Category Archives: Emotions

Emotions, Evolution, Feelings, Inner universe, Lessons, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Unknown

Biologically Valid Thoughts, Attitudes, and Beliefs

When we are born we possess a group of attitudes toward oneself and toward life. These allow us to grow with the greatest possible impetus into childhood. They are also important in every period of our life. We can see the results in life all about us, though in animals or plants these are experienced as a matter of feelings rather than, say, as thoughts or attitudes.

It may sound very simplistic to tell one that we must have sunny thoughts as well as rays of the physical sun in order to be healthy — but sunny thoughts are as biologically necessary to our well-being as are the rays of sun that shines in the sky. Even as infants, then, we are predisposed naturally toward certain feelings, thoughts and attitudes that are meant to insure our healthy survival and emergence into adulthood. These are actually composed of inbred psychological information as necessary and vital to our life as the data transmitted by our genes and chromosomes. Indeed, these inbred, inner psychological predispositions are all-important if the information carried by our genes and chromosomes is to be faithfully followed.

It is difficult to translate such biological and psychological material into the words of any language, even though these inbred psychological prerequisites form a kind of language of their own. It is a language that promotes growth, exuberance and fulfillment, and stimulates the entire organism of the body –signaling the proper responses that are required for health and growth.

In later blogs we will discuss contrary feelings, thoughts, and emotions. I want to substitute beliefs for emotions that greatly curtail the natural progression of health and vitality. Here, however, we will deal primarily with those inner predispositions that encourage life and vitality.

I look in a puddle

and what should I see

but the stars in

the heavens looking back at me….

Electrical Reality, Emotions, Evolution, Feelings, HEALING, Inner universe, Lessons, METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Uncategorized, Unknown

Misdirected Good Intent

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If any of my blog readers, are in poor health, or generally unhappy, no one is asking you to pretend that those conditions do not exist. I hope to show you that even those unfortunate situations were created out of a misdirected good intent. In these blogs we will keep reminding you, however, that exuberance and high spirits are a natural part of our heritage.

We also hope to allow you to recapture those feelings, if you have lost them, and to give other ways of keeping those emotions fresh and intact. Blog readers will benefit in various fashions, according to their own conditions and intents, but every blog reader will benefit to some degree or another — and each blog reader will become reacquainted with those inner springs of vitality and wellbeing that are so important in human experience.

Concentrate upon the joys that you possess, keep your goals in mind, and trust the infinite intelligence within you to bring about the desired results. This frees your mind and allows improvements to continue without interruptions.

It’s our version of worrying that desired effects may not be brought into the present — that is, will not come into your close vision. When you feel that way, close your eyes, of only for a moment, reassure yourself that you can trust your vision — mental and physical — and that indeed your goals will be brought into clear focus.

Emotions, Energy, Feelings, Gestalt, Inner universe, Lessons, Metaphysics, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Unknown

Secondary Personalities

People who have epilepsy are afraid of their own energy.

They do not trust it, nor do they trust the spontaneous portions of the self. They are afraid that left alone their energy might strike out against others, and so they short-circuit its use, having attacks that momentarily render themselves helpless.

People with so-called secondary personalities also fear their own energy. They divide it up so that it seems to belong to different personalities, and is therefore effectively, divided. In basic terms, true amnesia does not exist in such cases, though it appears to. The people involved are quite aware of their activity at all times, but they behave in a fashion that is not continuous — that is, the main personality does not seem to behave in a continual manner, but is broken up, or again, seemingly divided. This psychological ploy neatly prevents the so-called main personality from using all of its energy at any one time.

The individuals concerned pretend to themselves that they have no memory of the other personalities’ existences or activities. These personalities, however, store up their energy so that one personality often exhibits explosive behavior, or makes certain decisions that seem to go against the wishes of the main entity. In this way, different kinds of behavior may be exhibited, and while it would seem that many decisions are made by one portion of the self, without another portion of the self knowing anything about it, such usually is not the case. In fact, the main personality is able to express many different kinds of probable action, but the entire personality is prevented from acting with its full energy or power. Instead the energy is diverted into other channels.

All portions of the self are indeed conscious, and they are also basically conscious of each other, though for working purposes they may seem to be separate or isolated.

The idea of the sinful self will not be predominant in my blogs, but I certainly will delve into the many unfavorable concepts that are held by the various religions — concepts that certainly make many people feel that the self is indeed sinful rather than blessed.

The self is indeed blessed, and just the reminder of that fact can often short-circuit negative beliefs, particularly if they are not too deep-seated.

