Session 805

Mass Events, Session 805

An animal has a sense of its own biological integrity.  So does a child.  In all forms of life each individual is born into a world already provided for, with circumstances favorable to its growth and development; a world in which its own existence rests upon the equally valid existence of all other individuals and species, so that each contributes to nature’s whole.

In that environment there is a cooperative sociability of a biological nature, that is understood by the animals in their way, and taken for granted by the young of your own species.  The means are given so that the needs of the individual can be met.  The granting of those needs furthers the development of the individual, its species, and by inference all others in the fabric of nature.

Survival, of course, is important, but it is not the prime purpose of a species, in that it is a necessary means by which that species can attain its main goals.  Of course [a species] must survive to do so, but it will, however, purposefully avoid survival if the conditions are not practically favorable to maintain the quality of life or existence that is considered basic.

A species that senses a lack of this quality can in one way or another destroy its offspring – not because they could not survive otherwise, but because the quality of that survival would bring about vast suffering, for example, so distorting the nature of life as to almost make a mockery of it.  Each species seeks for the development of its abilities and capacities in a framework in which safety is a medium for action.  Danger in that context exists under certain conditions clearly known to the animals, clearly defined: The prey is known, for example, as is the hunter.  But even the natural prey of another animal does not fear the “hunter” when the hunter animal is full of belly, nor will the hunter then attack.

There are also emotional interactions among the animals that completely escape you, and biological mechanisms, so that animals felled as natural prey by other animals “understand” their part in nature.  They do not anticipate death before it happens, however.  The fatal act propels the consciousness out from the flesh, so that in those terms it is merciful.

During their lifetimes animals in their natural state enjoy their vigor and accept their worth.  They regulate their own births – and their own deaths.  The quality of their lives is such that their abilities are challenged.  They enjoy contrasts; that between rest and motion, heat and cold, being in direct contact with natural phenomena that everywhere quickens their experience.  They will migrate if necessary to seek conditions more auspicious.  They are aware of approaching natural disasters, and when possible will leave such areas.  They will protect their own, and according to circumstances and conditions they will tend their own wounded.  Even in contests between young and old males for control of a group, under natural conditions the loser is seldom killed.  Dangers are pinpointed clearly so that bodily reactions are concise.

The animal knows he has the right to exist, and a place in the fabric of nature.  This sense of biological integrity supports him.

Man, on the other hand, has more to contend with.  He must deal with beliefs and feelings often so ambiguous that no clear line of action seems possible.  The body often does not know how to react.  If you believe that the body is sinful, for example, you cannot expect to be happy, and health will most likely elude you, for your dark beliefs will blemish the psychological and biological integrity with which you were born.

The species is in a state of transition, one of many.  This one began, generally speaking, when the species tried to step apart from nature in order to develop the unique kind of consciousness that is presently your own.  That consciousness is not a finished product, however, but one meant to change, [to] evolve and develop.  Certain artificial divisions were made along the way that must now be dispensed with.

You must return, wiser creatures, to the nature that spawned you – not only as loving caretakers but as partners with the other species of the earth.  You must discover once again the spirituality of your biological heritage.  The majority of accepted beliefs – religious, scientific, and cultural – have tended to stress a sense of powerlessness, impotence, and impending doom – a picture in which man and his world is an accidental production with little meaning, isolated yet seemingly ruled by a capricious God.  Life is seen as a “valley of tears” – almost as a low-grade infection from which the soul can be cured only by death.

Religious, scientific, medical, and cultural communications stress the existence of danger, minimize the purpose of the species or of any individual member of it, or see mankind as the one erratic, half-insane member of an otherwise orderly realm of nature.  Any or all of the above beliefs are held by various systems of thought.  All of these, however, strain the individual’s biological sense of integrity, reinforce ideas of danger, and shrink the area of psychological safety that is necessary to maintain the quality possible in life.  The body’s defense systems become confused to varying degrees.

