Session 648

Personal Reality, Session 648

There are too many aspects of what you think of as health and illness to discuss even in a book that is directed to personal reality, in which the body plays such an important role.

Health and illness are both evidences of the body’s attempt to maintain stability.  There is a difference in the overall health patterns in men and animals because of the quite diverse nature of their physical experience.  More will be said about this particular subject later.  Overall, however, in the animals, illness and disease play a life-giving role, keeping balance both within a species and between them, therefore insuring the future existence of all involved.

In their own ways, the animals are quite aware of this fact.  Some of them even bring themselves to their own destruction through what you would call suicide, and en masse.  At that level the animals understand, and are always in touch with deep biological connections in which they know their own continuances within the chain of nature.

Man grants rich psychological activity to his own species but denies it in others.  There are as many luxuriant and diverse kinds of psychological movement as there are species, however.  The cycles of health and disease are felt as rhythms of the body by the large variety of animals, and even with them illness or disease has life-saving qualities on another level.

Instinct is fairly accurate, for example, guiding the beasts to those territories in which proper conditions can be found; and even for them the well-being of the body represents physical evidence of their “being in the proper place at the proper time”.  It reinforces the animals’ sense of grace, in terms mentioned earlier in the book.  (See the 636^th session in Chapter Nine.)

They understand the beneficial teaching quality of disease, and follow their own instinctive ways of treating it.  In a natural situation, this might involve a mass migration from one territory to another.  In such cases the illness of only a few animals might send a whole herd to its safety, and a new food supply.

Man is so highly verbal that he finds it difficult to understand that other species work with idea-complexes of a different kind, in which of course thought as you consider it is not involved.  But an equivalent exists; using an analogy, it is as if ideas are built up not through sentence structure reinforced by inner visual images, but by like “mental” patterns structured through touch and scent – in other words, thinking, but within a framework entirely different and alien to you.

Such “thinking” exists, using the analogy, within the framework of instinct, whereas your own verbalized thoughts can also intrude outside of that framework.  One of the main differences between you and the animals, and one of the significant meanings in terms of free will, is involved here.

Animals, then, understand the beneficial directing elements of disease.  They also comprehend the nature of stress as a necessary stimulant to physical activity.  Observing even a pet, you will notice its marvelous complete relaxation, and yet its immediate total response to stimulus.  So animals in captivity will fight to provide themselves with necessary health-giving stress factors.

Animals, then, do not think of illness in terms of good or bad.  Disease in itself on that level is a part of the life-survival process, and a system of checks and balances.  With the emergence of man’s particular kind of consciousness, other issues become involved.  Mankind feels its own mortality even more than the beasts do.

With the growth of this particular variety of self-consciousness came the exteriorization, magnification and intensification of definite elements that lie latent in other animals, the individuation of strong emotional activity to a new degree, for example.  The emergence of the “pause of reflection” mentioned earlier (in the 635^th session in Chapter Eight, for instance) and the blossoming of memory along with the emotional intensification, led to a situation in which members of the new species recalled, in the present, the dead and the diseases that killed them.  They became frightened of disease, particularly in the case of plagues.

Man forgot the teaching and healing elements, and concentrated instead upon the unpleasant experience itself.  To some extent this was quite natural, for the new species developed in order to change the nature of its consciousness, to follow a reality in which instinct was no longer “blindly” followed, and to individualize in strong personal focus corporeal experience that had previously taken a different pattern.

Man has a far greater leeway.  He forms his reality according to his conscious beliefs, even while its basis lies in the deep unconscious nature of the earth in corporeal terms.  Man’s “I am”, [seemingly] apart from nature – a characteristic necessary for the development of his kind of consciousness – led him into value judgments, and also necessitated some break with the deep inner certainties of other species.

Illness therefore was experienced as “bad”.  An entire tribe could be endangered by one sick member.  At the same time, as the mind developed, cunning and memory became highly effective survival tools.  In some societies or tribes, the old or infirm were killed lest their care take too much attention from the able-bodied and endanger the group.

In others, however, the old were honored for the wisdom that they had accumulated with age, and this became very practical in tribes where many did not survive.  History was dependent upon the old with their memory of past events, and the group’s sense of continuity was also in the hands of its oldest members, who passed memories on to others.

An individual who had himself survived many diseases was considered a sage.  Such people often watched the animals and observed nature’s own therapies and treatments.

In certain eras, the lines between the species were not completely drawn, and there were long periods where men and animals mixed and learned from each other.  Man’s imagination made him a great maker of myths.  Myths as you know them represent bridges of psychological activity, and point quite clearly to patterns of perception and behavior through which, in your terms, the race passed as it traveled to its present state.  Mythology bridges the gap between instinctive knowledge and the individualization of idea.

When an animal is sick it immediately begins to remedy the situation, and unconsciously it knows what to do.  It does not bother thinking in your terms of good and evil.  It does not wonder what it did to get into such a situation.  It does not think of itself as inferior.  It automatically begins its own therapy.

A human being, however, has another dimension to deal with, a new area of creativity, a diverse mixture of beliefs.  His or her ideas about the self must be examined, for they are being materialized in flesh.  Again, the situation has great complexity, for the condition is still a healthy attempt on the part of the body to maintain balance.  Overall there is also the world situation to be taken into consideration – the status of the species on the planet, in which, say, overpopulation problems will bring about death to insure new growth.

The individuals alive at such a time will also have a hand in such decisions, however.  Once more, because you are self-conscious beings your beliefs regulate your reality.  An animal knows unconsciously that it is unique and has a place in the scheme of being.  Its sense of grace is built-in.  Your free will allows for the freedom of any belief, including one that says you are unworthy, with no right to your existence.