Dreams, Emotions, Energy, Evolution, Feelings, Inner universe, Lessons, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Time, Unknown

The Daily Hypothesis

It would help all if we remind ourselves that our creative mind is at work whether or not we are aware of it, and regardless of what we are doing, and that such periods of dead time have the potential, at least, of accelerating creativity, if we allow our intellect to go into a kind of free drive at such times.

Each person has such a daily hypothesis — one that might be quite different for say, Friday than it is for Monday. We build our daily experience partially by such working hypotheses.

Many of the beliefs  that we have individually and jointly are somewhat relieved in the evening, in that they so often apply to the day’s activities, when the rest of the world seems to be engaged in the nine-to-five assembly-line world experience.

We do not project as many negative ideas upon the evening hours, and to same applies to most people to varying degrees. We are jointly free of limitations that might hamper us at other times of the day. We are  less visited by preconceptions of what we are supposed to do in any given hour of the day.

The natural, magical flows of our own rhythms are more often broken up in the daytime. This applies to many people as well, because of our ideas of what we should be doing at any given time, or what is socially respectable, proper, upright, even moral in limited terms.

We have settled upon a system that seems to be naturally based, the exclusive results of our historic past, one in which our main activities are daytime ones. It seems only natural that early man and woman, for example, carried on all of his and her main activities in the day, hiding after dark. As a matter of fact, however, early man and woman were a natural night dweller, and early developed the uses of fire for illumination, carrying on many activities after dark, when many natural predators slept. He and she also hunted very well in the dark, cleverly using all of his and her senses with high accuracy — the result of learning processes that are now quite lost.

In any case, man and woman were not by any means exclusively a daytime creature, and fires within caves extended activities far into the night. It was agriculture that turned him and her more into a daytime rhythm, and for some time many beliefs lingered that resulted from earlier nighttime agricultural practices.

Many people’s natural rhythms, then, still do incline in those directions, and they are always kept operable as alternate rhythms for the species as a whole.

I have some inclinations in that direction, as do many creative people, but these rhythms are often nearly completely overlaid by culturally-learned ones. Cultures that were night-oriented appreciated the night in a different fashion, of course, and actually utilized their consciousnesses in ways that are almost nearly forgotten. I believe there are ancient fairy tales and myths still surviving that speak of these underworlds, or worlds of darkness — but they do not mean worlds of death, as is usually interpreted.

 

In a fashion, the intellect goes hand-in-hand with the imagination under such conditions. It is not that man and woman stressed physical data less, but he and she put it together differently — that in the darkness he and she relied upon his and her inner and outer senses in a more unified fashion. The night portions of our personalities have become strangers to us — for as we identify with what we think of a our rational intellect, then we identify it further with the daytime hours, with the objective world that becomes visible in the morning, with the clear-cut physical objects that are then before our view.

In those times, however, man and woman identified more with his and her intuitive selves, and with his and her imagination, and these to some extent more than now, directed the uses to which he and she put his or her intellect.

This meant, of course, a language that was in its way more precise than our own, for concepts were routinely expressed that described the vast complexity of subjective as well as objective events. There were myriad relationships, for example, impossible now to describe, between a person and his of her dream selves, and between the dream selves of all the members of the tribe. Particularly in warmer climates, man and woman were naturally nocturnal, and did a good deal of his and her sleeping and dreaming in the daytime.

We must remember, of course, that the use of clocks is a fairly recent phenomenon. Men and women thought in terms of rhythms of the time, of flowing time, not of time in sections that were arbitrary. So as far as creature-hood is concerned, we have adapted to a time environment that we ourselves have formed. Creative people, again, are often aware of those connections, at least at certain levels, and I have in particular always felt this way to some extent. We have largely buried our own natural feelings in that direction.

These rhythms are also more natural to us than we suspect. We often have freedoms, then, that we do not use — a 24-hour period that we use quite arbitrarily, one that is already sectioned for us by society — but only if we allow it to be. It can be used in any fashion that we wish.

Dreams, Emotions, Evolution, Feelings, HEALING, Inner universe, Lessons, METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, SOUL, Thoughts, Uncategorized

Relaxation and Effortlessness

It is true, of course, that before the time of modern psychology man and woman had a concept of himself and herself that dealt with conscious exterior aspects only, although it has been written that until that time man and woman thought of themselves as a kind of flat-surfaced self-minus, for example, subconscious or unconscious complexity.

Instead, previous to psychology’s entrance, before psychology mapped the acceptable or forbidden, the dangerous or safe compartments of the self, man and woman used the word “soul” to  include his or her own entire complexity. The word was large enough to contain man’s and woman’s experience. It was large enough to provide room for conventional and unconventional, bizarre and ordinary states of mind and experience. It was roomy enough to hold images of reality that were physically perceived or psychologically perceived.

