so that we can make an intelligent assessment of what we call a dream number one the physical aspect we have in our bodies a great central axis of nervous matter ending in the brain and from this a network of nerve threads radiates in every direction through the body it is these nerve threads according to modern scientific theory which convey all impressions from without to the brain and the latter upon receipts of these impressions translates them into sensations or perceptions so he begins to explore the part of the nervous system and this will be important as we are going to see but the idea is that we receive impressions that suppose this is in normal consciousness and we touch something and that that touching the object produces certain electrochemical reaction in our reactions in our mouths that they are communicated to the brain and somehow the brain or as we are going to see later some subtle aspects of of the brain not the physical brain necessarily but what we call the brain that say transforms emotion that is electrochemical into a sensation or a perception this is a problem in science is called in in the philosophy of science the hard problem of consciousness hard because it's hard to solve it is hard to understand from the scientific point of view consciousness is the result of this electrochemical ectric amical activity so they don't know there is a gap between a depolarization in in the membrane of the neurons which is an interchange of sodium and potassium from from the environment how that is transformed into a visual or a tactile or any sensorial stimulus so they don't know how that works and in in the Theosophical view we we postulate that the process is far more complex and involves some other aspects of our being not only the physical one now this brain of ours is very readily affected by slight variations in our general health and most especially by any which involve a change in the circulation of the blood through it when the flow of blood through the vessels of the head is normal and regular the brain and therefore the whole nervous system is at liberty to function in an orderly and efficient manner but any alteration in this normal circulation either as to quantity quality or speed immediately produces a corresponding effect on the brain and through it on the nerves throughout the body here he is talking about something that normally we don't consider too important but when we are talking about transferring a perception from the inner place to the physical plane it becomes very important in my circumstances he he's going to explain if the the flow of of blood through the brain is not good enough we may get sleepy or something like that but if this is happening while for example when we are awakening and while the consciousness that was the having some activity on different planes from the physical while that consciousness was coming to the brain he something like this happens it may distort the memory of what happens actually in some other books he says that this is why the the psychic research the clairvoyant research that they did is so difficult because even a problem of digestion may distort what you were you saw on higher planes and when you are bringing it down to the physical plane because the brain is not working properly maybe you know how your body's having a hard time digesting and there is not enough blood flowing through the brain that fact will distort what you saw on higher planes if you were clairvoyant for example so even people who are not clairvoyant when when we remember a dream if this dream is a remembrance from what happens on the inner planes as we are going to see then the remembrance may be affected by how the brain is working if the supply of oxygen to the brain be deficient it becomes overcharged with carbon dioxide and heaviness and lethargy very shortly supervened if the speed with which the blood flows through the vessels is too great it produces fever if too slow then again lethargy is caused so these are some examples of the thing that happened on the physical body are they and on the level of the waking consciousness but as as I say darkness we are going to see this effect more dramatically the what we perceived from the inner place it is obvious therefore that our brain through which be it remembered all physical impressions must pass may very easily be disturbed and more or less hindered in the due performance of its functions by causes apparently trivial causes to which we probably often pay no attention whatever even during waking hours of which we should almost certainly be entirely ignorant during sleep now the reason why this is important to to begin with and all the other the other processes that we are going to explain tonight it's a at a certain point in our growth what we call dreams the remembrance from experience on the only higher planes may have an important role in air even in our waking consciousness as long as the dreams are just curiosities and our things that have no necessarily impact on our daily life well it doesn't matter much if you remember well or not what you were you had read after all is just an imagination in your mind but as I said in the spiritual life the there is a period where consciousness begins to be able to learn on the inner planes and when waking up all that knowledge is transferred to the brain even if not in a very conscious way many times all this is transferred in a more unconscious manner so if this there is a conscious remembrance of certain things and they are distorted by by these mechanisms that we are going to explore then unless we know about that possibility if we start giving some if we considered our begin to consider our dreams as something important but we give them an importance without having the discernment that these things may affect what we remember from the experience then we may be led astray and we are going to see us the class goes on how dreams can be of help in the spiritual life normally as I said in the previous class we tend to look at the whole world from the point of view of the personality and the physical plane how things can be helpful for my personal life so a person dreams of a number and the first thing that the person thinks is of you know doing using it to win the lottery or something like that in in the Theosophical path we have the view that the the real is our inner self and that our physical life and our life in all the planes that their real purpose of this is to be able to realize the inner self so whatever happens from the inner planes may help us to lead a physical life that is conducive to the spiritual development and growth so this is why when dreams may begin to help us in that direction we need to know how to interpret them not in terms of if you dream with water what it means because as we are going to see that also is normally quite personal but in a deeper way we need to to understand what possibilities are they are - for error or to misinterpret and we are going to see all this during the class I'm just trying to point out why this is important because it's something that is not normally talked about when when exploring dreams before we pass on one other peculiarity of this physical mechanism must be noted and that is it's remarkable tendency to repeat automatically vibrations to which it is accustomed to respond it is to this property of the brain that are to be attributed all those bodily habits and tricks of man which are entirely independent of the will and are often so difficult to conquer and as will presently be seen it plays an even more important part during sleep than it does in our waking life so the the body the physical body has this ability to fall into habits this is very useful for certain things when we learn for the first time how to drive we have to think every motion and then we got we develop the habit this is that is called the muscle memory and then we don't have to think about it the body knows how to do it we just have to be present so the body has this ability to generate habits and repeat them now the this this quality of the body may become an obstacle when we are trying to perceive deeper aspects of life because the body is very good to relate to the physical world it is built to relate to the physical world but then that same body may become an obstacle when we want to perceive something beyond the physical world and I'm not talking necessarily about psychic perception or clairvoyance I'm talking about listening to the spiritual voice developing wisdom understanding life from a deeper perspective in particular with dreams because our brain as part of the body has the tendency to to repeat impressions many times whatever the the brain was was perceiving during the day will affect in a very important way how it will receive the remembrance from what was happening on the inner planes why the brain was asleep so if during the day we were worried then when we go to sleep and when we wake up that tendency to repeat the worry many times distorts the memory of a dream the memory of something that may have been an actual experience on the inner plates so for this reason the waking life and the the dreaming life the life on the on the physical plane and the life on the inner planes they affect each other they are a continually in a certain way so part of the the process discipline to to begin to open up to this deeper experience of life on the inner plate is to set the physical life in order it all comes together you cannot really just not pay attention to one aspect and suppose that is not going to affect another aspect but we are going to talk about all these more in in later classes number two etheric aspect it is not alone through the brain to which we have hitherto been referring however that impressions may be received by the person almost exactly coextensive with and interpenetrating its visible form is his etheric double and that also has a brain which is really no less physical than the other though composed of matter in a condition finer than the gaseous if you see here on the table that that you have on the screen on the physical plane there are two principles according to the philosophical view the physical body and the etheric double the physical bodies the dense aspect of ourselves that we perceive with our five senses and in the Theosophical view it is said that there is a an etheric or subtler counterpart of the physical body which is the bridge between the body that is material and the soul that is immaterial and I'm using the word soul in a general way so we have things for example the astral body if you see they are in the in the diagram or the table the astral body is not physical the physical body is physical how can something that is in material affect something that is material this is a problem in philosophy they call it the ghost in the machine they say if the mind is in material and the body's material then is like a ghost trying to to drive a machine it cannot interact with it well the ideas at the etheric double is like a bridge because it has it responds to both the material and the immaterial so it has equality of both aspects least steel physical but is subtler than the the dense matter and therefore can respond to what is in material so that is a in the same way that we have a physical brain there is a subtler counterpart to the brain that is the what we can call the etheric brain this etheric brain is has a function of of passing the bio electrical impulses that are happening at the level of the physical organ passing that and transforming that into sensations at the level of the D astral body and therefore it's part of the mechanism of consciousness if there is a disruption in the etheric brain then there will be a disruption in the physical or in the perception of the physical world now this etheric is the vehicle of the human vital force called in sanskrit prana and anyone who has developed the psychic faculties can see exactly how this is so he will see the solar life principle almost colorless though intensely luminous and active which is constantly poured into the earth's atmosphere by the sun he will see how their theory part of his spleen absorbs this universal life and specializes it into prana so that it may be more readily a similar ball by his BA one important aspect of the etheric double is to to generate a kind of vitality that the body can use this is as he says what in Hinduism they called prana in Chinese philosophy the Chi so if the the etheric counterpart of the spleen is the one that takes the prana that that comes from the Sun and that is all around us and that is a kind of universal vital force and specializes that into a kind of prana that we can assimilate and that the the body can used to keep on functioning now as we are going to see the flow of prana is very important in transferring physical vibrations to consciousness you will see how prana courses all over that body running along every nerve thread in tiny globules of lovely rosy light and how when the rose-colored particles have been absorbed the superfluous life principle finally radiates from the body in every direction as bluish white light so this is how the clairvoyant sees this he described this in other books also this is how he he saw all this so there is a an almost colorless kind of vitality that comes from the Sun then it is absorbed in the body and turned into some kind of pinkish or rosy globules that go around the body then that that vitality is absorbed and the leftover goes out of the human body in in this kind of bluish light that some people may see when they see the etheric double many times they see with this bluish white light and that is because it's the vitality that is we are pouring out that is the prana that is already used by human beings although then it can be that kind of bluish can be used by other species if he examines further into the action of this life principle he will soon see that the transmission of impressions to the brain depends rather upon its regular flow along the etheric portion of the nerve threads then upon the mere vibration of the particles of their denser and visible portion as is commonly supposed so at the beginning of the this chapter Ledbetter said according to science impressions are transmitted to the brain by this electric nerve impression or what we know now more specifically in the science of the 21st century is an electrochemical reaction so he says according to science that's what transmits the impressions to the brain but what he says here is a to the clairvoyant site the this electrochemical reactions actually follow the flow of prana and as he is going to explain if you in some way stop the flow of prana then this electrochemical reaction doesn't produce an impression in the brain when a finger becomes entirely numbed with cold it is incapable of feeling and the same phenomenon of insensibility may readily be produced at will by a mesmerizer who by a few passes over the arm of his subject will bring it into a condition in which it may be pricked with a needle or burnt by the flame of a candle without the slightest sensation of pain being experienced now why does the subject feel nothing in either of these two cases the ideas he's going to show very briefly both the the cold and the effect of the idea of a mesmerizer was the turn of that night into the 20th century mesmerism was quite famous and there were people that we're able to do some passes over Pete over you know another person so that the person would not feel physical stimulus today also that happens with some some people that practice hypnotism or similar things in the East they are the fakirs or the some Hindu hata Yogi's they know how to manipulate the flow of prana so they can pierce their their body and not even blood will flow and they were won't feel any pain so libido is asking here if it all depends on day on this electrochemical reaction how come that when these things are done by this mesmerizer the brain cannot feel anything there has to be something else going on there the nerve threads are still there and though in the first case it might be contended that their action was paralyzed by cold and by the absence of blood from the vessels this certainly cannot be the reason in the second case where the arm retains its normal temperature and the blood circulates as usual the this is not too different also from when we go into surgery and you have an anaesthetic then what happens according to theosophy is that the Terek towel is removed from the physical so even though you may have the electrochemical reactions going on and going to the brain because the plane is not flowing and bringing the impressions to the brain then the brain doesn't feel it and he will he will show how this happens in in this case is how he was describing if we call in aid of the clairvoyant he will tell us that the reason why the frozen finger seems dead and the blood is unable to circulate through its vessels is because the Rosi life ether is no longer coursing along the nerve threads for we must remember that though matter in the theory condition is invisible to ordinary sight it is still purely physical and therefore can be affected by the action of cold or heat yeah so let's go to the next one in the second case he will tell us that when the mesmerizer makes the passes by which he renders the subjects armed and sensible what he really does is to pour his own nerve ether or magnetism as it is often called into the arm thereby driving back for the time that of the subject the arm is still warm and living because there is still life ether coursing through it but since it is no longer the subjects own specialized life ether and is therefore not an rapport with his brain it conveys no information to that brain and consequently there is no sense of feeling in the arm so basically what this person is doing is pouring out part of his soul prana and because the the that prana belongs to him and not to the other person the brain cannot read that kind of prana because that prana was specialized by this other person's plane not by the subjects the subject of this experiment let's say now this knowing that he goes as you can see quite into detail about how impressions go from the physical to the etheric and to consciousness because it has an impact in many different aspects for example when even when we want to meditate something that most meditation teachers will will tell you is they need to have your back straight then the reason for having the back straight is so that the prana can circulate in a proper way because if the plan is not circulating properly then your brain is not going to be working properly also many times breathing exercises are recommended many times at the beginning of the meditation for the same reason now if you are going to be they're just sitting there maybe not many differences or much difference between having a lot of prana going on or not you will feel just a little more sleepy or less sleepy but if in your meditation you are trying to attain a higher state of consciousness to understand something from a higher point of view to stimulate the wisdom that is intrinsic in us then it is very important that the brain is receptive because you may have an insight but if the brain is not able to receive it without distortion then for all that matters to you in your waking consciousness is like if you have never had the insight so it is important when we are we are in pursuit of spiritual life to understand that the physical body needs to be healthy some people say well after all we are not the body then why should it be healthy but although that doesn't affect the spirit itself so to say you're the inner aspect of our being a physical body that is not working properly will be an obstacle for us in our waking consciousness to retain higher impressions so all this mechanism can explain a little and we are going to see how this is transmitted to to the inner person to the astral body and from there up to the mental and cosa but all this mechanism this is important to keep it in mind to recognize the need to to pay attention this is also why for example it is recommended to meditate when your stomach is empty because if the if you meditate after eating and your the most of the blood is is being spent in trying to digest the food then again the brain is not going to be as receptive as it should be you may miss these higher perceptions li asks what is the status of prana when a person is sleeping when the person is sleeping there isn't working out of the department the planner sorry the the physical elemental which is like the consciousness of the physical body devotes most of its energy when the body is asleep to repair the body and try to bring back the harmonium balance there's a lot of prana that is left over that has not been eliminated so that that's also something that happens but all this this activity of the physical elemental requires prana for the physical elemental to work it is said that this is why in the from a an occult point of view occult in the sense of taking into account what is hidden what is not easily seen it is good to go to sleep early rather than late because in the first part of the night the there is in the environment there is still prana from from the Sun that the physical elemental can use if you go to sleep late when the plan is already exhausted then the physical elementa has less energy to to use to repair the body so it is it is normally you know there used to be the saying that the early part of the night was like one hour sleeping in the early part of the night was worth three hours of sleeping in the late part of the night so of course our life may not allow us to to go to sleep too early but within what our life allows we should try to go to sleep early rather than late so that the physical element that can use the the leftover prana that is in the environment now Janet has another question how would compression fracture and the t12 vertebra effect ones meditation I would say that that depends on how the thetic double is working there because they you know when when something happens on the physical body then the etheric double is also affected at the moment of of the fact or the accident in this case but the aesthetic double can be repaired even if the physical part cannot the etheric double is as it is not so dense is far more fluid so prana willing flows through the etheric double as we saw not through the physical nerves of course you need some amount of physical electrochemical impulse huerta by but if if you are able to move your limbs and all that that means that that is happening so in principle it shouldn't affect much if they thirty double is working properly the prana will call naturally in their in the appropriate way if at the beginning I mean the the etheric double may need some time to heal but after you know a few years that I know that this happened to you some years ago it shouldn't affect much so yeah now just as any change in the circulation of the blood affects the receptivity of the denser brain matter and thus modifies the reliability of the impressions derived through it so the condition of the etheric portion of the brain is affected by any change in the volume or the velocity of these life currents so yeah we were saying it's not so much that the blood affects the etheric double but blood is the carrier the physical carrier of prana so if there is there is not enough blood or there is too much blood then the same will happen at the level of prana so this is this is why the the mechanism of consciousness can be affected by something physical for example when the quantity of nerve ethers specialized by the spleen Falls for any reason below the average physical weakness and weariness are immediately felt if under these circumstances it also happens that the speed of its circulation is increased the person becomes super sensitive highly irritable nervous and perhaps even hysterical in such a condition he is often more sensitive to physical impressions than he would normally be and so it often occurs that a person suffering from ill health sees visions or apparitions which are imperceptible to his more robust neighbor there is a a quote in the secret doctrine where Blavatsky says that world physical health is many times an impediment for psychic perception and this is because the the more active the physical senses are the the louder they they are so to say and then the subtler perceptions cannot be you cannot