Session 917

Dreams, Evolution, Value Fulfillment: Session 917

Remember that these units of consciousness of which I have been speaking are not neutral, mathematical, or mechanistic.

They are the smallest imaginable “packages” of consciousness that you can imagine, and despite any ideas to the contrary, basically consciousness has nothing to do with size.  If that were the case, it would take more than a world-sized globe to contain the consciousness of simply one cell.

So, your physical life is the result of a spectacular spontaneous order – the order of the body spontaneously formed by the units of consciousness.  Your experience of the world is largely determined by your imaginations and your reasoning abilities.  These did not develop through time, as per usual evolutionary beliefs.  Both imagination and reason belonged to the species from the beginning, but the species has used these qualities in different ways throughout what you think of as historic time.  There is great leeway in that direction, so that the two can be combined in many many alternate fashions, each particular combination giving you its own unique picture of reality, and determining your experience in the world.

Your many civilizations, historically speaking, each with its own fields of activity, its own sciences, religions, politics and art – these all represent various ways that man has used imagination and reason to form a framework through which a more or less cohesive reality is experienced.

Man, then, has sometimes stressed the power of imagination and let its great dramatic light illuminate physical events about him, so that they were largely seen through its cast.  Exterior events in those circumstances become magnets attracting the dramatic force of the imagination.  Inner events are stressed over exterior ones.  The objects of the world then become important not only for what they are but because of their standing in an inner world of meaning.  In such cases, of course, it becomes quite possible to go so far in that direction that the events of nature almost seem to disappear amid the weight of their symbolic content.

In recent times the trend has been in the opposite direction, so that the abilities of the imagination were considered highly suspect, while exterior events were considered the only aspects of reality.  You ended up with a true-or-false kind of world, in which it seemed that the answers to the deepest questions about life could be answered quite correctly and adequately by some multiple-choice test.  Man’s imagination seemed then to be allied with falsehood, unless its products could be turned to advantage in the materialistic existence.  In that context, the imagination was tolerated at all only because it sometimes offered new technological inventions.

I have taken two contrasting examples of the many ways in which the powers of the imagination and those of reasoning abilities can be used.  There are endless varieties, however – each subjectively and genetically possible, and many, of course, that you have not yet developed as a species.

Ruburt today received a letter from a man who would certainly be labeled a schizophrenic.  Ruburt was distressed – not only by the individual’s situation, but by the philosophical implications.  Why on earth, he thought, should someone form such a reality?

Now on the question of “mental disorders”, it is highly important that individual integrity be stressed, rather than the blanket definitions that are usually accorded to any group of symptoms.  In many such circumstances, however, such individuals are combining the imagination and the reasoning abilities in ways that are not in keeping with their historic periods.  It would not be entirely out of keeping, though somewhat exaggerated a statement, to claim that men who stockpile nuclear weapons in order to preserve peace are insane.  In your society, such activities are, in a way that completely escapes me, somehow under the label of humanitarianism!

Such plans are not considered insane ones – though in the deepest meaning of that word, they are indeed.  There are many reasons for such actions, but an overemphasis upon what you think of as the reasoning abilities, as opposed to what you think of as the imaginative abilities, is at least partially to blame.

In the case of the man who wrote Ruburt, we have a mixture of those characteristics in which interior events – the events of the imagination – cast too strong a light upon physical events as far as the socially accepted blend is concerned.  Again, I am not speaking about all cases of mental disorder here.  I do, however, want to make the point that your prized psychological norm as a species means that you must also be allowed a great leeway in the use of the imagination and the intellect.  Otherwise, you could become locked into a rigid conscious stance, one in which both the imagination and the intellect could advance no further.  It is vitally important that you realize the great psychological diversity that is present within your psychological behavior – and those varieties of psychological experience are necessary.  They give you vital psychological feedback, and they exercise the reaches of your abilities in ways that are overall most advantageous.

The man who wrote wants to live largely in his own world.  He hurts no one.  He supports himself a good deal of the time.  His view of reality is eccentric from most viewpoints.  He adds a flavor to the world that would be missing otherwise, and through his very eccentricity, to some extent he shows other people that their rigid views of reality may indeed have chinks in them here and there.

I do not mean to idealize him either, or others of his kind, but to point out that you can use your imaginations and intellects in other fashions than you do.  In fact, such fashions are not only genetically possible, but genetically probable – a matter I will discuss later in the book.  The imagination, of course, deals with the implied universe, those vast areas of reality that are not physically manifest, while reason usually deals with the evidence of the world that is before it.  That statement is generally true, but specifically, of course, any act of the imagination involves reasoning, and any [act] of reason involves imagination.

Session 916 - very profound

Dreams, Evolution, Fulfillment: Session 916

When Joseph read the last session, he wondered whether or not the invisible particles I referred to were the same as the units of consciousness I have spoken of before.

He was supposed to ask the question, and so was each reader.  For one thing, while I realize the importance of specific terms, I do not want you as a reader to become so dependent upon terms that coming across one you have read before, you instantly categorize it.  For one thing, each time I reintroduce such information I do so from another direction, so to speak, so that you as a reader are meant to approach it from a different angle also.  In that way, you become familiar with certain knowledge from a variety of viewpoints.

As you read those passages the question itself – “Are these after all the units of consciousness referred to earlier?” – should have triggered your intellect and your intuition to work together, even if only slightly, in another way.  In other words, of course, I hope to inspire both your imagination and your intelligence in this chapter and in this section of the book, devoted to such subject matter.

