Example of a Charles Class Session

© 2003 Kurt Leland

CL 296: November 10, 2002 (Newton, MA)

Charles: It seems as if in recent years most of the sessions have been about heavy topics such as relationships and the world situation, reflections, energy fields, and so on. So, we thought perhaps it’s time to lighten things up a bit and move in the direction of expanding consciousness as opposed to just trying to keep it together.

We imagine that for the next several sessions we will be talking on the subject of expanding consciousness. We hope that you will perhaps begin to have some interesting and unusual experiences of your own that you can bring to the group to talk about, to ask questions about, and so on.

The first thing we would like to say is that when you hear or think the word psychic, try to figure out what that tends to mean to you. Does it mean telepathy, or clairvoyance, or precognition, or telekinesis, or out-of-body experiences, or dreams, or Charles, and so on? These are the areas in which most people are familiar with some term describing expanded consciousness. The ironic thing is that these labels tend to confine consciousness. The idea is to expand your understanding of the term psychic beyond those well-known categories.

In other words, as you’re opening to develop your own consciousness and abilities, try to let go of expecting anything dramatic, such as predicting some future event of world magnitude, or moving the butter knives across the table without touching them. All of those things, of course, you dream about when you’re driving here or there--wishing that perhaps you could do things like causing cars to disintegrate. The idea is to recognize that, because, as a human being, you have a psyche, to some extent, everything that you experience is psychic in nature. The idea then is to go beyond the ordinary ways in which you experience the psychic and begin, perhaps, to experience some aspects of consciousness that are less ordinary--ones that may not even really have names associated with them.

We’re asking you to pay attention to the contents of your consciousness, to see what’s there besides what you’re familiar with and experience on a daily basis in connection with your thoughts, worries, concerns, and so on.

We have a particular purpose in mind for introducing this subject now. It seems to us that there are many factors present in your lives these days that keep your consciousness occupied in ways that may block out your own soul. The world situation, the economic situation, the job situation--in addition to any more ordinary miseries, such as ongoing relationship issues--all of these things take up so much mental and emotional space that it’s difficult perhaps for you to have any awareness of the other realms of existence that impinge on your reality, or of the insights your soul could provide you with at any given moment.

If you work in the direction of emptying your mental and emotional space, you may find that such experiences start to show up. But during a period in history when it seems that there are so many things to clutter your consciousness with worry and fear about, it takes a little bit of discipline, a little bit of intentionality to clear that mental and emotional space.

Also, you’ll find that in doing so some of the issues in your external life no longer bother you so much. If you’re able to get a closer relationship with your soul, going through the kinds of exercises and ideas we will be talking about in this and subsequent evenings, then you may find that you increase your peace of mind and are much more able to deal with the external circumstances.

We’ve spent many months talking about ways you can clear your consciousness and achieve greater peace of mind. Almost all of the information that we provide has this end in mind. So, for example, when we speak as we did last month about wayward reflections, the idea is to help you recognize those reflections--which often, when unrecognized, create emotional stress--and release that stress or prevent it from building up to begin with. Then you’re much more open and available to guidance from the soul, as well as some of these more interesting experiences of consciousness.

The first subject that we would like to introduce is another one that has not been present for quite a long time in the group, we call it ranging. Ranging is allowing your consciousness to drift away temporarily from the position that you experience it in during waking hours and under normal circumstances. So, ranging involves opening your consciousness to alternative perspectives on what’s going on around you. Ranging sometimes happens in a daydream, a moment of abstraction or distraction. But it can also be willed. If you learn how to will ranging, you’ll find that you’re able to enjoy all kinds of extra perceptions of what’s going on around you, ones beyond the ordinary or the normal. We’ll talk more about ranging in a moment.

The worst thing that you can do for yourself during these exercises is to try to get them to prove something to yourself or to someone else. We’ve often mentioned that when you look for proof you end up gathering evidence on both sides of the question. So, this is not about trying to answer the question: “Are you really psychic?” You might as well ask if you’re really a human being.

So, that’s why it’s so important to let go of what being psychic means to you. There are so many more interesting abilities available to consciousness than predicting the future--such as allowing your consciousness to drift to the point where it can touch briefly, or actually enter, the reality of an animal, a pet or a wild animal, or even a partner. This kind of ranging is the simplest--a plant, for example. You can allow your consciousness to drift off-center to the point where you feel the energy-being of the plant.

