Session 821

Mass Events, Session 821

You are, of course, a part of nature, and a part of nature’s source.

Growing from an infant to a full adult was probably one of the most difficult, and yet the most easy feats that you will ever accomplish in a life.  As a child you identified with your own nature.  You intuitively realized that your being was immersed in and a part of the process of growth.

No amount of intellectual information, no accumulation of facts however vast, could give you the inner knowledge necessary to accomplish the physical events involved in that growth process.  You learn to read, but the seeing itself is an accomplishment of far greater magnitude – one that seemingly happens all by itself.  It happens because each of you is, again, indeed a part of nature and of nature’s source.

In various ways your religions have always implied your relationship with nature’s source, even though they often divorced nature herself from any place of prime importance.  For religions have often hinged themselves upon one or another quite valid perception, but then distorted it, excluding anything else that did not seem to fit.  “You are children of the universe.”  This is an often-heard sentence – and yet the main point of the Christ story was not Christ’s death but his birth, and the often-stated proposition that each person was indeed “a child of the father”.

There are many later-appended references in the Bible, such as the fig tree story, in which nature is played down.  Christ’s “father” was, however, the God who was indeed aware of every sparrow that fell, who knew of every creature’s existence, whatever its species or kind.  The story of the shepherds and flocks comes much closer to Christ’s intent, where each creature looked out for the others.

The officials of the Roman Catholic Church altered many records – cleansing them, in their terms, of anything that might suggest pagan practices, or nature worship as they thought of it.  In terms of your civilization, nature and spirit became divided so that you encounter the events of your lives largely in that context.  To some degree or another, then, you must feel divorced from your bodies and from the events of nature.  The great sweeps of emotional identification with nature itself do not sustain you, therefore.  You study those processes as if you somehow stood apart from them.

To some extent your society’s beliefs allow you enough freedom so that most of you trust your bodies while they are growing toward adulthood.  Then, however, many of you no longer rely upon the processes of life within you.  Certain scientific treatises often make you believe that the attainment of your adulthood has little purpose, except to insure the further existence of the species through parenthood – when nature is then quite willing to dispense with your services.  You are quite simply told that you have no other purpose.  The species itself must then appear to have no reason except a mindless determination to exist.  The religions do insist that man has a purpose, yet in their own confusion they often speak as if that purpose must be achieved by denying the physical body in which man has his life’s existence, or by “rising above” “gross, blunted,” earthly characteristics.  In both cases man’s nature, and nature in general, take short shrift.

Such tales are myths.  They do indeed have power and strength.  In those terms they represent the darker side of myths, however – yet through their casts you presently view your world.  You will interpret the private events of your lives, and the spectacular range of history, in the light of those assumptions about reality.  They not only color your experience, but you create those events that more or less conform to those assumptions.

Those who “lose” their lives in natural disasters become victims of nature.  You see in such stories examples of meaningless deaths, and further proof of nature’s indifference to man.  You may, on the other hand, see the vengeful hand of an angry God in such instances, where the deity once again uses nature to bring man to his knees.  Man’s nature is to live and to die.  Death is not an affront to life, but means its continuation – not only inside the framework of nature as you understand it, but in terms of nature’s source.  It is, of course, natural then to die.

The natural contours of your psyche are quite aware of the inner sweep and flow of your life, and its relationship with every other creature alive.  Intuitively, each person is born with the knowledge that he or she is not only worthwhile, but fits into the context of the universe in the most precise and beautiful of fashions.  The most elegant timing is involved in each individual’s birth and death.  The exquisite play of your own inner nature in general – and that identification leads you into the deeper knowledge of your own part of nature’s source.

The myths upon which you base your lives so program your existence that often you verbally deny what you inwardly know.  When people are hurt in a natural disaster, for example, they will often profess to have no idea at all for such involvement.  They will ignore or deny the inner feelings that alone would give the event any meaning in their lives.  The reasons for such involvement would be endless, of course – all valid, yet in each and every case, man and nature in those terms would meet in an encounter that had meaning, from the largest global effects to the smallest, most private aspects of the individuals involved.  You have made certain divisions because of your myths, of course, that make this kind of explanation extremely important and difficult.  You think of rain or earthquakes as natural events, for example, while you do not consider thoughts or emotions as natural events in the same terms.  Therefore, it is difficult for you to see how there can be any valid interactions between, say, emotional states and physical ones.

You might say: “Of course, I realize that the weather affects my mood”, yet it will occur to very few of you that your moods have any effect upon the weather.  You have so concentrated upon the categorization, delineation, and exploration of the objective world that it surely seems to be “the only real one”.  It seems to exert force or pressure against you, or to impinge upon you, or at least almost to happen by itself, so that you sometimes feel powerless against it.  Your myths have given great energy to the outsideness of things.

In exasperation some of you see nature as good and enduring, filled with an innocence and joy, while on the other hand you envision man as a bastard species, a blight upon the face of the earth, a creature bound to do everything wrong regardless of any strong good intent.  Therefore, you do not trust man’s nature either.

This myth finds great value in the larger processes of nature in general, and yet sees man alone as the villain of an otherwise edifying tale.  A true identification with nature, however, would show glimpses of man’s place in the context of his physical planet, and would bring to the forefront accomplishments that he has achieved almost without his knowing.

I will return to those accomplishments somewhat later.  For now, I would like to mention some other issues, involving the individual’s connection either with natural disasters or with epidemics of one kind or another, that by definition concern large groups of people.

You form your own reality.  If you are tired of having me stress that point, I can only say that I hope the repetition will serve to make you understand that the statement applies to the most minute and the most important of the events that you experience.

Some people believe that they must be punished, and so they seek [out] unfortunate circumstances.  They [go] to one event after another in which they meet retribution.  They may seek out areas of the country in which natural disasters are frequent, or their behavior may be such that they attract from other people reactions of an explosive kind.  Often, however, individuals use disasters quite for their own purposes, as an exteriorized force that brings their lives into clear focus.  Some may be flirting with the idea of death, and choose a dramatic encounter with nature in the final act.  Others change their minds at the last moment.