If you misinterpret the myths, then you may believe that man has fallen from grace and that his very creaturehood is cursed, in which case you will not trust your body or allow it its “natural” pattern of self-therapy.

In order for consciousness to develop in your terms, there must be freedom for the exploration of all ideas individually and en masse.  Each of you are living entities, growing toward your own development.  Each of your beliefs, therefore, has its own unique origin and feeling patterns, so you must for yourself travel back through your beliefs and your own feelings until intellectually and emotionally you realize your rightness, your completely original existence in time and space as you know it.

This knowing will give you the conscious knowledge that is a counterpart of the animal’s unconscious comprehension.

An animal has no need of conscience, in any terms.

Because of the great flexibility of your natures, however, mankind needs a framework in which the ramifications of what I have referred to as normal healthy guilt can be considered.

What you consider conscience is often an applied-from-without sense of right and wrong instilled in you in your youth.  As a rule these ideas represent your parents’ conceptions of natural guilt, distorted by their own beliefs.  (See the 619^th session in Chapter Four, as well as the first session in this chapter.)  You accepted these ideas for a reason, individually and en masse, for mankind at any given “time” has a strong idea of the particular sort of world experience it will create.

Because you have free will you have the responsibility and the gift, the joy and the necessity, of working with your beliefs and of choosing your personal reality as you desire.  I told you earlier (in the 636^th session in Chapter Nine) that you cannot fall out of a state of grace.  Each of you must intellectually and emotionally accept it, however.

While this may seem like the sheerest Pollyanna, nevertheless there is no evil in basic terms.  This does not mean that you do not meet with effects that appear evil, but as you each move individually through the dimensions of your own consciousness, you will understand that all seeming opposites are other faces of the one supreme drive toward creativity.

(Aside, concerning the migration of geese:  Their migration is perfect in its simplicity and complexity, yet your journey as a species is far less predictable, opening avenues of probabilities in which your consciousness and free will allows you to become conscious creators in worlds that you initiate and then inhabit.)

Session 647

Personal Reality, Session 647

The serpent is the symbol of the deepest knowledge within creaturehood; it also contains the impetus to rise above or beyond itself in certain aspects.  Eve, rather than Adam, for example, eats of the apple first because it was the intuitive elements of the race, portrayed in the story as female, that would bring about this initiation; only afterward could the ego, symbolized by Adam, attain its new birth and its necessary alienation.  The tree of knowledge, then, did indeed offer its fruits – and “good and bad” – because this was the first time there were any kinds of choices available, and free will.

There were other tales, some that have not come down to you, in which Adam and Eve were created together, and in a dream fell apart into the male and female.  In your particular legend Adam appeared first.  The woman being created from his rib symbolized the necessary emergence, even from the new creature, of the intuitive forces that will always come forth – for without that development the race would not have attained self-consciousness in your terms.

Good and evil then simply represented the birth of choices, initially in terms of survival, where earlier instinct alone had provided all that was needed.  In deeper terms, there is still another meaning that mirrors all of those apparent divisions that occur as All That Is seemingly separates portions of itself from itself, scattering its omnipotence into new patterns of being that, in your terms, remember their source and look back to it longingly, while still glorying in the unique individuality that is their own.

The story of the fall, the rebellious angels, and the leader Satan who becomes the devil – all of this refers to the same phenomena on a different level.  Satan represents – in the terms of the story – the part of All That Is, or God who stepped outside of Himself, so to speak, and became earthbound with His creatures, offering them the free will and choice that “previously” had not been available.

Hence you have the majestic elements given to Satan, and the power.  The earthly characteristics often appear as he is depicted in the animal form, for he was also of course connected with the intuitive terrestrial attributes from which the new human consciousness would spring.

In terms of simple biological function, you now had a species no longer completely dependent upon instinct, yet still with all the natural built-in desires for survival, and the appearance within it of a mind able to make decisions and distinctions.

This new kind of consciousness brought with it the open mirror of memory in which past joy and pain could be recalled, and so the realization of mortal death became more immediate than it was with the animals.

An association could trigger the clear memory of a past agony in the bewildered new mind.  At first, there was a difficulty in separating the remembered image from the moment in the present.  Man’s mind then struggled to contain many images – past, present, and future imagined ones – and was forced to correlate these in any given moment of time.  A vast acceleration took place.

It was only natural that certain experiences would seem better than others, but the species’ new abilities made it necessary that sharp distinctions be made.  Good and evil, the desirable and the less so, were invaluable aids then in helping form the basis for such separations.

The birth of imagination initiated the largest possibilities, and at the same time put great strain upon the biological creature whose entire corporeal structure would now react not only to present objective situations, but imaginative ones.  At the same time members of the species had to cope with the natural environment as did any other animal.  Imagination helped because an individual could anticipate the behavior of other creatures.

In another way, animals also possess an “unconscious” anticipation, but they do not have to come to terms with it on an aware basis as the new consciousness did.  Again, good and evil and the freedom of choice came to the species’ aid.  The evil animal was the natural predator, for example.  It would help here if the reader remembers what has been said about natural guilt earlier in this book.  It would aid in understanding the later myths and the variations that came from them.  (See the 634^th session in Chapter Eight, among others.)

As the mind developed, the species could hand down to its offspring the wisdom and law of the elders.  This is still being done in modern society, of course, when each child inherits the beliefs of its parents about the nature of reality.  Apart from all other considerations, this is also a characteristic of creaturehood.  Only the means are different with the animals.

The acceleration continues, however.  Ideas of right and wrong are always guidelines that are then individually interpreted.  Because of the connection with survival mentioned earlier (in the last session), there is a great charge here.  Initially the child had to be impressed with the fact, for example, that a predator animal was “bad” because it could kill.  Today a mother might unwittingly say the same thing about a car.