These are simple exercises and quite fulfilling. They make the world come alive for you in a new way. To a large extent, the only things that stand in the way of your having these experiences are: your mental and emotional space is too cluttered; or you have a definition of what it means to be psychic, or a desire to prove yourself as psychic, that these experiences do not really seem to fit.

Take a moment--we’ll be silent. Take a moment, turn inward, close your eyes, and recognize that you’re now present in one of the many phases of normal, waking consciousness. This one happens to be a particularly attentive one. There may be others such phases, but this is a good beginning point.

What we would like for you to do is just--without worry about who or what you’re asking this favor of, whether your soul or some larger consciousness, Charles, or what have you--just ask, inside of yourself, for an image that can in some way encapsulate ordinary waking consciousness for you. It should be an environment, as opposed to a single, symbolic thing. Some people may find it as a place. It could be a room, for example.

The value for you of such an image is it becomes a starting point. For one thing, because we’ve asked you to create an image for your ordinary waking consciousness, it actually represents your being in a somewhat heightened state of awareness, with your minds directed on spiritual growth. You’ve got an especially strong inner space to begin your exercises from. Any exercise you attempt along the lines of what we’re talking about this evening should easily begin from this image of normal, waking consciousness.

The idea, then, would be to quiet the mind, relax the body, to sit or lie in a comfortable position, not necessarily for a long period of time--a few minutes may be sufficient--imaging yourself within this space that you’ve identified as normal, waking, consciousness. Essentially, you’re telling body and soul to place you in a state similar to the one you’re in right now.

The first experiment would be to range from that space. In other words, imagine you’re leaving the room, or the house, or the place that’s your symbol of normal, waking consciousness. You don’t have to go far.

The trip can take place in a number of ways. You can visualize yourself leaving. You can visualize yourself entering another environment. That set of images may tell you something about the state of consciousness that you’re now in.

But you can also move yourself beyond your normal, waking, state of consciousness, from this image of it, and then leave the exercise. Open your eyes. Look around the actual room that you’re in, or go someplace outside of the house, even. Because you’ve symbolized to yourself in this visualization a movement away from ordinary waking consciousness, you should experience anything you perceive after leaving the actual room as something different, out of the ordinary--not, perhaps, in a large way. There may be an extra dimension or reality added to it, an extra brightness to the color or sharpness to the outlines. Or there may be something more dramatic, manifesting itself as a sign that you’ve ranged away from ordinary waking consciousness. If things look too strange, if you get upset, close your eyes, revisualize the space that represents ordinary waking consciousness to yourself--and you’ll find that you immediately leave the ranged state that you’ve entered.

This is a quite simple exercise that can be performed anytime, anywhere, without impairing your ability to function socially, do your job, or anything else that may come your way. We would not, of course, recommend that you range too far away from ordinary waking consciousness whenever you’re involved in an activity that requires ordinary waking consciousness. That would be de-ranged!

This simple exercise can begin your experiences of altered states and expanded consciousness.

Deanna: Is this an exercise that’s meant to be done in real time, like right now?

Charles: Only the visualization of the space that is your ordinary waking consciousness was what we were asking for now. If you wish, of course, to experiment while you’re listening to these words, you’re certainly welcome to do so. We would not find any such experimentation disruptive--unless it resulted in snoring.

Alice: What if no image arises?

Charles: It may well be that this is not the ideal space for you to make an experiment of this nature in, since you’re surrounded by other people--and since we did not give people a very long period of time to allow an image of this nature to arise. But, if visualizations of this kind are difficult for you, take a room in your living space and do the exercise in that room, looking around the room, then closing your eyes, and looking around again, and closing your eyes again--as if to memorize the room that surrounds you. Then, when you’re able to summon the memory-based image of that room, just tell yourself, or ask yourself--your soul perhaps--to make that your image of normal waking consciousness. Then use that image in the experiment, as given earlier. It should be fairly simple for you, even if you’re not much of a visualizer, to imagine yourself leaving the room to go beyond it, to experience this state of ranging that we’re talking about.

It’s quite possible, if you have a space in your home that you use for the purpose of meditation, to do the exercise as we recommended here: imagine yourself walking out of that room. Then, actually walk out of that room, even as you carry something within you of the ranged state that you’re attempting to achieve here.

In many experiments with expanded consciousness, there’s a certain importance to the idea of returning to ordinary waking consciousness afterwards. The exercise that we’ve just given you is something of an exception. Unless, when you open your eyes and look around the room, or leave the room and go out into the world, only to find you’re experiencing something at the level of an LSD trip, in terms of what you perceive in this ranged state, you don’t need to worry about calling yourself back to ordinary waking consciousness.

