Session 665

Personal Reality, Session 665

Again, there are no accidents.  No one dies under any circumstances who is not prepared to die.  This applies to death through natural catastrophe as well as to any other situation.

Your own choice will dictate the way you die, as well as the time.  We are dealing now with your beliefs as you know them in this life, and leaving for a later chapter any bleed-throughs of beliefs that may occur from other existences.  But whatever beliefs you accept, for whatever reasons, your point of power is in the present.

It is far more important that you understand this than that you become overly concerned with labyrinthian “past reasons”, for you can get so lost in a negative approach that you forget that these beliefs can be changed in the present.  For various reasons, you hold beliefs that you can alter at any time.  Many individuals die young, for example, because they believe so strongly that old age represents a degradation of the spirit and an insult to the body.  They do not want to live under the conditions as they believe them to be.  Some quite frankly prefer to die in what others would consider to be the most dire circumstances – swept away by the raging waves of an ocean, or crushed in an earthquake, or battered by the winds of a hurricane.

Slow death in a hospital, or an experience with an illness, would be unthinkable to these same people.  Some of this has to do with temperament, and with quite normal individual differences and preferences.  Many more human beings are aware of their own impending deaths than is generally known.  They know and yet pretend they do not know, but those who die in catastrophes choose the experience – the drama, even the terror when that occurs.  They prefer to leave physical life in a blaze of perception, battling for their lives, at a point of challenge, “fighting” and not acquiescent.

Natural disasters possess the great rousing energy of powers unleashed, of nature escaping man’s discipline, and by their very characteristics also remind man of his own psyche; for in their way such profound events always involve creativity being born, rising even from the bowels of the earth, reshaping the land and the lives of men.

Individual reactions follow this innate knowledge, for while man fears the unleashed power of nature and tries to protect himself from it, he revels in it and identifies with it at the same time.  The more “civilized” man becomes, the more his social structures and practices separate him from intimate relationship with nature – and the more natural catastrophes there will be, because underneath he senses his great need for identification with nature; he will himself conjure it into earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods, so that he can once again feel not only their energy but his own.

As nothing else can, a great encounter with the full energy of the elements puts man face to face with the incredible potency from which he springs.

For many people, a natural calamity provides their first personal experience with the realities of creaturehood’s connection with the planet.  Under such conditions men who feel a part of nothing, of no structure or family or country, can understand in a flash their comradeship with the earth, their place upon it and its energy; through suddenly recognizing that relationship they feel their own power of action.

On quite a different level, riots often serve the same purpose, where the release of energy, for whatever reasons, introduces a group of individuals to the intimate recognition that highly concentrated vitality exists.  They may not have found it earlier in their lives.

This recognition can lead them – and often does – to seize their own energy and use it in a strong creative manner.  A natural catastrophe or a riot are both energy baths, potent and highly positive in their ways despite their obvious connotations.  In your terms this in no way absolves those who start riots, for example, for they will be working within a system of conscious beliefs in which violence begets violence.  Yet even here individual differences apply.  The inciters of riots are often searching for the manifestation of energy which they do not believe they possess on their own.  They light and start psychological fires, and are as transfixed by the results as any arsonist.  If they understood and could experience power and energy in themselves they would not need such tactics.

As racial problems may be worked out on many levels, through a riot or a natural disaster, or a combination of both, according to the intensity of the situation on a psychological level; and as physical symptoms can be pleas for help and recognition, so can natural misfortunes be utilized by members of one portion of the country, or one part of the world, to obtain aid from other portions.

Obviously, many riots are quite consciously instigated.  Certainly thousands of individuals, or millions of them, do not consciously decide to bring about a hurricane, or a flood or an earthquake, in the same manner.  In the first place, on that level they do not believe such a thing possible.  While conscious beliefs have a part to play in such cases, on an individual basis the “inner work” is done just as unconsciously as the body produces physical symptoms.  The symptoms often seem to be inflicted upon the body, just as a natural disaster seems to be visited upon the body of the earth.  Sudden illnesses are thought of as frightening and unpredictable, with the sufferer a victim, perhaps, of a virus.  Sudden tornadoes or earthquakes are seen in the same light, as the result of air currents and temperature, or fault lines instead of viruses.  The basic causes of both, however, are the same.

