Belladonna is a perennial herb native to Europe. Extracts made from it contain the alkaloid atropine (among others), which is used to relieve muscle spasms, and to dilate the pupil of the eye for optical surgery.
In medieval Europe larger amounts of those extracts were used as hallucinogens by witches and the members of various other cults.
Nor could our biological reality as we know it exist without viruses.
Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule we think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. These — and I am putting it as simply as possible — take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. Viruses that are “deadly in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.
As an example from another field, consider poisons. Belladona can be quite deadly, yet small doses of it were known to aid the body in disease conditions.
The viruses in the body have a social, cooperative existence. Their effects become deadly only under certain conditions. The viruses must be triggered into destructive activity, and this happens only at a certain point, when the individual involved is actively seeking either death or a crisis situation biologically.
The initial contagion in such cases is always emotional and mental. Social conditions are usually involved, so that an individual is, say, at the lower end of a poor social environment, a seeming victim of it, or in a situation where his individual values as a social member is severely weakened.
In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. So of course the resulting diseases are infectious. To that degree they are social diseases. It is not so much that a virus, say, suddenly turns destructive — though it does — as it is that the entire cooperative structure within which all the viruses are involved becomes insecure and threatened.
Viruses mutate. Such is often the case. It seems quite scientific to believe in inoculations against such dangerous diseases — and certainly, scientifically, inoculations seem to work. People in our time right now are not plagued by smallpox, for example. Some cultures have believed that illnesses were caused by demons. Medicine men, through certain ceremonies, would try to rid the body of the demons — and those methods worked also. The belief system was tight and accepted, and it only began to fail when societies encountered “civilized views.”
If we call the demons “negative beliefs,” however, then we have taken strides forward. People continue to die of diseases. Many of our scientific procedures, including inoculations, of themselves “cause” new diseases. It does not help a patient inoculated against smallpox and polio if [eventually] he/she dies as a result of his negative beliefs.
What I have said about viruses applies to all biological life. Viruses are “highly intelligent” — meaning that they react quickly to stimuli. They are responsive to emotional states. They are social and usually spread through person-to-person contact. This is why many people try to limit their exposure to these viruses by wearing things like a surgical-mask,” for example. By wearing face masks, and other things similar, people can reduce their chances of getting the virus and spreading it on to others. Their spread determines their scale of life. This usually varies considerably, and some can be inactive for centuries, and revive. They have extensive memory patterns, biologically imprinted. Some can multiply in the tens of thousands within seconds. They are in many ways the basis of biological life, but we are aware of them only when they show “a deadly face.”
We are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle.
A suggestion solemnly repeated many times, particularly after the turn of the century. This might sound like a bit of overly optimistic, though maybe delightful, nonsense. To a degree, however, that suggestion worked for millions of people. It was not a cure-all. It did not help those who believed in the basic untrustworthiness of their own natures. The suggestion was far from a bit of fluff, however, for it could serve — and it did — as a framework about which new beliefs could rally.
We often have in our society the opposite suggestion, however, given quite regularly: “Everyday, in every way, I am growing worse, and so is the world.” We have meditations for disaster, beliefs that invite private and mass tragedies. They are usually masked by the polite clothing of conventional acceptance. Many thousands may die in a particular battle or war, for example. The deaths are accepted almost as a matter of course. These are victims of war, without question. It seldom occurs to anyone that these are victims of beliefs — since the guns are quite real, and the bombs and the combat.
The enemy is obvious. His intentions are evil. Wars are basically examples of mass suicide — embarked upon, however, with all of the battle’s paraphernalia, carried out through mass suggestion, and through the nation’s greatest resources, by men who are convinced that the universe is unsafe, that the self cannot be trusted, and that strangers are always hostile. We take it for granted that the species is aggressively combative. We must out-think the enemy nation before we ourselves are destroyed. These paranoiac tendencies are largely hidden beneath man’s nationalistic banners.
“The end justifies the means.” This is another belief, most damaging. Religious wars always have paranoiac tendencies, for the fanatic always fears conflicting beliefs, and systems that embrace them.
We have occasional epidemics that flare up, with victims left dead. Partially, these are also victims of beliefs, for we believe that we have natural body is the natural prey of viruses and diseases over which we have no personal control, except as it is medically provided. In the medical profession, the overall suggestion that operates is one that emphasizes and exaggerates the body’s vulnerability, and plays down its natural healing abilities. People die when they are ready to die, for reasons that are their own. No person dies without a reason. We are not taught that, however, so people do not recognize their own reasons for dying, and are not taught to recognize their own reasons for living — because we are told the life itself is an accident in a cosmic game of chance.
Therefore, we cannot trust our own intuitions. We think that our purpose in life must be to be something else, or someone else, than we are. In such a situation many people seek out causes, and hope to merge the purposes of the cause with their own unrecognized one.
There have been many great men and women involved in causes, to which they gave their energies, resources, and support. Those people, however, recognized the importance of their own beings, and added that vitality to causes in which they believed. They did not submerge their individuality, and became more themselves. They extended their horizons, pushed beyond the conventional mental landscapes — driven by zest and vitality, by curiosity and love, and not by fear.
Many people lose their lives in tragedies. People willingly take their lives at the command of their leaders. No armies stand outside. Those people succumb to an epidemic of beliefs, to an environment [that is] closed mentally and physically. The villains consists of the following ideas that the world is unsafe, and growing deadly; that the species itself is tainted by a deadly intent; that the individual has no power over his or her reality; that society or social conditions exist as things in themselves, and their purposes run directly counter to the fulfillment of the individual; and lastly, that the end justifies the means, and that the action of any kind of god is powerless in the world.
The people who kill themselves are idealists — perfectionists of exaggerated quality, whose very desire for the good was tainted and distorted by those beliefs just mentioned. For those beliefs must gradually shut out perception of good from experience.
Man/Woman is of good intent. When we see evil everywhere in man’s and woman’s intent — in our own actions and those of others — then we set oneself up against our own existence, and that of our kind. We focus upon the gulf between our ideals and our experience, until the gulf is all that is real. We will not see man’s and woman’s good intent, or we will do so ironically — for in comparison with our ideals, good in the world appears to be so minute as to be a mockery.
To this extent experience becomes closed. Such people are frightened of themselves, and of the nature of their existence. They may be intelligent or stupid, gifted, or mundane, but they are frightened of experiencing themselves as themselves, or of acting according to their own wishes. They help create the dogma or system or cult to which they “fall prey.” They expect their leader to act for them. To a certain extent he/she soaks up their paranoia, until it becomes an unquenchable force in him/her, and he/she is their “victim” as much as his/her followers are his/her “victims.”
