Category Archives: Metaphysics

Combine the idea of a disease with the idea of creativity

Both disease and creativity are related.

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Compare the analogy of the landscape of physical experience to the painter’s landscape — which may be dark, gloomy, filled with portents of disaster, and yet still be a work of art. In that regard, every person paints his or her own portrait in living color — a portrait that does not simply sit in a tranquil pose at a table, but one that has the full capacity for action. Those of us now living, say, are in the same life class. We look about to see how our contemporaries are getting along with their portraits, and we find multitudinous varieties: tragic self-portraits, heroic self-portraits, comic self-portraits. And all of these portraits are alive and interacting, and as they interact they form the planetary, mass social and political events of our world.

These portraits obviously have a biological reality. In a manner or speaking, now, each person dips into the same supplies of paint, and so forth — which are the elements out of which our likenesses emerge. There must be great creative leeway allowed for such portraits. Each one interacting with each other one helps form the psychological and physical reality of the species, so we are somehow involved in the formation of a multitudinous number of portraits. I simply want you to keep that analogy in the background.

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These portraits, however, are the result of creativity so inborn and miraculous that they are created automatically — an automatic art. At certain levels the species is always creatively embarked upon alternative versions of itself. The overall patterns will remain. Biological integrity is everywhere sustained. What we think of as diseases, however, are quite creative elements working at different levels, and at many levels at once.

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Many viruses are vital to physical existence, and in our terms there are gradations of activity, so that only under certain conditions do viruses turn into, say, what we think of as deadly ones. The healthiest body contains within it many so-called deadly viruses in what we may call an inactive form — inactive from our viewpoint, in that they are not causing disease. They are, however, helping to maintain the body’s overall balance. In a way in each body, the species settles upon a known status quo, and yet experiments creatively at many levels with cellular alterations, chromosomal variations, so that of course each body is unique. There are kinds of gradations, say, in the lines and kinds of disease. Certain diseases can actually strengthen the body from a prior weaker state, by calling upon the body’s full defenses. Under certain conditions, some so-called disease states could insure the species’ survival.

In a way, some disease states help to insure the survival of the species — not by weeding out the sickly but by introducing into large numbers of individuals the conditions needed to stabilize other strains within the species that need to be checked, or to “naturally inoculate” the species against a sensed greater danger.

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At the minute levels — microscopic levels — there are always some biological experiments being carried out, in a creative effort to give the species as much leeway as possible for effective action. Our body is changed biologically by our thoughts.

Our culture has its biological effect upon the species. I am not speaking of obvious connections in a derogatory manner, such as pollution and so forth. If we were thinking in old terms of evolution, then I would be saying that our cultures and civilizations actually alter the chromosomal messages. Our thoughts affect our cells, again, and they can change what are thought of as hereditary factors. Our imaginations are intimately connected with our diseases, just as our imaginations are so important in all other areas of our lives. We form our being by imaginatively considering such-and-such a possibility, and our thoughts affect our body in that regard. In a way, illness is a tool used on behalf of life, for people have given it social, economic, psychological, and religious connotations. It becomes another area of activity and of expression.

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At microscopic level there is no rigid self-structure like our own. There is identity. A cell does not fear its own death. Its identity has traveled back and forth from physical to nonphysical reality too often as a matter of course.

It “sings” with the quality of its own life. It cooperates with other cells. It affiliates itself with the body of which it is part, but in way it lends itself to that formation. The dreams of the species are highly important to its survival — not just because dreaming is a biological necessity, but because in dreams the species is immersed in deeper levels of creativity, so that those actions, inventions, ideas that will be needed in the future will appear in their proper times and places. In the old terms of evolution. I am saying that man’s and woman’s evolutionary progress was also dependent upon his or her dreams.

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Now many of the characteristics we consider human — in fact, most of them — appear to one extent or another in all other species. It was the nature of man’s and woman’s dreams, however, that was largely responsible for what we like to think of as the evolution of our species. We learned to dream differently than other creatures.

We dreamed we spoke languages before their physical invention, of course. It was the nature of our dreams, and our dreams’ creativity, that made us what we are, for otherwise we would have developed a mechanical-like language — had we developed one at all — that named designations, locations, and dealt with the most simple, objective reality: “I walked there. He walks there. The sun is hot.” We would not have had any way of conceiving of objects that did not already exist. We would not have had any way of imagining ourselves in novel situations. We would not have any overall picture of the seasons, for dreaming educated the memory and lengthened man’s and woman’s attention span. It reinforced the lessons of daily life, and was highly important in man’s and woman’s progress.

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Using the intellect alone, man and woman did not simply learn through daily experience over the generations, say, that one season followed the other. He or she lived too much in the moment for that. In one season he or she dreamed of the others, however, and in dreams he or she saw himself or herself spreading the seeds of fruits as he or she had seen the wind do in daily life.

His or her dreams reminded him or her that a cold season had come, and would come again. Most of our inventions cane in dreams, and again, it is the nature of our dreams that makes us so different from other species.

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The creativity of the species is also the result of our particular kind of dream specialization. It amounts to — a unique state of existence by itself, in which we combine the elements of physical and nonphysical reality. It is almost a threshold between the two realities, and we learned to hold our physical intent long enough at that threshold so that we have a kind of brief attention span there, and use it to draw from nonphysical reality precisely those creative elements that we need.

Animals, as a rule are less physically-oriented in their dreaming states. They do dream of physical reality, but much more briefly than us. Otherwise, they immerse themselves in dreams in different kinds of dreaming consciousness.

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When ancient man and woman had a series of mass dreams in which he and she learned how to speak. The dreams were like glossolalia — speaking in unintelligible speech sounds — yet the made sense, and man and woman began to speak.

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Also when man and and woman were with other men and women in the physical world, he and she could point to stuff to share descriptions with others, but that he or she learned to speak when he and she tried to describe dreams. It was the only way — speech — by which he or she could share data that couldn’t be seen. He or she could point to a tree and grunt, but there wasn’t anything in a dream he or she could point to. He or she had to have a method of expression to describe invisible things. Inventions could have come about when he or she tried to tell others what he or she saw in his or her dreams, too.

Every species is endowed with emotional feelings

Each species is immersed in an interior system of value fulfillment. Each species, then, is not only concerned with physical survival and the multiplication of its members, but with an intensification and fulfillment of those particular qualities that are characteristic of it.

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As far as this discussion is concerned, there are biological ideals, imprinted within the chromosomes, but there are also in-built ideals much more difficult to define, that exist as, say, mental blueprints for the development of other kinds of interior mental life, as opposed to the physical characteristics of plants or animals with which we are familiar. Our official views effectively close us off from the true evidence we might perceive of the cooperation that exists among the species, for example. Nor an I speaking of an enforced cooperation — the result of “instinct” that somehow arranges the social habits of the animals; for their habits are indeed social and cooperative.

I have read that orthodox science still does not grant man or woman with volition. According to its tenets, any such feeling of conscious choice is instead the reflection of the brain’s attitude at any given time. Yet I am saying that man has free will within the framework of his existence, and that all other species do also within the framework of his or her existence, and that all other species do also within the framework of their existences.

