Session 661

Personal Reality, Session 661

I am not implying that all social workers are driven by personal problems.  On the other hand, it is quite true to say that many such questions turn into challenges with a change of mind, and are then used as impetuses to affect social alterations.

In such cases the dilemma is projected outside of the self and seen as an exterior condition which can be manipulated.  Indeed, a “magical” transformation is involved.  This is not to be construed, however, as a statement that all creative acts result from individual problems or neuroses.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  Such problems projected outward can never really be solved as far as the individual is concerned, of course, since their source is not understood.

Since the source is not understood, no exterior manipulation in the social structure will be effective enough, and the person involved will see the problem personified in every issue.  Hence, even improvements in the social framework will be “invisible” to the individual’s perception – not noticed.  They will seem so minute in comparison with the problem.

The same sort of reaction occurs if you concentrate upon a personal illness, and then find any improvements insignificant because of the great focus of your attention upon the negative aspects.

A sudden conversion may completely rid an individual of physical symptoms – any kind of conversion.  Under that general term I include a strong emotional arousal and fresh emotional involvement, affiliation, or sense of belonging.  This may involve, religion, politics, art, or simply falling in love.

In all of these areas the problem, whatever its nature or cause, is in one way or another “magically” transferred to another facet of activity, projected away from the self.  Huge energy blocks are moved.  The man who has believed that he was evil may now see the world, or persons of another faith or political affiliation, as evil instead.  He then feels rid of the problem itself but is quite ready to attack it in others, and with great self-righteousness and justification.

I am making a distinction here between such conversion experience and genuine mystic understanding – which may also come in a flash of time.  Mystic enlightenment does not see an enemy, however, and there is no need for arrogance, attack, or self-justification.

Love, as it is often experienced, allows an individual to take his sense of self-worth from another for a time, and to at least momentarily let the other’s belief in his goodness supersede his own beliefs in lack or worth.  Again, I make a distinction between this and a greater love in which two individuals, knowing their own worth, are able to give and to receive.

Again, you make your own reality.  When you view the world, social groups, political groups, your friends, your private experience – these are all attracted into your realm of activity by your beliefs.  Natural hypnosis, as explained in the last chapter, leads you to seek out those situations that will confirm your beliefs, and to avoid those that threaten them.

You will often try to project a problem outward to free yourself.  If this is done the question at issue will seem forever outside of you, beyond solution, and of mass proportion.  Let us look into a situation involving a woman I will call Dineen, who telephoned Ruburt today from a Western state, and see one of the predicaments that can arise.

Dineen is a well-educated woman of middle age with several grown children, financially at ease, possessing all of the things that money can buy.  She called Ruburt, nearly in a frenzy – desperate, she said, for help.  Since she has written Ruburt several times, he was aware of the situation.  Dineen was convinced that she was being cursed, hypnotized, and had fallen under the domination of another.

She had been going from psychic to psychic, dabbling in automatic writing and seeing little of her husband, who was involved in his own business affairs.  She had been told by different “psychics” that she would be a psychic teacher, and various words and techniques had been given her to ward off the “evil” influence.

Ruburt correctly perceived the great need for a zest and excitement in this woman’s life, for initiative.  It was apparent that Dineen sat alone all day in her lovely home with nothing to do; that she was making no effort to face her situation truly, but looking to others to do it for her, and therefore reinforcing her sense of powerlessness.  She felt she had no power in the moment.

This is an abdication of the severest kind, involving both your spirituality and your biological nature; you feel trapped far more than an animal in a dire situation, and you deny yourself the ability to act.  The withheld power is itself transferred, then.  In Dineen’s case it was put onto another.  If she could not make decisions this other person could, through long-distance hypnosis, force her to act whether she wanted to or not.

Now the other individual has no power that Dineen does not possess.  Dineen heartily believes in good and evil; so, being convinced that she was at the mercy of demonical forces, she began to pray.  As Ruburt pointed out, however, the prayers themselves were merely a weak surrender to the idea that evil is so powerful.  They were not based on any real belief in that power of good, but only upon a superstitious hope that if bad forces exist, good ones must also.

Ruburt explained, after hearing about the automatic communications, that these were simply repressed elements of the subconscious finding needed outlet.  He suggested that Dineen find herself a job, stop seeing psychics, and assert her own individuality and her own responsibility for action.  Dineen believed that other people acted oddly toward her because they had all been hypnotized into doing so.  If someone frowned at her, this was the result of hypnotic suggestion.  All of this may sound exotic to some of you, and be only too real to others, but any time that you assign elements of your experience to exterior sources, you are really doing the same thing that Dineen did.

