Session 829

Mass Events, Session 829

The animals do have imagination, regardless of your current thought.  Yet man is so gifted that he directs his experience and forms his civilizations largely through the use of his imaginative abilities.

You do not understand this point clearly at all, but your social organizations, your governments – these are based upon imaginative principles.  The basis of your most intimate experience, the framework behind all of your organized structures, rests upon a reality that is not considered valid by the very institutions that are formed though its auspices.

It is now nearing Easter (on March 26), and the yearly commemoration of what is considered historic fact: the [resurrection and] ascension of Christ into heaven.  Untold millions have in one way or another commemorated that occasion through the centuries.  Private lives have merged with public sentiment and religious fervor.  There have been numberless village festivals, or intimate family gatherings, and church services performed on Easter Sundays now forgotten.  There have been bloody wars fought on the same account, and private persecutions in which those who did not agree with one or another’s religious dogmas were quite simply killed “for the good of their souls”.

There have been spiritual rebirths and regenerations – and ungodly slaughter as well, as a result of the meaning of Easter.  Blood and flesh have certainly been touched then, and lives changed in that regard.

All of those religious and political structures that you certainly recognize as valid, arising from the “event” of Christ’s ascension, existed – do exist – because of an idea.  The idea was the result of a spectacular act of the imagination that then leapt upon the historical landscape, highlighting all of the events of the time, so that they became illuminated indeed with a blessed and unearthly light.

The idea of man’s survival of death was not new.  The idea of a god’s “descent” to earth was ancient.  The old religious myths fit a different kind of people, however, and lasted for as many centuries in the past as Christianity has reached into the future.  The miraculous merging of imagination with historical time, however, became less and less synchronized, so that only rites remained and the old gods seized the imagination no longer.  The time was ripe for Christianity.

Because man has not understood the characteristics of the world of imagination, he has thus far always insisted upon turning his myths into historical fact, for he considers the factual world alone as the real one.  A man, literally of flesh and blood, must then prove beyond all doubt that each and every other [human being] survives death – by dying, of course, and then by rising, physically-perceived, into heaven.  Each man does survive death, and each woman, but only such a literal-minded species would insist upon the physical death of a god-man as “proof of the pudding”.

Again, Christ was not crucified.  The historical Christ, as he is thought of, was a man illuminated by psychic realities, touched with the infinite realization that any one given individual was, by virtue of his or her existence, a contact between All That Is and mankind.

Christ saw that in each person divinity and humanity met – and that man survived death by virtue of his existence within the divine.  Without exception, all of the horrors connected with Christianity’s name came from “following the letter rather than the spirit of the law”, or by insistence upon literal interpretations – while the spiritual, imaginative concepts beneath were ignored.

Again, man directs his existence through the use of his imagination – a feat that does distinguish him from the animals.  What connects people and separates them is the power of idea and the force of imagination.  Patriotism, family loyalty, political affiliations – the ideas behind these have the greatest practical applications in your world.  You project yourselves into time like children through freely imagining your growth.  You instantly color physical experience and nature itself with the tints of your unique imaginative processes.  Unless you think quite consistently – and deeply – the importance of the imagination quite escapes you, and yet it literally forms the world that you experience and the mass world in which you live.

The theory of evolution, for instance, is an imaginative construct, and yet through its lights some generations now have viewed their world.  It is not only that you think of yourselves differently, but you actually experience a different kind of self.  Your institutions change their aspects accordingly, so that experience fits the beliefs that you have about it.  You act in certain ways.  You view the entire universe in a fashion that did not exist before, so that imagination and belief intangibly structure your subjective experience and your objective circumstances.

The idea of a meaningless universe, however, is in itself a highly creative imaginative act.  Animals, for example, could not imagine such an idiocy, so that the theory shows the incredible accomplishment of an obviously ordered mind and intellect that can imagine itself to be the result of non-order, or chaos – [you have] a creature who is capable of “mapping” its own brain, imagining that the brain’s fantastic regulated order could emerge from a reality that itself has no meaning.  Indeed, then, the theory actually says that the ordered universe magically emerged – and evolutionists must certainly believe in a God of Chance somewhere, or in Coincidence with a capital C, for their theories would make no sense at all otherwise.