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The chicken cannot read a book. It cannot choose to read. The plant cannot choose to walk down the street. The chicken and the plant can choose to live or die, however — rather important issues in the existence of any entity. They can choose to like or dislike their environment, and to change it according to their individual circumstances. It is fashionable to say that some scientific laws can be proven at microscopic levels, where, for example, small particles can be accelerated far beyond their usual states. But we quite studiously ignore that feeling exists on microscopic levels, that there can be psychological particles, much less come to the conclusion that all particles are psychological particles, with their own impetuses for development and value fulfillment. That is why atoms join together to form matter. They seek the fulfillment of themselves through form. They cooperatively choose the forms that they take.

If the simplest particle is so endowed with impetus, with hidden ideals that seek fulfillment, then what about the human being? We have the propensity to search for meaning, for love, for cooperative ventures. We have the propensity to form dazzling mental and psychological creations, such as our arts and sciences and religions and civilizations. Whatever errors that we have made, or gross distortions, even those exist because of our need to find meaning in our private existences and in life itself.

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Any scientist who believes that life has no meaning has simply provided himself with what he thinks of as an unfailing support against life’s vicissitudes. If he or she says: “life has no meaning, “he or she cannot be disappointed if such is the case, for he or she is ensconced in a self-created cocoon that has meaning, because it provides a cushion against his or her deepest fears.

When a civilization does not support creativity it beings to falter. When it distrust its gifted people, rather than encouraging them, a nation is at least in trouble. Our psychologies, stressing “the norm,” made people frightened of their individual characteristics and abilities, because psychology’s norm did not fit the contours of any one human being. It did not touch the heights of the depths of human experience. People became afraid of their own individuality.

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Gifted children do not fit psychology’s picture. Gifted children do not fit the portrait of children that is sold to parents. The fact is that for many reasons gifted children merely show the latent quickness, mental agility, and curiosity and learning capacity, that is inherent in the species. They are not eccentric versions of humanity at all, but instead provide a hint of mankind’s and womankind’s true capacities.

Our brains are not empty, but well-oiled machines ready to whirl into activity at our births. They are provided with a propensity to learn — and the rudiments of knowledge as we understand it exist within the brain. In those terms, now, the brain thinks before birth. It does not simply react. Each individual has its own unique abilities. Some that involve relationships with others, we do not even have words for. Parents, however, often half-disapprove of their children if they show unusual gifts. They are afraid their children will not get along with others. They are upset because the children do not fit the norm — but no child ever fits “the norm.”

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Many adults, sensing their own abilities in one field or another, deliberately play down those abilities because they are afraid of standing out from “the masses” — or they are afraid they will be attacked by their peers. They have been taught by religion and science alike that any kind of greatness is suspect. Yet each person alive contains an elements of greatness; and more, a desire to fulfill those inner abilities.

I am not speaking of greatness in terms of fame, or in terms of usually understood artistic or intellectual abilities alone, but also of people whose lives have the capacity for great emotional content. I am speaking also of others natural abilities — that of dread communication, the conscious utilization of dreams and creativity in daily life. There are dimensions of human sentiment and psychological experience, that remain latent simply because we focus our attention so closely within the idea of “the norm.” Ay unofficial experience must then remain bizarre, eccentric, outside of our main concerns, and ignored by our sciences.

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Many children, for that matter, who are regarded as retarded by their teachers, are instead highly gifted. The same also applies to disruptive children, who are overactive and out on drugs. Their rebellion is quite natural. Autistic children, in many cases, now, are those who have picked up the idea that the world is so unsafe that it is better not to communicate with it at all, as long as their demands or needs are being met. When the child is fed and clothed and cared for, then it continues its behavior, and the behavior itself does serve its needs.

The child feels that it is not safe to interact with the world, however. No one is going to deprive a child of food, and yet food can be used in such cases, in terms perhaps of treats, if the child must ask for them, or in some way indicate a choice. Autistic children are afraid of making choices. Some of this is often picked up from parents, so that the child expresses their own unacknowledged fears. The autistic child can be highly intelligent, however.

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To some extent, such child symbolizes what happens when an individual believes that he or she is unworthy, that he or she cannot trust impulses, that choices present more problems than advantages. That it is safer to hide abilities than it is to use them. Life is expression.

When a sperm carrying cancer enters a woman’s uterus, and if she has no intentions of getting the disease, her body’s own system would make the cancer completely ineffective.

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I will explain as best I can, though some of what I say will certainly seem contradictory to scientific knowledge.

Though scientists might find “cancer cells,” and though it might seem that cancer is caused by a virus, cancer instead involves a relationship, say, between what we might think of as a host and parasite, in those terms — and to some extent the same applies to any disease, including smallpox, though the diseases themselves may appear to have different causes completely. A host cell, say, is not simply attacked. It invites attack, though I am not pleased at all with the connotations of the word “attack.” I am trying to use words familiar to us to start.

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It is not simply that a cell suddenly “relaxes its defenses” against disease. As easily as I an, I will try to explain. A cell mirrors a psychological state. A cell exists by itself, as its own entity, but also in context with all of the other cells in the body. There are literally uncountable psychological states mixing and interchanging constantly, with the overall psychological stance being one of biological integrity: The organism holds together, maintains its functions, and so forth.

Our body is the physical mirror of our psychological state. It is powered by the energy of the universe. It actually springs into being in each moment. Our mind and our body come from the same source, from universal energy. We are powered with vitality. We must seek meaning in our lives. When we lose the sense of life’s meaning, for whatever reason, this is reflected in our body. It is very difficult to separate all of this from many connotations placed about disease, and I do not want the material to be misread. Cancer, for example, has become the symbol for the body’s vulnerability, in current years — the proof of man’s and woman’s susceptibility to the body. It is a disease that people have when they want to die — when they are ashamed to admit that they want to die, because death seems to fly against sane behavior. If the species struggles to survive, then how can individuals want to die?

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Many people have had cancer and recovered without knowing it. In our belief system, however, it is almost imperative to see a doctor in such circumstances, for many fears are unsubstantiated, and the fear alone, found groundless, gives the person new life symbolically and physically.

In the case of my example, a woman’s cells would already have had to prepare themselves for the guest — granted the guest was cancerous, and was a sperm. There is not an attack. There is an acceptance, and a preparation for certain changes.

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A life crisis is formed. The “parasite,” or virus, plays its part in setting up such a psychologically-desired position. It is an emotionally-charged position, an imminent crisis. I am aware of the tormenting questions involved in such issues, and also of the gap between my explanations and daily experiences of many people. The fact is that when death comes it is wanted; it has been chosen.

The fact is that death in its way is the culmination of life, leading toward a new birth and new experience. The cells know this. So does the heart. People cannot admit that they want to die at certain times. If they could accept the fact of their own wishes, some could even change their minds, many do: The psychological condition changes for the better, and the body cells are no longer amiable to the cancerous condition.

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Women whose husband have had vasectomies have themselves often resolved sexual problems that have bothered them. Fear is reduced in that area. Cervical cancer can involve, distortions of the growth process itself, because of the complicated distortions of belief on the woman’s part. In a way the very pain of cancer — of some cancers — often acts through its intensity as a reflection of the person’s belief that life is painful, tormenting. At the same time, the pain is a reminder of feeling and sensation.

 

Natural Law

When I speak of natural law, I am not referring to the scientists’ laws of nature, such as the law of gravity, for example — which is not a law at all, but a manifestation appearing from the viewpoint of a certain level of consciousness as a result of perceptive apparatus. Our “prejudiced perception” is also built into our instruments in that regard.