In the Middle East affair, we have “red-blooded Americans” dying on a foreign shore, under a banner of wars, which under certain circumstances have been acceptable. We did not have Americans dying in a bloody revolution, caught among terrorists. We had instead Americans succumbing in a foreign land to some belief that are peculiarly American, and home-grown.
We have American belief that money will solve almost any social problem, that the middle-class way of life is the correct “democratic” one, and that the difficulty between blacks and whites in particular can be erased by applying social bandages, rather than by attacking the basic beliefs behind the problem.
Many young men and women have come to adulthood in fine ranch houses in good neighborhoods. They would seem to be at the peak of life, the product of the best America has to offer. They never had to work for a living, perhaps. they may have attended colleges — but they are the first to realize that such advantages do not necessarily add to the quality of life, for they are the first to arrive at such an enviable position.
The parents have worked to give their children such advantages, and the parents themselves are sometimes confused by their children’s attitudes. The money and position, however, have often been attained as a result of the belief in man’s and woman’s competitive nature — and that belief itself erodes the very prizes it produces: The fruit is bitter in the mouth. Many of the parents believed, quite simply, that the purpose of life was to make more money. Virtue consisted of the best car, a house, or swimming pool – proof that one could survive in a tooth-and-claw world. People may need money to build a lifestyle and maintain those standards (for instance, house renovation or pool remodeling).
Yes, lifestyle could be a necessity of the current generation, but the children wondered: What about those other feelings that stirred in their consciousness? What about those purposes they sensed? The hearts of some of them were like vacuums, waiting to be filled. They looked for values, but at the same time, they felt that they were themselves sons and daughters of a species tainted, at loose ends, with no clear destinations.
They tried various religions, and in the light of their opinions of themselves their earlier advantages seemed only to damn them further. They tried social programs, and found a curious sense of belonging with the disadvantaged, for they were also rootless. The disadvantaged and the advantaged alike then join in a bond of hopelessness, endowing a leader with a power they felt they did not possess.
They finally retreated into isolation from the world they knew, and the voice of their leader at the was magnified merging of their own voices. In death they fulfilled their purposes, merging a mass statement. It would make Americans question the nature of [suicide’s]their society, their religions, their politics, and their beliefs.
Each suicide decided to go along that course.
Paranoia is extremely interesting because it shows the ways in which private beliefs can distort events that connect the individual with other people. The events are “distorted.” yet while the paranoid is convinced that those events are valid, this does not change other people’s perception of the same happenings.
Paranoia is most commonly associated with intoxication and withdrawal symptoms from drugs, including alcohol and cocaine. However, paranoia is seen in a wide range of people for many different reasons. Paranoia can be a feature of another mental illness, like anxiety or depression, but most commonly occurs in psychotic disorders like schizophrenia and paranoid personality disorder. The more severe the mental illness is, the less likely the said person is going to realize that they are experiencing paranoia instead of threat from people, or even the world.
Alternatively, elderly people suffering from illnesses like dementia can experience paranoia as a symptom of their illness. This is due to the way the brain is altered throughout the illness. Paranoia will usually start with suspicious delusions that the person suffering from Alzheimer’s experiences; they may imagine that their family members are stealing from them, or that someone is following them. As family members, it can make it difficult to interact with the person with Alzheimer’s (you can take a look at these tips on Alzheimer’s Communication if you’re struggling with this) and it can be even more difficult to calm the person down than those suffering from mental illness or drug abuse. Unfortunately, treating paranoia in those with Alzheimer’s is hard due to the alterations of the brain constantly.
Whatever the case, paranoia takes many different forms and impacts many different people. Paranoia does not care for whoever it takes a hold on, and it’s not something that is easily fought off.
What I want to emphasize here is the paranoid’s misinterpretation of innocuous personal or mass events, and to stress the ways in which physical events can be put together symbolically, so that from them a reality can be created that is almost part physical and part dream.
We must of course interpret events in a personal manner. We create them. Yet there is also a meeting ground of more or less shared physical encounters, a sense plateau that offers firm-enough footing for the agreement of a mass-shared world. With most mental aberrations, we are dealing with people whose private symbols are so heavily thrust over prime sense data that even those data sometimes become almost invisible. These individuals often use the physical world in the way that most people use the dream world, so that for them it is difficult to distinguish a private and a publicly-shared reality.
Many such people are highly creative and imaginative. Often, however, they have less of a solid foundation than others in dealing with a mass-shared reality, and so they attempt to impose their own private symbols upon the world, or to form a completely private world. I am speaking in general terms now, and in those terms such people are leery of human relationships. Each person forms his or her own reality, and yet that personal reality must also be shared with others, and must be affected by the reality of others.
As creatures dwelling in time and space, our senses provide us with highly specific data, and with a cohesive-enough physical reality. Each person may react to the seasons in a very personal manner, and yet we all share those natural events. They provide a framework for experience. It is up to the conscious mind to interpret sense events as clearly and concisely as possible. This allows for the necessary freedom of action for psychological and physical mobility. We are an imaginative species, and so the physical world is colored, charged, by our own imaginative projections, and powered by the great sweep of the emotions. But when we are confused or upset, it is an excellent idea to return our attention to the natural world as it appears at any given moment — to sense its effect upon us as separate from our own projections.
We form our own reality. Yet if we are in the Northeast in the wintertime, we had better be experiencing a physical winter, or we are far divorced from primary sense data.
The paranoid has certain other beliefs. Let us take a hypothetical individual — one who is convinced he has a healthy body, and is proud of mental stability. Let us call this friend Paul.
Paul [for his own reasons] may decide that his body is out to get him and punish him, rather than say, the FBI. He may symbolically pick out an organ or a function, and he will misinterpret many body events in the same way that another may misinterpret mass events. Any public service announcements, so-called, publicizing symptoms connected with his sensitive area, will immediately alarm him. He will consciously and unconsciously focus upon that [art of the body,] anticipating its malfunction. Our friend can indeed alter the reality of his body.
Paul will interpret such body events in a negative fashion, and as threatening, so that some quite normal sensations will serve the same functions as a fear of policemen, for example. If he keeps this up long enough, he will indeed strain a portion of the body, and by telling others about it he will gradually begin to affect not only his personal world, but that part of the mass world with which he has contact: It will be known that he has an ulcer, or whatever. In each case we are dealing with a misinterpretation of basic sense data.
When I say that a person misinterprets sense data, I mean that the fine balance between mind and matter becomes overstrained in one direction. There are, then, certain events that connect the world. Though when everything’s said and done these events come from outside of the world’s order, nevertheless they appear as constants within it. Their reality is the result of the most precise balancing of forces so that certain mental events appear quite real, and others are peripheral. We have dusk and dawn. If in the middle of the night, and fully awake, we believe it is sunrise in physical terms, and cannot differentiate between our personal reality and the physical one, then that balance is disturbed.