impress the brain because the the physical perceptions are too loud they are too strong so as leader says here if certain conditions happen what he described there that the there is not necessarily enough prana and the the circulation of the blood is increased we happens a lot for example when a person is stressed we know that when we are under stress we feel irritable we feel anxious or nervous because these conditions happen there is not enough prana and the blood is going faster that produces a particular physical state were where our senses are like more tense and there for they may receive some psychic impressions they immigrant in the wrong way and become you know a kind of hysterical attack or he may produce a vision or many times they told the two go together it is historical truth that many of these sensitive people even mystics they they had these also hysterical attacks because then they were able to perceive on the higher planes because they are nares or were naturally more tense than in other people when this happens when the the normal the regular physical evolution happens then the nerves grow or evolve along with the with the ability of consciousness to deal with all these and then the person doesn't fall into this irritability or any of these other problems when for any reason if we force try to force the perception of on the inner place as we explained in the previous class then this lack of balance may happen but the point here is that in certain physical conditions we may be more open to psychic perceptions it must be remembered that the etheric and denser matter are really both part of one and the same physical organism and that therefore neither can be affected without instantly producing some reaction on the other consequently there can be no certain certainty that impressions will be correctly transmitted unless both portions are functioning quite normally in the irregularity in either part may very readily disturb its recipe receptivity and produce blurred or distorted images of whatever is presented to it furthermore as will presently be explained it is infinitely more liable to such aberrations during sleep than when in the waking State so here is the reason why he was going in detail into into old days if then the physical and etheric aspects are not working properly as he says it it disturbs the receptivity of the brain and produce a distorted image there is I remember a story where Damodar he was an early Theosophical member he lived he was an associate of Lebowski and he was a disciple of the Masters and then he had I think he was sleeping actually and he woke up and remembered or brought to his memory the the image of an accident that Blavatsky had had had so he we pop Blonsky was living somewhere else and he reported to the people around that something had happened to Blavatsky now his remembrance of what happened to her was distorted it was it was more or less what happened then they asked Lebowski and she confirmed that I think she had tripped and hurt her knee but the remembrance that the mother had was distorted and this is an example not not that dreams are for that purpose but this is an example of how impressions are healed obviously so on the astral plane what was happening to gravity but then in the process of bringing it to the physical brain there was a distortion so again if we are talking about dreams as just something fun and you know some things that our brain are creating then these distortions are not very important but if we are looking at the subject of dreams as something that more and more may be important in the development of the spiritual life then all these things begin to be important and we are going to see some some examples of this as the class goes on so it is honest he says all these problems at the level of the brain that during our waking state may not produce a lot of difficulties they do produce a big impact when we are in the process of bringing back the memory to the physical brain 3 it should be 3 is this oh did you call back let me see no so yeah they go there astral aspect number 2 astral aspect still another mechanism that we have to take into account is the astral body which is the vehicle expression of the astral plane on the astral plane this astral vehicle is even more sensitive to external impressions than the gross and etheric bodies for it is itself the seat of all desires and emotions it is peculiar peculiarly susceptible to the influence of passing thought currents and when the mind is not actively controlling it it is perpetually receiving these stimuli from without and eagerly responding to them this mechanism also like the others is more readily influenced during the sleep of the physical body so now we are at the level of the astral body as you can see in the table there and the the the impression set so we have seen on the physical body there is these electrochemical reactions which are transmitted to the brain and carry with it the the prana the the prana is flowing through the thirty double while the the electrochemical reactions are going through the physical body and these impressions are transmitted to the astral body which is the one that transforms physical and etheric reactions into what we call a sensation a sensation and they and later on a feeling so this is where science doesn't know how this happens because of course within the physical science that we have developed at the moment they cannot measure any other phenomena than what happens on the physical brain and it is clear that an exchange of ions through the membrane of the neurons cannot produce per se a sensation something that is so complex as a feeling or sensation well the ideas are as I mentioned is that the quality justice the quality of the physical body is what we call chemistry and physics you know the activity of the physical bodies what what in science we we know as chemistry and physics the activity of what we call the astral body is what we call feelings and sensations so when all this stimuli goes to the astral body then it is transforming these sensations now the problem with the the astral body as you go to subtler and subtler aspects of a human being this aspects because they are lighter they are more fluid they are less dense they can be more easily affected they are more responsive it's like the difference between having a very fine blow blow on your hand or having a very thick one you know if you have a very thick one you will miss many of the saddle impressions if you have a glow that is that is very thing then you can perceive much more so the astral body is far more influential than they theory condemned the physical and as we know in in theosophy every feeling and every thought that we produce of Astral murder that impact our astral body and that impact tends to reproduce a similar sensation in our bodies so if we go to a place where people were angry we tend to feel that anger we tend to reproduce that anger whether consciously or unconsciously all the the opposite is the same we go to a sacred place and we tend to reproduce that kind of feeling so this is important because most of the dreams that we that are that are more than just a physical activity as we are going to see there are some dreams that are just a physical effect of how the body works but the dreams that are not the dreams that are part of an experience of the inner planes on the inner planes most of those that we can remember happen on the astral plane which is a plane of feelings that planes the plane of emotions and they they are perceived by our astral body so when the astral body is perceiving all this the the emotional animals fear may influence what how the perception is received in addition to the influence that may have how the physical and the etheric body are are working so we are going to see an example of this in the next slide for example a man had been a drunkard and after a long period of total abstinence had succeeded in entirely destroying the physical desire for alcohol yet he stated that he still frequently dreamed that he was drinking and in that state he felt the horror the old horrible pleasure during the day his desire was kept under control by the will and casual thought forms or causal thought forms casual casual thought forms or passing elementals were unable to make any impression upon it but when the astral body was liberated in sleep it escaped to some extent from the domination of the ego and it again responded readily to these painful influences and imagined itself experiencing once more at the disgraceful delights so this is from a person that wrote a letter to let bitter and and this is an experience that is not uncommon that so they disappear in a particular vice in this case it was drinking when when they died in theosophy for those who may not be aware of this the idea of the ego ego actually the way that it is used in Theosophical literature is from the Greek Eco the Greek word Tegel means - and so the when the ego is is written in in the capital e it refers to the spiritual - there is also a lower you go that is the ego that we normally talk about in psychology is the personal ego but the spiritual eyeness this they go there is what what is expressing through the mental body the astral body and the physical body when we are awake so while they are consciousness is in charge if we are result to fight a particular vice we little by little we begin to gain control over that desire and while we are in control then the desire is for all purposes dead now when in in in sleeping the consciousness retreats to the astral body and then there is a period during sleep that retreats even beyond to the mental body and then the astral body is left just like the physical in this kind of slumber then the astral body may be influenced by external thought forms or elementals or feelings so because there is still astral matter in the astral body that tend to respond to the old vice when there is some mmm thoughtful more or a formal feeling that that is similar to device that the person had that stimulates the matter in the astral body and because the astral body has this ability to produce images just as the physical body does and the mental body does we are going to see that later it generates this kind of dream of the person drinking and then many times it happens that when a person is fighting something then the person goes to sleep and has this kind of dreams and many times this has nothing to do with the person it has to do with an external influence on the astral body that is that is still in a process of purification so you can see here how something that is completely external and may not have anything to do with the consciousness of the person may produce this particular dream and in the case of this person who was very worrisome because the person thought what why am I still having these dreams and enjoying this these horrible pleasure as this person put it that he was trying to fight so this is all part of necessary understanding of the complexity of human beings so that we can understand or interpret in an intelligent way what happens when we dream for example in psychology they would say that he has that his repressing his desire so when the conscious mind is not there then the the desire expresses itself and even though that may be what happens sometimes there is a difference between self-control and repression self-control is a conscious attitude in which we are put in order in our nature repression is an unconscious mechanism when a person because of feeling of guilt or fear the consciousness of the person cannot bear something is something that happens without the person knowing unconsciously that shuts those things off but then when consciousness goes beyond the astral body in sleeping the astral body is full of this tendencies so it begins to reproduce all these desires so in that particular case you could say that these dreams are a product of the subconscious mind us in psychology then they say but that is not always the case many times the dream is because of this external stimulation has nothing to do with the person with the consciousness of the person so in psychology they called subconscious mind to a whole lot of phenomena that that are not understood and that can can come from many different sources by by studying studying all these you know teachings and what we are going to explore in the in this class you can begin to put some order in these perceptions and understand what is going on so this is an example of how the astral body may produce something an image in your brain that have nothing to do with you or what you were really doing and so can the physical body we all know that sometimes it sounds a physical sound produces a dream related to that sound or a or a it's like physical perception if your your unfinished lip you know that may generate a dream that you are losing your arm because any stimulation from the outside or from the inside meaning from consciousness tends to produce an image so in in our growth in understanding our dreams we need to begin to be able to differentiate when certain things were external influences and when some things were part of our conscious activity so this is the this is the last slide in what I wanted to present today we have not yet gotten completely into the subject of Dreams although we just touched on this because the the first thing that the bidder wants to show is all how the mechanism of consciousness words and all the different possibilities you know what this is a blessing and a curse in the Theosophical teachings it is a curse in the sense that most people need a kind of simple blanket statement you know what if you say something that is very simple then it's easy for that to to catch up catch on and for people to understand okay it is a you'll be and that is fine but then if you really want to go to go deeper you need to know the complexities and many times that simplistic approach produces misunderstanding I am not sure if I gave this example here last class I know I gave it not too long ago in one of the talk so I apologize if I already did but this idea for example that the mind or the illnesses come from the mind there is an oversimplification of a fact it is true that our mind can affect the body it is not true that everything that happens to the body came from the mind or at least not from this present mind many of the illnesses come from karma that was generated in many incarnations in the past some people are born with a particular illness before they could develop in mind of this incarnation so many of the illnesses have nothing to do with how the mind of the person is working there are many influences that can produce an illness now if you have this simplistic approach the mind the are produced by demand the good aspect is that it is easy for people to see that it's important to pay attention to how you think but then the the the bad aspect of that simplistic teaching is that it is not always true and many times a person not only falls ill but now feels guilty about falling ill because that person says is my fault I have this cancer because my thoughts were incorrect and maybe the person was a very loving hearted person and cannot understand and I have seen cases like this cannot understand how he or she may have this this illness when his or her thoughts were perfectly fine so the same way in the Theosophical view there is the tendency to try to explain the complexity of the universe and human beings which does exist there this scares some people away but on the other hand if you really want to to go deeper with all this you need to know the complexity so if we are giving doing just a class teaching people how to interpret their dreams then it they simply the simplest your explanation the better for most people but if we are dealing with this from the spiritual point of view to see ok this is a new realm of experience that as we grow spiritually begins to to have an impact on our life then you need to know what really goes on you need to know the different possibilities and although it may be confusing at the beginning knowing that these possibilities are there you begin to understand and and recognize when something happens and you are not going to be led astray by a simplistic view so that's what I wanted to present today now we can go to some questions and answers or comments feel free to to ask any question or if you don't agree with thing that's perfectly fine we can discuss it down and explore it so if you have a microphone you can raise your hand there is a button they are with a little person with a hand up you can raise your hand and we can give you the microphone if you don't you can write in the chat box and then we will read the question so we say any question or comments to the exercise yeah marina saying that we gave an exercise for the week last week so if there is any any comment or question about the exercise the idea of the exercise was that when we go to sleep we may be on the astral plane but we may be within a kind of babble self center surrounded by our thoughts and worries and our personal activity and not be really aware of the environment and actually many times we are like that during our day we are not really aware of people of what what is going on outside we may be walking in a beautiful place and be just inside our head with all our thinking so if we are going to be aware on the astral plane when we are sleeping then we need to begin to break that bubble in our daily life as we saw there is a kind of echo or continuity between what we do when awake and work what we do when asleep so the the exercise that we proposed was to work on this so if there is any comment or question about that that's also welcome if you if you want to to contribute and if not it's perfectly fine - okay PRV now you have the mic what you have to do is to click on the the mics icon that you will see on the top bar there click on it and you will probably get a sign that asks you to allow the software to use your mic so you have have to say allow and then you should be able to speak so yeah I have a question just because I went through this recently with having a baby when the mother and baby they're so connected and physical level and so when I dream and obviously when she was a little it like last threat to a master and he dreams do we as strongly connected to an astral level to otherwise if I see dreams and say they're scary does he feel it like when he's in utero what do you think yes the the mother and they connected on the inner planes even more than on the physical plane it is not uncommon that a person when when a woman is pregnant certain desires appear on the person that were not really hurts and many times they come with a baby the ID in the Theosophical view is that the the soul that is in canadian brings his or her own tendencies from the past so because they the the oil of their debian and the your of the man are interpenetrating they affect is each other and many times there are these desires that all of a sudden come that really belong to the the soul of the baby the the the soul during the when when the body is just a baby the soul is not all connected to the physical body yet there is a few years in which the life of the baby is more still at the biological level the brain is being developed and the whole organism so that the soul can express itself through the brain so for for a few years the baby is still not completely connected to the soul on the physical plane it's like the the real consciousness of the baby is waiting for the physical body to be to be ready and this is also why the this tradition of the guardian angel that they the little the babies and little kids have is because nature since the soul cannot really take care of it of the body under the development nature provides a kind of angel or daiva depending on what tradition you're talking about that fulfills that purpose until the soul can really take care of the body so most of the the consciousness of the baby is really on the inner planes and at that level there is far more connection between between everybody you know if you are on the astral plane there is far more connection with a person than on the physical plane so there is a constant you know interchange of feelings and emotions and thoughts and of course this is why it's good if the mother can be as peaceful and happy as possible but at the same time life is life and if not through the mother then the baby when growing up we have to face difficulties and all day so it's although it is better if the man if the mother can have a good emotional and mental and physical environment nevertheless sometimes that is not possible I mean it's not that you will you know ruin the the possibilities of the child so in short yes there is there is a connection a stronger connection you know it's just natural that that happens I don't know if that answers or you have any other question you know that cancer is thank you very much any other question or comment all right so I'll I'll send a an exercise as I did last last week for you in case you know you you want to to try to apply some of these these teachings and if next week you want you have any question or comment you can bring them up at the end of the class but otherwise we'll meet next Tuesday thank you everybody for connecting and participating and I hope you have a great week
Dreams-Part-3