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I am speaking of the inner laws of nature, that pervade existence. What we call nature refers of course to our particular experience with reality, but quite different kinds of manifestations are also “natural” outside of that context. The laws of nature that I am in the process of explaining underlie all realities, then, and form a firm basis for multitudinous kinds of “natures.” I will put these in terms of reference, however.

Each being experiences life as if it were at life’s center. This applies to a spider in a closet as well as to any man or woman. This principle applies to each atom as well. Each manifestation of consciousness comes into being feeling secure at life’s center — experiencing life through itself, aware of life through its own nature. It comes into being with an inner impetus toward value fulfillment. It is equipped with a feeling of safety, of security within its own environment with which it is fit to deal. It given the impetus toward growth and action, and filled with the desire to impress its world.

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The term “value fulfillment” is very difficult to explain but it is very important. Obviously it deals with the development of values — not moral values, however, but values for which we really have no adequate words. Quite simply, these values have to do with increasing the quality of whatever life the being feels at its center. The quality of that life is not simply to be handed down or experienced, for example, but is to be creatively added to, multiplied, in a way that has nothing to do with quantity.

In those terms, animals have values, and if the quality of life of their lives disintegrates beyond a certain point, the species dwindles. We are not speaking of survival of the fittest, but the survival of life with meaning. Life is meaning for animals. The two are indistinguishable.

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We say little, for example, if we note that spiders make webs instinctively because spiders must eat insects, and that the best web-maker will be the fittest kind of spider to survive. It is very difficult for me to escape the sticky web of our beliefs. The web, however, in its way represents an actualized ideal on the spider’s part — and if you will forgive the term, an artistic one as well. It amazes the spiders that flies so kindly fall into those webs. We might say that the spider wonders that art can be so practical.

What about the poor unsuspecting fly? Is it then so enamored of the spider’s web that it loses all sense of caution? For surely lies are the victims of such nefarious webby splendors. We are into sticky stuff indeed.

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For one thing, we are dealing with different kinds of consciousness that our own. They are focused consciousnesses, surely, each one feeling itself at life’s center. While this is the case, however, these other forms of consciousness also identify then with the source of nature from which they emerge. In a way impossible to explain, the fly and the spider are connected, and aware of the connection. Not as hunter and prey, but as individual participants in deeper processes. Together they work toward a joint kind of value fulfillment, in which both are fulfilled.

There are communions of consciousness of which we are unaware. While we believe in theories like the survival of the fittest, however, and the grand fantasies of evolution, then we put together our perceptions of the world so that they seem to bear out those theories. We will see no value in the life of a mouse sacrificed in the laboratory, for example, and we will project claw-and-fang battles in nature, completely missing the great cooperative venture that is involved.

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Men and women can become deranged if they believe life has no meaning. Religion has made gross errors. At least it held out an afterlife, a hope of salvation, and preserved — sometimes despite itself — the tradition of the heroic soul. Science, including psychology, by what it has said, and by what it has neglected to say, has come close to a declaration that life itself is meaningless. This is a direct contradiction of deep biological knowledge, to say nothing of spiritual truth. It denies the meaning of biological integrity. It denies man and woman the practical use of those very elements that he or she needs as a biological creature: the feeling that he or she is at life’s center, that he/she can act safely in his or her environment, that he or she can trust himself or herself, and that his or her being and his/her actions have meaning.

Impulses provide life’s guide to action. If we are taught that we cannot trust our impulses, then we are set against our very physical integrity. If we believe that our life has no meaning, then we will do anything to provide meaning, all the while acting like a mouse in one of science’s mazes — for our prime directive, so to speak, has been tampered with.

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I am trying to temper my statements here, but our psychology of the past 100 years has helped create insanities by trying to reduce the great individual thrust of life that lie within each person, to a generalized mass chaotic impulses and chemicals — a mixture, of Freudian and Darwinian thought misapplied.

The most private agonies of the soul were assigned a more or less common source in man’s and woman’s primitive “unconscious” drives. The private unequalled thrust toward creativity were seen as the unbalanced conglomeration of chemicals within a person’s most private being — a twist of perversity. Genius was seen as a mistake of chromosomes, or the fortunate result of a man’ or woman’s hatred for his or her father. The meaning of life was reduced to the accidental nature of genes. Science thought in terms of averages and statics, and each person was supposed to fit within those realms.

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To some extent, this also applies to religion in the same time period. Churches wanted sinners galore, but shied away from saints, or any extravagant behavior that did not speak of man’s and woman’s duplicity. Suddenly people with paranoid characteristics, as well as schizophrenics, emerged from the wallpaper of this slickly styled civilization. The characteristics of each were duly noted. A person who feels that life has no meaning, and that his or her life in particular has no meaning, would rather be pursued than ignored. Even the weight of guilt is better than no feeling at all. If the paranoid might feel that he or she is pursued, by the government or “ungodly powers,” then at least he or she feels that his or her life must be important: otherwise, why would others seek to destroy it? If voices tell him or her he or she is to be destroyed, then these at least are comforting voices, for they convince him or her that his or her life must have value.

At the same time, the paranoid person can use his or her creative abilities in fantasies that seemingly boggle the minds of the sane — and those creative abilities have a meaning, for the fantasies, again, serve to reassure the paranoid of his or her worth. If in our terms he or she were sane, he or she could not use his or her creative abilities, for they are always connected with life’s meaning; and sane, the paranoid is convinced that life is meaningless. It did little good in the past for Freudian psychologists to listen to a person’s associations while maintaining an objective air, or pretending that values did not exist. Often the person labeled schizophrenic is so frightened of his or her own energy, impulses, and feelings that these are fragmented, objectified, and seen to come from outside rather than from within.

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Ideas of good and evil are exaggerated, cut off from each other. Yet here again the creative abilities are allowed some expression. The person does not feel able to express them otherwise. Such people are afraid of the brunt of their own personalities. They have been taught that energy is wrong, that power is disastrous, and that the impulses of the self are to be feared.

What protection, then, but to effectively project these outside of the self — impulses of good as well as evil — and hence effectively block organized action?

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The term schizophrenia, with the authority of psychology, becomes a mass coverall in which the integrity of personal meaning is given a mass, generalized explanation. Those who are paranoid are, unfortunately, those who most firmly believe the worst idiocies of science and religion. The paranoid and the schizophrenic are trying to find meaning in a world they have been taught is meaningless, and their tendencies appear in lesser form throughout society.

Creativity is an in-built impetus in man and woman, far more important than, say, what science calls the satisfaction of basic needs. In those terms, creativity is the most basic need of all. I am not speaking here of any obsessive need to find order — in which case, for example, a person might narrow his or her mental and physical environment — but of a powerful driver within the species for creativity, and for the fulfillment of values that are emotional and spiritual. And if man or woman does not find these, then the so-called basic drives toward food or shelter will not sustain him or her.

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I am not simply saying that man or woman does not live for bread alone. I am saying that if man or woman does not find meaning in life he or she will not live, bread or no. He or she will not have the energy to seek bread, nor trust his or her impulse to do so.

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There are natural laws, then, that guide all kinds of life, and all realities — laws of love and cooperation — and those are the basic needs of which I am speaking.

We are each innocent until a crime is proven against us.

