Category Archives: Metaphysics

Meaningfulness of Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is nothing wrong with technology. Man and woman have an innate inclination toward the use of tools, and technology is no more than an extension of that capacity. When men and women, use tools in accord with the “dictates” of value fulfillment, those tools are effective. Our technology, however, as it stands, has to some important degree — but not entirely  —  been based upon a scientific philosophy that denies the very idea of value fulfillment. Therefore, we end up with affairs of great national and world concern, such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and other lesser-known near-nuclear accidents.

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

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

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

Seeds are blown by the wind, and so reproduce their kind. Many people speculate about the physical journeys of early man and woman from one continent to another. It is said that in “the struggle to survive” man and woman were literally driven to expand his or her physical boundaries. The true motion of the species, however, has always been psychological, or psychic if you prefer, involving the exploration of ideas. And again, the survival of the species in those terms is basically dependent upon its belief in the meaningfulness of its existence. These new cults and groups, however — these new cults and groups, therefore are following the paths of genetic wisdom, opening up new areas of speculation and belief. And if some of their present beliefs are ludicrous in the light of the intellect’s reason, in the end — because such groups are following the dictates of value fulfillment, however feebly — they are significant. It is easy for the intellect, as we are used to using it, to see only the antics of such groups, and they can appear ridiculous in that light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subjective reality of Cells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The species chooses the best conditions in which to display and develop such to the utmost, taking into consideration all its other needs and purposes. The particular, brilliant, intensified flowering of painting and sculpture that took place, say, in the time of Michelangelo (1475-1564) could not, in our probability, have occurred after the birth of technology, for example, and certainly not in our own era, where images are flashed constantly before our eyes on computers, television and in the movies, where they are rambunctiously present in our magazines and advertisements. We are everywhere surrounded by photography of all kinds, but in those days images outside of those provided by nature’s objects were highly rare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did mean to mention that man’s and woman’s use of perspective in painting was a turning point (early in the 15th century) in that it foreshadowed the turning of art away from its imaginative colorations toward a more specific physical rendering — that is, to a large degree after that the play of the imagination would not be allowed to “distort” the physical frame of reference.

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

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Woodcuts and wood blocks were used for a variety of purposes by the ancient Chinese and Egyptians, for example, and even by the Romans. Many of the early prints created in Europe illustrate religious subjects. One of the first dated European woodcuts, showing a religious figure, appeared in 1423; a book bearing woodcut illustrations was produced circa 1460; the first Roman book containing woodcuts was made in 1467; Bibles were illustrated with woodcuts in the late 15th century. The earliest known engravings, printed on paper, date from around 1450; pictorial engravings and etching were evidently developed in Germany in the early 1500s. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) experimented with his own method of copper engraving. But all of these efforts were beginnings: There couldn’t have been any mass circulation of printed material in those days.

What happened to all the Rembrandts?

Why isn’t there at least one artist in all of the world painting today whose ability equals Rembrandt’s, and who uses that great gift to evoke the depths of compassion for the human condition as Rembrandt did? For in my opinion there isn’t such a one around. By extension, why isn’t there a Rubens or a Velazquez or a Vermeer operating now? My choices are personally arbitrary, or course — yet why don’t we have a Rembrandt contributing to  our current reality? Just those four artists, whose lives spanned a period of only 98 years (from 1577 to 1675), explored human insight in powerful ways. To link the “great masters” with our species’ reincarnational intents and drives, opens up a new field for understanding my question, and a very large and intriguing one indeed.

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Our many excellent “modern” painters inevitably work within a different world ambience. Our species’ art is just no longer the same — a fact I both applaud and mourn. However, I do feel that in the course of ordinary time we have either lost certain qualities of art or no longer stree them.

The “Genetic System” is far more open than is usually supposed

The genetic system not only contains and conveys information, but it also reacts to information from the physical and cultural worlds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Some people have built careers around negative beliefs– they may have spent their professional lives maintaining belief systems which after death they begin to understand are quite wrong. How do they react? Are those individuals even aware of their earlier beliefs? Do they care what they used to think? Are they shocked, do they have feelings of regret or embarrass what? Or is there such a variety of responses possible that we can’t answer the question simply? And how do such people react after death, they start to get glimmerings about the workings of reincarnation, for example?

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

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

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“If there is no life after life,

then what cosmic spendthrift formed

the universe,

for Chance alone can’t be

that prolific, or fake an order in which

an accident of such proportions

as the creation of a world

seems so inevitable,

each random element

falling pat, into place.,

and each consciousness promptly appearing

with body parts all neatly assembled —

only to be squandered,

falling apart, dissolving into nothingness

while Chance grinds out newer odds.

