Session 870

Mass Events, Session 870

The blueprints for “ideal” developments exist within the pool of genetic knowledge, providing the species with multitudinous avenues for fulfillment.  Those blueprints exist mentally as ideals.  They express themselves through the impulses and creativity of the species’ individual members.

Your natural athletes, for example, show through their physical expertise certain ideal body conditions.  They may personify great agility or strength or power: the individual attributes, physical ideals which are held up to others for their appreciation, and which signify, to whatever extent, abilities inherent in the species itself.

I believe that man runs the mile much quicker now than he did, say, thirty years ago.  Has the body’s effective speed suddenly quickened?  Hardly.  Instead, mental beliefs about the body’s performance have changed, and increased physical speed resulted.  The body can indeed run faster than the current record.  I merely want to show the effect of beliefs upon physical performance.  All people do not want to be expert runners, however.  Their creativity and their ideals may lie in quite different fields of endeavor, but individual performance always adds to the knowledge of the species.  Good, better, best.  Is it bad to be a poor runner?  Of course not, unless running is your own particular avocation.  And if it is, you improve with practice.

Now your ideals, whatever they may be, initially emerge from your inner experience, and this applies to the species as a whole.  Your ideas of society and cooperation arise from both a biological and spiritual knowledge given you at birth.  Man recognized the importance of groups after observing the animal’s cooperation.  Your civilizations are your splendid, creative, exterior renditions of the inner social groupings of the cells of the body, and the cooperative processes of nature that give you physical life.  This does not mean that the intellect is any less, but that it uses its abilities to help you form physical civilizations that are the reflections of mental, spiritual, and biological inner civilizations.  You learn from nature always, and you are a part of it always.

Your searches toward understanding excellent performance in any area – your idealisms – are all spiritually and biologically ingrained.  If many of the conditions we have mentioned in this book are less than ideal in your society, then you can as an individual begin to change those situations.  You do this by accepting the rightness of your personhood.  You do this by discarding ideas of unworthiness and powerlessness, no matter what their sources.  You do this by beginning to observe your own impulses, by trusting your own direction.  You start wherever you are, today.

You do not dwell upon the unfortunate conditions in your environment, but you do take steps in your own life to express your ideals in whatever way is given.  Those ways are multitudinous.

Generally speaking, for example, if you are seriously worried about a physical condition, go to a doctor, because your own beliefs may over-frighten you otherwise.  Begin with innocuous but annoying physical conditions, however, and try to work those out for yourself.  Try to discover why you are bothered.  When you have a headache or a simple stomach upset, or if you have a chronic, annoying but not serious condition, such as trouble with your sinuses, or if you have hay fever – in those situations, remind yourself that your body does indeed have the capacity to heal itself.

Exercise

Do the exercises in my book, The Nature of Personal Reality, to discover what conditions of a mental nature, or of psychological origin, are causing you distress.  Instead of taking an aspirin for a headache, sit down, breathe quietly, and remind yourself that you are an integral part of the universe.  Allow yourself to feel a sense of belonging with nature.  Such an exercise can often relieve a headache in no time.  But each experience will allow you to build up a sense of trust in your own body’s processes.

Examine the literature that you read, the television programs that you watch, and tell yourself to ignore those indications given of the body’s weaknesses.  Tell yourself to ignore literature or programs that speak authoritatively about the species’ “killer instincts”.  Make an effort to free your intellect of such hampering beliefs.  Take a chance on your own abilities.  If you learn to trust your basic integrity as a person, then you will be able to assess your abilities clearly, neither exaggerating them or underassessing them.

You will not feel the need, say, to “justify your existence” by exaggerating a particular gift, setting up the performance of one particular feat or art as a rigid ideal, when in fact you may be pleasantly gifted but not greatly enough endowed with a certain ability to give you the outstanding praise you think you might deserve.

On the other hand, there are many highly gifted people who continually put down their abilities, and are afraid to take one small step toward their expression.  If you accept the rightness of your life in the universe, then your ideals will be those in keeping with your nature.  They will be fairly easily given expression, so that they add to your own fulfillment and to the development of the society as well.

Your impulses are your closest communication with your inner self, because in the waking state they are the spontaneous urgings toward action, rising from that deep inner knowledge of yourself that you have in dreams.  You were born because you had the impulse to be.  The universe exists because it had the impulse to be.  There was no exterior cosmic Pied Piper, singing magical notes or playing a magical tune, urging the universe into being.  The urge to be came from within, and that urge is repeated to some extent in each impulse, each urge toward action on the part of man or molecule.  If you do not trust the nature of your impulses, then you do not trust the nature of your life, the nature of the universe, or the nature of your own being.

Any animal knows better than to distrust the nature of its own life, and so does an infant. Nature exists by virtue of faith.  The squirrels gather nuts in the faith that they will have provisions, in the faith that the next season will come, and that spring will follow winter.  Your impulses are immersed in the quality called faith, for they urge you into action in the faith [that] the moment for action exists.  Your beliefs must interact with your impulses, however, and often they can erode that great natural beneficial spontaneity that impulses can provide.

When I speak of impulses, many of you will automatically think of impulses that appear contradictory or dangerous or “evil” – and that is because you are so convinced of the basic unworthiness of your being. You have every right to question your impulses, to choose among them, to assess them, but you must be aware of them, acknowledge their existence, for they will lead you to your own true nature.  This may involve a lengthy journey for some of you, with your belief systems, for many of your impulses now are the result of the pressure caused by perfectly normal unacknowledged ones in the past.  But your impulses reflect the basic impulse of your life.  Even if they appear contradictory at any given time, overall they will be seen to form constructive patterns toward action that point more clearly towards your own clear path for fulfillment and development.

Exercise

Natural attributes show themselves quite clearly in early childhood, for example, when you are allowed greater freedom to do what you want to do.  As children, some people love to work with words, some with images, some with objects.  Some show great ability in dealing with their contemporaries, while others naturally lean toward solitude and private meditations.  Look back toward the impulsive behavior of your childhood, toward those activities that mostly pleased you.