The law in our country says we are innocent until proven guilty. In the eyes of that law, then we are each innocent until a crime is proven against us. There usually must also be witnesses. There are other considerations. Often a spouse cannot testify against the other. Opportunity and motive must be established.

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In the world of religion, however, we are already tainted by original sin: “The mark of Cain” is symbolically upon our foreheads. We come from a species that sinned against God. Automatically condemned, we must do good works, or be baptized, or believe in Christ, or perform other acts in order to be saved or redeemed.

According to other religions, we may be “earthbound” by the “gross desires” of our nature, “bound to the wheel of life,” condemned to endless reincarnations until we are “purified.” According to psychology and science, we are a living conglomeration of elements and chemicals, spawned by a universe without purpose, itself accidentally formed, and we are given a life in which all the “primitive and animalistic” drives of our evolutionary past ever lurk within us, awaiting expression and undermining our control.

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So, dear reader, look at the law as it stands in this country with somewhat more kindly eyes that we have before — for it at least legally establishes a belief in our innocence, and for all of its failings, it protects us from the far more fanatical aspects, say, or any religion’s laws.

Religious laws deal with sin, whether or not a crime is committed, and religious concepts usually take it for granted that the individual is guilty until proven innocent. And if we have not committed a crime in fact, then we have at least sinned in our heart — for which, or course, we must be punished. A sin can be anything from playing cards to having a sexual fantasy or to Watch as much mobile XXX as you can stomach. We are sinful creatures. How many of us believe that?

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We were born with an in-built recognition of our own goodness. We were born with an inner recognition of our rightness in the universe. We were born with a desire to fulfill our abilities, to move and act in the world. Those assumptions are the basis of what I will call natural law.

We are born loving. We are born compassionate. We are born curious about oneself and our world. Those attributes also belong to natural law. We are born knowing that we possess a unique, intimate sense of being that is itself, and that seeks its own fulfillment, and the fulfillment of others. We are born seeking the actualization of the ideal. We are born seeking to add value to the quality of life, to add characteristics, energies, abilities to life that only we can individually contribute to the world, and to attain a state of being that is uniquely ours, while adding to the value fulfillment of the world.

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All of these qualities and attributes are given us by natural law. We are a cooperative species, and we are a loving one. Our misunderstandings, our crimes, and our atrocities, real as they are, are seldom committed out of any intent to be evil, but because of severe misinterpretations about the nature of good, and means that can be taken toward its actualization. Most individual people know that in some inner portion of themselves. Our societies, governments, educational systems are all built around a firm belief in the unreliability of human nature. ” We cannot change human nature.” Such a statement takes it for granted that man’s and woman’s nature is to be greedy, a predator, a murderer at heart. We act in accordance with our own beliefs. We become the selves that we think we are. Our individual beliefs become the beliefs of our society, but that is always a give-and-take.

I want to discuss the formation of a better kind of mass reality — a reality that can happen as more and more individuals begin to come in contact with the true nature of the self. Then we will have less frightened people, and fewer fanatics, and each person involved can to some extent begin to see the “ideal” come into practical actualization. The means never justify the ends.

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The Therapy of Value Fulfillment:
The therapy of value fulfillment will attempt to put individuals in touch with their basic instincts, to allow them to sense the impulsive shapes of their lives, to define their own versions of the ideal through the recognition of it as it exists in their own impulses and feelings and abilities, and to help them find acceptable and practical methods of exerting their natural power in the practical actualization of those ideals.

Why do we have laws, crime and sin?

Why do we have laws? Are laws made to protect life, to protect property, to establish order, to punish transgressors? Are laws made to protect man from his own cunning and chicanery? In short, are laws made to protect man/woman from his/her own “basically criminal nature”? In today’s society, we use lawyers like personal-injury-lawyers to handle cases and uphold the law for us all.

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When someone breaks those laws, we move towards litigation attorneys handling business litigation, or other legal areas. This is the status quo we have made, and that we are used to.

Moreover, put simply, criminal lawyers are responsible for either prosecuting or defending someone accused of a criminal offense. They are required to act in a neutral, impartial manner to ensure that the legal rights of those prosecuted are upheld so that they receive fair treatment against the conduct of the law. If you would like more information about the responsibilities of criminal-lawyers is home to some brilliant law firms and you can find plenty of useful resources on their websites.

So, that being said, are laws made to protect man and woman from the self as it is generally outlined by Freud and Darwin? Man and woman had laws, however, far earlier. Are laws made then to protect man and woman from his and her “sinful nature”? If we were all “perfect beings,” would we need laws at all? Do laws define what is unacceptable, or do they hint of some perhaps undifferentiated, barely sensed, more positive issues? Are laws an attempt to limit impulses? Do they represent society’s mass definitions of what behavior is acceptable and what is not?

What is the difference between a crime and a sin, as most of us think of those terms? Can the state punish us for a sin? It certainly can punish us for a crime. Is the law a reflection of something else– a reflection of man’s and woman’s inherent search toward the ideal, and its actualization? When does the law act as a practical idealist? Why do we sneer so when politicians show their feet of clay?

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How does this concern us as an individual? We will start with the individual.

Each individual is innately driven by a good intent, however distorted that intent may become, or however twisted the means that may be taken to achieve it.

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As the body wants to grow from childhood on, so all of the personality’s abilities want to grow and evolve. Each person has his or her own ideals, and impulses direct those ideals naturally into their own specific avenues of development — avenues meant to fulfill both the individual and his society. Impulses provide specifications, methods, meanings, definitions. They point toward definite avenues of expression, avenues that will provide the individual with a sense of actualization, natural power, and that will automatically provide feedback, so that the person knows he or she is impressing his or her environment for the better.

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Those natural impulses, followed, will automatically lead to political and social organizations that become both tools for individual development and implements for the fulfillment of the society. Impulses then would follow easily, in a smooth motion, from private action to social import. When we are taught to block our impulses, and to distrust them, then our organizations become clogged. We are left with vague idealized feelings of wanting to change the world for the better, for example — but we are denied the personal power of our own impulses that would otherwise help direct that idealism by developing our personal abilities. We are left with an undefined, persisting, even tormenting desire to do good, to change events, but without having any means at our disposal to do so. This leads to lingering frustration, and if our ideals are strong the situation can cause us to feel quite desperate.

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We may begin to exaggerate the gulf between this generalized ideal and the specific evidences of man’s and woman’s “greed and corruption” that we see so obviously about us. We may begin to concentrate upon our own lacks, and in our growing sense of dissatisfaction it may seem to us that most men and women are driven by a complete lack of good intent.

We may become outraged, scandalized — or worse, filled with self-righteousness, so that we being to attack all those with whom we do not agree, because we do not know how else to respond to our own ideals, or to our own good intent.

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The job of trying to make the world better seems impossible, for it appears that we have no power, and any small private beneficial actions that we can take seem so puny in contrast to this generalized ideal that we dismiss them sardonically, and so we do not try to use power constructively. We do not begin with our own life, with our own job, or with our own associates. What difference can it make to the world if we are a better salesperson, or plumber, or office worker, or car salesman or saleswoman, for Christ’s sake? What can one person do?

Yet that is precisely where first of all we must begin to exert ourselves. There, on our jobs and in our associations, are the places where we intersect with the world. Our impulses directly affect the world in those relationships.