The early acquiescence to beliefs has a biological importance, therefore, but as the conscious mind attains its maturity it is also natural for it to question those beliefs, and to assess them in relation to its own environment.  Many of my readers may have certain ideas about good and evil that are very hampering.  These may be old beliefs in new clothing.  You may think that you are quite free, only to discover that you hold old ideas but have simply put new terms to them, or concentrated upon other aspects.

Your daily experience is intimately connected with your ideas of worth and personal value.

You may be quite able to see through the distortions of conventional Christianity.  You may have changed your ideas to such an extent that you can see little similarity between your current ones and those of the past.  Now you may believe in the theories of Buddhism, for example, or of another Eastern philosophy.

The differences between any of those systems of thought and Christianity may be so apparent that the similarities escape you.  You may follow one of the schools of Buddhism in which great stress is laid upon the denial of the body, discipline of the flesh, and the avoidance of desire.  These elements are quite characteristic of Christianity also, of course, but they may appear more palatable, exotic, or reasonable coming from a source foreign to your childhood education.  So you may leap from one to the other, shouting emancipation and feeling yourself quite free of old limiting ideas.

Philosophies that teach denial of the flesh must ultimately end up preaching a denial of the self and building a contempt for it, because even though the soul is couched in muscle and bone it is meant to experience that reality, not to refute it.

All such dogmas use artificial guilt, and natural guilt is distorted to serve those ends.  In whatever terms, the devotee is told that there is something wrong with earthly experience.  You are, therefore, considered evil as a self in flesh by virtue of your very existence.

This alone will cause adverse experience, making you reject the very basis of your own framework of experience.  You will consider the body as a thing, a fine vehicle but not in itself the natural living expression of your being in material form.  Many such Eastern schools also stress – as do numerous spiritualistic schools – the importance of the “unconscious levels of the self”, and teach you to mistrust the conscious mind.

The concept of nirvana (see the 637^th session in Chapter Nine) and the idea of heaven are two versions of the same picture, the former being one in which individuality is lost in the bliss of undifferentiated consciousness, and the latter one in which still-conscious individuals perform mindless adoration.  Neither theory contains an understanding of the functions of the conscious mind, or the evolution of consciousness – or, for that matter, certain aspects of greater physics.  No energy is ever lost.  The expanding universe theory applies to the mind as well as to the universe.

However, these philosophies can lead you to a deep mistrust of both your body and mind.  You are told that the spirit is perfect, and so you can try to live up to standards of perfection quite impossible to achieve.  The failure adds to the sense of guilt.

You attempt then to further banish the characteristic enjoyment of your own creaturehood, denying the lusty spirituality of your flesh and the strong present corporeal leanings of your soul.  You will try to rid yourself of very natural emotions, and so be cheated of their great spiritual and physical motion.  On the other hand, some leaders may give little consideration to such issues, but still be deeply convinced of the misery of the human condition, focusing upon all the “darker” elements, seeing the world’s destruction ever closer to hand without really examining the beliefs that arouse such constant feelings.

They may find it easy to cluck their tongues at obvious fanatics who cry out for God’s vengeance, and speak about the world’s end in brimstone and ashes.  They may be as equally convinced, however, of man’s basic unworthiness, and so of course of their own.  In daily life such people will concentrate upon negative events, store them up, and unfortunately cause personal experience that will seem to quite reinforce the basic ideas.

Here in different context is the same denial of the worth and integrity of earth experience.  In some such cases, all of the desirable human attributes are magnified and projected outward into a god or superconsciousness, while all the less admirable characteristics are left to the race and the individual.

The individual therefore deprives himself of the use of much of his ability.  He does not consider it his own, and is astounded when any others of his race display such superior qualities.

To some extent, such beliefs follow certain rhythms in both civilizations and in time.

The mind is a system of checks and balances even as the body, and so often a set of beliefs that can be seen as highly negative will often serve beneficial ends in countering other beliefs.  For some time Western civilization stressed a distorted version of intellectual reasoning, for example, and so the current stress about other portions of the self serves a purpose.

The people alive within the world come into it with their own problems and challenges, and this will have much to do with the kind of national and worldwide beliefs that are generated and that dominate.  The beliefs, of course, are frameworks in which various kinds of experience are tested.  This also applies to religions, and political and social situations as well.  There is always a give and take between the individual and the mass system of beliefs in which he has chosen his environment.

There is a belief in illness as being morally wrong, and a countering belief in it as being ennobling, uplifting and spiritually good.  These value judgments are extremely important, for they will be reflected in your own experience with any illness or disease.

Session 646

Personal Reality, Session 646

When you allow your emotions their natural spontaneous flow they will never engulf you, and always return you refreshed to “logical” conscious-mind thought.

It is only when you dam them up that they appear to be opposed to the intellect, or overwhelming.  It is of the utmost importance, however, that you understand the power and directing nature of your conscious mind, for otherwise you will believe yourself to be forever at the mercy of conditions and situations over which you feel you have no control.

Again, while he conscious mind is meant to direct the flow of your experience through your beliefs, and to materialize them, the actual mechanics are taken care of automatically by other portions of the self.  You must indeed trust that your new beliefs will work as completely for you as your older ones.

It may seem that your religious beliefs have little to do with your health or with your day-to-day experience.  Those of you who have left organized religions may feel relatively free from what you consider to be the adverse connotations of original sin and the like.  Yet no one is free of belief of any kind in that area.  Indeed, a belief in atheism is a belief.

In the next chapter, let us consider more closely your ideas about good and evil, the morality of the self, and examine the ways in which your ideas are reflected in your lives.

