session 634

Personal Reality, Session 634

Each individual will have a slightly different definition for “negative” emotions.  One person my find sexually stimulating thoughts delightful and a most enjoyable kind of diversion.  Another may consider them impure, bad, unhealthy, or otherwise disadvantageous.

Some individuals can with ease and exuberance imagine themselves in a fistfight, a brawl, unmercifully beating “the devil out of an adversary.  The same thoughts may fill another man with intense terror and grave feelings of guilt.  This same man, however, who would not purposely entertain fantasies of such nature under normal conditions, may in time of war imagine himself killing the enemy with the greatest feelings of holy joy and righteousness.

What is usually forgotten is the real nature of aggressiveness, which in its truest sense simply means forceful action.  This does not necessarily imply physical force, but instead the power of energy directed into a material action.

Birth is perhaps the most forceful aggression, in your terms, of which you are capable in your system of reality.  In the same way, the growth of any idea into temporal realization is the result of creative aggression.  It is impossible to try to erase true aggressiveness.  To do so would obliterate life as you know it.

Any attempt to impair the flow of true aggression results in a distortive, uneven, explosive pseudo-aggression that causes wars, individual neurosis, and a great many of your problems in all areas.

Normal aggressiveness flows with strong patterns of energy, giving motive power to all of your thoughts whether you consciously regard them as positive or negative, good or bad.  The same thrusting creative surge brings them all forth.  When you consider a thought good you usually do not question it.  You allow it its life and follow through.  Usually if you regard a thought as bad or beneath you, or if you are ashamed of it, then you try to deny it, stop its motion and hold it back.  You cannot restrain energy, although you may think you can.  You simply collect it, whereupon it grows, seeking its fulfillment.

This will lead you to say, “Supposing I feel like killing my boss, then, or putting poison in my husband’s tea; or worse, hanging my five children on the clothesline instead of the towels?  Are you saying that I should merely follow through?”

I sympathize with your predicament.  The fact is that before being “assailed” by what may seem to be such terrifying unnatural ideas, you have already blocked off an endless variety of far less drastic ones, any of which you could have expressed quite safely and naturally in daily life.  Your problem then is not how to deal with normal aggressiveness, but how to handle it when it has remained unexpressed, ignored, and denied over a long period of time.  Later in this book we will deal specifically with methods to that end.  Here I simply want to point out the difference between healthy natural aggressiveness, and the explosive, distorted emergence of repressed aggression.

You will each have to discover for yourself those areas in which you strongly repress your thoughts, for many energy blockages will be found there.  All of this will be covered in the later section.

For now consider this blocked energy.  Consciously, most people are already afraid of it – they did not repress it because they considered it good.  When I use the word “repressed” I do not mean forgotten, or shoved into the unconscious, or beyond reach.  You may pretend that such material is hidden but it is quite within your conscious awareness.  You have only to honestly look for it and organize what you find.

It is very possible to “see” such information and not see it at the same time, simply because you do not add all of the data together.  No one can make you do that, of course.  To do it you must have a sense of courage and adventuresomeness; and tell yourself that you refuse to be cowed by ideas that after all belong to you, but are not you.

It is often said that man believes in devils because he believes in gods.  The fact is that man began to believe in demons when he started to feel a sense of guilt.  The guilt itself arose with the birth of compassion.

Animals have a sense of justice that you do not understand, and built-in to that innocent sense of integrity there is a biological compassion, understood at the deepest cellular levels.

In your terms man is an animal, rising out of himself, from himself evolving certain animal capacities to their utmost; not forming new physical specialization of body any longer (again in your terms), but creating from his needs, desires and blessed natural aggressiveness inner structures having to do with values, space and time.  To varying degrees this same impetus resides throughout all creaturehood.

Such a task meant that man must break out of the self-regulating, precise, safe and yet limiting aspects of instinct.  The birth of a conscious mind, as you think of it, meant that the species took upon itself free will.  Built-in procedures that had beautifully sufficed could now be superseded.  They became suggestions instead of rules.

