Mass Events Session 801

MASS EVENTS

PART ONE: THE EVENTS OF “NATURE”, EPIDEMICS AND NATURAL DISASTERS

Chapter 1: The Natural Body and Its Defenses

Session 801

You cannot begin to understand the nature of mass events of any kind unless you consider the even greater framework in which they have their existence.

A person’s private experience happens in the context of his psychological and biological status, and basically cannot be separated from his religious and philosophical beliefs and sentiments, and his cultural environment and political framework.

All of the issues form together to make a trellis of behavior.  Thorns or roses may grow therein.  That is, the individual will grow outward toward the world, encountering and forming a practical experience, traveling outward from his center in almost vine-like fashion, forming from the fabric of physical reality a conglomeration of pleasant or aesthetic, and unpleasant or prickly events.

The vine experience in this analogy is formed in quite a natural fashion from “psychic” elements that are as necessary to psychological experience as sun, air, and water are to plants.  I do not want to get too entwined in this analogy, however; but as the individual’s personal experience must be seen in the light of all of these issues, so mass events cannot be understood unless they are considered in a far greater context than usual.

The question of epidemics, for example, cannot be answered from a biological standpoint alone.  It involves great sweeping psychological attitudes on the part of many, and meets the needs and desires of those involved – needs which, in your terms, arise in a framework of religious, psychological and cultural realities that cannot be isolated from biological results.

I have thus far stayed clear of many important and vital subjects, involving mass realities, because first of all the importance of the individual was to be stressed, and his power to form his private events.  Only when the private nature of reality was emphasized sufficiently would I be ready to show how the magnification of individual reality combines and enlarges to form vast mass reactions – such as, say, the initiation of an obviously historical and cultural period; the rise or overthrow of governments; the birth of a new religion that sweeps all others before it; mass conversions; mass murders in the form of wars; the sudden sweep of deadly epidemics; the scourge of earthquakes, floods, or other disasters; the inexplicable appearance of periods of great art or architecture or technology.

I said there are no closed systems.  This also means that in world terms, events spin like electrons, affecting all psychological and psychic systems as well as biological ones.  It is true to say that each individual dies alone, for no one else can die that death.  It is also true that part of the species dies with each death, and is reborn with each birth, and that each private death takes place within the greater context of the existence of the entire species.  The death serves a purpose species-wise while it also serves the purposes of the individual, for no death comes unbidden.

An epidemic, for example, serves the purposes of each individual who is involved, while it also serves its own functions in the greater species framework.

When you consider epidemics to be the result of viruses, and emphasize their biological stances, then it seems that the solutions are obvious; You learn the nature of each virus and develop an inoculation, given [each member of] the populace a small dose of the disease so that a man’s own body will combat it, and he will become immune.

The shortsightedness of such procedures is generally overlooked because of the definite short-term advantages.  As a rule, for example, people inoculated against polio do not develop that disease.  Using such procedures, tuberculosis has been largely conquered.  There are great insidious variables operating, however, and these are caused precisely by the small framework in which such mass epidemics are considered.

In the first place, the causes are not biological.  Biology is simply the carrier of a “deadly intent”.  In the second place, there is a difference between a virus produced in the laboratory and that inhabiting the body – a difference recognized by the body but not by your laboratory instruments.

In a way, the body produces antibodies, and sets up natural immunization as a result of, say, inoculation.  But the body’s chemistry is also confused, for it “knows” it is reacting to a disease that is not a “true disease”, but a biologically counterfeit intrusion.

To that extent – and I do not mean to overstate the case – the body’s biological integrity is contaminated.  It may at the same time produce antibodies also, for example, to other “similar” diseases, and so overextend its defenses that the individual later comes down with another disease.

Now, no person becomes ill unless that illness serves a psychic or psychological reason, so many people escape such complications.  In the meantime, however, scientists and medical men find more and more viruses against which the population “must” be inoculated.  Each one is considered singly.  There is a rush to develop a new inoculation against the newest virus.  Much of this is on a predictive basis: The scientists “predict” how many people might be “attacked” by, say, a virus that has caused a given number of deaths.  Then as a preventive measure the populace is invited to the new inoculation.