The paranoid organizes the psychological world about his/her obsession, for such it is, and he/she cuts everything out that does not apply, until all conforms to his/her beliefs. An examination of unprejudiced sense data at any point would at any time bring him/her relief.
Paranoia can be a very serious mental condition, that if untreated, may develop into something that inhibits an individual’s quality of life severely. An individual who is either suffering from this or knows someone who is may seek out help and assistance to possibly treat this. Forms of treatment could be the traditional rote of therapy and a doctor, or it might be through alternative medicines such as CBD gummies and other alternative healing therapies, that might be helpful.
Regradless of what option is chosen as a route for possible treatment, it is advised to seek out the advice of a medical professional like a doctor, so as to get some sound advice and treatment if an individual suffering from paranoia should ever need it in the future.
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And when it seems that the world is devoid of meaning, then some people will make a certain kind of statement through the circumstances connected with their own deaths.
We will shortly return to a discussion of such “causes,” and their relationship with the person’s feeling that life has or does not have a meaning.
For now, consider a very simple act. You want to walk across the room and pick up a paper, for example. That purpose is simple and direct enough. It automatically propels your body in the proper fashions, even though you are not consciously aware of the inner mechanisms involved. You don’t imagine the existence of blocks or impediments in your way, in the form of additional furniture placed in your path by accident, fate, or design. You make a simple straight path in the proper direction. The act has meaning because it is something you want to do.
There are purposes not nearly as easy to describe, however, intents of psychological nature, yearnings toward satisfactions not so easily categorized. Man and woman experiences ambitions, desires, likes and dislikes of a highly emotional nature — and at the same time he/she has intellectual beliefs about oneself, his/her feelings, and the world. These are the result of training, for we use our mind as we have been taught.
One person may desire fame, and even possess certain abilities that he or she wants to use, and that will indeed lead to that claim. Such a person may also believe that fortune or fame leads to unhappiness, licentiousness, or in some other way brings about disastrous conditions. Here we have a clear purpose to use abilities and receive acclaim. We also have another quite opposing clear purpose: to avoid fame.
There are people who want children and mates, and have those excellent qualities that would serve them well as parents. Some of those same individuals may be convinced that love is wrong, however or that sex is debasing, or that children mean the end of youth. Such persons may then find themselves breaking off good relationships with those of the other sex for no apparent reason, or forcing the other party to break with them. Here again we have two clear purposes, but they oppose each other.
Those who believe in the ultimate meaning of their lives can withstand such pressures, and often such dilemmas, and others like them, are resolved in an adequate-enough fashion. Disappointments, conflicts, and feelings of powerlessness of those who believe that life itself has little meaning. Such people begin to imagine impediments in their paths as surely as anyone would who imagined that physical barriers were suddenly put up between them and a table they wanted to reach at the end of the room.
When we simply want to reach a destination in space, there are maps to explain the nature of the land and waterways. When we are speaking of psychological role of destinations, however, there is more to consider.
Once our body is mobilized when we want to move. It responds to our intent and purpose. It is our private inner environment, psychologically speaking. Our psychological intent instantly mobilize our energies on a psychic level. We have what I will call “a body of thought,” and it is that “body” that constantly springs into action at our intent.
When we want to go downtown, we know that destination exists, though we may be miles away from it. When we want to find a mate we take it for granted that a potential mate exists, though where in space and time we do not know. Our intent to find a mate sends out “strands of consciousness,” however, composed of desire and intent. Like detectives, these search the world, looking in a completely different way than a physical sleuth. The world is probed with our characteristics in mind, seeking for someone else with characteristics that will best suit our own. And whatever our purpose is, the same procedure on a psychic level is involved.
The organization of our feelings, beliefs, and intents directs the focus about which our physical reality is built. This follows with impeccable spontaneously and order. If we believe in the sinfulness of the world, for instance, then we will search out from normal sense data those facts that confirm our belief. But beyond that, at other levels we also organize our mental world in such a way that we attract to oneself events that will confirm our beliefs.
Death is a part of us, even as birth is. Its import varies according to the individual — and in a certain fashion, death is our last chance to make a statement of import in any given life, if we feel we have not done so earlier.
Some people’s deaths are quiet periods. Some others’ are exclamation points, so that later it can be said that the person’s death loomed almost greater in importance that the life itself. Some people die in adolescence, filled with the flush of life’s possibilities, still half-dazzled by the glory of childhood, and ready to step with elation upon the threshold of adulthood — or so it seems. Many such young persons prefer to die at that time, where they feel the possibilities for fulfillment are intricate and endless. They are often idealists, who beneath extraordinary ability — still feel that life could no more than sully those abilities, dampen those spiritual winds, and darken that promise that could never be fulfilled.
This is not the reason for all such deaths by any means, but there is usually an implied statement in them so that the death seems to have an additional meaning that makes parents and contemporaries question. Such individuals usually choose deaths with a high dramatic content, because regardless of appearances they have not been able to express the dramatic contents of their psyches in the world as it seems to be to them. They turn their deaths into lessons for other people, forcing them to ask questions that would not be asked before. There are also mass statements of the same kind for people come together to die, however, to seeks company in death as they do in life People who feel powerless, and who find no cause for living, can come together then and “die for a cause” that did not give them the will or reason to live. They will seek out others of their kind.
The inner mechanics of emotions and beliefs are complicated, but these are individuals who feel that physical life has failed them. They are powerless in society. They think in black and white, and conflicts between their emotions, and their beliefs about their emotions, lead them to seek some kind of shelter in a rigid belief system that will give them rules to go by. Such systems lead to the formation of cults, and the potential members seek out a leader who will serve their purposes as surely as they seem to serve his/her — through an inner mechanics of which each member is at least somewhat aware.
A state of higher consciousness that represent a unique and yet universal source of information and revelation. Such a source does exist for each individual, regardless of how it is interpreted. White light is characteristically a symbol in such cases. The vastness.
In our terms, speaking more or less historically, early man and woman were in a more conscious relationship with Conscious-mind-2 than we are now.
There are many gradations of consciousness, and early man and woman used his or her consciousness in other ways than those we are familiar with. He often perceived what we would call the products of the imagination as sense data, for example, more or less objectified in the physical world.
The imagination has always dealt with creativity, and as man and woman began to settle upon a kind of consciousness that dealt with cause and effect, he no longer physically perceived the products of his or her imagination directly in the old manner. He realized in those earlier times that illness, for instance, was initially as much the result of the imagination as health was, for he experienced far more directly the brilliant character of his own imagination. The lines between imaginative and physical experience have blurred for us, and of course they have also become tempered by other beliefs and the experiences that those beliefs the engender.
