Session 870

Mass Events, Session 870

The blueprints for “ideal” developments exist within the pool of genetic knowledge, providing the species with multitudinous avenues for fulfillment.  Those blueprints exist mentally as ideals.  They express themselves through the impulses and creativity of the species’ individual members.

Your natural athletes, for example, show through their physical expertise certain ideal body conditions.  They may personify great agility or strength or power: the individual attributes, physical ideals which are held up to others for their appreciation, and which signify, to whatever extent, abilities inherent in the species itself.

I believe that man runs the mile much quicker now than he did, say, thirty years ago.  Has the body’s effective speed suddenly quickened?  Hardly.  Instead, mental beliefs about the body’s performance have changed, and increased physical speed resulted.  The body can indeed run faster than the current record.  I merely want to show the effect of beliefs upon physical performance.  All people do not want to be expert runners, however.  Their creativity and their ideals may lie in quite different fields of endeavor, but individual performance always adds to the knowledge of the species.  Good, better, best.  Is it bad to be a poor runner?  Of course not, unless running is your own particular avocation.  And if it is, you improve with practice.

Now your ideals, whatever they may be, initially emerge from your inner experience, and this applies to the species as a whole.  Your ideas of society and cooperation arise from both a biological and spiritual knowledge given you at birth.  Man recognized the importance of groups after observing the animal’s cooperation.  Your civilizations are your splendid, creative, exterior renditions of the inner social groupings of the cells of the body, and the cooperative processes of nature that give you physical life.  This does not mean that the intellect is any less, but that it uses its abilities to help you form physical civilizations that are the reflections of mental, spiritual, and biological inner civilizations.  You learn from nature always, and you are a part of it always.

Your searches toward understanding excellent performance in any area – your idealisms – are all spiritually and biologically ingrained.  If many of the conditions we have mentioned in this book are less than ideal in your society, then you can as an individual begin to change those situations.  You do this by accepting the rightness of your personhood.  You do this by discarding ideas of unworthiness and powerlessness, no matter what their sources.  You do this by beginning to observe your own impulses, by trusting your own direction.  You start wherever you are, today.

You do not dwell upon the unfortunate conditions in your environment, but you do take steps in your own life to express your ideals in whatever way is given.  Those ways are multitudinous.

Generally speaking, for example, if you are seriously worried about a physical condition, go to a doctor, because your own beliefs may over-frighten you otherwise.  Begin with innocuous but annoying physical conditions, however, and try to work those out for yourself.  Try to discover why you are bothered.  When you have a headache or a simple stomach upset, or if you have a chronic, annoying but not serious condition, such as trouble with your sinuses, or if you have hay fever – in those situations, remind yourself that your body does indeed have the capacity to heal itself.

Exercise

Do the exercises in my book, The Nature of Personal Reality, to discover what conditions of a mental nature, or of psychological origin, are causing you distress.  Instead of taking an aspirin for a headache, sit down, breathe quietly, and remind yourself that you are an integral part of the universe.  Allow yourself to feel a sense of belonging with nature.  Such an exercise can often relieve a headache in no time.  But each experience will allow you to build up a sense of trust in your own body’s processes.

Examine the literature that you read, the television programs that you watch, and tell yourself to ignore those indications given of the body’s weaknesses.  Tell yourself to ignore literature or programs that speak authoritatively about the species’ “killer instincts”.  Make an effort to free your intellect of such hampering beliefs.  Take a chance on your own abilities.  If you learn to trust your basic integrity as a person, then you will be able to assess your abilities clearly, neither exaggerating them or underassessing them.

You will not feel the need, say, to “justify your existence” by exaggerating a particular gift, setting up the performance of one particular feat or art as a rigid ideal, when in fact you may be pleasantly gifted but not greatly enough endowed with a certain ability to give you the outstanding praise you think you might deserve.

On the other hand, there are many highly gifted people who continually put down their abilities, and are afraid to take one small step toward their expression.  If you accept the rightness of your life in the universe, then your ideals will be those in keeping with your nature.  They will be fairly easily given expression, so that they add to your own fulfillment and to the development of the society as well.