Chapter 12: Grace, Conscience, And Your Daily Experience

Thus far I have rather frequently mentioned the state of grace (in the 636^th session in Chapter Nine, for instance), because while it has many dimensions it is, practically speaking, the cause of your sense of well-being and accomplishment.  It is a condition of your existence.  Each of you may put the following in your own terms, but often it may seem as if your conscience tells you that you have “fallen out of grace”, and that some inner, mysterious, joyous sense of support no longer sustains you.  Unfortunately, conscience as you think of it is an untrustworthy guide, speaking to you through the mouths of mothers and fathers, teachers and clergy – all perhaps from distant years, and each of whom had their own ideas of what was right and wrong for you and for humanity at large.

These people of course were, and are, quite fallible.  When you are a child however adults seem godlike.  Their words fall with great weight because you are so at the mercy of their support.  As a child it was quite necessary that you accept beliefs from others before your conscious mind could form its own.

You accepted the concepts for your own reasons.  Those given beliefs represent the spiritual and mental fabric of ideas – the raw material, so to speak, with which you have to work.  In adolescence certain beliefs will be easily and immediately abandoned, or altered to fit the expanding pattern of experience.  Still other beliefs will remain, with perhaps certain elements being changed.  The beliefs may be revised to fit your new image, for example, while the main pattern remains the same.

Let us consider the idea of original sin, all of the colorful forms it may take within your body of concepts, and the ways in which these will affect your behavior and experience.

The concept itself existed long before Christianity’s initiation, and was told in various forms throughout the centuries and in all civilizations.  On the side of consciousness, it is a tale symbolically representing the birth of the conscious mind in the species as a whole, and the emergence of self-responsibility.  It also stands for the separation of the self who perceives – and therefore judges and values – from the object which is perceived and evaluated.  It represents the emergence of the conscious mind and of the strongly oriented individual self from that ground of being from which all consciousness comes.

It portrays the new consciousness seeing itself unique and separate, evolving from the tree of life and therefore able to examine its fruits, to see itself for the first time as different from others, like the serpent who crawled upon the surface of the earth.  Man came forth as a creature of distinctions.  In so doing he quite purposefully detached himself, in your terms now, from the body of his planet in a new way.  A part of him very naturally yearned for that primeval knowing unknowingness that had to be abandoned, in which all things were given – no judgements or distinctions were necessary, and all responsibilities were biologically foreordained.

He saw himself as rising above the serpent, which was a symbol of unconscious knowledge.  Yet the serpent would always mystify and attract man, even though he must stand upon its head, symbolically speaking, and rise from its knowledge.

With the birth of this consciousness came conscious responsibility for the fruits of the planet.  Man became the caretaker.

Session 644

Personal Reality, Session 644

Ruburt did receive some information from me, by using another method.  Some advance material was given to him for his own use ahead of time, so to speak.

It seemed to him that the information “just came”, but not already prepared into words.  Instead he received ideas which he then interpreted and verbalized, and wrote down for himself.  That material is pertinent and belongs in this chapter.  I will give it in my way now.

I have often stated that the mind-body relationship is one system.  The thoughts are as necessary to the whole system as the body’s cells are.  Ruburt correctly interpreted an analogy I gave him in which I compared thoughts to individual cells, and belief systems to the physical organs, which are composed of cells.  The organs obviously are stationary in the body, though the cells within them die and are reborn.

Belief systems are as necessary and natural as physical organs are.  In fact, their purpose is to help you direct the functioning of your biological being.  You give no conscious thought to the coming and going of cells within your organs.  Left alone, your thoughts will come and go through your belief systems just as naturally; and ideally, they will balance out, maintaining their own health and directing your body so that its innate therapies take place.

Your systems of belief will of course attract certain kinds of thoughts, with their trails of emotional experience.  A steady barrage of hateful, revengeful thoughts should actually lead you to look for the beliefs from which they are gaining their strength.

You cannot do this by ignoring the validity of the thoughts as your experience, however, by trying to shove them under the rug of a superficial optimism.  Such habitual, unhappy thoughts will bring about the same kind of physical experience, but it is your own system of beliefs that you must examine.

The “negative” subjective and objective events that you meet are meant to make you examine the contents of your own conscious mind.  In their way the hateful or revengeful thoughts are natural therapeutic devices, for if you follow them, accepting them with their own validity as feelings, they will automatically lead you beyond themselves; they will change into other feelings, carrying you from hatred into what may seem to be the quicksands of fear – which is always behind hatred.

By going along with feelings you unify your emotional, mental and bodily state.  When you try to fight or deny them, you divorce yourself from the reality of your being.  Dealing with thoughts and feelings as just directed at least roots you firmly in the integrity of your present experience, and allows its innate motion and natural creativity to thrust toward a therapeutic solution.

When you refute such emotions or become terrified of them, you impede the flow of feeling from one moment to the other.  You set up dams.  Any emotion will change into another if you experience it honestly.  Otherwise you clog the natural movement of your entire system.

Fear, faced and felt with its bodily sensations and the thoughts that go along with it, will automatically bring about its own state of resolution.  The conscious system of beliefs behind the impediment will be illuminated, and you will realize that you feel a certain way because you believe an idea that causes and justifies such a reaction.

If you habitually deny the expression of any emotions, to that degree you become alienated not only from your body but from your own conscious ideas.  You will bury certain thoughts and put up biological armor to prevent you from physically feeling their effects upon your body.  In each case the answer lies in your personal system of beliefs, in those strong concepts you hold on an intimate level that brought about the inhibitions to begin with.

If you find yourself running around in a spiritual frenzy, trying to repress every negative idea that comes into your head, then ask yourself why you believe so in the great destructive power of your slightest “negative” thought.

The body and mind together do present a united, self-regulating, healing, self-clearing system.  Within it each problem contains its own solution if it is honestly faced.  Each symptom, mental or physical, is a clue to the resolution of the conflict behind it, and contains within it the seeds of its own healing.

