The Way Toward Health - April 19, 1984 - How to approach difficult situations

April 19, 1984

The following material is for dictation, but I am giving it here also so that Ruburt will take it specifically to heart.  There are certain simple steps that can be followed, whenever you find yourself in a difficult situation, whether the condition is one of poor health, a stressful personal involvement with another, a financial dilemma, or whatever.

These steps seem very obvious, and perhaps too easy – but they will bring an immediate sense of ease and a peace of mind while your inner reserves are being released and activated.  I have mentioned these steps many times, because they are so vital in clearing the conscious mind, and bringing some sense of relief to the frightened ego.

1.      Immediately begin to live in the present as much as possible.  Try to become as aware as you can of present sense-data – all of it.  Often, while you are in pain, for example, you concentrate upon that sensation alone, ignoring the feelings of ease that may be felt by other portions of the body, and unaware of the conglomeration of sounds, sights, and impressions that are also in the immediate environment.  This procedure will immediately lessen the pressure of the problem itself, whatever it is, and give you a sense of refreshment.

2.      Refuse to worry.  This fits in automatically with Step 1, of course.  Tell yourself you can worry all you want tomorrow, or on some other occasion – but resolve not to worry in the present moment.

3.      When your thoughts do touch upon your particular problem in the present moment, imagine the best possible solution to the dilemma.  Do not wonder how or why or when the ideal solution will come, but see it in your mind’s eye as accomplished.  Or, if you are not particularly good at visual imagery, then try to get the feeling of thanksgiving and joy that you would feel if the problem was solved to your complete satisfaction.

These steps will allow you breathing time, and actually help minimize the pressure of your situation, whatever it is.  Then, quieted, you will be able to consider other suitable steps that may more directly address your particular solution.

Aside for Jane

While you and Ruburt embark upon a resolved path of getting to the bottom of Ruburt’s difficulties, it is highly important that Ruburt in particular increase his experience of pleasure, and his concentration upon it, so that pleasure can counter any other emotionally distressful feelings that may emerge along the way.

Again, we do not want a concentration solely upon deeply felt fears.  While these must be uncovered, they should be balanced by a new determination to seek out pleasure – the pleasure will help couch the fears.

We will not abandon book dictation, but the concentration for now will be largely devoted to better Ruburt’s condition by releasing his own energies, health, and flexibility.

I suggest you start with a kind of free association on Ruburt’s part.  With your resolve in mind, almost any subject matter you begin with will start to lead in the proper direction.  Again, we want, say, the release of painful thoughts or emotions somehow balanced by the steps I gave today, so that they provide a kind of supporting framework.

I will interrupt whenever I can be of benefit – and I will also provide sometimes short but pithy session material that can be used sometimes as subject matter for free association.  You can begin of course by free associating with any appropriate subject – his mother, his father, your relationship, your individual or joint sexual feelings, his ideas about his psychic material, his writing, or whatever – and I will also provide guidelines.

The endeavor itself will also activate his own dream mechanisms, and you will find that both of you bring new creative understandings to the task.

The Way Toward Health - April 10 and 12, 1984

April 10, 1984

Worry, fear, and doubt are detrimental to good health, of course, and these are very often caused by the officially held beliefs of society.

Those beliefs paint a dire picture, in which any given situation is bound to deteriorate.  Any conceivable illness will worsen, and any possible catastrophe be encountered.

Such beliefs discourage feelings of curiosity, joy, or wonder.  They inhibit playful activity or spontaneous behavior.  They cause a physical situation in which the body is placed in a state of defensive aggression.  Under such conditions. it seems only rational to look for the worm in the apple, so to speak, and to expect pain or danger in each new experience or encounter.

Play is a very important – indeed, vital – attribute in the development of growth and fulfillment.  Children play naturally, and so do animals.  For that matter, insects, birds, fish, and all kinds of life play.  Even ants and honeybees play.  Their sociability is not just a matter of constant work within a hive or an ant mound.  This playful activity is, in fact, the basis for their organized behavior, and they “play” at adult behavior before they assume their own duties.

Creatures play because the activity is joyful, and spontaneous and beneficial, because it activates all portions of the organism – and again, in play youngsters imitate adult patterns of operation that lead finally to their own mature activity.

When people become ill, worried or fearful, one of the first symptoms of trouble is a lack of pleasure, a gradual discontinuance of playful action, and an over-concentration upon personal problems.  In other words, illness is often first marked by a lack of zest or exuberance.

