Session 650

Personal Reality, Session 650

The simple diagrams merely represent some general belief systems from the standpoint of “moral values”.  Your ideas of good and evil affect not only your behavior with others, but your activity in a community and in the world at large.

Many believe – using the first diagram – that it is “good” and morally superior to be Christian, white, wealthy and in excellent health.  Now, though this does not appear in the diagram, the word “male” can also be added to the list of preferred attributes.

Reality, then, is viewed through this system of beliefs.  If you hold them you will feel that those characteristics are given by God.  According to the fervor with which you cherish these ideas you will find that they enclose you, for in a very limited manner they will define your concept of good.  People entertaining such beliefs are often very religious in conventional terms.  Countries emphasizing like beliefs send missionaries to “convert” those who are pagan, and therefore inferior.

Individuals feeling this way will be very uncomfortable when they mingle with others of a different race, creed or color, and despite themselves may be revengefully conservative in dealing, for example, with problems of a community nature.  They will consider poverty as a sign of God’s displeasure and so be inclined to leave the entire matter in his “hands”.  They may speak with seeming compassion about the plight of others, and yet all the while consider that difficulty the simple result of inferiority, of inequality.

These people may be of any age.  They may come from any economic environment.  Now if you happen to be Protestant, male, white, American, rich, and healthy, at least within the framework of your beliefs you can look at yourself with “clear” eyes.  Your foundation is shaky indeed, but at least you fit within it for the moment.  You will notice that I added “Protestant” to our value system, as well as “American”.  If however you hold this group of beliefs and fall short – that is, if in some way you do not fit in – then even within that system you are in trouble.

Some of the components are more charged than others.  A Catholic or Jew possessing these beliefs is obviously out of step to some extent, and will feel guilty as he measures himself against them.  A black man who accepts the same system is indeed in difficulty.  If he happens to be a poor black man he is in double jeopardy.

In that chart of belief, disease, poverty, femininity to some extent, non-Christian concepts, and a non-Caucasian racial heritage, are all considered wrong to one degree or another.

Any intrusion of other beliefs here will be considered threatening.  Both racial problems and religious dissension will be rationalized from the standpoint of these beliefs.  Some of my readers may consider themselves quite enlightened, believing, for example, in reincarnation as a series of consecutive lives.  However, they may then use that concept to justify their belief in the inferiority of other races.  They may say that since an individual chose his or her problems in this life – deciding for instance to be born black, or poor, or both – that karma is being worked out; therefore such issues should not be adjusted through a change of law or custom.

On the left side, looking at the second diagram, you will find people in this case, and in this country, of a more “liberal” frame of mind.  But you will not find them quite as liberal if you understand that they are as prejudiced in one direction as the first group is in another.

Here we have a system of belief in which it is wrong to be white, American, or wealthy, or even at all well-off in financial terms.  All of the distortions in Christianity are apparent, where the first group is blind to them, of course.  Here, though, wealth and a white skin are not only bad, but obvious symptoms of moral deterioration.  If the first system of beliefs sees money and goods as a sign of God’s blessing, the second group views material possessions as evidence of spiritual decay.

Here the exotic is romanticized, the foreign held up, the picturesque seen as the real.  Black skin or brown skin becomes the criteria of spiritual perfection, and poverty a badge of honor to be worn not only proudly, but often to be used as an aggressive tool.  The people who follow these belief systems think that they are right.  Their living style, community affiliations, and political leanings will be in direct opposition to the “white-wealthy” ethic.

Now if you happen to be black or brown, poor, and believe in this system, you will at least feel secure within it.  If you are instead white and wealthy and hold such beliefs, you will think yourself quite inferior indeed, and do everything in your power to show how picturesque, and liberal and open-minded, and black or brown you can be, while still being white, fairly well-off, and perhaps secretly addicted to your Christianity.

You will doubtlessly have Buddhas tastefully displayed, and Indian beads.