If you painted pictures, this does not mean that you necessarily should be an artist.  Only you know the strength of those impulses – but if they are intense and consistent, then pursue them.  If you end up simply painting as a hobby, that will still enrich your life and understanding.  If your impulses lead you toward relationships with others, then do not let fears of unworthiness stand in your way.  It is very important that you express your idealism actively, to whatever extent you can, for this increases your sense of worth and power.

Such action serves as a safeguard so that you do not overemphasize the gaps that may exist in yourself or in society, between the reality and the ideal condition.  Many people want to change the world for the better, but that ideal seems so awe-inspiring that they think they can make no headway unless they perform some great acts of daring or heroism, or envision themselves in some political or religious place of power, or promote an uprising or rebellion.  The ideal seems so remote and unreachable that, again, sometimes any means, however reprehensible, eventually can seem justified.  To change the world for the better, you must begin by changing your own life.  There is no other way.

You begin by accepting your own worth as a part of the universe, and by granting every other being that same recognition.  You begin by honoring life in all of its forms.  You begin by changing your thoughts toward your contemporaries, your country, your family, your working companions.  If the ideal of loving your neighbor like yourself seems remote, you at least absolutely refrain from killing your neighbor – and your neighbor is any other person on the face of the planet.

You cannot love your neighbor, in fact, until you love yourself, and if you believe that it is wrong to love yourself, then you are indeed unable to love anyone else.

For a start, you will acknowledge your existence in the framework of nature, and to do that you must recognize the vast cooperative processes that connect each species with each other one.  If you truly use your prerogatives as an individual in your country, then you can exert far more power in normal daily living than you do now.  Every time you affirm the rightness of your own existence, you help others.  Your mental states are part of the planet’s psychic atmosphere.

Aside

Your exterior civilizations do indeed mirror and reflect the great cellular civilizations so that you try to exteriorize that kind of order and creativity.

Many of your technological advances – all of them, for that matter – are rather interpretations of the inner mechanisms of nature: sonar, radar, and so forth, as you attempt to physically or objectively reproduce the inner realities of nature.  I have mentioned civilizations often before.  But it is sometimes almost impossible to verbally describe civilizations of scent, civilizations built upon temperature variations, alphabets of color, pressure gradations – all of these highly intimate and organized, but quite outside of verbal representations.  You would have to have additional material, nonverbal, to approach an understanding of such matters.

In your lives, anything you want is possible within the contours of your natures, if only understand this is so.

Session 869

Mass Events, Session 869

A small note – for this will be a brief session – to add to your material on disease: All biological organisms know that physical life depends upon a constant transformation of consciousness and form.  In your terms, I am saying, of course, that physically death gives life. This biological knowledge is intimately acknowledged at microscopic levels.  Even your cells know that their deaths are necessary for the continuation of your physical form.

The entire orientation is strange or alien only to your conscious belief system.  In one way or another, most people are aware of a desire for death before they die – a desire they usually do not consciously acknowledge.  To a large measure, the sensations of pain are also the results of your beliefs, so that even diseases that are indeed accompanied, now, by great pain, need not be.  Obviously, I am saying that “deadly” viruses do not “think of themselves” as killers, any more than a cat does when it devours a mouse.  The mouse may die, and a cell might die as a result of the virus, but the connotations applied to such events ae also the results of beliefs.  In the greater sphere of spiritual and biological activity, the viruses are protecting life at their level, and in the capacity given them.

In one way or another, they are always invited in response to that greater rhythm of existence in which physical life is dependent upon constant transformation of consciousness and form.  Some early chapters in our latest book (Mass Events) throw light on reasons other than biological ones, for such circumstances.

The phase of death is, then, a part of life’s cycle.  I mentioned evolutionary experiments, as you think of evolution.  There is a disease you read about recently, where the skin turns leathery after intense itching – a fascinating development in which the human body tries to form a leathery-like skin that would, if the experiment continued, be flexible enough for, say, sweat pores and normal locomotion, yet tough enough to protect itself in jungle environments from the bites of many “still more dangerous” insects and snakes.  Many such experiments appear in certain states as diseases, since the conditions are obviously not normal physical ones.  To some extent, cancer also represents a kind of evolutionary experiment.  But all such instances escape you because you think of so-called evolution as finished.

Some varieties of your own species were considered by the animals as diseased animal species, so I want to broaden your concepts there.  In the entire natural scheme, and at all levels – even social or economic ones – disease always has its own creative basis.  Abnormalities of any kind in birth always represent probable versions of the species itself – and they are kept in the gene pool to provide a never-ending bank of alternatives.

There are all kinds of interrelationships.  So-called Mongoloid children, for example, are reminders of man’s purely emotional heritage, as separate from his intellectual achievements.  They often appear numerously in industrialized civilizations for that reason.

In our next book, we will try to acquaint people with the picture of their true nature as a species, as they exist independently of their belief systems.  We will hope to show man’s origin as existing in an inner environment, and emphasize the importance of dreams in “evolutionary advancement”, and as the main origin of man’s most creative achievements.

Session 868

PART FOUR: THE PRACTICING IDEALIST

Chapter 10: The Good, The Better, And The Best.  Value Fulfillment Versus Competition

Session 868

Most readers of this book can be considered idealists in one way or another by themselves or others.  Yet certainly in these pages we have presented several pictures of social and political realities that are far from ideal.  We have tried to outline for you many beliefs that undermine your private integrity as individuals, and contribute to the very definite troubles current in the mass world.

Very few people really act, again, from an evil intent.  Any unfortunate situations in the fields of medicine, science, or religion result not from any determined effort to sabotage the “idea”, but instead happen because men often believe that any means is justified in the pursuit of the ideal.

When science seems to betray you, in your society, it does so because its methods are unworthy of its intent – so unworthy and so out of line with science’s prime purpose that the methods themselves almost amount to an insidious antiscientific attitude that goes all unrecognized.  The same applies to medicine, of course, when in its worthy purpose to save life, its methods often lead to quite unworthy experimentation, so that life is destroyed for the sake of saving, say, a greater number of lives.  On the surface level, such methods appear sometimes regrettable but necessary, but the deeper implications far outdo any temporary benefits, for through such methods men lose sight of life’s sacredness, and begin to treat it contemptuously.