Very simply here. It is far more complicated — and yet early man, for example, became aware of the fact that no man or woman was injured without that event first being imagined to one extent or another. Therefore, imagined healings were utilized, in which a physical illness was imaginatively cured — and in those days the cures worked.
Regardless of our histories, those early men and women were quite healthy. They had strong teeth and bones. They dealt with the physical world through the purposeful use of the imagination, however, in a way now most difficult to understand. They realized they were mortal, and must die, but their greater awareness of Conscious-mind-2 allowed them a larger identification, so they understood that death was not only a natural necessity, but also an opportunity for other kinds of experience and development.
They felt their relationship with nature acutely, experiencing it in a far different fashion than we do ours. The felt that it was the larger expression of their own moods and temperament, the materialization of self-events that were too vast to be contained within the flesh of any one individual or any group of individuals. They wondered where their thoughts went after they had them, and they imagined that in one way or another those thoughts turned into the birds and rocks, the animals and trees that were themselves ever-changing.
They also felt that they were themselves, however; that as humans [they were] the manifestation of the larger expression of nature that was too splendid to be contained alone within nature’s framework, that nature needed them — that is, men and women — to give it another kind of voice. When men and women spoke they spoke for themselves; yet because they felt so a part of the natural environment they spoke for nature also, and for all of its creatures.
Much is not understood in our interpretations. In that world men and women knew that nature was balanced. Both animals and men and women must die. If a man or woman was caught and eaten by animals, as sometimes happened, [his or her fellows] did not begrudge that animal its prey — at least, not in the deepest of terms. And when they slayed other animals themselves and ate the heart, for example, it was not only to obtain the animals’ “stout hearts,” or fearlessness; but also the intent was to preserve those characteristics so that through men’s and women’s experiences each animal would continue to live to some extent.
Men and women in those times protected themselves and their homes against storms. Perhaps they never got any external help like Water and Mold Restoration Services to deal with the aftermath of the storms. Besides this, do not forget about the havoc wreaked by the storms on their homes– roofs
torn into pieces, windows broken, and the structure of their houses completely destroyed. However, they might have never got any assistance for window or Roof Repair. Yet, they were not bitter about the storm and its victims. They simply changed the alliances of their consciousnesses from the identification of self-within-the-flesh to self-within-the-storm. Man’s and woman’s and nature’s intents were largely the same and understood as such. Man and woman did not fear the elements in those early times, as is now supposed.
Some of the experience known by early man and woman would seem quite foreign to us now. Yet in certain forms they come down through the centuries. Early man and woman, perceived himself or herself as oneself, and individual. He or she felt that nature expressed for him or her the vast power of his or her own emotions. He or she projected oneself out into nature, into the heavens, and imagined there were great personified forms that late turned into the gods of Olympus, for example. He or she was also aware of the life-force within nature’s smallest parts, however, and before sense data became so standardized he or she perceived his or her own version of those individualized consciousnesses which must later became the elements, or small spirits. But above all he or she was aware of nature’s source.
He or she was filled with wonder as his or her own consciousness ever-newly came into being. He or she had not yet covered over that process with the kind of smooth continuity that our own consciousness has now achieved — so when he or she thought a thought he or she was filled with curiosity: Where had it come from? His or her own consciousness, then, was forever a source of delight, it changing qualities as noticeable and apparent as the changing sky. The relative smoothness of our own consciousness — in those terms, a least — was gained at the expense of certain other experiences, therefore, that were possible otherwise. We could not live in our present world of time if our consciousness was as playful, curious, and creative as it was, for [then] time was also experienced far differently.
It may be difficult for us to understand, but the events that we now recognize are as much the result of the realm of the imagination, as those experiences by early man and woman when he or she perceived as real happenings that now we would consider hallucinatory, or purely imaginative.
It seems quite clear to us that the mass events of nature are completely outside of our domain. We feel we have no part in nature except as we exert control over it through technology, or harm it, again through technology. We grant that the weather has an effect upon our moods, but any deeper psychic or psychological connections between us and the elements strikes most of us as quite impossible.
We use terms like “being flooded by emotion.” However, and other very intuitive statements showing our own deeper recognition of events that quite escape us when we examine them through reason alone. Man and woman actually court’s storms. He or she seeks them out, for emotionally he or she understands quite well their part in his or her own private life, and their necessity of a physical level. Through nature’s manifestations, particularly through its power, man and woman senses nature’s source and his or her own, and knows that the power can carry him or her to emotional realizations that are required for his or her own greater spiritual and psychic development.
Death is not an end; but a transformation of consciousness. Nature, with its changing seasons, constantly brings us that message. In that light, and with that understanding, nature’s disasters do not claim victims: Nature and man and woman together act out their necessary parts in the larger framework of reality.
Our concepts about death and nature, however, force us to see man and woman and nature as adversaries, and also program our experience of such events so that they seem to only confirm what we already believe. Each person caught in either an epidemic of a natural disaster will have private reasons for choosing those circumstances. Such conditions also often involve events in which the individual senses a larger identification, however — even sometimes a renewed sense of purpose that makes no sense in ordinary terms.
That perception was not the sort of official sense data recognized by our sciences. Our consciousness merge, while still retaining its own individuality, with the consciousness of the leaves outside his or her window, and with the nail in the windowsill, and traveled outward and inward at the same time, so that like a mental wind his or her consciousness traveled through other psychological neighborhoods.
The origin of our universe is nonphysical, and each event, however grand or minute, has its birth in the Conscious-mind-2 environment. Our physical universe arose from that inner framework, then, and continues to do so.
The power that fuels our thoughts has the same source. In a manner of speaking the universe as we understand it, with all the events that it includes, functions “automatically” in its important processes, as our own body does. Our individual desires and intents direct that activity of our body’s spontaneous processes — that is, our body walks across the floor at our command as a result of our wishes, even though the processes involved must happen “by themselves.”
Our intents have a great effect upon our body’s health. In the same fashion, jointly all of the people alive at any given time “direct” the events of the universe to behave in a certain fashion, even though the processes must happen by themselves, or automatically. Other species have a hand in this also, however, and in one way or another all of us direct the activity of the physical body of the world in much the same way that we [each] direct our own bodily behavior.
We are born with the impetus toward growth built in — automatically provided with the inner blueprints that would lead to a developed adult form. Not only the cells, but the atoms and molecules that compose them contained a positive intent to cooperate in a bodily formation, to fulfill themselves, and they were then predisposed not only toward survival, but with an idealization leading toward the best possible development and maturity.