She felt that certain rituals or foods warded off this evil hypnotic suggestion.  Yet many of you take vitamins, convinced that they will save you from various diseases.  Within Dineen’s belief system she was acting quite rationally – and in your belief system you are doing the same.

You are convinced of the reality of illness.  It may not be “out to get you” as viciously as Dineen believes that evil is bent on threatening her, but the issues are the same.

If you believe that you come down with a cold every time you are in a draft, you are using natural hypnosis.  If you think that you must come and go at everyone else’s beck and call, then you are like Dineen, who believes that she must do what this “hypnotist” tells her to do.  In her case Dineen gave up the responsibility for action and initiative, yet because one must act the reasons were assigned to another.  Ruburt also pointed this out.  Dineen asked for advice from me and again Ruburt said, quite correctly, “You must learn to stop depending upon others, to use your own common sense.  You must stop trying to use one symbol against another, and look at your own life and your beliefs”.

You can project your dilemmas or your abilities outward into other avenues of activity, then, but until you realize that you form your reality and that your power resides in the moment, you will not be able to solve your problems nor utilize your strengths properly.

Dineen carefully chose the territory in which these adventures would take place.  For some time, with her children grown, she had felt alone, unnecessary, denied the structure of vital action in which she had to care for her family earlier.  And so the great energy of her being, before taken up by her children, had no outlet.

Now her life, while difficult, has its own excitement.  She is a heroine, battling cosmic forces of good and evil, important enough so that another person even wants to control her.  Even the animals seek stimuli and feel a zest for existence; so in this way Dineen, in a misguided manner, is still giving expression to a definite need of her being.

Ruburt also suggested a counselor, but until Dineen is ready to exchange the beliefs she has for others that will allow her to fulfill her own abilities, she will still be in difficulty.

Dineen is in excellent physical health, however, and is an extremely attractive woman.  She did not choose a situation in which either her health or beauty would be imperiled.  She also stayed clear of any sexual involvement outside of marriage.  She chose the psychic arena because she felt it to be out of the ordinary to begin with, and invested with all kinds of mystery.  Any difficulties encountered there would automatically have a kind of glamour and distinction.  The more she was reassured by others with the same beliefs, the deeper her involvement grew.

Each individual has what I will call a psychic territory of power.  This represents an inviolate area in which the person insists upon remaining supreme, aware of his or her uniqueness and abilities.  This psychic region will be protected at all costs, and here there is indeed immunity from all disease or lack.  Other portions of the psyche may be battlegrounds for problems, but the individual will not really feel threatened in a critical way as long as this primary territory is intact.

For all her talk of desperation, then, Dineen has chosen her field of conflict.  She will avoid any kind of disfiguration or severe health problem, which to her would be a far greater danger.  Because of different personal characteristics, another individual will hold qualities of mind, say inviolate, and work out challenges through bodily illness.  Another may choose the severest poverty, projecting into that situation his or her own unresolved conflicts.  Another may choose alcoholism.

In these cases there can be some feeling of panic if an analyst, or friend, tries to switch the areas of conflict.  For instance, the alcoholic is well acquainted with the battleground he or she has picked.  An ill person, suddenly well, has to face dilemmas that were ignored before, or personified in disease.

Dineen, denied the support of the framework she had chosen, would have to face the questions that she had projected there.  But all of the inner difficulties can be resolved by understanding that you form your own reality, and that your point of power is in the present.

The habit of not facing problems, which indeed are challenges, can be addictive.  A feeling of powerlessness in one field can be transferred to others.  When this happens through natural hypnosis, then even the psychic territory of power can be assailed.  Here the individual becomes thoroughly aroused, threatened, and realizes for the first time perhaps the nature of belief and his or her predicament.  Here you have life and death struggles in creative terms.  Some miraculous cures or change-abouts in midlife occur as a result.

All of this is intimately connected with your biological structure, which is meant to follow the conscious mind’s interpretation of reality.

As I have said before, your thoughts are reality.  They directly affect your body.  It seems that you are highly civilized people because you put your ill into hospitals where they can be cared for.  What you do, of course, is to isolate a group of people who are filled with negative beliefs about illness.  The contagion of beliefs spreads.  Patients are obviously in hospitals because they are ill.  The sick and their doctors both work on that principle.

(See the 659^th session in the last chapter; it contains references to this kind of material also.)