Your impulses are your closest communication with your inner self, because in the waking state they are the spontaneous urgings toward action, rising from that deep inner knowledge of yourself that you have in dreams.  You were born because you had the impulse to be.  The universe exists because it had the impulse to be.  There was no exterior cosmic Pied Piper, singing magical notes or playing a magical tune, urging the universe into being.  The urge to be came from within, and that urge is repeated to some extent in each impulse, each urge toward action on the part of man or molecule.  If you do not trust the nature of your impulses, then you do not trust the nature of your life, the nature of the universe, or the nature of your own being.

Any animal knows better than to distrust the nature of its own life, and so does an infant. Nature exists by virtue of faith.  The squirrels gather nuts in the faith that they will have provisions, in the faith that the next season will come, and that spring will follow winter.  Your impulses are immersed in the quality called faith, for they urge you into action in the faith [that] the moment for action exists.  Your beliefs must interact with your impulses, however, and often they can erode that great natural beneficial spontaneity that impulses can provide.

When I speak of impulses, many of you will automatically think of impulses that appear contradictory or dangerous or “evil” – and that is because you are so convinced of the basic unworthiness of your being. You have every right to question your impulses, to choose among them, to assess them, but you must be aware of them, acknowledge their existence, for they will lead you to your own true nature.  This may involve a lengthy journey for some of you, with your belief systems, for many of your impulses now are the result of the pressure caused by perfectly normal unacknowledged ones in the past.  But your impulses reflect the basic impulse of your life.  Even if they appear contradictory at any given time, overall they will be seen to form constructive patterns toward action that point more clearly towards your own clear path for fulfillment and development.

Exercise

Natural attributes show themselves quite clearly in early childhood, for example, when you are allowed greater freedom to do what you want to do.  As children, some people love to work with words, some with images, some with objects.  Some show great ability in dealing with their contemporaries, while others naturally lean toward solitude and private meditations.  Look back toward the impulsive behavior of your childhood, toward those activities that mostly pleased you.

If you painted pictures, this does not mean that you necessarily should be an artist.  Only you know the strength of those impulses – but if they are intense and consistent, then pursue them.  If you end up simply painting as a hobby, that will still enrich your life and understanding.  If your impulses lead you toward relationships with others, then do not let fears of unworthiness stand in your way.  It is very important that you express your idealism actively, to whatever extent you can, for this increases your sense of worth and power.

Such action serves as a safeguard so that you do not overemphasize the gaps that may exist in yourself or in society, between the reality and the ideal condition.  Many people want to change the world for the better, but that ideal seems so awe-inspiring that they think they can make no headway unless they perform some great acts of daring or heroism, or envision themselves in some political or religious place of power, or promote an uprising or rebellion.  The ideal seems so remote and unreachable that, again, sometimes any means, however reprehensible, eventually can seem justified.  To change the world for the better, you must begin by changing your own life.  There is no other way.

You begin by accepting your own worth as a part of the universe, and by granting every other being that same recognition.  You begin by honoring life in all of its forms.  You begin by changing your thoughts toward your contemporaries, your country, your family, your working companions.  If the ideal of loving your neighbor like yourself seems remote, you at least absolutely refrain from killing your neighbor – and your neighbor is any other person on the face of the planet.

You cannot love your neighbor, in fact, until you love yourself, and if you believe that it is wrong to love yourself, then you are indeed unable to love anyone else.

For a start, you will acknowledge your existence in the framework of nature, and to do that you must recognize the vast cooperative processes that connect each species with each other one.  If you truly use your prerogatives as an individual in your country, then you can exert far more power in normal daily living than you do now.  Every time you affirm the rightness of your own existence, you help others.  Your mental states are part of the planet’s psychic atmosphere.

Aside

Your exterior civilizations do indeed mirror and reflect the great cellular civilizations so that you try to exteriorize that kind of order and creativity.

Many of your technological advances – all of them, for that matter – are rather interpretations of the inner mechanisms of nature: sonar, radar, and so forth, as you attempt to physically or objectively reproduce the inner realities of nature.  I have mentioned civilizations often before.  But it is sometimes almost impossible to verbally describe civilizations of scent, civilizations built upon temperature variations, alphabets of color, pressure gradations – all of these highly intimate and organized, but quite outside of verbal representations.  You would have to have additional material, nonverbal, to approach an understanding of such matters.

In your lives, anything you want is possible within the contours of your natures, if only understand this is so.