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.”