Ordinary waking consciousness, for most people, is a habit or a routine. Just as you can walk down the same street over and over again in your neighborhood to the point when you no longer see anything that lines the street--the houses, the trees, and so on--so it often happens that you experience your consciousness in exactly the same way, day after day, and don’t notice some of it’s particular convolutions or architectural details.

The idea would be to allow yourself to range, recognizing that at some point, something in waking reality will capture your attention and put you right back into ordinary waking consciousness. You’ll have to deal with it, whether it’s the next thing you need to do at work, or a child that needs attention in your family, or who knows what. But if you get into the practice of constantly launching your consciousness into this ranged state, you’ll find that interesting experiences develop, often quite subtle.

Claire: Should you have an intent for the ranging, or just let things happen and be open to whatever happens?

Charles: In the beginning, it’s probably best to simply maintain an awareness of what’s going on around you, without focusing on any particular intent. The problem for most people in opening up their consciousness is that they have ideas about what they would like to experience, as we were mentioning earlier, in connection with the word psychic.

Generally speaking, you can greatly accelerate the development of your capacity to expand consciousness by simply noticing what’s already present. There’s a lot going on, although below the surface and around the edges of your ordinary waking consciousness. The idea is to simply be alert, in much the same way that you need to be alert when you’re walking around in your neighborhood--not to avoid any particular dangers, but simply because it can be so enjoyable to simply notice things, even in the most familiar areas, that you’ve never seen before.

This actually brings us to another fairly easy exercise that can help with ranging. The exercise would be to take walks on a regular basis with the intention to notice as many things that you’ve never seen before as you possibly can. This trains your awareness away from habit. It also quiets the mind of any particular problems or fears you may have. You may find that taking a walk before doing the ranging exercise has interesting effects. Equally well, doing the ranging exercise before you take the walk can have interesting effects. You can experiment with both.

You’ll find that if you’re sufficiently empty, in terms of mental and emotional space, before you take the walk, you may have interesting experiences of ranging if you do the exercise before you take the walk. On the other hand, if there’s a lot to empty out, the walk can help you do that--and then the ranging exercise can carry you into anything else that you’re involved in following that. It’s even possible to do the ranging exercise while you’re walking, in the sense of just maintaining the intention to notice not only as much as you can, externally, but as much as you can internally, as well.

When a perception manifests itself, don’t judge it. Don’t make it go away. Don’t ask yourself if it’s right or wrong. Don’t wonder if it’s your imagination or a genuine perception. You don’t probably have to make any immediately necessary decision on the basis of what you’ve noticed. Just let it be. Let it enter your awareness. Let it be replaced by something else.

The possibility, for example, that the thought that suddenly entered your head could have come from somewhere else is an interesting one to entertain. But, if the ego becomes involved in trying to figure out if that’s possible--and who the thought came from, and whether you’re capable of doing such a thing, and is this telepathy?--then it will fill up your mental and emotional space before you’ve really had a chance to experience the expanded consciousness. The ego likes to do this sort of thing, because it’s afraid of the soul. So, you have to very gently let go of the tendency to do this--to try to decide or label the perceptions that you experience.

In any artistic creation, the idea of improvisation is essential. Here, we’re talking about what could be called improvisations of consciousness. Behind any improvisation is the question, “What would happen if?” So, if you’re writing a story, “What would happen if you took the story in this direction?” is an aspect of improvisation. With an improvisation of consciousness, you might ask yourself, “What would happen if that thought that just entered my head came from somewhere else? What if it came from this person or that tree?”

Now, these are games like the ones you played as a child. They may not help you develop particular abilities--for example, to turn on to the thoughts of trees. That’s not beyond the capacity of ranging. But allowing yourself to think in those ways breaks down habitual patterns of thought, so that if, at any point, someone else’s thought really did enter your mind, you would notice and recognize it for what it is, because the pathway had already been created by your thinking that such a thing just might be possible.

That was the second exercise. The third one has to do with what you do with these experiences, once they develop. There are two possible ways of handling this. One would be to write them down. The other would be to tell them to somebody. Either way is equally beneficial. You may wish to do both.

The idea of writing such experiences down is really good, in that it helps you see that you’re collecting experiences of ranging. Doing so can persuade you, on the one hand, that you have the ability to do this very simple alteration of consciousness. On the other hand, it helps you see just how active that aspect of you may be. It may spill out beyond your doing the exercise, so that interesting perceptions having to do with altered consciousness show up anytime in your life, whether you’ve done the exercise or not.