This retreat from pleasure begins to cut down upon normal activity, new encounters, or explorations that might in themselves help relieve the problem by opening up new options.  Such a person becomes dejected looking – unsmiling and somber, leading others to comment upon such a dejected countenance.  Comments such as these: “You look tired”, or: “What’s the matter, don’t you feel well?” and other such remarks often simply reinforce the individual’s earlier sense of dejection, until finally this same kind of give-and-take leads to a situation in which the individual and his fellows begin to intermix in a negative rather than a positive manner.

I do not mean to imply that it is always detrimental to make such queries as “Are you ill?” or “Are you tired?”  Such questions do indeed predict their own answers.  When a person is feeling in good health, exuberant and alive, such queries will be nonchalantly shoved aside – they will have no effect whatsoever.  But constant questions of such a nature do not help an individual who is having difficulties – and in fact, too frequent expressions of compassion can also worsen a person’s state of mind, stressing the idea that he or she must be very ill indeed to attract such feelings of compassion.  It is far better, then, to make no comment at all under such conditions.  I am not speaking of genuine questions of concern so much as rather automatic, unthinking, negative comments.

On the other hand, it is an excellent practice to comment upon another individual’s obvious zest or energy or good spirits.  In such a way, you reward positive behavior, and may indeed begin a chain of positive activity instead of continuing a chain of negative reactions.

April 12, 1984

I am not telling you to gush out a steady stream of positive suggestions, whether or not they bear any relation to the situation at hand.

I am saying that it is far better to look on the most hoped-for solution to any situation, and to voice that attitude rather than to expect the poorest outcome, or express the most dire of attitudes.  There are some issues highly vital to health and happiness, that are quite difficult to describe.  They are felt intrinsically.  They are a part of the esthetics of nature itself.  Flowers are not just brightly colored for man’s enjoyment, for example, but because color is a part of the flower’s own esthetic system.  They enjoy their own brilliance, and luxuriate in their own multitudinous hues.

The insects also appreciate flower’s profusion of color, and also for esthetic reasons.  I am saying, therefore, that even insects have an esthetic sense, and again, that each creature, and each plant, or natural entity, has its own sense of value fulfillment, seeking the greatest possible fulfillment and extension of its own innate abilities.

This sense of value fulfillment, once more, benefits not only the individual, but its species and all other species.  In a manner of speaking, then, the picture of nature is painted by its own consciously vital, esthetic portions.  Each portion of nature is also equipped to react to changing conditions, and therefore deals with its own kind of predictive behavior, so that it can grow today into tomorrow’s condition.

Nature always works with probabilities.  In human terms, this means that each person has a vast bank of avenues that lead to value fulfillment, and that individual abilities will ideally form their own boulevards of expression.

Poor health, or simply unhappy situations, arise only when the individual meets too many detours, or encounters too many blocks to the expression of value fulfillment.

With man’s own exteriorized ego, this leads to the question of free will and the making of conscious choices.

The human individual is aware of large numbers of probable activities.  Each individual person literally possesses far more abilities than can be adequately expressed in any given lifetime.  This insures a large profusion of possible actions from which the individual can draw according to changing circumstances.

Each person can also intrinsically sense the direction in which he or she is most inclined.  Inspiration will send nudges towards certain activities.  It will be easier and more delightful for each person to move and grow in certain directions, rather than others.

In this discussion, I am not merely speaking in terms of exterior accomplishments, or goals, though these are important.  Many people, however, will find they have a natural knack for relationships with others, in which the known value cannot be easily judged, as it can, say, in the works of an artist or writer.

Instead, such people will indeed perform a kind of artistry of relationships, composing, say, symphonic, emotional compositions that indeed play as masterfully upon the emotions as the pianist upon the keys.  By looking at your own life, you can quite easily discover in what areas your own abilities lie by following the shape of your own impulses and inclinations.  You cannot learn about yourself by studying what is expected of you by others – but only by asking yourself what you expect of yourself, and discovering for yourself in what direction your abilities lie.