Remember, again, the manifest [universe] emerges from a subjective reality, one that is implied in the very nature of your world itself.  I would like you, then to think of those units of consciousness from an entirely different scale of events.

Imagine, now, as far as you are able, the existence of All That Is, a consciousness so magnificently complex that what we may call its own psychological compartments are, literally, now, infinite.  All appearances of time, and all experience of it, must be psychological.  The “speed” of electrons, for example, would reflect their psychological motion.

All That Is, as the source of all realities and experience, is so psychologically complex, so multidimensionally creative, that it constantly surprises itself.  It is, itself, the invisible universe that is everywhere implied within your world, but that becomes manifest to your perception only through historic time.  All That Is disperses itself, therefore, so that it is on the one hand “a massive” subjective entity, a psychological structure – and on the other hand, it also disperses itself into the phenomenal world.  It is, in all meanings of the word, divine, yet it disperses even that divinity so that in your terms, each unit of consciousness contains within itself those properties of divinity.  All That Is has no one image, but is within all images (whether or not they are manifest).  Your thoughts are the invisible partners of your words, and the vast unstated subjectivity of All That Is is in the same way behind all stated or manifest phenomena.

In those terms, it is basically impossible for any given species to become extinct.  It can disappear for a time, become unmanifest for while in historic events.  The genetic patterns for any given species reside, of course, primarily in that species’ genetic bank – but that genetic bank does not exist in isolation, but [is] invisibly connected with the genetic makeup of each other species.

There are countless relationships between species that go unrecognized.  The generations of all species interact.  The genetic cues are not triggered on the proposition, obviously, that a species exists alone on the planet, but also in response to genetic sequences that operate in all of the species combined.  The genetic system, again, is not closed nearly as much as supposed.  That is, again, because the basic units of consciousness that build up matter – that form matter – are themselves endowed with a subjective acuteness.  This also accounts for my earlier statement, that in usually understood terms the environment and its creatures “evolve” together.  Your position on the scale of awareness inclines you to categorize consciousnesses so that only your own familiar brand seems to fit the definition – so again here I remind you that consciousness is everywhere in the deepest terms, because All That Is disperses itself throughout physical reality.  All portions of that reality have their own rights to existence, and purposes within it.  So, of course, do all peoples, and the races.

Your imaginations help you bring elements of that inner implied universe into actuality.  Your imaginations obviously are not limited by time.  You can imagine past and future events.  Your imaginations have always helped you form your civilization, your arts and your sciences, and when they are united with your reasoning processes they can bring you knowledge about the universe and your places in it that you can receive in no other fashion.

Session 914 - very profound

Dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 914

People have a biologically built-in knowledge that life has meaning.  They share that biologically ingrained trust with all other living creatures.  A belief in life’s meaning is a necessity on the part of your species.

It is vital for the proper workings of genetic systems.  It is a prerequisite for individual health and for the overall vitality of any given “stock”.  Your greatest achievements have been produced by civilizations during those times when man had the greatest faith in the meaningfulness of life in general, and in the meaningfulness of the individual within life’s framework.

You are, I hope, coming toward a time of greater psychological synthesis, so that the intuitions and reasoning abilities work together in a much more smooth fashion, so that emotional and intuitive knowledge regarding the meaningfulness of life can find clearer precision and expression, as the intellect is taught to use its faculties in a far less restricted manner.

No matter what science says about certain values being outside of its frame of reference, science implies that those values are therefore without basis.  The reasoning qualities of the mind are directed away from any exploration that might bring about any acceptable scientific evidence for such values, therefore.  The fact is that man lives by those values that science ignores.

For that reason, science – after its first great adventurous era – had its own flaws built in, and so it must expand its definitions of reality or become a tin-can caricature of itself, a prostituted handmaiden to an outworn technology, and quite give up its early claims of investigating the nature of truth or reality.  It could become as secondary to life as, say, the Roman Catholic Church is now, losing its hold upon world dominance, losing its claim of being the one official arbiter of reality.

There are, overall, some processes important in man’s development, and in the development of the species.  Efforts, methods that work against value fulfillment phase themselves out, for in the long run they do not work.

There is nothing wrong with technology.  Man has an innate inclination toward the use of tools, and technology is no more than an extension of that capacity.  When men use tools in accord with the “dictates” of value fulfillment, those tools are effective.  Your technology, however, as it stands, has to some important degree – but not entirely – been based upon a scientific philosophy that denies the very idea of value fulfillment.  Therefore, you end up with a technology that threatens to work no longer.  You end up with affairs of great national and world concern, such as the Three Mile Island episode, and other lesser-known near-nuclear accidents.

The control panels of the nuclear plants, many of them, were designed as if consciousness did not enter into the picture at all, as if the plants were [to be] run by other machines, not men – with controls that are not handily within reach, or physically inaccessible, as if the men who drew up the plans had completely forgotten what the species [is] like mentally or physically.

Now, the overall purpose supposedly is the utilization of energy – a humanitarian project meant to bring light and warmth to millions of homes.  But that intent was sabotaged because the philosophy behind it denied the validity of the very subjective values that give man his reason for living.  Because those values were forgotten, life was threatened.

There are grass-roots organizations – cults, groups of every persuasion – growing up in your country as small groups of people together, once again, search for intellectual reasons to back up their innate emotional knowledge that life has meaning.  These groups represent the beginnings of new journeys quite as important to the species as any sea voyage ever was as man searched for new lands.

Seeds are blown by the wind, and so reproduce their kind.  Many people speculate about the physical journeys of early man from one continent to another.  It is said that in “the struggle to survive” man was literally driven to expand his physical boundaries.