Now the church finally placed all of the condemnation of its religious laws against certain psychological and mystical experiences — not because it did not consider them realities, of course, but precisely because it recognized too well the disruptive influence that, say, revelationary experience could have upon a world order that was based upon a uniform dogma.

“Witches” were not considered insane, for example, or deranged, for their psychological beliefs fit in only too well with those of the general populace. They were considered evil instead. The vast range of psychological expression, however, had some kind of framework to contain it. The saint and the sinner each had access to great depths of possible heroism or despair. Psychological reality, for all of the religious dangers placed upon it, was anything but a flat-surfaced experience. It was in fact because the church so believe in the great range of psychological activity possible that it was so dogmatic and tireless in trying to maintain order.

Unfortunately, with the development of scientific era, a development occurred that need not have happened. As I have mentioned before, science’s determination to be objective almost immediately brought about a certain artificial shrinking of psychological reality. What could not be proven in laboratory was presumed not to exist at all.

Anyone who experienced “something that could not exist” was therefore to some extent or another deluded or deranged. There is no doubt that the accepted dimensions of psychological reality began to shrink precisely at the time that modern psychology began. Modern psychology was an attempt to make man and woman conform to the new scientific world view.

It was an attempt to fit man within the picture of evolution, and to manufacture a creature whose very existence was somehow pitted against itself. Evolutionary man and woman, with Darwinian roots, could not be a creature with a soul. It had to have hidden in its psychological roots the bloody remnants of the struggle for survival that now cast the soul in a position of stress, caught as it was between its heavenly source and original sin — but there was a sense of psychological mobility involved, one that saw continued existence after death.

The new psychology shut off mobility after death, while giving each individual an unsavory primitive past heritage — a heritage genetically carried, that led finally only to the grave. Psychological activity was scaled down in between life and death, then, even while the possibility of any after-death experience was considered the most unreasonable and unintellectual of speculations.

Any man or woman might rise in our democracy from a poor peasant’s son to be the President. Outcasts might become the socially prominent. The unlettered might become highly educated. The idea of achieving greatness, however, was considered highly suspect. The self was kept in bounds. Great passion, or desire or intent — or genius — did not fit the picture.

Now some peoples would not fit into that mold. They would take what they could from our technology, but in conscious and spontaneous ways they retaliated — and still do — by exaggerating all of those human tendencies that our society has held down so well. If we can have reason without faith, then indeed, for example, we will see that there can be faith without reason. When human experience becomes shrunken in such a fashion — compressed — then in a fashion it also explodes at both ends, one might say.

We have atrocious acts committed, along with great heroisms, but each are explosive, representing sudden releases of withheld energies that have in other ways been forbidden, and so man’s and woman’s mass psyche expresses itself sometimes like explosive fireworks, simply because the release of pressure is necessary.

Even our poor misguided moral/religious organization is saying in it’s fashion to the scientifically-oriented society: “How is faith not real, then? We’ll change your laws with it. We”ll turn it into power — political power. What will you say then? We have been laughed at for so long. We will see who laughs now.”

Fanaticism abounds, of course, because the human tendencies and experiences that have been denied by the mainline society erupt with explosive force, where the tendencies themselves must be accepted as characteristics of human experience. Iran is an example for the world, in explosive capsule form, complete with historical background and a modern political one. Modern psychology does not have a concept of the self to begin to explain such realities.

Now, in the world we early formed our own beliefs and strategies. In midlife we are presented with a recognized overall vitality of materials. This is mean to reorient our attitudes. Some don’t realize, that we are not merely being presented with an alternate view of reality, but with the closet approximation we could get of what reality is, and how it worked, and what it meant.

I have been very gentle in my treatment of our mores and institutions — for I do not want to be against our world, but for a more fulfilling one. In future blogs I will be discussing how our ideas can be applied by the individual in terms of value fulfillment, so that individuals can begin to reclaim those dimensions of experience that are indeed our right heritage.

For my blog readers, I want them to remember the idea of effortlessness, because with the best of intentions some have been trying too hard. I want them to remember that relaxation is one of creativity’s greatest champions — not its enemy. He or she is naturally gifted with the quickness of body and mind. Remind oneself that it is safe to express his or her natural rhythms, to remember the natural person. Our most vital inspirations are effortlessly ours. I want us to see how many of our beliefs are the result of the old framework, for in that way we will find ourselves releasing ourselves ore and more, so the our own strengths come to our support.

 

Emotions, Energy, Evolution, Feelings, Gestalt, Inner universe, Lessons, METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES, Metaphysics, Thoughts, Unknown

The Magical Precognition Approach

In our terms, whether a minute or 10 minutes, or an hour or two hours were involved, we react ahead of time to a headline that have not as yet physically encountered. We react creatively, using the precognitive story as a basis for a fictional endeavor. We turn it into art’s purposes.