Women delivering children are placed in the same environment.  This may seem very humane to you, and yet the entire system is structured so that childbirth does not seem to be the result of health but of illness.

Stimuli pertaining to health are effectively blocked in such organizations.  The ill are gathered together and denied all of their normal and natural conditions, including the compensating motivations that alone would sometimes be enough to restore health if given time.

This isolation would be unfortunate enough without the application of drugs meant to help, but often given without understanding.  Loved ones are permitted to visit the sick on but certain occasions, so those who wish them well in the strongest terms, who are closest to them and who love them, are efficiently prevented from exerting any natural constructive behavior.

For all practical purposes the ill are put into prison.  They are forced to concentrate upon their condition.  All of this applies quite apart from any other dehumanizing effects, such as overcrowded conditions, the denial of human privacy, and often the negation of dignity.

The individual is made to feel powerless, at the mercy of doctors or nurses who often do not have the time or energy to be personable, or to explain his [or her] condition in terms that he can understand.  The patient is therefore forced to transfer his own sense of power to others, which further deepens his miser; this in turn reinforces the sense of powerlessness that initiated his condition.

Furthermore, the natural elements of sun, air, and earth are refused him.  The stability of familiarity is withdrawn.  Now with your set of beliefs you are indeed more or less obligated to go to hospitals in severe conditions.  I am not saying here that many doctors and nurses do not try their best to promote healing, and certainly healings occur – but they do so despite the system and not because of it.  In many cases the belief of a doctor in a person who is ill revives him and rearouses his own belief in himself.  The patient’s confidence in the doctor will then reinforce the entire medical procedure, and he may then be filled with faith in his recovery.  But as there are natural healing processes within animals, so there are in your race.

Illnesses usually represent unfaced problems, in your terms, and these dilemmas embody challenges meant to lead you to greater achievement and fulfillment.  Because body and mind operate so well together, one will attempt to cure the other, and will often succeed if left alone.  The organism has its own beliefs in health that are unconscious on your part.

You are a part of your environment.  You form it.  Yet the energy that forms you and the environment springs alive in each of you through the intersection with the physical world.  The sun makes you smile.  The smiling of itself activates pleasant memories, neurological connections, hormonal workings.  It reminds you of your creaturehood.

The old witch doctors operated within the surroundings of nature, utilizing its great healing ability, directing its practical and symbolic qualities in a creative fashion.

In your hospitals however you take your patients out of their natural environment, and often deny them the comforts of creaturehood.  There is little emotional involvement.  The senile, in their efforts to run away from the closeted rooms in sanitariums, often show far greater sanity in their way than the relative or society who imprisoned them.  For they intuitively recognize the need to be free, and they sense the lack of the mystic connection with the earth that has been denied them.  (See the 650^th session in Chapter Thirteen.)

Small hospitals on spacious grounds, with freedom for all but the bedridden to use their bodies, would far surpass what you have.  But in your system as it is set up, such an environment is impossible except for the most wealthy.

In many animal groups the sick animal isolates itself for a period of rest, in which it is also free to seek out those natural conditions most conducive to its health.  It travels to find certain herbs, or it lies in the mud or clay by certain rivers.  Often it is helped by others of its kind, but it is free.

When and if it is killed by its brothers, this is not an act of cruelty but an innate understanding that the creature can no longer operate physically without agony; a quite natural euthanasia is involved, in which the “patient” also acquiesces.  In your society such a natural death is most difficult, and because of the power structures can hardly be promoted.  No one who decides upon death is saved from it by the medical profession, however.  On deeper levels the quite normal desire for survival requires that the individual leave his or her body, in your terms, at one time or another.  When that period arrives the person knows it, and the great vitality of the spirit no longer wants to be encased by a suffering physical body.

Yet here the medical profession often takes care to see that every technological advance is brought to bear to force the self to remain within its flesh, when naturally soul and flesh would part.  There are normal interlocking mechanisms that prepare the self for death, even chemical interactions that make this easier physically – bursts of acceleration, in your terms, to propel the individual easily out of the body.  Drugs can only hamper this.

Certain kind of medications can indeed help, but those given in your hospitals simply drug the consciousness out of its own understanding, and inhibit the body mechanisms that make for an easy transition.  In your prisons you do the same thing, of course, isolating groups of people with like beliefs – denying them all natural stimuli so that a greater contagion of similar beliefs ensues.  You separate such people from the normal contact of their loved ones, and all usual conditions for growth and development.