Session 804
The body is a spiritual, psychic, and social statement,
biologically spoken. It is obviously private, yet it cannot be concealed, in
that "it is where you are," in usual terms.
The individual body is what it is because it exists in the
context of others like it. By this I mean that a given present body presupposes
a biological past of like creatures. It presupposes contemporaries. If, for
example, one adult human being were perceived by an alien from another world,
certain facts would be apparent. Even though such an alien came upon a lone
member of your species in otherwise uninhabited land, the alien could make
certain assumptions from the individual's appearance and behavior.
If the "earthling" spoke, the alien would of
course instantly know that you were communicating creatures, and in the vocal
sounds recognize patterns that contained purpose and intent. To one extent
or another, all creatures use language, implying a far vaster
sociobiological relationship than is usually supposed. From [the earthling's]
appearance the alien would be able to deduce — if it did not already know — the
proportions of the various elements upon your planet; this being surmised from
your method of locomotion, appendages, and the nature of your physical vision.
While each individual springs privately into the world at
birth, then, each birth also represents quite literally an effort — a
triumphant one — on the part of each member of each species, for the
delicate balance of life requires for each birth quite precise conditions that
no one species can guarantee alone, even to its own kind. The grain must grow.
The animals must produce. The plants must do their part. Photosynthesis, in
those terms, reigns.
The seasons must retain some stability. The rains must fall,
but not too much. The storms must rage, but not too devastatingly. Behind all
of this lies a biological and psychic cooperative venture. All of this could be perceived by our
hypothetical alien from one lone human individual; and we will return to our
alien later on.
Cells possess "social" characteristics. They have
a tendency to unite with others. They naturally communicate. They naturally
want to move. In making such statements I am not personifying the cell, for the
desire for communication and motion does not belong to man, or even animals,
alone. Man's desire to journey into other worlds is in its way as natural as
the plant's urge to turn its leaves toward the sun.
Man's physical world, with all of its civilizations and
cultural aspects, and even with its technologies and sciences, basically
represents the species' innate drive to communicate, to move outward, to
create, and to objectify sensed inner realities. The most private life
imaginable is a very social affair. The most secluded recluse must still depend
upon the biological sociability of not only his own body cells, but of the
natural world with all of its creatures. The body, then, no matter how private,
is also a public, social, biological statement. A spoken sentence has a certain
structure in any language. It presupposes a mouth and a tongue, the kind of
physical organization necessary; a mind; a certain kind of world in which
sounds have meaning; and a very precise, quite practical knowledge of the
nature of sounds, the combination of their patterns, the use of repetition, and
a knowledge of the nervous system. Few of my readers possess such conscious
knowledge, yet the majority speak quite well.
In one way or another, therefore, it certainly seems that
your body possesses a kind of quite pragmatic information, and acts upon it.
You can express almost any idea that you want in vocal terms, even if you have
hardly any conception at all of the way in which your own speech is executed.
The body is geared then to act. It is pragmatically
practical, and above all it wants to explore and to communicate. Communication
implies a social nature. The body has within it inherently everything necessary
for its own defense. The body itself will tease the child to speak, to crawl
and walk, to seek its fellows. Through biological communication the child's
cells are made aware of its physical environment, the temperature, air
pressure, weather conditions, food supplies — and the body reacts to these
conditions, making some adjustments with great rapidity.
At cellular levels the world exists with a kind of social
interchange, in which the birth and death of cells are known to all others, and
in which the death of a frog and a star gain equal weight. But at your
level of activity your thoughts, feelings, and intents, however private, form
part of the inner environment of communication. This inner environment is as
pertinent and vital to the species' well-being as is the physical one. It
represents the psychic, mass bank of potential, even as the planet
provides a physical bank of potential. When there is an earthquake in another
area of the world, the land mass in your own country is in one way or another
affected. When there are psychic earthquakes in other areas of the world, then
you are also affected, and usually to the same degree.
In the same way, if one portion of your own body is injured,
then other portions feel the effects of the wound. An earthquake can be a
disaster in the area where it occurs, even though its existence corrects
imbalances, and therefore promotes the life of the planet. Emergency actions
are quite rigorous in the immediate area of an earthquake, and aid is sent in
from other countries. When an area of the body "erupts," there are
also emergency measures taken locally, and aid sent from other portions of the
body to afflicted parts.
The physical eruption, while it may appear to be a disaster
in the area of the disease, is also, however, a part of the body's defense
system, taken to insure the whole balance of the body. Biologically,
illness therefore represents the overall body defense system at work.