There are as many reasons then for “earth illnesses” as there are for body illnesses.  To some extent the same can be said of wars, if you consider a war as a small infection; in the case of a world war, it would be a massive disease.  War will finally teach you to revere life.  Natural catastrophes will remind you that you cannot ignore your planet or your creaturehood.  At the same time such experiences themselves provide contact with the deepest energies of your being – even when they are being used “destructively”.

Natural disasters are brought about more at an emotional level than at a belief level, though beliefs have an important part to play, for they generate the emotions to begin with.

The overall emotional tone or feeling-level of masses of people, through their body connections with the environment, brings about the exterior  physical conditions that initiate such an onslaught of natural energy.  (Seth describes feeling-tones in the 613^th session Chapter One.)  According to the mass emotional conditions, various excesses are built up physically; these are then thrown off into the atmosphere in different form.  The ghost chemicals mentioned earlier (in the last session) play a part here, and the electromagnetic properties of emotions.  A rock in a stream will divide the water so that it must flow around the impediment.  Your emotions are quite as real as rocks.  Your collective feelings affect the flow of energy and their force – in terms of natural phenomena – can be seen quite clearly in a thunderstorm, which is the exteriorized local materialization of the inner emotional state of the people experiencing the storm.

As your conscious beliefs determine your bodily condition, and as your body is maintained at an unconscious level (though in line with your beliefs), so natural catastrophies are the result of the beliefs that give rise to emotional states which are then automatically transformed into exterior atmospheric conditions.

Then, according to your beliefs, you deal with the physical dilemma as it is presented in those terms.  You will react individually with your own purpose in mind.  Your own unique and highly private beliefs help bring about the overall emotional condition.  The pool of emotional energy into which your emotions flow is still composed of unalike charges, but generally speaking, the individual contribution of all those participating will fall into a coherent pattern that gives impetus and direction to the storm, providing the charge and the power behind it.

As mentioned earlier in this book, Ruburt and Joseph were both involved in a flood situation (in June, 1972), and so I will use that as a case in point and this specific area in particular, although the flood itself was much more far-reaching.

Locally, there were some general beliefs held: The Elmira region was economically depressed and considered to be in a backwash area of the state of New York, yet the condition was not bad enough for crisis aid.  Industry had been moving away.  People were out of work; the old routines of livelihood had been uprooted.  There was no inspiring local leadership, and a variety of different kinds of individuals felt ill at ease, depressed and forced to the wall.

Urban renewal projects ripped up the homes of the poor and destroyed older established neighborhoods.  This often involved social divisions, for the impoverished were a mixture of blacks and “lower-class” whites.  The better off sat at city councils, however, and the displaced poor were not able to afford the new structures.  Through various manipulations, all underground, they were kept out of the “better” neighborhoods.

The rich and well-to-do felt threatened, for they had changed the status quo by their insistence upon modernity and progress, thus releasing the energy of the needy.  There was movement of the middle class from the city proper into the suburbs, with a change in the tax balance, and the city merchants began to suffer.  The locality had no great sense of unity as a region, or overall pride in itself as a cultural or natural identity.

There was some racial tension, hints of impending riots that did not occur.  A very capable mayor who had been in office for some time was defeated.  Politics entered in, for many reasons not necessary to this discussion.  Politically oriented people felt that they had no really strong hold, so that effective communication with the federal government could not be expected.  In that area a sense of powerlessness grew.

Culturally the region did not have its own identity, though it has always striven for some kind of characteristic expression.  It saw government funds go past it to other sectors more economically depressed.  The people had individual dreams and hopes, and en masse these represented a regional vision of improvement at many levels.  At the same time feelings of discouragement grew.  The young and the old, the conventional and the unconventional, had small skirmishes, where some of the city fathers objected to the long-haired youths in a city park – quite trivial incidents, and yet indicative of splits of values and misunderstandings between the generations.

To one extent or another, these same problems existed in all areas (of the East Coast) that were directly involved with that particular flood.

Locally you had a depressed region not yet in the kind of crisis situation that would draw great federal funds, and highly unstable social and economic conditions coupled with a sense of hopelessness.