The true motion of the species, however, has always been psychological, or psychic if you prefer, involving the exploration of ideas.  And again, the survival of the species in those terms is basically dependent upon its belief in the meaningfulness of its existence.  These new cults and groups, however – these new cults and groups therefore – are following the paths of genetic wisdom, opening up new areas of speculation and belief.  And if some of their present beliefs are ludicrous in the light of the intellect’s reason, in the end – because [such groups] are following the dictates of value fulfillment, however feebly – they are significant.  It is easy for the intellect, as you are used to using it, to see only the antics of such groups, and they can appear ridiculous in that light.

A scientist who would threaten the very survival of life on the planet in order to increase life’s conveniences is, however, truly displaying ludicrous behavior.

The trouble with most ideas concerning evolution is that they are all one-sided – all loaded, of course, at man’s end at the expense of the other species, and [with] all thinking in terms of progress along very narrow consecutive lines.  Such ideas have much to do with the way you think of yourselves, and what you consider human characteristics, and the light in which you view those who vary in one way or another from those norms.

Man needs the feeling that he is progressing, but technological progress alone represents a comparatively shallow level unless it is backed up by a growth of emotional understanding – a progression of man’s sense of being at one with himself and with the rest of the natural world.

There are people who are highly intellectually proficient, whose reasoning abilities are undisputed, and yet their considerable lack of, say, emotional or spiritual development remains largely invisible as far as your assessments are concerned.  Such people are not considered retarded, of course.  I will always be speaking about a balance between intuitional and reasoning abilities and, I hope, [be] leading you toward a wedding of those abilities, for together they can bring about what would certainly appear in your world to be one completely new faculty, combining the very best elements of each, but in such a fashion that both are immeasurably enhanced.

I also want to emphasize that your present beliefs limit the full and free operation of your intellects, as far as your established fields of knowledge are concerned, for science has placed so many taboos, limiting the areas of free intellectual inquiry.  I am not, however, promoting dependence upon feelings above the intellect, or vice versa.

The fact remains that when you assess your fellows, you put a far greater stress upon intellectual achievement than emotional achievement.  Some of you may even question what emotional achievement is, but it is highly important spiritually and biologically.  Some people, who would rate quite high on any hypothetical emotional-achievement test, might very possibly under certain conditions be labeled as retarded, according to the dictates of your society.  The species is at least embarked upon its journey toward emotional achievement, as it is upon the development of its intellectual capacities, and ultimately the two must go hand in hand.

A brilliant mathematician or scientist, or even an artist, or an accepted genius in any field, can be an emotional incompetent, but no one considers him as retarded.  I am not speaking now of eccentric behavior on the part of, say, creative people or anyone else, but of a lack of understanding of emotional values.

Now as far as the species is concerned, all variations are necessary – and it is as if in one instance a member of the species – for its own reasons, but also on behalf of the whole – decides to specialize in one particular area, to isolate certain abilities, so to speak, and display them with the greatest tenacity and brilliance, while nearly completely ignoring certain other areas.  In your society, however, the capacities of the reasoning mind have been considered in opposition to the intuitive abilities, so that your ideas of what a person is or should be largely ignore the idea of emotional achievement, emotional understanding.

Other people may be sophisticated, brilliantly aware of their own feelings and those of other people, intuitively knowledgeable in the handling of relationships, even, as adults, exquisite parents – yet they may be labeled as retarded if they do not live up to certain artificial intellectual standards.  They are actually in the same position at the other end as the people mentioned earlier.

It is as if certain members of the species, for their own reasons, and again on the part of the whole, specialized this time in the use of emotional capacities.  But those people are usually considered retarded.

I will have more to say about that particular issue, for I am speaking about certain cases only.

Mankind is a species that specializes in the use of the imagination, and without the imagination language would be unnecessary.  Man from his particular vantage point imagines images and events that are not before his eyes.  The applied use of the imagination is one of the most distinguishing marks of your species, and the imagination is your connection between the inner worlds of reality and the exterior world of your experience.  It connects your emotions and your reason.  All species are interconnected, so, as I said earlier, when you think you think for yourselves, you also specialize in thinking for the rest of nature, which physically sustains you.

I want to discuss reason and imagination, then, and those subtle variations that unite the two.  Through doing so, I hope to give you a truer picture of your own dimension, and to continue our discussion about the gifts and seeming defects that are genetically inspired.

Session 913 - Evolution of Art

Dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 913

Your established fields of knowledge do not grant any subjective reality to cells.

Cells, however, possess an inner knowledge of their own shapes, and of any other shapes in their immediate environment – this apart from the communication system mentioned earlier that operates on biological levels between all cells.

To some important degree, cells possess curiosity, an impetus toward action, a sense of their own balance, and a sense of being individual while being, for example, a part of a tissue or an organ.  The cell’s identification biologically is highly connected with this [very] precise knowledge of its own shape, or sometimes shapes.  Cells, then, know their own forms.

In highly complicated cellular structures like yourselves, with your unique mental properties, you end up with a vital inborn sense of shape and form.  The ability to draw is a natural outgrowth of this sensing of shape, this curiosity of form.  On a quite unconscious level you possess a biological self-image that is quite different from the self that you see in a mirror.  It is a knowledge of bodily form from the inside out, so to speak, composed of cellular shapes and organizations, operating at the maximum.  The simple cell, again, has a curiosity about its environment, and on your much more advanced cellular level your own curiosity is unbounded.  It is primarily felt as a curiosity about shapes: the urge to touch, to explore, to feel edges and smooth places.