You will often condone quite reprehensible acts if you think they were committed for the sake of a greater good.  You have a tendency to look for outright evil, to think in terms of “the power of good and evil”, and I am quite sure that many of my readers are convinced of evil’s force.  Evil does not exist in those terms, and that is why so many seemingly idealistic people can be partners in quite reprehensible actions, while telling themselves that such acts are justified, since they are methods toward a good end.

That is why fanatics feel justified in their actions.  When you indulge in such black-and-white thinking, you treat your ideals shabbily.  Each act that is not in keeping with that ideal begins to unravel the ideal at its very core.  As I have stated [several times], if you feel unworthy, or powerless to act, and if you are idealistic, you may begin to feel that the ideal exists so far in the future that it is necessary to take steps you might not otherwise take to achieve it.  And when this happens, the ideal is always eroded.  If you want to be a true practicing idealist, then each step that you take along the way must be worthy of your goal.

In your country, the free enterprise system is immersed in strange origins.  It is based upon the democratic belief in each individual’s right to pursue a worthy and equitable life.  But that also [became] bound up with Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest, and with the belief, then, that each individual must seek his or her own good at the expense of others, and by the quite erroneous conception that all of the members of a given species are in competition with each other, and that each species is in further competition with each other species.

The “laws” of supply and demand are misconceptions based upon a quite uncomplimentary belief in man’s basic greedy nature.  In the past you treated the land in your country as if your species, being the “fittest”, had the right to survive at the expense of all other species, and at the expense of the land itself.  The ideal of the country was and is an excellent one: the right of each individual to pursue an equitable, worthy existence, with dignity.  The means, however, have helped erode that ideal, and the public interpretation of Darwin’s principles was, quite unfortunately, transferred to the economic area, and to the image of man as a political animal.

Religion and science alike denied other species any real consciousness.  When man spoke of the sacredness of life – in his more expansive moods – he referred to human life alone.  You are not in competition with other species, nor are you in any natural competition with yourselves.  Nor is the natural world in any way the result of competitiveness among species.  If that were the case, you would have no world at all.

Individually, you exist physically because of the unsurpassed cooperation that exists just biologically between your species and all others, and on deeper levels because of the cellular affiliations that exist among the cells of all species.  Value fulfillment is a psychological and physical propensity that exists in each unit of consciousness, propelling it toward its own greatest fulfillment in such a way that its individual fulfillment also adds to the best possible development on the part of each other such unit of consciousness.  This propensity operates below and within the framework of matter.  It operates above as well, but I am here concerned with the cooperative nature with which value fulfillment endows all units of consciousness within your physical world.

While you believed in competition, then competition became not only a reality but an ideal.  Children are taught to compete against each other.  The child naturally “competes” against herself and himself in an urge to outdo old performance with new.  Competition, however, has been promoted as the ideal at all levels of activity.  It is as if you must look at others to see how you are doing – and when you are taught not to trust your own abilities, then of course you need the opinions of others overmuch.  I am not speaking of any playful competition, obviously, but of a determined, rigorous, desperate, sometimes almost deadly competition, in which a person’s value is determined according to the number of individuals he or she has shunted aside.

This is carried through in economics, politics, medicine, the sciences, and even the religions.  So, I would like to reinforce the fact that life is indeed a cooperative venture, and that all the steps taken toward the ideal must of themselves be life-promoting.

Session 867

Mass Events, Session 867

I can be perplexed, and it was my perplexity that Ruburt felt, for there is indeed much information that I want to give you along certain lines.  And yet I must contend with modes of thought that are habitual to you, and those modes make it difficult for you to combine various elements of speculation.

As always, I will do the best that I can, using concepts with which you are familiar, at least to begin.  I realize that current experience may perhaps seem contradictory to some of these ideas, so bear with me.  I will, therefore, combine the idea of a disease with the idea of creativity, for the two are intimately connected.

Briefly, remember analogies I have made in the past, comparing the landscape of physical experience to the painter’s landscape – which may be dark, gloomy, filled with portents of disaster, and yet still be a work of art.  In that regard, every person paints his or her own portrait in living color – a portrait that does not simply sit in a tranquil pose at a table, but one that has the full capacity for action.  Those of you now living, say, are in the same life class.  You look about to see how your contemporaries are getting along with their portraits, and you find multitudinous varieties: tragic self-portraits, heroic self-portraits, comic self-portraits.  And all of these self-portraits are alive and interacting, and as they interact they form the planetary, mass social and political events of your world.

These portraits obviously have a biological reality.  In a manner of speaking, now, each person dips into the same supplies of paint, and so forth – which are the elements out of which your likenesses emerge.  There must be great creative leeway allowed for such portraits.  Each one interacting with each other one helps form the psychological and physical reality of the species, so you are somehow involved in the formation of a multitudinous number of portraits.  I simply want you to keep that analogy in the background.

These portraits, however, are the result of creativity so inborn and miraculous that they are created automatically – an automatic art.  At certain levels the species is always creatively embarked upon alternate versions of itself.  The overall patterns will remain.  Biological integrity is [everywhere] sustained.  What you think of as diseases, however, are quite creative elements working at different levels, and at many levels at once.

Many viruses are vital to physical existence, and in your terms, there are gradations of activity, so that only under certain conditions do viruses turn into, say, what you think of as deadly ones.  The healthiest body contains within it many so-called deadly viruses in what you may call an inactive form – inactive from your viewpoint, in that they are not causing disease.  They are, however, helping to maintain the body’s overall balance.  In a way in each body, the species settles upon a known status quo, and yet experiments creatively at many levels with cellular alterations, chromosomal variations, so that of course each body is unique.  There are kinds of gradations, say, in the lines and kinds of disease.  Certain diseases can actually strengthen the body from a prior weaker state, by calling upon the body’s full defenses.  Under certain conditions, some so-called disease states could ensure the species’ survival.

It is very difficult to explain.  In a way, some disease states help to insure the survival of the species – not by weeding out the sickly but by introducing into large numbers of individuals the conditions needed to stabilize other strains within the species that need to be checked, or to “naturally inoculate” the species against a sensed greater danger.