I do not intend to give a treatise upon the biological structures of the body and their interworkings, but only to add such information in that line that is not currently known, and is otherwise important to the ideas I have in mind.  I am far more concerned [with] more basic issues.  The body’s defenses will take care of themselves if they are allowed to, and if the psychological air is cleared of the true “carriers” of disease.

Chapter 2: “Mass Meditations”. “Health Plans for Disease. Epidemics of Beliefs, and Effective Mental “Inoculations” Against Despair.

While in this book I will point out some of the unfortunate areas of private mass experience, I will also provide some suggestions for effective solutions.  “You get what you concentrate upon”.  Your mental images bring about their fulfillment.  These are ancient dictums, but you must understand the ways in which your mass communications systems amplify both he “positive and the negative” issues.

I may for a while stress the ways in which individually, and as a civilization, you have undermined your own feelings of safety; yet I will also give you methods to reinforce those necessary feelings of biological integrity and spiritual comprehension that can vastly increase your spiritual and physical existence.

Your beliefs have generated feelings of unworth.  Having artificially separated yourselves from nature, you do not trust it, but often experience it as an adversary.  Your religions granted man a soul, while denying any to other species.  Your bodies then were relegated to nature and your souls to God, who stood immaculately apart from His creations.

Your scientific beliefs tell you that your entire world happened accidentally.  Your religions tell you that man is sinful: The body is not to be trusted; the senses can lead you astray.  In this maze of beliefs you have largely lost a sense of your own worth and purpose.  A generalized fear and suspicion is generated, and life too often becomes stripped of any heroic qualities.  The body cannot react to generalized threats.  It is, therefore, put under constant strain in such circumstances, and seeks to specify the danger.  It is geared to act in your protection.  It builds up strong stresses, therefore, so that on many occasions a specific disease or threat situation is “manufactured” to rid the body of a tension grown too strong to bear.

Many of my readers are familiar with private meditation, when concentration is focused in one particular area.  There are many methods and schools of thought here, but a highly suggestive state of mind results, in which spiritual, mental, and physical goals are sought.  It is impossible to meditate without a goal, for that intent is itself a purpose.  Unfortunately, many of your public health programs, and commercial statements through the various media, provide you with mass meditations of a most deplorable kind.  I refer to those in which the symptoms of various diseases are given, in which the individual is further told to examine the body with those symptoms in mind.  I also refer to those statements that just as unfortunately specify diseases for which the individual may experience no symptoms of an observable kind, but is cautioned that these disastrous physical events may be happening despite his or her feelings of good health.  Here the generalized fears fostered by religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs are often given as blueprints of diseases in which a person can find a specific focus – the individual can say: “Of course, I feel listless, or panicky, or unsafe since I have such-and-such a disease”.

The breast cancer suggestions associated with self-examinations have caused more cancers than any treatments have cured.  They involve intense meditation of the body, and adverse imagery that itself affects the bodily cells.  Public health announcements about high blood pressure themselves raise the blood pressure of millions of television viewers.

Your current ideas of preventive medicine, therefore, generate the very kind of fear that causes disease.  They all undermine the individual’s sense of bodily security and increase stress, while offering the body a specific, detailed disease plan.  But most of all, they operate to increase the individual sense of alienation from the body, and to promote a sense of powerlessness and duality.

Your “medical commercials” are equally disease-promoting.  Many, meaning to offer you relief through a product, instead actually promote the condition through suggestion, thereby generating a need for the product itself.

Headache remedies are a case in point here.  Nowhere do any medically-oriented commercial or public service announcements mention the body’s natural defenses, its integrity, vitality, or strength.  Nowhere in your television or radio matter is any emphasis put upon the healthy.  Medical statistics deal with the diseased.  Studies upon the healthy are not carried out.