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If there is no life after life,

then what a lack

of cosmic economy,

for nature strings one molecule

on to another so craftily

that each seed can grow a tree,

and contains the properties

of an entire forest,

while multiplications

are hidden everywhere.”

The Genetic system is an inner, biological, “Universal” language

In our terms that language speaks the flesh — and it speaks the flesh equally in all races of mankind. There are no inferior or superior races. Now dreams also provide us with another universal kind of language, one that unites all peoples to one extent or another, regardless of their physical circumstances or nationalities or alliances. The cataloging of separate races simply involves us in organizations of variances played upon a common theme — variances that we have used for various purposes. Often those purposes led us to over exaggerate the differences between groups, and to minimize man’s and woman’s biological unity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The idea today is to love and protect and cherish, and express the body that we have. The human species has an “amazing interplay between genetic preciseness and genetic freedom,” and that our genetic structure reacts to each thought that we have, to the state of our emotions, to our psychological climate. Choices and probabilities apply. Thus do we avoid genetic rigidity.

If there were no Idiots, we would find Geniuses absent among us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Using animals in the laboratory is imposing human goals and values upon other life forms, even though the modern scientific method is supposed to be value-free. For such research is carried out in the name of progress and the practical common good, of course — and that progress applies also in the remedial treatment of other animals, let us remember. We think that every reader of this blog has benefited, and still does, from animal experimentation, some of it most cruel, in ways that he or she can hardly suspect, let alone specify: even benefiting from the use of animals in the study of medical and chemical, beauty and recreational products that can be found in practically every home in the country. I see the passive, thinking and unthinking tolerance of animal experimentation as a classical case of a society using ends to justify means — yet in the United States, at least, we carefully teach each generation of our species that such rationalization aren’t morally acceptable. 

I also believe, however, that generally speaking science still views our genetic systems in mechanical, deterministic, and reductionistic terms, and will continue to do so for a long time. So that evidence is being accumulated to support that overall view that at this time science has no need to seek for other, larger, and more unsettling frames of reference encompassing consciousness, intent, and genetics. Indeed, I seldom see consciousness mentioned in connection with genetics, except as its quality may relate to genetic “defects” like mental retardation, say.

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Nor do I think that establishment science will soon be interested in ideas that exchanges take place involving our genetic systems, the environment, and cultural events like politics and economics; of that our genetic systems react to our thoughts and emotions — let alone that there’s any genetic planning for future probabilities! I do not know whether, or how, any of those factors could be measured and/or manipulated in the laboratory. Science could grant ideas their own realities outside of the scientific framework, or course, and thus be free of them.

But granted or not, the idea of any sort of genetic preparation for future contingencies collides with the very powerful theory of evolution, which holds that evolutionary, genetic changes take place only through natural selection and chance mutations (although random of chance mutations are generally regarded as mistakes on nature’s part). There are many unsolved challenges here. Another version of old, discredited Lamarckian theories. (jean Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck [1744-1829] was a French naturalist who advocated that certain modifications of an organism’s structure and function could develop in response to environmental factors, and that these “acquired characters” could be inherited. Lamarck’s work has been widely misunderstood, however. It still has value, and recently has been employed in some remarkable scholarly studies that show how, in scientific teams, evolution can take place through means other than natural selection and chance mutations.

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Some would agree that consciousness obviously contains an unlimited number of viewpoints, regardless of which ones we humans may choose to call “true” at any particular time. Consciousness is just as amenable to having some of its physical manifestations scientifically studied, its parts manipulated through “genetic engineering.” All of our  species’ actions represent our keen and creative interests in studying ourselves in the finest details possible. That the scientific approach has limitations is obvious. So do all others in this physical realm. A discipline, of whatever nature and motivation, can erect barriers to “outside” influences — and those barriers are often artifacts growing almost automatically out of the very nature of the belief system in question

The Gifted and the Handicapped

Our species as a species includes the idiot and the genius, the stupid and the wise, the athletic, the deformed, the beautiful and the ugly, and all variations in between. There are genetic cultures operating, then, of literally infinite variety, and they each have their place and their reason, and they each fit into the overall picture — not only of man’s and woman’s reality but of the planet’s  reality, including all of nature.

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Our religious ideas have often told us that deformities at birth were the result of the parents’ sins cast upon the children, or that another kind of punishment was involved in terms of “karma.” In terms of biology, people talk about coming from good stock or bad stock, and even those designations imply moral judgments.

The entire idea of reincarnation has been highly distorted by other religious concepts. It is not a psychological arena composed of crime and punishment. Again, we have free will in the conditions of life, given the characteristics that are our own. The great facility and adaptability of the human species are dependent upon an amazing interplay between genetic preciseness and genetic freedom. The very characteristic attributes of species, its dependability and integrity, are dependent upon constant checks and balances, the existence of divergent characteristics against which the species can measure itself.