welcome everybody to another lesson on dreams in this series of at home with theosophy so far we have gone through two introductory classes the first one was about the astral plane which is where most of the experiences of true dreams takes place and then this the second class last last week was about the mechanisms of consciousness and how they affect the the perceptions that our consciousness may may have remember we talked about how their physical body has a very basic consciousness of its own with its own tendencies then the the etheric double which is a counterpart of the physical body is is in flow can be influenced by images that are let us say floating around in the form of thought forms and images of that kind and then with also that the astral body which is the vehicle of consciousness that is active when the body is asleep then that astral body also can be influenced by by external thought forms or emotions or vibrations so all these things as we are going to see normally have some some effect on the dreams or how we remember our dreams so we will today we will start examining the more basic kind of dream that that is the the what happens with the physical body so let us start with the reading the ego all these different portions of the mechanism are in reality merely instruments of the ego though his control of them is as yet often very imperfect for it must always be remembered that the ego is himself a developing entity and that in the case of most of us he is scarcely more than a germ of what he is to be one day in the Theosophical view the this ego the word ego comes from the Greek I think I mentioned this in the previous class it comes from the Greek that means islands in the Theosophical view there our sense of eyeness can be expressed on different levels when it is expressing through our mind and emotions in in identification with the body we call it the lower ego meaning the sense the lower sense of inés when that ego that sense of eyeness is expressing through what we could call the soul and in this little diagram you have there on the screen the soul would be at the level of of the higher mental plane in in a vehicle of consciousness that is called the causal body so when that ego is being expressed at that level is called the higher ego now the sense of Imus in the process of evolution can be raised up to the buddhic level in the in this spiritual body and that would be the spiritual ego that is a sense of eyeness where the eye is not separate from the other where there is a sense of being but being in unity so we have the expression of this sense of eyeing us on different levels when Leadbeater talks about the ego he is talking about the how they the soul working at the level of the causal body experiences the world now to experience the world you know the the ego bitter normally talks about the ego as as he Navasky many times talks about the ego as an it because it's beyond gender so let's say when when he is expressing through the lower vehicles of consciousness the mental body the astral body and the physical body with it it's very double counterpart then the ego is in submitted or or is a slave of the limitations of these bodies as we are going to see now the ego itself Leadbeater says here is in a process of evolution at the beginning of evolution of human evolution the ego is pretty much like a baby quite unconscious with an interned consciousness and as evolution proceeds the ego begins to awaken first begins to be awakened by the experience that he has on the lower plains through the body the emotions of the mind then the ego begins to awaken in his soul plane that the higher mental plane and then the ego begins to raise his consciousness to the spiritual plane that's the idea of the process of evolution so in since we are a half way in the cycle in the general cycle of evolution in humanity most of the egos of humanity are still half asleep half awakened and this is why Leadbetter says that it at that level the ego is still a germ of this glorious entity that can become the grass which the ego has of his various instruments and therefore his influence over them is naturally small in his early stages of evolution neither his mind nor his passions are thoroughly under his control indeed the average person makes almost no effort to control them but allows himself to be swept hither and thither just as his lower thoughts or desires suggest so there are two main aspects in the evolution of the ego one is his his awakening again taking the example of a baby we can see that the baby goes through a process of awakening to the external world at the beginning the the babies most of the time unconscious with a sleeping and awakens when there is some discomfort at the physical level he's hungry or there is something that aches and then as soon as that that discomfort is relieved then he goes back to unconsciousness with the process of living little by little this consciousness begins to unfold and begins to be more and more aware of the external world in a similar way this is what happens with a with a ego but another aspect of this is that he has to learn to control and yeah let's say to control the vehicles of consciousness again in the Theosophical view the body has a life of its own as well as the emotions and the mind I'll get to you add in a little bit so then the mind thinks on its own and we can see that when we want to meditate for example many times the mind goes whatever they might want and we have a hard time trying to focus the mind same with the emotions many times we feel things we don't want to feel so in there in the Theosophical view these vehicles of consciousness are alive they have their own tendencies just I frequently use the example of a horse because it's like you are put on a horse when you are barely a child and at the beginning you go whatever the horse wants to go then little by little you realize that you can control this horse and then you make you start making efforts and you begin to succeed on this that is what happens with a ego as they go to accept it begins to realize that he can control the thoughts and emotions that he is not the thoughts and emotions and that is an important part in the spiritual process yes go ahead so this this whole way of talking makes the eager seem like it's some solid thing that's evolving and yet it's it's probably more like an activity that's evolving or an experience that's evolving and it's what do you have to say in your to that yes it's as much a processors our our own psychological eye is so everything is a process and what what I call Pablo for practical purposes we regarded as an entity but again it's a it's a process that is constantly growing and responding to the environment etc so in in that sense they go everything is a process except for the ultimate reality but from that down everything is a process yes however for practical purposes you know we we talk at the level of entities this is would be the relative truth versus the absolute truth but it's good to keep in mind that idea amenable to change then then we usually think objects are mmm-hmm all right consequently and sleep the different parts of the mechanism which we have mentioned are very apt to act almost entirely on their own account without reference to him and the stage of his spiritual advancement is one of the factors that we have to take into account in considering the question of dreams so as we seen in the last class all the the body has a tendency to act by itself and I'm the same with their emotions undermined as the ego begins to to awaken and its influence begins to be stronger on their on the personality then this automatic activity of the vehicles begins to lessen and the idea is as we approach the the end of evolution in the direction towards the end of the human experience the vehicles of consciousness we become real vehicles without this automatic activity that they have on their own this this elemental consciousness but since at this point they still have their own activity then this the this activity has its effect in in what we experience the streams and we are going to see that today it is also important for us to realize the part which this ego takes in the in the formation of our concepts of external objects for example when I look out the window and see a house and a tree I instantly recognize them for what they are yet all the information the senses really transmit is that in a particular direction there is a certain very there are certain varied patches of color bounded by more or less definite outlines so our our interpretation of the impressions that we received through the senses is very important for good and for ill when when we see a tree for the first time we probably cannot recognize what that is we don't remember because we were barely conscious at the time but all we see is a collection of colors and shapes that we don't really understand how they are related now with experience our consciousness learns to relate all these impressions together and generate the idea of objects of isolated objects of course everything is connected and the idea of objects is more a question of concentrations of atoms together than atoms that are completely independent from the rest if we could see at the level of the atoms we could probably see a constant interchange of atoms from a tree to the air to the - to the earth and and we wouldn't see that the limits where there is a tree and there is not not a tree but from the level of perception that our senses bring we learn to discriminate these sensations these perceptions and generate objects now this is something that I remind us and at some point it is so ingrained that is impossible almost impossible to perceive something without bringing the image that our memory generated for example if you will see a Chinese character you can see the Chinese character if you don't know Chinese just as a collection of lines as a drawing but if you see a letter in our alphabet it's very difficult to see the letter as a collection of lines you always see the letter the concept that you learn from the letter so this is the mind that produces that that image that complex image and there there are some questions yes Lee asks why is it so very difficult for a dreaming ego to think about whether he might be dreaming we are going to explore that today today we will explore the lower aspect of this and in in the next class we will begin to explore the higher aspects of of that experience of dreaming and why we cannot realize how we are dreaming it is the mind which from its past experiences experience is able to decide that one particular square white object is a house and another rounded green one is a tree and that they are both probably of such-and-such a size and at such-and-such a distance from me so the point here to remember because this will help us understand certain kinds of dreams is that it is the mind which it is the ego working through what we call mind that brings order to the perceptions if the ego is not there we have just a collection of perceptions but with no particular order the condition of sleep clairvoyant observation bears abundant testimony to the fact that when a man falls into a deep slumber the higher principles in their astral vehicle almost invariably withdraw from the body and hover in its immediate neighborhood while the physical body includes including that finer portion of it the etheric double lies quietly on the bed the eagle floats with equal tranquility in its astral body just above it so this is how a clairvoyance sees it the normally they tarik double stays with the body and the astral body is floating above the physical body now they the consciousness of the ego the lowest vehicle in which the ego is is working is the this astral body and the physical and etheric double are beyond the control of the ego the brain and its dreams when the ego has thus for the time resigned the control of his brain the ladder does not become entirely unconscious as one would perhaps expect it is evident from various experiments that the physical body has a certain dim consciousness of its own quite apart from that of the real self and apart also from the mirror Grigore the consciousness of its individual cells so what happens when the ego is leaves the body behind and it's now using the astral body assets vehicle of consciousness but let bidder says is that the body doesn't fall completely unconscious as you could think may happen when you faint in in dreaming the the this elemental consciousness of the body of the physical body stays with it so when the ego is in in the astral body perceiving whatever he is perceiving on the astral plane the physical body is also perceiving by itself whatever is going on in an independent way from the ego and this gives rise to a kind of dreams that that is what we are going to explore today the consciousness is of course far feebler than that of the man himself and consequently all those causes which are mentioned before as likely to affect the action of the brain are now capable of influence it to a very much greater extent the slightest alteration in the supply or circulation of the blood now produces grave irregularities of action and this is why indigestion as affecting the flow of the blood so frequently causes troubled sleep or bad dreams so while our consciousness the consciousness what that we are saying the consciousness of the ego that is our sense of eyeness it's working through the physical body there are many things that happen in the body and the ego is behind trying to keep the order in our perceptions so many times we may perceive something wrong but the ego corrects that perception or we we may have some our senses for the time being may be working in not a very good state but then the ego is behind trying to put order on this on all these sensations so there is a balance that is maintained when the bodies healthy because of this ordering activity of the ego now when the ego is not there the bodies left on its own and any of these alterations like that we discussed in the previous class like like the flow of the blood for example that if it diminishes when we are awake we may feel a little sleepy but when the circulation of the blood diminishes when the ego is not there and there is no mechanism to to try to bring some balance then that produces far more important effects on the consciousness of the body because the consciousness of the body doesn't have this ability to try to keep a balance at the level of consciousness it knows how to give a balance at the physical level and start different chemical reactions to try the body to try to keep the body working but at the level of consciousness it doesn't have that that ability so things that affect the body may generate chaotic images in in the in the physical consciousness the consciousness of the physical elemental even when undisturbed the strange dim consciousness has many remarkable peculiarities its action seems to be a great to a great extent automatic and the results are usually incoherent senseless and hopelessly confused it seems unable to apprehend an idea except in the form of a scene in which it itself is an actor and therefore all stimuli whether from within or without our forthwith translated into perceptual images it is incapable of grasping abstract ideas or memories as such they immediately become imaginary precepts persons percept so these physical consciousness as we were saying is a very basic one this is why it is called physical elemental is a very elemental consciousness and it's not able to understand anything that is abstract so as we are going to see several examples oh I don't want to talk about them right now but if there is something that is happening at the level of the ego on the astral plane and the physical memory happens to perceive that it will immediately generate an image because it's not as the bidder says there is not able to retain a concept and this image is not necessarily going to be retained in a sequential way we may have all kinds of fragmentary images if for example the idea of glory could be suggested to that consciousness it could take shape only as a vision of some glorious being appearing before the dreamer if a thought of hatred somehow came across it it could be appreciated only as a scene in which some imaginary actor showed violent hatred towards the sleeper so in the dreamers that come from the this this level the dreams that come from this particular level you you have you can have several images that do not necessarily correlate to reality so as we were saying you may have they are the an idea of this glory or an idea of something that can be good or bad but when it is translated by the brain it is interpreted in terms of an image so we need to learn to recognize the physical dreams from more real dreams and we are going to see as we go to to all the different levels of the dreams we will see how we can recognize from where it comes any passing thoughts just in country could image itself only as an actual instantaneous transportation to it and the dreamer would suddenly find himself there surrounded by as much of the appropriate circumstances as he happened to be able to remember it has often been noted that while startling transitions of this sort are extremely frequent in dreams the sleeper never seems at the time to feel any surprise at their suddenness in the mere consciousness of the physical brain there is nothing capable of such a feeling as surprised it simply perceives the pictures as they appear before it it has no power to judge their sequence or lack of it so this is partly an answer to the question that Lee was asking if when we wake up the the images that we remember came from the physical elemental those images of course when we remember them we remember them afterwards we are not remembered remembering the dream as it happens when it was happening all kinds of incoherent things may happen because the physical consciousness has not the ability this power of putting order that we were saying that the ego has so while it is happening all kinds of different things may be going on and the physical for the physical consciousness that's perfectly fine so then you wake up and you remember all these disjointed images and you you say how come that I did I didn't realize that this was so incoherent but you weren't really there it wasn't you you as the ego that was having these dreams it was the physical consciousness responding to the environment either to physical stimuli or to thought forms that are floating around so that level of Dreams is not really a real dream in the in the way that we are going to explore them it is just a fish responds to different stimuli another source of the extraordinary confusion visible in this half consciousness is the manner in which the law of the association of ideas works in it we are all familiar with the wonderful instantaneous action of this law in waking life we know how a chance word a strain of music even the scent of a flower may be sufficient to bring back to the mine a change of law and forgotten memories so there is this this tendency in in our being to generate to associate ideas and we may hear a music as Leadbeater says there and that thinking of something completely unrelated or that appears to be completely unrelated at the end like a tree that we we had someplace so this association of ideas bring all images that that are related only in a very indirect way but do not belong to a real sequence of things that happen and this has an impact also in how the physical consciousness interprets the this phenomena now in the sleeping brain this law is as active as ever but it acts under curious limitations every such Association of ideas whether abstract or concrete becomes a mere combination of images as our association of ideas is often of events really entirely unconnected it may readily be seen that the most inextricable confusion of these images is a frequent occurrence naturally enough a succession of such pictures is rarely perfect perfectly recoverable by memory since there is no order to help in recovery so the physical consciousness also does this but since these images don't belong to a real sequence they are just Association they come to the physical consciousness in in in no were there or there at all or even if they come in in an order the physical consciousness cannot recognize the sequence again remember that all these higher-level interpretation of perceptions belongs to the ego not to the physical senses themselves so many times when we wake up and have this this you know hazy idea of a dream that was kind of chaotic many different things and we cannot really remember what was going on this is the the source of those dreams and something that is important for memories the sequence for example you you can't remember the order of many letters if they they are concepts you can remember the sentence as our association of ideas and then you can repeat the order of the letters if I give you the same amount of letters with no order it's very difficult to remember them so the same happens with these dreams if the dream doesn't have a sequence is very difficult to remember it and that's the the kind of dreams that we are exploring right now they once I just come from the physical consciousness another peculiarity of this curious consciousness of the brain is that while singularly sensitive to the slightest external influences such as sounds or touches it yet magnifies and distorts them to an almost incredible degree among the stories most commonly told is one of a man who had a painful dream of being hanged because his shirt-collar was too tight another person magnified the prick of a pen into a fatal stab received in a duel another translated a slight pinch into the bite of a wild beast so I think probably most of us have this kind of experience where a sound or sudden sensation like that is really turned into something much bigger the level of the the dreams this physical elemental is kind of the axis a guardian of the body and it's always in like on guard to try to defend the body when somebody comes into the room for example and you get startled it's not us your consciousness I'll get startled it's a physical elemental in the body that does that because it's always in this state of ready to fight or flight this is what we call the fight-or-flight response so it seems that when the ego is not there the bringing a more rational perception bringing some control this this tendency to exaggerate is very very much evident in the physical consciousness I guess that this is also why in in the spiritual path it is many times said that we should try to repress the tendency to exaggerate we have a tendency to exaggerate but that doesn't seem to be a tendency that is ours it seems to be a tendency of this more elemental consciousness so when we go into that when we yield to this tendency what we are doing is assimilating model of this elemental consciousness as opposed to you know keep it under control if we want to put it that way so this is also the reason why many times all this little stimuli becomes a dramatic scene it is again produced by the physical consciousness Lee has a question why is it that a person known but by my waking consciousness to be dead makes appearances in my dreams as a living person and my dreaming ego never suspects that that person has already died we are going to explore that in our next class those are a different kind of dreams and so you it may be the person may be dead but for the ego is not because we say that the person is dead all we are saying is that the person doesn't have a physical body anymore so in your waking consciousness you cannot relate to that but every time we go to sleep if we are aware at all on the on the astral plane we relate to that people as we relate to living people too but so for you on the astral plane that doesn't make any difference and is it's a matter of common occurrence but we are going to discuss that in the next class right now we are seeing the more basic kind of dreams that we need to learn to recognize and to you know leave leave aside if when we regarded the reality of dreams you know whenever there is a dream that seems chaotic whenever there is a dream that doesn't really have a sequence or some intelligence behind whenever there is something that is per its induced by external stimuli then we can be pretty much sure that that is not a real dream of our consciousness that that is an activity of the physical elemental it must by this time the evident that even from this bodily brain alone there comes enough confusion and exaggeration to account for many of the dream phenomena but this is only one of the factors that we have to take into consideration as we are going to see this this activity may may be happening along with some more real experience of the ego on the astral plane so when the experience on the astral plane is being impressed in memory and that happens when when the ego can come back comes back to the body then that memory that he has been trying to be impressed in the brain gets confused with all these other things that may have been going on at the time with a so many times we have this kind of mixtures between a real experience and what the physical brain or as we are going to see the etheric brain we're doing so again all there is when when trying to interpret dreams it is so normally it is it is difficult for most people and you can see so many different kind of theories and explanation and it is usually because there is not a knowledge of all the different levels of experience that that come into what we call a dream that we remember but knowing about this and with a certain training during our daily life we can minimize the lower experiences that the experience of the elemental consciousness and we can train ourselves to retain a pure memory of what what really goes on them on the inner planes this oh I'm sorry there is a question what about dreams that involve elements like water and air say I fly a lot in my dreams and also walk on the surface of water yeah again those are astral experiences that we are going to explore in our next next class and in the others and probably that the next one will set up the foundation to understand this kind of experiences and in the following class we are going to really go into what kind of experiences these are but yeah those are non-physical dreams we are exploring today ok number two the etheric brain it will be obvious that this part of the organism so sensitive to every influence even during our waking life must be still more susceptible when in the condition of sleep when examined under these circumstances by a clairvoyant streams of thought are seen to be constantly sweeping through it not its own thoughts in the least or it has of itself no power to think but the casual thoughts of others which are always floating around us so remember or if you are not acquainted with this teaching in the Theosophical view every thought every feeling that we have is a kind of vibration that produces a response in the what we could call the emotional matter around and the mental matter around so this this response that that is produced outside generates what is called thought forms and those thought forms stay floating on the astral plane which is the emotional plane or the mental plane and they stay for a while until the energy of that thought form disappears and then they the form is dissolved in a certain way we can think of them as the echo of our thinking you know