Those involved in such disasters – the survivors – often use such “larger-than-life” circumstances in order to participate in affairs that seem to have greater import than those possessed by previous humdrum existences.  They seek the excitement, whatever its consequences.  They become a part of history to whatever extent.  For once their private lives are identified with a greater source – and from it many derive new strength and vitality.  Social barriers are dropped, economic positions forgotten.  The range of private emotions is given greater, fuller, sweep.

To some extent or another man’s desires and emotions merge with the physical aspects of nature as you understand it, so that such storms or disasters are as much the result of psychological activity as they are of weather conditions.

Objectively – whatever the appearances – storms, earthquakes, floods, et cetera, are quite necessary to the well-being of the earth.  Both man’s and nature’s purposes are served, then, though generally speaking man’s myths make him blind to those interactions.  People’s thoughts and emotions always give clear clues whenever illness is involved, yet most people ignore such information.  They censor their own thoughts.  Many therefore “fall prey” to epidemics of one kind or another because they want to, though they might deny this quite vigorously.

I am speaking particularly of epidemics that are less than deadly, though danger is involved.  In your times, hospitals, you must realize, are important parts of the community.  They provide a social as well as a medical service.  Many people are simply lonely, or overworked.  Some are rebelling against commonly held ideas of competition.  Flu epidemics become social excuses for much needed rest, therefore, and serve as face-saving devices so that the individuals can hide from themselves their inner difficulties.  In a way, such epidemics provide their own kind of fellowship – giving common meeting grounds for those of disparate circumstances.  The [epidemics] serve as accepted states of illness, in which people are given an excuse for the rest or quiet self-examination they desperately need but do not feel entitled to otherwise.

I do not mean to assign any hint of accusation against those so involved, but mainly to state some of the reasons for such behavior.  If you do not trust your nature, then any illness or indisposition will be interpreted as an onslaught against health.  Your body faithfully reflects your inner psychological reality.  The nature of your emotions means that in the course of a lifetime you will experience the full range of feelings.  Your subjective state has variety.  Sometimes sad or depressing thoughts provide a refreshing change of pace, leading to periods of quiet reflection, and to a quieting of the body so that it rests.

Fears, sometimes even seeming irrational ones, can serve to rouse the body if you have been too lethargic, or have been in a rut psychologically or physically.  If you trusted your nature you would be able to trust such feelings, and following their own rhythms and routes they would change into others.  Ideally even illnesses are a part of the body’s health, representing needed adjustments, and also following the needs of the subjective person at any given time.  They are a part of the interplay between the body and mind, or spirit.

The majority of my readers have come down with one or another disease usually considered very dangerous, and without ever knowing it, because the body healed itself normally and naturally.  The disease was not labeled.  It was not given recognition as a condition.  Worries or fears were not aroused, yet the disease came and vanished.

In such instances natural healing processes occurred, for which the body is seldom given credit.  Such healings do not just involve changes in the body, for example, for a physical healing can take place because of events that seem utterly disconnected.

Some portion of each individual is in direct contact with the very source of its own existence.  Each individual is innately aware that help is available in every situation, and that information does not need to come through the physical senses alone.  Many illnesses are cured, then, through quite natural methods that not only involve physical healings, but bring into play other events – events that have great bearing on the psychological elements that may be involved behind the scenes.  For those interactions we will have to look to Framework 2.

Session 820

Mass Events, Session 820

How nice that you remembered Framework 2 again.

To some extent the material on Frameworks 1 and 2 is of course an example of the entire idea, for you receive a good deal of information in sessions not given to book discussion – simply because, while our books are extremely free, still they must be colored by your ideas of what books are.

Even your concepts of creativity are necessarily influenced by Framework 1 thinking, of course, so our sessions do indeed follow a larger pattern than that, giving you certain perspectives from different angles in book dictation, and in other material.  To some extent the larger creative pattern of the material, which does exist and is sensed, is nevertheless not directly perceived, for you are bound to perceive it piecemeal.

I have said that acts of creativity best approach the workings of Framework 2, for [those] acts always involve leaps of faith and inspiration, and the breaking of barriers.

Each of our books adds to the others.  That includes Ruburt’s as well – and that also includes of course books not yet written, in your terms, so that the future books also influence what you think of as the past ones.  Again, while appearing in your time, the contents of the books come from outside of your time.

When you are writing a regular book you draw upon associations, memories, and events that are known to you and others, that perhaps you had forgotten but that suddenly spring to mind in answer to your intent and following your associations.  When an artist is painting a landscape, he might unconsciously compare hundreds of landscapes viewed in the past in multitudinous, seemingly forgotten hues that splashed upon the grass or trees, or as he seeks for a new creative combination.  Art is his focus so that he draws from Framework 2 all of those pertinent data that are necessarily for his painting.  Not just technique is concerned, but the entire visual experience of his life.

Framework 2 involves a far vaster creative activity, in which your life is the art involved – and all [of the] ingredients for its success are there, available.  When you are creating a product or work of art, the results will have much to do with your ideas of what the product is, or what the work of art is – so your ideas about your life, or life itself, will also have much to do with your experience of it as a living art.

If you believe in the laws of cause and effect, as accepted, or in the laws of polarity, as accepted, then you will be bound by those laws, for they will represent your artistic technique.  You will believe that you must use them in order to, say, paint the living portrait of your life.  You will therefore structure your experience, drawing to yourself from Framework 2 only that which fits.  You will not have the “technique” to attract other experience, and as long as you stick with one technique your life-pictures will more or less have a certain monotony.

Again, the writer or the artist also brings more into his work than the simple ability to write or paint.  In one way or another all of his experience is involved.  When you pay attention to Framework 1 primarily, it is as if you have learned to write simple sentences with one word neatly before the other.  You have not really learned true expression.  In your life you are writing sentences like “See Tommy run”.  Your mind is not really dealing with concepts but with the simple perception of objects, so that little imagination is involved.  You can express the location of objects in space, and you can communicate to others in a similar fashion, confirming the physical, obvious properties that others also perceive.