The Way Toward Health - April 8 and 9, 1984 Suggestions and Health

Chapter 5: Suggestion and Health

April 8, 1984

Suggestions are usually statements directed toward a particular action or hypothesis.  To a large extent, suggestions are tied into conscious thought processes, following the dictates of reason.  For example: “If thus and thus be so, then thus and thus must follow”.  There is no magic connected with suggestions – but repeated often enough, and believed in fervently, such suggestions do indeed take on a deeply habitual nature.  They are no longer examined, but taken for literal truth.

They are then handed over to the more automatic levels of personality, where they trigger the specific actions that are so strongly implied.  Many such suggestions are “old-hat idioms”.  They belong to the past, and again they escape the questioning and examination that are usually given to new ideas.

These suggestions may be remarkably long-standing, therefore, and consist of beliefs received in childhood.  Accepted now in the present, noncritically, they may still affect health and well-being.  Such suggestions can be beneficial and supportive, or negative and detrimental.  Here are some examples that should be quite familiar to many people.  They consist of suggestions given to children:

“If you go out in the rain without your rubbers, you will catch cold.”

“If you are too talkative or demonstrative, people will not like you.”

“If you run you will fall down.”

There are many variations, of course, such as: “If you go out in rainy weather, you’ll get pneumonia”, or: “If you tell a lie your tongue will turn to stone”.

These suggestions and others like them are often given to children by their parents with the best of intentions.  When they are young, the offspring will accept some such suggestions uncritically, coming as they do from a revered adult, so that the suggestions are almost interpreted as commands.

A suggestion like: “If you go swimming too soon after lunch, you will drown”, is extremely dangerous, for it predicts behavior of a disastrous nature that would follow almost automatically after the first act is performed.  Obviously, children who go into the water right after eating do not all drown.  The suggestion itself can lead to all kinds of nervous symptoms, however – panics, or stomach cramps – that can persist will into adulthood.

Such suggestions can be removed, as we will explain shortly.

There are other kinds of suggestions that involve identification.  A child may be told: “You are just like your mother, she was always nervous and moody”.  Or: “You are fat because your father was fat”.

These are all statements leading toward a certain hypothesis.  Again, the problem is that often the hypotheses remain unquestioned.  You end up with structured beliefs unexamined, that are then automatically acted upon.

April 9, 1984

The suggestions we have given so far are predictives; they actually predict dire events of one kind or another, following a given original action.

There are many of these, dealing particularly with age also.  Many people believe fervently that with approaching age they will meet a steady, disastrous deterioration in which the senses and the mind will be dull, and the body, stricken with disease, will lose all of its vigor and agility.  Many young people believe such nonsense, and therefore they set themselves up to meet the very conditions they so fear.

The mind grows wiser with age when it is allowed to do so.  There is even an acceleration of thought and inspiration, much like that experienced in the adolescent years, that suddenly brings a new understanding to the aged individual, and provides an impetus that should help the person to achieve greater comprehension – a comprehension that should quell all fears of death.

Thoughts and beliefs do indeed bring about physical alterations.  They can even – and often do – change genetic messages.

There are diseases that people believe are inherited, carried from one generation to another by a faulty genetic communication.  Obviously, many people with, for example, a genetic heritage of arthritis do not come down with the disease themselves, while others indeed are so afflicted.  The difference is one of belief.

The people have accepted the suggestion uncritically that they will inherit such a malady do then seem to inherit it: they experience the symptoms.  Actually, the belief itself may have changed a healthy genetic message into an unhealthy one.  Ideally, a change of belief would remedy the situation.

People are not simply swung willy-nilly by one negative suggestion or another, however.  Each person has an entire body of beliefs and suggestions – and these are quite literally reflected in the physical body itself.

All practical healing deals with the insertion of positive suggestions and the removal of negative ones.  As we mentioned earlier, each smallest atom or cell contains its own impetus toward growth and value fulfillment.  In other words, they are literally implanted with positive suggestions, biologically nurtured, so to that extent it is true to say that in a certain fashion negative suggestions are unnatural, leading away from life’s primary goals.  Negative suggestions could be compared to static sounding on an otherwise clear program.

The Codicils with Comments

The Codicils

1.      ‘‘All of creation is sacred and alive, each part connected to each other part, and each communicating in a creative cooperative commerce in which the smallest and the largest are equally involved.

2.      ‘‘The physical senses present one unique version of reality, in which being is perceived in a particular dimensionalized sequence, built up through neurological patterning, and is the result of one kind of neurological focus. There are alternate neurological routes, biologically acceptable, and other sequences so far not chosen.