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Many of us are convinced that we are not important — and while each of us feels that way it will seem that our actions have no effect upon the world. We will purposefully keep our ideals generalized, thus saving oneself from the necessity of acting upon them in the one way open to us: by trusting oneself and our impulses, and impressing those that we meet in daily life with the full validity that is our own.

Most criminals act out of a sense of despair. Many have high ideals, but ideals that have never been trusted or acted upon. They feel powerless, so that many strike out in self-righteous anger or vengeance against a world that they see as cynical, greedy, perverted. They have concentrated upon the great gaps that seem to exist between their ideals of what man or woman should be, and their ideas of what man or woman is.

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On the one hand, they believe that the self is evil, and on the other they are convinced that the self should not be so. They react extravagantly. They often see society as the “enemy” of good. Many — not all, now — criminals possess the same characteristics we ascribe to heroes, except that the heroes have a means toward the expression of idealism, and specific avenues for that expression. And many criminals find such avenues cut off completely.

I do not want to romanticize criminals, or justify their actions. I do want to point out that few crimes are committed for “evil’s sake,” but in a distorted response to the failure of the actualization of a sensed ideal.

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So we return to what is the nature of the ideal and the good. Who defines what is right and wrong, legal and illegal?

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“The God of me”. No one else is watching what I watch from my personal viewpoint any moment of my day. I feel as if I am being privileged to view a beginning of the world… or of my edge of it.

It is like seeing a new corner of our own psyche, transformed into trees, grass, flowers, sky and fog … I feel as if I am viewing that part of myself that I am always pursuing, the part is as clear-eyed as a child, fleet, at one with its own knowing. That part of us exists apart from our concerns about careers or business (if you are a startup lending-expert a-guide-to-personal-guarantees-on-business-loans most business lenders will want , money, fame, the opinion of family, friends, or the world. It’s our direct connection with the universe, from which we emerge in each moment of our lives.

So, in that moment, I named that part of me the God of Me, and that designation makes senses to me, at least. In those terms, we each have our personal ‘God,’ and I am convinced that the universe knows us no matter who or where — or what — we are. I think there is a God of every individual being, and the each consciousness, regardless of its status, possess this intimate connection with the universe.

Impulses provide impetus toward motion

Impulses coax the physical body and the mental person toward utilization of physical and mental power.

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They help the individual impress the world — that is, to act upon it and within it effectively. Impulses also open up choices that may not have been consciously available before. The cells precognate, and that at that level the body is aware of vast information, information not consciously known or apprehended. The universe and everything within it is composed of “information,” but this information is aware-ized containing” — information concerning the entire universe is always latent within each and any part of it.

The motive power of the universe and of each particle or wave or person within it it the magnificent thrust toward creative probabilities, and the tension that exists, the exuberant tension, that exists “between” probable choices and probable events. This applies to men/women and molecules, and to all of those hypothetically theorized smaller divisions with which scientists like to amaze themselves. Divisions or units.

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In more mundane terms, impulses often come from unconscious knowledge, then. This knowledge is spontaneously and automatically received by the energy that composes our body, and then it is processed so that pertinent information applying to us can be taken advantage of. Ideally, our impulses are always in response to our own best interests — and, to the best interests of our world as well. Obviously there is a deep damaging distrust of impulses in the contemporary world, as in our terms there has been throughout the history that we follow. Impulses are spontaneous, and we have been taught not to trust the spontaneous portions of our being, but to rely upon our reason and our intellect — which both operate, incidentally, quite spontaneously, by the way.

When we let ourselves alone, we are spontaneously reasonable, but because of our beliefs it seems that reason and spontaneity make poor bedfellows.

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Psychologically, our impulses are as vital to our being as our physical organs are. They are as altruistic, or unselfish, as our physical organs are. And yet each impulse is suited and tailored directly to the individual who feels it. Ideally, by following our impulses we would feel the shape, the impulsive shape of our life. We would not spend time wondering what one’s purpose was, for it would make itself known to us, as we perceived the direction in which our natural impulses led, and felt oneself exert power in the world through such actions. Impulses are doorways to action, satisfaction, the exertion of natural mental and physical power, the avenue for our private expression — the avenue where our private expression interests the physical world and impresses it.

Many cults of one kind or another, and many fanatics, seek to divide us from our natural impulses, to impede their expression. They seek to sabotage our belief in our spontaneous being, so that the great power of impetus becomes damned up. Avenues of probabilities are closed bit by bit until we do indeed live — if we follow such precepts — in a closed mental environment, in which it seems we are powerless. It seems we cannot impress the world as we wish, that our ideals must always be stillborn.

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In the case of the Jonestown tragedy, for example, all doors toward probable effective action seemed closed. Followers had been taught to act against their natural impulses with members of their families. They had been taught not to trust the outside world, and little by little the gap between misguided idealism and an exaggerated version of the world’s evil blocked all doors through which power could be exerted — all doors save one. The desire for suicide is often the last recourse left to frightened people whose natural impulses toward action have been dammed up — intensified on the one hand, and yet denied any practical expression.

There is a natural impulse to die on the part of men/women and animals, but in such circumstances [as we are discussing here] that desire becomes the only impulse that the individual feels able to express, for it seems that all other avenues of expression have become closed. There is much misunderstanding concerning the nature of impulses, so we will discuss them rather thoroughly. I always want to emphasize the importance of individual action, for only the individual can help form organizations that become physical vehicles for the effective expression of ideals. Only people who trust their spontaneous beings and the altruistic nature of their impulses can be consciously wise enough to choose from a myriad of probable futures that most promising events — for again, impulses take not only [people’s] best interest into consideration, but those of all other species.

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I am using the term “impulses” for the understanding of the general public, and in those terms molecules and protons have impulses. No consciousness simply reacts to stimuli, but has its own impulse toward growth and value fulfillment. It seems to many of us that impulses are unpredictable, contradictory, without reason, the result of erratic mixtures of body chemicals and that they must be squashed with as much deadly intent as some of us might when we spray a mosquito with insecticide.

Often the insecticide kills more than the mosquito, and its effects can be far-reaching, and possibly have disastrous consequences. However, to consider impulses as chaotic, meaningless — or worse, detrimental to an ordered life — represents a very dangerous attitude indeed; an attempt that causes many of our other problems, an attempt that does often distort the nature of impulses. Each person is fired by the desire to act, and to act beneficially, altruistically, to practically put his stamp, or her stamp,upon the world. When such natural impulses toward action are constantly denied over a period of time, when they are distrusted, when an individual feels in battle with his or her own impulses and shuts down the doors toward probable actions, then that intensity can explode into whatever avenue of escape is still left open.

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I am not speaking of anything like “repression,” as it is used by psychologists, but a far deeper issue: one in which the very self is so distrusted that natural impulses of any kind become suspect. We try to inoculate ourselves against ourselves — a nearly impossible situation, of course. We expect our motives to be selfish because we have been told that they are, and so when we catch oneself with unkind motives we are almost comforted, because we think that at least we are behaving normally.

When we find oneself with good motives, we distrust them. “Surely,” we think, “beneath this seeming altruism, there must indeed be some nefarious, or at best selfish, motives that escape me.” As a people we are always examining our impulses, and yet we rarely examine the fruits of our intellects.

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It may seem that impulsive actions run rampant in society, in cultish behavior, for example, or in the behavior of criminals, or on the part of youth, but such activities show instead the power of impulses denied their natural expression, intensified and focused on the one hand into highly ritualized patterns of behavior, and in other areas denied expression.