It is true that habitual thoughts of love, optimism and self-acceptance are better for you than their opposites; but again, your beliefs about yourself will automatically attract thoughts that are consistent with your ideas.  There is as much natural aggressiveness in love as there is in hate.  Hate is a distortion of such a normal force, the result of your beliefs.

As in the material that Ruburt received ahead of time for his own use, natural aggression is cleansing and highly creative – the thrust behind all emotions.

There are two ways to get at your own conscious beliefs.  The most direct is to have a series of talks with yourself.  Write down your beliefs in a variety of areas, and you will find that you believe different things at different times.  Often there will be contradictions readily apparent.  These represent opposing beliefs that regulate your emotions, your bodily condition and your physical experience.  Examine the conflicts.  Invisible beliefs will appear that unite those seemingly diverse attitudes.  Invisible beliefs are simply those of which you are fully aware but prefer to ignore, because they represent areas of strife which you have not been willing to handle thus far.  They are quite available once you are determined to examine the complete contents of your conscious mind.

If this strikes you as too intellectual a method, then you can also work backward from our emotions to your beliefs.  In any case, regardless of which method you choose, one will lead you to the other.  Both approaches require honesty with yourself, and a firm encounter with the mental, psychic and emotional aspects of your current reality.

As with Andrea (see the last session), you must accept the validity of your feelings while realizing that they are about certain issues or conditions, and are not necessarily factual statements of your reality.  “I feel that I am a poor mother”, or, “I feel that I am a failure”.  These are emotional statements and should be accepted as such.  You are to understand, however that while the feelings have their own integrity as emotions, they may not be statements of fact.  You might be an excellent mother while feeling that you are very inadequate.  You may be most successful in reaching your goals while still thinking yourself a failure.

By recognizing these differences and honestly following the feelings through – in other words, by riding the emotions – you will be led to the beliefs behind them.  A series of self-revelations will inevitably result, each leading you to further creative psychological activity.  At each stage you will be closer to the reality of your experience than you have ever been.

The conscious mind will benefit greatly as it become more and more aware of its directing influence upon events.  It will no longer fear the emotions, or the body, as threatening or unpredictable, but sense the greater unity in which it is involved.

The emotions will not feel like stepchildren, with only the best-dressed being admitted.  They will not need to cry out for expression, for they will be fully admitted as members of the family of the self.  Now, again, some of you will say that your trouble is that you are too emotional, too sensitive.  You may believe that you are too easily swayed.  In such cases you are afraid of your emotions.  You think their powers so strong that all reason can be drowned within them.

 No matter how open it may seem that you are, you will nevertheless accept certain emotions that you think of as safe, and ignore others, or stop them at particular points, because you are afraid of following them further.  This behavior will follow your beliefs, of course.  If you are over forty, for instance, you may tell yourself that age is meaningless, that you enjoy much younger people, that you think young thoughts.  You will accept only those emotions that appear to be in keeping with your ideas of youth.  You accept what you think of as optimistic health-giving thoughts.  You consider yourself quite emotional, perhaps.

Underneath however you are very much aware, as indeed you should be, of your reality in creaturehood.  Yet you firmly ignore any changes in your appearance from the time you were, say thirty – and in so doing lose sight of your validity as a creature in space and time.

You will inhibit any thoughts of death or dying, or of old age, and so close out quite natural feelings that are meant to lead you beyond your earlier years.  You are denying the body’s corporeal existence and its focus in the time of the seasons, and cheating yourself of those natural biological, psychic, and mental motions that are meant to take you past themselves.

In this particular context, one of the problems arises out of the connotations given to the words “older”, or “old”.  In your culture you believe that to be young is to be flexible, alert and aware.  To be old or older is considered a disgrace, generally speaking; rigid, out of style, and passé.

If you desperately try to remain young, it is usually to hide your own beliefs about age, and to negate all of those emotions connected with it.  Whenever you refuse to accept the reality of your creaturehood, you also reject aspects of your spirit.  The body exists in the world of space and time.  The experiences you may encounter in your sixties are as necessary as those in your twenties.  Your changing image is supposed to tell you something.  When you pretend alterations do not occur you block both biological and spiritual messages.

In old age the organism is, in certain terms, preparing for a new birth.  The combined events of spirit, mind and body involve not only the passing of one season but preparation for the beginning of another.  The situation includes all of those supports necessary to carry you through, not only with acceptance but with the great aggressive drive toward new experience.

To refute your reality in time, therefore, results in your being stuck in time and obsessed by it.  Accepting your integrity in time allows the body to function until its natural end, in good condition, free from those distorted, invisible concepts about age.  If you believe that youth is the ideal and struggle for it while simultaneously believing that old age must involve infirmities, then you cause an unnecessary dilemma, and hasten aging according to the negative aspects of your mind.

Each individual must examine his or her individual beliefs, or begin with feelings which will inevitably lead to them.  In this area, as in all others, those of you who are proficient verbally might use the method of writing.  Either write down your beliefs as they come to you, or make lists of your intellectual and emotional assumptions.  You may find that they are quite different.

If you have a physical symptom, do not run away from it.  Feel its reality in your body.  Let the emotions follow freely.  These will lead you, if you allow them to flow, to the beliefs that cause the difficulty.  They will take you through many aspects of your own reality that you must face and explore.  These methods release your withheld natural aggressiveness.  You may feel that you are swamped by emotion, but trust it – again, it is the motion of your being, and it arouses your own creativity.  Followed, it will seek the answers to your problems.

Ruburt in his Dialogues has an excellent example, in the way in which he allowed his feelings to arise, though he was initially frightened of them.  Everyone cannot write poetry, but each person is creative in his or her own way, and follow the emotions as Ruburt did whether or not a poem results.