3.      ‘‘Our individual self-government and our political organizations are by-products of sequential perception, and our exterior methods of communication set up patterns that correlate with, and duplicate, our synaptic behavior. We lock ourselves into certain structures of reality in this way.

4.      ‘‘Our sequential prejudiced perception is inherently far more flexible than we recognize, however. There are half steps – other unperceived impulses – that leap the nerve ends, too fast and too slow for our usual focus. Recognition of these can be learned and encouraged, bringing in perceptive data that will trigger changes in usual sense response, filling out potential sense spectra with which we are normally not familiar.

5.      ‘‘This greater possible sense spectrum includes increased perception of inner bodily reality in terms of cellular identity and behavior; automatic conscious control of bodily processes; and increased perception of exterior conditions as the usual senses become more vigorous. (Our sight, for example, is not nearly as efficient as it could be. Nuances of color, texture, and depth could be expanded and our entire visual area attain a brilliance presently considered exceptional or supernormal.)

6.      ‘‘Each person is a unique version of an inner model that is in itself a bank of potentials, variations, and creativity. The psyche is a seed of individuality and selfhood, cast in space-time but ultimately independent of it.

7.      ‘‘We are born in many times and places, but not in a return of identity as we understand it; not as a copy in different clothes, but as a new self ever-rising out of the psyche's life as the new ruler rises to the podium or throne, in a psychic politics as ancient as humanity.

8.      ‘‘Civilizations both past and present represent projections of inner selfhood, and mirror the state of the mass psyche at any given time. We hold memory and knowledge of past civilizations as we hold unconscious memories of our private early current-life experiences.

9.      ‘‘From our present, we exert force upon the past as well as the future, forming our ideas of the past and reacting accordingly. We actually project events into our own new past.

10.  ‘‘Each generation forms such a new past, one that exists as surely as the present; not just as an imaginary construct but as a practical platform – a newly built past – upon which we build our present.

11.  ‘‘Options and alternate models for selfhood and civilizations exist in a psychic pattern of probabilities from which we can choose to actualize an entirely new life system.’’

Comments on the Codicils

General Comment on Codicil 1-5

Acceptance of these first codicils would expand practical knowledge of the self, break down barriers that are the result of our prejudiced perception, and restructure personal, social, and political life.

Concepts of the self and practical experience of the self must be broadened if the species is to develop its true potentials. Only an evolution of consciousness can alter the world view that appears to our official line of consciousness.

Comment on Codicil 2

This next step is as important as the birth of Christianity was in the history of mankind. It will present a new structure for civilization to follow. Christianity represented the human psyche at a certain point, forming first inner patterns for development that then became exteriorized as myth, drama, and history, with the Jewish culture of the Talmud presenting the psyche’s direction. The differences between Jewish and Christian tradition represented allied but different probabilities, one splitting off from the other, but united by common roots and actualized in the world to varying degrees.

The traditional personified god concept represented the mass psyche’s one-ego development; the ego ruling the self as God ruled man; man dominant over the planet and other species, as God was dominant over man— as opposed to the idea of many gods or the growth of a more multifocused self with greater nature identification.

Neurological patterning of the kind we know began with the early old-Testament Jews (known, then, as God’s people), looking forward through time to a completely one-ego focused self: Before, neurological functioning was not as set; and in our world today some minority peoples and tribes still hold to those alternate neurological pulses. These will not appear to our measuring devices because we are literally blind to them.

The Jewish prophets, however, utilized these alternate focuses of perception themselves, and were relatively unprejudiced neurologically. They were therefore able to perceive alternate visions of reality. Yet their great work, while focusing the energy of an entire religion, and leading to Christianity, also resulted in limiting man’s potential perceptive area in important ways.

The prophets were able to sense the potentials of the mass psyche, and their prophecies charted courses in time, projecting the Jewish religion into the future. The prophecies gave the people great strength precisely because they gave their religion a future in time, providing a thread of continuity and a certain immortality in earthly terms.

The prophecies were psychic molds to be filled out in flesh. Some were fulfilled and some were not, but the unfulfilled ones were forgotten and served their purpose by providing alternate selections and directions. The prophecies ahead of time charted out a people’s probable course, foreseeing the triumphs and disasters inherent in such an adventure through time.