At the minute levels – microscopic levels – there are always some biological experiments being carried out, in a creative effort to give the species as much leeway as possible for effective action.  Your body is changed biologically by your thoughts.

Your culture has its biological effect upon the species.  I am not speaking of obvious connections in a derogatory manner, such as pollution and so forth.  If you were thinking in old terms of evolution, then I would be saying that your cultures and civilizations actually alter the chromosomal messages.  Your thoughts affect your cells, again, and they can change what are thought of as hereditary factors.  Your imaginations are intimately connected with diseases, just as your imaginations are so important in all other areas of your lives.  You form your being by imaginatively considering such-and-such a possibility, and your thoughts affect your body in that regard.  In a way, illness is a tool used on behalf of life, for people have given it social, economic, psychological, and religious connotations.  It becomes another area of activity and expression.

I have told you that at microscopic levels there is no rigid self-structure like your own.  There is identity.  A cell does not fear its own death.  Its identity has traveled back and forth from physical to nonphysical reality too often as a matter of course.

It “sings” with the quality of its own life.  It cooperates with other cells.  It affiliates itself with the body of which it is part, but in a way, it lends itself to that formation.  The dreams of the species are highly important to its survival – not just because dreaming is a biological necessity, but because in dreams the species is immersed in deeper levels of creativity, so that those actions, inventions, ideas that will be needed in the future will appear in their proper times and places.  In the old terms of evolution, I am saying that man’s evolutionary progress was also dependent upon his dreams.

Now many of the characteristics you consider human – in fact, most of them – appear to one extent or another in all other species.  It was the nature of man’s dreams, however, that was largely responsible for what you like to think of as the evolution of your species.  You learned to dream differently than other creatures.

You dreamed you spoke languages before their physical invention, of course.  It was the nature of your dreams, and your dreams’ creativity, that made you what you are, for otherwise you would have developed a mechanical-like language – had you developed one at all – that named designations, locations, and dealt with the most simple, objective reality: “I walked there.  He walks there.  The sun is hot.”  You would not have had that kind of bare statement of physical fact.  You would not have had any way of conceiving of objects that did not already exist.  You would not have had any way of imagining yourselves in novel situations.  You would not have had any overall picture of the seasons, for dreaming educated the memory and lengthened man’s attention span.  It reinforced the lessons of daily life, and was highly important in man’s progress.

Using the intellect alone, man did not simply learn through daily experience over the generations, say, that one season followed the other.  He lived too much in the moment for that.  In one season he dreamed of the others, however, and in dreams he saw himself spreading the seeds of fruits as he had seen the wind do in daily life.

His dreams reminded him that a cold season had come, and would come again.  Most of your inventions came in dreams, and, again, it is the nature of your dreams that makes you so different from other species.

The creativity of the species is also the result of your particular kind of dream specialization.  It amounts to a unique state of existence by itself, in which you combine the elements of physical and nonphysical reality.  It is almost a threshold between the two realities, and you learned to hold your physical intent long enough at that threshold so that you have a kind of brief attention span there, and use it to draw from nonphysical reality precisely those creative elements that you need.

Animals, as a rule, are less physically-oriented in their dreaming states.  They do dream of physical reality, but much more briefly than you.  Otherwise, they immerse themselves in dreams in different kinds of dreaming consciousness that I hope to explain at a later date.

Session 866

Mass Events, Session 866

Each species is endowed with emotional feelings, immersed in an interior system of value fulfillment.  Each species, again, then, is not only concerned with physical survival and the multiplication of its members, but [with] an intensification and fulfillment of those qualities that are characteristic of it.

As far as this discussion is concerned, there are biological ideals, imprinted within the chromosomes, but there are also in-built ideals much more difficult to define, that exist as, say, mental blueprints for the development of other kinds of abilities.  I use the word mental, meaning that all species possess their own kinds of interior mental life, as opposed to the physical characteristics of plants or animals with which you are familiar.  Your official views effectively close you off from the true evidence you might perceive of the cooperation that exits among the species, for example.  Nor am I speaking of an enforced cooperation – the result of “instinct” that somehow arranges the social habits of the animals; for their habits are indeed social and cooperative.

Ruburt was recently scandalized upon reading that orthodox science still does not grant man with volition.  According to its tenets, any such feeling of conscious choice is instead the reflection of the brain’s attitude at any given time.  Yet I am saying that man has free will within the framework of his existence, and that all other species do also within the frameworks of their existences.

A chicken cannot read a book.  It cannot choose to read.  The plant cannot choose to walk down the street.  The chicken and the plant can choose to live or die, however – rather important issues in the existence of any entity.  They can choose to like or dislike their environment, and to change it according to their individual circumstances.  It is fashionable to say that some scientific laws can be proven at microscopic levels, where, for example, small particles can be accelerated far beyond [their usual states].  But you quite studiously ignore that feeling exists on microscopic levels, that there can be psychological particles, much less come to the conclusion that all particles are psychological particles, with their own impetuses for development and value fulfillment.  That is why atoms join together to form matter.  They seek the fulfillment of themselves through form.  They cooperatively choose the forms that they take.

If the simplest particle is so endowed with impetus, with hidden ideals that seek fulfillment, then what about the human being?  You have the propensity to search for meaning, for love, for cooperative ventures.  You have the propensity to form dazzling mental and psychological creations, such as your arts and sciences and religions and civilizations.  Whatever errors that you have made, or gross distortions, even those exist because of your need to find meaning [in] your private existence and [in] life itself.

Any scientist who believes that life has no meaning has simply provided himself with what he thinks of as an unfailing support against life’s vicissitudes.  If he says: “Life has no meaning”, he cannot be disappointed if such is the case, for he is ensconced in a self-created cocoon that has meaning, because it provides a cushion against his deepest fears.

When a civilization does not support creativity, it begins to falter.  When it distrusts its gifted people, rather than encouraging them, a nation is at least in trouble.  Your psychologists, stressing “the norm”, made people frightened of their individual characteristics and abilities, because psychology’s norm did not fit the contours of any one human being.  It did not touch the heights or the depths of human experience.  People became afraid of their own individuality.