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The species is also always in the process of keeping within its genetic bank millions of characteristics that might be needed in various contingencies, and in that regard there is a connection, of course, between, say, viruses of many strains and the health not only of man and woman but of other species.

The possibility of creative change must always be present to insure the species’ resiliency, and that resiliency can show in many ways — in conditions that we consider deformities, disabilities from birth, or in any physical variation for a hypothetical physical norm. We all look quite alike, with one head, to arms and legs, and so forth, as a rule. Such differences or variations are very noticeable at a certain level, if we have more fingers that we are supposed to or less, or two thumbs to a hand, or any other condition that is considered an abnormality.

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There are mental conditions also: the so-called retarded people who do not use their reasoning minds as others do. There are also, again, highly gifted people, physically or mentally, people who seem to be at times as far from the ordinary person on the gifted scale as an idiot might be on the other. So as we progress in my blogs, I hope to show where all of these situations fit in with the development of the individual and the species.

At a smaller level of activity such variances of course escape our notice. We do not know if we have any errant genes unless their effects show themselves. At microscopic levels, in fact, no one fits any norm, and there is no way to predict with complete certainty the development of any genetic element. We can make group predictions, and overall make certain judgments, but other elements are involved, so that any particular genetic element cannot be pinned down in terms of its development. This is because its activity is also involved with relationships that do not show in any of our calculations.

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Our thoughts, feelings, desires and intents, our reincarnational knowledge as well, modify that structure, bring certain latent characteristics into actualization, minimize others, as through the experience of our life we use our free will and constantly make new decisions.

Out-of-body is the result of a change in attitude, and makes possible also because of the body’s relaxation. Exercising the consciousness, allowing it greater freedom. a certain portion of our mind drifting at this time.

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Now people may wiggle their feet, or doodle, or tap a desk while they are concentrating on other things. They also exercise their consciousnesses in the same fashion — doodle with their minds, relaxing themselves in such a fashion, wandering off to refresh themselves .

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Only the physical body is in the same place. This is like a mental doodle, the colors are not complete, the picture is not filled in.

Human’s first encounter with physical reality in life, is with the state of one’s own consciousness

He or she is aware of a different kind of being. He or she encounters his and her consciousness first, and then he and she encounters the world — so I am saying, of course, that each person has an identity that is larger than the framework of consciousness with which we are usually familiar in life.

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When we are born, we understand that we have a new consciousness. We explore its ramifications. It is our primary evidence that we exist in flesh. basically, each person must confront the experience of reality through a direct encounter with it. this encounter takes place through the use of the physical senses, of course, as they are used to perceive and interpret physical data. the very utilization of those senses, however, is dependent upon the nature of our consciousness itself, and that consciousness is aware of its power and action through the exercise of its own properties.

Those “properties” are the faculties of the imagination, creativity, telepathy, clairvoyance, and dreaming, as well as the functions of logic and reason. We know that we dream. We know that we think. Those are direct experiences. Anytime we use instruments to probe into the nature of reality, we are looking at a kind of secondary evidence, no matter how excellent the instruments may be. The subjective evidence of dreaming, for example, is far more “convincing” and irrefutable than is the evidence for an expanding universe, black holes, or even atoms and molecules themselves. Although instruments can indeed be most advantageous in many ways, they still present us with secondary rather than primary tools of investigation — and they distort the nature of reality far more than the subjective attributes of thoughts, feelings, and intuitions do.

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The human consciousness has not, therefore, developed the best and most proper “tool” with which to examine the nature of reality. It is because we have used other methods that much evidence escapes us — evidence that would show that the physical universe exists in quite different terms than is supposed.

We are taught not to trust our subjective experience, which means that we are told not to trust our initial and primary connection with reality.

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Evidence for reincarnation is quite available. there are enough instances of it, known and tabulated, to make an excellent case; and beside this there is evidence that remains psychologically invisible in our private lives, because we have been taught not to concentrate in that direction.

There is enough evidence to build an excellent case for life after death. All of this involves direct experience — episodes, encountered by individuals, that are highly suggestive of the after death hypothesis; but the hypothesis is never taken seriously by our established sciences. There is far more evidence for reincarnation and life after death than is, for example, for the existence of black holes. Few people have seen a black hole, to make the most generous statement possible, while countless people have had private reincarnational experiences, or encounters that suggest the survival of the personality beyond death.