The idea, then, of the my blogs came from past and future events, though I were to catch up with those future events very quickly. My mind intuitively organized all of that material, and put it together in a completely new fashion. Sometimes when such events occur, the precognitive trigger is not recognized when it is encountered physically, because it happens too far ahead of time. We organize mental and physical events in a creative manner. In this case my blogs were involved because the concept, while strongly involving images, carries a time span that would make narrative necessary.

I used the magical approach. I caught myself in the act of acting naturally, of demonstrating abilities that our society to a large degree does not admit. That same kind of lighting-swift organization goes on within the body itself constantly, as it deals with probable scenarios to which we may or may not end up reacting to.

The events themselves discussed in any newspaper article point up the same kind of magical affiliations. We live personally in a world of lush creative ideas. Our intellect is aware of that. It is used to working creatively. The focused intellect can indeed activate the intuitive abilities — and the healing abilities. We get what we concentrate upon.

The intellect is a vital organizer even if it is not aware of the magical levels of activity from which often it’s best ideas emerge.

When we look at world events, however, the present world situation for example ( wars in the Middle East), try to enlarge the scope of our intellectual reach, so that we consider world events as living multidimensional “blogs” being formed in the present in response to both future and past triggers. The impact of the future on the past, in our terms — or rather, the implications of the future on the present — are highly important, and such precognitive reactions are as vital, numerous, and real as we ordinarily think that the reactions to past events are.

This puts present world events in an entirely different perspective. Men and women act, then, in relationship to events happening, say, in the future, in certain terms cast their shadows back into the present, or illuminate the past according to the events’ characteristics. There is always more going on than ordinary sense data show.

In our comparatively simple experience, we can see, however, the implications of such activities. Men and women react to future events by unconsciously translating them into art, or motion pictures. They may react by unconsciously taking certain steps of a political nature that seem at the time either unreasonable, or even incomprehensible — steps whose logic appears only in hindsight.

The same occurs, of course, in all areas of human behavior, as well as in the behavior of animals and even of plants. This future shadowing the presents, or future illuminating the present, represents a vital elements in the formation of events as they are perceived in time. In a fashion triplets are reacting in their past to a future event that now can catch up with them, so that each of their actions in any moment of that past happened as a result of a tension — a creative tension — between the event of their original separation and the event of their future reunion.

I do not mean that the reunion is inevitable or predestined, but the vigor of that probabilities, we might say, magnified the original tension. I want to apply all of this to my own situation, both in terms of creative endeavors and my physical situation, so that I begin to understand that I can start to react in the present to a future change.

I can see how important periods of letting go are. My experience happens where I am nearly asleep, but merely relaxed, not worrying, with my intellect in a kind of free flow. I am not hampering it. It is momentarily free of limiting beliefs, and it naturally used — and chose to use — the magical approach to answer what is very simple, now-forgotten intellectual question: What might be in today’s news?

The usual answer, or the usual method of obtaining an answer, is at times inconvenient: I was not about to get up , go to the TV or computer and get the news, so on it’s own the intellect pressed the magical-approach button, I might say, getting the information the quickest and easiest way possible.

It did not give me the bare headline, however — even though that and the blog story were perceived far too quickly for me to follow. What I was aware of was my own creative reveries in response to that information.

Now left alone, the intellect will often solve problems in just such a fashion, when it is allowed to, when we forget what is supposed to be possible and what is not, when we forget that our mind is supposed to be pedestrian and parochial.

Emotions, Evolution, Feelings, Inner universe, Lessons, Metaphysics, Ontology, Thought, Thoughts, Uncategorized, Unknown

The Natural Person’s Education and Culture

The body is constantly repairing itself at an ex excellent rate.

It is doing so because we are giving it different “orders.” We are giving it a different picture of the world, and when doing that we have finally changed many of our old beliefs.

In actuality, the body’s response to such information is always instantaneous, whether or not the results show at once.  We are beginning to hold a more “realistic” picture of how overall reality works. We are managing to disentangle ourselves from many disadvantageous cultural beliefs — beliefs that all of us for years took for granted.

 

We might combat those beliefs, struggle against them, but they still carry great weight. We will still believe them to an important degree. The entire idea, of fear, that had at one time of leading people down the garden path, was based upon those old beliefs. Those ideas have vanished. We are approaching a state of mind, individually and jointly, that represents far more closely one that is natural, with which the natural person is innately equipped.

Education in our culture is a mixed bag — and education comes not from schools alone, but from computers and television, magazines and books, from art and from culture’s own feedback. Generally speaking, for the purposes of this discussion, there are two kinds of education — one focused toward teaching the child to deal with the natural world, and one focused toward teaching the child to deal with the cultural world. Obviously, these are usually combined. It is impossible to separate them.