Having an accumulation of this kind of experience can also show you how you’re developing yourself over time. If you do choose to write down your experiences, dedicate a fresh notebook to this project. We do not recommend, except under extraordinary circumstances, that you record what you experience in enormous detail.

In the beginning, any interesting perception or thought that shows up, that seems like an altered-states perception, can be written down, can be noted here. Such things will often begin by your noticing something really beautiful. So, if you notice a particularly beautiful leaf, or tree, or tree shape, or rock wall, or the night, note these things.

The experience of beauty is a ranged perception. It’s not a part of ordinary waking consciousness. That does not mean it can’t become a part of ordinary waking consciousness. Most of the time, if you’re busy, you’re too distracted to notice beautiful things. Therefore, they’re not part of ordinary waking consciousness.

The fact that you take the time to notice something of this nature opens you up to your soul. We’ve said, in the past, that the soul has very little direct influence on physical reality--but it has complete control over your attention. It’s quite capable of directing your attention anywhere. Because the ego often doesn’t like that, it behaves like a horse with a bit in its mouth. You do everything you can to fill your minds up, so the soul can’t get through--and that means you don’t experience beauty. So, really, the first step toward getting back into a relationship with your soul is to take a walk, and open yourself to all the beauty around you, acknowledging that the experience of that beauty is a ranged perception.

When you write your experiences down, do not judge them. Do not decide whether they’re unimportant because they’re not spectacular. If you write nothing more than, “I noticed a beautiful leaf,” that’s enough. That’s a ranged perception. If you start filtering your experience by deciding what to write down is important and what isn’t, you’re essentially arguing yourself back into ordinary, waking consciousness.

We mentioned the other aspect of this exercise could be sharing your experiences with someone else. What we would recommend is that you consider anyone present in the room this evening as a potential psychic buddy--not perhaps someone you know extremely well. But, if that’s a problem, you’re certainly welcome to share these experiences with someone you’re close to. But connect with someone. Make a contract to share such experiences. Exchange phone numbers. And, if you wish to do the exercises in this way, call each other up once a week or so and report what you’ve experienced to each other.

The idea of having a witness to such experiences can make them more real for you. Sharing them can also help you recognize the great variety of ranged experiences that are possible to human consciousness. Once you start to open up in this way, and begin to share with others your ranged experiences, you’ll find that it’s easier for you to have experiences like ones that your psychic buddy has been sharing with you--simply because you didn’t know such things were possible before. You’re able to direct or attune your consciousness so that such experiences show up in your life.

Occasionally, of course, there may be something more spectacular that shows up. You’ll feel a genuine and deep need to share with someone else, to tell it through and to have a witness for it, to understand it better, and to experience the wonder of it even more deeply.

Certainly, if anything shows up that frightens you, you should have somebody to talk to about it, whether it’s your psychic buddy, or perhaps Kurt--because we don’t want an exercise such as we are suggesting here to have unfortunate consequences. If something shows up that you don’t understand, the sooner you get the information you need to understand it, the less likely it will be that fear of the unknown will stand in the way of furthering your development along these lines.

Alice: Is there a difference between a ranged experience and a peak experience?

Charles: Let’s say that you can have the experience of ranging without a peak experience, but you can’t have a peak experience without the experience of ranging. What this means is that the peak experience is available to you, but it’s a more ranged experience than just noticing something beautiful, for example.

You could envision a continuum, with your ordinary waking consciousness at one end, and a transformational, mystical, experience at the other--and everything from one end of the continuum to the other would be an experience of ranging. A peak experience would be closer to the mystical side than to the ordinary waking consciousness side. You could say, therefore, that a peak experience is a kind of mystical experience, perhaps a mini-mystical experience. It’s just getting the pump primed, except most people get scared of going too far in a direction like that.

We would also like to introduce another concept that has not been present in the group for a long time. This is the concept of the seven access states. These are seven states of consciousness that are available to human beings--and they may be combined to create interesting and unusual states of consciousness.

These state of consciousness may take some training or experience to bring into your lives. They may not be as immediately available to you--at least the later of these seven access states, the more advanced ones--with the tool of ranging that we’ve been talking about this evening. Ranging can prime you for all kinds of experiences. But, possibly, you’ll need something more to get you from ranging to some of the more advanced access states.