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Those experiences are usual. They have been reported by people of all kinds and in all ages, and they represent a common-sense kind of knowledge that is frowned upon by the men and women of learned universities. Throughout my blogs we will often be talking about experiences that are encountered in one way or another by most people, but are not given credence to on the part of the established fields of knowledge. Therefore, dreams will be considered throughout the blogs in various capacities as they are related through genetics, reincarnation, culture, and private life. We will also be considering the matter of free will and its role in individual value fulfillment.

The reasoning mind represents human mental activity in a space and time context

The reasoning mind is involved with the trial-and-error method. It sets up hypothesis, and its very existence is dependent upon a lack of available knowledge — knowledge that it seeks to discover.

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In the dreaming state the characteristics of the reasoning mind become altered, and from a waking viewpoint it might seem distorted in its activity. What actually happens, however, is that in the dreaming state we are presented with certain kinds of immediate knowledge. It often appears out of context in usual terms. It is not organized according to the frameworks understood by the reasoning portions of our mind, and so to some extent in dreams we encounter large amounts of information that we cannot categorize.

The information may not fit into our recognizable time or space slots. There are, in fact, many important issues connected with the dreaming state that can involve genetic activation of certain kinds: information processing on the part of the species, the insertion or reinsertion of civilizing elements — and all of these are also connected with the reincarnational aspects of dreaming.

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I have not touched upon some of these subjects before, since I wanted to present them in that larger context of man’s and woman’s origins and historic appearance as a species. I also wanted to make certain points, stressing the importance of dreams as they impinge upon and help form cultural environments. Dreams also sometimes help in showing the pathways that can be taken to advantage by an individual, by a group of individuals, and therefore help clarify the ways in which free will might most advantageously be directed. So I hope to cover all of these subjects.

Let us first of all return momentarily to the subject of the reasoning mind, its uses and characteristics. It seems to the reasoning mind that it must look outside of itself for information, for it operates in concert with the physical senses, which present it with only a limited amount of information about the environment at any given time. The physical eyes cannot see today the dawn that will come in the morning. The legs today cannot walk down tomorrow’s street, so if the mind wants to know what is going to happen tomorrow, or what is happening now, outside of the physical senses’ domain, then it must try through reason to deduce the information that it wants from the available information that it has. It must rely upon observation to make its deductions accordingly. In a fashion, it must divide to conquer. It must try to deduce the nature of the whole it cannot perceive from the portions that are physically available.

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Children begin to count by counting on their fingers. Later, fingers are dispensed with but the idea of counting remains. There have been people throughout history who mentally performed mathematical feats that appear most astounding, and almost in a matter of moments. Some, had they lived in our century, would have been able to outperform computers (just as some are outperforming computers these days!). In most cases where such accomplishments show themselves, they do so in a child far too young to have learned scientific mathematical procedures to begin with, and often such feats are displayed by people who are otherwise classified as idiots (idiot savants), and who are incapable of intellectual reasoning.

Indeed, when a child is involved, the keener his or her use of the reasoning mind becomes the dimmer his or her mathematical abilities grow. Others, children [or adults] who would be classified as mentally deficient, can tell, or have been able to tell, the day of the week that any given date, past or present, would fall upon. Others have been able, while performing various tasks, to keep a precise count of the moments from any given point in time. There have been children, again, with highly accomplished musical abilities, and great facility with music’s technical aspects — all such accomplishments before the assistance of any kind of advanced education.

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Now, some of these children went on to become great musicians, while others lost their abilities along the way, so what are we dealing with in such cases? We are dealing with direct knowing. We are dealing with the natural perceptions of the psyche, at least when we are speaking in human terms. We are dealing with natural, direct cognition as it exists before and after man’s and woman’s experience with the reasoning mind.

Some of those abilities show themselves in those classified as mentally deficient simply because all of the powers of the reasoning mind are not activated. In children under such conditions, the reasoning mind has not yet developed in all of its aspects sufficiently, so that in a certain area direct cognition shines through with its brilliant capacity.

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Direct cognition is an inner sense. In physical terms we might call it remote sensing. Our physical body, and our physical existence, are based upon certain kinds of direct cognition, and it is responsible for the very functioning of the reasoning mind itself. Scientists like to say that animals operate through simple instinctive behavior, without will or volition: It is no accomplishment for a spider to make its web, a beaver its dam, a bird its nest, because according to such reasoning, such creatures cannot perform otherwise. The spider must spin his web. If he or she chooses not to, he or she will not survive. But by that same reasoning — to which, of course, I do not subscribe — we should also add that man and woman can take no credit either for his or her intellect, since man and woman must think, and cannot help doing so.

Some pessimistic scientist would say: “Of course,” for man and woman and animal alike are driven by their instincts, and man’s and woman’s claim to free will is no more than an illusion.

