Session 646

Personal Reality, Session 646

When you allow your emotions their natural spontaneous flow they will never engulf you, and always return you refreshed to “logical” conscious-mind thought.

It is only when you dam them up that they appear to be opposed to the intellect, or overwhelming.  It is of the utmost importance, however, that you understand the power and directing nature of your conscious mind, for otherwise you will believe yourself to be forever at the mercy of conditions and situations over which you feel you have no control.

Again, while he conscious mind is meant to direct the flow of your experience through your beliefs, and to materialize them, the actual mechanics are taken care of automatically by other portions of the self.  You must indeed trust that your new beliefs will work as completely for you as your older ones.

It may seem that your religious beliefs have little to do with your health or with your day-to-day experience.  Those of you who have left organized religions may feel relatively free from what you consider to be the adverse connotations of original sin and the like.  Yet no one is free of belief of any kind in that area.  Indeed, a belief in atheism is a belief.

In the next chapter, let us consider more closely your ideas about good and evil, the morality of the self, and examine the ways in which your ideas are reflected in your lives.

Chapter 12: Grace, Conscience, And Your Daily Experience

Thus far I have rather frequently mentioned the state of grace (in the 636^th session in Chapter Nine, for instance), because while it has many dimensions it is, practically speaking, the cause of your sense of well-being and accomplishment.  It is a condition of your existence.  Each of you may put the following in your own terms, but often it may seem as if your conscience tells you that you have “fallen out of grace”, and that some inner, mysterious, joyous sense of support no longer sustains you.  Unfortunately, conscience as you think of it is an untrustworthy guide, speaking to you through the mouths of mothers and fathers, teachers and clergy – all perhaps from distant years, and each of whom had their own ideas of what was right and wrong for you and for humanity at large.

These people of course were, and are, quite fallible.  When you are a child however adults seem godlike.  Their words fall with great weight because you are so at the mercy of their support.  As a child it was quite necessary that you accept beliefs from others before your conscious mind could form its own.

You accepted the concepts for your own reasons.  Those given beliefs represent the spiritual and mental fabric of ideas – the raw material, so to speak, with which you have to work.  In adolescence certain beliefs will be easily and immediately abandoned, or altered to fit the expanding pattern of experience.  Still other beliefs will remain, with perhaps certain elements being changed.  The beliefs may be revised to fit your new image, for example, while the main pattern remains the same.

Let us consider the idea of original sin, all of the colorful forms it may take within your body of concepts, and the ways in which these will affect your behavior and experience.

The concept itself existed long before Christianity’s initiation, and was told in various forms throughout the centuries and in all civilizations.  On the side of consciousness, it is a tale symbolically representing the birth of the conscious mind in the species as a whole, and the emergence of self-responsibility.  It also stands for the separation of the self who perceives – and therefore judges and values – from the object which is perceived and evaluated.  It represents the emergence of the conscious mind and of the strongly oriented individual self from that ground of being from which all consciousness comes.

It portrays the new consciousness seeing itself unique and separate, evolving from the tree of life and therefore able to examine its fruits, to see itself for the first time as different from others, like the serpent who crawled upon the surface of the earth.  Man came forth as a creature of distinctions.  In so doing he quite purposefully detached himself, in your terms now, from the body of his planet in a new way.  A part of him very naturally yearned for that primeval knowing unknowingness that had to be abandoned, in which all things were given – no judgements or distinctions were necessary, and all responsibilities were biologically foreordained.

He saw himself as rising above the serpent, which was a symbol of unconscious knowledge.  Yet the serpent would always mystify and attract man, even though he must stand upon its head, symbolically speaking, and rise from its knowledge.

With the birth of this consciousness came conscious responsibility for the fruits of the planet.  Man became the caretaker.