The first of the seven access states involves physical reality and normal waking consciousness. So you’ve already got that one down. The second access state is the median state, and the third is the dream state. You’ve also certainly had dream experiences. However, it’s possible to have an ordinary dreaming consciousness, just as it’s possible to have an ordinary waking consciousness.

If you pay attention to your dreams at all, and they do seem to have a certain characteristic flavor or subject matter, a certain characteristic level of surreality or normality, then that, for you, is ordinary dreaming consciousness. It’s possible to range within the dream state as well. Certainly any experience of a lucid dream will be a ranging in the dream state.

The median state is the one that you enter in light meditation, in the period when you’re just falling asleep or just waking up, or during a short nap--one in which you do not actually fully loose consciousness. This is a state in which it’s possible to experience words, voices, flashes of color or light, images of faces--all kinds of apparently disconnected visual or auditory imagery.

This imagery has an origin, often, in your ordinary waking consciousness. In a sense, what you’re experiencing when it flashes before the screen of your closed eyes, or in your inner ear, is a kind of uploading of your experience of the world to the soul, as your mainframe self. This process of uploading involves turning which you’ve experienced in terms of situations, conversations, things that you’ve seen, into a language that the soul can understand, which is essentially energetic in nature.

It’s possible, also, to range in the median state. The trick is to create that state and sustain it as long as possible without falling asleep. All of the techniques of meditation have that particular value. They employ this second access state as a way of accessing other access states.

If you’re able to prolong the median state and maintain consciousness during it, you may be able to experience such things as an out-of-body projection, or other kinds of projection consciousness. You can receive information. This is the state that many creative and scientific problems have been solved in by the world’s great minds.

There is, within the Seth material, the concept of “psychological time” or “psy time.” This is essentially the same as the median state. There are a number of interesting exercises in the Seth material for developing this state.

The gist of the exercises in the Seth material is that you lie down for ten or twenty minutes and allow yourself to drift into the state of consciousness between waking and sleeping, perhaps with an intention to be open to information from your inner senses, or perhaps just to experiment with the state itself and see what shows up. The idea of ranging intentionally is something that we may speak about in more detail in a later session.

Essentially, we’ve given you a kind of game to play, which is ranging, and we’ve suggested three possible playing fields-- ordinary waking consciousness, the median state, and the dream state--as areas within which you can experience ranging.

For example, if you’ve developed the habit of giving yourself suggestions at night, as you’re falling asleep, to have dreams of a particular subject or of a particular kind, you can easily add to those suggestions, or experiment with the technique of suggestion itself, by simply saying to yourself or your soul that you would like to have an experience of ranging in the dream state and see what shows up.

Generally speaking, when you use suggestions of this nature, it’s best for them to be open ended. Don’t determine the nature of the experience that you would like to have too intently. So, don’t ask for a dream about a train wreck in North Carolina next week before it happens, or whatever.

These are the first three access states. The next one, the fourth access state, we call the archetypal access state. This is not one that’s especially well developed in this culture. However, in cultures that involve active visualization during meditation--for example, Tibetan Buddhism--the archetypal access state may be an important component of the experience.

The archetypal access state involves a kind of direct experience of archetypal energy patterns or individual beings. So, in the Tibetan Buddhist visualizations that involve imagining gods and goddesses, these would be ways of entering the archetypal access state.

The value of entering the archetypal access state is something like, but beyond what you experience, in a lucid dream. The archetypes are all embodied energies or aspects of human consciousness. In the archetypal access state it’s possible to observe how these archetypes interact with each other, so that you can gain direct information about how the different components of your own psyche are interacting with each other. Or you can enact or enable situations to develop between these archetypes and manipulate them in various ways, as you would the images of a lucid dream. This is, on the one hand, the basis for certain kinds of magic. On the other hand, it can also help with reality creation in any area.

The idea here is that you’ve gone to deeper levels than you ordinarily have access to in the dream state, and can work more directly and intentionally on your own consciousness, to get it to line up in certain ways, or to break apart certain aspects of it that are combined in ways that are not conducive to the goals that you would like to achieve.

Sometimes, you’ll encounter a combination of the dreaming state and the archetypal access state, in an especially potent dream that shows you as a hero involved in a heroic journey with epic deeds and so on. Such dreams are ranged dreams, as you can tell by the fact that they’re often extremely vivid in terms of color and outline.

Here, the archetypal state is involved. The dream is about some aspect of the soul’s master plan for your growth. Ultimately, the archetypal access state gives you access to information about that plan.