Ruburt today read an article about gifted children – their background and development.  Gifted children do not fit the portrait of children that is sold to parents.  The fact is that for many reasons gifted children merely show the latent quickness, mental agility, and curiosity and learning capacity, that is inherent in the species.  They are not eccentric versions of humanity at all, but instead provide a hint of mankind’s true capacities.

Your brains are not empty, but well-oiled machines ready to whirl into activity at your births.  They are provided with a propensity to learn – and the rudiments of knowledge as you understand it exists within the brain.  In those terms, now, the brain thinks before birth.  It does not simply react.  Each individual has its own unique abilities.  Some that involve relationships with others, you do not even have words for.  Parents, however, often half-disapprove of their children if they show unusual gifts.  They are afraid their children will not get along with others.  They are upset because the children do not fit the norm – but no child ever fits “the norm”.

Many adults, sensing their own abilities in one field or another, deliberately play down those abilities because they are afraid of standing out from “the masses” – or they are afraid they will be attacked by their peers.  They have been taught by religion and science alike that any kind of greatness is suspect.  Yet each person alive contains an element of greatness; and more, a desire to fulfill those inner abilities.

I am not speaking of greatness in terms of fame, or in terms of usually understood artistic or intellectual abilities alone, but also of people whose lives have the capacity for great emotional content.  I am speaking also of other natural abilities – that of dream communication, the conscious utilization of dreams and creativity in daily life.  There are dimensions of human sentiment and psychological experience, that remain latent simply because you focus your attention so closely within the idea of “the norm”.  Any unofficial experience must then remain bizarre, eccentric, outside of your main concerns, and ignored by your sciences.

Many children, for that matter, who are regarded as retarded by their teachers, are instead highly gifted.  The same also applies to disruptive children, who are overactive and put on drugs.  Their rebellion is quite natural.  Autistic children, in many cases, now, are those who have picked up the idea that the world is so unsafe that it is better not to communicate with it at all, as long as their demands or needs are being met.  When the child is fed and clothed and cared for, then it continues its behavior, and the behavior itself does serve its needs.

The child feels that it is not safe to interact with the world, however.  No one is going to deprive a child of food, and yet food can be used in such cases, in terms perhaps of treats, if the child must ask for them, or in some way indicate a choice.  Autistic children are afraid of making choices.  Some of this is often picked up from parents, so that the child expresses their own unacknowledged fears.  The autistic child [can be] highly intelligent, however.

To some extent, such a child symbolizes what happens when an individual believes that he or she is unworthy, that he or she cannot trust impulses, that choices present more problems than advantages.  That it is safer to hide abilities than it is to use them.  Life is expression.

Aside on Cancer

I will give the beginning of an answer (to my question about the relationship between the host organism and disease).  You make your own reality.  That should be your complete answer, but obviously, it is not.

First of all, if a sperm carrying cancer entered a woman’s uterus, and if she had no intentions of getting the disease, her body’s own system would make the cancer completely ineffective.  In the second place, however, referring to the article, that is not what happens to begin with – and I am somewhat at a loss to explain, simply because of certain invisible assumptions that it seems to me you must necessarily make.

I will explain as best I can, though some of what I say will certainly seem contradictory to scientific knowledge.

Though scientists might find “cancer cells”, and though it might seem that cancer is caused by a virus, cancer instead involves a relationship, say, between what you might think of as a host and parasite, in those terms – and to some extent the same applies to any disease, including smallpox, though the diseases themselves may appear to have different causes completely.  A host cell, say, is not simply attacked.  It invites attack, though I am not pleased at all with the connotations of the word “attack”.  I am trying to use words familiar to you to start.

It is not simply that a cell suddenly “relaxes its defenses” against a disease.  As easily as I can, I will try to explain.  A cell mirrors a psychological state.  A cell exists by itself, as its own entity, but also in context with all of the other cells in the body.  There are literally uncountable psychological states mixing and interchanging constantly, with the overall psychological stance being one of biological integrity: The organism holds together, maintains its functions, and so forth.

Your body is the physical mirror of your psychological state.  It is powered by the energy of the universe.  It actually springs into being in each moment.  Your mind and your body come from the same source, from universal energy.  You are powered with vitality.  You must seek meaning in your lives.  When you lose the sense of life’s meaning, for whatever reason, this is reflected in your body.  It is very difficult to separate all of this from the many connotations placed about disease, and I do not want the material to be misread.  Cancer, for example, has become the symbol for the body’s vulnerability, in current years – the proof of man’s susceptibility to the body.  It is a disease that people have when they want to die – when they are ashamed to admit that they want to die, because death seems to fly against sane behavior.  If the species struggles to survive, then how can individuals want to die?

I have mentioned before that many people have had cancer and recovered without knowing it.  In your belief system, however, it is almost imperative to see a doctor in such circumstances, for many fears are unsubstantiated, and the fear alone, found groundless, gives the person new life symbolically and physically.

In the case of your article, a woman’s cells would already have had to prepare themselves for the guest – granted that guest was cancerous, and was a sperm.  There is not an attack.  There is an acceptance, and a preparation for certain changes.

A life crisis is formed.  The “parasite”, or virus, plays its part in setting up such a psychologically-desired position.  It is an emotionally-charged position, an imminent crisis.  I am aware of thee tormenting questions involved in such issues, and also of the gap between my explanations and the daily experiences of many people.  The fact is that when death comes it is wanted; it has been chosen.

The fact is that death in its way is the culmination of life, leading toward a new birth and new experience.  The cells know this.  So does the heart.  People cannot admit that they want to die at certain times.  If they could accept the fact of their own wishes, some could even change their minds.  Many do: The psychological condition changes for the better, and the body cells are no longer amiable to the cancerous condition.

Women whose husbands have had vasectomies have themselves often resolved sexual problems that have bothered them.  Fear is reduced in that area.  Cervical cancer can involve – can involve – distortions of the growth process itself, because of the complicated distortions of belief on the woman’s part.  In a way, the very pain of cancer – of some cancers – often acts through its intensity as a reflection of the person’s belief that life is painful, tormenting.  At the same time, the pain is a reminder of feeling and sensation.