A particular idealist believes that the world is headed for disaster, and that is powerless to prevent it. Having denied his or her impulses, believing them wrong, and having impeded his/her expression of his/her own power to affect others, he/she might, for example, “hear the voice of God.” That voice might tell him or her to commit any of a number of nefarious actions — to assassinate the enemies that stand in the way of his/her great ideal — and it might seem to him and to others that he/she has a natural impulse to kill, and indeed an inner decree from God to do so.

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According to conditions, such a person could be a member of a small cult of the head of a nation, a criminal or a national hero, who claims to act with the authority of God. Again, the desire and motivation to act is so strong with each person that it will not be denied, and when it is denied then it can be expressed in a perverted form. Man and woman must not only act, but he must act constructively, and he or she must feel that he or she acts for good ends.

Only when the natural impulse is denied consistently does the idealist turn into a fanatic. Each person in his or her own way is an idealist.

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Power is natural. It is the force, the power of the muscle to move, or the eye to see, of the mind to think, the power of the emotions — these represent true power, and no accumulation of wealth or acclaim can substitute for that natural sense of power if it is lacking. Power always rests with the individual, and from the individual all political power must flow.

A democracy is a highly interesting form of government, highly significant because it demands so much of individual consciousness, and because it must rest primarily upon a belief in the powers of the individual. It is a tribute to that belief that it has lingered in our country, and operated with such vitality in the face of quite opposing beliefs officially held by both science and religion.

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The idea [of democracy] expresses the existence of a high idealism — one that demands political and social organizations that are effective to some degree in providing some practical expression of those ideals. When those organizations fail and a gulf between idealism and actualized good becomes too great, then such conditions help turn some idealists into fanatics. Those who follow with great strictness the dictates of either science or religion can switch sides in a moment. The scientist begins tipping tables or whatever, and suddenly disgusted by the limits of scientific knowledge, he/she turns all of his/her dedication to what he/she thinks of as its opposite, or pure intuitive knowledge. Thus, he/she blocks his/her reason as fanatically as earlier he/she blocked his/her intuitions. The businessmen or businesswoman who believed in Darwinian principles and the fight for survival, who justified injustice and perhaps thievery to his/her ideal of surviving in a competitive world — she/she suddenly turns into a fundamentalist in religious terms, trying to gain his/her sense of power now, perhaps, by giving away the wealth he/she has amassed, all in a tangled attempt to express a natural idealism in a practical world.

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How can we trust our impulses when we read, for example, that a man or woman commits a murder because he/she has a strong impulse to do so, or because the voice of God commanded it? If some of us followed our impulses right now, for example — our first natural ones — it might seem they would be cruel or destructive.

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How do our impulses affect our future experience, and help form the practical world of mass reality?

Paranoid views are not based on mass fact

No one is as fanatical, and no one can be more cruel, than the self-righteous. It is very easy for such persons “to become [religiously] converted” after paranoid episodes, lining themselves up once more on the side of good, searching for “the power of fellowship,” turning to church rather than government, hearing in one way or another the voice of God.

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So how can the well-meaning idealist know whether or not his good intent will lead to some actualization? How can he know, or how can she know, whether or not this good intent might in fact lead to disastrous conditions? When does the idealist turn into a fanatic?

Look at it this way; If someone tells us that pleasure is wrong and tolerance is weakness, and that we must follow this or that dogma blindly in obedience, and if we are told this is the only right road toward the idealized good, then most likely we are dealing with a fanatic. If we are told to kill for the sake of peace, we are dealing with someone who does not understand peace or justice. If we are told to give up our free will, we are dealing with a fanatic.

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Both male and female and molecules dwell in a field of probabilities, and their paths are not determined. The vast reality of probabilities makes the existence of free will possible. If probabilities did not exist, and if we were not to some degree aware of probable actions and events, not only could we not choose between them, but we would not of course have any feelings of choice. We would be unaware of the entire issue.

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Through our mundane conscious choices, we affect all of the events of our world, so that the mass world is the result of multitudinous individual choices. We could not make choices at all if we did not feel impulses to do this or that, so that choices usually involve us in making decisions between various impulses. Impulses are urges toward action. Some are conscious and some are not. Each cell of our body feels the impulse toward action, response, and communication. We have been taught not to trust our impulses. Impulses in children teach them to develop their muscles and minds [each] in their own unique manner. And as we will see, those impulses of a private nature are nevertheless also based upon the greater situation of the species and the planet, so that “ideally” the fulfillment of the individual would automatically lead to the better good of the species.

We use a vocabulary that automatically scales down greater concepts to fit its rigors

In other words, such attempts further compound the problem of considering a seemingly objective universe, and describing it in an objective fashion.

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The universe is a spiritual or mental or psychological manifestation, and not, in our usual vocabulary, and objective manifestation.

There is presently no science, religion, or psychology that comes close to even approaching a conceptual framework that could explain, or even indirectly describe, the dimensions of that kind of universe. Its properties are psychological, following the logic of the psyche, and all of the physical properties that we understand are reflections of those deeper issues. Again, each atom and molecule — and any particle that we can imagine — possesses, and would possess, a consciousness. Unless we accept that statement at least as a theory upon which to build, then much of my material would appear meaningless.

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That statement, therefore, must be the basis for any scientific theories that hope to accomplish any performances at all leading to an acquisition of knowledge.

Since I must use an objective vocabulary I am always seeking for analogies. By objective I refer to the use of language, the English language, that automatically sets up its own screens of perception — as of course any language must do to some extent.

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The universe expands, as an idea expands; and as sentences are built upon words, in our terms, and paragraphs upon sentences, and as each retains its own logic and continuity and evidence within that framework, so do all the portions of the universe appear to us with the same cohesiveness — meaning continuity and order. Any sentence is meaningful. It seems to fall in order by itself as we say it. Its order is obvious. That one sentence is meaningful because of its organization of letters, or if it is spoken, its organization of vowels and syllables. It make sense, however, not only because of the letters or vowels or syllables that it excludes.

The same applies to our universe. It has meaning, coherence and order not only because of those realities that are obvious to us, and that appear, but also because of those inner realities that are “unspoken,” or hidden. I am not speaking merely of hidden variables, in scientific terms, nor am I saying that the universe is an illusion, but a psychological reality in which “objectivity” is the result of psychological creativity.

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It is not just that our view of reality is relative to our position within the universe, but that the universe itself is different according to our position within it, and that spiritual or psychological rule apply. The universe deals with different kinds of order, perceptions, and organizations, each dependent upon the others, yet each separate in its own domain.

In our realm of reality, there is no real freedom but the freedom of ideas, and there is no real bondage except for the bondage of ideas, for our ideas form our private and mass reality. We want to examine the universe from the outside, to examine our societies from the outside. We still think that the interior world is somehow symbolic and the exterior world is real — that wars, for example, are fought by themselves or with bombs. All of the time, the psychological reality is the primary one, that forms all of our events.

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It is not to say that we cannot understand the nature of the universe to some extent, but the answers lie in the natures of our own minds, in the processes of individual creativity, in studies that ask questions like: “Where did this thought come from? Where does it go? What effect does it have upon oneself or others? How do I know how to dream, when I have never been taught to do so? How do I speak without understanding the mechanisms? Why do I feel that I have an eternal reality, when it is obvious that I was physically born and will physically die?”

