Session 902

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 902

(continuing from the Session 901 Aside) You were presented – or rather you presented yourself – with a prime example of the abilities of the natural person.  I said something once to the effect that so-called miracles were simply the result of nature unimpeded, and certainly that is the case.  You are presented now, in the world, with a certain picture of a body and its activities, and that picture seems very evidential.  It seems to speak for itself.

Instead you are presented, of course, with a picture of man’s body as it reflects, and is affected by, man’s beliefs.  Doctors expect vision to [begin to] fail, for example, after the age of 30, and there are countless patient records that “prove” that such disintegration is indeed a biological fact.

Your beliefs tell you, again, that the body is primarily a mechanism – a most amazing machine, but a machine, without its own purpose, without any intent, a mindless assembly plant of assorted parts that simply happened to grow together in a certain prescribed fashion.  Science says that there is no will, yet it assigns to nature the will to survive – or rather, a will-less instinct to survive.  To that extent, it does admit that the machine of the body “intends” to insure its own survival – but a survival which has no meaning beyond itself.  And because [the body] is a machine, it is expected to decay after so much usage.

In that picture consciousness has little part to play.  In man’s very early history, however, and in your terms for centuries after the “awakening”, as described in our book, people lived in good health for much longer periods of time – and in certain cases they lived for several centuries.  No one yet told them that this was impossible, for one thing.  Their sense of wonder in the world, their sense of curiosity, creativity, and the vast areas of fresh mental and physical exploration, kept them alive and strong.  For another thing, however, elders were highly necessary and respected for the information they had acquired about the world.  They were needed.  They taught the generations.

In those times, great age was a position of honor that brought along with it new responsibility and activity.  The senses did not fade in their effectiveness, and it is quite possible biologically for all kinds of regenerations of that nature to occur.

You spoke today, or this evening, about some [world] statesmen who are not young at all, and men and women who do not only achieve, but who open new horizons in their later years.  They do so because of their private capacities, and also because they are answering the world’s needs, and in ways that in many cases a younger person could not.

In your society age has almost been considered a dishonorable state.  Beliefs about the dishonor of age often cause people to make the decision – sometimes quite consciously – to bring their own lives to an end before the so-called threshold is reached.  Whenever, however, the species needs the accumulated experience of its own older members, that situation is almost instantly reversed and people live longer.

Some in your society feel that the young are kept out of life’s mainstream also, denied purposeful work, their adolescence prolonged unnecessarily.  As a consequence, some young people die for the same reason: They believe that the state of youth is somehow dishonorable.  They are cajoled, petted, treated like amusing pets sometimes, diverted with technology’s offerings but not allowed to use their energy. There were many unfortunate misuses of the old system of having a son follow in his father’s footsteps, yet the son at a young age was given meaningful work to do, and felt a part of life’s mainstream.  He was needed.

The so-called youth culture, for all of its seeming exaggerations of youth’s beauty and accomplishments, actually ended up putting down youth, for few could live up to that picture.  Often, then, both the young and the old felt left out of your culture.  Both share also the possibility of accelerated creative vitality – activity that the elder great artists, or the elder great statesmen, have always picked up and used to magnify their own abilities.  There comes a time when the experiences of the person in the world click together and form a new clearer focus, provide a new psychological framework from which his or her greatest capacities can emerge to form a new synthesis.  But in your society many people never reach that point – or those who do are not recognized for their achievements in the proper way, or for the proper reasons …

Man’s will to survive includes a sense of meaning and purpose, and a feeling for the quality of life.  You are indeed presented with an evidential picture that seems to suggest most vividly the “fact” of man’s steady deterioration, and yet you are also presented with evidence to the contrary, even in your world, if you look for it.

Your Olympics, on television, present you with evidence of the great capacity of the young human body.  The contrast between the activity of those athletes, however, and the activity of the normal young person is drastic.  You believe that the greatest training and discipline must be used to bring about such activity – but that seemingly extraordinary physical ability simply represents the inherent capacities of the human body.  In those cases, the athletes through training are finally able to give a glimpse of the body’s spontaneous abilities.  The training is necessary because it is believed necessary.

Again, in our material on suffering, I mentioned that illness serves purposes – that it has a face-saving quality in your society – so here I am speaking of the body’s own abilities.  In that light, the senses do not fade.  Age alone never brought about any loss of physical agility, or of mental ability, or of desire.  Death must come to every living person, yet the time and the means are basically up to each individual.  Meaningful work is important at any age.  You cannot content the aged entirely with hobbies any more than you can the young, but meaningful work means work that also has the exuberance of play, and it is that playful quality that contains within itself great propensities of a healing and creative nature.

In a fashion, now, your eyes improved their capacities, practically speaking, in a playful manner.  The senses want to exceed themselves.  They also learn “through experience”.  You have been painting lately.  Your eyes became more involved to that extent.  Your eyes enjoy their part in that activity, as the ears, say, enjoy hearing.  It is their purpose.  Your own desire to paint joined with and reinforced your eyes’ natural desire to see.

When [most of] you think of physical symptoms, of course, you regard your body with a deadly seriousness that to some extent impedes inner spontaneity.  You lay your limiting beliefs upon the natural person.

Your dream fits in here in its own fashion, for you see that the ship of life, so to speak, rides very swiftly and beautifully also beneath the conscious surface, traveling through the waters of the psyche … You are progressing very well at under-the-surface levels.  There were few impediments.  You had clear sailing, so to speak, and the dream was indeed meant as an inner vision of your progress.