There is particularly a fascination with space itself, in which, so to speak, there is nothing to touch, no shapes to perceive.  You are born, then, with a leaning toward the exploration of form and shape in particular.

Remember that cells have consciousness, so while I say these leanings are biologically entwined, they are also mental properties.  Drawing in its simplest form is, again, an extension of those inclinations, and in a fashion, serves two purposes.  Particularly on the part of children, it allows them to express forms and shapes that they see mentally first of all.  When they draw circles or squares, they are trying to reproduce those inner shapes, transposing those images outward into the environment – a creative act, highly significant, for it gives children experience in transplanting inner perceived events of a personal nature into a shared physical reality apparent to all.

When children draw objects, they are successfully, then, turning the shapes of the exterior world into their personal mental experiences – possessing them mentally, so to speak, through physically rendering the forms.  The art of drawing or painting to one extent or another always involves those two processes.  An astute understanding of inner energy and outer energy is required, and for great art an intensification and magnification of both elements.

The species chooses the best conditions in which to display and develop such a capacity to the utmost, taking into consideration all its other needs and purposes.  The particular, brilliant, intensified flowering of painting and sculpture that took place, say, in the time of Michelangelo could not, in your probability, have occurred after the birth of technology, for example, and certainly not in your own era, where images are flashed constantly before your eyes on television and in the movies, where they are rambunctiously present in your magazines and advertisements.  You are everywhere surrounded by photography of all kinds, but in those days, images outside of those provided by nature’s objects were highly rare.

People could physically only see what was presently before their eyes – no postcards with pictures of the Alps, or far places.  Visual data consisted of what the eye could see – and that was indeed a different kind of a world, a world in which a sketched object was of considerable value.  Portraits [were] possessed only by the priests and nobility.  You must remember also that the art of the great masters was largely unknown to the poor peasants of Europe, much less to the world at large.  Art was for those who could enjoy it – who could afford it.  There were no prints to be passed around, so art, politics, and religion were all connected.  Poor people saw lesser versions of religious paintings in their own simple churches, done by local artists of far lesser merit than those [who] painted for the popes.

The main issue, however, in that particular era, was a shared belief system, a system that consisted of, among other things, implied images that were neither here nor there – neither entirely earthly nor entirely divine – a mythology of God, angels, demons, an entire host of Biblical characters that were images in man’s imagination, images to be physically portrayed.  Those images were like an entire artistic language.  Using them, the artist automatically commented upon the world, the times, God, man, and officialdom.

Those mythological images and their belief system were shared by all – peasants and the wealthy – to a large degree.  They were, then, highly charged emotionally.  Whether an artist painted saints or apostles as heroic figures, as ideas embodied in flesh, or as natural men, he commented on the relationship between the natural and the divine.

In a fashion, those stylized figures that stood for the images of God, apostles, saints, and so forth, were like a kind of formalized abstract form, into which the artist painted all of his emotions and all of his beliefs, all of his hopes and dissatisfactions.  Let no one make God the Father look like a mere human, for example!  He must be seen in heroic dimensions, while Christ could be shown in divine and human attributes also.  The point is that the images the artists were trying to portray were initially mental and emotional ones, and the paintings were supposed to represent not only themselves but the great drama of divine and human interrelationship, and the tension between the two.  The paintings themselves seemed to make the heavenly horde come alive.  If no one had seen Christ, there were pictures of him.

This was an entirely different kind of art than you have now.  It was an attempt to objectify inner reality as it was perceived through a certain belief system.  Whether the artist disagreed with certain issues or not, the belief system was there as an invisible framework.  That intense focus that united belief systems, that tension between a sensed subjective world and the physical one, and the rarity of images to be found everywhere, brought art into that great flowering.

Later, as man insisted upon more objectivity of a certain kind, he determined that images of men should look like men – human beings, with weaknesses and strengths.  The heroic mold began to vanish.  Artists decided to stick to portraying the natural world as they saw it with their natural eyes, and to cast aside the vast field of inner imagery.  Some of da Vinci’s sketches already show that tendency, and he is fascinating because with his undeniable artistic tendencies he also began to show those tendencies that would lead toward the birth of modern science.

His notebooks, for example, dealt with minute observations made upon aspects of nature itself.  He combined the forces of highly original strong imagination with very calculated preciseness, a kind of preciseness that would lead to detailed sketches of flowers, trees, the action of water – all of nature’s phenomena.

Now: Drawing of that nature flourishes in your times in an entirely different fashion, divorced to some extent from its beginnings – in, for example, the highly complicated plans of engineers; the unity of, say, precise sketching and mathematics, necessary in certain sciences, [with] the sketching [being] required for all of the inventions that are now a part of your world.  In your world, technology is your art.  It is through the use of technology and science that you have sought to understand your relationship with the universe.

Science has until recently provided you with a unified belief system that is only now eroding – and if you will forgive me, your space voyages have simply been physical attempts to probe into that same unknown that other peoples in other times have tried to explore through other means.  Technology has been responsible for the fact that so many people have been able to see the great paintings of the world, either directly or through reproductions – and more people are familiar with the works of the great masters than ever were in their lifetimes.

The species uses those conditions, however, so that the paintings of the great masters can serve as models and impetuses, not simply for the extraordinary artwork involved, but to rearouse within man those emotions that brought the paintings into being.