All of those characteristics have their sources in Conacious-mind-2, for the psychological medium in conscious-mind-2 is automatically conducive to creativity. It is not simply a neutral dimension, therefore, but contains within itself an automatic predisposition toward the fulfillment of all patterns inherent within it. ” The universe is of good intent.” It is automatically predisposed, toward the creation of “good.”
The physical universe, like each physical body, is “magical.” The term “magical” purposefully by so confounding what we think of as reason, arousing within us a hint of what I refer to as the higher intellect.
Reasoning by itself can only deal with deductions made about the known world. It cannot accept knowledge that comes from “else-where,” for such information will not fit in reason’s categories, and confounds its cause-and-effect patterning. The power to reason comes from Conscious-mind-2. In the terms of this discussion, we are able to reason as a result of “magical” events that make reason itself possible. The term “magic” has in one way or another been used to simply describe events for which reason has no answer –events that exist outside of the framework in which reason feels comfortable.
Our scientists consider themselves quite rational, yet many of them, at least, would be more honest when they tried to describe the beginning of the universe if they admitted that reason alone cannot provide any true insight. Each of us are as familiar with the so-called birth of the universe, as close to it or as distant [from it], as our own recognized consciousness is to our own physical birth, for the initiation of awareness and sensation in one infant really carries all of the same questions as those involved with the birth of the universe.
The mother could not consciously control the bodily processes that lead to birth. In that truest sense, the birth magically happens, as miraculous in those terms as the so-called initial emergence of life upon the planet itself. Scientific analysis of the brains will tell us nothing about the power that moves our thoughts, or hints at the source of the brain’s abilities. However, the constant activity between Conscious-mind-1 and 2 is constantly apparent in the very existence of our world, and in the relationship involving our imagination, feelings, and beliefs, and those private and shared events that compose our experience.
I do not mean to speak of reason in derogatory terms, for it is well suited to its purposes, which are vital in our reality. It is also true, so that our version of its bound to result in some distortions.
Nor do I mean to agree with those whose ask us to use our intuitions and feelings at the expense of our reason. Our reasoning as we now use it, however, deals primarily with reality by dividing it into categories, forming distinctions, following the “laws” of cause and effect — and largely its realm is the examination of events already perceived. In other words, it deals with the concrete nature of ascertained events that are already facts our our world.
On the other hand our intuitions follow a different kind of organization, as does our imagination — one involved with associations, and organization that unifies diverse elements and brings even known events together in a kind of unity that is often innocent of the limitations dictated by cause and effect. In those terms, then, Conscious-mind-2 deals with associations, so that within it the recognizable events of the physical world can be put together in an infinite number of ways, after which they appear in our private experience according to directions we have given them though those associations that we form mentally.
The coincidences that seem to happen, the chance encounters, the unexpected events — all of these come into our experience because in one way or another we have attracted them, even though their occurrences might seem to have insurmountable odds against them. Those odds — those impediments — do not exist in Conscious-mind-2.
To some extent or another, our intuitions acquaint us with the fact that we have our own place in the universe, and that the universe itself is well-disposed toward us. The intuitions speak of our unique and vital part in the fabric of that universe. The intuitions know that the universe bends in our direction. Our reasoning can deal only with results of our physical perception, however — at least with the training our societies have allowed it. We have in fact denied our reasoning the results of important data, for we have taught it to distrust the psychic faculties. Children’s fairy tales still carry some of that ancient knowledge.
So far, I have been speaking of Conscious-mind-1 and 2 separately, and I will continue to do so for our convenience and understanding. Actually the two merge, of course, for our Conscious-mind-1 existence is immersed in Conscious-mind-2. Our body itself is constantly replenished in Conscious-mind-1 because of its simultaneous reality in Conscious-mind-2. Conscious-mind-2 is ever exteriorizing itself, appearing in our experience as Conscious-mind-1. We concentrate so thoroughly upon exterior reality, however, that we often ignore the quite apparent deeper sources of our own physical existence. As a result we deal with the methods of division and categorization so completely that we lose sight of associative organizations, even though we use them constantly in our own most intimate though processes.
The Cinderella fairy tale. According to the definition, this fairy tale is a myth. Surely it may seem that such a children’s tale has little to do with any serious discussion concerning anything so profound as the creations of the known world. And most certainly, it may appear, no scientifically pertinent data about the nature of events can possibly be uncovered from such a source.
For one thing, [the] Cinderella [tale] has a happy ending, of course, and is therefore highly unrealistic, according to many educators, since it does not properly prepare children for life’s necessary disappointments. Fairy godmothers are are definitely a thing of the storyteller’s imagination, and many serious, earnest adults will tell that daydreaming or wishing will get us nowhere.
In the Cinderella story, however, the heroine, though poor and of low estate, manages to attain a spectacular ball, and meet the prince, initiates a series of magical events, none following the dictates of logic. The fairy godmother, suddenly appearing, uses the normal objects of everyday life so that they are suddenly transformed, and we have a chariot from a pumpkin, and other transformations of like nature.
The tale has always appealed to children because they recognize the validity behind it. The fairy godmother is a creative personification of the personalized elements in the Conscious-mind-2 — a personification therefore of the inner ego, that rises to the aid of the mortal self to grant its desires, even when the intents of the mortal self may not seem to fit into the practical framework of normal life. When the inner ego responds in such a fashion, even the commonplace, ordinary, seemingly innocuous circumstances suddenly become charged with a new vitality, and appear to “work for” the individual involved. If you are reading this blog you are already too old to clearly remember the constant fantasies of our early childhood. Children however know quite well, automatically, that they have a strong hand in the creation of events that then seem to happen to them.
They experiment very often, and quite secretly, since their elders are at the same time trying to make the children conform to a given concrete reality that is more or less already mass-produced for them.
Children experiment with the creation of joyful and frightening events, trying to ascertain for themselves the nature of their control over their own experience. They imagine joyful and terrifying experiences. They are in fact fascinated by the effects that their thoughts, feelings, and purposes. If they create “bogeymen or bogeywomen,” then they can cause them to disappear also. If their thoughts can cause them to become ill, then there is no real reason for them to fear illness, for it if their own creation. Their learning process is nipped in the bud, however. By the time we are adults, its certainly seems that we are a subjective being in an objective universe, at the mercy of others, and with only the most superficial control over the events of our lives.
The tale of Cinderella becomes a fantasy, a delusion, or even a story about sexual awakening, in Freudian terms. The disappointments we have faced indeed make such a tale seem to be a direct contradiction to life’s realities. To some extent or another, however, the child in us remembers a certain sense of mastery only half realized, of power nearly grasped, then seemingly lost forever — and a dimension of existence in which dreams quite literally came true. The child in us sensed more, of course: It sensed its own greater reality in another framework entirely, from which it had only lately emerged — yet with which it was intimately connected. It felt itself surround, then by the greater realities of Conascious-mind-2.