Session 863

Mass Events, Session 863

When I speak of natural law, I am not referring to the scientist’s laws of nature, such as the law of gravity, for example – which is not a law at all, but a manifestation appearing from the viewpoint of a certain level of consciousness as a result of perceptive apparatus.  Your “prejudiced perception” is also built into your instruments in that regard.

I am speaking of the inner laws of nature, that pervade existence.  What you call nature, refers of course to your particular experience with reality, but quite different kinds of manifestations are also “natural” outside of that context.  The laws of nature that I am in the process of explaining underlie all realities, then, and form a firm basis for multitudinous kinds of “natures”.  I will put these in your terms of reference, however.

Each being experiences life as if it were at life’s center.  This applies to a spider in a closet as well as to any man or woman.  This principle applies to each atom as well.  Each manifestation of consciousness comes into being feeling secure at life’s center – experiencing life through itself, aware of life through its own nature.  It comes into being with an inner impetus toward value fulfillment.  It is equipped with a feeling of safety, of security within its own environment with which it is fit to deal.  It is given the impetus toward growth and action, and filled with the desire to impress its world.

The term “value fulfillment” is very difficult to explain, but it is very important.  Obviously, it deals with the development of values – not moral values, however, but values for which you really have no adequate words.  Quite simply, these values have to do with increasing the quality of whatever life the being feels at its center.  The quality of that life is not simply to be handed down or experienced, for example, but is to be creatively added to, multiplied, in a way that has nothing to do with quantity.

In those terms, animals have values, and if the quality of their lives disintegrates beyond a certain point, the species dwindles.  We are not speaking of survival of the fittest, but the survival of life with meaning.  Life is meaning for animals.  The two are indistinguishable.

You say little, for example, if you note that spiders make webs instinctively because spiders must eat insects, and that the best web-maker will be the fittest kind of spider to survive.  It is very difficult for me to escape the sticky web of your beliefs.  The web, however, in its way represents an actualized ideal on the spider’s part – and if you will forgive the term, an artistic one as well.  It amazes the spiders that flies so kindly fall into those webs.  You might say that the spider wonders that art can be so practical.

What about the poor unsuspecting fly?  Is it then so enamored of the spider’s web that it loses all sense of caution?  For surely flies are the victims of such nefarious webby splendors.  We are into sticky stuff indeed.

For one thing, you are dealing with different kinds of consciousness than your own.  They are focused consciousnesses, surely, each one feeling itself at life’s center.  While this is the case, however, these other forms of consciousness also identify then with the source of nature from which they emerge.  In a way impossible to explain, the fly and the spider are connected, and aware of the connection.  Not as hunter and prey, but as individual participants in deeper processes.  Together they work toward a joint kind of value fulfillment, in which both are fulfilled.

There are communions of consciousness of which you are unaware.  While you believe in theories like the survival of the fittest, however, and the grand fantasies of evolution, then you put together your perceptions of the world so that they seem to bear out those theories.  You will see no value in the life of a mouse sacrificed in the laboratory, for example, and you will project claw-and-fang battles in nature, completely missing the great cooperative venture that is involved.

Men can become deranged if they believe life has no meaning.  Religion has made gross errors.  At least it held out an afterlife, a hope of salvation, and preserved – sometimes despite itself – the tradition of the heroic soul.  Science, including psychology, by what it has said, and by what it has neglected to say, has come close to a declaration that life itself is meaningless.  This is a direct contradiction of deep biological knowledge, to say nothing of spiritual truth.  It denies the meaning of biological integrity.  It denies man the practical use of those very elements that he needs as a biological creature: the feeling that he is at life’s center, that he can act safely in his environment, that he can trust himself, and that his being and his actions have meaning.

Impulses provide life’s guide to action.  If you are taught that you cannot trust your impulses, then you are set against your very physical integrity.  If you believe that your life has no meaning, then you will do anything to provide meaning, all the while acting like a mouse in one of science’s mazes – for your prime directive, so to speak, has been tampered with.

I am trying to temper my statements here, but your psychology of the past 50 years has helped create insanities by trying to reduce the great individual thrust of life that lies within each person, to a generalized mass of chaotic impulses and chemicals – a mixture, again, of Freudian and Darwinian thought, misapplied.

The most private agonies of the soul were assigned a more or less common source in man’s primitive “unconscious” drives.  The private unquelled thrusts toward creativity were seen as the unbalanced conglomeration of chemicals within a person’s most private being – a twist of perversity.  Genius was seen as a mistake of chromosomes, or the fortunate result of a man’s hatred for his father.  The meaning of life was reduced to the accidental nature of genes.  Science thought in terms of averages and statistics, and each person was supposed to fit within those realms.

To some extent, this also applies to religion in the same time period.  Churches wanted sinners galore, but shied away from saints, or any extravagant behavior that did not speak of man’s duplicity.  Suddenly people with paranoidal characteristics, as well as schizophrenics, emerged from the wallpaper of this slickly styled civilization.  The characteristics of each were duly noted.  A person who feels that life has no meaning, and that his or her life in particular has no meaning, would rather be pursued than ignored.  Even the weight of guilt is better than no feeling at all.  If the paranoid might feel that he [or she] is pursued, by the government or “ungodly powers”, then at least he feels that his life must be important: otherwise, why would others seek to destroy it?  If voices tell him he is to be destroyed, then these at least are comforting voices, for they convince him that his life must have value.

At the same time, the paranoid person can use his creative abilities in fantasies that seemingly boggle the minds of the sane – and those creative abilities have a meaning, for the fantasies, again, serve to reassure the paranoid of his worth.  If in your terms he were sane, he could not use his creative abilities, for they are always connected with life’s meaning; and sane, the paranoid is convinced that life is meaningless.  It did little good in the past for Freudian psychologists to listen to a person’s associations while maintaining an objective air, or pretending that values did not exist.  Often the person labeled schizophrenic is so frightened of his or her own energy, impulses, and feelings that these are fragmented, objectified, and seen to come from outside rather than from within.