Many people who would not get the disease in any case are then religiously inoculated with it.  The body is exerted to use its immune system to the utmost, and sometimes, according to the inoculation, overextended [under such] conditions.  Those individuals who have psychologically decided upon death will die in any case, of that disease or another, or of the side effects of the inoculation.

Inner reality and private experience give birth to all mass events.  Man cannot disentangle himself from the natural context of his physical life.  His culture, his religion, his psychologies, and his psychological nature together form the context within which both private and mass events occur.  This book will, then, be devoted to the nature of the great sweeping emotional, religious, or biological events that often seem to engulf the individual, or to lift him or her willy-nilly in their power.

What is the relationship between the individual and the gigantic mass motions of nature, of government, or even of religion?  What about mass conversions?  Mass hysteria?  Mass healings, mass murder, and the individual?  Those are the questions we will devote ourselves to in this book.

Dying is a biological necessity, not only for the individual, but to insure the continued vitality of the species.  Dying is a spiritual and psychological necessity, for after a while the exuberant, ever-renewed energies of the spirit can no longer be translated into flesh.

Inherently, each individual knows that he or she must die physically in order to survive spiritually and psychically.  The self outgrows the flesh.  Particularly since [the advent of Charles] Darwin’s theories, the acceptance of the fact of death has come to imply a certain kind of weakness, for is it not said that only the strong survive?

To some degree, epidemics and recognized illnesses serve the sociological purpose of providing an acceptable reason for death – a face-saving device for those who have already decided to die.  This does not mean that such individuals make a conscious decision to die, in your terms: But such decisions are often semiconscious.  It might be that those individuals feel they have fulfilled their purposes – but such decisions may also be built upon a different kind of desire for survival than those understood in Darwinian terms.

It is not understood that before life an individual decides to live.  A self is not simply the accidental personification of the body’s biological mechanism.  Each person born desires to be born.  He dies when that desire no longer operates.  No epidemic or illness or natural disaster – or stay bullet from a murderer’s gun – will kill a person who does not want to die.

The desire for life has been most flaunted, yet human psychology has seldom dealt with the quite active desire for death.  In its natural form this is not a morbid, frightened, neurotic, or cowardly attempt to escape life, but a definite, positive, “healthy” acceleration of the desire for survival, in which the individual strongly wants to leave physical life as once the child wanted to leave the parent’s home.

I am not speaking here of the desire for suicide, which involves a definite killing of the body by self-deliberate means – often of a violent nature.  Ideally this desire for death, however, would simply involve the slowing of the body’s processes, the gradual disentanglement of psyche from flesh; or in other instances, according to the individual characteristics, a sudden, natural stopping of the body’s processes.

Left alone, the self and the body are so entwined that the separation would be smooth.  The body would automatically follow the wishes of the inner self.  In the case of suicide, for example, the self is to some extent acting out of context with the body, which still has its own will to live.

I will have more to say about suicide, but I do not mean here to imply guilt on the part of a person who takes his or her own life.  In many such cases, a more natural death would have ensued in any event as the result of “diseases”.  Often, for example, a person wanting to die originally intended to experience only a portion of earth life, say childhood.  This purpose would be entwined with the parent’s intent.  Such a son or daughter might be born, for instance, through a woman who wanted to experience childbirth but who did not necessarily want to encounter the years of child-raising, for her own reasons.

Such a mother would attract a consciousness who desired, perhaps, to re-experience childhood but not adulthood, or who might teach the mother lessons sorely needed.  Such a child might naturally die at 10 or 12, or earlier.  Yet the ministrations of science might keep the child alive far longer, until such a person [begins] encountering an adulthood thrust upon him or her, so to speak.

An automobile accident, suicide, or another kind of accident might result.  The person might fall prey to an epidemic, but the smoothness of biological motion or psychological motion has been lost.  I am not here condoning suicide, for too often in your society it is the unfortunate result of conflicting beliefs – and yet it is true to say that all deaths are suicide, and all births deliberate on the part of child and parent.  To that extent, you cannot separate issues like a population explosion on the part of certain portions of the world, from epidemics, earthquakes, and other disasters.

In wars, people automatically reproduce their kind to make up for those that are killed, and when the race overproduces there will be automatic controls set upon the population.  Yet these will in all ways fit the intents and purposes of the individuals involved.