Our educational systems, however, for all of their idealism, have largely ended up smothering the natural individual bents and leanings of children, and overemphasized instead the cultural organization. It became more important, then for the child to conform to the culture rather than to follow its own individual natural leanings. Its own characteristic ways of dealing with nature were frowned upon, so that education does not work with the child’s abilities, but against them. Education then often goes against the grain of the natural person.

This does not mean that some children do not do very well under our system. I do not mean to imply, either, that children do not need an education, or that some discipline and direction are not beneficial. Children, however, will concentrate for hours at a time on subject matters and questions that interest  them. They are often taken from such pursuits, and their natural habits of concentration suffer as a result.

We are unlearning right now, and discovering that this particular unlearning process is indeed highly educational. We are encountering our own natural knowledge.

In many instances, of course, we learned too well . The natural person that is ourselves loves to create. We did this apart from what we had to do in school as a child. These blogs, in that regard, came naturally, as the expression of natural abilities and tendencies, finally emerging despite my official views at any time.

My blog discussions brought about, however, a new kind of education that often seem in direct conflict with the old, and with the official views of contemporary society.

Whether or not these blog discussions happened as they did, however, once written online, the probability brought about by our relationships, meaning that in one way or another we would seek out a larger context of consciousness — a context, because of our talents, that would not remain private, but attract others.

The natural person is to be found, now, not in the past or in the present, but beneath layers and layers of official beliefs, so we are dealing with an archeology of beliefs to find the person who creates beliefs to begin with. As I have said often, evidence of clairvoyance, telepathy, or whatever, are not eccentric, isolated instances occurring in man’s and woman’s experience, but are representative of natural patterns of everyday behavior that become invisible in our world because of the official picture of behavior and reality.

The body’s natural healing processes each day rid people of diseases, repair emotional or bodily illnesses — and such instances go largely unrecorded.

Many of the ideas I have given in previous blogs have indeed, become alive now. In the same way, many other concepts and ideas already given will also assume a new significance and meaning, and add to the richness of our experience, because we will be open to them more than we were before, to ideas having to do with reincarnation, life after death, other spheres of activity.

Instinctively my paintings represent a certain state of consciousness — an in between threshold dimension of awareness, in which the imagination and the senses are almost caught in the act of putting an object together, or of bringing the world into a sensed reality, brand-new, from the realm of the inner mind: a very evocative state of consciousness, and one that could be used in connection with faces.

The body is then magically and naturally repairing itself in a function just as creative, of course, as inner work that goes on in the production of a blog, book or a poem — a fact I am finally getting through my head.

 

Electrical Reality, Emotions, Energy, Evolution, Feelings, HEALING, Inner universe, Lessons, METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES, Metaphysics, Ontology, Thought, Thoughts, Uncategorized, Unknown

The Body’s Magical Reasoning

The body reasons so quickly, so clearly and concisely, that its deductions, its logic, are far too fast for the intellect to follow. The body reasons directly. The body’s reasoning transforms itself into action, with nothing to stand between its elegant logic and the logic’s brilliant execution. Humans could not possibly follow all of the manipulations necessary so improvements can take place. Again, bodily efforts are as magical, as creative, certainly, as the writing of a blog or a poem — but I have in the past trusted my creative abilities as if they were something I had to guard from my physical self.

My change of attitudes has allowed, and changed physical habits: the encouragement of motion, the expanded feeling of identity, which now includes the physical body rather than trying to exclude it.

The body is not a tool, to do our mental bidding. Our body is a mental expression physically materialized. More improvements are indeed even now occurring, and as long as attitudes continue to improve we can expect such progress — for again, the body is quite capable of healing itself completely, and with far greater ease than we give it credit for. However, at times when the body is not able to heal itself, external aid is required to give the body a push to do its work. Take, for example, digestive disorders. Although our bodies can heal such mundane matters, sometimes dietary supplements like Bio X4 (interested people can have a glance at the Bio X4 reviews online) are needed to help the body recuperate faster.

Nevertheless, it is true that we don’t have to do anything in particular, for example, of a conscious nature, except to state our intentions, and the body’s healing mechanisms immediately quickened. This is because we began to take the pressure off, so to speak, and really began to understand the abilities and limitations of the rational mind in its relationship to the body.

Some people believe it is quite possible to have clairvoyant dreams, out-of-body experiences, creative adventures in the arts — but to some of us doubt in the physical power or energy could be directed effectively in the physical realm, so-called, of bodily health, or situations of the nitty-gritty. Again, the material is indeed dealing with a far more valid explanation for the working ways of reality than the old official beliefs — and again, we are not just dealing with evocative, creative hypotheses.