Pam: What I think of when you talk about archetypal access points is a kachina mask in which someone embodies a godlike quality. Is this something like it?

Charles: Yes, for the individual who is acting in such a role, there would be a combination of waking consciousness, or access state, and an archetypal access state. Essentially, any drama that has an archetypal underpinning will be infused by energy, so to speak, from this state, and may also place people who watch it in a similar state.

So, for example, the ancient Greek tragedies were something more than plays, and something less than ritual magic. But, in that interesting in-between place, it was possible, when an audience was sufficiently moved, for changes in the contents of individual or group consciousness to take place as a result of witnessing that experience. Such changes would happen in the archetypal access state. The idea would be to get people into that state.

And, of course, modern plays, because they’re not really coming from a value system involving consciousness, have very little understanding of how to do that. Whereas, throughout the world, it’s a fairly common mode of social interaction. Shadow plays, for example, have much the same involvement with the archetypal state as the kachina dances. In both cases, the music is an important element of getting people into the archetypal access state.

Claire: Are you also talking about shamanic journeying, for example, to the lower or upper worlds?

Charles: That can indeed be a use of the archetypal access state. It’s one that goes often more in the direction of the body consciousness, as opposed to the soul. If you’re going in the direction of seeing the soul’s master plan, you might call that the upper world, if you were a shaman. On the other hand, if you’re going in the direction of healing the body, you might call that the lower world.

The animal powers that are visualized in such journeys have exactly the same relationship with what’s going on in the body as the gods do with what’s going on within the soul.

Aline: In certain religions--and I’m speaking particularly of vodoun--during the rituals some of the participants seem to take on the persona of their gods to the point where they appear to be possessed and speak in a different voice or speak of things they could not know as people. Is this also an expression of the archetypal consciousness?

Charles: It may be. The higher states of consciousness beyond this one can also be involved. Let’s go on to those.

The fifth access state--we apologize for its having something of a jawbreaker of a label, but it was the best we could do, given the fact that your language doesn’t really contain words that effectively describe the energy, so to speak, of this access state. We call it the meta-mnemonic state, based on the Greek muse of memory, Mnemosyne.

Meta-mnemonic means, essentially, beyond memory. What we mean here is: beyond your individual memories in this lifetime. We said that the archetypal access state had to do with your consciousness and the soul’s master plan for your growth. You could say that the meta-mnemonic state expands from your individual self to the level of the oversoul, and/or your larger entity, and/or your soul as the repository of your past-life memories.

So, the fifth access state is the one from which you would get any information of a past-life nature. Some people may get that information through dreams. That would be an example of a combination of the meta-mnemonic and the dream state. Some might get it through hypnosis. Hypnosis, at least in its simpler forms, is a way of using the median state. So, past- life information received through hypnosis would be a combination of the meta-mnemonic and the median state.

Getting information from your soul, in terms of its other lifetimes, or its largeness beyond your individual consciousness, or the oversoul beyond that, is not something that most people are ready for or able to deal with. So, if you put the gods at the fourth level, that may be as far as most people will ever go.

The sixth access state, however, we call universal access. This is the state where an individual has access to an alternative universe, or an alternative universe has access to an individual. This is the state that Kurt has perfected in order to channel Charles. So many experiences of channeling will develop from this universal access state.

The most basic form of channeling is simply tuning into nonphysical reality, which exists as an energy field full of information. When you tune in to that reality, if you’re able to receive the energy with deep enough sensitivity and convert it accurately enough into words, you become a channel, you could say, for that universe. That is why we call this the universal access state.

Even though you consider Charles to be a personality, there is no a human being, so to speak, on the other side who is responsible for these communications. In many cases, there may not be another entity at all. There may simply be the logging in, as it were, of Kurt into this network of available information from nonphysical reality. You could, perhaps, say that this is especially true this evening. That’s one of the reasons why the topic this evening seems to be coming through without quite the same amount of warmth and humor that you’re used to when we’re in our more compassionate modes, dealing with physical, emotional, and spiritual pain.

The seventh access state is absolute access. This one is rarely achieved. It’s the goal of many kinds of yoga, and also of Buddhism. It’s the state of nirvana.

Many will say that nirvana is “nothingness,” and the goal of Buddhism is a sort of oblivion of consciousness, or at least of individual consciousness. This is not really so, from our perspective. It’s possible for consciousness to go to a point quite beyond its ability to represent itself in images or words that the mind can remember. That state certainly seems like an annihilation of ego. That’s what is meant by nirvana.