if you are in a cave you you speak and then that vibration travels around the cave for a little bit if you speak louder than it will be louder and it may stay longer so these thought forms are like the echo of our thinking and feeling so when we go to sleep we are constantly not only when we go to sleep we are constantly in an ocean of thought forms as we go on the street we we are constantly passing through them and actually if you see when you are not paying attention you are let's say walking from one place to the other if you try to think of what were you thinking during the the you know the the little path that you took if you are not actively thinking of anything your mind was not silent your mind was thinking which is really not true thinking but we're producing all these thought forms that come to your mind and you just reproduce the images so the same happens when we go to sleep we go to sleep and all these thought forms keep going through our aura let's say they keep going through our etheric brain and emotional body a mental body when again when the ego is there there is this we can shut them off if we are actively thinking then they don't even come close because we are irradiating so to say thoughts or even if we are not thinking our presence there may may bring some order to consciousness but again as we said with the physical body when the ego is not there all these thoughts will go through the thick part of our brain and will produce themselves in India deep brain we are living in the midst of an ocean of other people's thoughts and whether we are awake or asleep these are constantly presenting themselves to the etheric part of our brain so long as we are actively thinking our brain is practically impervious to this continual impingement of thought from without but the moment that we leave it idle the stream of in consequent chaos begins to pour through it in sleep then the etheric part of the brain is even more than usually at the mercy of these thought currents since the ego is for the time unless close association with it yeah that's what I just explained a curious fact brought out in some recent experiments is that when by any means these currents are shut out from the breath from this part of the brain it does not remain absolutely passive but begins very slowly and dreamily to evolve pictures for itself from its store of past memories an example of this will be given later when some of these experiments are described so they at the time LeBaron others would and all these teachings come from they are their research let's say on they they would look at people sleeping and dreaming and do some experiments and Leadbetter and some others like Annie Basin had a very well-trained clairvoyance and that's where all this information comes from so there is this the the etheric brain is reproducing all these thought forms that are around that may have nothing to do with you you know you may go to sleep and then you may have a dream that you say why did I have that dream that dream has nothing to do in my life with my psychological life with what I was watching before going to sleep and yet I have this dream you may really have nothing to do with you it may be a thought form that was passing through you know your your room and then the etheric double picked it up and reproduced it so there are all these aspects that in the in the phenomena of dream that are needed to that we need to know but libido says that even if we can't for example we can create an etheric shell that would keep the the external thoughts outside of ourselves and sometimes that is a good idea to do when we cannot sleep you know when you want to go to sleep and you have all these chaotic thoughts are not really yours not know when you are worried about something that is an activity of your consciousness but sometimes there are all these chaotic in consequent thoughts that many times come from the external mental claim so if you create with your willpower and imagination a kind of etheric shell you can keep them away from you so that you can fall asleep now even in these cases it is seen that that in many people they 30w an undisturbed little-by-little begins to produce images of Leadbeater says come from the store of memory so we can see that many of the images come from the physical aspect of our body and from the thirty part to number three the astral body it will be obvious that this part of the organism so sensitive to every influence even during our waking life must be still more susceptible when in the condition of sleep when examined under these circumstances by a clairvoyant streams of thought are seen to be constantly sweeping through it not its own thoughts in the least for it has of itself no power to think but the casual thoughts of others which are always floating around us so the same happens with the astral body if you see there in the diagram the astral body is the one that follows in subtlety there above a thirty devil this astral body is what is also called the emotional body and is that the vehicle of consciousness in which impressions from the outside are turned into feelings or emotions so when we touch an object our physical body will will bring like the physical perception to the brain but that perception in particular is not is not a feeling a sensation in the in the sense that we normally regard sensation that that feeling of of sensation is produced in the astral body as this this stimulus is communicated to the astral body it turns into a sensation and when that stimulus from the astral body goes to the mental body it turns into an idea a concept so we say the surface is rough the sensation the physical perception came through the nerves the the feeling of roughness came or was produced in the astral body and the concept this is rough appears in the mind so the bitter says that the the astral body is constantly responding to external emotions and thoughts and many of us may be more sensitive to all these sometimes you may encounter a person and just don't feel a pleasant sensation about the person without even notice or knowing that person or you may go to a place and have a sense of peace or restlessness or whatever it is in the place this is because your your emotional body is responding to the emotional atmosphere of the person or the place now at that level all your habits are is a sensation then your body your mind tries to make it into a concept and tries to say to try to explain it to to give it a conceptual reality now when the the ego is in sleep in the emotional body there are these two things that are going on at the same time the ego is creating its own activity in the emotional or astral body but the astral body thoughts are receiving influences from the outside and and that also will look just like in in our waking life according to how we feel many times we respond therefore the experience of the ego will be affected by what comes from the outside unless this ego is at a stage of evolution where there is more independence from external stimulus we are going to see all this in more detail in in our next class but here we are go we are sitting there like like the knowledge base to understand what we are going to see in the next class as before mentioned it is in this vehicle that the ego is functioning during sleep and it is usually to be seen by anyone whose inner sight is opened hovering over the physical body on the bed its appearance however differs very greatly according to the stage of development which the ego to which it belongs has reached so as he said before the twelve body is seen normally hovering over the physical body now this astral body has a different appearance according to the stay the stage of evolution of the person so if you are clairvoyant you you can see the astral body if your clairvoyance is deep enough you can see all the other principles like the mental body and the Cosa body that are there too but looking only at the level of the astral body the bidder is now going to talk briefly about the the appearance of this astral body in different people in the case of in top of the entirely uncultured and undeveloped person it is simply a floating wreaths of mist roughly ovoid in shape but very irregular and indefinite in outline while the figure within the mist the denser astral counterpart of the physical body is also vague though generally recognizable it is receptive only on the coarser and more violent vibrations of desire and unable to move more than a few yards away from its physical body in the process of evolution there are two levels in announced that are evolving on one level our vehicles of consciousness are evolving meaning all the bodies the physical bodies evolving and that science knows some about the etheric double is evolving the astral body the mental body the causal body so there is an aspect of evolution that has to do with the form with a vehicle of consciousness and then there is another aspect of evolution that has to do with consciousness itself so when we normally say in theosophy with the unfolding of consciousness because consciousness has everything all the powers of consciousness are are always there in at the beginning they are latent just like we would say a baby has potentially all the powers of a mature mind but at the beginning of life they are latent and they have to be unfolded so what we are looking at at this moment is the evolution of the vehicles of consciousness at the beginning of evolution the bodies are not really bodies you know if we talk about the astral body the mental body are not really bodies in the sense of well defined structures they are more like a mist like a yeah a misty form of astral model that is not very well organized therefore any any perception on the astral plane is kind of vague because the astral body responds like in in a very in specific way as the person evolves and the astral body begins to be more defined more well organized more more sensitive then impressions can be perceived in a far better way so the first thing that he says is that in a person that that is in the that is in the earliest stages of evolution just like like a child not in a judgmental way human souls begin to evolve evolve at different times so there there are people that have been evolving for less time than others and it's just like a bad blooming that are different flowers on different stages so in people that are in the early stages of evolution the astral body cannot really respond to too many things in on the astral plane it responds to them they're more the denser vibrations which are closer to the dense physical experience that consciousness is used to to having there is a question here oh no no that's the same yeah okay okay as evolution progresses the ovoid miss becomes more and more definite in outline the figure within it more and more nearly a perfect image of the physical body beneath it's receptivity simultaneously increases until it is instantly responsive to all the vibrations of its plane the finer as well as the more ignoble though they asked though in the astral body of a highly developed person there would naturally be practically no matter left course enough to respond to the latter so in a certain sense it is like if you think of the evolution of the eye probably a primitive eye can only see the differences between light and dark and the us the eye evolves then consciousness can perceive the details that are coming through the eye consciousness itself has the potential to perceive in a perfectly good way but because the vehicle of consciousness in this case the eye is not well developed then we find the limitation there so as a person evolves on the physical and the astral body also begins to be more responsive it becomes able to respond to all kinds of vibrations on the astral plane not just the more basic ones and well the bidder says that in a highly developed person there would be naturally practically not no matter left course enough to respond to the course feelings because there is also a process of purification as we evolve so the the matter that can respond to what we would call a course feeling it's not very prominent in the astral body of the person can you get an example of coarser versus finer well feeling normally it is said that feeling spiritual feelings feelings of love and the perception of beauty and compassion these are subtle feelings and the feelings of violence or hate or separation or feelings the negative emotions that we normally talk about those are coarser feelings they are delivered of vibe relations they are closer to the the rate of vibration of the physical matter so since consciousness begins to evolve on the physical body it it begins to learn to recognize the more the the coarser vibrations the denser vibrations and in evolution it begins to be able to recognize finer and finer vibrations and what about attachment yes mental so it's a form an emotional form that but again maybe there may be attachment to something higher or lower right so stronger attachment to more material coarser things it's power of locomotion also becomes much greater it can travel without discomfort to considerable distance from its physical encasement and can bring back more or less definite impressions as to places which it may have visited and people whom it may have met in every case this astral body is as ever intensely impressionable by any thought or suggestion involving desire though in some of the desires which most readily awaken a response in it may be somewhat higher than in others so the idea remember at the beginning we said that normally we can see the astral body over you know over the physical body now as a person evolves that and the astral body begins to be more of a body a real body then the that body is able to get away from the physical body and as the consciousness of the ego also evolves and begins to awaken to the astral plane then the the the the ego learns to begin to travel in the astral body as we do in the physical body and again bring back the idea of the baby in the baby both his physical body and his consciousness are evolving even if if the consciousness of a baby were fully awakened his physical body doesn't allow him to move away he the body has to develop more so in the same way the the the astral body has to be developed more so that he can move but also the consciousness has to be awakened in a baby the consciousness to is unconscious or or in this state of introspection that we call sleeping therefore both things have to be developed to some extent to leap to be able to use the astral body si as a vehicle of consciousness when this happens and as we are going to see at this point in evolution most people in humanity are I at least aware to some extent on the astral plane when this happens then the person can travel when the body's asleep the astral body can be many miles away away in different places relating to different people having all kinds of experiences that we are going to explore later and that can account for the experiences that Leda and Li where we're talking about okay Jeannette has a question what determines the type of thought forms that come to one yeah that's a good question to some extent we tend to attract the kind of thoughts that are in harmony with our normal thinking and the same we tend to attract the kind of feelings that are in tune let's say with our regular feeling so if we are worried during our waking life then we tend to attract thoughts that are similar that are you know related to worry we if we tend to have more peaceful feelings we tend to attract more peaceful forms of feeling or or astral influences that is a general rule but also there are certain things that kind of just by proximity in Si as we said in the process of evolution we begin to purify our emotional body so that the lower or the matter that can respond to the lower kind of vibration begins to be less and less but even up to quite advanced stages of evolution we still have some mother in our astral body a mental body that can respond to those to those vibrations so if you happen to be close to a person that has those kind of thoughts or in in a place where those thoughts are produced or you know somebody happened to walk by your your window so by the mere proximity you may be affected by those kind of thoughts so it's not an all-or-nothing answer but generally speaking we we are far more receptive to whatever is in tune with the kind of thoughts and emotions that we have during the day so if we watch the news and that disturbs us or movies or read something that could have an effect either way yes and that's why in the the exercise that we proposed for this week was trying not to to watch anything that would disturb us before going to sleep because if we go to sleep with that kind of vibration in our astral body then we are more prone to attract that kind of thought forms which then will produce the the kind of dreams that we we were talking about okay and Lee has a comment what I find most interesting about dreams is the inclusion of objectivity into dreams such as prophetic dreams and the appearance in a dream of a person who sings a chatty and unfamiliar song with lyrics so intricate that I must presume that the song is not coming from within me yes we are going to talk about the prophetic dreams and remember that there is this this possibility of mixing up different levels of dreaming so there may in what we remember as a single dream there may be an element of something that the ego was really experiencing there may be an element of what the the astral body was responding to there may be also an element of a thought form that was flying by and I was coached by your your theory brain and and the response of the physical brain so when we remember a dream there may be a mixture of all these different elements as we go go on in in the spiritual pattern and we learn to to be more aware with that awareness keeps in control our lower vehicles and then as hard as these vehicles little by little lose they are elemental consciousness then the dreams begin to be far clearer because all this interference is reduced but normally many times we have this mixing up and this is why it is so important I think to know about all these different levels unless you know about this if you try to interpret your dreams and you are aware that there may be different sources for all these stimuli it's very difficult to really do a systematic and serious interpretation of Dreams at least that's what I think this is what we have prepared for today there as as you saw we have explored lie the first level of dreams and in our next class we are going to explore a higher level and then in the following one the the levels that belong really to the to the experience of the ego on on the astral plane and higher planes now is there any other question or comment that any of you have before we close well I hope you enjoy the the information and we are getting closer to to the core of our subject and I'm going to send an exercise as I have been doing in in the past weeks and I hope to see you next next Tuesday thank you for joining us and have a great week thank you
Dreams-Part-4
welcome everybody to another session of home with theosophy we have been exploring this boat by LED bitter dreams what they are how they are cost and in our last meeting we explored the more the more basic aspect of dreams the ones that are generated by the automatic action of our brain and today we are going to explore some other aspects that are deeper and more interesting from a spiritual point of view so the first part of the meeting will have we will read parts of the book the dreams book and then in the second part of the meeting we will explore I brought some something that Ledbetter wrote in a different book that is called invisible helpers because Ledbetter is assuming that there is a certain knowledge that is not described in this particular book so I thought that it will be good to to read a little about this aspect as we are going to see so the exercise during the that that we suggested for the week was to start paying attention to these kind of physical dreams the physical dreams are those typical dreams that physical meaning the ones that are just generated by our brain and our nervous system our physical body and that are those chaotic fragmentary and many times including external stimuli those kind of dreams which are very frequent or which we frequently remember because trying to starting to pay attention to the dream is a The Dream's is a way to begin to develop our our ability to remember them and so the first step is to start paying attention to the dreams the second step is beginning to differentiate the different kinds of dreams this aspect is very rarely worked in in different traditions they assume that all dreams are of the same quality and in the in the philosophical view there is a far more deeper and complex view of dreams so what we proposed is to begin to be familiar with how these physical dreams work so that we can discern them from the other kinds so today we are going to go on with with the subject then in the last meeting we ended in the idea that they the true consciousness that Ledbetter calls the ego in the sense of a sense of inez the true consciousness when the body's asleep is on the astral body if you see they are the table this is the on the astral plane there is the astral body that is the vehicle of consciousness as we are going to see today again repeat little this concept the astral body may be very little developed or very well developed when it is little developed the consciousness in the astral body is similar as the consciousness in a baby is for the most part asleep and may have some perception that come from the outside but they they are way as the the the soul evolves and the astral body also develops then consciousness awakens more and more on the astral plane and eventually can move around on the astral plane as the baby as he grows can move around on the physical plane so now we are going to pay attention in particular to the consciousness of the ego to our true consciousness when the body is asleep the ego in sleep though the condition in which the astral body is to be found during sleep changes largely as evolution takes place that of the ego in having it changes still more where the former is in the stage of flow of the floating wreaths of mist the ego is practically almost as much asleep as the body lying below him so we explained in the previous class that they the the astral body beat begins by being just like a mist or a cloud of astral matter with no organization and of course that kind of astral body cannot serve as say a good vehicle of consciousness the impacts that come from the outside are are lost in in trying to to be translated by this mystic kind of astral body they cannot be translated to consciousness or or transferred to consciousness in thin air in a clear and sharp way and as evolution goes on we just said that the astral body begins to be organized but also the consciousness itself evolves along with evolution so we have these two branches of evolution the evolution of the vehicle of consciousness the bodies and the evolution of consciousness itself so there is a degree of how awakened and how how much the the consciousness understands there is a great variety of states in different people he is blind to the sites and deaf to the voices of his own higher plane and even if some idea belonging to it should be by chance reach him since he has no control over his mechanism he will be quite unable to impress it upon his physical brain so that it may be remembered upon waking if a man is in his primitive condition recollects anything at all of what happens to him during sleep it will almost invariably be the result of purely physical impression made upon the brain either from within or from without any experience which his real ego may have had being forgotten so this is his he's starting with when when the soul is in the early stages of evolution even if if the consciousness of the ego that is from the astral body perceives something from the astral plane or from the higher planes it's almost impossible to impress that in the brain because the brain again it normally the brain is very active on it's on automatic activity and on the the unconsciousness doesn't know how to impress that memory on the physical brain there is something that consciousness learns to do as evolution goes on so most of the dreams that are