The child knew “that it came from somewhere else — not by chance but by design. The child knew that in one way or another its most intimate thoughts, dreams, and gestures were as connected with the natural world as blades of grass are to a field. The child knew it was unique and utterly original event or being that on the one hand was its own focus, and that on the other hand belonged to its own time and and season. In fact, children let little escape them, so that, again, they experiment constantly in an effort to discover not only the effect of their thoughts and intents and wishes upon others, but the degree to which others influence their own behavior. To that extent, they deal rather directly with probabilities in a way quite foreign to adults behavior.
In a fashion, they make quicker deductions than adults, and often truer ones, because they are not conditioned by a past of structured memory. Their subjective experience then brings them in rather direct contact with the methods by which events are formed.
Children understand the importance of symbols, and they use them constantly to protect themselves — not from their own reality but from the adult world. They constantly pretend, and they quickly learn that persistent in any one area will result in a physically-experienced version of the imagined activity. They also realize that they do not possess full freedom, either, for certain pretended situations will later happen in less faithful versions than the imagined ones. Others will seem almost entirely blocked, and never materialize.
Before children are acquainted with conventional ideas of guilt and punishment, they realize that it is easier to bring about good events, through wishing, than it is to bring about unhappy ones. The child carries with him or her the impetus and supporting energy provided him or her at birth from Conscious-mind-2, and he or she knows intuitively that desires conducive to his development “happen” easier than those that are not. His or her natural impulses naturally lead him or her toward the development of his body and mind, and he is aware of a cushioning effect and support as he acts in accordance with those inner impulses. The child is innately honest. When he gets sick he or she intuitively knows the reason why, and he or she knows quite well that he or she brought about the illness.
Parents and physicians believe, instead, that the child is a victim, ill for no personal reason, but indisposed because of elements attacking him or her — either the outside environment, or [something] working against him or her from within. The child may be told: “You have a cold because you got your feet wet.” Or: “You caught the cold from Johnny or Buffy.” He may be told that he has a virus, so that it seems his or her body itself was invaded despite his or her will. He or she learns that such beliefs are acceptable. It is easier to go along than to be honest, particularly when honesty would often involve a kind of communication his parents might frown upon, or the expression of emotions that are quite unacceptable.
Mother’s little man or brave little girl can then stay at home, for example, courageously bearing up under an illness is the result of feelings that the parents would consider quite cowardly, or otherwise involves emotional realities that the parents simply would not understand. Gradually it becomes easier for the child to accept the parents’ assessment of the situation. Little by little the feelings and bodily reality, erode.
The child who gets the mumps with a large number of his classmates, however, knows he or she has his or her private reasons for jointing into such a mass biological reality, and usually the adults who “fall prey” to a flu epidemic has little conscious awareness of his or her own reason for such a situation. He or she doesn’t understand the mass suggestions involved, or his or her own reasons for accepting them. He or she is usually convinced instead that his or her body has been invaded by a virus despite his or her own personal approval or disapproval — despite his or her own personal approval or disapproval. He is therefore a victim, and his sense of personal power is eroded.
When a person recovers from such an ordeal, he or she usually grants his or her recovery to be the result of the medication he has been given. Or he or she may think that he was simply lucky — but he or she does not grant himself or herself to have any real power in such an affair. The recovery seems to occur to him or her, as the illness seemed to happen to him or her. Usually the patient cannot see that he or she brought about his or her own recovery, and was responsible for it, because he or she cannot admit that his or her own intents were responsible for his or her own illness. He or she cannot learn from his or her own experience, then, and each bout of illness will appear largely incomprehensible.
The individual some how could perceive the nature of reality on his or her own by virtue of innate capacities that belonged to the individual by right — capacities that were a part of man’s and woman’s heritage. In other words, there is a slim chance of opening doors of knowledge that had been closed, and we can decide to take that chance.
We can see that each person have chosen the events of his or her life in; one way or another, and the each person was not the victim but the creator of those events that were privately experienced or jointly encountered with others.
The physical senses do not so much perceive concrete phenomena, but actually had a hand in the creation of events that were then perceived as actual.
That susceptibility is a medical fact of life. It is a fact, however, without a basic foundation in the truth of man’s or woman’s biological reality. It is a fact brought about through suggestion. The doctors see the bodily results, which are quite definite, and then those results are taken as evidence.
In a few isolated areas of the world even today, the old are not disease-ridden, nor their vital signs weaken They remain quite healthy until the time of death.
Their belief systems, therefore, we must admit, are quite practical. Nor are they surrounded by medical professions. We have what almost amounts to a social program for illness — the flu season. A mass meditation, it has an economic structure in back of it: The scientific and medical foundations are involved. Not only this, however, but the economic concerns, from the largest pharmacies to the tiniest drugstores, the supermarkets and the corner groceries all of these elements are involved.
Pills, potions, and shots supposed to combat [colds and the] flu are given prominent displays, serving to remind those who might have missed them otherwise of the announcements [about] the coming time of difficulty. Commercials on television bring a new barrage, so that we can go from the hay fever season to the flu season without missing any personal medications.
A cough in June may be laughed off and quickly forgotten. A cough in the flu season, however, is far more suspect — and under such conditions one might think, particularly in the midst of a poor week: “Who wants to go out tomorrow anyhow?”
We are literally expected to come down with the flu. It can serve as an excuse for not facing many kinds of problems. Many people are almost consciously aware of what they are doing. All they have to do is pay attention to the suggestions offered so freely by the society. The temperature does rise. Concern causes the throat to become dry. Dormant viruses — which up to now have done no harm –are activated.
Coats, gloves, and boot manufactures also push their wares. Yet in those categories there is more sanity, for their ads often stress wholesome activities, portraying the happy skier, the tramper through the woods in winter. Sometimes, however, they suggest that their ware will protect us against the flu and colds, and against the vulnerability of our nature.
The inoculations themselves do little good overall, and they can be potentially dangerous, particularly when they are given to prevent an epidemic which has not in fact occurred. They may have specific value, but overall they are detrimental, confusing bodily mechanisms and setting off other biological reactions that might not show up, say, for some time.