In those terms, using our analogy, the recognition of Framework 2 would bring you from that point to the production of great art, where words served to express not only the seen but the unseen – not simply facts but feelings and emotions – and where the words themselves escaped their consecutive patterns, sending the emotions into realms that quite defied both space and time.

Now and then people have such moments, and yet each private reality has its existence in an eternal creativity from which, again your world springs.

It is not as if that vaster reality were utterly closed to your perception, for it is not.  To some extent it is everywhere apparent in each person’s private experience, and it is obviously stated in the very existence of your world itself.  The religions, in one way or another, have always perceived it, although the attempt to interpret that reality in terms of the recognized facts of the world is bound to distort it.

Your world, then, is the result of a multidimensional creative venture, a work of art in terms almost impossible for you to presently understand, in which each person and creature, and each particle, plays a living part.  Again, in Framework 2 each event is known, from the falling of a leaf to the falling of a star, from the smallest insect’s experience on a summer day to the horrendous murder of an individual on a city street.  Those events each have their meaning in a larger pattern of activity.  That pattern is not divorced from our reality, not thrust upon you, not apart from your experience.  It often only seems to be because you so compartmentalize your own experience that you automatically separate yourself from such knowledge.

Creativity does not deal with compartments.  It throws aside barriers.  Even most people who are involved in creative work often apply their additional insights and knowledge only to their art, however – not to their lives.  They fall back to cause and effect.

Your Framework 1 life is, again, based on the idea that you have only so much energy, that you will wear out, and that a certain expenditure of energy will produce a given amount of work – in other words, that applied effort of a certain kind will produce the best results.  In the same way, it is believed that the energy of the universe will die out.  All of this presupposes “the fact” that no new energy is inserted into the world.  The source of the world would therefore seem no longer to exist, having worn itself out in the effort to produce physical phenomena.  In the light of such thinking, Framework 2 would be an impossibility.

Instead, the energy of life is inserted constantly into your world, in a way that has nothing to do with your so-called physical laws.  I said (14 years ago) that the universe expands as an idea does, and that is exactly what I mean.

The greater life of each creature exists in that framework that “originally” gave it birth, and in a greater manner of speaking each creature, regardless of its age, is indeed being constantly reborn.  I am couching all of this in terms of your world’s known reality, which means that I am dealing with local properties of Framework 2 as they have impact in your experience.

Session 818

Mass Events, Session 818

ASIDE

In explanation, I do not know exactly how to word this, but in a manner of speaking I take tours – through psychological realities, however, or through psychic lands rather than physical ones.  Such journeys “take no time” in your terms.  Yet for our sessions I must synchronize many activities, so that on some occasions I am with you, and I am also involved elsewhere.

You have a storm.  Weathermen speak of local conditions and merging air currents – but my journeys are in a realm where consciousnesses merge.  I do not know if I have specifically mentioned it, but you should understand my constant state of growth, expansion, and development.  Recall Ruburt’s episodes with the [psychic] library.  Those are examples of far lesser versions of my activities, and yet in those terms, and using an analogy, I travel to many great universities of the mind.

Much of this is difficult to explain, again, for information and knowledge is constantly transformed – almost completely reborn, so to speak, through characteristics that are inherently a part of thought itself.  Knowledge is changed automatically through the auspices of each consciousness who perceives it.  It is magnified and yet refined.  It is a constant language, yet one that transforms itself.  When I “attend these sessions”, or “speak”, then I exchange with others a more complicated system of reality than any computer could handle.  You do not understand or perceive the ways in which your reality contributes to the foundation of the mass-world reality that you experience.  Unconsciously, each individual participates in forming that world.  In my case, however, I am aware of the same kind of activities, only in regard to many realities rather than one.

As I try to increase your capacity for understanding, and to expand the scopes of your abilities, so in other kinds of worlds I do the same thing.  While our meetings take place in your time, and in the physical space of your house, say, the primary encounter must be a subjective inner one, an intersection of consciousnesses that is then physically experienced.

FRAMEWORK 3

The encounters themselves occur in a Framework 3 environment.  That framework of course, again in terms of an analogy, exists another step away from your own Framework 2.  I do not want to get into a higher-or-lower hierarchy here, but the frameworks represent spheres of action.  Our encounters initially take place, then, beyond the sphere that deals exclusively with either your physical world or the inner mental and psychic realm from which your present experience springs.

On a very few occasions over the past years, before a session Ruburt has felt a distance between us, or that our material was not quite ready.  I have already explained that sometimes I leave you a “tape”.  Usually that takes care of any instances.  This evening, however, Ruburt somewhat sensed not only a distance but also the larger complications of my activities.

Now to some extent, you see, you are both involved, but in ways almost impossible for me to explain.  Do not take this literally by any means.  Portions of your consciousness are alive in mine, so you are to some extent carried along where I go, as motes of dust might be swept along with a brisk autumn wind from one area to another.  I am not comparing you with motes of dust by any means; to some extent, however, you do share in my journeys.  You are carried above the land of your usual perception so that portions of you glimpse subjective states.  These arouse your curiosity even when consciously you are not aware of perceiving them.  That curiosity acts as impetus.

Your intents and concerns, your interests, your needs and desires, your characteristics and abilities, directly influence our material, for they lead you to it to begin with.

You want to make the material workable in your world – a natural and quite understandable desire: The proof is in the pudding, and so forth.  Yet of course you are also participators in an immense drama in which the main actions occur outside of your world, in those realms from which your world originated – and you are, foremost, natives of those other realms, as each individual is; as each being is.

Those realms are far from lonely, dark, and chaotic.  They are also quite different from any concept of nirvana or nothingness.  They are composed of ever-spiraling states of existence in which different kinds of consciousnesses meet and communicate.  They are not impersonal realms, but are involved in the most highly intimate interactions.  Those interactions exist about you all the while, and I would like you in your thoughts to aspire toward them, to try to stretch your perceptions enough so that you become at least somewhat aware of their existence.