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Man’s and woman’s reasoning mind, however, with its fascinating capacity for logic and education, and for observation, rests upon a direct cognition — a direct cognition that powers his or her thoughts, that makes thinking itself possible. He or she thinks because he or she knows how to think by thinking, even though the true processes of thought are enigmas to the reasoning mind.

In dreams the reasoning mind loosens its hold upon perception. From our standpoint we are almost faced with too much data. The reasoning mind attempts to catch what it can as it reassembles its abilities toward waking, but the net of its reasoning simply cannot hold that assemblage of information. Instead it is processed at other levels of the psyche. Dreams also involve a kind of psychological perspective with which we have no physical equivalent — and therefore such issues are most difficult to discuss.

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The reasoning mind is highly necessary, effective, and suitable for physical existence, and for the utilization of free will, which is very dependent upon perception of clearly distinguishable actions. In the larger framework of existence, however, it is simply one of innumerable methods of organizing data. A psychological filing system, if you prefer.

Our dreaming self possesses psychological dimensions that escape us, and they serve to connect genetic and reincarnational systems. We must, again, realize that the self that we know is only a part of our larger identity — an identity that is also historically actualized in other times than our own. We must also understand that mental activity is of the utmost potency. We experience our dreams from our own perspective, as a rule. I am simply trying to give a picture of one kind of dream occurrence, or show one picture of dream activity of which we are not usually aware.

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If we are having a dream as oneself from our own perspective, another reincarnational self may be having the same dream from its perspective — in which, of course, we play a minor role. In our dream, that reincarnational self may appear as a minor character, quite on the periphery of our attention, and if the dream were to include an idea, say, for a play or an invention, then that play or invention might appear as a physical event in both historic times, to whatever degree it would be possible for the two individuals living in time to interpret that information. But culture throughout the ages was spread by more than physical means. Abilities and inventions were not dependent upon human migrations, but those migrations themselves were the result of information given in dreams, telling tribes of men and women the directions in which better homelands could be found.

Direct cognition: You know what you know.

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Our knowledge knows how to flow through the techniques we have learned, to use them and become part of them, so that a painting emerges with a spontaneous wisdom. That is what we are learning. That is what the painting shows. That is where we are.

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To some extent each vision, each subject matter, will itself make minute alterations in technique of we allow it to. Our impulses have shadings as our colors do. They should mix and merge with our brushstrokes, so that the idea of our subject matter is almost magically contained in each spot of paint, and that is what we are learning. Or rather, we are learning to take advantage of our direct cognition.

Free will and determinism lead to questions concerning the reasoning mind

Any real discussion of genetic heritage must all bring up questions involving free will and determinism, and to some extent those issues must also lead to questions concerning the nature of the reasoning mind itself.

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Reasoning, as we are familiar with it, is the result of mental or psychic processes functioning in a space-time context, and in a particular fashion. To some extent, then, reasoning — again, as we are familiar with it — is the result of a lack of available knowledge. We try to “reason things out,” because the answer is not in front of us. If it were, we would “know,” and hence have no need to question.

The reasoning mind is a uniquely human and physical phenomenon. It depends upon conscious thinking, problem-solving methods, and it is a natural human blossoming, a spectacular mental development in its own framework of activity.

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Our technology is one of the results of that reasoning mind. That “reasoning” is necessary, however, because of the lack of a larger, immediate field of knowledge. Thoughts are mental activity, scaled to time and space terms so that they are like mental edifices built to certain dimensions only. Our thoughts make us human.

Other creatures have their own kinds of mental activity, however. They also have different kinds of immediate perceptions of reality. All species are united by their participation in emotional states, however. It is not just that all species of life have feeling, but that all participate in dimensions of emotional reality. It has been said that only men and women have a moral sense, that only men and women have free will — if indeed free will is possible at all. The word “moral” has endless connotations, of course. Yet animals have their own “morality,” their own codes of honor, their own impeccable senses of balance with all other creatures. They have loving emotional relationships, complicated societies, and in a certain sense at least — an important one — they also have their arts and sciences. But those “arts and sciences” are not based upon reasoning, as we understand it.

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Animals also possess independent volition, and while I am emphasizing animals here, the same applies to any creature, large or small: insect, bird, fish, or worm; to plant life; to cells, atoms, or electrons. They possess free will in relationship to the conditions of their existence.

The conditions of existence are largely determined by genetic structure. Free will must then of course function in accordance with genetic integrity. Genetic structure makes possible physical organisms through which life is to be experienced, and to a large extent that structure must determine the kind of action possible in the world, and the way or ways in which volition can be effectively expressed.