Man always does best, or his best, when he sees himself in heroic terms.  While the Roman Catholic Church gave him a powerful, cohesive belief system, for many reasons those beliefs shifted so that the division between man and God became too great.  Man the sinner took over from man the child of God.  As a result, one you see in art particularly, man became a heroic figure, then a natural one.  The curiosity that had been directed toward divinity became directed toward nature.  Man’s sense of inquiry led him, then, to begin to paint more natural portraits and images.  He turned to landscapes also.  This was an inevitable process.  As it occurred, however, [man] began to make great distinctions between the world of imagination and the world of nature, until finally he became convinced that the physical world was real and the imaginative world was not.  So, his paintings became more and more realistic.

Art became wedded, then, to phenomena directly before the eyes.  Therefore, in a way it could present man with no more data than he had before.  Imaginative interpretations seemed like pretensions.  Art largely ended up – in those terms, now – as the handmaiden of technology: engineering plans, mathematical diagrams, and so forth.  What you call abstract art tried to reverse that process, but even the abstract painters did not believe in the world of imagination, in which there were any heroic dimensions, and the phase is largely transitory.

I did mean to mention that man’s use of perspective in painting was a turning point, in that it foreshadowed the turning of art away from its imaginative colorations toward a more specific physical rendering – that is, to a large degree after that the play of the imagination would not be allowed to “distort” the physical frame of reference.

All of this involved the triggering of innate abilities at certain points in time by the species at large, and on the parts of certain individuals, as their purposes and those of the species merged.

Session 912

Dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 912

Again, the genetic system is a far more open one than is usually supposed.  It not only contains and conveys information, but it also reacts to information from the physical and cultural worlds.

In a way I hope to explain, then, the genetic system also reacts to those beliefs and events that are paramount in any given civilization.  Events can trigger genetic activity – not simply through, say, chemical reactions, but through individual and mass beliefs about the safety or lack of it in the world at large.

There are also what I will call genetic dreams, which are inspired directly by genetic triggering.  These help form and direct consciousness as it exists in any given individual from before birth.

The fetus dreams.  As its physical growth takes place in the womb, so the shaping of its consciousness is also extended by genetic dreams.  These particular fetus-oriented dreams are most difficult to describe, for they are actually involved with forming the contours of the individual consciousness.  Such dreams provide the subjective understanding from which thoughts are developed, and in those terms complete thoughts are possible before the brain itself is fully formed.  It is the process of thinking that helps bring the brain into activity, and not the other way around.

Such thoughts are like electrical patterns that form their own magnets.  The ability to conceptualize is present in the fetus, and the fetus does conceptualize.  The precise orientation of that conceptualizing, and the precise orientation of the thinking patterns, wait for certain physical triggers received from the parents and the environment after birth, but the process of conceptualization and of thought are already established.  This establishment takes place in genetic dreams.

Infants think long before they can speak.  Thought must come before language.  Language is thought’s handmaiden.

The ability to use language is also genetically built-in, through the precise orientation, again with the physical triggering of the parents’ native language.  Children learn such languages mentally long before they are physically capable of speaking them; but again, in genetically inspired dreams, children – or rather, infants – practice language.  Before such infants hear their parents speak, however, they are in telepathic communication, and even in the fetus genetic dreams involve the coding and interpretation of language.  Those dreams themselves inspire the physical formations necessary to bring about their own actualizations.

Genetic dreams of one kind or another continue throughout your lives, whether or not you are consciously aware of them.  They were of prime importance in “man’s evolution”, as you think of it.  They were the source of dreams, mentioned earlier, that sent man on migrations after food, that led him toward fertile land.  Those dreams are most closely related to survival in physical existence, and whenever that survival seems threatened such dreams arise to consciousness whenever possible.

They are the dreams that warn of famines or of wars.  Such dreams, however, can also be triggered often, as in your own times, when the conscious mind is convinced that the survival of the species is threatened – and in such cases the dreams then actually represent man’s fears.  Overanxiety, then, can confuse the genetic system, and in a variety of ways.  The existence of each of the species is dependent upon trust, indeed a biological optimism, in which each species feels the freedom to develop the potentials of its members in relative safety, within the natural frameworks of existence.  Each species comes into being not merely feeling a natural built-in trust in its own validity, but is literally propelled by exuberance in its ability to cope with its environment.  It knows that it is uniquely suited to its place within life’s framework.  The young of all species exhibit an unquenchable rambunctiousness.  That rambunctiousness is built in.

Animals know that their own lives spell out life’s meaning.  They feel their relationship with all other forms of life.  They know that their existences are vitally important in the framework of planetary existence.  Beyond that, they identify themselves with the spirit of life within them so fully and so completely that to question its meaning would be inconceivable.  Not inconceivable because such creatures cannot think, but because life’s meaning is so self-evident to them.

Whenever man believes that life is meaningless, whenever he feels that value fulfillment is impossible, or indeed nonexistent, then he undermines his genetic heritage.  He separates himself from life’s meaning.  He feels vacant inside.  Man for centuries attached faith, hope, and charity to the beliefs of established religions.  Instead, these are genetic attributes, inspired and promoted by the inseparable unity of spirit in flesh.  The animals are quite as familiar with faith, hope, and charity as you are, and often exemplify it in their own frameworks of existence to a better extent.  Any philosophy that promotes the idea that life is meaningless is biologically dangerous.  It promotes feelings of despair that directly hamper genetic activity.  Such philosophies are extremely disadvantageous creatively, since they dampen the emotional spirits and exuberance, and sense of play, from which creativity itself emerges.