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Unscientific questions? I tell you that these are the most scientific of all. To some extent the attempt on the part of science to consider such material may possibly bring about those qualities of true scientific intuition that will help science bridge the gap between such divergent views as its own and ours.

Fanatics believe they are powerless

The fanatic does not trust his/her own self-structure, or his ability to act effectively. Joint action seems the only course, but a joint action in which each individual must actually be forced to act, driven by frenzy, or fear or hatred, incensed and provoked, for otherwise the fanatic fears that no action at all will be taken toward “the ideal.”

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Through such methods, and through such group hysteria, the responsibility for separate acts is divorced from the individual, and rests instead upon the group, where it becomes generalized and dispersed. The cause, whatever it is, can then cover any number of crimes, and no particular individual need bear the blame alone. Fanatics have tunnel vision, so that any beliefs not fitting their purposes are ignored. Those that challenge their own purposes, however, become instant targets of scorn and attack. Generally speaking in our society, power is considered a male attribute. Cult leaders are more often male than female, and females are more often than not followers, because they have been taught that it is wrong for them to use power, and right for them to follow the powerful.

We have religious and scientific cults, and the male-oriented scientific community uses its power in the same way that the male Jehovah used his power in a different arena, to protect his friends and destroy his enemies. Some of our sexual beliefs affect our behavior.

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The male scientist considers the rocket his private symbol of sexual power. He feels he has the prerogative to use power in any way he chooses. Now many scientists are “idealists.” They believe that their search for answers, however, justifies almost any means, or sacrifices, not only on their parts but on the parts of others. They becomes fanatics when they ignore the rights of others, and when they defile life in a misguided attempt to understand it.

Women make a grave error when they try to prove their “equality” with men by showing that they can enter the armed forces, or go into combat as well as any man. War always makes us less as a species than we could be. Women have shown uncommon good sense in not going to war, and uncommon bad sense by sending their sons and lovers to war. To kill for the sake of peace only makes us better killers, and nothing will change that. In any war, both sides are fanatical to the extent that they are involved. I am quite aware that often was seems to be our only practical course, because of the set of beliefs, war will seem to have some practical value — a value which is highly deceptive, and quite false.

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Fanatics always use ringing rhetoric, and speak in the highest terms of truth, good and evil, and particularly of retribution. To some extent capital punishment is the act of a fanatical society: The taking of the murderer’s life does not bring back the victim’s, and it does not prevent other men from [committing] such crimes. I am aware that the death penalty often seems to be practical solution — and indeed many murderers want to die, and are caught because of their need for punishment. Many, now — and I am speaking generally — are in the position they are because they so thoroughly believe what all of us believe to a large extent: that we are flawed creatures, spawned by a meaningless universe, or made by a vengeful God and damaged by original sin.

Criminals act out those beliefs to perfection. Their “tendencies” are those that each of us fears we possess. Science and religion each tell us that left alone we will spontaneously be primitive creatures, filled with uncontrolled lust and avarice. Both Freud and Jehovah gave us that massage. Poor Darwin tried to make sense of it all, but failed miserably.

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Fanatics cannot stand tolerance. They expect obedience. A democratic society offers the greatest challenges and possibilities of achievement for the individual and the species, for it allows for the free intercourse of ideas. It demands much more of its people, however, for in a large manner each must pick and choose from amid a variety of life-styles and beliefs his and her own platform for daily life and action.

There are periods in which it certainly seems to some that all standards vanish, and so they yearn for old authorities. And there are always fanatics there to stand for ultimate truth, and to lift from the individual the challenge and “burden” of personal achievement and responsibility. Individuals can survive without organizations. Organizations cannot survive without individuals, and the most effective organizations are assemblies of individuals who assert their own private power in a group, and do not seek to hide within it.

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Organized action is an excellent method of exerting influence, but only when each member is self-activating; only when he or she extends individuality through group action, and does not mindlessly seek to follow the dictates of others.

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Fanatics exist because of the great gap between an idealized good is projected into the future, while its exaggerated opposite is seen to pervade the present. The individual is seen as powerless to work alone toward that ideal with any sureness of success. Because of his/her powerlessness [the fanatic] feels that any means to an end is justified. Behind all this the belief that spontaneously the ideal will never be achieved, and that, indeed, on his/her own man and woman are getting worse and worse in every aspect: How can flawed selves ever hope to spontaneously achieve any good?

Creativity has feminine connotations in our society

While the power has masculine connotations, and is largely thought of as destructive.

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Our scientists are, generally now, intellectually , believing in reason above the intuitions, taking if for granted that those qualities are opposites. They cannot imagine life’s “initial” creative source, for in their terms it would remind them of creativity’s feminine basis.

In the framework of this discussion only we have a male’s and female’s universe. It is a universe endowed with male and female characteristics as these appear in the male-female orientations of our history. The universe seems to have no meaning because the male and female “intellect” alone cannot discern meaning, since it must take nothing for granted. Even though certain characteristics of the universe are most apparent, they must be ignored.

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We must understand, that the terms “male” and “female” here are being used as they are generally understood, and have nothing to do with the basic characteristics of either sex. In those terms, the male-oriented intellect wants to order the universe, name its parts, and so forth. It wants to ignore the creative aspects of the universe, however, which are everywhere apparent, and it first of all believes that it must divorce itself from any evidence of feeling. We have in our history than a male god of power and vengeance, who killed our enemies for us. We have a prejudiced god, who will, for example, slay the Egyptians and half of the Jews to retaliate against previous Egyptian cruelty. The male god is a god of power. He is not a god of creativity.

Now, creativity has always been the species’ closet connection with its own source, with the nature of its own being. Through creativity the species senses All That Is. Creativity goes by a different set of rules, however. It is a sources of revelation and inspiration — yet initially revelation and inspiration do not deal with power, but with knowing. So what often happens in our society when men an women have creative bents, and good minds to boot?

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The Catholic Church taught that revelation was dangerous. Intellectual and psychic obedience was much the safer road, and even the saints were slightly suspect. Women were inferiors, and in matters of religion and philosophy most of all, for there their creativity could be most disruptive. Women were considered hysterics, aliens to the world of intellectual thought, swayed instead by incomprehensible womanish emotions. Women were to be handled by wearing down their energies through childbirth.

The trance itself has feminine connotations, though we conveniently forget {several excellent male mediums].

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The art the old masters escaped such connotations, largely because it involved so much physical labor — the making of colors, canvases, and so forth. That work, providing the artist’s preparation, now belongs to the male-world manufacturer, so as a male in our society the artist is often left with what he thinks of as art’s feminine basis, where it must be confronted, of course.

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I want to make it plain that such ideas are rampant in society, and are at the basis of many personal and national problems. They are behind large issues, involved in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant nuclear fiasco, for example, and in the scientist’s idea of power and creation. Some of us, highly creative, find our creativity in conflict with our ideas of sexuality, privately and in our stances with the world. Much of this is involved with the unfortunate myths about the creative person, who is not supposed to be able to deal with the world as well as others, whose idiosyncrasies are exaggerated, and whose very creativity, it is sometimes said, leads to suicide or depression. No wonder few numbers of creative people persist in the face of such unfortunate beliefs!