Yet, anyone who has exposure to nirvana will change in important ways. You’ll find that information of a higher spiritual nature is instantly and immediately available at any time and in response to any question. This is because absolute access involves access to the fundamental consciousness behind all other forms of consciousness, or the fundamental reality behind all forms of reality.

That sounds impressive, of course. Do keep in mind that we have to use words to describe it--and your understanding of these feeble carriers of the energy we’re trying to convey probably have nothing whatsoever to do with the reality itself.

It literally is unimaginable--although individuals who have had near-death experiences may have had ,through their immersion in that reality, an experience of it. They may not find words for it either.

Some of Kurt’s experiences have taken him into that reality. Afterwards there’s a feeling of glow, an intensification of life. It’s almost as if your ordinary waking consciousness remains for some hours, if not days, after such an experience in a ranged state.

The purpose of yogic breathing and meditation as well as Buddhist meditation techniques is to continually renew contact with absolute access so that a state of samadhi in this world is achieved. Individuals who are able to do this are often able to do good, as the Buddhists say, for the benefit of all beings, trying to lead them to liberation.

There is more we will say in future sessions about these access states. It’s sometimes possible that individuals who channel may channel from this access state. Chances are that their egos are completely oblivious to the fact. Edgar Cayce, for example, channeled through the absolute access state, as opposed to the universal access state, and was therefore completely unaware of what he said in such states.

For him, it would have been impossible to have experienced channeling at all, if he didn’t feel that he was essentially “resting in the bosom of Abraham,” or the Lord, because he was such a deeply religious man. That feeling is what allowed him to use this access state.

The last thing we’ll say on this subject this evening, before we open the session to questions for the rest of the session, is that there’s an aspect of each person’s consciousness that knows how, and can be used, to combine these access states in an almost infinite number of ways, so that you’ve got not just one going, in any particular moment, but two, three, four or any combination of states. There may be ways in which you’re unaware of your ordinary waking consciousness as having an influx, so to speak, from these other levels. So, ranging is essential as a beginning process--noticing what’s actually going on in your consciousness.

From our perspective, noticing is much better than having any particular intention to develop your consciousness in specific ways. So, we do not recommend that you all go home now and give yourself the suggestion that you have the experience of absolute access in your sleep. This is not to say that you couldn’t have such an experience. Chances are you won’t remember it. Maybe you would not be able to handle how it would change your experiences in waking reality.

The portion of consciousness that’s able to combine states is essentially the Witness dream character. The dream characters have not been talked about for a while here, either. We don’t need to go into that information this evening.

The Witness is a portion of the ego--you could say the inner ego, or that part of the ego that’s most closely involved with the soul. It records experiences for memory. It’s also involved in establishing, maintaining, and altering states of consciousness.

In the past, years ago, we had a fancy name for this function. We called it the multiple access sourcing channel, based on a dream that Kurt had. It’s not really necessary any longer to use that term, but the concept behind it is helpful: multiple access--and the fact that you can channel multiple access through a single source. It’s as if you could get all of the devices that are plugged into your receiver to provide significant and meaningful output through your speakers simultaneously.

So, multiple, access, sourcing, channel--i.e., the Witness. We’ll talk more about the function of the Witness in later sessions, as far as altering consciousness. There may even be, at some point, some suggestions on how to open yourself to the higher states of access that we’ve described here.

Paul: Is there any correlation between the higher, six and seventh access points, and the higher intellectual or the higher emotional center from the Michael system?

Charles: Those would be, in our system, equivalent to ranged experiences. We understand that the higher emotional center involves the ability to embrace the total emotional reality of another person, which is quite a few degrees beyond ordinary empathy. Empathy, itself, when it’s not simply pity, is a way of feeling the emotional reality of another person, and is therefore a mildly ranged experience.

There are advanced yogis who have developed certain of the powers, or siddhis, associated with the chakras, who can allow their minds to enter the beingness of another person at will. This would be an example of what we understand a higher emotional center to be.

The higher intellectual center involves transfer of thoughts. This transfer of thoughts is another thing that can be mastered by the yogis. It involves learning to feel the energy that’s behind any thought before it’s turned into words. This ability is certainly being used while Kurt channels. It can be used in a variety of other ways, as well, some of which we may get into in the future.