Ideas of good and evil are exaggerated, cut off from each other.  Yet here again the creative abilities are allowed some expression.  The person does not feel able to express them otherwise.  Such people are afraid of the brunt of their own personalities.  They have been taught that energy is wrong, that power is disastrous, and that the impulses of the self are to be feared.

What protection, then, but to effectively project these outside of the self – impulse of good as well as evil – and hence effectively block organized action?

The term schizophrenia, with the authority of psychology, becomes a mass coverall in which the integrity of personal meaning is given a mass, generalized explanation.  Those who are paranoid are, unfortunately, those who most firmly believe the worst idiocies of science and religion.  The paranoid and the schizophrenic are trying to find meaning in a world they have been taught is meaningless, and their tendencies appear in lesser form throughout society.

Creativity is an in-built impetus in man, far more important than, say, what science calls the satisfaction of basic needs.  In those terms, creativity is the most basic need of all.  I am not speaking here of any obsessive need to find order – in which case, for example, a person might narrow his or her mental and physical environment – but of a powerful drive within the species for creativity, and for the fulfillment of values that are emotional and spiritual.  And if man does not find these, then the so-called basic drives toward food or shelter will not sustain him.

I am not simply saying that man does not live for bread alone.  I am saying that if man does not find meaning in life he will not live, bread or no.  He will not have the energy to seek bread, nor trust his impulse to do so.

There are natural laws, then, that guide all kinds of life, and all realities – laws of love and cooperation – and those are the basic needs of which I am speaking.

Session 862

Mass Events Session 862

The law in your country says that you are innocent until proven guilty.  In the eyes of that law, then, you are each innocent until a crime is proven against you.  There usually must also be witnesses.  There are other considerations.  Often a spouse cannot testify against the other.  Opportunity and motive must also be established.

In the world of religion, however, you are already tainted by original sin: “The mark of Cain” is symbolically upon your foreheads.  You come from a species that sinned against God.  Automatically condemned, you must do good works, or be baptized, or believe in Christ, or perform other acts in order to be saved or redeemed.

According to other religions, you may be “earthbound” by the “gross desires” of your nature, “bound to the wheel of life”, condemned to endless reincarnations until you are “purified”.  As I have said before, according to psychology and science, you are a living conglomeration of elements and chemicals, spawned by a universe without purpose, itself accidentally formed, and you are given a life in which all the “primitive and animalistic” drives of your evolutionary past ever lurk within you, awaiting expression and undermining your control.

So, dear reader, look at the law as it stands in this country with somewhat more kindly eyes than you have before – for it at least legally establishes a belief in your innocence, and for all of its failings, it protects you from the far more fanatical aspects, say, of any religion’s laws.

Religious laws deal with sin, whether or not a crime is committed, and religious concepts usually take it for granted that the individual is guilty until proven innocent.  And if you have not committed a crime in fact, then you have at least sinned in your heart – for which, of course, you must be punished.  A sin can be anything from playing cards to having a sexual fantasy.  You are sinful creatures.  How many of you believe that?

You were born with an in-built recognition of your own goodness.  You were born with an inner recognition of your rightness in the universe.  You were born with a desire to fulfill your abilities, to move and act in the world.  Those assumptions are the basis of what I will call natural law.

You are born loving.  You are born compassionate.  You are born curious about yourself and your world.  Those attributes also belong to natural law.  You are born knowing that you possess a unique, intimate sense of being that is itself, and that seeks its own fulfillment, and the fulfillment of others.  You are born seeking the actualization of the ideal.  You are born seeking to add value to the quality of life, to add characteristics, energies, abilities to life that only you can individually contribute to the world, and to attain a state of being that is uniquely yours, while adding to the value fulfillment of the world.

All of these qualities and attributes are given you by natural law. You are a cooperative species, and you are a loving one.  Your misunderstandings, your crimes, and your atrocities, real as they are, are seldom committed out of any intent to be evil, but because of severe misinterpretations about the nature of good, and the means that can be taken toward its actualization.  Most individual people know that in some inner portion of themselves.  Your societies, governments, educational systems, are all built around a firm belief in the unreliability of human nature.  “You cannot change human nature.”  Such a statement takes it for granted that man’s nature is to be greedy, a predator, a murderer at heart.  You act in accordance with your own beliefs.  You become the selves that you think you are.  Your individual beliefs become the beliefs of your society, but that is always a give-and-take.

Shortly we will begin to discuss the formation of a better kind of mass reality – a reality that can happen as more and more individuals begin to come in contact with the true nature of the self.  Then we will have less frightened people, and fewer fanatics, and each person involved can to some extent begin to see the “ideal” come into practical actualization.  This means never justify the ends.

Session 860

Mass Events, Session 860

Let us return again to our discussion of impulses, in connection with probable actions.

You live surrounded by impulses.  You must make innumerable decisions in your lives – must choose careers, mates, cities of residence.  Experience can help you make decisions, but you make decisions long before you have years of experience behind you.

Overall, whether or not you are conscious of it – for some of you are, and some of you are not – your lives do have a certain psychological shape.  That shape is formed by your decisions.  You make decisions as the result of feeling impulses to do this or that, to perform in one manner or another, in response to both private considerations and in regard to demands seemingly placed upon you by others.  In the vast arena of those numberless probabilities open to you, you do of course have some guidelines.  Otherwise you would always be in a state of indecision.  Your personal impulses provide those guidelines by showing you how best to use probabilities so that you fulfill your own potential to greater advantage – and [in] so doing, provide constructive help to the society at large.

When you are taught not to trust your impulses you begin to lose your powers of decision, and to whatever extent involved in the circumstances, you begin to lose your sense of power because you are afraid to act.

Many people in a quandary of indecision write to Ruburt.  Such a correspondent might lament, for example: “I do not know what to do, or what direction to follow.  I think that I could make music my career.  I am musically gifted.  On the other hand, I feel a leaning toward psychology.  I have not attended to my music lately, since I am so confused.  Sometimes I think I could be a teacher.  In the meantime, I am meditating and hoping that the answer will come.”  Such a person is afraid to trust any one impulse enough to act upon it.  All remain equally probable activities.  Meditation must be followed by action – and true meditation is action.  Such people are afraid of making decisions, because they are afraid of their own impulses – and some of them can use meditation to dull their impulses, and actually prevent constructive action.