There is no need, to be surprised if some of our ideas frighten people.

If our ideas were already accepted in the world, there would be no need for my blog. That is, some disapproval is acceptable. To attack medical corruption, or medical errors, or particular clinics, for example, is within bounds, but to attack the belief systems of the entire structure is something else again.

Some people’s objections should simply show us why our blog work is so important. We must not forget, again, that we chose these challenges. We wanted to be involved with the initiation of new thematic material. We want the experience of getting it for ourselves, so to speak — the exhilaration of discovery.

The implications are here in my blogs, but our belief systems must be allowed to mellow and change in the light of new knowledge, rather than to be booted aside with an angry foot.

Electrical Reality, Emotions, Energy, Evolution, Feelings, Gestalt, Inner universe, Lessons, METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thought, Uncategorized, Unknown

The Intellect As A Cultural Artifact

The intellect is far more socially oriented than is generally understood.

Some of this, again, is difficult to explain, but in a fashion the intellect is a cultural phenomenon. It is amazing resilient, in that according to the belief structures of any given historical period, it can orient itself along the lines of those beliefs, using all of its reasoning abilities to bring such a world picture into focus, collecting data that agree, and rejecting what does not.

Obviously, the mind can use its reasoning abilities, for example, to come to the conclusion that there is a single god behind the functioning of the world, that there are many gods, that divinity is a fantasy, and that the world itself springs from no reasonable source. Like statistics, the reasoning abilities can be used to come to almost any conclusion. This is done, again, by taking into consideration within any given system of reasoning only the evidence that agrees with the system’ premises.

This flexibility allows the species great variation overall in its psychological and cultural and political and religious activities. When any system of reasoning becomes too rigid, however, there are always adjustments made that will allow other information to intrude — otherwise, of course, our belief systems would never change.

Our species shares with the other species a feeling of kinship for its kind. There is a great give-and-take of ideas. We end up, then, with a consensus, generally speaking, as to what a reasonable picture of agreed-upon reality is. Our system has frowned upon many experiences, considering them eccentric behavior in an adverse fashion, since our belief systems have so regimented behavior, and so narrowly defined sanity. The intellect, I want to stress, is socially oriented. It is peculiarly suited, of course, to react to cultural information. It wants to see the world as it is seen by the minds of others. Through that kind of action it helps form our cultural environment, the civilization of which we are justly proud.

The intellect, then, helps our species translate its own natural purposes and intents — the purposes and intents of the natural person — into their “proper” cultural context, so that those abilities the natural person possesses can benefit the civilization of its time. Those purposes and intents literally change the world. The intellect’s expectations and intents spontaneously and automatically trigger  the proper bodily mechanisms to bring about the necessary environmental interactions, and our intent as expressed through our intellect directs our experience of the world.

I am speaking about the intellect here for our discussion, but remember it is everywhere cushioned also. There are backup systems, in other words. If the intellect believes that the world is a threat to existence, then that belief will alter its intents, of course, and therefore the body’s activities. The beliefs of the intellect operate then as powerful suggestions, particularly when the intellect identifies with those beliefs, so that there is little distance between the intellect and the beliefs that it holds as true.

I am doing my best to explain the very practical aspects of the intellect’s beliefs, and their strength in drawing experience to us. At one time I had difficulty with understanding some of these ideas. Our own relationship, our private beliefs about the sort of persons we want individually for mates, brought about incalculable actions that lead finally to our meeting — yet it all happened “quite naturally,” of course. Our beliefs bring us into correspondence with the elements likely to lead to their affirmation. They draw from Framed-mind-2 all of the necessary ingredients. They elicit from other people’s behavior that is in keeping with those beliefs.

Our own attitudes, for example — and beliefs — about foreigners, people’s stupidity and lack of integrity, put us in correspondence with those same beliefs on the part of others, resulting in a translation fiasco. An entirely different kind of behavior could have been elicited from those same people. Like attracts like in that regard. Those same people, for example, all have, as we do, beliefs in people’s trustworthiness, and so forth — but under those conditions, at that time, we each — or rather us all — are in correspondence at many levels. My blogs are published. They have helped many people, and that is because we are also in correspondence as far as many of our more positive beliefs are concerned, and those outweigh the others.

We get what we concentrate upon, and our beliefs are largely responsible for those areas in which we concentrate.

There are no magical methods, only natural ones that we use all of the time, although in some cases we use them for beliefs that we take for truths, when instead they are quite defective assumptions. A small example — one, incidentally, that I finally realized; but it is a beautiful instance of natural methods.