These frameworks, while I speak of them separately, exist one within the other, and each one impinges upon the other.  To some extent you are immersed in all realities.  In a strange fashion, and in this particular case, your conflict with your notes had to do with a sense of orderliness aroused by the need to assemble facts.  But [this was] then carried over so that you wanted to keep your Roman (reincarnational – one of Rob’s incarnations) world and this [present] one separate and not merge them through association – as you did – so that it was difficult to know this when you did your sketches.  Subjectively you wanted to put the worlds together, to explore the similarities and so forth, but practically you wanted to divide them for your notes.

If you can, try to sense this greater context in which you have your being.  Your rewards will be astonishing.  The emotional realization is what is important, of course, not simply an intellectual acceptance of the idea.  Ruburt wanted material on this book, and that is well and good.  The book is important.  The book has its meaning in your world, but I do not want you to forget the vaster context in which these sessions originate.  This kind of information can at least trigger responses on your part, increasing still further the scope of knowledge that you can perceive from me.

In your world knowledge must be translated into specifics, yet we also deal with emotional realities that cannot be so easily deciphered.  In this session, in the words I speak – but more importantly in the atmosphere of the session – there are hints of those undecipherable yet powerful realities that will then, in your time, gradually be described in verbal terms that make sense to you.

There is more, but it will have to wait simply because it is not presently translatable.  According to the impact of this session, your own comprehensions and perceptions will bring other clues, either in the waking or the dream state.  Keep your minds open for them, but without any preconceived ideas of how they might appear.  Ruburt’s own development triggers certain psychic activity that then triggers further growth.  He has been participating in his library, for example, whether or not he is always aware of it.

Session 817

PART TWO: FRAMEWORK 1 AND FRAMEWORK 2

Chapter 3: Myths and Physical Events, The Interior Medium in Which Society Exists

Session 817

Before we discuss man’s and woman’s private roles in the nature of mass events – no matter what they are – we must first look into the medium in which events appear concrete and real.  The great sweep of the events of nature can be understood only by looking into a portion of their reality that is not apparent to you.  We want to examine, therefore, the inner power of natural occurrences.

A scientist examining nature studies its exterior, observing the outsideness of nature.  Even investigative work involving atoms and molecules, or faster-than-light particles, concerns the particle nature of reality.  The scientist does not usually look for nature’s heart.  He certainly does not pursue the study of its soul.

All being is manifestation of energy – an emotional manifestation of energy.  Man can interpret the weather in terms of air pressure and wind currents.  He can look to fault lines in an effort to understand earthquakes.  All of this works at a certain level, to a certain degree.  Man’s psyche, however, is emotionally not only a part of his physical environment, but intimately connected with all of nature’s manifestations.  Using the terms begun in the last chapter, I will say then that man’s emotional identification with nature is a strongly-felt reality in Framework 2.  And there we must look for the answers regarding man’s relationship with nature.  There in Framework 2 the nature of the psyche appears quite clearly, so that its sweeps and rhythms can be understood.  The manifestations of physical energy follow emotional rhythms that cannot be ascertained with gadgets or instruments, however fine.

Why is one man killed and not another?  Why does an earthquake disrupt an entire area?  What is the relationship between the individual and such mass events of nature?

Before we can begin to consider such questions, we must take another look at your own world, and ascertain its source, for surely its source and nature’s are the same.  We will also along this line, and throughout this book, have to make some distinctions between events and your interpretations of them.

It certainly seems that your world is concrete, factual, definite, and that its daily life rests upon known events and facts.  You make a clear distinction between fact and fantasy.  You take it for granted as a rule that your current knowledge as a people rests upon scientific data, at least, that is unassailable.  Certainly technological development appears to have been built most securely upon a body of concrete ideas.

The world’s ideas, fantasies, or myths may seem far divorced from current experience – yet all that you know or experience has its origin in that creative dimension of existence that I am terming Framework 2.  In a manner of speaking your factual world rises on a bed of fantasy, myth, and imagination, from which all of your detailed paraphernalia emerge.  What then is myth, and what do I mean by the term?

Myth is not a distortion of fact, but the womb through which fact must come.  Myth involves an intrinsic understanding of the nature of reality, couched in imaginative terms, carrying a power as strong as nature itself.  Myth-making is a natural psychic characteristic, a psychic element that combines with other such elements to form a mythical representation of inner reality.  That representation is then used as a model upon which your civilizations are organized, and also as a perceptual tool through whose lens you interpret the private events of your life in their historical context.

When you accept myths you call them facts, of course, for they become so a part of your lives, of societies and your professions, that their basis seems self-apparent.  Myths are vast psychic dramas, more truthful than facts.  They provide an ever-enduring theater of reality.  It must be clearly understood, then, that when I speak of myths I mean to imply the nature of psychic events whose enduring reality exists in Framework 2, and forms the patterns that are then interpreted in your world.

If someone is caught in a natural disaster, the following questions might be asked: “Am I being punished by God, and for what reason?”  A scientist might ask instead: “With better technology and information, could we somehow have predicted the disaster, and saved many lives?”  He might try to dissociate himself from emotion, and to see the disaster simply as the result of a nonpersonal nature that did not know or care what lay in its path.

In all cases, however, such situations instantly bring to mind questions of man’s own reality and source, his connections with God, his planet, and the universe.  He interprets those questions according to his own beliefs.  Let us then look at some of them.

Myths are natural phenomena, rising from the psyche of man as surely as giant mountain ranges emerge from the physical planet.  Their deeper reality exists, however, in Framework 2 as source material for the world that you know.

In those terms, the great religions of your civilizations rise from myths that change their character through the centuries, even as mountain ranges rise and fall.  You can see mountain ranges.  It would be ridiculous to ignore their reality.  You see your myths somewhat less directly, yet they are apparent within all of your activities, and they form the inner structures of all of your civilizations with their multitudinous parts.

In those terms, then, Christianity and your other religions are myths, rising in response to an inner knowledge that is too vast to be clothed by facts alone.  In those terms also, your science is also quite mythical in nature.  This may be more difficult for some of you to perceive, since it appears to work so well.  Others will be willing enough to see science in its mythical characteristics, but will be most reluctant to see religion as you know it in the same light.  To some extent or another, however, all of these ideas program your interpretation of events.

