Session 896

dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 896

A continuation of our discussion on suffering.

I feel sometimes as if I am expected to justify life’s conditions, when of course they do not need any such justification.

Your beliefs close you off from much otherwise quite-available knowledge concerning man’s psychology – knowledge that would serve to answer many questions usually asked about the reasons for suffering.  Other questions, it is true, are more difficult to answer.  Men and women are born, however, with curiosity about all sensations, and about all possible life experiences.  They are thirsty for experience of all kinds.  Their curiosity is not limited to the pretty or the mundane.

Men and women are born with a desire to push beyond the limits – to “explore where no man has ever gone before” – a bastard version of the introduction [to a famous television program], I believe.  Men are women are born with a sense of drama, a need of excitement.  Life itself is excitement.  The quietest mood rides the thrust of spectacular molecular activity.

You forget many of your quite natural inclinations, feelings, and inner fantasies as you mature into adults, because they do not fit into the picture of the kind of people, or experience, or species you have been taught to believe you are.  As a result, many of the events of your lives that are the natural extensions of those feelings appear alien, against your deepest wishes, or thrust upon you, either by outside agencies or by a mischievous subconscious.

The thoughts of children give excellent clues as to mankind’s nature, but many adults do not remember childhood thoughts except those that fit, or seem to fit, in with their beliefs about childhood.

Children play at getting killed.  They try to imagine what death is like.  They imagine what it would be like to fall from a wall like Humpty-Dumpty, or to break their necks.  They imagine tragic roles of which adults might approve.  They are often quite aware of “willing” themselves sick to get out of difficult situations – and of willing themselves well again.

They quickly learn to forget their parts in such episodes, so that later, when as adults they find themselves ill they not only forget that they caused the illness to begin with, but unfortunately they forget how to will themselves well again.

As I said, there are all ranges of suffering, and I am beginning this discussion, which I will continue now and then in between regular book dictation, in a very general manner.  In times past in particular, though the custom is not dead, men purged themselves, wore ashes and beat themselves with chains, or went hungry or otherwise deprived themselves.  They suffered, in other words, for religion’s sake.  It was not just that they believed suffering was good for the soul – a statement which can or cannot be true, incidentally, and I will go into that later – but they understood something else: The body will only take so much suffering when it releases consciousness.  So, they hoped to achieve religious ecstasy.

Religious ecstasy does not need physical suffering as a stimulus, and such a means in the overall will work against religious understanding.  Those episodes, however, represent one of the ways in which man can actively seek suffering as a means to another end, and it is beside the point to say that such activity is not natural, since it exists within nature’s framework.

Discipline is a form of applied suffering, as discipline is usually used.  People are not taught to understand the great dimensions of their own capacity for experience.  It is natural for a child to be curious about suffering, to want to know what it is, to see it – and by doing so he (or she) learns to avoid suffering that they do not want, and to understand, more importantly, the gradations of emotion and sensation that are his heritage.  [As an adult] he will not inflict pain upon others if he understands this, for he will allow himself to feel the validity of his own emotions.

If you deny yourself the direct experience of your own emotions, but muffle them, say, through too-strict discipline, then you can hurt others much more easily, for you project your deadened emotional state upon them – as in the Nazi war camps [men] followed orders, torturing other people – and you do that first of all by deadening your own sensitivity to pain, and by repressing your emotions.

Man’s vulnerability to pain helps him sympathize with others, and therefore helps him to more actively alleviate whatever unnecessary causes of pain exist in society.

That will be it for the evening.  My heartiest regards to each of you.  I have but one more point to make: Each person’s experience of a painful nature is also registered on the part of what we will call the world’s mind.  Each, say, failure, or disappointment, or unresolved problem that results in suffering, becomes a part of the world’s experience: This way or that way does not work, or this way or that way has been tried, with poor results.  So, in that way, even weaknesses or failures of suffering are resolved, or rather redeemed as adjustments are made in the light of those data.

In that regard, each person lives his or her life privately, and yet for all of humanity.  Each person tries out new challenges, new circumstances, new achievements from a unique viewpoint, for himself or herself, and for the entire mass of humanity as well.