I am trying to put this simply — but without some illnesses,
the body could not endure. Give us a moment. . . First of all, the body must be
in a state of constant change, making decisions far too fast for you to follow,
adjusting hormonal levels, maintaining balances between all of its systems; not
only in relationship to itself — the body — but to an environment that is also
in constant change. At biological levels the body often produces its own
"preventative medicine," or "inoculations," by seeking out,
for example, new or foreign substances in its environment [that are] due to
nature, science or technology; it assimilates such properties in small doses,
coming down with an "illness" which, left alone, would soon vanish as
the body utilized what it could [of it], or socialized "a seeming invader”.
The person might feel indisposed, but in such ways the body
assimilates and uses properties that would otherwise be called alien ones. It
immunizes itself through such methods. The body, however, exists with the mind
to contend with — and the mind produces an inner environment of concepts. The
cells that compose the body do not try to make sense of the cultural world.
They rely upon your interpretation, therefore, for the existence of threats of
a non-biological nature. So they depend upon your assessment.
If that assessment correlates with biological ones, you have
a good working relationship with the body. It can react swiftly and clearly.
When you sense threat or danger for which the body can find no biological
correlation, even as through cellular communication it scans the environment
physically, then it must rely upon your assessment and react to danger
conditions. The body will, therefore, react to imagined dangers to some
degree, as well as to those that are biologically pertinent. Its defense system
often becomes overexerted as a result.
The body is, therefore, quite well equipped to deal with its
physical stance in the physical world, and its defense systems are unerring in
that respect. Your conscious mind, however, directs your temporal perception
and interprets that perception, organizing it into mental patterns. The body,
again, must depend upon those interpretations. The biological basis of all life
is a loving, divine and cooperative one, and presupposes a safe physical stance
from which any member of any species feels actively free to seek out its needs
and to communicate with others of its kind.
It is fashionable to believe that the animals do not possess
imagination, but this is a quite erroneous belief. They anticipate mating, for
example, before its time. They all learn through experience, and despite all of
your concepts, learning is impossible without imagination at any level.
In your terms, the imagination of the animals is limited.
Theirs is not merely confined to the elements of previous experience, however.
They can imagine events that have never happened to them. Man's abilities in
this respect are far more complicated, for in his imagination he deals with
probabilities. In any given period of time, with one physical body, he can
anticipate or perform an infinitely vaster number of events — each one
remaining probable until he activates it.
The body, responding to his thoughts, feelings, and beliefs,
has much more data to deal with, therefore, and must have a clear area in which
concise action is possible.
The body's defense system is automatic, and yet .to a
certain degree it is a secondary rather than primary system, coming into
mobilization as such only when the body is threatened.
The body's main purpose is not only to survive but to
maintain a quality of existence at certain levels, and that quality itself
promotes health and fulfillment. A definite, biologically pertinent fear alerts
the body, and allows it to react completely and naturally. You might be reading
a newspaper headline, for example, as you cross a busy street. Long before you
are consciously aware of the circumstances, your body might leap out of the
path of an approaching car. The body is doing what it is supposed to do. Though
consciously you were not afraid, there was a biologically pertinent fear that
was acted upon.
If, however, you dwell mentally in a generalized environment
of fear, the body is given no clear line of action, allowed no appropriate
response. Look at it this way: An animal, not necessarily just a wild one in
some native forest, but an ordinary dog or cat, reacts in a certain fashion. It
is alert to everything in its environment. A cat does not anticipate danger
from a penned dog four blocks away, however, nor bother wondering what would
happen if that dog were to escape and find the cat's cozy yard.
Many people, however, do not pay attention to everything in
their environments, but through their beliefs concentrate only upon "the
ferocious dog four blocks away." That is, they do not respond to what is
physically present or perceivable in either space or time, but instead [dwell]
upon the threats that may or may not exist, ignoring at the same time other
pertinent data that are immediately at hand.
The mind then signals threat — but a threat that is nowhere
physically present, so that the body cannot clearly respond. It therefore
reacts to a pseudothreatening situation, and is caught between gears, so to
speak, with resulting biological confusion. The body's responses must be
specific.
The overall sense of health, vitality, and resiliency is a
generalized condition of contentment — brought about, however, by multitudinous
specific responses. Left alone, the body can defend itself against any disease,
but it cannot defend itself appropriately against an exaggerated general fear
of disease on the individual's part. It must mirror your own feelings and
assessments. Usually, now, your entire medical systems literally generate as
much disease as is cured — for you are everywhere hounded by the symptoms of
various dis eases, and filled with the fear of disease, overwhelmed by what
seems to be the body's propensity toward illness — and nowhere is the body's
vitality or natural defense system stressed.