He will know the passage to which I refer.  Use it.

You must realize that your conscious mind is competent, its ideas pertinent, and that your own beliefs affect and form your body and experience.

Excerpt from Dialogues where the Mortal Self tells the Soul:

But now

My body trembles and breathes deep.

Ancient angers

Rumble up from my toes.

A dull heavy black hole

Rises up through my belly to my throat

And empties its load upon my tongue

Which turns leaden

With unsaid uncried things,

Long forgotten by my mind

But clotted in my blood.

Ashen statues

Of unspoken vowels and syllables,

Images I have kicked,

All from my lips go toppling.

The specifics merge,

The icy heavy mass

Grows alive in birth

And rushes

Squalling, out

Into the universe.

Shapes and colors,

Blacks and purples mix

With the skyscape’s

Great moving picture

And are lost

And redeemed in it.

And I feel you now, even in my anger,

Splendid and terrible

Emerging through my flesh

With the rightness of storm winds

And clouds blowing,

Devastating the landscape

Yet filling it with freshness,

Sending debris flying

Full blast and releasing

New tubers

Which lay hidden under

And are justly served by my anger,

Which lifts them

And you and me all together

Over repressions frosty land,

Surging in giant free swirls

That burst like summer lightning, flashing

And speeding over the countryside,

Joyously furious.”

Session 643

Personal Reality, Session 643

Today Ruburt received a call from a young woman I will name Andrea.  She is a lovely young blonde.  I would like to use this instance as an excellent example of the ways in which conscious beliefs affect your feelings and behavior.

Andrea is in her early thirties, divorced, with three children.  She called to tell Ruburt that she had lost her job this morning; but more than this, that she was involved in a week of very negative circumstances and emotional encounters.  A young man she had been seeing began to avoid her.  A salesman placed her in what seemed to be a very humiliating situation, and yelled at her in front of a crowd of people.  All of her other encounters of late had seemed to follow the same pattern.  Finally she became ill and emotionally overwrought.  She stayed home from work, and that situation culminated in the loss of her job.

She told Ruburt that she felt herself to be an inferior person, unable to cope, an individual who was not able to hold her own with her co-workers or the world at large.

She had carried those beliefs of course throughout that period of time, and they were expressed unconsciously through her body – through gestures, expressions, tones of voice.  The whole physical self expected rebuffs.  The events of those days, whatever they were, would be interpreted in the light of that mental set.

All of the available data coming into the organism would be sifted, weighed and valued in a precise search for the material that would give physical emphasis to those beliefs.  Information or events running counter would be ignored to a large degree, or distorted in such a fashion that they would be made to fit in with and what the mind said was reality.

Conscious beliefs focus your attention, channel it and direct your energy so that you can swiftly bring the ideas into your physical experience.  They also act as blinders, throwing aside data that cannot be assimilated while preserving the integrity of the beliefs.  So our Andrea did not see, or ignored, the smiles that came her way, or the encouragement; and in some cases she even perceived some potentially beneficial events as “negative” – these then were used to further reinforce the belief in her own inferiority.

Over the phone Ruburt reminded Andrea of her own basic uniqueness, and also of the fact that she was creating her reality through beliefs.  Ruburt reinforced other ideas that Andrea had momentarily forgotten – the fact, among others, of her own true worth, and because Andrea knew it, this more positive belief rose up to shove the others aside.

During the day, Andrea was able to look at both beliefs and see them as opposing ideas that she had held about herself.  She believed she was unique and good – and also that she was inferior and bad.  At various times one belief would color her experience nearly to the exclusion of the other.  Just before this session Andrea called back.  She realized that she had indeed set up the situation by not dealing honestly with her own conscious ideas.

She had wanted to leave her job for another one but was afraid of taking the step, so she created circumstances in which the decision was seemingly taken out of her hands; it would appear as if she were the victim of unfeeling co-workers, jealous and misunderstanding, and a boss who would not stand up for her.

Now she understood that she was not a victim but the originator of those conditions.  During the time involved, her feelings faithfully mirrored her conscious beliefs.  She was lost in self-pity and self-condemnation.  These brought about the weakened body state.  In speaking to her the second time Ruburt gave Andrea excellent advice, explaining the way in which such feelings can be handled to advantage.  In his or her own way, each reader can easily utilize the method.

Ruburt advised Andrea to accept the validity of such feelings as feelings – not to inhibit them, but to follow their flow with the understanding that they are feelings about reality.  As themselves they are real.  They express emotional reactions to beliefs.  The next time Andrea feels inadequate, for example, she is to actively experience that feeling, realizing that even though she feels inferior this does not mean that she is inferior.  She is to say, “I feel inferior”, and at the same time to understand that the feeling is not a statement of fact but of emotion.  A different kind of validity is involved.

Experiencing your emotions as such is not the same as accepting them as statements of fact about your own experience.  Andrea is then supposed to ask, “Why do I feel so inferior?”  If you deny the validity of the emotion itself and pretend it away, then you will never be led to question the beliefs behind it.

At this point Andrea believes that her life must be difficult.  She has been told often that a woman without a man is in a very difficult situation, particularly a woman with children.  She believes that a new mate will be almost impossible to find.  She has been informed that children need a father, and feels at the same time that no man wants to become involved with a woman with children.

In her thirties, it seems to her that youth is fast fleeing, and in line with her beliefs she cannot see a woman who is much older being desirable.  So her beliefs put her in a state of crisis.  Change them and no crisis exists.  The body would then cease reacting to such stress, and almost immediately the exterior situation itself would be altered.