The third diagram can cut across the other systems of belief, of course.  In the first two groups there are many leeways.  You may have one, two, or three preferred characteristics that correlate with your ideas, for example, but your concepts about age leave you no such freedom; for at one time or another all of you, “if you are lucky” in your terms, will approach old age.

Many believe that it is a time of spiritual and/or physical deterioration, an era in which all those hard-won attributes of maturity vanish, and the reasoning faculties disappear like grains of sand held too long by the thinking hands of the mind.

If life is seen as good in this system of belief, then youth is viewed as the crowning glory, from which summit there is no further journey except descent.  The old are not granted characteristics of wisdom, but feared as evil, bad, undesirable or frightening.  To these people senility seems a natural, inevitable end to life.

As mentioned earlier in this book (in the 644^th session in Chapter Eleven), many who follow such beliefs try to hide them from themselves, desperately attempting to be young.  Youth and old age both have their place, and within the framework of your race each play important roles.

You are used to thinking in terms of heredity.  In physical terms, and in a different way than you imagine, this is important.  Certain earth experiences however are dependent upon duration in time, and result as a consequence of the mind playing upon its experience through long earth sessions.

There are specific functions brought into operation quite naturally that are scarcely perceived by your scientists, much less understood.  As the mind within the body clearly sees its earthly time coming to an end, mental and psychic accelerations take place.  These are in many ways like adolescent experiences in their great bursts of creative activity, with the resulting formation of questions, and the preparation for a completely new kind of personality growth and fulfillment.

This would be quite apparent were it not for your current belief systems, through which the old are forced to interpret their experience.  Many instances of expansion of consciousness, and mental and psychic growth, are interpreted by you as senility.  No important correlations have been made between the subjective experiences of the old, particularly in “senile” conditions, with those of other ages involved in expansion of consciousness, whether natural or drug induced.

Any such sensations are immediately repressed by the old for fear that “senility” will be the diagnosis.  The experiences, however, affect the right hemisphere of the brain, and in such a way that abilities are released in somewhat the same manner as an adolescent’s.

The individual, when it is time then, begins to see beyond temporal life, to open up dimensions of awareness that in your terms he or she could not afford while involved in the intense physical focus of normal adult life.  Unfortunately the personality has no system of beliefs, as a rule, to support such an expansion.  The natural therapies, both physical and mental, are denied.  Drugs are often used as depressants, clouding the clarity of what seems to be distorted vision.  This is one of the most creative, valuable aspects of your lives.  Instead the old are made to feel useless in your society.  Often of course they share this value judgment, and their experience within your communities has in no way prepared them to face subjective experience.

There are no teachers to guide them.  Old age is a highly creative part of living.  The connections between it and childhood are often made in a derogatory fashion, but the personality is in just as creative a state.  I am speaking generally now, of course, for your living conditions so distort the natural situation.

Even the chemical and hormonal changes that occur are those that are conducive to spiritual and psychic growth at that time.  The joyful affirmation possible is denied to the old because of your system of beliefs.

In certain terms, “psychedelic experience” cannot be explained within your limited frameworks of reference – not because such illuminations are beyond explanation but because your present systems of belief are too limiting.

So at whatever age, a revelatory episode is difficult to relate to others.  In older age, however, no one is interested, and yet it is here, as in adolescence, that the greatest creativity may emerge but go unrecognized.  This era could be more advantageous to the individual and to the race than any other period, were it recognized for what it is and understood.

The peculiar chemical changes that occur are often precisely those that lead to greater conceptions and experience, but these are free from what you think of as practical application.  There is a trigger set off then, an impetus in which the personality tries to free itself from time-space orientation released from the usual necessity to participate in “adult” terms.

The personality, again, looks at the nature of experience in its purest terms.  In some previous civilizations this was done within a natural framework in which the old were cared for physically while there words were listened to most carefully.

Ideas of the “wise old man”, and similar legends apply here, as do the mystical concepts of the powerful old woman.  In their natural progression, and left alone, the old understand their own “visions” quite well.  Body and mind operate beautifully together.