In this part of the book, we are more or less dealing with events of nature as you understand it.  It will seem obvious to some, again, that a natural disaster is caused by God’s vengeance, or is at least a divine reminder to repent, while others will take it for granted that such a catastrophe is completely neutral in character, impersonal and [quite] divorced from man’s own emotional reality.  The Christian scientist is caught in between.  Because you divorce yourselves from nature, you are not able to understand its manifestations.  Often your myths get in the way.  When myths become standardized, and too literal, when you begin to tie them too tightly to the world of facts, then you misread them entirely.  When myths become most factual they are already becoming less real.  Their power become constrained.

Most people interpret the realities of their lives, their triumphs and failures, their health or illness, their fortune or misfortune, then, in the light of a mythical reality that is not understood as such.  What is behind these myths, and what is their source of power?

Facts are a very handy but weak brew of reality.  They immediately consign certain kinds of experiences as real and others as not.  The psyche, however, will not be so limited.  It exists in a medium of reality, a realm of being in which all possibilities exist.  It creates myths the way the ocean creates spray.  Myths are originally psychic fabrications of such power and strength that whole civilizations can rise from their source.  They involve symbols and known emotional validities that are then connected to the physical world, so that the world is never the same again.

They cast their light over historical events because they are responsible for those events.  They mix and merge the inner, unseen, but felt, eternal psychic experience of man with the temporal events of his physical days, and form a combination that structures thoughts and beliefs from civilization to civilization.  In Framework 2 the interior power of nature is ever-changing.  The dreams, hopes, aspirations and fears of man interact in a constant motion that then forms the events of your world.  That interaction includes not only man, of course, but the emotional reality of all earthly consciousness as well, from a microbe to a scholar, from a frog to a star.  You interpret the phenomena of your world according to the mythic characteristics that you have accepted.  You organize physical reality, then, through ideas.  You use only those perceptions that serve to give those ideas validity.  The physical body itself is quite capable of putting the world together in different fashions than the one that is familiar to you.

You divorce yourselves from nature and nature’s intents far more than the animals do.  Nature in its stormy manifestations seems like an adversary.  You must either look for reasons outside of yourselves to explain what seems to be nature’s ill intent at such times, or its utter lack of concern.

Science often says that nature cares little for the individual, only for the species, so then you must often see yourselves as victims in a larger struggle for survival, in which you own intents do not carry even the puniest sway.

Session 815

Mass Events, Session 815

Ruburt and Joseph have recently purchased a color television set, so now their television world is no longer in black and white.  I have used television as an analogy at various times, and I would like to do so again, to show the ways in which physical events are formed, and to try to describe the many methods used by individuals in choosing those particular events that will be personally encountered.

Not only does television actually serve as a mass means of communal meditation, but it also presents you with highly detailed, manufactured dreams, in which each viewer shares to some extent.  We will use some distinctions here, and so I am going to introduce the terms “Framework 1” and “Framework 2” to make my discussion clear.

We will call the world as you physically experience it, Framework 1.  In Framework 1, you watch television programs, for example.  You have your choice of many channels.  You have favorite programs.  You follow certain scenes or actors.  You watch all of these dramas, hardly understanding how it is that they appear on your screen to begin with.  You are certain, however, that if you do buy a television set it will perform in an adequate fashion, whether or not you are familiar with electronics.

You switch from channel to channel with predictable results.  The programming for Channel 9, for example, does not suddenly intrude on Channel 6.  Even the actors themselves, taking part in such sagas, have not the remotest idea of events that are involved in order that their own images will appear on your television screen.  Their jobs are to act, taking it for granted that the technicians are following through.

Now somewhere there is a program director, who must take care of the entire programming.  Shows must be done on time, actors assigned their roles.  Our hypothetical director will know which actors are free, which actors prefer character roles, which ones are heroes or heroines, and which smiling Don Juan always gets the girl – and in general who plays the good guys and the bad guys.

There is no need in my outlining in detail the multitudinous events that must occur so that you can watch your favorite program.  You flip the switch and there it is, while all of that background work is unknown to you.  You take it for granted.  Your job is simply to choose the programs of your choice on any evening.  Many others are watching the same programs, of course, yet each person will react quite individually.

Now for a moment let us imagine that physical events occur in the same fashion – that you choose those which flash upon the screen of your experience.  You are quite familiar with the events of your own life, for you are of course your own main hero or heroine, villain or victim, or whatever.  As you do not know what happens in the television studio before you observe a program, however, so you do not know what happens in the creative framework of reality before you experience physical events.  We will call that vast “unconscious” mental and universal studio Framework 2.

In this book I will try to tell you what goes on behind the scenes – to show you the ways in which you choose your daily physical programs, and to describe how those personal choices mix and merge to form a mass reality.  For now, we will go back to television again.  You can turn off a program that offends you.  You can choose to buy or not buy a product whose virtues are being praised.  Television presents you with a mirror of your society.  It reflects and re-reflects through millions of homes the giant dreams and fears, the hopes and terrors of events in the most private individual.

Television interacts with your lives, but it does not cause your lives.  It does not cause the events that it depicts.  With your great belief in technology, it often seems to many people that television causes violence, for example, or that it causes a love of over-materialism, or that it causes “loose morals”.  Television reflects.  In a manner of speaking it does not even distort, though it may reflect distortions.  The writers and actors of television dramas are attuned to the “mass mind”.  They are not leaders or followers.  They are creative reflectors, acutely aware of the overall, generalized emotional and psychic patterns of the age.

They also make choices as to which plays they will take part in.  [Each has his or her] own favorite kind of role, even if the role be that of a maverick.  To the actors, of course, their roles become strong parts of their personal experiences, while those who observe the plays take part largely as observers.

You are aware through your newspapers and magazines of the dramas, news broadcasts, or other programs that are presently being offered.  In the same way you are aware, generally speaking, of the “programs” being physically presented in your own nation and throughout the world.  You decide which of these adventures you want to take part in – and those you will experience in normal life, or in Framework 1.