Such philosophies are also deadening on an intellectual basis, for they must, of necessity, close out man’s great curiosity about the subjective matters that are his main concern.  If life has no meaning, then nothing else really makes any difference, and intellectual curiosity itself also ends up withering on the vine.

The intellectual ideas of species, therefore, also have a great effect upon which genetic systems are triggered, and which ones are not.

You have genetic systems, then, carrying information that is literally uncalculatable.  Through your technologies, through your physical experience, you are also surrounded by an immense array of communication and information of an exterior nature.  You have your telephones, radios, televisions, your earth satellites – all networks that process and convey data.  Those inner biological systems and the exterior ones may seem quite separate.  They are intimately connected, however.  The information you receive from your culture, from your arts, sciences, fields of economics, is all translated, decoded, turned into cellular information.  Certain genetic diseases, for example, may be activated or not activated according to the cultural climate at any given time, as the relative safety or lack of it in that climate is interpreted through private experience.

In one way or another, the living genetic system has an effect upon your cultural reality, and the reverse also applies.  All of this is further complicated by the purposes and intents of the generations in any historical period, and the reincarnational influences.

Value fulfillment always implies the search for excellence – not perfection, but excellence.  Excellence in any given area – emotional, physical, intellectual, intuitional, scientific – is reflected in other areas, and by its mere existence serves as a model for achievement.  This kind of excellence need not be structured, then, into any one aspect of life, though it may appear in any aspect, and wherever it appears it is an echo of a spiritual and biological directive, so to speak.  There are different historical periods, in your terms, where the species has showed what it can do – and what is possible in certain specific directions when the genetic and reincarnational triggers are touched and opened full blast, so that certain characteristics appear in their clearest, most spectacular light, to serve as individual models and as models for the species as a whole.

Again, such times are closely bound with reincarnational intents that direct the genetic triggering, and that meet in the culture the further stimulus that may be required.  The time of the great masters in the fields of painting and sculpture is a case in point.

ASIDE: Reincarnation and Religious Beliefs

It is a highly individual matter.

Reincarnational patterns apply also.  Some people, having lived lives believing in one religious system or another, being completely immersed in them, give themselves shock treatments of sorts, then, living lives in which they believe in nothing, or at least freeing themselves from any beliefs – only to discover, of course, that a belief in nothing is the most confining belief of all.  That realization is the eye-opener, in such cases.

There are those who over relied upon religious beliefs, using them as crutches, and in [later lives] then, they might – such people – throw those crutches away over reacting to their newfound “freedom”; and through living lives as meaningless they then realize, after death, that the meaningfulness of existence was after all not dependent upon any religious system.  It was there all along, but they had not seen it.

The variations are endless.  On the whole, in the vast scheme of reincarnational reality, a belief in life’s meaning is by far the rule, and other excursions are indeed eccentric variations.  Specifically, however, such life episodes will of course involve their “moments” of after-death realization – dismay, shock, or what have you.

Session 911

Dreams, evolution, value fulfillment: Session 911

The genetic system is an inner, biological, “universal” language.

In your terms that language speaks the flesh – and it speaks the flesh equally in all races of mankind.  There are no inferior or superior races.  Now dreams also provide you with another universal kind of language, one that unites all peoples to one extent or another, regardless of their physical circumstances or nationalities or alliances.

The cataloging of separate races simply involves you in organizations of variances played upon a common theme – variances that you have used for various purposes.  Often those purposes led you to overexaggerate the differences between groups, and to minimize man’s biological unity.

The most important aspects of individuality are those subjective characteristics that on the one hand distinguish each person from the other, and that on the other hand are each like sparkling psychological mosaics, giving separate, exquisite individual versions of that larger pattern from which mankind emerges.  The security, the integrity, and the brilliance of each individuality rises in these terms from that universal genetic language, and also from the inner subjective language of dreams.  There are great connections between the two, and both are spoken together.

Let us become more practical, and see how these issues merge in your reality.  Some of this requires a great honesty on your own parts, as you try to recall some feelings and daydreams that you have tried to put away or forget or disown.  Why are some people, then, born with conditions that are certainly experienced as genetically defective, granting even the overall value of such variances on the part of the species?  For, again, I must stress the fact that in its way nature makes no such judgments, regardless of the beliefs of your science or religions.

Science seems to be of the opinion that the individual is important only insofar as he or she serves the purposes of the species’ survival – and I am not saying that.  I am saying that the existence of each individual is important to the value fulfillment of the species.  And moreover, I am stating that the value fulfillment of the individual and the species go hand in hand.

I am also stating that the species is itself aware of those conditions that lead to its own value fulfillment, and that of its members.  No species basically biologically considers its own existence with other species except in a cooperative manner – that is, there is no basic competition between species.  When you think that there is, you are reading nature wrong.  Whatever man’s conscious beliefs, on a biological level his genetic structure is intimately related to the genetic structure of all other species.

In man, the probabilities of development are literally numberless.  No computer could count the combinations of characteristics possible.  It is highly important, then, that the species retain flexibility, and not become locked into any one pattern, however advantageous – and I am referring to physical or mental patterns.  Within the framework of established specieshood, there must be every kind of leeway – leeways that are biologically activated, so that variances are constantly active.  Those genetic variances may appear as defective or eccentric.  They may appear as the handicapped.  They may appear as superior characteristics of one kind or another, but they must be biologically stated as the variations from the genetic norm.