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The beaver is not free to make a spider web. In human beings the genetic structure largely determines physical characteristics such as height, color of eyes, color of hair, color of skin — and, of course, more importantly, the number of fingers and toes, and the other specific physical attributes alone, a man or woman cannot use his or her free will to fly like a bird, or to perform physical acts for which the human body is not equipped.

The body is equipped to perform far better, in a variety of ways, than we give it credit for, however — but the fact remains that the genetic structure focuses volition. The genetic apparatus and the chromosomal messages actually contain far more information than is ever used. that genetic information can, for example, be put together in an infinite number of ways. The species cares for itself in the event of any possible circumstance, so that the genetic messages also carry an endless number of triggers that will change genetic combinations if this becomes necessary.

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Beyond that, however, genetic messages are coded in such a way that there is a constant give-and-take between those messages and the present experience of any given individual. That is, no genetic event is inevitable.

Now besides this physical genetic structure, there is an inner bank of psychic information that in our terms would contain the “past” history — the reincarnational history — of the individual. This provides an overall reservoir of psychic characteristics, leanings, abilities, knowledge, that is as much a part of the individual’s heritage as the genetic structure is a part of the  physical heritage.

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A person of great intelligence may be born from a family of idiots, for example, because of that reincarnational structure. Musical ability may thus appear complete, with great technical facility, regardless of family background, genetically speaking, and again, the reincarnational bank of characteristics accounts for such events. That inner reincarnational psychic structure is also responsible for triggering certain genetic messages while ignoring others, of for triggering certain combinations of genetic messages. In actuality, of course — say that I smile — all time is simultaneous, and so all reincarnational lives occur at once.

Perhaps an analogy will help. An actor throwing himself or herself into a role, even momentarily lost in the part, is still alive and functioning as himself or herself in a context that is larger than the play. The character in the play is seemingly alive ( creatively) for the play’s duration, perception being limited to that framework, yet to play that role the actor or actress draws upon the experience of his or her own life. he or she brings to bear his or her own understanding, compassion, artistry, and is he is a good actor, or if she is, then when the play is over the actor is a better person for having played the role.

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Now in the greater framework of reincarnational existences we choose our roles, or our lives, but the lines that we speak, the situations that we meet, are not predetermined. “You” live or exist in a larger framework of activity even while we live our life, and there is a rambunctious interplay between the yous in time and the you outside of time.

The you inside of time adopts a reasoning mind. It is a kind of creative psychological face that we use for the purposes of our life’s drama. This psychological face of our analogy has certain formal, ceremonial features, so that we mentally and psychologically tend to perceive only those data that are available within the play’s formal structure. We cannot see into the future, for example, or into the past.

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We reason out our position. Otherwise our free will would have no meaning in a physical framework, for the number of choices available would be so multitudinous that we could not make up our mind to act within time: With all the opportunities of creativity, and with our own greater knowledge instantly available, we could be swamped by so many stimuli that we literally could not physically respond, and so our particular kinds of civilization and science and art could not have been accomplished — and regardless of their flaws they are magnificent accomplishments, unique products of the reasoning mind.

Without the reasoning mind the artist would have no need to paint, for the immediacy of his or her mental vision would be so instant and blinding, so mentally accomplished, that there would be no need to try any physical rendition of it. So nowhere do I ever mean to demean the qualities or excellence of the reasoning mind as we understand it.

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We have, however, become so specialized in its use, so prejudiced in its favor, that our tendency is to examine all other kinds of consciousness using the reasoning mind as the only yardstick by which to judge intelligent life. We are surrounded everywhere by other kinds of consciousness whose validity we have largely ignored, whose psychic brotherhood we have dismissed — kinds of consciousness in the animal kingdom particularly, that deal with a different kind of knowing, but who share with us the reality of keen emotional experience, and who are innately aware of biological and psychic values, but in ways that have escaped our prejudiced examination.

To some extent that emotional reality is also expressed at other levels — as our own is — in periods of dreaming, in which animals, like men, participate in a vast cooperative venture that helps to form the psychological atmosphere in which our lives must first of all exist.

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All creatures of whatever degree have their own appreciation of esthetics. many such creatures merge their arts so perfectly into their lives that it is impossible to separate the two: the spider’s web, for example, or the beaver’s dam — and there are endless other examples. This is not “blind instinctive behavior’ at all, but the result of well-ordered spontaneous artistry.

Art is not a specifically human endeavor, though man and woman likes to believe that this is so. Art is above all a natural characteristic. I try to straddle our definitions — but flowers, for example, in a fashion see themselves as their own artistic creations. They have an esthetic appreciation of their own colors. But nature seeks to outdo itself in terms that are most basically artistic, even while those terms may also include quite utilitarian purposes. The natural man and woman, then, are a natural artist. In a sense, painting is man’s and woman’s natural attempt to create an original but coherent, mental yet physical interpretation of his or her own reality — and by extension to create a new version of reality for his or her species.