The inner mechanisms that happen prior to your experience will take place in the vast mental studio of Framework 2.  There, all the details will be arranged, the seemingly chance encounters, for example, the unexplained coincidences that might have to occur before a given physical event takes place.

On a conscious level, and with your conscious reserves alone, you could not keep your body alive an hour.  You would not know how to do it, for your life flows through you automatically and spontaneously.  You take the details for granted – the breathing, the inner mechanisms of nourishment and elimination, the circulation, and the maintenance of your psychological continuity.  All of that is taken care of for you in what I have termed as Framework 2.

In that regard, certainly, everything works to your advantage.  Indeed, often the more concerned you become with your body the less smoothly it functions.  In the spontaneity of your body’s operation there is obviously a fine sense of order.  When you turn on a television set the picture seems to come out of nowhere onto the screen – yet that picture is the result of order precisely focused.

Actors visit casting agencies so that they know what plays need their services.  In your dreams you visit “casting agencies”.  You are aware of the various plays being considered for physical production.  In the dream state, then, often you familiarize yourself with dramas that are of a probable nature.  If enough interest is show, if enough actors apply, if enough resources are accumulated, the play will go on.  When you are in other than your normally conscious state, you visit the creative inner agency in which all physical productions must have their beginning.  You meet with others, who for their own reasons are interested in the same kind of drama.  Following our analogy, the technicians, the actors, the writers all assemble – only in this case the result will be a live event rather than a televised one.  There are disaster films being planned, educational programs, religious dramas.  All of these will be encountered in full-blown physical reality.

Such events occur as a result of individual beliefs, desires, and intents.  No death occurs by chance, nor any birth.  In the creative atmosphere of Framework 2, intents are known.  In a manner of speaking, no act is private.  Your communication systems bring to your living room notices of events that occur throughout the world.  Yet that larger inner system of communications is far more powerful in scope, and each mental act is imprinted in the multidimensional screen of Framework 2.  That screen is available to all, and in other levels of consciousness, particularly in the sleep and dreaming stages, the events of that inner reality are as ever-present and easily accessible as physical events are when you are awake.

It is as if Framework 2 contains an infinite information service, that instantly puts you in contact with whatever knowledge you require, that sets up circuits between you and others, that computes probabilities with blinding speed.  Not with the impersonality of a computer, however, but with a loving intent that has your best purposes in mind – yours and also those of each other individual.

You cannot gain what you want at someone else’s detriment, then.  You cannot use Framework 2 to force an event upon another person.  Certain prerequisites must be met, you see, before a desired end can become physically experienced.

Session 814

Mass Events, Session 814

While Ruburt was working at one of his books a few days ago, he heard a public service announcement.  The official told all listeners that the flu season had officially begun.  He sternly suggested that the elderly and those with diseases make appointments at once for flu shots.

The official mentioned, by the way, that there was indeed no direct evidence connecting past flu shots with the occurrence of a rather bizarre disease that some of those inoculated with the flu vaccine happened to come down with.  All in all, it was quite an interesting announcement, with implications that straddle biology, religion, and economics.  “The flu season” is in a way an example of a psychologically-manufactured pattern that can at times bring about a manufactured epidemic.

Behind such announcements there is the authority of the medical profession, and the very authority of your systems of communication as well.  You cannot question the voice over the radio.  It is disembodied and presumes to know.

Once again, the elderly were singled out.  It seems obvious that they are more susceptible to diseases.  That susceptibility is a medical fact of life.  It is a fact, however, without a basic foundation in the truth of man’s biological reality.  It is a fact brought about through suggestion.  The doctors see the bodily results, which are quite definite, and then those results are taken as evidence.

In a few isolated areas of the world even today, the old are not disease-ridden, nor do their vital signs weaken.  They remain quite healthy until the time of death.

Their belief systems, therefore, you must admit, are quite practical.  Nor are they surrounded by medical professions.  Later in the book we will return to the subject.  Here, you have, however, what almost amounts to a social program for illness – the flu season.  A mass meditation, it has an economic structure in back of it: The scientific and medical foundations are involved.  Not only this, however, but the economic concerns, from the largest pharmacies to the tiniest drugstores, the supermarkets and the corner grocers – all of these elements are involved.

Pills, potions, and shots supposed to combat [colds and the] flu are given prominent displays, serving to remind those who might have missed them otherwise of the announcements [about] the coming time of difficulty.  Commercials on television bring a new barrage, so that (amused) you can go from the hay fever season to the flu season without missing any personal medications.

A cough in June may be laughed off and quickly forgotten.  A cough in the flu season, however, is far more suspect – and under such conditions one might think, particularly in the midst of a poor week: “Who wants to go out tomorrow anyhow?”

You are literally expected to come down with the flu.  It can serve as an excuse for not facing many kinds of problems.  Many people are almost consciously aware of what they are doing.  All they have to do is pay attention to the suggestions offered so freely by the society.  The temperature does rise.  Concern causes the throat to dry.  Dormant viruses – which up to now have done no harm – are activated.

Coat, glove, and boot manufacturers push their wares.  Yet in those categories there is more sanity, for their ads often stress wholesome activities, portraying the happy skier, the tramper through the woods in winter.  Sometimes, however, they suggest that their wares will protect against the flu and colds, and against the vulnerability of your nature.

The inoculations themselves do little good overall, and they can be potentially dangerous, particularly when they are given to prevent an epidemic which has not in fact occurred.  They may have specific value, but overall they are detrimental, confusing the bodily mechanisms and setting off other biological reactions that might not show up, say, for some time.