Impulses arise in a natural, spontaneous, constructive response to the abilities, potentials, and needs of the personality.  They are meant as directing forces.  Luckily, the child usually walks before it is old enough to be taught that impulses are wrong, and luckily the child’s natural impulses toward exploration, growth, fulfillment, action and power are strong enough to give it the necessary springboard before your life systems begin to erode its confidence.  You have physical adult bodies.  The pattern for each adult body exists in the fetus – which again, “luckily”, impulsively, followed its own direction.

No one told it that it was impossible to grow from a tiny organism to a complicated adult structure.  What tiny, spindly, threadlike, weak legs you all once had in your mother’s wombs!  Those legs now climb mountains, stride gigantic boulevards, because they followed their own impulsive shapes.  Even the atoms and molecules within them sought out their own most favorable probabilities.  And in terms that you do not understand, even those atoms and molecules made their own decisions as the result of recognizing and following those impulsive sparks toward action that are inherent in all consciousness, whatever their statuses in your terms.

Consciousness attempts to grow toward its own ideal development, which also promotes the ideal development of all organizations in which it takes part.

We are back, then, to the matter of the ideal and its actualization.  When and how do your impulses affect the world?  Again, what is the ideal, the good impulse, and why does it seem that your experience is so far from that ideal that it appears to be evil?

Chapter 9: The Ideal, The Individual, Religion, Science, And The Law

What is the law?

Why do you have laws?  Are laws made to protect life, to protect property, to establish order, to punish transgressors?  Are laws made to protect man from his own cunning and chicanery?  In short, are laws made to protect man from his own “basically criminal nature”?

Are laws made to protect man from the self as it is generally outlined by Freud and Darwin?  Man had laws, however, far earlier.  Are laws made then to protect man from his “sinful nature”?  If you were all “perfect beings”, would you need laws at all?  Do laws define what is unacceptable, or do they hint of some perhaps undifferentiated, barely sensed, more positive issues?  Are laws an attempt to limit impulses?  Do they represent society’s mass definitions of what behavior is acceptable and what is not?

What is the difference between a crime and a sin, as most of you think of those terms?  Can the state punish you for a sin?  It certainly can punish you for a crime.  Is the law a reflection of something else – a reflection of man’s inherent search toward the ideal, and its actualization?  When does the law act as a practical idealist?  Why do you sneer so when politicians show their feet of clay?

How does this concern you as an individual?  We will start with the individual.

Each individual is innately driven by good intent, however distorted that intent may become, or however twisted the means that may be taken to achieve it.

As the body wants to grow from childhood on, so all of the personality’s abilities want to grow and develop.  Each person has his [or her] own ideals, and impulses direct those ideals naturally into their own specific avenues of development – avenues meant to fulfill both the individual and his society.  Impulses provide specifications, methods, meanings, definitions.  They point toward definite avenues of expression, avenues that will provide the individual with a sense of actualization, natural power, and that will automatically provide feedback, so that the person knows he is impressing his environment for the better.

Those natural impulses, followed, will automatically lead to political and social organizations that become both tools for individual development and implements for the fulfillment of the society.  Impulses then would follow easily, in a smooth motion, from private action to social import.  When you are taught to block your impulses, and to distrust them, then your organizations become clogged.  You are left with vague idealized feelings of wanting to change the world for the better, for example – but you are denied the personal power of your own impulses that would otherwise help direct that idealism by developing your personal abilities.  You are left with an undefined, persisting, even tormenting desire to do good, to change events, but without having any means at your disposal to do so.  This leads to lingering frustration, and if your ideals are strong the situation can cause you to feel quite desperate.

You may begin to exaggerate the gulf between this generalized ideal and the specific evidences of man’s “greed and corruption” that you see so obviously about you.  You may begin to concentrate upon your own lacks, and in your growing sense of dissatisfaction it may seem to you that most men are driven by a complete lack of good intent.

You may become outraged, scandalized – or worse, filled with self-righteousness, so that you begin to attack all those with whom you do not agree, because you do not know how else to respond to your own ideals, or to your own good intent.

The job of trying to make the world better seems impossible, for it appears that you have no power, and any small private beneficial actions that you can take seem so puny in contrast to this generalized ideal that you dismiss them sardonically, and so you do not try to use your power constructively.  You do not begin with your own life, with your own job, or with your own associates.  What difference can it make to the world if you are a better salesperson, or plumber, or office worker, or car salesman, for Christ’s sake?  What can one person do?

Yet that is precisely where, first of all, you must begin to exert yourselves.  There, on your jobs and in your associations, are the places where you intersect with the world.  Your impulses directly affect the world in those relationships.

Many of you are convinced that you are not important – and while [each of] you feels that way it will seem that your actions have no effect upon the world.  You will purposefully keep your ideals generalized, thus saving yourself from the necessity of acting upon them in the one way open to you: by trusting yourself and your impulses, and impressing those that you meet in daily life with the full validity that is your own.

Most criminals act out of a sense of despair.  Many have high ideals, but ideals that have never been trusted or acted upon.  They feel powerless, so that many strike out in a self-righteous anger or vengeance against a world that they see as cynical, greedy, perverted.  They have concentrated upon the great gaps that seem to exist between their ideals of what man should be, and their ideas of what man is.

On the one hand, they believe that the self is evil, and on the other they are convinced that the self should not be so.  They react extravagantly.  They often see society as the “enemy” of good.  Many – not all, now – criminals possess the same characteristics you ascribe to heroes, except that the heroes have a means toward the expression of idealism, and specific avenues for that expression.  And many criminals find such avenues cut off completely.

I do not want to romanticize criminals, or justify their actions.  I do want to point out that few crimes are committed for “evil’s sake”, but in a distorted response to the failure of the actualization of a sensed ideal.

So we return to what is the nature of the ideal and the good.  Who defines what is right and wrong, legal or illegal.