They provided psychic webworks, blueprints, and dramas, with living people stepping into the roles already outlined, but also improvising as they went along. These roles were valid, however, chosen in response to an inner reality that foresaw the shape that the living psyche of the people would take in time.

But as a snake throws off old skin, the psyche throws off old patterns that have become rigid, and we need a new set of psychic blueprints to further extend the species into the future, replete with great deeds, heroes, and challenges; a new creative drama projected from the psyche into the three-dimensional arena. For now, we no longer view reality through original eyes, but through structures of beliefs that we have outgrown. These structures are simply meant to frame and organize experience, but we mistake the picture for the reality that it represents. We’ve become neurologically frozen in that respect, forced to recognize the one sequential pattern of sense perceptions, so that we think that the one we’ve chosen is the only one possible.

Comment on Codicil 3

Thus far we’ve projected the unrecognized portions of our greater selfhood outward into God, religion, government, and exteriorized concepts. In this existence, selfhood is dependent upon sense perceptions, so that our neurological prejudice and rigid focus have limited our concepts of identity. When we do become aware of unofficial information, coming through other than recognized channels then it seems to come from “notself,” or outside.

A great deal of energy has been used to repress levels of selfhood and to project these into religious and nationalistic heroes and cultural organizations. Government and religion try to preserve the status quo, to preserve their own existences, not for political or religious reasons, but to preserve the official picture of the self around which they are formed.

But the structured reality in which that kind of a self can exist is breaking down. The official picture no longer fits or explains private experience which is growing out of it. There is a momentary rift between the inner psyche and its creations.

Besides this, the experienced self is not the same through the ages. The experienced self is a psychic creation, responsive to exterior conditions which it creates as the psyche dives into the waters of experienced earthly selfhood. Only a portion of the potential self is experienced, but different portions as intents and purposes change. It is possible, though, to actualize more of our potential.

Comment on Codicils 4 and 5

The answers and solutions lie in using levels of consciousness now considered eccentric or secondary. This includes far greater utilization of the dream states and altered conditions thus far thought to be exceptions of consciousness. These “exceptions” represent other kinds of focuses, greatly needed to broaden our concepts of the self; and our experience of personal selfhood by increasing conceptualization, giving direct experience of alternate views, and bringing other kinds of data to bear upon the world we know. In the past, the attitudes surrounding such perceptions brought about their own difficulties. The perceptions are biologically acceptable, however, and will lead to a clearer relationship between mind and body.

The Way Toward Health - April 4 and 6, 1984

April 4, 1984

This chapter consists of a potpourri of different ideas – merely to hint at the multitudinous issues connected with health and well-being.

Your ideas about yourself are, again, vital in the larger context of a healthy lifetime.  The condition of your heart is affected, for example, by your own feelings about it.  If you consider yourself to be coldhearted, or heartless, those feelings will have a significant effect upon that physical organ.  If you feel broke-hearted, then you will also have that feeling reflected in one way or another in the physical organ itself.

Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, each individual also has many options open.  Everyone who feels brokenhearted does not die of heart failure, for example.  The subject of health cannot be considered in an isolated fashion, but must be seen in that greater context that gives health itself a value and a meaning.  As mentioned earlier, each person will also try to fulfill their own unique abilities, and to “fill out” the experience of life as fully as possible.

If an individual is hampered in that attempt strongly and persistently enough, then the dissatisfaction and frustration will be translated into a lack of physical exuberance and vitality.  There is always an unending reservoir of energy at the command of each person, however, regardless of circumstances, and we will also discuss the ways in which you can learn to tap that source and better your own health situation.

The sooner you can rid yourself of rigid beliefs about the survival of the fittest, the better you will be.  All philosophies that stress the idea of the body’s impurity or degradation should also be seen as detrimental to bodily and spiritual integrity.  Such beliefs clutter up your conscious mind with negative suggestions that can only frighten the exterior ego and impede the great strength and vitality that is your heritage from lending you the fullest possible strength and support.

Later on we will indeed discuss various methods of healing, conventional and unconventional.  Medical technology alone, however expert, cannot really heal a broken heart, of course.  Such a healing can only take place through understanding and through expressions of love.  In other words, through emotional transplants rather than physical ones alone.  The emotional factors are extremely vital, both in the development and in the healing of all dis-ease.

We will not stress particular diseases in this book, and mention symptoms only to identify the cases associated with such symptoms.  It is actually far more important that we stress the symptoms of health and those methods, beliefs, and healings that promote them.