The flu season intersects with the Christmas season, of course, when Christians are told to be merry and [wish] their fellows a happy return to the natural wonders of childhood, in thought at least.  [They are also told] to pay homage to God.  Christianity has become, however, a tangled sorry tale, its cohesiveness largely vanished.  Such a religion becomes isolated from daily life.  Many individuals cannot unify the various areas of their belief and feeling, and at Christmas they particularly recognize the vast gulf that exists between their scientific beliefs and their religious beliefs.  They find themselves unable to cope with such a mental and spiritual dilemma.  A psychic depression often results, one that is deepened by the Christmas music and the commercial displays, by the religious reminders that the species is made in God’s image, and by the other reminders that the body so given is seemingly incapable of caring for itself and is a natural prey to disease and disaster.

So the Christmas season carries man’s hopes in your society, and the flu season mirrors his fears and shows the gulf between the two.

The physician is also a private person, so I speak of him only in his professional capacity, for he usually does the best he can in the belief system that he shares with his fellows.  Those beliefs do not exist alone, but are of course intertwined with religious and scientific ones, as separate as they might appear.  Christianity has conventionally treated illness as the punishment of God, or as a trial sent by God, to be borne stoically.  It has considered man a sinful creature, flawed by original sin, forced to work by the sweat of his brow.

Science has seen man as an accidental product of an uncaring universe, a creature literally without a center of meaning, where consciousness was the result of a physical mechanism that only happened to come into existence, and that had no reality outside of that structure.  Science has at least been consistent in that respect.  Christianity, however, officially asks children of sorrow to be joyful and sinners to find a childlike purity; it asks them to love a God who one day will destroy the world, and who will condemn them to hell if they do not adore him.

Many people, caught between such conflicting beliefs, fall prey to physical ills during the Christmas season particularly.  The churches and the hospitals are often the largest buildings in any town, and the only ones open on Sunday without recourse to city ordinances.  You cannot divorce your private value systems from your health, and the hospitals often profit from the guilt that religions have instilled in their people.

I am speaking now of religions so intertwined with social life and community ventures that all sense of basic religious integrity becomes lost.  Man is by nature a religious creature.

One of man’s strongest attributes is religious feeling.  It is the part of psychology most often overlooked.  There is a natural religious knowledge with which you are born.  Ruburt’s book The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James explains that feeling very well.  It is a biological spiritually translated into verbal terms.  It says: “Life is a gift (and not a curse).  I am a unique, worthy creature in the natural world, which everywhere surrounds me, gives me sustenance, and reminds me of the greater source from which I myself and the world both emerge.  My body is delightfully suited to its environment, and comes to me, again, from that unknown source which shows itself through all of the events of the physical world”.

That feeling gives the organism the optimism, the joy, and the ever-abundant energy to grow.  It encourages curiosity and creativity, and places the individual in a spiritual world and a natural one at once.

Organized religions are always attempts to redefine that kind of feeling in cultural terms.  They seldom succeed because they become too narrow in their concepts, too dogmatic, and the cultural structures finally overweigh the finer substance within them.

The more tolerant a religion is, the closer it comes to expressing those inner truths.  The individual, however, has a private biological and spiritual integrity that is a part of man’s heritage, and is indeed any creature’s right.  Man cannot mistrust his own nature and at the same time trust the nature of God, for God is his word for the source of his being – and if his being is tainted, then so must be his God.

Your private beliefs merge with those of others, and form your cultural reality.  The distorted ideas of the medical profession or the scientists, or of any other group, are not thrust upon you, therefore.  They are the result of your mass beliefs – isolated in the form of separate disciplines.   Medical men, for example, are often extremely unhealthy because they are so saddled with those specific health beliefs that their attention is concentrated in that area more than others not so involved.  The idea of prevention is always based upon fear – for you do not want to prevent something that is joyful.  Often, therefore, preventive medicine causes what it hopes to avoid.  Not only does the idea [of prevention] continually promote the entire system of fear, but specific steps taken to prevent a disease in a body not already stricken, again, often set up reactions that bring about side effects that would occur if the disease had in fact been suffered.

A specific disease will of course have its effects on other portions of the body as well, [effects] which have not been studied, or even known.  Such inoculations, therefore, cannot take that into consideration.  There are also cases where alterations occur after inoculation, so that for a while people actually become carriers of diseases, and can infect others.

There are individuals who very rarely get ill whether or not they are inoculated, and who are not sensitive in the health area.  I am not implying, therefore, that all people react negatively to inoculations.  In the most basic terms, however, inoculations do no good, either, though I am aware that medical history would seem to contradict me.

At certain times, and most particularly at the birth of medical science in modern times, the belief in inoculation, if not by the populace then by the doctors, did possess the great strength of new suggestion and hope – but I am afraid that scientific medicine has caused as many new diseases as it has cured.  When it saves lives, it does so because of the intuitive healing understanding of the physician, or because the patient is so impressed by the great efforts taken in his behalf, and therefore is convinced secondhandedly of his own worth.

Physicians, of course, are also constantly at the beck and call of many people who will take no responsibility at all for their own well-being, who will plead for operations they do not need.  The physician is also visited by people who do not want to get well, and use the doctor and his methods as justification for further illness, saying: “The doctor is no good”, or “The medicine will not work”, therefore blaming the doctor for a way of life they have no intention of changing.

The physician is also caught between his religious beliefs and his scientific beliefs.  Sometimes these conflict, and sometimes they only serve to deepen his feelings that the body, left alone, will get any disease possible.

Again, you cannot separate your systems of values and your most intimate philosophical judgments from the other areas of your private or mass experience.

In this country, your tax dollars go for many medical experiments and preventive-medicine drives – because you do not trust the good intent of your own bodies.  In the same way, your government funds [also] go into military defenses to prevent war, because if you do not trust your own body’s good intent toward you, you can hardly trust any good intent on the part of your fellow men.

In fact, then, preventive medicine and outlandish expenditures for preventive defense are quite similar.  In each case there is the anticipation of disaster – in one case from the familiar body, which can be attacked by deadly diseases at any time, and is seemingly at least without defenses; and in the other case from the danger without: exaggerated, ever-threatening, and ever to be contended with.

Disease must be combatted, fought against, assaulted, wiped out.  In many ways the body becomes almost like an alien battleground, for many people trust it so little that it becomes highly suspect.  Man then seems pitted against nature.  Some people think of themselves as patients, as others, for example, might think of themselves as students.  Such people are those who are apt to take preventive measures against whatever disease is in fashion or in season, and hence take the brunt of medicine’s unfortunate aspects, when there is no cause.