Instead of a flood, disastrous social upheavals could have erupted.  Because of the peculiar, unique and characteristic feeling-tones involved, however, the resulting emotional tensions were released, automatically transformed, into the atmosphere.  A natural catastrophe provided many answers.  The [Chemung] river was close by, directly in the heart of the business section [of Elmira], for example.

Again, all of this involved other areas affected by the flood.  As certain primitives do rain dances and consciously bring about rain, deliberately directing unconscious forces, so the people in these different places did the same thing quite automatically, without awareness of the process involved.

They seeded the clouds therefore through unconscious intent, and through the spontaneous release of emotional states operating biologically, so that excess hormonal and chemical reactions directly affected the atmosphere.

Some time earlier, local religious organizations had made plans for a mass revival.  Followers of a popular religious group were signed up and some considerable publicity given for the event.  Again, this was not accidental.  It was an attempt on the part of fundamental denominations to solve the problems at another level, through an influx of religious identification, conversion, and enthusiasm.

The beliefs upon which these plans were based did not correlate, however, with the mass beliefs of the populace, and so the attempt failed.  The program was based on precognitive knowledge of the flood event.  The crusade never took place for the revivalist organization was frightened away by the flood.

Many in the religious community said that the flood was the will of God at that level, or that people were being punished for their transgressions.  In its own way the flood was a religious event, for it united diverse groups of people – who did not always have the most humanistic of intents – with the community.  In a strange way it also served to isolate certain portions of the people, and to highlight their predicament in a way that no riot could.

It also humbled some, denying them the comfort of social position and belongings at least momentarily, and brought them face to face with others of varying backgrounds with whom they would not have become acquainted otherwise.

Crises such as this provide spotlighted views of reality, in which what has been hidden is suddenly only too apparent.  In many cases the poor were saved, for most of the old homes and apartments houses survived while the newer ranch-style homes could not stand the onslaught of the water.  Yet the college [Elmira College] still found itself with many of the dispossessed needy at its doorstep.  Women who had no stronger purpose than playing bridge ended up struggling for survival beside their more destitute sister.  Many of the poor who lost their living quarters discovered qualities of leadership in themselves that astonished them.

The downtown area saw its inner, always known but hidden predicament, physically materialized.  It was in a state of near ruin and needed drastic help.  City government was suddenly confronted with a reality that had little to do with conference rooms.  The crisis united the people.  The feeling of hopelessness was out in the open for all to see, and therefore action could be taken.

There were old people, laden with negative beliefs about age, who discovered great vitality and further purpose under the stimuli of survival.  There were people blinded and lost by a belief in the supreme importance of things, who found themselves with nothing left.  They realized the relative unimportance of belongings, and felt within themselves the stirring of a freedom they had not experienced since youth.

The hidden “illness” of the area was plain for everyone to see.  People came from all around to help.  For once comradeship ignored social structure.  Taken-for-granted patterns of existence had been ripped away quite effectively in a day’s time.  To one extent or another each individual involved saw himself in clear personal relationship with the nature of his life thus far, and sensed his kinship with the community.  More than this, however, each human being felt the enduring energy of nature and was reminded, even in the seeming unpredictability of the flood, of the great permanent stability upon which normal life is based.

The power of the water put each individual in touch with intimate recognition of his dependence upon nature, and made him question values taken for granted too long.  Such a crisis automatically forces each person to examine values, to make instant choices that will provide him with recognitions to which he had been blind earlier.

The flood therefore physically materialized the inner problems of the region, and at the same time released energies that had been trapped in hopelessness.

The area became a psychic and physical focus point of attention, thereby attracting other energy to it.  Each individual involved had his or her own reasons for participating, and through the mass-created framework, worked out private purposes and dilemmas.

Many past beliefs were automatically shattered in the reality of the moment.  Powers of initiation and action, long buried, were released in numberless individuals.  Federal funds were directed instantly to this region.  The spotlight was turned on to the section.  Many lonely people were forced, or rather forced themselves, into a situation where it was imperative that they relate to others.  Since this is not the main topic of this book, I cannot go deeply into the ways and means involved.

As a case in point, however, we will deal with Ruburt’s and Joseph’s experience with the flood situation, for their participation will have application to many others.