The world of the imagination is indeed your contact with your own source.  Its characteristics are the closest to those in Framework 2 that you can presently encounter.

Your experience of history, of the days of your life, is invisibly formed by those ideas that exist in imagination only, and then are projected upon the physical world.  This applies to your individual beliefs about yourself and the way you see yourself in your imagination.  You are having wars between the Jews and the Arabs and the Christians once again, because emphasis is put upon literal interpretations of spiritual truths.

In each person the imaginative world, its force and power, merges into historical reality.  In each person, the ultimate and unassailable and unquenchable power of All That Is is individualized, and dwells in time.  Man’s imagination can carry him into those other realms – but when he tries to squeeze those truths into frameworks too small, he distorts and bends inner realities so that they become jagged dogmas.

The latest growth of fundamentalist religion has arisen as countermeasure against the theories of evolution.  You have, then, an overcompensation, for in the Darwinian world there was no meaning and no laws.  There were no standards of right or wrong, so that large portions of the people felt rootless.

The [fundamentalists] returned to an authoritarian religion in which the slightest act must be regulated.  They gave release, and they are giving release, to the emotions, and are thus rebelling against scientific intellectualism.  They will see the world in black-and-white terms again, with good and evil clearly delineated in the most simplistic terms, and thus escape a slippery, thematic universe, in which man’s feelings seemed to give him no foothold at all.

Unfortunately, the fundamentalists accept literal interpretations of intuitive realities in such a way that they further narrow the channels through which their psychic abilities can flow.  The fundamental framework, in this period of time, for all of its fervor, is not rich – as for example Christianity was in the past, with its numerous saints.  It is instead a fanatical Puritan vein, peculiarly American in character, and restrictive rather than expansive, for the bursts of emotion are highly structured – that is, the emotions are limited in most areas of life, permitted only an explosive religious expression under certain conditions, when they are not so much spontaneously expresses as suddenly released from the dam of usual repression.

The imagination always seeks expression.  It is always creative, and underneath the frameworks of society it provides fresh incentives and new avenues for fulfillment, that can become harnessed through fanatical belief.  When this happens your institutions become more repressive, and violence often emerges as a result.

If you look for signs of God’s vengeance you will find them everywhere.  An avalanche or a flood or an earthquake will not be seen as a natural act of the earth’s natural creativity, but instead as a punishment from God for sin.

In evolution man’s nature is amoral, and anything goes for survival’s sake.  There is no possibility of any spiritual survival as far as most evolutionists are concerned.  The fundamentalists would rather believe in man’s inherent sinful nature, for at least their belief system provides for a framework in which he can be saved.  Christ’s message was that each man is good inherently, and is an individualized portion of the divine – and yet a civilization based upon that precept has never been attempted.  The vast social structures of Christianity were instead based upon man’s “sinful” nature – not the organizations and structures that might allow him to become good, or to obtain the goodness that Christ quite clearly perceived man already possessed.

It seems almost a sacrilege to say that man is good, when everywhere you meet contradictions, for too often man certainly appears to act as if his motives were instead those of a born killer.  You have been taught not to trust the very fabric of your being.  You cannot expect yourselves to act rationally or altruistically in any consistent manner if you believe that you are automatically degraded, or that your nature is so flawed that such performance is uncharacteristic.

You are a part of nature that has learned to make choices, a part of nature that naturally and automatically produces dreams and beliefs about which you often organize your reality.  There are many effects which you do not like, but you possess a unique kind of consciousness, in which each individual has a hand in the overall formation of a world reality, and you are participating at a level of existence in which you are learning how to transform the imaginative realm of possibilities into a more or less specific, physically experienced world.

In a way you choose from an infinite, endless, incomputable number of ideas, and sculpt these into the physical fragments that compose normal experience.  You do this in such a way that the timeless events are experienced in time, and so that they mix and merge to conform to the dimensions of your reality.  Along the way there are accomplishments that are as precious as any creatures of any kind could produce.  There are also great failures – but these are failures only in comparison with the glittering inner knowledge of the imagination that holds for you those ideals against which you judge your acts.

Those ideals are present in each individual.  They are natural inclinations toward growth and fulfillment.