Session 824

Mass Events, Session 824

In connection with the creation of the universe, and with the creation of public and private events alike, let us for a moment consider a different kind of myth.

Tonight, during a pleasant supper time, our friends Ruburt and Joseph watched a television production based upon the Cinderella fairy tale.  According to the definition I gave earlier, this fairy tale is a myth.  Surely it may seem that such a children’s tale has little to do with any serious adult discussion concerning anything so profound as the creation of the known world.  And most certainly, it may appear, no scientifically pertinent data about the nature of events can possibly be uncovered from such a source.

For one thing, [the] Cinderella [tale] has a happy ending, of course, and is therefore highly unrealistic (with irony), according to many educators, since it does not properly prepare children for life’s necessary disappointments.  Fairy godmothers are definitely a thing of the storyteller’s imagination, and many serious, earnest adults will tell you that daydreaming or wishing will get you nowhere.

In the Cinderella story, however, the heroine, though poor and of low estate, manages to attain a fulfilling and seemingly impossible goal.  Her desire to attend a spectacular ball, and meet the prince, initiates a series of magical events, none following the dictates of logic.  The fairy godmother, suddenly appearing, uses the normal objects of everyday life so that they are suddenly transformed, and we have a chariot from a pumpkin, and other transformation of a like nature.

The tale has always appealed to children because they recognize the validity behind it.  The fairy godmother is a creative personification of the personalized elements in Framework 2 – a personification therefore of the inner ego, that rises to the aid of the mortal self to grant its desires, even when the intents of the mortal self may not seem to fit into the practical framework of normal life.  When the inner ego responds in such a fashion, even the commonplace, ordinary, seemingly innocuous circumstances, suddenly become charged with a new vitality, and appear to “work for” the individual involved.  If you are reading this book you are already too old to clearly remember the constant fantasies of your early childhood.  Children however know quite well, automatically, that they have a strong hand in the creation of the events that then seem to happen to them.

They experiment very often, and quite secretly, since their elders are at the same time trying to make the children conform to a given concrete reality that is more or less already mass-produced for them.

Children experiment with the creation of joyful and frightening events, trying to ascertain for themselves the nature of their control over their own experience.  They imagine joyful and terrifying experiences.  They are in fact fascinated by the effects that their thoughts, feelings, and purposes have upon daily events.  This is a natural learning process.  If they create “bogeymen”, then they can cause them to disappear also.  If their thoughts can cause them to become ill, then there is no real reason for them to fear illness, for it is their own creation.  This learning process is nipped in the bud, however.  By the time you are adults, it certainly seems that you are a subjective being in an objective universe, at the mercy of others, and with only the most superficial control over the events of your lives.

The tale of Cinderella becomes a fantasy, a delusion or even a story about sexual awakening, in Freudian terms.  The disappointments you have faced indeed make such a tale seem to be a direct contradiction to life’s realities.  To some extent or another, however, the child in you remembers a certain sense of mastery only half realized, of power nearly grasped, then seemingly lost forever – and a dimension of existence in which dreams quite literally came true.  The child in you sensed more, of course: It sensed its own greater reality in another framework entirely, from which it had only lately emerged – yet with which it was intimately connected.  It felt itself surrounded, then, by the greater realities of Framework 2.

The child knew “that it came from somewhere else” – not by chance but by design.  The child knew that in one way or another its most intimate thoughts, dreams, and gestures were as connected with the natural world as blades of grass are to a field.  The child knew it was a unique and utterly original event or being that on the one hand was its own focus, and that on the other hand belonged to its own time and season.  In fact, children let little escape them, so that, again, they experiment constantly in an effort to discover not only the effect of their thoughts and intents and wishes upon others, but the degree to which others influence their own behavior.  To that extent, they deal rather directly with probabilities in a way quite foreign to adult behavior.

In a fashion, they make quicker deductions than adults, and often truer ones, because they are not conditioned by a past of structured memory.  Their subjective experience then brings them in rather direct contact with the methods by which events are formed.

