Sessions 832, 833

Mass Events, Session 832

In your society, it is generally thought that a person might have a decent livelihood, a family or other close relationships, good health, and a sense of belonging if the individual is to be at all productive, happy, or content.

Better social programming, greater job opportunities, health plans or urban projects, are often considered the means that will bring fulfillment “to the masses”.  Little if anything is said about the personality’s innate need to feel that his life has purpose and meaning.  Little is said about the personality’s innate desire for drama, the kind of inner spiritual drama in which an individual can feel part of a purpose that is his own, and yet is greater than himself.

There is a need within man to feel and express heroic impulses.  His true instincts lead him spontaneously toward the desire to better the quality of his own life and that of others.  He must see himself as a force in the world.

Animals also dramatize.  They possess emotions.  They feel a part of the drama of the seasons.  They are fully alive, in those terms.  Nature in all of its varieties is so richly encountered by the animals that it becomes their equivalent of your structures of culture and civilization.  They respond to its rich nuances in ways impossible to describe, so that their “civilizations” are built up through the interweavings of sense data that you cannot possibly perceive.

They know, the animals, in a way that you cannot, that their private existences have a direct impact upon the nature of reality.  They are engaged, then.  An individual can possess wealth and health, can enjoy satisfying relationships, and even fulfilling work, and yet live a life devoid of the kind of drama of which I speak – for unless you feel that life itself has meaning, then each life must necessarily seem meaningless, and all love and beauty end only in decay.

When you believe in a universe accidentally formed, and when you think you are a member of a species accidentally spawned, then private life seems devoid of meaning, and events can seem chaotic.  Disastrous events thought to originate in a god’s wrath could at least be understood in that context, but many of you live in a subjective world in which the events of your lives appear to have no particular reason – or indeed sometimes seem to happen in direct opposition to your wishes …

What kind of events can people form when they feel powerless, when their lives seem robbed of meaning – and what mechanics lie behind those events?

Session 833

People die for a “cause” only when they have found no cause to live by.  And when it seems that the world is devoid of meaning, then some people will make a certain kind of statement through the circumstances connected with their own deaths.

We will shortly return to a discussion of such “causes”, and their relationship with the person’s feeling that life has or does not have a meaning.

For now, consider a very simple act.  You want to walk across the room and pick up a paper, for example.  That purpose is simple and direct enough.  It automatically propels your body in the proper fashions, even though you are not consciously aware of the inner mechanisms involved.  You do not imagine the existence of blocks or impediments in your way, in the form of additional furniture placed in you path by accident, fate, or design.  You make a simple straight path in the proper direction.  The act has meaning because it is something you want to do.

There are purposes not nearly as easy to describe, however, intents of a psychological nature, yearnings toward satisfactions not so easily categorized.  Man experiences ambitions, desires, likes and dislikes of a highly emotional nature – and at the same time he has intellectual beliefs about himself, his feelings, and the world.  These are the result of training, for you use your mind as you have been taught.

One person may desire fame, and even possess certain abilities that he or she wants to use, and that will indeed lead to that claim.  Such a person may also believe that fortune or fame leads to unhappiness, licentiousness, or in some other way brings about disastrous conditions.  Here we have a clear purpose to use abilities and receive acclaim.  We also have another quite opposing clear purpose: to avoid fame.

There are people who want children and mates, and have those excellent qualities that would serve them well as parents.  Some of those same individuals may be convinced that love is wrong, however, or that sex is debasing, or that children mean the end of youth.  Such persons may then find themselves breaking off good relationships with those of the other sex for no apparent reason, or forcing the other party to break with them.  Here again we have two clear purposes, but they oppose each other.

Those who believe in the ultimate meaning of their lives can withstand such pressures, and often such dilemmas, and others like them, are resolved in an adequate-enough fashion.  Disappointments, conflicts, and feelings of powerlessness can begin to make unfortunate inroads in the personalities of those who believe that life itself has little meaning.  Such people begin to imagine impediments in their paths as surely as anyone would who imagined that physical barriers were suddenly put up between them and a table they wanted to reach at the end of the room.

When you simply want to reach a destination in space, there are maps to explain the nature of the land and waterways.  When we are speaking of the psychological role of destinations, however, there is more to consider.

Once more, your body is mobilized when you want it to move.  It responds to your intent and purpose.  It is your private inner environment, psychically speaking.  Your psychological intents instantly mobilize your energies on a psychic level.  You have what I will call for now “a body of thought”, and it is that “body” that constantly springs into action at your intent.

When you want to go downtown, you know that destination exists, though you may be miles away from it.  When you want to find a mate you take it for granted that a potential mate exists, though where in space and time you do not know.  Your intent to find a mate sends out “strands of consciousness”, however, composed of desire and intent.

The organization of your feelings, beliefs, and intents directs the focus about which your physical reality is built.  This follows with impeccable spontaneity and order.  If you believe in the sinfulness of the world, for instance, then you will search out from normal sense data those facts that confirm your belief.  But beyond that, at other levels you also organize your mental world in such a way that you attract to yourself events that – again – will confirm your beliefs.

Death is a part of you, even as birth is.  Its import varies according to the individual – and in a certain fashion, death is your last chance to make a statement of import in any given life, if you feel you have not done so earlier.

Some people’s deaths are quiet periods.  Some others’ are exclamation points, so that later it can be said that the person’s death loomed almost greater in importance than the life itself.  Some people die in adolescence, filled with the flush of life’s possibilities, still half-dazzled by the glory of childhood, and ready to step with elation upon the threshold of adulthood – or so it seems.  Many such young persons prefer to die at that time, where they feel the possibilities for fulfillment are intricate and endless.  They are often idealists, who beneath it all – beneath the enthusiasm, the intelligence, and sometimes beneath extraordinary ability – still feel that life could no more than sully those abilities, dampen those spiritual winds, and darken that promise that could never be fulfilled.

This is not the reason for all such deaths by any means, but there is usually an implied statement in them so that the death seems to have an additional meaning that makes parents and contemporaries question.  Such individuals usually choose deaths with a high dramatic content, because regardless of appearances they have not been able to express the dramatic contents of their psyches in the world as it seems to be to them.  They turn their deaths into lessons for other people, forcing them to ask questions that would not be asked before.  There are also mass statements of the same kind for people come together to die, however, to seek company in death as they do in life.  People who feel powerless, and who find no cause for living, can come together then and “die for a cause” that did not give them the will or reason to live.  They will seek out others of their kind.

The inner mechanics of emotions and beliefs are complicated, but these are individuals who feel that physical life has failed them.  They are powerless in society.  They think in black and white, and conflicts between their emotions, and their beliefs about their emotions, lead them to seek some kind of shelter in a rigid belief system that will give them rules to go by.  Such systems lead to the formation of cults, and the potential members seek out a leader who will serve their purposes as surely as they seem to serve his – through an inner mechanics of which each member is at least somewhat aware.