Session 873

Mass Events, Session 873

In a manner of speaking, you must be a practicing idealist if you are to remain a true idealist for long.  You must take small practical steps, often when you would prefer to take giant ones – but you must move in the direction of your ideals through action.  Otherwise you will feel disillusioned, or powerless, or sure, again, that only drastic, highly unideal methods will ever bring about the achievement of a given ideal state or situation.

Life at all levels of activity is propelled to seek ideals, whether of a biological or mental nature.  That pursuit automatically gives life its zest and natural sense excitement and drama.  Developing your own abilities, whatever they may be, exploring and expanding your experience of selfhood, gives life a sense of purpose, meaning, and creative excitement – and also adds to the understanding and development of the society and the species.

It is not enough to meditate, or to imagine in your mind some desired goal being accomplished, if you are afraid to act upon the very impulse to which your meditations and imaginings give rise.  When you do not take any steps toward an ideal position, then your life does lack excitement.  You become depressed.  You might become an idealist in reverse, so that you find a certain excitement in contemplating the occurrence of natural disasters, such as earthquakes.  You may begin to concentrate your attention on such activities.  You may contemplate the end of the world instead, but in either case you are propelled by a sense of personal frustration, and perhaps by some degree of vengeance, seeing in your mind the destruction of a world that fell so far beneath your idealized expectations.

None of the unfortunate situations discussed in this book have any power over you, however, if you understand that events do not exist by themselves.  All events and situations exist first within the mind.  At the deepest levels of communication no news is secret, whether or not you receive it by way of your technological gadgets.

Your thoughts and beliefs and desires form the events that you view on television.  If you want to change your world, you must first change your thoughts, expectations, and beliefs.  If every reader of this book changed his or her attitudes, even though not one law was rewritten, tomorrow the world would have changed for the better.  The new laws would follow.

Any new law always follows the change in belief.  It is not the other way around.

There is no civilization, no system of science, art, or philosophy, that did not originate in the mind.  When you give lip service to ideas with which you do not agree, you are betraying your own ideals, harming yourself to some extent, and society as well, insofar as you are denying yourself and society the benefit of your own understanding.  Each person is an idealist.  I simply want to help you practice your idealism in the acts of your daily life.

Each person alive helps paint the living picture of civilization as it exists at any given time, in your terms.  Be your own best artist.  Your thoughts, feelings and expectations are like the living brush strokes with which you paint your corner of life’s landscape.  If you do your best in your own life, then you are indeed helping to improve the quality of all life.  Your thoughts are as real as snowflakes or raindrops or clouds.  They mix and merge with the thoughts of others, to form man’s livingscape, providing the vast mental elements from which physical events will be formed.

As you learn to allow your impulses some freedom, you will discover their connection with your own idealized version of what life should be.  You will begin to discover that [those spontaneous urges] are as basically good and life-giving as the physical elements of the earth, that provide the impetus for all biological life.

Beyond that, however, those impulses, again, connect you with the original impulse from which all life emerges.

You will discover the natural, cooperative nature of your impulses, and you will no longer believe that they exist as contradictory or disruptive influences.  Your impulses are part of the great multi-action of being.  At deeper levels, the impulsive portion of the personality is aware of all actions upon the earth’s surface.  You are involved in a cooperative venture, in which your slightest impulse has a greater meaning, and is intimately connected with all other actions.  You have the power to change your life and the world for the better, but in doing so you must, again, reevaluate what your ideals are, and the methods that are worthy of them.  Science and religion have each contributed much to man’s development.  They must also reevaluate their ideals and methods, however.

In larger terms, there are really only scientific and religious men and women, however, and fields of science and religion would be meaningless without those individuals who believe in their positions.  As those men and women enlarge their definitions of reality, the fields of science and religion must expand.  You must be reckless in pursuit of the ideal – reckless enough to insist that each step you take along the way is worthy of that ideal.

You will understand, if you are a practicing idealist, that you cannot kill in the name of peace, for if you do so your methods will automatically undermine your ideal.  The sacredness of life and sprit are one and the same.  You cannot condemn the body without ultimately condemning the soul.  You cannot condemn the soul without ultimately condemning the body.

I would like each of my readers to be a practicing idealist, and, if you are then you will automatically be tolerant of the beliefs of others.  You will not be unkind in the pursuit of your own ideals.  You will look upon the world with a sane compassion, with some humor, and you will look for man’s basic good intent.  You will find it.  It has always been there.  You will discover your own basic good intent, and see that it has always been behind all of your actions – even in those fitted to the pursuit of your private ideals.

The end does not justify the means.  If you learn that lesson, then your good intent will allow you to act effectively and creatively in your private experience, and in your relationships with others.  Your changed beliefs will affect the mental atmosphere of your nation and of the world.

You must encounter the selves that you are now.  Acknowledge your impulses.  Explore their meanings.  Rely upon yourselves.  You will find far greater power, achievement, and virtue than you suppose.

Conclusion

You are individuals, yet each of you forms a part of the world’s reality.  Consciously, you are usually aware only of your own thoughts, but those thoughts merge with the thoughts of all others in the world.  You understand what television is.  At other levels, however, you carry a picture of the world’s news, [one] that is “picked up” by signals transmitted by the cells that compose all living matter.  When you have an impulse to act, it is your own impulse, yet it is also a part of the world’s action.  In those terms, there are inner neurological-like systems that provide constant communication through all of the world’s parts.  If you accept the fact that man is basically a good creature, then you allow free, natural motions of your own psychic nature – and that nature springs from your impulses, and not in opposition to them.

There is no event upon the face of the earth in which each of you has not played some part, however minute, because of the nature of your thoughts, beliefs, and expectations.

There is no public act in which you are not in that same manner involved.  You are intimately connected with all of the historic events of your time.

To some extent you participated in putting a man on the moon, whether or not you had any connection at all with the physical occurrence itself.  Your thoughts put a man on the moon as surely as any rocket did.  You can become involved now in a new exploration, one in which man’s civilizations and organizations change their course, reflecting his good intents and his ideals.  You can do this by seeing to it that each step you personally take is “ideally suited” to the ends you hope to achieve.  You will see to it that your methods are ideal.

If you do this, your life will automatically be provided with excitement, natural zest and creativity, and those characteristics will be reflected outward into the social, political, economic, and scientific worlds.  This is a challenge more than worth the effort.  It is a challenge that I hope each reader will accept.  The practical idealist … When all is said and done, there is no other kind.