By themselves, whether they appear as superior or defective conditions, they necessitate a different kind of adaptability, a change of subjective or physical focus, the intensification of other abilities that perhaps have been under stressed.  Yet granting all this, why, again, would some individuals choose situations that would be experienced ad defective conditions?  For this, we need to examine some human feelings that are often forgotten.

Now I have often said that suffering of itself is not “good for the soul”.  It is not a virtue, yet certainly many individuals seem to seek suffering.  Suffering cannot be dismissed from human experience as a freak matter of distorted emotions or beliefs.

Suffering is a human condition that is sought for various reasons.  There are gradations of suffering, of course, and each person will have his or her definitions of what suffering is.  Many people do indeed equate a certain kind of suffering with excitement.  Sportsmen, race-car drivers, mountain climbers – all seek suffering to one extent or another, and find the very intensity of certain kinds of pain pleasurable.  You might say that they like to live dangerously.

Some sects have believed that spiritual understanding came as the result of bodily agony, and their self-inflicted pain became their versions of pleasure.  It is usually said that animals, and also man, avoid pain and seek pleasure – and so any courting of pain, except under certain conditions, is seen as unnatural behavior.

It is not unnatural. It is an eccentric behavior pattern.  Many children daydream not only of being kings or queens, or given great honors, they also daydream about being tragic figures.  They daydream of cruel deaths.  They glory in stories of wicked stepmothers.  They imagine, in fact, every situation that they can involving human experience.  To an extent adults do the same thing.  They are drawn to cinema or television dramas that involve tragedies, sorrows, great dramatic struggles.  This is because you are alive as the result of your great curiosity for human experience.  You are alive because you want to participate in human drama.

While I admit that many people will not agree with me, I know from experience that most individuals do not choose one “happy” life after another, always ensconced in a capable body, endowed by nature or heritage with all of the gifts most people seem to think they desire.

Each person seeks value fulfillment, and that means that they choose various lives in such a fashion that all of their abilities and capacities can be best developed, and in such a way that their world is also enriched.  Some people will choose “defective” bodies purposely in order to focus more intensely in other areas.  They want a different kind of focus.  They want to sift their characteristics through a certain cast.  Such a choice demands an intensification.  It is made on the part of the individual and on the parts of the parents as well, so that a certain group of people will relate to the world in a highly characteristic way.  In almost all such cases, such people will be embarked upon subjective issues and questions also that might not be considered otherwise.  They will ask questions on their own parts that need to be raised, not only for themselves but for the society at large.

Those questions help bring out psychological maturities and insights about the nature of the species in general.  Many such conditions also serve to keep man’s sympathies alive.  I make a distinction between sympathy and pity, for a lively sympathy leads toward construction, toward the utilization of abilities, even to social discourse, while pity can be deadening.

Your overreliance upon physical norms, and your distorted concepts concerning survival of the fittest, help exaggerate the existence of any genetic defects, of course.  Many religious dogmas consider such conditions, again, the result of a god’s punishment.  The survival of the species is far more dependent upon your subjective activities than your physical ones – for it is your subjective behavior that is responsible for your physical acts.  Science of course looks at it the other way around, as if your physical acts are the result of a robot’s mechanical, formalized behavior – a robot miraculously programmed by the blind elements of an accidental universe formed by chance.  The robot is programmed only to survive at anyone’s or anything’s expense.  It has no real consciousness of its own.  It thoughts are merely mental mirages, so if one of its parts is defective then obviously, it is in deep trouble.  But man is no robot, and each so-called genetic defect has an internal part to play in the entire picture of genetic reality.  The principle of uncertainty must operate genetically, or you would have been locked into overspecializations as a species.

There are states of consciousness, one within the other, and yet each connected, of course, so that genetic systems are really systems of consciousness.  They are intertwined with reincarnational systems of consciousness.  These are further entwined with the consciousness that you recognize.  The present is the point of power.  Given the genetic makeup that you now have, your conscious intents and purposes act as the triggers that activate whatever genetic or reincarnational aspects that you need.

The state of dreaming provides the connecting links between these systems of consciousness.

(Concerning Jane’s current troubles with stiffness and walking.)  In Ruburt’s case, there is no particular genetic connection.  The same kind of process could occur, of course.

In Ruburt’s case, patterns of behavior were concerned – picked up for the purposes of intensification.  Ruburt’s mother, and to a large extent your father, had some similar behavior problems.  In Ruburt’s case, we are still dealing with functioning – impaired functioning – rather than genetic results.  Tell Ruburt the end does not justify the means in his particular situation, any more than in any other.  The idea still is to love and protect and cherish, and express the body that you have.

The statement also applies to people who have genetic handicaps.

Session 910

Dreams, Evolution, Value Fulfillment: Session 910

If there were no idiots among you, you would soon find that geniuses were absent also.

Those human abilities that you consider to be characteristic of your species are, again, dependent upon the existence of infinite numbers of variations that appear in the aggregate, to give you often obviously opposing states.  What you think of then as the average intelligence is a condition that exists because of the activity of constant variables, minute variations that give you at one end of the scale the idiot, and at the other the genius.

Both are necessary to maintain that larger “norm” of mental activity.  I am using the word “norm” here for your convenience, though I disagree with the ways in which the term has been used, when it has been set up as a rule of measurement, psychologically speaking.  The genetic system is not closed, therefore.  The genes do not simply hold information without any reference to the body’s living system.  It does not exist, then – the genetic structure – like some highly complicated mechanism already programmed, started and functioning “blindly”, so that once it is set into operation there is no chance for modification.