I heard the next day’s weather report, groaned, thought of a very uncomfortable 90-degree temperature tomorrow and imagined myself miserable with the heat. Indeed, I began to feel warmer. In a flash I remembered previous days of discomfort, and in the next moment I projected those into the weekend. I felt trapped. Midway through this process I tried to catch myself, but I believed that my body could not handle the heat — and that belief outweighed my intent to change my thoughts, so they kept returning for perhaps ten minutes.

I continued, however, to remind myself that I was not going to worry about tomorrow today, regardless. I told myself that the prediction might be wrong, and I began with my intellect to pile up evidence that could in one way or another bring about a different, more beneficial experience. I did this by recognizing the way I had earlier been building up the picture in the old manner, by collecting all the evidence that fitted it. I used the same process, only for a more beneficial picture, and the process works. We have only to become aware of it.

Our experience will follow our concentration and beliefs and expectation. The mind is a great discriminator. It can use its reasoning to bring about almost any possible experience within our framework.

Emotions, Energy, Evolution, Feelings, Inner universe, Lessons, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Uncategorized, Unknown

The Way In Which The Individual is Defined

Part of the difficulty arises from the current scientific-oriented blend of rationalism. As a species, we think of ourselves as the “pinnacle” end of an evolutionary scale, as if all other entities from the first cell onward somehow existed in a steady line of progression, culminating with animals, and finally with man and woman the reasoning animal. (with all of that progress occurring of course by chance, incidentally.)

That particular blend of rational thinking with which our society is familiar takes it more or less for granted, then, that  man’s and woman’s identity as a species, and the identity of the individual, is first and foremost connected with the intellect . We identify ourselves with our intellect, primarily, casting aside as much as possible other equally vital elements of our personhood.

In our historical past, when man and woman identified his or her identity with the soul, he or she actually gave himself or herself greater leeway in terms of psychological mobility, but eventually the concept of the soul as held resulted in a distrust of the intellect. That result was the inevitable follow-up of dogma. Part of man’s woman’s latest over-identification with the intellect is, of course, an overreaction to those past historical events. Neither religion or science grant other creatures much subjective dimension, however: We like to think of ourselves, again, as the reasoning animal in terms of our species.

However, animals do reason. They do not reason in the same areas that we do. In those areas in which they do reason, they understand cause and effect quite well. Their reasoning is applied, however, to levels of activity to which our own reasoning is not applied. Therefore, often animal reasoning is not apparent to us. Animals are curious. Their curiosity is applied to areas in which we seldom apply our own.

The animals possess a consciousness of self, and without the human intellect. We do not need a human intellect to be aware of our own consciousness. Animals, it is true, do not reflect upon the nature of their own identities as man and woman do, but this is because that nature is intuitively comprehended. It is self-evident.

I only want to show that the sense of identity need not inevitably be coupled with the intellect exclusively. Our intellect is a part of us — a vital, functioning portion of our cognitive processes — but it does not contain our identity.

The natural person is understood perhaps more clearly by considering any person as a child. In fashion the child discovers its own intellect, as it discovers its own feelings. Feelings come “first.” The child’s feelings give rise to curiosity, to thoughts, to the operation of the intellect: “Why do I feel thus and so? Why is grass soft, and rock hard? Why does a gentle touch soothe me, while a slap hurts me”

The feelings and sensations give rise to the questions, to the thoughts, to the intellect. The child in a fashion feels — feels — its own thoughts rise from a relative psychological invisibility into immediate, vital formation. There is a process there that we have forgotten. The child identifies with its own psychic reality first of all — then discovers its feelings, and claims those, and discovers its thoughts and intellect, and claims those.

The child first explores the components of its psychological environment, the inside stuff of subjective knowledge, and claims that inner territory, but the child does not identify its basic being with either its feelings or its thoughts. That is why, for example, it often seems that young children can die so easily. They can disentangle themselves because they have not as yet identified their basic beings with life experience.

In most cases children grow up, of course, although in the vast overall picture of nature a goodly proportion of individuals do indeed take other courses. They serve other functions, they have other purposes, they take part in life through a different cast of action. They affect life while themselves not completely immersed in it. They die young. They are aborted. They remain, however, an important element in life’s overall picture — part of a psychological underpainting that always affects later versions.

Ideally, however, children finally claim their feelings and their thoughts as their own. They identify naturally with both, finding each valid and vital. By the time we are an adult, however, we have been taught to disconnect our identity from our feelings as much as possible, and to think of our personhood in terms of our intellectual orientation. Our identity seems to be in our head. Our feelings and our mental activity therefore appear, often, quite contradictory. We try to solve all problems through the use of reasoning alone.

We are taught to submerge the very intuitive abilities that the intellect needs to do its proper work — for the intellect must check with the feeling portions of the self for feedback, for support, for knowledge as to biological conditions. Denied that feedback, it can spin on endlessly in frenzied dry runs.