April 6, 1984

(Advice to Jane and Rob)

It is natural enough in your situation to have blue periods now and then.

These can often serve as springboards, however, leading to greater understanding, and the feelings themselves do indeed help rid you of fears and doubts that are expressed through such a medium.  I am sure that I mentioned this before, but I wanted to refresh your memory, and this applies, generally speaking, to all individuals.  It is far better to express those feelings than to inhibit them.

At the same time, you both should – and do – try to turn your minds in other directions, so that the periods do not linger.  Generally speaking, you have handled such situations well, and what I said about your activities in Framework 2 does still apply.

Aside: Framework 2

In Jane/ Seth’s The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which was published in 1981, I wrote: “Seth maintains that Framework 2, or inner reality, contains the creative source from which we form all events, and that by the proper focusing of attention we can draw from that vast subjective medium everything we need for a constructive, positive life in Framework 1, or physical reality.” Seth has a lot to say about Frameworks 1 and 2 in Mass Events. For example: “Those unique intents that characterize each individual exist first in Framework 2, then — and with birth, those intents immediately begin to impress the physical world of Framework 1.”

The Way Toward Health - April 2 and 3, 1984

April 2, 1984

There are many large issues that touch upon the circumstances involving the health of individuals, and these concern questions that we have not yet discussed.

They will indeed be covered later in this book, but for now we will only be concerned with them in a general way.  They are more divorced from ordinary medical thought, and would indeed be considered sheer quackery in the majority of medical circles.

The fact is that each individual lives many lives, and that the inner self is quite aware of its own spiritual and physical dexterity.  The body consciousness alone understands that its physical existence in any one life is dependent upon its physical death – and that that death will assure it of still another existence.  The “drive for survival” is, therefore, a drive that leads to death and beyond it, for all of consciousness understands that it survives through many forms and conditions.

Reincarnation, therefore, also is part of the larger framework in which any individual’s health and well-being must be considered.  The reincarnational influences are most apparent in what would be considered bodily defects dating from birth, and these will be discussed later on in this book.

Reincarnational influences are not nearly as rigid as many believers in the concept think.  That is, reincarnational influences usually leave many options open to an individual in any case.  It is quite simplistic, for example, to say, as some people do, that any given particular event from a past life leads inevitably to a particularly matching effect in a present one.  There are too many other elements that also apply to the human personality.  No one is “fated” to have bad health.  No one is punished in one life for “evil” activities in a previous one.

A person who has been cruel in one life may choose to experience conditions in the next life in which he or she understands the meaning of cruelty, but this does not mean that such a person would then necessarily experience an entire lifetime as a victim.

New learning would always be involved, and thus new options would always be open.  There are, in fact, so many distorted ideas connected with the concept of reincarnation in general, that I think it far better to simply concentrate upon the idea of multiple existences.  Because of the true nature of time, and the interrelationships of consciousness, a future life affects a past one, for in actuality all of these existences happen simultaneously.  All systems are open-ended, particularly psychological ones.  In greater terms, you are working “at all levels” and at all of your own existences at once, even though it is useful sometimes to think of reincarnation as a series of lives, one after the other.

April 3, 1984

The concept of the survival of the fittest has had a considerably detrimental effect in many areas of human activity – particularly in the realm of medical ideology and practice.

The whole idea was developed in the most mechanistic of terms, stressing competition among all aspects of life, pitting one life form against another, and using physical strength and dexterity, swiftness and efficiency, as the prime conditions for the survival of any individual or species.

It is quite true, however, that in the wild many animals protect and provide for wounded or disabled members, and that the wisdom that comes with age is indeed appreciated even in the animal kingdom.  The survival of the fittest concept, however, has been exaggerated far above those of cooperation.

Politically as well as medically, such distortions have led to unfortunate conditions: the Aryan-supremacy biological ideas fostered in the second world war, the concentration upon “the perfect body”, and other distortions.  The idea of the ideal body has often been held up to the populace at large, and this often sets forth a stylized “perfect” physique that actually could be matched by few individuals.  Any variations are frowned upon, and any birth defects considered in the most suspicious of lights.  Some schools of thought, then, have it that only the genetically superior should be allowed to reproduce, and there are scientists who believe that all defects can be eradicated through judicious genetic planning.

