Session 860

Mass Events, Session 860

Let us return again to our discussion of impulses, in connection with probable actions.

You live surrounded by impulses.  You must make innumerable decisions in your lives – must choose careers, mates, cities of residence.  Experience can help you make decisions, but you make decisions long before you have years of experience behind you.

Overall, whether or not you are conscious of it – for some of you are, and some of you are not – your lives do have a certain psychological shape.  That shape is formed by your decisions.  You make decisions as the result of feeling impulses to do this or that, to perform in one manner or another, in response to both private considerations and in regard to demands seemingly placed upon you by others.  In the vast arena of those numberless probabilities open to you, you do of course have some guidelines.  Otherwise you would always be in a state of indecision.  Your personal impulses provide those guidelines by showing you how best to use probabilities so that you fulfill your own potential to greater advantage – and [in] so doing, provide constructive help to the society at large.

When you are taught not to trust your impulses you begin to lose your powers of decision, and to whatever extent involved in the circumstances, you begin to lose your sense of power because you are afraid to act.

Many people in a quandary of indecision write to Ruburt.  Such a correspondent might lament, for example: “I do not know what to do, or what direction to follow.  I think that I could make music my career.  I am musically gifted.  On the other hand, I feel a leaning toward psychology.  I have not attended to my music lately, since I am so confused.  Sometimes I think I could be a teacher.  In the meantime, I am meditating and hoping that the answer will come.”  Such a person is afraid to trust any one impulse enough to act upon it.  All remain equally probable activities.  Meditation must be followed by action – and true meditation is action.  Such people are afraid of making decisions, because they are afraid of their own impulses – and some of them can use meditation to dull their impulses, and actually prevent constructive action.

Impulses arise in a natural, spontaneous, constructive response to the abilities, potentials, and needs of the personality.  They are meant as directing forces.  Luckily, the child usually walks before it is old enough to be taught that impulses are wrong, and luckily the child’s natural impulses toward exploration, growth, fulfillment, action and power are strong enough to give it the necessary springboard before your life systems begin to erode its confidence.  You have physical adult bodies.  The pattern for each adult body exists in the fetus – which again, “luckily”, impulsively, followed its own direction.

No one told it that it was impossible to grow from a tiny organism to a complicated adult structure.  What tiny, spindly, threadlike, weak legs you all once had in your mother’s wombs!  Those legs now climb mountains, stride gigantic boulevards, because they followed their own impulsive shapes.  Even the atoms and molecules within them sought out their own most favorable probabilities.  And in terms that you do not understand, even those atoms and molecules made their own decisions as the result of recognizing and following those impulsive sparks toward action that are inherent in all consciousness, whatever their statuses in your terms.

Consciousness attempts to grow toward its own ideal development, which also promotes the ideal development of all organizations in which it takes part.

We are back, then, to the matter of the ideal and its actualization.  When and how do your impulses affect the world?  Again, what is the ideal, the good impulse, and why does it seem that your experience is so far from that ideal that it appears to be evil?

Chapter 9: The Ideal, The Individual, Religion, Science, And The Law

What is the law?

Why do you have laws?  Are laws made to protect life, to protect property, to establish order, to punish transgressors?  Are laws made to protect man from his own cunning and chicanery?  In short, are laws made to protect man from his own “basically criminal nature”?

Are laws made to protect man from the self as it is generally outlined by Freud and Darwin?  Man had laws, however, far earlier.  Are laws made then to protect man from his “sinful nature”?  If you were all “perfect beings”, would you need laws at all?  Do laws define what is unacceptable, or do they hint of some perhaps undifferentiated, barely sensed, more positive issues?  Are laws an attempt to limit impulses?  Do they represent society’s mass definitions of what behavior is acceptable and what is not?

What is the difference between a crime and a sin, as most of you think of those terms?  Can the state punish you for a sin?  It certainly can punish you for a crime.  Is the law a reflection of something else – a reflection of man’s inherent search toward the ideal, and its actualization?  When does the law act as a practical idealist?  Why do you sneer so when politicians show their feet of clay?

How does this concern you as an individual?  We will start with the individual.

Each individual is innately driven by good intent, however distorted that intent may become, or however twisted the means that may be taken to achieve it.

As the body wants to grow from childhood on, so all of the personality’s abilities want to grow and develop.  Each person has his [or her] own ideals, and impulses direct those ideals naturally into their own specific avenues of development – avenues meant to fulfill both the individual and his society.  Impulses provide specifications, methods, meanings, definitions.  They point toward definite avenues of expression, avenues that will provide the individual with a sense of actualization, natural power, and that will automatically provide feedback, so that the person knows he is impressing his environment for the better.

Those natural impulses, followed, will automatically lead to political and social organizations that become both tools for individual development and implements for the fulfillment of the society.  Impulses then would follow easily, in a smooth motion, from private action to social import.  When you are taught to block your impulses, and to distrust them, then your organizations become clogged.  You are left with vague idealized feelings of wanting to change the world for the better, for example – but you are denied the personal power of your own impulses that would otherwise help direct that idealism by developing your personal abilities.  You are left with an undefined, persisting, even tormenting desire to do good, to change events, but without having any means at your disposal to do so.  This leads to lingering frustration, and if your ideals are strong the situation can cause you to feel quite desperate.

You may begin to exaggerate the gulf between this generalized ideal and the specific evidences of man’s “greed and corruption” that you see so obviously about you.  You may begin to concentrate upon your own lacks, and in your growing sense of dissatisfaction it may seem to you that most men are driven by a complete lack of good intent.

You may become outraged, scandalized – or worse, filled with self-righteousness, so that you begin to attack all those with whom you do not agree, because you do not know how else to respond to your own ideals, or to your own good intent.

The job of trying to make the world better seems impossible, for it appears that you have no power, and any small private beneficial actions that you can take seem so puny in contrast to this generalized ideal that you dismiss them sardonically, and so you do not try to use your power constructively.  You do not begin with your own life, with your own job, or with your own associates.  What difference can it make to the world if you are a better salesperson, or plumber, or office worker, or car salesman, for Christ’s sake?  What can one person do?

Yet that is precisely where, first of all, you must begin to exert yourselves.  There, on your jobs and in your associations, are the places where you intersect with the world.  Your impulses directly affect the world in those relationships.

Many of you are convinced that you are not important – and while [each of] you feels that way it will seem that your actions have no effect upon the world.  You will purposefully keep your ideals generalized, thus saving yourself from the necessity of acting upon them in the one way open to you: by trusting yourself and your impulses, and impressing those that you meet in daily life with the full validity that is your own.

Most criminals act out of a sense of despair.  Many have high ideals, but ideals that have never been trusted or acted upon.  They feel powerless, so that many strike out in a self-righteous anger or vengeance against a world that they see as cynical, greedy, perverted.  They have concentrated upon the great gaps that seem to exist between their ideals of what man should be, and their ideas of what man is.

On the one hand, they believe that the self is evil, and on the other they are convinced that the self should not be so.  They react extravagantly.  They often see society as the “enemy” of good.  Many – not all, now – criminals possess the same characteristics you ascribe to heroes, except that the heroes have a means toward the expression of idealism, and specific avenues for that expression.  And many criminals find such avenues cut off completely.

I do not want to romanticize criminals, or justify their actions.  I do want to point out that few crimes are committed for “evil’s sake”, but in a distorted response to the failure of the actualization of a sensed ideal.

So we return to what is the nature of the ideal and the good.  Who defines what is right and wrong, legal or illegal.