Children understand the importance of symbols, and they use them constantly to protect themselves – not from their own reality but from the adult world.  They constantly pretend, and they quickly learn that persistent pretending in any one area will result in a physically-experienced version of the imagined activity.  They also realize that they do not possess full freedom, either, for certain pretended situations will happen in less faithful versions than the imagined ones.  Others will seem almost entirely blocked, and never materialize.

Before children are acquainted with conventional ideas of guilt and punishment, they realize that it is easier to bring about good events, through wishing, than it is to bring about unhappy ones.  The child carries with him [or her] the impetus and supporting energy provided him at birth from Framework 2, and he knows intuitively that desires conducive to his development “happen” easier than those that are not.  His natural impulses naturally lead him toward the development of his body and mind, and he is aware of a cushioning effect and support as he acts in accordance with those inner impulses.  The child is innately honest.  When he gets sick he intuitively knows the reason why, and he knows quite well that he brought about the illness.

Parents and physicians believe, instead, that the child is a victim, ill for no personal reason, but indisposed because of elements attacking him – either the outside environment, or [something] working against him from within.  The child may be told: “You have a cold because you got your feet wet”.  Or: “You caught the cold from Johnny or Sally”.  He may be told that he has a virus, so that it seems his body itself was invaded despite his will.  He learns that such beliefs are acceptable.  It is easier to go along than to be honest, particularly when honesty would often involve a kind of communication his parents might frown upon, or the expression of emotions that are quite unacceptable.

Mother’s little man or brave little girl can then stay at home, for example, courageously bearing up under an illness, with his or her behavior condoned.  The child may know that the illness is the result of feelings that the parents would consider quite cowardly, or otherwise involves emotional realities that the parents simply would not understand.  Gradually it becomes easier for the child to accept the parent’s assessment of the situation.  Little by little the fine relationship, the precise connections between psychological feelings and bodily reality, erode.

I do not want to oversimplify, and throughout this book we will add other elaborations upon such behavior.  The child who gets the mumps with a large number of classmates, however, knows he has his private reasons for joining into such a mass biological reality, and usually the adult who “falls prey” to a flu epidemic has little conscious awareness of his own reasons for such a situation.  He does not understand the mass suggestions involved, or his own reasons for accepting them.  He is usually convinced instead that his body has been invaded by a virus despite his own personal approval or disapproval.  He is therefore a victim, and his sense of personal power is eroded.

When a person recovers from such an ordeal, he [or she] usually grants his recovery to be the result of the medication he has been given.  Or he may think that he was simply lucky – but he does not grant himself to have any real power in such an affair.  The recovery seems to occur to him, as the illness seemed to happen to him.  Usually the patient cannot see that he brought about his own recovery, and was responsible for it, because he cannot admit that his own intents were responsible for his own illness.  He cannot learn from his own experience, then, and each bout of illness will appear largely incomprehensible.

Some years ago, before our sessions actually began (in late 1963) – though immediately previous – Ruburt (Jane) had an experience that he has described in his own books.

The event resulted in a scribbled manuscript unpublished, called The Physical Universe as Idea Construction.  His desire and intense intent to understand more of the nature of reality triggered the production of that fragmentary automatic manuscript.  He found himself as a young adult, at the time of the President Kennedy assassination, in a world that seemed to have no meaning.  At the same time, while conditioned by the beliefs of his generation – beliefs that still tinge our times – he held on to one supporting belief never completely lost from childhood.

His belief, illogical as it sounded when spoken, contradictory as it seemed when applied to daily life, stated that the individual somehow could perceive the nature of reality on his or her own by virtue of innate capacities that belonged to the individual by right – capacities that were a part of man’s heritage.  In other words, Ruburt felt that there was a slim chance of opening doors of knowledge that had been closed, and he decided to take that chance.

The results, appearing initially in that now-yellowed handwritten script, made him initially see that he had chosen the events of his life in one way or another, and that each person was not the victim but the creator of those events that were privately experienced or jointly encountered with others.

In that literally power-packed few hours, he also knew that the physical senses did not so much perceive concrete phenomena, but actually had a hand in the creation of events that were then perceived as actual.