Session 628

Mass Events, Session 828

In your terms, speaking more or less historically, early man was in a more conscious relationship with Framework 2 than you are now.

As Ruburt mentioned in Psychic Politics, there are many gradations of consciousness, and as I mentioned in The Nature of the Psyche, early man used his consciousness in other ways than those you are familiar with.  He often perceived what you would call the products of the imagination as sense data, for example, more or less objectified in the physical world.

The imagination has always dealt with creativity, and as man began to settle upon a kind of consciousness that dealt with cause and effect, he no longer physically perceived the products of his imagination directly in the old manner.  He realized in those earlier times that illness, for instance, was initially as much the result of the imagination as health was, for he experienced far more directly the brilliant character of his own imagination.  The lines between imaginative and physical experience have blurred for you, and of course they have also become tempered by other beliefs and the experiences that those beliefs then engender.

I am putting this very simply here.  It is far more complicated – and yet early man, for example, became aware of the fact that no man was injured without that event first being imagined to one extent or another.  Therefore, imagined healings were utilized, in which a physical illness was imaginatively cured – and in those days the cures worked.

Regardless of your histories, those early men and women were quite healthy.  They had strong teeth and bones.  They dealt with the physical world through the purposeful use of the imagination, however, in a way now most difficult to understand.  They realized they were mortal, and must die, but their greater awareness of Framework 2 allowed them a larger identification, so they understood that death was not only a natural necessity, but also an opportunity for other kinds of experiences and development.

They felt their relationship with nature acutely, experiencing it in a far different fashion than you do yours.  They felt that it was the larger expression of their own moods and temperament, the materialization of self-events that were too vast to be contained within the flesh of any one individual or any group of individuals.  They wondered where their thoughts went after they had them, and they imagined that in one way or another those thoughts turned into the birds and rocks, the animals and trees that were themselves ever-changing.

They also felt that they were themselves, however; that as humans [they were] the manifestation of the larger expression of nature that was too splendid to be contained alone within nature’s framework, that nature needed them – that is, men – to give it another kind of voice.  When men spoke they spoke for themselves; yet because they felt so a part of the natural environment they spoke for nature also, and for all of its creatures.

Much is not understood in your interpretations.  In that world men knew that nature was balanced.  Both animals and men must die.  If a man was caught and eaten by animals, as sometimes happened, [his fellows] did not begrudge that animal its prey – at least, not in the deepest of terms.  And when they slayed other animals themselves and ate the heart, for example, it was not only to obtain the animals’ “stout hearts”, or fearlessness; but also the intent was to preserve those characteristics so that through men’s experiences each animal would continue to live to some extent.

Men in those times protected themselves against storms, and yet in the same way they did not begrudge the storm its victims.  They simply changed the alliances of their consciousnesses from the identification of self-within-the-flesh to self-within-the-storm.  Man’s and nature’s intents were largely the same, and understood as such.  Man did not fear the elements in those early times, as is now supposed.

Some of the experiences known by early man would seem quite foreign to you now.  Yet in certain forms they come down through the centuries.  Early man, again, perceived himself as himself, an individual.  He felt that nature expressed for him the vast power of his own emotions.  He projected himself out into nature, into the heavens, and imagined there were great personified forms that later turned into the god of Olympus, for example.  He was also aware of the life-force within nature’s smallest parts, however, and before sense data became so standardized he perceived his own version of those individualized consciousnesses which much later became the elementals, or small spirits.  But above all he was aware of nature’s source.

He was filled with wonder as his own consciousness ever-newly came into being.  He had not yet covered over that process with the kind of smooth continuity that your own consciousness has now achieved – so when he thought a thought he was filled with curiosity: Where had it come from?  His own consciousness, then, was forever a source of delight, its changing qualities as noticeable and apparent as the changing sky.  The relative smoothness of your own consciousness – in those terms, at least – was gained at the expense of certain other experiences, therefore, that were possible otherwise.  You could not live in your present world of time if your consciousness was as playful, curious, and creative as it was, for [then] time was also experienced differently.

It may be difficult for you to understand, but the events that you now recognize are as much the result of the realm of the imagination, as those experienced by early man when he perceived as real happenings that now you would consider hallucinatory, or purely imaginative.

It seems quite clear to you that the mass events of nature are completely outside of your domain.  You feel you have no part in nature except as you exert control over it through technology, or harm it, again through technology.  You grant that the weather has an effect upon your moods, but any deeper psychic or psychological connections between you and the elements strikes most of you as quite impossible.

You use terms like “being flooded by emotion”, however, and other very intuitive statements showing your own deeper recognition of events that quite escape you when you examine them through reason alone.  Man actually courts storms.  He seeks them out, for emotionally he understands quite well their part in his own private life, and their necessity on a physical level.  Through nature’s manifestations, particularly through its power, man senses nature’s source and his own, and knows that the power can carry him to emotional realizations that are required for his own greater spiritual and psychic developments.

Death is not an end, but a transformation of consciousness.  Nature, with its changing seasons, constantly brings you that message.  In that light, and with that understanding, nature’s disasters do not claim victims: Nature and man together act out their necessary parts in the larger framework of reality.

Your concepts about death and nature, however, force you to see man and nature as adversaries, and also program your experience of such events so that they seem to only confirm what you already believe.  As I mentioned earlier, each person caught in either an epidemic or a natural disaster will have private reasons for choosing those circumstances.  Such conditions also often involve events in which the individual senses a larger identification, however – even sometimes a renewed sense of purpose that makes no sense in ordinary terms.