The flu season intersects with the Christmas season, of course, when Christians are told to be merry and [wish] their fellows a happy return to the natural wonders of childhood, in thought at least.[They are also told] to pay homage to God. Christianity has become, however, a tangled sorry tale, its cohesiveness largely vanished. Such a religion becomes isolated from daily life. Many individuals cannot unify the various areas of their belief and feeling, and at Christmas the partially recognize the vast gulf the exists between their scientific beliefs and their religious beliefs. They find themselves unable to cope with such a mental and spiritual dilemma. A psychic depression often results, one that is deepened by the Christmas music and the commercial displays, by the religious reminders that the species is made in God’s image, and by the other reminders that the body so given is seemingly incapable of caring for itself and is a natural prey to disease and disaster.
So the Christmas season carries a man’s and woman’s hopes in our society, and the flu season mirrors his fears and shows the gulf between the two.
The physician is also a private person, so I speak of him or her only in his or her professional capacity, for he or she usually does the best he or she can in the belief system that he or she shares with his or her fellows. Those beliefs do not exist alone, but are of course intertwined with religious and scientific ones, as separate as they might appear. Christianity has conventionally treated illness as the punishment of God, or as a trail sent by God, to be borne stoically. It has considered man and woman a sinful creature, flawed by original sin, forced to work by the sweat of his or her brow.
Science has seen man and woman as an accidental product of an uncaring universe, a creature literally without a center of meaning, where consciousness was the result of a physical mechanism that only happened to come into existence, and that had no reality outside of the structure. Science has at least been consistent in the respect. Christianity, however, officially asks children of sorrow to be joyful and sinners to find a childlike purity; it asks them to love a God who one day will destroy the world, and who will condemn them to hell if they do not adore him.
Many people, caught between such conflicting beliefs, fall prey to physical ills during the Christmas season particularly. The churches and hospitals are often the largest buildings in any town, and the only ones on Sunday without recourse to city ordinances. We cannot divorce our private value systems form our health, and the hospitals often profit from the guilt that religions have instilled in their people.
I am speaking now or religions so intertwined with social life and community ventures that all sense of basic religious integrity becomes lost. Man and woman is by nature a religious creature.
One of man’s and woman’s strongest attributes is religious feeling. It is the part of psychology most often overlooked. There is a natural religious knowledge with which we are born. The feeling is a biological spirituality translated into verbal terms. It says: “Life is a gift ( and not a curse). I am a unique, worthy creature in the natural world, which everywhere surrounds me, gives me sustenance, and reminds me of the greater source from which I myself and the world both emerge. My body is delightfully suited to its environment, and comes to me, from that unknown source which shows itself through all of the events of the physical world.”
That feeling gives the organism the optimism, the joy, and the ever-abundant energy to grow. It encourages curiosity and creativity, and places the individual in a spiritual world and a natural one at once.
Organized religions are always attempts to redefine that kind of feeling in cultural terms. They seldom succeed because they become too narrow in their concepts, too dogmatic, and the cultural structures finally overweigh the finer substance within them.
The more tolerant a religion is, the closer it comes to expressing those inner truths. The individual, however, has a private biological and spiritual integrity that is a part of man’s and woman’s heritage, and is indeed any creature’s right. Man and woman cannot mistrust his or her own nature and at the same time trust the nature of God, for God is his or her word for the source of his or her being — and if his or her being is tainted, then so must be his or her God.
Our private beliefs merge with those of others, and form our cultural reality. The distorted ideas of the medical profession or the scientists, or any other group, are not thrust upon us, therefore. They are the result of our mass beliefs — isolated in the form of separate disciplines. Medical men and women, for example, are often extremely unhealthy because they are so saddled with those health beliefs that their attention is concentrated in that area more than others not so involved. The idea of prevention is always based upon fear — for we do not want to prevent something that is joyful. Often, therefore, preventative medicine causes what it hopes to avoid. Not only does the idea [or prevention] continually promote the entire system of fear, but specific steps taken to prevent a disease in a body not already stricken, again, often set up reactions that bring about side effects that would occur if the disease had in fact been suffered.
A specific disease will of course have its effects on other portions of the body as well, [effects] which have not been studied, or even known. Such inoculations, therefore, cannot take that into consideration. There are also cases where alterations occur after inoculation, so that for a while people actually become carriers of diseases, and can infect others.
There are individuals who very rarely get ill whether or not they are inoculated, and who are not sensitive in the health area. I am not implying, therefore, that all people react negatively to inoculations. In the most basic of terms, however, inoculations do no good, either, though i am aware that medical history would seem to contradict .
At certain times, and more particularly at the birth of medical science in modern times, the belief in inoculation, if not by the populace then by the doctors, did possess the great strength of new suggestion and hope — but I am afraid that scientific medicine has caused as many new diseases as it has cured. When it saves lives, it does so because of the intuitive healing understanding of the physician, or because the patient is so impressed by the great efforts taken in his or her behalf, and therefore is convinced second handedly of his own worth.
Physicians, of course, are also constantly at the beck and call of many people who will take no responsibility at all for their own well-being, who will plead for operations that do not need. The physician is also visited by people who do not want to get well, and use the doctor and his or her methods as justification for further illness, saying, “The doctor is no good,” or “The medicine will not work,” therefore blaming the doctor for a way of life they have no intention of changing.
The physician is also caught between his religious beliefs and his scientific beliefs. Sometimes these conflict, and sometimes they only serve to deepen his or her feelings that the body, left alone, will get any disease possible.
Again, we cannot separate our systems of values and our most intimate philosophical judgments from the other areas of our private or mass experience.
In this country, our tax dollars go for many medical experiments and preventative-medicine drives — because we do not trust the good intent of our own bodies. In the same way, our government funds [also] go into military defenses to prevent war, because it we do not trust our own body’s good intent toward us, we can hardly trust any good intent on the part of our fellowmen.
In fact, then, preventative medicine and outlandish expenditures for preventative defense are quite similar. In each case there is the anticipation of disaster — in one case from the familiar body, which can be attacked by deadly diseases at any time, and is seemingly at least without defenses; and in the other case from the danger without: exaggerated, ever-threatening, and ever to be contended with.
Disease must be combatted, fought against, assaulted, wiped out. In many ways the body becomes almost like an alien battleground, for many people trust it so little that it comes highly suspect. Man and woman then seems pitted against nature. Some people think of themselves as patients, as others, for example, might think of themselves as students. Such people are those who are apt to take preventative measures against whatever disease is in fashion or in season, and hence take the brunt or medicine’s unfortunate aspects, when there is no cause.
Many, meaning to offer us relief through a product, instead actually promote the condition through suggestion, thereby generating a need for the product itself.
Headache remedies are a case in point here. Nowhere do any medically-oriented commercial or public service announcements mention the body’s natural defenses, its integrity, vitality, or strength. Nowhere is our television or radio matter is any emphasis put upon the healthy are not carried out.
