The nocturnal man

[inavalan]

"The natural, magical flows of your own rhythms are more often broken up in the daytime. This applies to other people as well, because of your ideas of what you should be doing at any given time, or what is socially respectable, proper, upright, even moral (wryly) in limited terms.

(Long pause.) You have settled upon a system that seems to be naturally based, the exclusive results of your historic past, one in which your main activities are daytime ones. It seems only natural that early man, for example, carried on all of his main activities in the day, hiding after dark. (Pause.) As a matter of fact, however, early man was a natural night dweller, and early developed the uses of fire for illumination, carrying on many activities after dark, when many natural predators slept. He also hunted very well in the dark, cleverly using all of his senses with high accuracy — the result of learning processes that are now quite lost.

(10:00.) In any case, man was not by any means exclusively a daytime creature, and fires within caves extended activities far into the night. It was agriculture that turned him more into a daytime rhythm, and for some time many beliefs lingered that resulted from earlier nighttime agricultural practices.

Many people's natural rhythms, then, still do incline in those directions, and they are always kept operable as alternate rhythms for the species as a whole.

Ruburt has some inclinations in that direction, as do many creative people, but these rhythms are often nearly completely overlaid by culturally-learned ones. Cultures that were night-oriented (pause) appreciated the night in a different fashion, of course, and actually utilized their consciousnesses (pause) in ways that are almost nearly forgotten. I believe there are ancient fairy tales and myths still surviving that speak of these underworlds, or worlds of darkness — but they do not mean worlds of death, as is usually interpreted.

In a fashion, the intellect goes hand-in-hand with the imagination under such conditions. It is not that man stressed physical data less, but that he put it together differently — that in the darkness he relied upon his inner and outer senses in a more unified fashion. The nightly portions of your personalities have become strangers to you — for as you identify with what you think of as your rational intellect, then you identify it further with the daytime hours, with the objective world that becomes visible in the morning, with the clearcut physical objects that are then before your view.

(10:10.) In those times, however, man identified more with his intuitive self, and with his imagination, and these to some extent more than now, directed the uses to which he put his intellect.

This meant, of course, a language (pause) that was in its way more precise than your own, for concepts were routinely expressed that described the vast complexity of subjective as well as objective events.

(Pause.) There were myriad relationships, for example, impossible now to describe, between a person and his or her dream selves, and between the dream selves of all the members of the tribe. Particularly in warmer climates, man was naturally nocturnal, and did a good deal of his sleeping and dreaming in the daytime.

You must remember, of course, that the use of clocks is a fairly recent phenomenon. (Pause.) Men thought in terms of rhythms of the time, or of flowing time, not of time in sections that were arbitrary. So as far as creaturehood is concerned, you have adapted to a time environment that you yourselves have formed. Creative people, again, are often aware of those connections, at least at certain levels, and Ruburt in particular has always felt that way to some extent. You have largely buried your own natural feelings in that direction."

SESSION FIFTEEN THE NATURAL PERSON AND THE NATURAL USE OF TIME. --- TMA