remember are the dreams that are just produced by the physical body now libido says there that the the ego inhabiting the astral body may perceive something from his own plane he says from the higher higher planes if you see the chart the consciousness of the ego is from the astral body but that means the astral body is the lowest vehicle of consciousness but there is always influence coming from the higher planes so just like when we are awake on the physical plane we may have an inspiration and that inspiration comes from the higher planes we may be too distracted to really perceive that inspiration or we may perceive it so the same happens with the ego in the astral body especially at the in the early stages of evolution even even if son in some influence influence comes from the higher planes it's unable to perceive it or even if he does in some way it's very difficult for him to impress it on the physical body so at this stage of evolution that the activities while the body is asleep are are not really important for for consciousness it's just in a state of awakening so the the experience is array of knowing import sleepers may be observed at all stages from this condition of oblivion up to full and perfect consciousness on the astral plane though this latter is naturally comparatively rare even a man who is sufficiently awake to meet not infrequently with important experiences in this higher life may yet be and often is unable so far to dominate his brain as to check its current of in consequent thought pictures and impress upon it instead what he wishes it to recollect thus when his physical body awakes he may have only the most confused memory or no memory at all of what has really happened to him so there is a whole degree of states of consciousness on the astral plane mmm the as consciousness evolves it begins to be little by little more aware of the astral plane but not necessarily in a very clear way it's just like if you are focused reading or watching TV or something and you may hear that I don't know the oven the alarm of the oven went off but if you are concentrated on on the TV you may not be completely aware that the sound is they are a part of your consciousness here's the sound the sound until suddenly you realize that there is something going on well on the astral plane many times this happens that even if the person is aware on the astral plane and not just asleep as from the physical plane there may there may be some stimuli coming from the astral plane but the person is still center self-centered like in a little bubble and we faintly aware of what is going on with evolution the consciousness begins to be more and more and begin to identify with clarity the different stimulus stimuli that comes from the outside so but even when the ego Leadbeater says there is some extent aware of the astral plane still it is difficult for for him to be able to impress it on the physical body we have to remember that the lower we go in in the planes the harder it is to impress the matter with consciousness so when the higher planes consciousness and matter are almost the same but as you go down in on all the planes then it is more and more difficult for consciousness to move matter to impress matter with its own energy so to say and this is a pity for he may meet with much that is of the greatest interest and importance to him not only may he visit distant scenes of surpassing beauty but he may meet and exchange ideas with friends either living or departed who happened to be equally awake on the astral plane he may be fortunate enough to encounter those who know far more than he does and may receive warning or instruction from them he may on the other hand be privileged to help and comfort some who know less than himself so here the the idea is I think that I keep coming back to to the example of of the baby and a child because we know how consciousness little by little awakens on the physical plane and as consciousness awakens as the understanding develops as the physical body also develops then that person begins to be able to have a wider and Y wider range of activity so on the astral plane as evolution goes on at the beginning consciousness is like a baby cannot do much is for the most part unconscious then begins to be more and more conscious as they've the the asteroid body developed the consciousness can use the astral body to travel around at the beginning not too far from the body and eventually the person may have a very active active life on life on the on the astral plane even more active than on the physical plane may go to places may may have a relationship with other people as leaders as they are learn do things we are going to explore that a little so there is the whole grade or degree of TVD on the astral plane that happens as we evolve okay Lee has a question what can a person do to bring about the evolution of his or her astral body so that he may function well upon the astral plane yes we we are going to talk about that but I can mention here that the general ideas that the astral body is developed by increasing the activity on the higher body so the higher body to the astral bodies the mental body as consciousness begins to work more and more on on the mental body the the activity of this body begins to to emanate a certain influence that brings the astral body in order so that is one aspect in the same way if we want to develop the mental body as a vehicle of consciousness we need to start trying to stimulate the activity on the causal body the causal body is more is related to spirituality so let's say you know in simple ways we could say the causal body is related to two spiritual ideas spiritual endeavors spiritual intentions the mental body is related to understanding is our mind trying to want to think in a clearer way in a precise way well if we think in vague ways our mental body so so vague is like a mist the more clearly we think then the that forces the dimension body to to organize itself and that has a repercussion on the astral body so a mental activity a healthy and ordered mental activity is part of what we need and the other is to try to break the self-centeredness because there are many people at this point in evolution since most of the educated people at this point in evolution have a well-developed mind to some extent the astral body is also pretty well developed but the problem is that most people are still very self-centered so even though they have an astral body that could could devour or interact with the astral plane they still don't perceive the astral plane so in our daily life we have to begin to develop these awareness that is we have to break through this self concern constantly being in this bubble of my problems and my wishes and my desires so those I would say are the two major aspects of this he may come into contact with non-human entities of various kinds with nature spirits artificial elementals or even though very rarely with Davis he will be subject to all kinds of influence influences good or evil strengthening or terrifying the astral plane is a whole world many times is called the astral world just like the physical is so on the physical plane you have good people you have people that are trying to scam you you have good animals you have animals that if you encounter them they can kill you you have all kinds of influences same happens from the astral plane on the astral plane are good and bad entities are good and bad influences on the physical plane you get to people by physical proximity if you go into a four and then you you start working you may come across a tiger because you got close physically to the tiger on the asteroid playing the affinities are not at the level of space but are at the level of the kind of emotional life we have so when the the emotional life is closer to selfishness and aggression and all these negative feelings we are closer to the to the negative entities as in the physical plane we would be closer physically you know at the level of space with with bad people or or or animals so this state of unconsciousness that consciousness are they in the early stages of evolution is in it's actually a protection so when people there are many people that try to artificially stimulate these asteroid projections and astral travels and all that but many times studies that is not something good for several reasons we already discussed the the idea of having too many a lot of stimulus coming to you and being overwhelmed at the level of consciousness but also there is this other aspect that we may find things that are actually even dangerous so that is a nature knows how to do things how to do think things gradually so us as long as we work on our you know developing our mind as I was saying on on trying to be aware and breaking the self-centeredness on trying to cultivate good emotions then when we are in the astral plane we will be far away from the negative entities that doesn't mean that we can all come across some here and there but the the purity itself is a is a kind of shield so let bitter is saying they are not only human entities we can find but also we can find nature spirits or Davis now on the astral playing Davis art for the most part on the higher planes they work the the Devas are like angels and most of the spiritual entities rarely go down to the astral plane on the astral plane you you find for the most part either people who died and ours are there the astral plane kind of stuck trying to - to retain some contact with the earth or you have nature spirits that are a lower kind of Davis if you want to call it like that they are forces of nature and you may have people who are sleeping and they are active on the astral plane and those who are active on the astral plane when the body is asleep for the most part they are more or less evolved people but higher entities are rarely found on the astral plane although they can be found but not not so so frequently he makes more or less successful endeavors to impress these memories upon the brain when we take into account the stupendous difficulties in his way in the case of an ordinary person the fact that he is himself probably not even half awake that he has hardly any control over his various vehicles and cannot therefore prevent his message from being distorted or altogether overpowered by the surgeons of desire by the casual thought currents in the etheric part of his brain or by some slight physical disturbance affecting his denser body we shall not wonder that he so rarely fully succeeds in his attempt so the the ego when the ego is more or less awakened on the astral plane many times as Leadbeater says they are tries to impress the physical brain but it depends that the the success in doing this depends on several aspects first the skill of the ego of our consciousness their true consciousness the skill that consciousness has and also how much consciousness can still the emotional body the astral body that is the vehicle of emotions the etheric and the physical body it's not too different from meditation for example we seek to meditate and we can see how our mind does what the mind wants our emotions are all over the place our physical body also may have these sensations of that sensation and then we have to struggle with it to calm it down it's more or less similar the ego when on the astral plane and is trying to increase something on the physical plane it needs to bring all the vehicles into harmonium and in certain calmness so since we as consciousness are learning to do this for the most part the dreams that we really remember are a mixture of elements and we are going to discuss the see that in our next meeting but this is more or less the general the general view about dreams remember that there is the the activity of the physical body that can interfere the activity of the etheric body that catches on thought forms that are around and the activity of the astral body itself that all may come in the way of the attempt of the ego to impress some knowledge or experience on the physical brain so the whole spiritual life and the practice to be aware and the practice of meditation and all this it all is conducive for us to to begin to establish a more more reliable connection with with our astral consciousness but whether he remembers anything when physically awake or not the ego who is fully or even partially conscious of his surroundings on the astral plane is beginning to enter into his heritage of powers which are transcend those he possesses down here for his consciousness when the sliver from the physical body has remarkable possibilities so he doesn't talk anymore about this we are here I think is where we are going to jump into this other book to talk it about one aspect of the subject but they did said the the astral body can travel almost in almost instantaneously any anywhere in the world it's not instantaneous it takes some time there it seems that they the truck the moving on the astral plane requires some kind of translation or some kind of journey if you will the the space there is not like the physical space but there is still some kind of sense of distance however when the the astral body is fully developed a person can think of Egypt and being in Egypt in a few seconds or or can go to different places and there is never a sense of being tired on the astral plane there can be activity all night and and the sense of fatigue never appear what else then well there is no illness or many of these limitations we have on the physical body so the activity on the astral plane is far more extensive than on the physical then the same happens when the person begins to be aware on the mental plane that surpasses by by far the experience on the astral plane and so as the consciousness begins to be aware on higher and higher planes so he says here that when consciousness begins to be aware of the astral plane it begins to awaken these latent powers this hairy heritage as he says of the infinite possibilities that we have when we begin to make full use of our whole being and not just being limited to the physical the reality of super physical life from the book invisible helpers it seems difficult for those who are accustom only to the ordinary and somewhat materialistic lines of thought to believe in and realize fully a condition of perfect consciousness apart from the physical body so this is what we are talking about the possibility of even perfect consciousness when the body is when we are not in the body as the person begins to be really aware on the astral plane and if that awareness begins to be little by little or gradually transferred to the physical plane then the the fear of death disappears because consciousness by my direct experience knows that can be alive without the physical body there that the physical body is really not necessary to retain consciousness now when we are in our waking state because we don't remember any of this we may have this be afraid I'm thinking that that we depend on the physical body but the the consciousness of the our activity on the astral plane eradicate any fear of death every Christian at any rate is bound by the very foundations of his Creed to believe that he possesses a soul but if you suggest to him the possibility that that soul may be a sufficiently real thing to become visible under certain conditions apart from the body either during life or after death the chances are ten to one that he will scornfully tell you that he does not believe in ghosts I think the point there is that the astral body is a real body in certain conditions it can be made visible we are not going to talk about that in particular but this was even taught by st. Paul st. Paul say that we have three bodies the physical body then we have the psychic body which would be this astral body and then we have the spiritual body so and simples would say you know all the bodies are real bodies but in Christianity of course the concept of the soul is normally very vague and undefined we must shake ourselves free from the trammels of contemporary thought on these subjects and endeavor to grasp the great truth that the physical body is nothing but a vehicle or vesture of the real man it is put off permanently on death but it is also put off temporarily every night when we go to sleep indeed the process of falling asleep consists in this very action of the real man in his astral vehicle slipping out of the physical body yes I think that's quite clear this is no mere hypothesis or ingenious supposition there are many among us who are able to perform and do perform every day of their lives this elementary act of magic in full consciousness who passed from one plane to the other at will so the bidder was able to do this and several other people at the time that were associated with him too there is certain a certain point in our evolution that that we can retain the consciousness when going from one plane to the other first from the physical to the astral and then to the the other planes so that when the body goes asleep there is not a break in the continuity of consciousness now that also has different degrees sometimes there may be a short break when when passing through the the highest sub plane of the physical plane to the astral plane but eventually there is a continuity of consciousness so what he says there is that this is not a philosophy in the sense of something that we may think of and speculate that at least for him and some other people this is a matter of experience now of course we read this and for us it's not a matter of experience this is something that somebody that we may trust or not depend depending on how we feel about that person but it's a testimony of somebody about something that he claims to be a reality now the man who has not yet developed the link between the astral and the physical consciousness is unable to leave his denser body at will or to recollect most of what happens to him while away from it but the fact nevertheless remains that he leaves it every time he sleeps and may be seen by any trained clairvoyant either hovering over it or wandering about at a greater or less distance from it as the case may be to retain consciousness there the the etheric chakras has have to be linked to the astral chakras so that requires a particular technique now a person can work on trying to force as I said that connection and then that person would begin to be aware of the astral plane in his waking consciousness now having that connection doesn't imply that the consciousness on the astral plane will be accurate or inaccurate the person may have may be still half asleep on the astral plane or let's say half awakened on the astral plane and with certain techniques the connection may be done and that person will remember everything that he experiences on the astral plane but nevertheless those experiences would be for the most part experiences that that he made up on the astral plane not necessarily real experiences so my point here is that the ability to move around on the astral plane and perceive clearly the astral plane and the ability to remember that are two completely different set of skills we may have one and not the other or vice versa and they they don't imply each other so of course it would be for many people it would be interesting to remember the activities on the astral plane but the most important part is to be able to perceive and to act on the asteroid plane in the right way before we can't remember any of that and as Li asked and we discussed a little in order to be able to do this basically we need a spiritual practice as we were describing purifying our emotions envelope in our awareness and developing our mind and then remembering or not it's a secondary problem which as we grow begins to happen naturally the entirely undeveloped person usually floats close above his physical body scarcely less asleep than it is and comparatively shapeless and inchoate and it is found that he cannot be drawn away from the immediate neighborhood of that physical body without causing serious discomfort which would in fact awaken it so this is a different book he repeats this and I want it just to to bring it up again at the beginning on the earliest stages of evolution the the astral bodies just they're close to the physical and if it goes in little away the person wakes up with a sense of fear or something that if the physical consciousness is still not accustomed to having the the ego sleep in a way on the astral body as as the man evolves however his astral body grows more definite and more conscious and so becomes a fitter vehicle for him in the case of the majority of intelligent and cultured people the degree of consciousness is already very considerable and a man who is at all spiritually developed is as fully himself in that vehicle as in this denser body so we could say that that most of fasts of people who are interested in this subject will will be more or less in this degree that ledbetter is describing we most probably have to set some consciousness of the astral body or may even be quite fully aware of the the astral plane so there is a degree they are that's more or less the position in which we probably are I am saying probably I know this because it's difficult to generalize but just to give an idea and as we try to follow a spiritual life then we become more and more aware on the astral plane but though he may be fully conscious on the astral plane during sleep most people at this stage are so wrapped up in their own train of thought usually a continuation of some line taken up in waking hours that they are like a man in a brown study so much absorbed as to be practically entirely heedless of all that is going on about them and in many ways it is well that this is so for there as much upon the astral plane which might be unnerving and terrifying to one who had not the courage born of full knowledge as to the real nature of all that he would see so we discussed this a little many times you know when we say I sleep on this problem and then we wake up and we may have some some solution to the problem this is the result of the the ego working this out on the astral plane so that is possible even when the ego is not fully aware of the astral plane meaning of the things that are going on around him so the release a stage where the ego is awakened on the astral plane and then there is a further stage where there is a way it is awakened on the astral plane and also we are off the astral plane so what he talks about here is when the ego is awakened on the astral plane but still in this kind of bubble so again many of them and this is just my speculation but I think that many of the samples of these dreams that we really remember and that we can manipulate and that we can fly or do these they are not necessarily I mean of course it's it's important to try to be aware on on the the astral plane I have these kind of dreams but then if we are set Center we are doing all this this thing inside our bubble that doesn't mean that we are really living a an astral life we are just having fun inside of the bubble so I I wouldn't place immediately a value on lucid dreaming by itself there is some value there that they in the sense that we are aware and we can impress that awareness on the physical brain but there is more that that is needed what we want is to be aware of the astral plane and not just in our little bubble creating and recreating worlds of imagination invisible helpers sometimes a man gradually rouses himself out of this condition wakes up to the astral world around him as it were but more often he remains in that state until someone who is already active there takes him in hand and wakens him this is however not a responsibility to be lightly undertaken for a while it is comparatively easy thus to wake a man up on the astral plane it is practically impossible except by a most undesirable exercise of mesmeric influence to put him to sleep again so he's talking now here about this concept of invisible health Ursa we don't have a lot of time to go into but I wanted to bring it up to show an example of what kind of experiences we are talking about when a person is fully aware on the astral plane so let bitter says that there the there is a band of people on the astral plane just as there are many on the physical plane that instead of being in their own bubble or having fun with their own self-centered influences they are awakened on the astral plane and they are trying to help