Long, long ago, not for quite some time in this class, there was another consciousness besides Charles who would occasionally show up. This was a dolphin consciousness. The lesson of the dolphin consciousness was to help people understand the nature of telepathic communication, through what could be called the universal language of telepathy, which the dolphin called feel/think.

It would be difficult to say whether you got much of a picture of how dolphins experience the world from those sessions-- those of you who were present. A couple of you certainly were. However, the value of the exercise that developed in feel/think was that it opened up this higher intellectual center. We would expect that if people were able to master the experience of feel/think, they would also have more deeply ranged experiences in connection with other people and develop this higher intellectual center. It’s not clearly linked or mapped, however, in any of the access states that we’ve been talking about.

So, it’s entirely possible that in the exploration of consciousness that we’re doing, the dolphin might show up again--in which case you would have the opportunity to work on developing this feel/think capacity.

Greg: Could the states induced by various mind-altering drugs be categorized as access levels?

Charles: Yes. In some cases, these drugs can open the way for any of the access states that we’ve described. Chances are, under most circumstances, people will have a direct experience--unmitigated, uncontrolled by the mind--of their own souls. This would create the sense of religious or mystical experience that goes along with some mind-altering drugs--in particular, the ones that have been used for ceremonial purposes throughout the world. Often, the archetypal access state is the one that’s experienced.

In the case of the frightening, bad-trip type of drug experience, this could be a number of things. It can be, sometimes, a kind of super-aware dream state, in which the individual encounters the contents of his own consciousness in much more vivid than usual form, and is frightened. Or, it could be the individual is experiencing some aspect of nonphysical reality without being properly prepared for it. Or, the individual is in nonphysical reality and the randomness of thought that has not been controlled within his own consciousness is creating the frightening experience.

There are a number of ways in which these things can develop. We don’t recommend the use of drugs as ways of experiencing the access states, because they tend to break down the body, and often they frighten the mind. Whereas, from the soul’s perspective, in exploring the access states, you’ll never be given more than you’re ready for, or can integrate under the guidance of your own soul.

Alan: Was Seth coming through at the sixth or seventh access state?

Charles: Seth I came through the sixth access state. Seth II came through the seventh. And Oversoul Seven would have been through the fifth.

Alan: What about Cyprus?

Charles: That is still within the fifth.

Alan: During sleep, there appears to be times when there are no dreams. What access state would that non-dreaming period be in?

Charles: This cannot be answered generally. But we can use an analogy to help you understand our point. At the end of a day, you remember the high points of the day. Two days later, you might not even remember those. It depends on how high those high points were. If a day is particularly usual, there may be large chunks of it that you can’t account for at the end of the day--except, perhaps, to say that you were at work. You can’t do anything more specific than that. This is not necessarily a failure of memory. But it’s certainly a failure of consciousness, inasmuch as you’re running on habit.

Essentially, the periods of the dream state that are unaccounted for in your memory have much the same purpose or reason for being. They’re periods in which nothing in particular happened, or periods in which you blanked out what happened for some reason, perhaps because you wanted to get to sleep. You didn’t want to remember or experience something more dramatic than ordinary dreaming.

There’s a very powerful desire on the part of the ego, as you well know, to block out the soul. Habits and routines, not only in the waking state, but also in the dreaming state, are often tools of the ego used for just that purpose.

Kevin: It sounds like a common theme that all of the different varieties of expanded consciousness really have to do with connecting your own consciousness with the consciousness of other “beings” or sources of information. Is that really another way of looking at developing these abilities?

Charles: It can certainly be so. We mentioned a couple of sessions ago that one of the important aspects of developing your own humanity is to recognize the inherent humanity of other beings, to the point where you can, perhaps, even see everyone around you as being a stage in your own growth process that you’ve left behind. This would be taking steps in the direction of accessing the mass consciousness of humanity.

The mass consciousness of humanity exists somewhere between the fifth and sixth access state. Or we could say you could most easily access the mass consciousness through either of those states.

It may be possible, in later sessions, to talk about techniques that would involve opening your abilities in connection with other people. Certainly, we were leaning in that direction in the sessions given some time ago concerning opening and closing the energy field and reading the energy fields of other people. That too, is a kind of ranging experience.

Well, if there are no further questions, then we will take our leave of you.

Class: Thank you, Charles.

Charles: You are all certainly welcome. And just remember, if you have frightening experiences when you’re ranging, it’s always easy to pull yourself back to ordinary, waking consciousness. If you have trouble visualizing your image, just sing to yourself, “Home, home on the range.”

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