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We are still learning. Our work is still developing. How truly unfortunate we would be if that were not the case. There is always a kind of artistic dissatisfaction that any true artist feels with work that is completed, for he or she are always aware of the tug and pull, and the tension, between the sensed ideal and its manifestation. In a certain fashion the artist is looking for a creative solution to a sensed but never clearly stated problem or challenge, and it is an adventure that is literally unending. It must be one that has no clearly stated destination, in usual terms. In the most basic of ways, the artist cannot say where he or she is going, for is he or she knows ahead of time he or she is not creating but copying.

The true artist is involved with the inner workings of himself or herself with the universe — a choice, I remind you, that he or she has made, and so often the artist does indeed forsake the recognized roads of recognition. And more, seeing that, he or she often does not know how to assess his or her progress, since his or her journey has no recognizable creative destination. By its nature art basically is meant to put each artist of whatever kind into harmony with the universe, for the artist draws upon the same creative energy from which birth emerges.

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Free will is the philosophical doctrine that the individual has the freedom to choose, without coercion, some actions consistent with his or her particular morals and ideals. Determinism is the opposing doctrine that everything, even the individual’s course of action, is determined by conditions outside one’s will.

Through the centuries philosophical and religious thinkers have created numerous complicated variations of ideas involving free will and determinism, so that neither thesis is as simple as it first appears to be. Man and woman related the concept of free will long age to the question of whether he or she could deliberately choose evil, for example. He or she still does. And he or she still struggles with questions about his or her freedom before God’s omnipotence and foreknowledge, and whether those qualities cause events, or can cause them, and whether they involve predestination. Opposing determinism is the idea that man or woman has always fought for his or her personal responsibility — that instead of being controlled entirely by his or her heritage, he’s or she’s capable of forming new synthesis of thought and action based upon the complicated patterns of his or her own history.

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In a strange way, determinism has always seemed lacking as a concept — for if it means what it’s supposed to mean, then surely human beings setup the parameters within which determinism is said to operate. I see this as a contradiction of the notion that the individual is entirely at the mercy of his or her history and of nature. How can we be if through the ages we’ve created that history and nature against which we react? In other words, on joint and individual scales, vast though they may be, we do create our joint and individual realities.

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Even in modern terms, our psychological and medical knowledge of mind and brian have added more complications to the doctrine of free will, yet it survives and grows. I feel strong connections involving free will, determinism, and probable realities — connections largely unexpressed and unexplored in our world’s societies.

Viruses as biological statements and part of the body’s overall health system

Viruses serve many purposes. The body contains all kinds of viruses, including those considered deadly, but those are usually not only harmless, or inactive, but beneficial to the body’s overall balance.

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The body maintains its vitality not only through the physical motion and agility that we perceive, but by microscopic agility, and actions within microseconds, that we do not perceive. There is as much motion, stimulation, and reaction in the interior bodily environment as the body meets through its encounters with the exterior environment. The body must now and then “flush its systems out,” run through its repertoire, raise its temperature, activate its hormonal actions more strongly. In such ways it keeps its system of immunities clear. That system operates always. To some extent, it is a way that the body distinguishes between self and nonself.

In certain fashions, that system also keeps the body from squandering its energies, preserving biological integrity. Otherwise it would be as if we did not know where our own house began or ended, and so tried to heat the entire neighborhood. So some indispositions “caused by viruses” are accepted by the body as welcome triggers, to clean out the system, and this applies to our present indispositions.

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More is always involved, however, for those viruses that we consider communicable do indeed in one way or another represent communications on a biological level. They are biological statements, literally social communications, biologically made, and they can be of many kinds.

When a skunk is frightened, it throws off a foul odor indeed, and when people are frightened they react in somewhat the same fashion at times, biologically reacting to stimuli in the environment that they consider alarming. They throw off a barrage of “foul viruses” — that is, they actually collect and mobilize from within their own bodies viruses that are potentially harmful, biologically trigger these, or activate them, and send them out into the environment in self-protection, to ward off the enemy.

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In a fashion this is a kind of biological aggression. The viruses, however, also represent tensions that the person involved is getting rid of. That is one kind of statement. It is often used in a very strong manner in times of war, or great social upheaval, when people feel frightened.

The olympic athlete may be charged by the great physical vitality that one feels watching that athletic panorama. [Because of that, and for other personal reasons], one could find no release for the intense energy one could feel, so one may get rid of it, protecting oneself, and throw our one ‘s threatening biological posture: the viruses.