At the same time all beliefs are communicated to others, not only through quite unconscious bodily mechanisms, but telepathically.  You will always try to correlate your ideas with exterior experience.  All of the abilities of the inner self will be brought to bear to materialize the image of your beliefs, regardless of what they ought to be.  The “proper” emotions will be generated, bringing about those body states that exist in your conscious mind.

This was a way of assisting the young woman involved, and others too.  Show her this session.  There will be no problem.  The situation is one in which many young women are involved, and this material can help them solve dilemmas of which they may have been unaware previously.  They do not know Ruburt, but they can learn through this book.

I have used Andrea because so many typical Western beliefs coincide in her reality – the idea that aging is disastrous; that women are relatively powerless without a man beside them; that life is, practically speaking, highly difficult while it should be ideally simple.  All of these ideas obtain their charge from a basic belief in the powerlessness of the conscious self to form and regulate its experience.

Luckily Andrea is working with her own system of beliefs.  Presently, however, while she tells herself that age does not matter, she still believes that her desirability as a woman decreases with the passage of each day.  So she feels and acts less attractive – when that belief holds sway.  She is fortunate enough to be able to check her physical experience against her beliefs, and astute enough to see areas in which she has made great advances.  But let us look at some of those beliefs and apply them to others generally.

Often, of course, those who try the hardest to be “good” do so because they fear for their basic worth, and those who speak of having youthful minds and bodies do so because they are so terrified of age.  In the same way, many who shout about independence are afraid that they are basically helpless.  In most instances these opposing beliefs are held quite consciously, but kept apart from each other.  Therefore they are not reconciled.

Since your feelings follow your beliefs, various groups of them will appear to be senseless at times if you do not allow them free connection with opposing ideas that you may also hold.

A person may seem to be very open and responsive.  Reading this book, for example, any reader might say, “My trouble is that I am too emotional”.  Yet on some self-analysis, almost all will find areas in which emotions are expressed only to a certain point.  They are not followed through.

No feeling brings you to a dead end.  It is in motion, and that always leads into another feeling.  As it flows it alters your entire physical condition, and that interchange is meant to be consciously accepted.  Your emotions will always lead you into a realization of your beliefs if you do not impede them.  Emotional states are always impetuses for action, meant to be physically expressed.  Each has a basis of natural aggression.

The connections between creativity and aggression have never been understood in your society.  A misunderstanding of true aggression can lead into a fear of all emotion, and cause you to cut yourself off from one of nature’s best therapies.

Natural aggression provides the charge for all creativity.  Now reading this, many readers will be taken back, for they believe that love is the impetus, and that love is opposed to aggression.  There is no such artificial division.  Natural aggression is the creative loving thrust forward, the way in which love is activated, the fuel through whose agency love propels itself.  Aggression in the most basic terms has nothing to do with physical violence as you think of it, but with the force through which love is perpetuated and creatively renewed.

When you think in other terms, then you fall into distorted views in which power is assigned to negative elements – and seen as threatening, wrong, or even given demonic connotations.  In contrast, good is seen as weak, powerless, passive, and in great need of defense.

You will be afraid of any powerful emotion, therefore; frightened of the dimensions of your own actuality, and to a large extent be led to run away from an acceptance of the power and energy of your own being.  You will be forced to dilute your own experience.  Such beliefs have a strong depressing characteristic that can lead you to shut down powerful feelings by immediately considering them negative.

You will automatically begin to inhibit any stimulus that might bring about forceful emotions, and so deny yourself needed feedback.  You are at the mercy of your emotions only when you fear them.  They are the motion of your being.  They go hand in hand with your intellect.  But when you are unaware of the contents of your conscious mind, and not fair with your emotions, you run into difficulty.

Session 641

Personal Reality, Session 641

A man who makes a statue uses his conscious mind, his creative abilities, his physical body, and the inner resources of his own being.

Deliberately he decides to create a sculpture, and automatically focuses his energies in that direction.  When you form the living sculpture of your body, which is far more important to you than any work of art, you should certainly follow the same course.  In other words, direct your energies toward the creation of a healthy functioning body.  You form your image constantly; as many of the artistic processes are hidden, so the inner mechanisms by which you create your material self lie beneath the surface of your conscious mind.  They are highly effective, nevertheless.

As the creation of any art is intimately connected with the dream state, so is the living art of your body.  Its breathing form is influenced by the great therapy of dreams.  If there are chemical imbalances they are often corrected quite automatically in the dream state, as you act out situations calling up the production of hormones, say, that would be summoned in a like waking situation.

The role-playing in the dream drama would be one in which you creatively worked out the problems that caused the imbalances to being with.  Dreams of a strongly aggressive nature in this context may be very beneficial to a given individual, allowing the release of usually inhibited feelings and freeing the body from tension.  By such constant dream therapy, both body and mind regulate themselves to a large degree.  So your flesh is affected by your dreams.

In them of course one object may be a symbol, but there is no such thing as an overall statement of dream symbolism, in which a given symbol will have a general meaning.  There are too many variations in personal experience.  It is true that in dreams you do reach some of the deepest sources of your being at times, but even there, the expression of that being is far too individualistic to assign the same kind of “unconscious” meaning to overall symbols.

Again, there can be a useful analogy in the field of art.  While artists all use the same “material” – the human experience – it is still the brilliant uniqueness or individuality pointing out and riding upon that shared human performance that makes a work “great”.  Afterward the critics may point out patterns, assign the work to a certain school, connect the images or symbols to those in other paintings – and then make the mistake of believing the symbols to be general, always apt, meaning the same thing wherever they are found.  But all of this may have little to do with the artist’s interpretation of his own symbols, or with his personal experience, so he may wonder how the critics could read this into his work.

With dreams the same is true.  No one really knows their meaning but yourself.  If you read books in which you are told that a certain object always represents such and such, then you are like the artist who accepts the critic’s idea of the symbols in his own work.  You will feel alienated from your dreams since you are trying to make them follow a pattern that is not yours.