just us on the physical plane many people there are many people that are living in a bubble making money for themselves developing their skills for themselves and they don't have a thought of using that to help other people but there are many others that are interested in helping in trying to make the world better or the family or whatever cynical of influence same happens from the astral plane there are people that find themselves away are awakened and they naturally if they on the physical plane they are inclined to help on the astral plane they will naturally be inclined to do the same if somebody self centered on the physical plane he will be self centered on the astral plane because we are the same person we we have the same attitude so he says a we can naturally awaken on the astral plane little by little that would be like like a gradual natural process but many times when a person is at a certain point of develop and development has the appropriate qualities he may be held helped to wake up on the astral plane in order to become helper there so now what what he's saying there is that a person that is already awakened on the astral plane and is part of this this group of helpers which may sound weird but is not too different we are all members of the Theosophical Society we get together and we do things together well we do similar things on the astral plane if we are awake there so he says that sometimes some of these invisible helpers see a person that has the qualities that could join this band of helpers this society on the astral plane let's say so that person may be many times you may know the person on the physical plane and think oh this person you know is is a mature person it's interested in helping it would be great if this person could join us so it is possible to try to awaken a person on the astral plane that is already aware on the astral plane but not off the astral plane as I was saying now let Peter says this is a responsibility that is taken very carefully because if you away like a person on the astral plane and then that person gets scared or cannot handle it or whatever may happen then it's not easy to go back and put that person back to sleep like if nothing happened so so the according to Ledbetter there there is this possibility of being awakened there to join this this group of people that are trying to help on the astral plane so that before a member of the band of workers will thus awaken a dreamer he must fully satisfy himself that the man's disposition is such that he will make good use of the additional powers that will then be put into his hands and also that his knowledge and his courage are sufficient to make it reasonably certain that no harm will come to him as a result of the action if you want to know more about this get the book invisible helpers you can borrow it from our library or buy it and see there are many stories and examples of what kind of help can be done from the astral plane and normally the people who are awakened and/or that join the this this group they go through a little training on the astral plane to realize that that fire cannot harm them that if they fall into the water or have to go into the water they are not going to drown or if they fall they are not going to to crash so there is a little training area that is there so that then they can freely move on the astral plane to to and people around people both on the astral plane or on the physical to such awakening is performed such awakening so performed will put a man in a position to join if he will the band of those who helped mankind but it must be clearly understood that this does not necessarily or even usually bring with it the power of remembering in the waking consciousness anything which has been done that capacity has to be attained by the man for himself and in most cases it does not come for years afterwards perhaps not even in the same life so here again the difference between being aware on the astral plane and bringing that memory into the physical it person may be very very active on the astral plane and yet have no clue on the physical plane and another person may remember a lot of silly things that he may be doing on the on the astral plane and yet still be in a little bubble and anything in between so my point is that we don't have to be fooled unfortunately the physical consciousness is the most limited aspect of ourselves so we can't judge ourselves or what we do or who we are by our physical perception or whatever perception we will remember on the physical plane so as he says after some years if the person follows the spiritual discipline then little by little that person begins to remember these dreams dreams of helping in accidents or our dreams of you know doing different things and those dreams have a particular feeling a feeling of reality they are not chaotic unless they get mixed up with other things and we are going to discuss that too they they are quite varied they are quite coherent and sometimes you may even find some clue the physical plane that that was what is remembered actually happened but many times this we remembering of the activities Ledbetter says doesn't even happen in the same lifetime it depends on many factors so any any person can be very active and still have no clue on the physical plane that he or she is but happily this lack of memory in the body in no way impedes the work out of the body so that except for the satisfaction to a man of knowing during his waking hours upon what work he has been engaged in engaged during his sleep it is not a matter of importance what really matters is that the work should be done not that we should remember who did it though as yet unable to carry their consciousness through unbroken are nevertheless by no means wasting the hours when they think they are asleep but spending them in noble and unselfish labour for their fellow man so yes well once we are awakened on the astral plane then we may be very active and doing even more meaningful things when on the astral plane and on the physical plane on the physical plane we may be in a situation in life where we are too busy taking care of family or or whatever we have to take care of or our health may be not very good and we cannot be very active but when the body is left when we go to sleep then we may we are free from any of those limitations so the as the person evolves spiritually the activity on the higher place becomes more and more important and then the the physical life becomes a relatively small fragment of the life and activity of that person so this is something important to keep in mind this may serve us as a stimulus to to follow the spiritual life because we are actually extending our our circle of influence of usefulness and eventually if we are lucky enough to begin to remember some of the experiences that's usually encouraging but as Leadbeater said those things don't necessarily come without you know some challenges also whenever we expand our consciousness that are usually also challenges associated so we have to trust that nature knows far better than us and we have to do our best and then let nature take care of the how all these things manifest such assistance as that to which we are here referring may most fitly be given by men and women at a particular stage of their evolution not by the add ups since they are capable of doing far grander and more widely useful work and not by the ordinary person of no special spiritual development for he would be unable to be of any use so here is again this idea similar idea to what I said about the Devas the the the Masters of wisdom as we we understand them in the Theosophical tradition they were very rarely have their activity on the astral plane most of their activity are in the mental plane and even on the higher mental plane at the level of the causal body for them to go to the lower planes is kind of a waste of time because then the lower you go in the planes the more restricted your powers are and on the higher planes those who are able to be aware on the higher planes as they masters are then they can do an activity that no other that most humanity can't because we are asleep on the higher planes so the idea is that there is a chain of of beings and a chain of activity where we all help at whatever level we are awakened so if we are awakened on the physical plane and not still on the astral plane the ideas begin to try to be on the physical plane and do whatever you can because the masters are helping humanity on the higher planes so it is us the ones that have to be become co-workers of the Masters on the physical plane on and do that work then as we begin to be aware on the astral plane then we can fulfill that role on the astral plane and not expect that you know the Masters or spiritual entities would come to the astral plane to do that work so in that sense we can become co-workers of the Masters even if we are not direct disciples of them but in the in the overall scheme of evolution we are doing their work on the place where we are aware and that would be a waste of energy for them to chew out on those planes we find that this work of helping on the astral and lower mental planes is chiefly in the hands of the pupils of the Masters people who though yet far from the attainment of a DEP ship have evolved themselves to the extent of being able to function consciously upon the planes in question so those who are disciples of the Masters end up in the philosophical tradition there are not many people you know in some traditions in the New Age it looks like everybody is a disciple of the Masters and this and that in the Theosophical view the there are different stages of growth of development so to say and when we we are people that have to to a large extent transcended the limitations of our personality when we are able to to be aware on different planes even if we if the physical brain doesn't remember it when the person is not self-centered when when the person is beginning to reshape the mental and emotional body so that the negative emotions are they are less and less frequently then this kind of people may become fit to be a disciple of the Masters and and they have if freely an activity on the the astral and the mental plane planes the lower mental planes usually but the before getting there people that are students of spiritual traditions that are working on they are they are spiritual development they can begin to have some activity on the astral plane and join this this group of invisible helpers so that's the the idea of for an example of activities that may may go on on the astral plane that can be remembered in dreams or as dreams when we wake up in our next meeting we are going to see the different kinds of how we we may remember these different kinds of activities as I said this part was not really in there in the book on on dreams but since I don't know if we all are aware of the possibilities of activity on the astral plane I thought that it was good to incorporate this at this point and and and then when the bidder goes into this question of remembering actual experiences on the astral plane we will know what he is referring to now another thing that I want to clarify is that it is not that every person that is awakened on the astral plane is part of the invisible helpers there are many people that are working on the astral plane just by their grad natural evolution and they they may not necessarily join we you know busy themselves trying to help they may be aware on the astral plane and go here and there and visit friends and do whatever you do on the astral plane actually the it is said that many times people get together in what on the physical plane would be kind of lectures that we do similar things obviously Astra lized in the sense of adapted to the conditions of the astral plane but the activities on the astral plane are not radically different from the activities on the physical plane so there are groups of people you can visit places some people who like music they can go for free to any opera you know you don't have to so far you not have to pay on the astral plane I'm sure when all humanity is aware there they are they will find some way to to make you pay but so take advantage right now that they are not yet materialistic people there but joke apart aside the there is a whole activity there without necessarily being part of the the band of invisible helpers if you as I said if you are interested in what kind of activities they do go to that book and if you have any questions about it you can send me an email we can discuss it so I think this is all we have for tonight yes so we can go now to questions or comments do you have any any comments or questions so what we have read something that Lee had asked about meeting you know dreaming with people who had died on the physical plane this is frequently the remembrance of an actual experience on the on the astral plane as I said on the astral plane we get we get in touch with people entities situations not by by spacial proximity but by affinity so when somebody that that is dear to us died the person is like in a permanent sleep the the connection with the physical body is severed so that the person cannot go back to the physical body but the person is from the astral body in a not too different state from in a live person there are some differences because when when a person dies the astral body rearranges itself unless the person knows how to prevent that rearranging from happening but that's completely different subject so there are some differences but yet the person is aware on the astral plane so because of this affinity that we have if we are awake on the astral plane to some extent at least we we just run into this person because because of the affinity as I said so many times the remembrance of of talking to people on the astral plane that are there are actually you know memories of an actual inner change of our experience and then how well we remember it it's a different subject if you see if you read the books by descent and later on on life after death they say for a person that is awakened on the astral plane when somebody dear dies all that changes is that now we are in touch with the person while we are asleep asleep and then we forget when when we are on our physical body which is the reverse - what happens when when the person was alive during the day we have a relationship with the person we go to sleep and we forget about the person so they say it's it's really that the relationship is not broken the problem is that for the most part in most people they don't remember you know when we wake up that memory cannot be impressed in the brain maybe because of the the surprise that one gets the first time that one means the dear one on the on the astral plane maybe that that produces an impact in our consciousness and that impact is transferred to the physical brain so that we remember it but then the relationship with people on the astral plane may become matter-of-fact and then we never ever remember again dreaming of this person although we may be very well be in constant relationship to him or her Tianna asks why does a bad dream wake us up well there are two reasons and actually Navasky says in one of she wrote a small book it's not a book originally was a dialogue with the Blavatsky Lodge about dreams he was now it was edited as part of the transactions of a blob a ski lodge and they were talking about dreams and Blavatsky said we should train ourselves to wake up whenever we are going to do something wrong in in our dreams because we can generate karma also on the astral plane now again we have to differentiate we may have a dream of killing a person on the astral plane and that may be a thought form that was floating around or because we saw a movie before going to sleep and this is just a physical dream that doesn't generate any Karma or anything but on the astral plane we may run not I'm not saying killing a person we may run into situations where we can also make mistakes or do bad things just as from the physical plane so Blavatsky said we should always train ourselves to wake up when when we are about to do something wrong on the on the on the astral plane now how do you train yourself in that I don't know I mean normally the answer is it's always the same by training yourself to do it while you are awake so if you try to refrain yourself from doing bad things when you are awake a tendency will be also transferred to the astral plane now what dreams may be the result of different different kind of influences as we are going to see next week if it is really a bad experience on the astral plane Leadbetter said there are frightening things on the astral plane then they cannot really necessarily affect us although there can be some we can be affected on the astral plane in some ways but normally it's just a question of being afraid of there are some elementals that will take on the image of a monster for example because they don't like the intrusion of human beings you know they they know they have the experience that in nature whatever we call we destroy nature you know to build our houses that they don't understand to generate our companies that they all they see is that we destroy nature so at this point in evolution there is a kind of elementals are not very sympathetic with human beings and many times when they see that a person awakens on the astral plane they try to scare the person away so that may be one of the reasons of bad dreams and we wake up because we are afraid and we just go back to the physical plane and sometimes a bad dream maybe just bad digestion and the physical body gets scare and and calls the the Astra and consciousness up you know when the physical awakes then the our consciousness that was on the astral plane is brought brought back to the physical plane so if the physical body is uncomfortable for any reason as I said about digestion for example and that generates a physical dream bad physical dream that the physical elemental will wake up the body and then our consciousness is brought back to to the body so in all these things there may be very I think one of the points of this book is that there are many different influences and things are not simplistic and as we pay attention to all this we begin to acquire experience and know or at the beginning we begin to guess and then little by little we begin to be more certain as to what is going on when when we have it a particular dream or experience yes marina has a question maybe you could ask it in the microphone Michelle's microphone I can repeat okay Laura Michelle can have marina asks what is the relation between between meditation and the astral body yes meditation is actually one of the ways to stimulate or to reorganize the astral body on the astral plane and to making a faith vehicle of consciousness they basically one of the things we want to do on the astral bodies to to make it more compact so to say it from amazed to make it more of a body with a structure so in meditation that is exactly what we are trying to do this activity that of our thoughts and emotions that tend to to go out to be you know chaotic by the action of our will is is try we try to bring some order to keep it in control and that is that action of our will is reflected in our astral body so the astral body with the practice of meditation is brought into more and more control and shape so the bidder actually says that one of the main practices to develop the astral body so that it can be useful on the astral plane is meditation now as I said I would add to that and enable to stimulate positive emotions as opposed to the negative emotions life is complex and we always will have will be stimulated to have some negative emotions you know it's only when we are getting closer to the to be free from the personality that we may transcend the negative emotions but in our spiritual work the the negative emotions begin to have less less room in our life and we begin to be less identified with them so that is important as a protection on the astral plane and also breaking the self-centeredness because as I was saying we may have it perfectly well evolved astral body and be awakened on the astral plane and be playing around little bubble and that is not necessarily you know relevant from a spiritual point of view so meditation is important specifically for the shaping of the astral body any other question or comment alright then thank you everybody for joining us I will send again an exercises that just suggested exercise if if you want to practice it and we will meet next Tuesday and begin to explore the different sources of of dreams that that come from the ego know from the physical body or the etheric table or the astral body so I hope I see you next week let's see what Jimmy says okay thank you for being here - and have a great week
Dreams-Part-5