At each moment, from the most microscopic levels the body in one way or another is ascertaining a constant picture of its position within physical reality. That picture is composed of millions of ever-changing smaller snapshots, as it were — or moving pictures is better — determining so many conditions, positions and relationships that they could never be described. We end up with a predominating picture of reality in any given moment — one that is the result of the activity of psychological, biological, and electromagnetic strats. One picture is transposed upon the others, and calculations made constantly, so that all of the components that make up physical existence are met, and intersect to give us life.

None of that is the intellect’s concern at an intellectual level. At a biological level, and at an electromagnetic level, the intellect, of course, performs feats that it cannot consciously know through the use of its reason. Spontaneously, with the process just mentioned, millions of pictures are being taken also of the probable actions that will — or may — be needed, in our terms, in the moment immediately following, from microscopic action to the motion of a muscle, the driving of a car, the reading of a book, or whatever.

One of the intellect’s main purposes is to give us a conscious choice in a world of probabilities. To do that properly the intellect is to make clear, concise decisions, on its level, of matters that are its concern, and therefore to present its own picture of reality to add to the entire construct. On the one hand we have been told to identify ourselves almost completely with our intellects. On the other hand, we have been taught that the intellect, the “flower of consciousness,” so  frail, vulnerable adjunct — again, a chance creation, without meaning and without support without support because we believe that “beneath it” lie “primitive, animalistic, bloody instincts,” against which reason must exert what strength it has.

Despite all of that, men and women still find the solutions to many of their problems by rediscovering the larger sense of identity — a sense of identity that accepts the intuitions and the feelings, the dreams and the magic hopes as vital characteristics, not adjuncts, of personhood. When I tell you to remember your own natural persons, I do then want to remind you not to identify with your intellect alone, but to enlarge you scopes of identity. Automatically those other, often-shunted-aside characteristics begin to add their richness, fulfillment, and vitality to your lives effortlessly.

This new orientation will bring results, and the results do appear effortlessly. Remember that creative activity goes on within us all the time, and is often most active precisely when we are not aware of it. We are only aware of those moments when creative activity surges into our conscious awareness, and by then much of the “work” has already been done.

We are not responsible for other people’s realities, but we are responsible for our own. The Ill man’s or woman’s reality does not threaten our own in any way. The situation, however, shows that we sometimes still think we should be able to solve all problems, and to know all the reasons for any given sorrow or tragedy. The intellect cannot handle that kind of information at this level.

Some answers come when we are ready for them. Then they come naturally, as a matter of understanding and comprehension. The question of life’s tragedies still cannot be answered satisfactorily at the level at which any of us are currently asking it. I can give hints and clues and explanations that are quite valid within that context.

As a matter of fact, the kind of literal answers that we may think we want can indeed lead us somewhat astray in terms of the larger picture, so I must say: “That is not my province,” send energy, a note now and then; but the particular problem, the specific problem is the other’s, not mine’s.”

The reason for the problem is a philosophical concern of mine and of yours, but it is one whose answer — or answers — will gradually unfold. All of this information I consider necessary, again, to provide an overall atmosphere of comprehension that will allow the release of our own vitalities and strengths in an effortless manner, in such a way that our own problems begin to dissolve.

The kind of orientation I am speaking of represents the truest picture I can give of a man’s and woman’s natural relationship with himself or herself and the world. This is how it works. This is physical.

Emotions, Energy, Evolution, Feelings, Gestalt, Inner universe, Lessons, METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Unknown

The Present Is The Point Of Power

The point of power is where flesh and matter meet with spirit. That juncture embodies the actions and beliefs we choose to draw from all of our previous points of power. From our current present we project, for better or worse, those choices, plus any new ones we may decide upon, into each of the presents we’ll be creating throughout the rest of our lives. The contents of our projections, then, are of supreme importance.

Through even a five-minute exercise, in which we sit quietly and look about, we can become aware that the present is the point of power. In this exercise, we gently remind ourselves that we aren’t at the mercy of our past beliefs unless we think we are. We have the full freedom to insert new creative goals in our point-of-power exercises. Next, we relax, to give our fresh suggestions time to begin working within us. Next, physically we make a simple gesture or act, no matter how modest, that is in line with our desires for the future. Periodically we repeat the exercise — but easily, without pressure, confident that we’re doing well. Action is thought in physical motion.

My wife and I are “counterparts” — entities psychically connected to each other, and to other men, women and children alive now in this country and in others. The connection can be conscious, unconscious, or both. Many of us will never meet physically, but as a group all of us are exploring related lifetime themes in ways that no individual can do.