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Our normal bodies have not received any such goodies sometimes, so they exuberantly used them as triggers to regenerate the immune systems.

Many people had such reactions, coming from athletic events, in that they do not know how to use and release their own energies — as if they themselves felt put in an inferior position in comparison to such achievements.

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There are all kinds of biological reactions between bodies that go unnoticed, and they are all basically of a social nature, dealing with biological communications. In a fashion viruses, again, are a way of dealing with or controlling the environment. These are natural interactions, and since we live in a world where, overall, people are healthy enough to contribute through labor, energy, and ideas, health is the dominating ingredient — but there are biological interactions between all physical bodies that are the basis for that health, and the mechanisms include the interactions of viruses, and even the periods of indisposition, that are not understood.

All of this has to do with man’s and woman’s intent and his or her understanding. The same relationships, however, do not only exist between human bodies, or course, but between man and woman and the animals and the plants in the environment, and is part of the unending biological communication that overall produces the vitality of physical experience.

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One note on vitamins: they are most effectively used for periods of two or three weeks, where they act as stimuli and reminders to the body. Then drop their use for two or three weeks, so that the body then produces by itself those elements we have reminded it we want. Any steady use of vitamins is not to our overall benefit, for we give the body what it needs too easily, and its ability to produce such material on its own becomes sluggish.

Certain “diseases” are protections against other diseases, and the body on its own is its own excellent regulator.

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Obviously those abilities operate best when we trust them. The body’s systems know what diseases are in the air, so to speak, and will often set up countermeasures ahead of time, giving us what we experience as an indisposition of one kind or another — but an indisposition that is actually a statement of prevention against another condition.

There is great traffic flow in a city: A body knows how to leap out of the way in a moment’s time from an approaching car. In the interior physical environment there is far greater traffic flow. There are decisions made in periods of time so brief we cannot imagine them — reactions that are almost over before responds to its inner reality, and to all the stimuli from the exterior environment. The body is an open system. As solid as it seems to us, there are constant chemical reactions between it and the world, electromagnetic adjustments, alterations of balance, changes of relationships — alterations that occur between the body and its relationship with every other physical event, from the position of the planets and moon and the sun, to the position of the smallest grain of sand, to the tiniest microbe in anyone’s intestine.

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All of these adjustments are made without our conscious notice, and yet in with our overall purposes and intents.

Genes are elemental units arranged along the threadlike chromosomes in the nucleus of each cell, and transmit hereditary characteristics to following generations of animals and pants. The gene is primarily made up of protein and a twisted double strand of helix of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid. Each gene occurs at a specific location on a chromosome. We humans, for instance, have 46 chromosomes and an estimated 100,00 genes in each cell, and our genes provide the blueprints for the synthesis of some 50,000 proteins. I’m sure that our wonder at the vast organization of nature will continue to grow as our scientists plunger ever deeper into the complexities of genetic research. And what about the philosophical questions involving free will in all of this? Just how much real freedom do we have, if all is programmed by our genetic heritage? (I ask the question  aside from the old, still-extant arguments within philosophy, psychology, and religion over whether free will has ever existed — or does — in any context. In addition, now we also have many newer questions about inherited genetic equality and/or inequality.

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For that matter, one can ask the same questions about our supposed reincarnational heritage: Just how much free will does that concept leave us? Are we as fated to dance to unknown and unrealized nonphysical reincarnational events, tendencies, and goals, as we are to the physical, genetic ones — that is, do the two operate together? How immutable, or resistant to change, are those two endowments, and what parts of either one can we turn off if we choose to? Will the dissection of a gene, down even to its atomic components, ever yield reincarnational clues? Consciousness forms the genes, and not the other way around, and the about-to-be-born infant is the agency that add now material through the chromosomal structure.

Viruses and infections are always present. They are themselves fragments, struggling small fragments without intention of harm. We have general immunity, believe it or not, to all such viruses and infections. Ideally, we can inhabit a plane with them without fear. It is only when we give tacit agreement that harm is inflicted upon us by these fragments. To some degree, lesser, dependent lives such as household pets are dependent upon our psychic strength. They have their own, it it true, but unknowingly we reinforce their energy and health.

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When ur own personalities are more or less in balance, we have no trouble at all in looking out for creatures, and actually reinforcing their own existence with residues of our creative and sympathetic powers. In times of psychological stress or crisis, quite unwittingly we without this strong reinforcement.

Animals certainly do have energy to maintain their own health, but this is strongly reinforced as a rule by the vitality of human beings to whom the animals are emotionally attached.

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Animals, like people, sense when they are a burden.