Particularly in your own species there is a great give-and-take between human genetic systems, the environment, and cultural events – and by cultural events I mean events having to do with your peculiarly unique field of activity that includes the worlds of politics, economics, and so forth.

Genetic events are not irrefutable in a deterministic fashion.  They represent strong inclinations toward certain bodily or mental activity, certain biological preferences.  They lead toward the activation of certain events over others, so that the probabilities are “loaded” in certain directions.  Genetic events are then events, though at a different level of activity than you are used to thinking of.

We are speaking of chromosomal messages.  These are not written within the chromosomes as words might be written upon paper, but the information and the chromosomes are a living unit.  The information is alive.  We are speaking about a kind of biological cuneiform, in which the structures, the very physical structures, of the cells contain all of the knowledge needed to form a physical body – to form themselves.  This is indeed knowledge of biological form, and biologically making its clearest living statement.

The cells [with their] genetic packages, like all cells, react to stimuli.  They act.  They are aware of all of the body’s events biologically.  In ways impossible to verbalize, they are also aware of the environment of the body as it is perceived at biological levels.  I have said before that in one way or another each living cell is united with each other living cell through a system of inner communication.  “Programmed” genetic activity can be altered by conditions in the environment.

I am not simply saying that genetic activity can be changed, for example, through something like a nuclear accident, but that highly beneficial alterations can also take place in genetic behavior, as in your terms the genetic structure not only prepares the species for any contingency, but also prepares it by triggering those characteristics and abilities that are needed by the species at any given time, and also by making allowances for such future development.

Your genetic structure reacts to each thought that you have, to the state of your emotions, to your psychological climate. In your terms, it contains the physical history of the species in context with the probable future capabilities of the species.  You choose your genetic structure so that it suits the challenges and capabilities of the species.  You choose your genetic structure so that it suits the challenges and potentials that you have chosen.  It represents your physical reference point, your bodily framework.  It is your personal physical property.  It is a portion of physical matter that you have identified, filled out with your own identity.  It is like a splendid ship, the body, that you have chosen ahead of time for a splendid challenging adventure – a ship that you have personally appointed that is equipped to serve as much as possible as a physical manifestation of your personhood.

Some people, in beginning such a venture, will indeed insist upon an excellent vessel, with the most sophisticated mechanisms, equipped with grand couches and a banquet room.  Others would want much more excitement, much more zest, and order then instead a less grand vessel, but one that went faster.  Some would set goals for themselves that demanded that their powers of seamanship be tested.  The analogy may be a simple one, yet each person chooses the living vessel of the body, with his or her own intents and purposes in mind.

In physical reality, if you will forgive me, life is the name of the game – and the game is based upon value fulfillment.  That means simply that each form of life seeks toward the fulfillment and unfolding of all of the capacities that it senses within its living framework, knowing that in that individual fulfillment each other species of life is also benefited.

In no way do I mean to demean the indisputable value of geniuses, or their great contributions to the quality of life – but the quality of life is, again, also benefited by the existence of idiots.  Not only because both ends of the scale are necessary for genetic reasons, but also because idiots themselves are in no way considered failures or defects by nature.  Those terms are human judgments.  Idiots also serve their role by moderating the sometimes fierce hold that the reasoning mind can have upon human activity.

The idiot is often able to experience in his or her own reality a freer, more generous, more faithful flow of emotional states, unhampered by reason’s sometimes stern dictates, and it is important that such a moderating tendency does operate genetically.

I will have more to say on that subject later in the book.

The reasoning mind, as you have used it thus far, roughly since the birth of Christianity, has confined its reasoning abilities to a very narrow spectrum of reality.  It has seen the value of life largely only as that life conforms to its own standards.  That is, the reasoning mind, as you have used it, considers that only reasoning creatures are capable of understanding life’s values.  Other forms of life have almost seemed beside the point, their value considered only insofar as they were of service to man.  But man’s life is obviously dependent upon the existence of life’s other species, and with him those species share certain values.  Life is sacred – all life – and again, all life seeks value fulfillment, not simply physical survival.

Ruburt read an article about the development of a strain of mice without thymus [glands].  Since the thymus is very important in the necessary process of maintaining bodily resistance to disease, these particular mice have little resistance.  They are bred and sold for experimental purposes.  The intent of such procedures is to promote the quality of human life, to study the nature of diseases, and hopefully apply what is learned to some of the lives of human beings.  Mice are not considered human.  They are not.  So, like any animal, they are thought of as dispensable, sacrificed to a fine humanitarian end.

Perhaps at first that prejudice of the reasoning mind might escape you, since after all mice are far divorced from your own species. There were Jews sacrificed to the same end not too long ago, and the reasoning mind was largely the same, though in that case you were dealing with your own species.

Jews were considered almost not human, however, and whenever such atrocities against your own species are concerned, you indulge in the same kind of twisted reasoning.  Because the Jews were considered less than human – or, at best, human defects – they were thought of as justifiable sacrifices on the altar of “the genetic betterment of mankind”.  You cannot improve the quality of your own lives by destroying the quality of any other kinds of life.  There is no genetic master race.  The vary classification of the species into races to begin with is based upon distinctions that are ridiculously minute in the overall picture of the similarities.

Ruburt was incensed by thee article that he read, and he said indignantly that such procedures involve a biological immorality.  I usually avoid terms like “morality” or “immorality”, since their definitions vary according to the individual.  The proceedings, however, do involve a biological violation, a going against nature’s flow and intent, a process in which a form of life is made to go against its own value fulfillment, and it is because of such attitudes involving other kinds of life that the horrors of the Jewish war camps were made possible.