Compassion “rose” from the biological structure up to emotional reality.  The “new” consciousness accepted its emerging triumph – freedom – and was faced with responsibility for action of a conscious level, and with the birth of guilt.

A cat playfully killing a mouse and eating it is not evil.  It suffers no guilt.  On biological levels both animals understand.  The consciousness of the mouse, under the innate knowledge of impending pain, leaves its body.  The cat uses the warm flesh.  The mouse itself has been hunter as well as prey, and both understand the terms in ways that are very difficult to explain.

At certain levels both cat and mouse understand the nature of the life energy they share, and are not – in those terms – jealous for their own individuality.  This does not mean they will not struggle to live, but that they have a built-in unconscious sense of unity with nature in which they know they will not be lost or immersed.

Man, pursuing his own way, chose to step outside of that framework – on a conscious level.  The birth of compassion then took the place of the animals’ innate knowledge; the biological compassion turned into emotional realization.

The hunter, freed more or less from animal courtesy, would be force to emotionally identify with his prey.  To kill is to be killed.  The balance of life sustains all.  He must learn on a conscious level then what he knew all along.  This is the intrinsic and only real meaning of guilts and its natural framework.

You are to preserve life consciously, then, as the animals preserve it unconsciously.

Now:  The interpretations and uses to which this quite natural guilt has been put are horrendous.

Guilt is the other side of compassion.  Its original purpose was to enable you to empathize on an aware level with yourselves and other members of creaturehood, so that you could consciously control what was previously handled on a biological level alone.  Guilt in that respect therefore has a strong natural basis, and when it is perverted, misused or misunderstood, it has that great terrifying energy of any runaway basic phenomenon.

If you think you are guilty because you read one kind of book or another, or entertain certain thoughts, then you run particular risks.  If you believe something is wrong then in your experience it will be, and you will consider it negative.  So you will collect an “unnatural” guilt, one that you do not deserve but accept and so create.

You will not usually form a creation of it of which you are proud.  If you believe firmly in poor health you may use this repressed energy to attack a physical organ – a gall bladder may become “bad”.  According to your own belief system, you may trust the integrity of your body and instead project this guilt out upon others – onto a personal enemy, or a particular race, creed or color.

If you are religious-minded and fundamental in your beliefs, you may blame a devil who causes you to behave in such and such a manner.  As the body creates antibodies to regulate itself, so you will set up mental and emotional “antibodies”, certain thoughts that are “good”, to protect you from the fantasies or ideas that you consider bad.

If its built-in instincts are left alone the body is basically self-regulating.  It does not kill off all red blood cells if there are too many of them at a given time.  It has better sense.  But in your fear of negative thoughts you often attempt to deny all normal aggressiveness, and at the first glimpse of it bring up your mental antibodies prepared for action.  In so doing you try to repudiate the validity of your own experience.  If you do not feel your individual reality, then you can never realize that you form it, and so can change it.  It is this denial of experience, and the energy blockages involved, that build up the accumulation of unnecessary “unnatural” guilt.  The body itself cannot understand these blocked messages, and cries out to express its own corporeal knowledge of the moment as it experiences it.  You mentally shout in such situations that you do not feel what you feel.

Over a period of time the conscious mind, because of its position, can override the body’s messages.  Yet the backed-up accumulation of energy will seek outlet.  The smallest, most innocent symbol for the repressed material may then bring about behavior on your part that seems out of all proportion to the stimulus.

On ten justified occasions you may have felt like telling someone to leave you alone, but refrained, not wanting to hurt their feelings; afraid that you would be rude even though the occasion was one where your remark might well have been understood and taken calmly.  Because you did not accept your feelings, much less express them, on the next occasion you might explode seemingly without reason and initiate a spectacular argument, completely unjustified.

In this case the other person has no idea as to why you reacted in such a fashion, and is deeply hurt.  And your guilt grows.  The trouble is that ideas of right and wrong are intimately involved with your chemistry, and you cannot separate your moral values from your body.

When you believe that you are good, your body functions well.  I am sure that many of you will say, “I try constantly to be good, yet I am in miserable health, so how can that be?”  If you examine your own beliefs the answer will be apparent: You try to be so good precisely because you believe you are so bad and unworthy.