In any case, interpretation involves but one part of the task as you try to consciously assess a dream’s meaning.  The real work of the dream is done during the event itself, on deep psychic and biological levels.

The dream’s happening affects your entire physical condition, and so has this constant therapeutic effect.  This result stems from the psychic situation set up within any dream drama, and in it the problems or challenges of your existence are worked out.  Many probable actions are taken; these are then projected into the probable future.

As you come to understand the nature of your own beliefs, you can learn to use the dream state more effectively for your conscious purposes.  It is one of the most efficient natural therapies, and the inner framework in which much of your physical body building actually takes place.

There is another consideration involving medicine; though as I mentioned earlier (in the 624^th session from Chapter Five), if you accept Western medical beliefs I am not suggesting that you suddenly forsake all doctors.  But naturally and left alone, any chemical upsets in the body will right themselves after the inner problems causing them are worked out through any of a variety of innate healing methods.

The new balance signals the organism that an inner problem has been resolved.  The body, mind and psyche are then more or less operating together.  When new psychic challenges arise, another round of natural therapy begins in rhythmic pattern.  When imbalances of a physical nature are removed by the introduction of drugs, however, the body signals say that the dilemma must have been taken care of also – while this may not be the case at all.

The whole organism is not at one with itself under such conditions.  The problem manifested itself in a given way, and the drugs then block that normal expression of the psychic disorder.  Other pathways of demonstration will be sought.

If these are blocked in the same manner also, then the entire mind-body relationship becomes alienated from itself.  The inner mechanics are disturbed.  The basic challenge not only is not faced, but is constantly denied the physical expression that, left alone, would bring about its natural solution.

Obviously there are many ramifications here, and in your society your own belief systems must also be taken into consideration.  If you do not believe in the natural healing processes you will simply block them.  Your fear of not seeing a doctor then will only cause more damage.  On the other hand, if you have faith in medical help, this alone will bring therapeutic benefit.

This can only go so far, though, if the inner problems are not dealt with.  Often they are resolved regardless of what you do or believe, simply as a result of the vast creative energies within your being, and the system of checks and balances with which you provided your body at birth.

The same applies to mental conditions, which have a way, sometimes, of working themselves out better without your professional therapies than with them – often cures happen in spite of your best-intentioned treatment.  One of the latest ideas is that certain mental conditions are caused by chemical imbalances.  Supplying these does result in some improvement, but such inequalities do not cause any disease.  Your beliefs about the nature of your own reality do.  If medication of that sort improves the immediate situation, the inner problem of beliefs must still be worked out.  Otherwise other illnesses will be substituted.

It is extremely difficult to work with yourself in the natural manner when you are surrounded everywhere by the belief that certain drugs, or foods, or doctors will provide the answers.  So, in the barrage of mass ideas to the opposite, those who try to allow themselves the benefit of their own innate healing must usually face the stress of wondering whether or not they are right.

Unfortunately, the more you rely upon exterior methods the more it seems you must rely upon them, and the less you trust your own natural abilities.  You will often become “allergic” to a drug simply because the body realizes that if the drug was accepted, all recourse to the solution of a particular problem would be cut off, or another more severe illness would result from the physical “cover-up” of the dilemma.

Natural therapy, therefore, is difficult to achieve to its fullest benefit in your society, because it is constantly interfered with from the time of your birth.  Yet it operates regardless of interference, and is always at your command to give health and vitality to the living sculpture in which you have your present experience.

Mental “diseases” often point out the nature of your beliefs as they agree or conflict with those held by others.  Here the belief systems are different than those of society to such a degree that obvious effects show in terms of behavior.  There are crisis points here as with many physical illnesses, and left alone an individual may well work through to his own solution.

Even with so-called mental disorders, however, orientation with the body is very important, as are the individual’s beliefs about his own form and its relationship with others and with time and space.  There will often be chemical imbalances in such a situation, unconsciously produced by the individual, sometimes in order to allow him to work out a series of hallucinatory events.  Such sustained “objectified dreaming” necessitates a change, chemically, from the normal state of waking consciousness.  It is important to note that regardless of the mental or physical illness adopted, it is chosen for a reason, and is a natural method that the individual himself knows he is physically and mentally equipped to handle.

Personality differences then obviously have a great deal to do with the kind of illness adopted, or the “mars” you may inflict upon our own living sculpture.

Now the inner problems that you encounter are always constructive – challenges leading you toward greater fulfillment.

A problem caused by guilt, for example, physically materialized as a malady, is meant to lead you to face and conquer the idea of guilt, the belief in it that you hold in your conscious mind.  The body itself is always in a state of becoming.  You think of it as reaching a certain peak and then deteriorating, or becoming less.  That is because you do not understand it as the expression of your being in flesh.

It reflects the seasons of the earth and of the flesh.  In what you think of as you, it mirrors one condition with great faithfulness and abandon.  In old age it does the same thing.  It shows you in flesh, both as you come into it and leave it, and here you see great variation.  Many cease creating their bodies and die at a young age for a great variety of reasons, of course, but some die because they believe that old age is shameful and that only a young body can be beautiful.

Your beliefs about age, therefore, will affect your body and all of its capacities.  As mentioned earlier in this book (in the 627^th session in Chapter Six), you may become hard of hearing because you firmly believe that this must come with age.  You will alter the chemical composition of your body according to your beliefs about its activity through the various portions of your life.

Elements, chemicals, cells, atoms and molecules – these partially compose your living sculpture, but you are the one who directs their activity through your conscious beliefs, which then initiate all of those great creative powers that give your body its life, and insure its constant reflection of the self that you believe you are.