As a result of such long-held theories, people have grown distrustful of their own bodies.  The handicapped are often given messages, even by the medical profession, that make them feel like misfits, unworthy to survive.  When people become ill, they often blame themselves in such a way that unnecessary guilt is the result.

In the past, some religious groups have also promoted beliefs that illness is a sign of God’s punishment, or vengeance for sins committed against his “goodness”.

The same beliefs often spread to economic areas in which people who met pleasure in God’s eyes were therefore gifted with wealth and prosperity, as well as good health.  Therefore, God was seen to be on the side of those who competed most strenuously, so that to be poor or sick was almost seen as a sign of God’s disfavor.  All such concepts appear in one form or another at most official levels of thought and education.  The whole idea of the esthetics of nature is forgotten – a subject that we will touch upon further as we continue our discussion.

The Way Toward Health - March 25, 27 1984

March 25, 1984

Later on, we will discuss more thoroughly distorted ideas about the self and the body in particular that stand in the way of natural exuberance and good health.

Without going more deeply into the reasons for such beliefs until later, let me discuss several of the ways in which they impede general well-being.  Right now it is socially fashionable to take up some kind of exercise, gym work, or strenuous sport, so it seems obvious that the general populace must have a great regard for the physical body.  Unfortunately, large segments of the population feel uncomfortable with their bodies, and do not trust the body’s spontaneity, strength, or overall dependability.  They have been taught that medical science knows more about bodies than any private individual knows about their own bodies and their ways and workings.

People have been taught to trust X-rays for a picture of what is happening within their bodies, and cautioned not to trust their own feelings.  Some public-service announcements stress the “fact” that the individual can be gravely threatened by high blood pressure, for example, even though he or she feels in excellent physical health.

The populace has embarked upon this strong exercise program because of a mixture of very unfortunate beliefs.  Since they feel divorced from their bodies, many people suspect what is going on inside.  Some religious beliefs suggest that the body is impure, and the heir to disease and infirmity.  Often people exercise over-zealously to punish their bodies, or to force the body to respond at its best, since they do not trust it to do otherwise.

In many instances people exercise quite simply because they are afraid of what will happen if they do not.  They may run to avoid heart disease, for example, while their own fear can help to promote the very eventuality they fear.

The body’s health is the expression of inner well-being.  Poor health is an expression also, and it may serve many purposes.  It goes without saying that some people become ill rather than change their activities and their environments.  They may also become ill, of course, to force themselves to make such changes.

March 27, 1984

I do not mean to imply that exercise is detrimental to good health.  It is true, however, that the reason that you exercise is actually more important than the exercises that you do perform.  The reason can promote your good health or actually impede it.

Thus far in this book, we have barely begun to touch upon the multitudinous issues involved in good health or in its absence.  Before we are finished we hope to give you a far greater framework in which to consider your own well-being and the many options that are open to any individual.  We will discuss the aspects connected with a long, healthy, fairly happy lifetime, and those involved with early death, severe illnesses, and suicide – particularly with the suicides of fairly young persons.

Earlier we spoke about the incredible impulse on the part of all of nature toward exuberance and well-being.  It is as if nature always tries to exceed itself, and certainly to increase the quality of its existence.  The individual person is also involved in an ever-continuing process to increase the quality of life as it exists at all levels of personal experience.  Reality is so constructed that each individual seeking such fulfillment does so not at the expense of others, but in such a way that the quality of life is increased for all.

Each person impulsively tries to grow into his or her sensed potentials – even when they are not immediately apparent.

In one way or another each segment of consciousness is aware of each other segment, through an instantaneous communication that exists on many levels.  It is important that your ideas circulate freely, and that the ideas of the peoples of the world circulate freely, just as it is important that your individual body has good circulation.  Your ideas about your own health are even more important than those steps you take to promote it.

Your ideas about foreign countries, allies and enemies, also have a vital role to play in how you handle your own bodily defenses.  People who are afraid that their nation will be invaded by an enemy will often also consider viruses or diseases to be enemies, ever about to threaten their personal survival.  Such attitudes will, of course, be detrimental to feelings of well-being, health, and exuberance.  While it is true that medical technology has many serious defects, it is also true that many people believe in the medical profession to such a degree that it would be nearly impossible for them to survive in good health without it.

Later on in this book, we will also discuss the ways in which you can use your own beliefs about the medical profession to reinforce your overall sense of health, rather than to undermine it.