Private disease, then, happens also in a social context.
This context is the result of personal and mass beliefs that are intertwined at
all cultural levels, and so to that extent serve private and public purposes.
The illnesses generally attributed to all different ages are
involved. Those of the elderly, again, fit in with your social and cultural
beliefs, the structure of your family life. Old animals have their own dignity,
and so should old men and women. Senility is a mental and physical epidemic — a
needless one. You "catch" it because when you are young you believe
that old people cannot perform. There are no inoculations against beliefs, so
when young people with such beliefs grow old they become "victims."
The kinds of diseases change through historical periods.
Some become fashionable, others go out of style. All epidemics, however, are
mass statements both biologically and psychically. They point to mass beliefs
that have brought about certain physical conditions that are abhorrent at all
levels. They often go hand-in-hand with war, and represent biological protests.
Whenever the conditions of life are such that its quality is
threatened, there will be such a mass statement. The quality of life must be at
a certain level so that the individuals of a species — of any and all species —
can develop. In your species the spiritual, mental and psychic abilities add a
dimension that is biologically pertinent.
There simply must be, for example, a freedom to express
ideas, an individual tendency, a worldwide social and political context in
which each individual can develop his or her abilities and contribute to the
species as a whole. Such a climate depends, however, upon many ideas not
universally accepted — and yet the species is so formed that the biological
importance of ideas cannot be stressed too strongly.
More and more, the quality of your lives is formed through
the subjective realities of your feelings and mental constructions. Again,
beliefs that foster despair are biologically destructive. They cause the
physical system to shut down. If mass action against appalling social or
political conditions is not effective, then other means are taken, and these
are often in the guise of epidemics or natural disasters. The blight is wiped
out in one way or another.
Such conditions, however, are the results of beliefs, which
are mental, and so the most vital work must always be done in that area.
Session 805
An animal has a sense of its own biological integrity. So
does a child. In all forms of life each individual is born into a world already
provided for it, with circumstances favorable to its growth and development; a
world in which its own existence rests upon the equally valid existence of all
other individuals and species, so that each contributes to nature's whole.
In that environment there is a cooperative sociability of a
biological nature that is understood by the animals in their way, and taken for
granted by the young of your own species. The means are given so that the needs
of the individual can be met. The granting of those needs furthers the
development of the individual, its species, and by inference all others in the
fabric of nature.
Survival, of course, is important, but it is not the prime
purpose of a species, in that it is a necessary means by which that species can
attain its main goals. Of course [a species] must survive to do so, but it
will, however, purposefully avoid survival if the conditions are not
practically favorable to maintain the quality of life or existence that is
considered basic.
A species that senses a lack of this quality can in one way
or another destroy its offspring — not because they could not survive
otherwise, but because the quality of that survival would bring about vast
suffering, for example, so distorting the nature of life as to almost make a
mockery of it. Each species seeks for the development of its abilities and
capacities in a framework in which safety is a medium for action. Danger in
that context exists under certain conditions clearly known to the animals,
clearly defined: The prey is known, for example, as is the hunter. But even the
natural prey of another animal does not fear the "hunter" when the
hunter animal is full of belly, nor will the hunter then attack.
There are also emotional interactions among the animals that
completely escape you, and biological mechanisms, so that animals felled as
natural prey by other animals "understand" their part in nature. They
do not anticipate death before it happens, however. The fatal act propels the
consciousness out from the flesh, so that in those terms it is merciful.
During their lifetimes animals in their natural state enjoy
their vigor and accept their worth. They regulate their own births — and their
own deaths. The quality of their lives is such that their abilities are challenged.
They enjoy contrasts: that between rest and motion, heat and cold, being in
direct contact with natural phenomena that everywhere quickens their
experience. They will migrate if necessary to seek conditions more auspicious.
They are aware of approaching natural disasters, and when possible will leave
such areas. They will protect their own, and according to circumstances and
conditions they will tend their own wounded. Even in contests between young and
old males for control of a group, under natural conditions the loser is seldom
killed. Dangers are pinpointed clearly so that bodily reactions are concise.
The animal knows he has the right to exist, and a place in
the fabric of nature. This sense of biological integrity supports him.
Man, on the other hand, has more to contend with. He must
deal with beliefs and feelings often so ambiguous that no clear line of action
seems possible. The body often does not know how to react. If you believe that
the body is sinful, for example, you cannot expect to be happy, and health will
most likely elude you, for your dark beliefs will blemish the psychological and
biological integrity with which you were born.