welcome everybody to our fifth meeting in at home with Yousefi we are going through this book by letter on dreams what they are how they are cost and today we are going to explore something that is closer to the the interpretation of our dreams again not necessarily interpretation at the level of the symbolic meaning of the dreams as we are going to see symbolic dreams are only one part or one type of of Dreams and there are several other phenomena that are experienced by our consciousness as dreams today we are stuck we are going to see all these different kinds of dreams and in the next class we will see some examples as to how all these different experiences many times are mixed up in in one single dream when we wake up and we remembered those experiences so let us start with the first the first quote the ego in sleep his transcendental measure of time and then just a reminder that when he says his that's the pronoun for the ego yes and the the the ego if you let's go to this table again the word ego remember that means simply I miss the sense of eyeness it comes from the Greek and when the sense of I NSE is spiritual then we have a spiritual ego when the sense of the sense of I Ness is personal then we have the personal ego which is a one that psychology for the most part is works with that the personal ego now the the the origin of this sense of eyeness in the Theosophical teachings is on the monastic playing manners is the Sanskrit word form for mind on the higher aspect of the monastic plane we have the causal body the causal body is the vehicle of consciousness for for what we would call the soul the sense of of our sense of being the source of our sense of being now in sleep the consciousness that it's coming from Manas it is expressing itself at the level of the astral body so it's not the pure monastic consciousness when we are awake consciousness is expressing through the physical body so the the in fact is expressing through all the different body cells the mental the astral etheric and the physical body state like the the anchor of consciousness so our pure consciousness has to express itself through all these vehicles and each one of them impose certain limitations so our physical awareness is far more limited than what our real awareness is of course the real awareness are ultimately speaking comes from admin but that is a more Universal kind of awareness so the awareness with this feeling of I am I am myself I am I comes from Manus so when we are talking about the ego in sleep we are talking about our consciousness as it is expressed expressing itself through the causal body the mental body and the anchor for it would be the astral body and on this plane our consciousness is different and ledbetter is going to explain how consciousness expresses itself while the body's asleep his measure of time and space is so entirely different from that which we use in waking life that from our view it seems as though neither time nor space existed for him I do not wish here to discuss the question as to whether time can be really to exist I wish only to show that when the ego is freed from physical trammels either during sleep trance or death he appears to employ some transcendental measure of time which has nothing in common with our ordinary physiological one so on on each from a metaphysical point of view at least in the Theosophical approach time and space exist in different ways on all the planes on all the manifested planes it is only on the plane of the absolute that time and space do not exist in in any way that we could call it time and space however since we only know the physical manifestation of time this this succession of past present and future and also the physical manifestation of space as being a distance that we have to travel through from one point to the other then from this point of view time and space on the astral plane are completely different to the extent that it looks like there is no time or space or at least that they work in a in a different way let's see it has his hand up go ahead yeah I think any time we experience something the experience exists in duration and some volume it just isn't the linear predictable kind of thing that we experience more on the physical plane yes and libido will give some example of that but but basically as long as there is some motion as you say there has to be some perception of time and some perception of space illustrative examples of it it seems that in the there is a wonderful narrative concerning a visit paid one morning by the Prophet Muhammad to heaven during which he saw many different regions there had them all very fully explained to him and also had numerous lengthy conferences with various angels yet when he returned to his body the bed from which he had risen was still warm and he found that but a few seconds had passed in fact I believe the water had not yet all run out of a jug which he had accidentally overturned as he started on the expedition this is a description of an experience on the inner planes that the Mohammed had while the body was not not really asleep but he fell into a trance and he had all this long experience in in a matter of seconds seconds from the point of view of the physical body this is not exactly a dream but the same thing occurs constantly in ordinary dreams and there is abundant testimony to show it Ryker's a german writer tells the story of a man who was awakened by the firing of a shot which yet came in as the conclusion of a long dream in which he had become a soldier had deserted and suffered terrible hardship had been captured tried condemned and finally shot the whole long drama being lived through in the moment of being awakened by the sound of the shot one might multiply authenticated cases like this to any extent probably many of you have this experience sometimes we are awakened by by a physical stimulus whether some water that falls into our face or something that happens in one moment and we wake up but with this long dream that happened in the few seconds or instance between the physical stimuli reached the brain and our brain woke up so there there is there is a different way of experiencing time on the inner Plains and this has an important influence in dreams and in how we experience dreams and we are going to see some examples his power of dramatization another remarkable peculiarity of the ego in addition to his transcendental measure of time is suggested by some of these stories and that is his faculty or perhaps we should rather say his habit of instantaneous dramatization it will be noticed in the case of the shot just narrated that the physical effect which awakened the person came as the climax to a dream apparently extending over a considerable space of time though obviously suggested in reality entirely by that physical effect itself when people talk about or mystics or a cultists talk about how the ego things the ego meaning as I said our true consciousness it seems that it thinks through images those images when they come today to the mental body and in the astral and then the physical and express themselves through the brain they come out in words words are symbols of the images that we have but it seems that the way the monastic consciousness perceives is through symbols through images and when the ego is in in the astral body if the ego is say of a person that is developed and that ego he or that person which is the same is working on the astral plane then that person is having a real experience but as we have seen in many people at this point of evolution the ego is in the in the astral body not not necessarily asleep the ego is aware but not aware of the environment so it is in the astral body doing what we normally do during our day just involved in our own thoughts in our own activities you know if you look at your mind during the day you would see that the mind is constantly thinking and we are highly aware of what the mind is doing during the day but many many things something happens and then the mind begins to take that that thing that happened and build a story in which we are involved it may be something not related to us at all we see an accident and the mind immediately begins to think what we would do if we were in an accident or a relative or so there is this tendency at this point in evolution of the mind to generate these images these stories this this kind of self-centered activity and the same does the ego on the astral plane when it is not actually working on the on that plane whatever happens that ego generates a story of it and in this case is there is an example there was this this sound of a shot and the ego generated all the story of being a soldier and being shot you know in a trial and shot so these two aspects of how the ego works again are the foundations for the kinds of dreams that we have so there is so far we have seen the different perception of time and this habit of generating stories in which we can see it as I said even in our physical mind okay Lee has a question or a statement I occasionally hear a loud noise when I awaken the noise is always different and unrelated to any dream I was having now is this a physical noise or is something that happens in your mind we widely is writing the answer we have to remember that the the physical brain state keeps perceiving on the physical plane even if the ego is not there so it may translate some of these external stimuli into or communicating to consciousness and then our consciousness may make a story of it now listen that it is not a physical sound so that is more how your consciousness is probably translating the passage from the astral plane into the physical plane I have no experience that particular let's say way of interpretation of that sometimes the different people may interpret the passage in different ways some some people just wake up with sadness because consciousness on the astral plane is far freer than it is on the physical plane so coming back to the physical body if you remember at all the experience of of the astral plane and I'm not talking about remember remembering what happened but if you bring an intuition of of the feeling of being outside of the body when you come back to the body there is this sense of oppression or weight or being clad in a kind of armor heavy armor that's many times how consciousness experiences or interprets coming from the astral plane to the physical now regarding the noise side I don't know I haven't having experienced that but it's probably related to it it would be interesting for you to pay keep paying attention to that and try to see what feelings are associated if if any now isn't along with symbols part of the mental plane one of the attributes is sounds or lights so could it be a sub plane that that's coming from yes the mental plane is associated to a caution that is associated to to sound as Michelle says and it could be yes I I don't know no I don't know normally the the astral plane is a plane of feelings and since Asians so if this is this is a psychic effect psychic in the sense of belonging to the psychic planes the astral and the lower mental he may come associated to a feeling on the inner planes the senses are not separate taste sound sight they are they are a characteristic of the whole astral body we don't have censuses on the physical plane so there is a particular kind of stimulus that is translated into sound when you are waking up and it would be something interesting to research in yourself and see if you can find the meaning the ego went out of the body is able to proceed with absolute instant a instant nattie without the use of the nerves and consequently is aware of what happens before the information reaches his physical brain in that barely appreciable space of time he appears to compose a kind of drama or series of scenes leading up to and culminating in the event which awakens the physical body after waking he is limited by the body and becomes incapable of distinguishing in memory between the subjective and the objective therefore images therefore imagines himself to have really acted through his own drama in a stream state so when the ego is from the astral body there are two sets of perceptions that are going on at the same time the ones that are coming to the physical body and are being communicated to the brain and the one that the ego is consciousness is perceiving outside of the body you know in the near-death experiences the body the brain the heart they are not not active they are dead from a medical point of view and yet consciousness can see can see that the operation room around for example they can hear people talking because all these as I said all these perceptions they do not depend on the physic body they depend on the physical body when we are acting through their physical body so if your lights don't work then when you are within the body you don't see but when you go to the astral plane you can see you can see through the astral side so to say so when there is this for example this sound there is the perception of the physical body and since the sounds struck the year until the this depolarization of the membrane of the nerves is transmitted to the brain there is there are some instants that that elapsed but in those instance the the the ego in the astral body that also heard - the shot produced all these images in that very brief lapses now when we come to the physical body these two independent perceptions come into one and that is many times the origin of confusion in dreams as we are going to see some examples especially next in next class today we are going to see how all the different dreams that are there or sources of dreams and in our last class when we see some examples of how this works out then we will understand better what part each of these sources of dream playing normally this habit however seems to be peculiar to the ego which as far as spirituality goes is still comparatively undeveloped it would seem that just as primitive man casts every natural phenomenon into the form of a myth so the unadvised ego dramatizes every event that comes under his notice but the man who has attained continuous consciousness finds himself so fully occupied in the work of the higher planes that he devotes no energy to such matters and therefore he dreams no more so when he talks about comparatively undeveloped remember that in the Theosophical view we are only halfway through our evolution so we are all comparatively undeveloped comparatively - what we can or we will be eventually so it's like a flower that is still a bad and and then in time that will blossom into a flower so there are some people at any time in evolution that have gone through through all the different stages either because they went faster or as it is more frequently the case because they have studied their evolution before in previous systems but we cannot go into that the point is that for the most part most egos are at this point in this particular state in people who begin to be interested in a serious spirituality we are in the transition between that kind of state and the state of active work conscious work on the inner Plains and in many of us we can be in between the two and sometimes the ego will will still do these kind of things and sometimes the ego will be doing some work on the on the astral plane so that's something that we need to keep in mind and not get the wrong idea in the sense of saying that people are less evolved or it's just a natural process of development so but eventually when the ego is active on the astral plane there are no dreams anymore in the in the regular sense remember what the dreams that that are merely imaginations are the ones that are produced by the brain the ones that are produced by the etheric double the etheric brain and this kind of dreams the one that is produced by the ego on the astral plane so these three are simply visualizations and putting in picture different stimuli and these are dreams that do not correspond with reality again we are going to see examples of this so this will be clear now when dreams begin to see to be as we are going to see today remembrances of actions on the astral plane or visions of the future or insights into things those are not really dreams in the sense of imaginary pictures or visualizations these are remembrances of actual experiences so this is why Leadbetter says that as the ego begins to awaken on the astral plane it begins to be basic working on these inner planes then most of this Dreaming begins to receive still the physical body will generate its own broken broken images the etheric brain will also generate this chain of images because they still have some automatic activity but little by little those experiences begin to recede into the background his Faculty of prevision another result which follows the egos super normal method of time measurement is that in some degree prevision is possible to him the present the past and to a certain extent the future lie open before him if he knows how to read them and he undoubtedly thus foresees at times events that will be of interest or importance to his lower personality and makes more or less successful endeavors to impress them upon him so this is something that some of you may have experienced this is not that uncommon of dreaming about something that is going to happen in the future and again when I say not that uncommon I'm not talking about in generally humanity but in people who start working spiritually at some point this may begin to happen it's not necessarily a sign of any anything in particular you know if you if you start putting your these things and you start trying to work on calming your mind then these things may happen but they're for those who this begins to happen is very evident that the the future or at least the near future can be seen even in silly things you know I know of people that had dreams about very concrete things that happen in the future a game finished or or why was going to happen in you know in a particular situation as Leadbeater talks about in the book sometimes there is a very important reason why the ego tries to impress the lower consciousness the physical brain sometimes is a question of life on there and I haven't put a lot of examples here because we don't have time to go through it but if you read the book there are several examples but sometimes it's not even important if if you start remembering what you see on the astral plane you may remember things that are not really relevant it's just that the Akashic records are they are you just happened to see them and then you wake up and you remember them so let's talk a little more about this in the preview in the next slide it has sometimes been argued that if events could really be foreseen they must be for ordained in which case there can be no free will for man in the affairs of the average man it is probably possible to foresee something to a very large extent since he has developed no will of his own and is consequently very largely the creature of circumstances his Karma places him amid certain surroundings and their action upon him is so much the most important factor that his future course may be foreseen with almost mathematical certainty so if we have a person that simply reacts to the environment you can predict what that person is going to do if the person meets somebody that treats him well or ill you can predict how how that person will act people don't think about being fair they you think about just responding us as you treat them so in certain circumstances it's obvious that they will take this option or make this choice but as we begin to try to do the right thing not to be led by emotions by conditioning then it's not so easy to foresee what will happen because we may be in a certain situation and then even if we react to that situation when we can think about it what we decide to do is not necessarily what our emotions would tell us to do so the more a person begins to be free from the environment to to act the less you can predict what a person will do and on the contrary the more you just react mechanically to circumstances the easier it is to say what you are going to do I know very very little of of astrology but I have noticed that when when I did the astral charts of friends in the Theosophical society you could see that they were quite different from what the chart said of course there were always some things that were they are but you could see that there was some some work when I did it with regular people that they are in no particular discipline or religion with no particular intent of working on themselves you could see that the the the astral chart chart was just a picture of what they were so you can see how these works in that way but when we come to deal with a developed individual a man with knowledge and will then prophecy fails us for he is no longer the creature of circumstances but to a great extent their master true the main events of his life are arranged beforehand by his past Karma but the way in which he will allow them to affect him the method by which he will deal with them and perhaps triumph over them these are his own and they cannot be foreseen except as probabilities so this is more or less what we were talking about now before we go to this however so this is a how the creation of the destiny works we generate causes that produces circumstances and those circumstances that are already produced chemically we can foresee this is going to happen because they were already produced in the past now how we will react to that that cannot be foreseen B as long as we are free from reacting mechanically so many times in your dreams if you are seeing the future in something that is important what you will see is a circumstance in which you will you will find yourself or other people but not how you are going to react to that so that is important to keep in mind his symbolic thought another point worth notice in relation to the condition of the ego went out of the body during sleep is that he appears to think in symbols that is to say that what down here would be an idea requiring many words to express is perfectly conveyed to him by a single symbolic image now when such a thought as this is impressed upon the brain and so remembered in the waking consciousness consciousness it of course needs translation often the mind duly performs this function but sometimes the symbol is recollected without its key comes through untranslated as it were and then confusion arises because of these characteristic of perceiving in images and images have far more information and it's not only a visual image it is a feeling image many times if you remember a dream and you remember what what happened especially if this is it is this kind of symbolic dreams how you felt is as as important a piece of information as what happened in the dream because feelings are part of of the symbol so you may be reading something and have the feeling that is a long long reading that may mean that whatever the dream is symbolizing will take a long time for example and nothing in the image of the dream will tell you we'll talk about time but the feeling of there's been a long text for example that you are reading implies that this process will take a long time so because images with feelings have so much information and this is the way that the ego perceives on the on the inner planes many times when that is communicated to the physical body the physical body cannot necessarily translate all into concepts sometimes it does if it is a relatively simple simple symbol maybe you remember as a concept but many times we just remember the symbolic thought so these are the typical dreams we are going to see a little about this later of dreaming that you are in the middle of the ocean in a boat and it was raining and you know this kind of symbolic dreams that then you may wake up knowing what it meant you may wake up without knowing what what it meant the kid to translate that is lost in the translation so this requires some practice there are some you know young and many other people have studied this aspect of dreaming which is just as we can see it's only one aspect of dreaming and they have studied this they have found that there are certain symbols that seem to be collective but at the same time there are many symbols that are personal so I'm not sure that you can really go to a book or an interpretation of dreams and then be sure that that is a the way you have to interpret your dream as with anything else related to the inner life it is by trial and error that you learn so if you have often this kind of symbolic dreams it is good to first to familiarize yourself with the quality of your dream and try to pay attention to remember it as good as possible to pay attention to the feelings associated etc and then as we are going to see in the next class you will have to learn how to disentangle the dreams because many times what the ego was thinking on the astral plane is mixed up with what the etheric brain was doing on the physical brain with experience you begin to see all this is a physical element most probably or this is you know part of the mechanism and then you can you can get that the the core of that leap many people however are quite in the habit of bringing the symbols through in this manner and trying to invent an interpretation down here in such cases each person seems usually to have a system of symbology of his own there are however a few points upon which most of these dreamers agree as for example that your dream of deep water signifies approaching trouble and that pearls are a sign of Tears so yeah these are just examples of what we were talking about so now let's these then are characteristics of how the ego on the astral plane perceives it has the perceives in a different time frame it tends to perceive in images in symbols and many times can see pieces of the future or the past so this added to what we have already explored how the brain works and generates images on its own now we can see all the different factors that come together in the production of different drinks the factors in the production of Dreams having thus exam the condition of man during sleep we see that the factors which may be concerned in the production of Dreams are one the ego who may be in any state of consciousness from almost utterance sensibility to perfect command of his faculties and as he approximates to the latter condition enters more and more fully into possession of certain powers transcending any that most of us possess in our ordinary waking state to the astral body ever palpitating with the wild surgeons of emotion and desire remember the astral bodies on the astral plane there are constantly thought forms and feelings floating on the astral plane and as they impact our astral body they may generate a kind of echo so the astral body itself may generate a dream which is normally related to emotions to to feelings so we have the ego that may be creating these images we have the astral body then go on three the etheric part of the brain with a ceaseless procession of disconnected pictures we've been through it normally the dreams that come from the etheric the ether is like the lower aspect of Akasha Akasha is like the memory of nature so many times there are images going through floating so to say in the ether and may be perceived by our etheric brain sometimes it is memories from when we were a child or from the past or from things that happened sometimes these are images produced by other people so there are some dreams where there is a succession of of memories which they are not particularly symbolic they they are not they don't seem to have any particular meaning they are just these pictures that are picked up by the etheric brain and again we will see some examples of that did I read number 4 no I'm sorry for the lower physical brain with its infantile semi-consciousness and its habit of expressing every stimulus in pictorial form normally the image is produced by the brain so have a sequence or too much