More and more foods, drugs, and natural environmental conditions are being added to the list of disease-causing elements. Different reports place dairy products, red meats, coffee, tea, eggs, and fats on the list. Generations before us managed to subsist on many such foods, and they were in fat promoted as additive to health. Indeed, man and woman almost seems to be allergic to his or her own natural environments, a prey to the weather itself.
It is true that our food contains chemicals it did not in years past. Yet within reason man is biologically capable of assimilating such material, and using them to his or her advantage. When man feels powerless, however, and in a state of generalized fear, he can even turn the most natural earthly ingredients against himself or herself. Our television, and our arts and sciences as well, add up to mass mediations. In our culture, at least, the educated in the literary arts provide us with novels featuring anti-heroes, and often portray an individual existence [as being] without meaning, in which no action is sufficient to mitigate, the private puzzlement or anguish.
Many — not all — plotless novels or movies are the result of this belief in man and woman’s powerlessness. In that context no action is heroic, and man and woman is everywhere the victim of an alien universe. On the other hand our common, unlettered, violent television drama do indeed provide a service, for they imaginatively specify a generalized fear in a given situation, which is then resolved through drama. Individual action counts. The plots may be stereotyped or the acting horrendous, but in the most conventional terms the “good” man/woman wins. Such programs do indeed pick up the generalized fears of the nation, but they also present folk dramas — disdained by the intelligentsia — in which the common man or woman can portray heroic capabilities, act concisely toward a desired end, and triumph.
Those programs often portray our cultural world in exaggerated terms, and most resolution is indeed through violence. Yet our more educated beliefs lead us to an even more pessimistic picture, in which even the violent action of men and women who are driven to the extreme serves no purpose. The individual must feel that his/her actions count. He/she is driven to violent action only as a last resort — and illness often is the last resort.
Our television dramas, the cops-and-robbers shows, the spy productions, are simplistic, yet they relieve tension in a way that our public health announcements cannot do. The viewer can say: “Of course I feel panicky, unsafe, and frightened, because I live in such a violent world.” The generalized fear can find a reason [for its existence]. But the programs at least provide a resolution dramatically set, while the public health announcements continue to generate unease. Those mass meditations therefore reinforce negative conditions.
In the overall, then, violent shows provide a service, in that they usually promote the sense of a man’s or woman’s individual power over a given set of circumstances. At best the public service announcements introduce the doctor as we take our car to a garage, to have its parts serviced. Our body is seen as a vehicle out of control, that needs constant scrutiny.
The doctor is like a biological mechanic, who knows our body far better than us. Now these medical beliefs are intertwined with our economic and cultural structures, so we cannot lay the blame upon medical men or women or their profession alone. Our economic well-being is also a part of our personal reality. Many dedicated doctors use medical technology with spiritual understanding, and they are themselves the victims of beliefs they hold.
If we do not buy headache potions, our uncle or our neighbor may be out of business and not able to support his family, and therefore lack the means to buy our wares. We cannot disconnect one area of life from another. En masse, our private beliefs form our cultural reality. Our society is not a thing in itself apart from us, but the result of the individual beliefs of each person in it. There is no stratum of society that we do not in one way or another affect. Our religions stress sin. Our medical professions stresses disease. Our orderly sciences stress the chaotic and accidental theories of creation. Our psychologies stress men and women as victims of their backgrounds. Our most advanced thinkers emphasize man’s and woman’s rape of the planet, or focus upon the future disaster that will overtake the world, or see men and women once again as victims of the stars. Many of our resurrected occult schools speak of a recommended death of desire, the annihilation of the ego, for the transmutation of physical elements to finer levels. In all such cases the clear spiritual and biological integrity of the individual suffers, and the precious immediacy of our moments is largely lost.
Earth life is seen as murky, a dim translation of greater existence, rather than portrayed as the unique, creative, living experience that is should be. The body becomes disoriented, sabotaged. The clear lines of communication between spirit and body become cluttered. Individually and en masses, diseases and conditions result that are meant to lead us into other realizations.
Suggestions for effective solutions? “We get what we concentrate upon.” Our mental images bring about their own fulfillment. These are ancient dictums, but we must understand the ways in which our mass communication systems amplify both the “positive and the negative” issues.
Individually, and as a civilization, we have undermined our own feelings of safety; yet methods to reinforce those necessarily feelings of biological integrity and spiritual comprehension that can vastly increase our spiritual and physical existence.
Our beliefs have generated feelings of unworth. Having artificially separated ourselves from nature, we do not trust it, nut often experience it as as adversary. Our religions granted man a soul, while denying any to other species. Our bodies then were relegated to nature and our souls to god, who stood immaculately apart from His or Her creations.
Our scientific beliefs tell us that our entire world happened accidentally. Our religions tell us that man and woman are sinful: The body is not to be trusted; the senses can lead us astray. In this maze of beliefs we have largely lost a sense of our own worth and purpose. A generalized fear and suspicion is generated, and life too often becomes stripped of any heroic qualities. The body cannot react to generalized fear and suspicion is generated, and life too often becomes stripped of any heroic qualities. The body cannot react to generalized threats. It is, therefore, put under constant strain in such circumstances, and seeks to specify the danger. It is geared to act in our protection. It builds up strong stresses, therefore, so that on many occasions a specific disease or threat situation is “manufactured” to rid the body of tension grown too strong to bear.
Many are familiar with private meditation, when concentration is focused in one particular area. There are many methods and schools of thought here, but a highly suggestive state of mind results, in which spiritual, mental, and physical goals are sought. It is impossible to mediate without a goal, for that intent is itself a purpose. Unfortunately, many of our public health programs, and commercial statements through the various media, provide us with mass meditations of a most deplorable kind. I refer to those in which the specific symptoms of various diseases are given, in which the individual is further told examine the body with those symptoms in mind. I also refer to those statements that just as unfortunately specify diseases for which the individual may experience no symptoms of an observable kind, but is cautioned that these disastrous physical events may be happening despite his or her feelings of good health. Here the generalized fears fostered by religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs are often given as blueprints of diseases in which a person can find a specific focus — the individual can say: “Of course, I feel listless, or panicky, or unsafe since I have such-and-such a disease.”
The breast cancer suggestions associated with self-examinations have caused more cancers than any treatments have cured. They involve intense meditations of the body, and adverse imagery that itself affects the bodily cells. Public health announcements about high blood pressure themselves raise the blood pressure of millions of television viewers.
Our current ideas of preventive medicine, therefore, generate he very kind of fear that causes disease. They all undermine the individual’s sense of bodily security and increase stress while offering the body a specific, detailed disease plan. But most of all, they operate to increase the individual sense of alienation from the body, and to promote a sense of powerlessness and duality.