The species is in a state of transition, one of many. This
one began, generally speaking, when the species tried to step apart from nature
in order to develop the unique kind of consciousness that is presently your
own. That consciousness is not a finished product, however, but one meant to
change, [to] evolve and develop." Certain artificial divisions were made
along the way that must now be dispensed with.
You must return, wiser creatures, to the nature that spawned
you — not only as loving caretakers but as partners with the other species of
the earth. You must discover once again the spirituality of your biological
heritage. The majority of accepted beliefs — religious, scientific, and
cultural — have tended to stress a sense of powerlessness, impotence, and
impending doom — a picture in which man and his world is an accidental
production with little meaning, isolated yet seemingly ruled by a capricious
God. Life is seen as "a valley of tears" — almost as a low-grade
infection from which the soul can be cured only by death.
Religious, scientific, medical, and cultural communications
stress the existence of danger, minimize the purpose of the species or of any
individual member of it, or see mankind as the one erratic, half-insane member
of an otherwise orderly realm of nature. Any or all of the above beliefs are
held by various systems of thought. All of these, however, strain the
individual's biological sense of integrity, reinforce ideas of danger, and
shrink the area of psychological safety that is necessary to maintain the
quality possible in life. The body's defense systems become confused to varying
degrees.
I do not intend to give a treatise upon the biological
structures of the body and their interworkings, but only to add such
information in that line that is not currently known, and is otherwise
important to the ideas I have in mind. I am far more concerned [with] more
basic issues. The body's defenses will take care of themselves if they are
allowed to, and if the psychological air is cleared of the true
"carriers" of disease.
CHAPTER 2
"MASS MEDITATIONS." "HEALTH" PLANS FOR
DISEASE. EPIDEMICS OF BELIEFS, AND EFFECTIVE MENTAL "INOCULATIONS"
AGAINST DESPAIR
While in this book I will point out some of the unfortunate
areas of private and mass experience, I will also provide some suggestions for
effective solutions. "You get what you concentrate upon." Your mental
images bring about their own fulfillment. These are ancient dictums, but you
must understand the ways in which your mass communication systems amplify both
the "positive and the negative" issues.
I may for a while stress the ways in which individually, and
as a civilization, you have undermined your own feelings of safety; yet I will
also give you methods to reinforce those necessary feelings of biological
integrity and spiritual comprehension that can vastly increase your spiritual
and physical existence.
Your beliefs have generated feelings of unworth. Having
artificially separated yourselves from nature, you do not trust it, but often
experience it as an adversary. Your religions granted man a soul, while denying
any to other species. Your bodies then were relegated to nature and your souls
to God, who stood immaculately apart from His creations.
Your scientific beliefs tell you that your entire world
happened accidentally. Your religions tell you that man is sinful: The body is
not to be trusted; the senses can lead you astray. In this maze of beliefs you
have largely lost a sense of your own worth and purpose. A generalized fear and
suspicion is generated, and life too often becomes stripped of any heroic
qualities. The body cannot react to generalized threats. It is, therefore, put
under constant strain in such circumstances, and seeks to specify the danger.
It is geared to act in your protection. It builds up strong stresses,
therefore, so that on many occasions a specific disease or threat situation is
"manufactured" to rid the body of a tension grown too strong to bear.
Many of my readers are familiar with private meditation,
when concentration is focused in one particular area. There are many methods
and schools of thought here, but a highly suggestive state of mind results, in
which spiritual, mental, and physical goals are sought. It is impossible to
meditate without a goal, for that intent is itself a purpose. Unfortunately,
many of your public health programs, and commercial statements through the
various media, provide you with mass meditations of a most deplorable kind. I
refer to those in which the specific symptoms of various diseases are given, in
which the individual is further told to examine the body with those symptoms in
mind. I also refer to those statements that just as unfortunately specify diseases
for which the individual may experience no symptoms of an observable kind, but
is cautioned that these disastrous physical events may be happening despite his
or her feelings of good health. Here the generalized fears fostered by
religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs are often given as blueprints of
diseases in which a person can find a specific focus — the individual can say:
"Of course, I feel listless, or panicky, or unsafe since I have such-and-such
a disease."
The breast cancer suggestions associated with
self-examinations have caused more cancers than any treatments have cured (most emphatically). They involve
intense meditation of the body, and adverse imagery that itself affects the bodily
cells. Public health announcements about high blood pressure themselves
raise the blood pressure of millions of television viewers (even more emphatically).
Your current ideas of preventative medicine, therefore,
generate the very kind of fear that causes disease. They all undermine the individual's
sense of bodily security and increase stress, while offering the body a
specific, detailed disease plan. But most of all, they operate to increase the
individual sense of alienation from the body, and to promote a sense of
powerlessness and duality.
