Session 635

Personal Reality, Session 635

Natural guilt is also highly connected with memory, and arose hand in hand with mankind’s excursions into the experience of past, present and future.  Natural guilt was meant as a preventive measure.  It needed the existence of a sophisticated memory system in which new situations and experiences could be judged against recalled ones, and evaluations made in an in-between moment of reflection.

Any previous acts that had aroused feelings of natural guilt were to be avoided in the future.  Because of the multitudinous courses open to the species, not only did the highly specific nature of many kinds of animalistic instinct no longer apply, but a curious balance had to be maintained.  The conscious options that opened as man’s mental world enlarged made it impossible to allow sufficient freedom, and yet necessary control, on a biological level alone.

So controls were needed lest the conscious mind, denied full use of the animal’s innate taboos, run away with itself.  Guilt, natural guilt, depends upon memory then.

It does not carry with it any built-in connections with punishment as you think of it.  Once more, it was meant as a preventive measure.  Any violation against nature would bring about a feeling of guilt so that when a like situation was encountered in the future, man would, in that moment of reflection, not repeat the same action.

I have used the phrase “moment of reflection” several times because it is another attribute peculiar to the conscious mind and, again in your terms, is largely denied to the rest of creaturehood.  Without that pause – in which man can remember past in the present, and envisage a future – natural guilt would have no meaning.  Man would not be able to recall past acts, judge them against the present situation, or imagine the future sense of guilt that might result.

To that extent natural guilt projected man into the future.  This is of course a learning process, natural within the time system that the species adopted.  Unfortunately, artificial guilt takes on the same attributes, utilizing both memory and projection.  Wars are self-perpetuating because they combine both natural and unnatural guilt, compounded and reinforced by memory.  Conscious killing beyond the needs of sustenance is a violation.

The collection of unrecognized artificial guilts, built up through the centuries, has led to such an accumulation of repressed energy that its release has resulted in violent action.  Thus the hatred of one generation of adults whose parents were killed in a war helps generate the next one.

Thou shalt not violate.  Again, the injunction had to be flexible enough to cover any situations in which the conscious species could become involved.  The animal’s instincts and their natural situation kept their numbers in bounds; and with unconscious unknowing courtesy they made room for all others.

Thou shalt not violate against nature, life, or the earth.  In your terms creaturehood, while striving for survival and longing for life, while abundant and rambunctious, is not inherently gluttonous.  It follows the unconscious order that is within it even as there is a definite order, relationship and limit to the number of chromosomes.  A cell that becomes omnivorous can destroy the life of the body.

Thou shalt not violate.  So the principle applies to both life and death.

There is hardly anything mysterious in the idea that life can kill.  On a biological level all death is hidden in life, and all life in death.

Viruses are alive, as I mentioned in another connection (in the 631^st session in Chapter Seven), and can be beneficial or detrimental according to other balances in the body.  In cancer cells the growth principle runs wild; within creaturehood each of the species has its place, and if one multiplies out of its proper order then all life and the body of the earth itself comes into peril.

In those terms overpopulation is a violation.  In the cases of both war and of overgrowth, the species has ignored its natural guilt.  When a man kills another, regardless of his other beliefs a certain portion of his conscious mind is always aware of the violation involved, justify it though he may.

When women give birth in a crowded world they also know, and with a portion of their conscious minds, that a violation is involved.  When your species sees that it is destroying other species and disrupting the natural balance, then it is consciously aware of its violation.  When such natural guilt is not faced there are other mechanisms that must be employed.  Again at the risk of repeating myself: Many of your problems result from the fact that you do not accept the responsibility of your own consciousness.  It is meant to assess the reality that is unconsciously formed in direct replica of your thoughts and expectations.

When you do not embrace this conscious knowledge, but refuse it, you are not using one of the finest “tools” ever created by your species, and you are to a large extent denying your birthright and heritage.

When this happens, the species by default must fall back upon vestiges of old instincts – that were not geared to operate in conjunction with a conscious reasoning mind, and do not comprehend your experience; that finds your “moment of reflection” an impertinent denial of impulse.  So man loses full use of the animal’s regulated, graceful instinct, and yet denies the conscious and emotional discrimination given him instead.

The messages sent as a result are so highly contradictory that you are caught in a position where true instinct cannot reign, nor can reason prevail.  Instead a distorted version of instinct results, along with a bastard use of sense as the species tries desperately to regulate its course.

Presently you have a condition in which overpopulation is compensated for by wars, and if not by wars then by diseases.  Yet who must die?  The young who would be the parents of children.  An understanding of the nature of natural guilt’s integrity would save you from such predicaments.

The “demons”, your projections, are then placed upon a national enemy, or the leader of another race; sometimes whole masses of population will project upon other large groups the images of their own unfaced frustrations.  Even in Augustus you find the hero and the villain, separate and diversified.  As a man can be so divided, so can a nation and a world.  So can a species.

So, therefore, can a family be so divided, and one member always appear as a hero and one the villain or the demon.

You may have two children, one of whom generally speaking, behaves like Augustus One, and one who acts like Augustus Two.  Because one seems so compliant and docile and one is so violent and unruly, you may never see the connections between their behavior, thinking them so obviously different.  Yet if being “good”, polite, and compliant is not the usual state of normal children, neither is incessant violent activity.  In such cases what you usually have is a situation in which one child is acting out unfaced aggressive behavior for the whole family.  Such unreconciled patterns of activity also mean that love is not being freely expressed.

Love is outgoing, as aggression is.  You cannot inhibit one without similarly affecting the other, so under such conditions the docile loving child is usually projecting and expressing the restrained love for the family as a whole.  Both the villain and the hero will be in trouble, however, for each are denying other legitimate aspects of their experience.

The same applies then to nations.  Natural guilt is a creative mechanism, meant to serve as a conscious spur in the solving of problems that, in your terms, no other animals ever had.  By taking advantage of it you leap still further through unknown frontiers, and break through into dimensions of awareness that were always latent since the birth of the conscious mind.

Natural guilt, followed, is a wise guide that brings along with it not only biological integrity, but triggers within consciousness aspects of activity that must otherwise remain closed.

Chapter 9:  Natural Grace, The Framework Of Creativity, And The Health Of Your Body And Mind.  The Birth Of Consciousness

With animals, there are varying degrees of division between the self who acts and the action involved.  With the birth of the conscious mind in man, however, the self who acts needed a way to judge its actions.  Again we come to the importance of that period of reflection, in which the self, with the use of memory, glimpses its own past experience in the present and projects its results into the future.