Session 806

Mass Events, Session 806

Because events do not exist in the concrete, done-and-finished versions about which you have been taught, then memory must also be a different story.

You must remember the creativity and the open-ended nature of events, for even in one life a given memory is seldom a “true version” of a past event.  The original happening is experienced from a different perspective on the part of each person involved, of course, so that the event’s implications and basic meanings may differ according to the focus of each participant.  That given event, in your terms happening for the first time, say, begins to “work upon” the participants.  Each one brings to it his or her own background, temperament, and literally a thousand different colorations – so that the event, while shared by others, is still primarily original to each person.

The moment it occurs, it begins to change as it is filtered through all of those other ingredients, and it is minutely altered furthermore by each succeeding event.  The memory of an event, then, is shaped as much by the present as it is by the past.  Association triggers memories, of course, and organizes memory events.  It also helps color and form such events.

You are used to a time structure, so that you remember something that happened at a particular time in the past.  Usually you can place events in that fashion.  There are neurological pockets, so to speak, so that biologically the body can place events as it perceives activity.  Those neurological pulses are geared to the biological world you know.

In those terms, past or future-life memories usually remain like ghost images by contrast.  Overall, this is necessary so that immediate body response can be focused in the time period you recognize.  Other life memories are carried along, so to speak, beneath those other pulses – never, in certain terms, coming to rest so that they can be examined, but forming, say, the undercurrents upon which the memories of your current life ride.

When such other-life memories do come to the surface, they are of course colored by it, and their rhythm is not synchronized.  They are not tied into your nervous system as precisely as your regular memories.  Your present gains its feeling of depth because of your past as you understand it.  In certain terms, however, the future represents, say, another kind of depth that belongs to events.  A root goes out in all directions.  Events do also.  But the roots of events go through your past, present, and future.

Often by purposefully trying to slow down your thought processes, or playfully trying to speed them up, you can become aware of memories from other lives – past or future.  To some extent you allow other neurological impulses to make themselves known.  There may often be a feeling of vagueness, because you have no ready-made scheme of time or place with which to structure such memories.  Such exercises also involve you with the facts of the events of your own life, for you automatically are following probabilities from the point of your own focus.

It would be most difficult to operate within your sphere of reality without the pretension of concrete, finished events.  You form your past lives now in this life as surely as you form your future ones now also.

EXERCISE

Simultaneously, each of your past and future selves dwell in their own way now, and for them the last sentence also applies.  It is theoretically possible to understand much of this through an examination-in-depth of the events of your own life.  Throwing away many taken-for-granted concepts, you can pick a memory.  But try not to structure it – a most difficult task – for such structuring is by now almost automatic.

The memory, left alone, not structured, will shimmer, shake, take other forms, and transform itself before your [mental] eyes, so that its shape will seem like a psychological kaleidoscope through whose focus the other events of your life will also shimmer and change.  Such a memory exercise can also serve to bring in other-life memories.  Edges, corners, and reflections will appear, however, perhaps superimposed upon memories that you recognize as belonging to this life.

Your memories serve to organize your experience and, again, follow recognized neurological sequences.  Other-life memories from the future and past often bounce off of these with a motion too quick for you to follow.

In a quiet moment, off guard, you might remember an event from this life, but there may be a strange feeling to it, as if something about it, some sensation, does not fit into the time slot in which the event belongs.  In such cases that [present-life] memory is often tinged by another, so that a future or past life memory sheds its cast upon the recalled event.  There is a floating quality about one portion of the memory.

This happens more often than is recognized, because usually you simply discount the feeling of strangeness, and drop the part of the memory that does not fit.  Such instances involve definite bleed-throughs, however.  By being alert and catching such feelings, you can learn to use the floating part of the otherwise-recognizable memory as a focus.  Through association that focus can then trigger further past or future recall.  Clues also appear in the dreaming state, with greater frequency, because then you are already accustomed to that kind of floating sensation in which events can seem to happen in their own relatively independent context.

Dreams in which past and present are both involved are an example; also dreams in which the future and the past merge, and dreams in which time seems to be a changing ingredient.

EXERCISE

In certain terms the past, present, and future [of your present life] are all compressed in any given moment of your experience.

Any such moment is therefore a gateway into all of your existences.  The events that you recognize as happening now are simply specific and objective, but the most minute element in any given moment’s experience is also symbolic of other events and other times.  Each moment is then like a mosaic, only in your current life history you follow but one color or pattern, and ignore the others.  As I have mentioned [in other books], you can indeed change the present to some extent by purposefully altering a memory event.  That kind of synthesis can be used in many instances with many people.

Such an exercise is not some theoretical, esoteric, impractical method, but a very precise, volatile, and dynamic way of helping the present self by calming the fears of a past self.  That past self is not hypothetical, either, but still exists, capable of being reached and of changing its reactions.  You do not need a time machine to alter the past or the future.

Such a technique is highly valuable.  Not only are memories not “dead”, they are themselves ever-changing.  Many alter themselves almost completely without your notice.  In his (unpublished) apprentice novels, Ruburt (Jane) did two or three versions of an episode with a priest he had known in his youth.  Each version at the time he wrote it represented his honest memory of the event.  While the bare facts were more or less the same, the entire meaning and interpretation of each version differed so drastically that those differences far outweighed the similarities.

Because the episode was used on two or three different occasions, Ruburt could see how this memory changed.  In most cases, however, people are not aware that memory changes in such a fashion, or that the events they think they recall are so different.

The point is that past events grow.  They are not finished.  With that in mind, you can see that future lives are very difficult to explain from within your framework.  A completed life in your terms is no more completed or done than any event.  There is simply a cut-off point in your focus from your framework, but it is as artificial as, basically, perspective is applied to painting.

It is not that the inner self is not aware of all of this, but that it has already chosen a framework or a given frame of existence, that emphasizes certain kinds of experience over others.