Demons of any kind are the results of your beliefs.  They are born from a belief in “unnatural” guilt.  You may personify them.  You may even meet them in your experience, but if so they are still the product of your immeasurable creativity, though formed by your guilt and your belief in it.

If you shed the distorted concepts of unnatural guilt and accepted the wise ancient wisdom of natural guilt instead, there would be no wars.  You would not kill each other mindlessly.  You would understand the living integrity of each organ in your body and have no need to attack any of them.

This obviously does not mean that the time of the body’s death would not come.  It does mean that the seasons of the body would be understood as following those of the mind, ever-changing and flowing, with conditions coming and going but always maintaining the splendid unity within the body’s form.  You would not have chronic illnesses.  Generally speaking, and ideally, the body would wear out gradually while still showing far greater endurance than it does now.

There are many other conditions, though, all having to do with your conscious beliefs.  You may think it is better to die quickly of a heart attack, for example.  Your individual purposes are not the same so you will manage your body experiences in a great variety of ways.

Generally speaking, you are here to expand your consciousness, to learn the ways of creativity as directed through conscious thought.  The aware mind can change its beliefs, and so to a large extent it can alter its bodily experience.

Natural guilt then is the species’ manifestation of the animals’ unconscious corporeal sense of justice and integrity.  It means:  Thou shalt not kill more than is needed for they physical sustenance.  Period.

It has nothing to do with adultery or with sex.  It does contain innate issues that apply to human beings, that would have no meaning for other animals in the framework of their experience.  Strictly speaking, the translation from biological language to your own is as given in this session; but the finer discrimination reads thusly:  Thou shalt not violate.

The animals do not need such a message, of course, nor can it be literally translated, for your consciousness is flexible and leeway had to be left for your own interpretation.

An outright lie may or may not be a violation.  A sex act may or may not be a violation.  Not going to church on Sunday is not a violation.  Having normal aggressive thoughts is not a violation.  Doing violence to your body, or another’s, is a violation.  Doing violence to the spirit of another is a violation – but again, because you are conscious beings the interpretations are yours.  Swearing is not a violation.  If you believe that it is then in your mind it becomes one.

Killing another human being is a violation.  Killing while protecting your own body from death at the hand of another through immediate contact is a violation.  Whether or not any justification seems apparent, the violation exists.

Because you believe that physical self-defense is the only way to counter such a situation then you will say, “If I am attacked by another person, are you telling me that I cannot aggressively counter this obvious intent to destroy me?”

Not at all.  You could counter such an attack in several ways that do not involve killing.  You would not be in such a hypothetical situation to begin with unless violent thoughts of your own, faced or unfaced, had attracted it to you.  But once it is a fact, and according to the circumstances, many methods could be used.  Because you consider aggression synonymous with violence, you may not understand that aggressive – forceful, active, mental or spoken – commands for peace could save your life in such a case; yet they could.

Usually there are a variety of physical actions, not involving killing, that would suffice.  As long as you believe that violence must be met with violence you court it and its consequences.  On individual terms, your own body and mind become the battleground, as does the physical body of the earth in mass terms.  Your material form is alive through natural aggression, the poised, forceful and directed action that is the carrier for creativity.

If you cut your finger it bleeds.  In so doing the blood clears away any poisons that may have entered.  The bleeding is beneficial and the body knows when to stop it.  If the flow continued it would be wrong or detrimental in your terms, but the body would not think the blood was bad because it continued its course of action.  It would not attempt to cut off all blood, considering it evil.  It would instead make whatever adjustments were necessary to bring the emission to a natural halt.

When you consider aggressive thoughts wrong, using this analogy, you do not even begin to allow the system to clear itself.  Instead you shut up the “poisons” inside.

As an accumulation would occur in the flesh, so the same thing might happen in your mental experience.  Physically you could end up with a very serious condition; and mentally and emotionally such a clamping down on natural forces can result in “diseased” idea structures that are isolated from other more healthy concepts.  These can be like growths – not lacking oxygen, for example, but free access and flow with other portions of your conscious experience.