of logic they are fragmented maybe for example you feel a prick on your body and then you may have the dream that you you are being killed but with no story behind if there is a story like in the example of this bullet then that is being produced by the the ego on the astral plane then the physical brain would would just produce a kind of image tends to exaggerate all these stimuli and it's just a fragmented image which many times is added to something that has far more substance than this when we go to sleep our ego withdraws further within himself and leaves his various encasements freer to go their own way than they usually are but it must be remembered that the separate consciousness of these vehicles when they are allowed to show it is of a very rudimentary character when we add that each of these factors is then in infinitely more susceptible of impression from without even then it ordinarily is we shall see small cause - we shall see small cause to wonder that the recollection on waking which is a sort of synthesis of all the different activities which have been going on should generally be somewhat confused so this is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to to research into dreams because of all these different sources of information that get come together and and this we know about this it's it's difficult to separate to sort out what things in a dream maybe may be useful and what others are Leadbetter will now talk about the different kinds of dreams in a general way and in our next meeting we are going to see some concrete examples to see how all these elements come together and they form one single dream and you can recognize the different elements that came from different places and when you see the example you will probably recognize yes many times I have that kind of of Dreams and this is because of that mixture of elements the nature of dreams the true vision this cannot properly be classified as a dream it is where the ego either sees for himself on a higher plane or has impressed upon him by a more advanced entity some fact which is which it is important for him to know or some glorious and ennobling vision which encourages and strengthens him happy is a man to whom such visions comes with sufficient clearness to make its own way its way through all obstacles and fix itself firmly in his waking memory so as leader says this is not really a dream in the sense of this imaginary stories this is the memory of a real experience true vision as he says and if we are awake on the inner planes many times we may come to important realizations that then we may make an effort to impress on day on the physical brain we are sleepy nurses there we may come in touch with either a person that knows that it that is skillful in the realities of the inner planes we may come in touch with some advanced entity whether an angel or something like that although as we said that is not all that common on the on the astral plane but it may happen or we may see on the Akashic record something that is important and then when we are on the astral plane we think this is important for me to remember when I wake up so we try to impress that on the physical brain but then whether we can do it depends on first our skill to impress this on the physical direct brain and the receptivity of the physical brain and it's not too different from when our emotions are altered for example and we are trying to to keep to keep calm you see the tension and the effort and our effort to keep the emotions at bay and many times we are not able to do it in a similar way we may be on the astral plane us and say I need to remember this but then we are not able to to calm down at the the astral body and the thetic goggle and the physical brain to be able to impress that memory so let bitter says happy is the person that has this kind of visions and has the ability to impress it on the on the physical brain with the spiritual work all this becomes easier or more probable many of the things we see on the astral plane you know it would be great if we remember it but it's not really essential but there are some occasions in which it is important when some hardship is going to come on the physical plane for example the on the astral plane you may be aware of that far in advanced because in advance because the causes in the universe come from the inner planes to the outer plane when they happen on the physical plane that is the last key or or you know the last key in a chain of causes so many times on the astral plane you already know what is going to happen and if you can impress that knowledge on the physical brain you can like prepare yourself to face things you know with calm or whatever the right attitude is so it is important part of the spiritual practice not only study but actually practicing has an effect on on this aspect to the prophetic dream this also we must attribute exclusively to the action of the ego who either foresees for himself or is told of some future event for which he wishes to prepare his lower consciousness this may be of any degree of clearness and accuracy according to the power of the ego to assimilate it himself and having done so to impress it upon his waking brain so yes I about the two kinds here the information you may get on the astral plane may be just a delivery of knowledge or understanding or instruction or you may have these prophetic dreams that I was talking about that you try to remember to prepare your your lower consciousness and again how much you remember it will depend on all these factors sometimes the event is one of serious moment such as death or disaster so that the motive of the ego is endeavouring to impress it is obvious on other occasions however the fact foretold is apparently unimportant and it is difficult for us to comprehend why the ego should take should take any trouble about it of course it is always possible that in such a case the fact remembered maybe only a trifling detail of some far larger vision the rest of which has now come through to the physical brain yes also sometimes the the whole it may be that sometimes is a detail of something that was larger or sometimes it's just something that used you really say you know what's the meaning of this why it's something that has no consequence but I guess in those cases is not necessarily that you made a special effort to impress it on the brain but it's just that it was impressed if your brain was quiet if the conditions were were appropriate even without and if you have some you know develop some skill even without trying there there is this memories that filter down of course most of in very few cases the there are questions of life and death in the life of people you know in general but in those occasions where there is even sometimes you you can there are examples in the book again that you can read where there is the memory of or the vision of something that is going to happen and yet you cannot change anything even if it is an accident the accident will happen even if you try not to that I don't know why you would see except just to be you know to be ready to know that it was preordained by karmic causes and help you you know take it in a more philosophical way perhaps but sometimes you you cannot really do much and sometimes the ego impresses it on the brain not because it has any particular purpose it's because his you saw it on the astral plane and you know you the impact that that produced on you is impressed in the in the brain but not because you were supposed to do anything particular now as we said these are not we are dreams in the sense of in imaginary things these are memories of something that was real often the prophecy is evidently intended as a warning and instances are not wanting in which that warning has been taken and so the dreamer has been saved from injury or death in most cases the hint is neglected or it's true signification not understood until the fulfillment comes in others an attempt is made to act upon the suggestion but nevertheless circumstances over which the dreamer has no control bring him in spite of himself into the position foretold so that's what we were talking about sometimes they there's nothing you can do 3 the symbolical dream this too is the work of the ego and indeed it almost be defined as a less successful variant of the preceding class for it is after all an imperfectly translated effort on his part to convey information as to the future it has his hand up let's see and go ahead yes even though you can affect the events you could always practice equanimity and in fact it's a you know a spiritual view of circumstances yes and you know in my case sometimes it happened that the very fact that you had a dream of something even if it was something unpleasant and odd or a difficulty and then that that comes to happen then the fact of having dreamt of it before gives you the perspective that there is far more going on than we know on the physical plane and and that awareness itself can help you go through it as you said with a more philosophical attitude with more equanimity so many times you know the problem is that we are we are so centered on the physical consciousness when we are awake that we think that everything that happens should be so that it can make your life on the physical plane plane more pleasurable you know more pleasant and but the the real consciousness sees these things in a completely different way and and the real consciousness may know that that we must go to through certain difficulty that that is the best thing that happened to you so a memory of that is not necessarily supposed to or have the the purpose of you trying to avoid the circumstances it may have the purpose of us you were saying take this in a more spiritual way so don't think that dreaming of the future should be because you you have to be able to change of course if we have certain information and we can avoid certain suffering we can try you know we can always try to avoid suffering that has not happened but that is not necessarily what what is based so if if the best is to go through the circumstances we won't be able to prevent them so let's say something about the symbolic dream yada so let bitter says this is more or less the same as the other ones but it's when when they either the ego is not able to impress this on the brain with their translation or the brain is not able to translate it however it works but many times the symbolic dream is a piece of information that the ego is trying to convey to the physical consciousness either of something that may happen in the future or or something that is going on at the moment or something that we need to understand that may be on the astral plane we understand and then we say I need to understand this you know when I am awake but but the ego may not be able to convey it in a clear way so it comes assessing as a symbol so these again are the symbolic dreams for the vivid and connected dream this is sometimes a remembrance more or less accurate of a real astral experience which has occured to the eagle while wandering away from his sleeping physical body many times you have this kind of vivid dreams with a with a very coherent history or a story in the dream and and they may be remembrances as the bitter sense of what happened on the astral plane now again as we are going to see normally on the backbone of this real memory there will be many other elements that that bring some kind of chaotic you know nature or Sun something that doesn't really make sense and these elements may be things that were added by the physical the astral body or the 30 brain which again we are going to see some examples of so a vivid unconnected dream may be a remembrance of the astral plane or as he is going to say normally we don't get the pure remembrance we get a mixed remembrance of different things more frequently perhaps it is the dramatization by the ego either of the impression produced by some trifling physical sound or touch or of some casual idea which happens to strike him so this is important to remember for example the dream of this person that was a soldier went to trial was killed that's it that's a coherent dream it has a storyline it may feel vivid because it was awakened even by your physical sound and yet has nothing to do with a real experience on the astral plane so we need to know that many times these coherent dreams may be just this kind of dramatization of the ego when we remember a dream we we need to keep in mind the possibilities and see if we can find the meaning behind the dream if we don't see any meaning in particular even if he was you know a coherent dream then it's probably just some dramatization of the ego of something physical or a thought form that was around or similar things the confused dream this which is by far the communist of all may be caused as has already been pointed out in various ways one it may be simply a more or less perfect recollection of a series of the disconnected pictures and impossible transformations produced by the senseless automatic action of the lower physical brain so let's go one by one so this confused dream as he says is mostly what we have and so so that we need to work a little on the memory so if there is a confused dream many times it's just the pictures produced by the physical brain and they they don't have any particular meaning to it maybe a reproduction of the stream of casual thought which has been pouring through the etheric part of the brain we explained that there are thought forms going around they get to the etheric brain and then that produces some kind of images again they they maybe we are going to see an example of that after a memory of of when we were you know a child or of when we were in some situation or place these are normally produced on the etheric level three essential images of any kind enter into it it is due to the ever Restless tide of earthly desire probably stimulated by some unholy influence of the astral world so we have the astral body and as we said there are all kinds of thought forms and forms of feelings going through the astral plane and if they they happen to to encounter our astral body they will tend to to generate an echo in our astral body so dreams that are sensual or that are related to anger or things like that many times they are just external stimulation now sometimes it may be the product or the result of our own psychological activity if during the dread the day we are we are angry for example we go to sleep the vibration on the astral plane stays active it is said that even for 48 hours a strong vibration made me stay active for 48 hours so when we go to sleep that anger that is still on our astral body may generate all these these images in the ego the ego is is feeling these these vibrations of anger and generates these stories or these memories so these are the case of the psychological dreams were where a dream is talking about something that is going on in our psyche some we may not even be aware people on the spiritual path tend to be more and more aware a person may be very angry about something that is going on but because of the lack of awareness not even really notice that he or she is angry about it and then when when he goes to sleep all that anger begins to generate all this images so from a psychological point of view many times looking at these kind of dreams helps to to find out what is happening with our astral body what in psychology is called the unconscious mind is nothing but the vibrations in our astral body and our mental body that they keep on vibrating whether we are aware of that or not on on the physical plane but many times the dreams don't necessarily have to do with your own psychological activity as we see here they are just the echo of external influences so if you are sleeping close to and somebody in your household is really angry doesn't mean that those thought forms may come to you and generate a new some kind of angry dream for example so we have to be careful yeah let's see and yes go ahead what about the recurring dreams yeah recurring dreams I would say that are probably something that has to do with we with a more psychological aspect you know when when we go to sleep if we go to sleep worried about something for example the ego on the on the astral plane we keep on thinking and just as we do in our physical brain and go into that again especially if the ego is not really aware of the astral plane and active on the astral plane it's just like if you are worried about something in your physical life but you have to go to work well you may forget for the time being that don't worry but if you are alone in your house then it keeps playing in your mind so in a similar way if you are active on the astral plane that may not happen but if not that keeps in the mind and that may be a source of it yes what what else do you want to say I'm talking about like over years oh I I think part of it has to do with its how we how our astral body manifests or how it looks I know for example for me when if it's anxiety I manifest anxiety by it's always either I'm a teacher without can't find my lesson plans or I can't find the room or I'm a student and I'm in a marble hallway and I have socks on and I can't get to class so that's if I have that dream I know that there's some sort of anxiety in my life even if it's not apparent to me yeah that's that's a good explanation it may be that are the we generate a habit of interpreting a particular feeling with a particular scene I I don't have a lot of personal experience in that I don't know if I have recurring dreams but what Michelle says makes sense so probably our consciousness generates preferred it kind of image to express those feelings that make sense yet okay we're going on to number four or it may be due to an imperfect attempt at dramatization on the part of an undeveloped eagle so the the confused dream may be as he says the ego in drama decides something generates these stories but if it is not really developed the it may be confused and five or it may be and most often is due to an inextricable mingling of several or any several or all of these influences so that's what usually happens all these influences have some part in the confused dreams and this is what we are going to see in the next in the next class there is I think only the last one that is set up for for the next meeting the way in which such mingling takes place will perhaps be made clear by a short account of some of the experiments on the dream state recently made by the London lodge of the Theosophical Society with the aid of some clairvoyant investigators among its members now recently is not yes at the end of the 19th century when Leadbeater and seen it and some others were part of the London lodge they did some interesting experiments that we are going to go through in the next class and that will be a concrete example of how all these things happen so that's all for tonight let's see if anybody else has some comments or questions about what we have been talking about you can raise your hand if you have a mic or you can type in the chat box okay there is one dad what's going on tell me that with this day I should look down upon the topic of our conversation to believe that my dream was for training my understanding of the situation rather than what she was actually doing and saying in other words whereas the lady was objectively they are on the astral plane attempting to converse with me in my dream what I was actually seeing and hearing was entirely subjective Oh were you able to hear what Michelle said and we should just read the dream it was well I could read I could hear it okay so yes well again this depends on how how each each for consciousness interprets this so I I wouldn't tell you how you have to interpret this because I have seen that we do it in different ways and it is very important to see the feelings that were associated as I said not only what happened but what feelings were associated with that and I think you are kind of doing that because you say that she was doing this with disdain so there was this feeling of this day so this may be two things it may be a symbolic dream and and the lady may may have represented something you know and the looking down and I or it may be something that happened on the astral plane an experience on the astral plane which you remember in a fragmentary way in the sense that you you are not sure what she was doing when showing you know looking down I don't know if the the idea of looking down upon the topic of of the conversation means looking down down in the in the sense of of actually because the idea of down also may mean the lower planes so this could be a remembrance of the attempt to impress on the physical brain a particular information that the brain retained us this idea of looking down but again since you are talking about this thing they are it may be that your interpretation of of looking down in a bad way may be true so this is an example of something that can be interpreted in different ways and that we need to to make efforts to to have different theories and then as you try to do this it's like we generate a kind of intuition that tells us what's the right interpretation without having this dream when I first read it especially if you had not put this their disdain thing the feeling there I I would think that this was somebody trying to to tell you you know how to impress on the brain some memory because you actually did remember at least part of it so that would be an interpretation but again I don't know what the the feeling of this day would have happened there it may also happen that many times on the astral plane we just don't care about communicating to the physical consciousness something that we know they are we we understand something on the astral plane we are fine with it we just don't want to make the effort to impress it on the physical brain and which I said whatever it's fine I don't need to I understand this I don't need it on the physical plane and then when we are awake we actually made it but we just didn't want to make the effort so all these things we begin to understand it just by experience as we have the dreams and try to interpret them and the effort begins to to generate this intuition can you repeat done yeah uh marina was wondering if all the dreams that you have throughout the night the sequence of dreams if they're somehow connected trying to get one clear message across or last night listen again to ideas come to my mind that that it could be one it could be that there is an experience on the astral plane sometimes we we learn different things on the astral plane and we do things so if we were doing something in particular during that night or learning something in particular whenever we wake up is when we impress the brain with the memory of what we were doing so if during that night we woke up several times and we got different fragments of that experience then in the morning we may remember all the different fragments and they were actually memories of something that we were doing or learning on the astral plane and sometimes it's simply the ego in this this story making Faculty of the ego many times it happens we have a dream that we like we wake up and we go back to sleep and keep on dreaming the same thing it's just because we were we like that dream so when we go back to the astral plane we just keep on you know making up this story as we do when we are daydreaming we are thinking of something amusing ourselves with thinking of something somebody asked you something you answer the person leaves and you fall back into continuing with your memory image-making so it could be those are the two options that come to my mind and again this I personally don't believe too much in other people interpreting the dreams for us I do believe we can help rather like giving different options but ultimately speaking it is us the ones that will develop this intuition to say to understand how to interpret our dreams any other question or comment all right so thank you everybody for joining as usual we are going to send an exercise in case you want to to try these things and I hope to see you next week we are going to finish the book if you if you can't because this was not in the schedule don't worry as usual we would send the recording and I hope you thank you everybody again and I hope you had a great week bye bye
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