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We run into many contradictions. God is supposed to be male. The soul is sometimes considered female. The angels are male. Now let us look at the Garden of Eden. The story says that Eve tempted the male, having him eat of the tree of good and evil, or the tree of knowledge. This represented a state of consciousness, the point at which the species began to think and feel for itself, when it approached a certain state of consciousness in which it dared exert its own creativity.

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This is difficult to verbalize. It was a state when the species became aware of its own thoughts as its own thoughts, and became conscious of the self who thinks. That point released man’s and woman’s creativity. In our terms, it was the product of the feminine intuitions (thought, as we know, such intuitions belong to both sexes). When the [Biblical} passages were written, the species had come to various states of order, achieving certain powers and organizations, and it wanted to maintain the status quo. No more intuitive visions, no more changes, were wanted. Creativity was to follow certain definite roads, so the woman became the villain.

 

Is “good” an absolute?

When discussing the nature of good and bad, we are on tricky ground indeed, for many — or most — of man’s and woman’s atrocities to man and woman have been committed in misguided pursuit of “the good.”

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Whose good? In our arena of events, obviously, one man’s and woman’s good can be another’s disaster. Adolf Hitler pursued his version of “the good” with undeviating fanatical intent. He believed in the superiority and moral rectitude of the Aryan race. In his grandiose, idealized versions of reality, he saw that race “set in its proper place,” as natural master of humankind.

He believed in heroic characteristics, and became blinded by an idealized superman version of an Aryan strong in mind and body. To attain that end, Hitler was quite willing to sacrifice the rest of humanity. “The evil must be plucked out.” That unfortunate chant is behind the beliefs of many cults — scientific and religious — and Hitler’s Aryan kingdom was a curious interlocking of the worst aspect of religion and science alike, in which their cultish tendencies were encouraged and abetted.

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The political arena was the practical working realm in which those ideals were to find fruition. Hitler’s idea of good was hardly inclusive, therefore, and any actions, however atrocious, were justified.

How did Hitler’s initially wishy-washy undefined ideals of nationalistic goodness turn into such a world catastrophe? Hitler’s daydreams became more and more grandiose, and in their light, the plight of his country seemed worsened with each day’s events. He counter its humiliations over and over in his mind, until his mind became an almost completely closed environment, in which only certain ideas were allowed entry.

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All that was not Aryan, really , became the enemy. The Jews took the brunt ,largely because of their financial successes and their cohesiveness, their devotion to a culture that was not basically Aryan. They would become the victims of Hitler’s fanatical ideal of Germany’s good.

Hitler preached on the great value of social action as opposed to individual action. He turned children into informers against their own parents. He behaved nationalistically, as any minor cult leader does in a smaller context. The Jews believed in martyrdom. Germany became the new Egypt, in which their people were set upon. I do not want to simplify here, and certainly I am nowhere justifying the cruelties the Jews encountered in Germany. We do each create our own reality, however, and en masse we create the realities of our nationalities and our countries — so at that time the Germans saw themselves as victors, and the Jews saw themselves as victims.

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Both reacted as groups, rather than as individuals, generally speaking now. For all of their idealism, both basically believed in a pessimistic view of the self. It was because Hitler was so convinced of the existence of evil in the individual psyche, that he set up all of his existence of evil in the in the individual psyche, that set up all of his rules and regulations to build up and preserve “Aryan purity.” The Jews’ idea was also a dark one, in which their own rules and regulations were set to preserve the soul’s purity against the forces of evil. And while in the Jewish books [of  The Old Testament} Jehovah now and then came through with great majesty to save his chosen people, he also allowed them to suffer great indignities over long periods of time, seeming to save them only at the last moment — and this time, seemed, he did not sane them at all. What happened?

Despite himself, and despite his followers, Hitler brought to flower a very important idea, and one that changed our history. All of the most morbid of nationalistic fantasies that had been growing for centuries, all of the most grandiose celebrations of war as a nation’s inalienable right to seek domination, focused finally in Hitler’s Germany.

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The nation served as an example of what could happen in any country if the most fanatical nationalism was allowed to go unchecked, if the ideas of right were aligned with might, if any nation was justified in contemplating the destruction of others.

We must realize that Hitler believed that any atrocity was justified in the light of what he thought of as the greater good. To some extent or another, many of the ideals he held and advocated had long been accepted in world communities, though they had not been acted upon with such dispatch. The nations of the world saw their own worst tendencies personified in Hitler’s Germany, ready to attack them. The Jews, for various reasons — and again, this is not the full story — the Jews acted as all of the victims of the world, both the Germans and the Jews basically agreeing upon “man’s nefarious nature.” For the first time the modern world realized its vulnerability to political events, and technology and communication accelerated all of war’s dangers. Hitler brought many of man’s and woman’s most infamous tendencies to the surface. For the first time species the  species understood that might alone did not mean right, and that in larger terms a world war could have no real victors. Hitler might well have exploded the world’s first atomic bomb.

as423

In a strange fashion, however, Hitler knew that he was doomed from the very beginning, and so did Germany as far as Hitler’s hopes for it were concerned. He yearned for destructions of his earlier ideals. This meant that he often sabotaged his own efforts, and several important Allied victories were the result of such sabotaging. In the same way, Germany did not have the [atomic] bomb for the same reasons.

Now, however, we come to Hiroshima, where this highly destructive bomb was exploded (on August 6, 1945) — and for what reason? To save life, to save American lives. The intent to save American lives was certainly “good” — at the expense of the Japanese this time. In that regard, America’s good was not Japan’s, and an act taken to “save life” was also designed to take individual lives.

as67

At what expense is “the good” to be achieved — and whose idea of the good is to be the criterion? Man’s and woman’s pursuit of the good, to some extent now, fathered the Inquisition and the Salem witch hunts. Politically, many today believe that Russia/Iran is “the enemy,” and that therefore any means may be taken to destroy that country. Some people within the United States believe fervently that “the establishment” is rotten to the core, and that any means is justified to destroy it. Some people believe that homosexuals and lesbians are “evil,” that somehow they lack the true qualities of humanness [and therefore need not be treated with normal respect]. These are all value judgements involving our ideas of the good.

Very few people start out trying to be as bad as possible. Al least some criminals feel that in stealing they are simply righting society’s wrongs. I am not saying that is their only motive, but in one way or another they manage to justify their activities by seeing them in their own version of the good and the right.

as32

We must realize that fanatics always deal with grandiose ideals, while at the same time they believe in man’s and woman’s sinful nature, and the individual’s lack of power. They cannot trust the expression of the self, for they are convinced of its duplicity. Their ideals then seem even more remote. Fanatics call others to social action. Since they do not believe that the individual is ever effective, their groups are not assemblies of private individuals come reasonably together, pooling individual resources. They are instead congregations of people who are afraid to assert their individuality, who hope to find it in the group, or hope to establish a joint individuality — and that is an impossibility.

True individuals can do much through social action, and the species is a social one, but people who are afraid of their individuality will never find it in a group, but only a caricature of their own powerlessness.

as72

Hitler’s espousal of a German-Aryan super-race is an excellent example of how a leader can subvert history to his own ends. Anthropologists do not assign any validity to “Aryan” as a racial term. In Nazi eyes, Aryans were the non-Jewish, Caucasian, “Nordic” descendants of the prehistoric peoples who originally spoke the hypothetical parent language of the Indo-European language family. The Aryans flooded into India, the Middle East, and Europe from southern Russia.