More and more foods, drugs, and natural environmental conditions are being added to the list of disease-causing elements.  Different reports place dairy products, red meats, coffee, tea, eggs, and fats on the list.  Generations before you managed to subsist on many such foods, and they were in fact promoted as additive to health.  Indeed, man almost seems to be allergic to his own natural environment, a prey to the weather itself.

It is true that your food contains chemicals it did not in years past.  Yet within reason man is biologically capable of assimilating such materials, and using them to his advantage.

When man feels powerless, however, and in a state of generalized fear, he can even turn the most natural earthly ingredients against himself.  Your television, and your arts and sciences as well, add up to mass meditations.  In your culture, at least, the educated in the literary arts provide you with novels featuring antiheroes, and often portray an individual existence [as being] without meaning, in which no action is sufficient to mitigate the private puzzlement or anguish.

Many – not all – plotless novels or movies are the result of this belief in man’s powerlessness.  In that context no action is heroic, and man is everywhere the victim of an alien universe.  On the other hand, your common, unlettered, violent television dramas do indeed provide a service, for they imaginatively specify a generalized fear in a given situation, which is then resolved through drama.  Individual action counts.  The plots may be stereotyped or the acting horrendous, but in the most conventional terms the “good” man wins.

Such programs do indeed pick up the generalized fears of the nation, but they also represent folk dramas – disdained by the intelligentsia – in which the common man can portray heroic capabilities, act concisely toward a desired end, and triumph.

Those programs often portray your cultural world in exaggerated terms, and most resolution is indeed through violence.  Yet your more educated beliefs lead you to an even more pessimistic picture, in which even the violent action of men and women who are driven to the extreme serves no purpose.  The individual must feel that his actions count.  He is driven to violent action only as a last resort – and illness often is that last resort.

Your television dramas, the cops-and-robbers shows, the spy productions, are simplistic, yet they relieve tension in a way that your public health announcements cannot do.  The viewer can say: “Of course I feel panicky, unsafe, and frightened, because I live in such a violent world”.  The generalized fear can find a reason [for its existence].  But the programs at least provide a resolution dramatically set, while the public health announcements continue to generate unease.  Those mass meditations therefore reinforce negative conditions.

In the overall, then, violent shows provide a service, in that they usually promote the sense of a man’s or woman’s individual power over a given set of circumstances.  At best the public service announcements introduce the doctor as mediator: You are supposed to take your body to a doctor as you take your car to a garage, to have its parts serviced.  Your body is seen as a vehicle out of control, that needs constant scrutiny.

The doctor is like a biological mechanic, who knows your body far better than you.  Now these medical beliefs are intertwined with your economic and cultural structures, so you cannot lay the blame upon medical men or their profession alone.  Your economic well-being is also a part of your personal reality.  Many dedicated doctors use medical technology with spiritual understanding, and they are themselves the victims of the beliefs they hold.

If you do not buy headache potions, your uncle or your neighbor may be out of business and not able to support his family, and therefore lack the means to buy your wares.  You cannot disconnect one area of life from another.  En masse, your private beliefs form your cultural reality.  Your society is not a thing in itself apart from you, but the result of the individual beliefs of each person in it.  There is no stratum of society that you do not in one way or another affect.  Your religions stress sin.  Your medical profession stresses disease.  Your orderly sciences stress the chaotic and accidental theories of creation.  Your psychologies stress men as victims of their backgrounds.  Your most advanced thinkers emphasize man’s rape of the planet, or focus upon the future disaster that will overtake the world, or see men once again as victims of the stars.

Many of your resurrected occult schools speak of a recommended death of desire, the annihilation of the ego, for the transmutation of physical elements to finer levels.  In all such cases the clear spiritual and biological integrity of the individual suffers, and the precious immediacy of your moments is largely lost.

Earth life is seen as murky, a dim translation of greater existence, rather than portrayed as the unique, creative, living experience that it should be.  The body becomes disoriented, sabotaged.  The clear lines of communication between spirit and body become cluttered.  Individually and en masse, diseases and conditions result that are meant to lead you into other realizations.