Your "medical commercials" are equally
disease-promoting. Many, meaning to offer you relief through a product, instead
actually promote the condition through suggestion, thereby generating a need
for the product itself.
Headache remedies are a case in point here. Nowhere do any
medically-oriented commercial or public service announcements mention the
body's natural defenses, its integrity, vitality, or strength. Nowhere in your
television or radio matter is any emphasis put upon the healthy. Medical
statistics deal with the diseased. Studies upon the healthy are not carried
out.
More and more foods, drugs, and natural environmental
conditions are being added to the list of disease-causing elements. Different
reports place dairy products, red meats, coffee, tea, eggs, and fats on the
list. Generations before you managed to subsist on many such foods, and they
were in fact promoted as additive to health. Indeed, man almost seems to be
allergic to his own natural environment, a prey to the weather itself.
It is true that your food contains chemicals it did not in
years past. Yet within reason man is biologically capable of
assimilating such materials, and using them to his advantage.
When man feels powerless, however, and in a state of
generalized fear; he can even turn the most natural earthly ingredients against
himself. Your television, and your arts and sciences as well, add up to mass
meditations. In your culture, at least, the educated in the literary arts
provide you with novels featuring antiheroes, and often portray an individual
existence [as being] without meaning, in which no action is sufficient to
mitigate the private puzzlement or anguish.
Many — not all — plotless novels or movies are the result of
this belief in man's powerlessness. In that context no action is heroic, and
man is everywhere the victim of an alien universe. On the other hand your
common, unlettered, violent television dramas do indeed provide a service, for
they imaginatively specify a generalized fear in a given situation, which is
then resolved through drama. Individual action counts. The plots may be
stereotyped or the acting horrendous, but in the most conventional terms the
"good" man wins.
Such programs do indeed pick up the generalized fears of the
nation, but they also represent folk dramas — disdained by the intelligentsia —
in which the common man can portray heroic capabilities, act concisely toward a
desired end, and triumph.
Those programs often portray your cultural world in
exaggerated terms, and most resolution is indeed through violence. Yet your
more educated beliefs lead you to an even more pessimistic picture, in which
even the violent action of men and women who are driven to the extreme serves
no purpose. The individual must feel that his actions count. He is driven to
violent action only as a last resort — and illness often is that last resort.
Your television dramas, the cops-and-robbers shows, the spy
productions, are simplistic, yet they relieve tension in a way that your public
health announcements cannot do. The viewer can say: "Of course I feel
panicky, unsafe, and frightened, because I live in such a violent world."
The generalized fear can find a reason [for its existence]. But the programs at
least provide a resolution dramatically set, while the public health
announcements continue to generate unease. Those mass meditations therefore
reinforce negative conditions.
In the overall, then, violent shows provide a service, in
that they usually promote the sense of a man's or a woman's individual power
over a given set of circumstances. At best the public service announcements
introduce the doctor as mediator: You are supposed to take your body to a
doctor as you take your car to a garage, to have its parts serviced. Your body
is seen as a vehicle out of control, that needs constant scrutiny.
The doctor is like a biological mechanic, who knows your
body far better than you. Now these medical beliefs are intertwined with your
economic and cultural structures, so you cannot lay the blame upon medical men
or their profession alone. Your economic well-being is also a part of your
personal reality. Many dedicated doctors use medical technology with spiritual
understanding, and they are themselves the victims of the beliefs they hold.
If you do not buy headache potions, your uncle or your
neighbor may be out of business and not able to support his family, and
therefore lack the means to buy your wares. You cannot disconnect one area of
life from another. En masse, your private beliefs form your cultural reality.
Your society is not a thing in itself apart from you, but the result of the
individual beliefs of each person in it. There is no stratum of society that
you do not in one way or another affect. Your religions stress sin. Your
medical profession stresses disease. Your orderly sciences stress the chaotic
and accidental theories of creation. Your psychologies stress men as victims of
their backgrounds. Your most advanced thinkers emphasize man's rape of the
planet, or focus upon the future disaster that will overtake the world, or see
men once again as victims of the stars.
Many of your resurrected occult schools speak of a
recommended death of desire, the annihilation of the ego, for the transmutation
of physical elements to finer levels. In all such cases the clear spiritual and
biological integrity of the individual suffers, and the precious immediacy of
your moments is largely lost.
Earth life is seen as murky, a dim translation
of greater existence, rather than portrayed as the unique, creative, living
experience that it should be. The body becomes disoriented, sabotaged. The
clear lines of communication between spirit and body become cluttered.
Individually and en masse, diseases and conditions result that are meant to lead
you into other realizations.
