Category Archives: Thought

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.

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.

The emergence of action within a time scheme

The emergence of action within a time scheme is actually one of the most important developments connected with the beginning of our world.

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The Garden of Eden story in its basic refers to man’s and woman’s sudden realization that now he and she must act within time. His or her experiences must be neurologically structured. This immediately brought about the importance of choosing between one action and another, and made acts of decision highly important.

This time reference is perhaps the most important within earth experience, and the one that most influences all creatures. In experience or existence outside of time, there is no necessity to make certain kinds of judgements. In an our-of-time reference, theoretically speaking now, an infinite number of directions can be followed at once. Earth’s time reference, however, brought to experience a new brilliant focus — and in the press of time, again, certain activities would be relatively more necessary than others, relatively more pleasant or unpleasant than others. Among a larger variety of possible actions, man and woman were suddenly faced with a need to make choices, that within that context had not been made “before.”

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Speaking in terms of our time, early man and woman still had a greater neurological leeway. There were alternate neurological pathways that, practically speaking, were more available then than now. They still exist now, but they have become like ghostly signals in the background of neurological activity.

This is, again, difficult to explain, but free will operates in all units of consciousness, regardless of their degree — but it operates within the framework of that degree. Man and woman possesses free will, but that free will operates only within man’s and woman’s degree — that is, his or her free will is somewhat contained by the framework of time and space.

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He and she have free will to make any decisions that he or she are able to make. This means that his or her free will is contained, given meaning, focused, and framed by his or her neurological structure. He and she can only move, and he or she can only choose therefore to move, physically speaking, in certain directions in space and time. That time reference, however, gives his or her free will meaning and a context in which to operate. We are speaking now of conscious decisions as we think of them.

We can only make so many conscious decisions, or we would be swamped and caught in a constant dilemma of decision making. Time organizes the available choices that are to be made. The awakening mentioned earlier, then, found man rousing from his or her initial ” dreaming condition,” faced suddenly with the need for action in a world of space and time, a world in which choices became inevitable, a world in which he or she must choose among probable actions — and from an infinite variety of those choose which events he or she would physically actualize. This would be an almost impossible situation were the species — meaning each species — not given its own avenues of expression and activity, so that it is easier for certain species to behave in certain manners. And each species has its own  overall characteristics and propensities that further help it define the sphere of influence in which it will exert its ability to make choices.

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Each species is endowed also, by virtue of the units of consciousness that compose it, with an overall inner picture of the condition of each other species, and further characterized by basic impulses so that it is guided toward choices that best fulfill its own potentials for development while adding to the overall good of the entire world consciousness. This does not curtail free will any more than man’s and woman’s free will is curtailed because he or she must grow from a fetus into an adult instead of the other way around.

The differences among all species are caused by this kind of organization, so that areas of choice are clearly drawn, and areas of free activity clearly specified. The entire gestalt of probable actions, therefore, is already focused to some degree in the species’ differentiations. In the vast structure of probable activity, however, far more differentiation was still necessary, and this is provided for through the inner passageways of reincarnational existence.

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Each person, for example, is born with his or her uniquely individual set of characteristics and abilities, likes and dislikes. Those serve to organize individual action in a world where an infinite number of probable roads are open — and here again, private impulses are basically meant to guide each individual toward avenues of expression and probable activities suited best to his or her development. They are meant, therefore, as aids to help organize action, and to set free will more effectively into motion. Otherwise, free will would be almost inoperable in practical terms: Individuals would be faced by so many choices that any decisions would be nearly impossible. Essentially, the individual would have no particular leaning toward any one action over any other.

” By the time” that the Garden of Eden tale reached our biblical stories, the entire picture had already been seen in the light of concepts about good and evil that actually appeared, in those terms, a long time later in man’s and woman’s development. The inner reincarnational structure of the human psyche is very important in man’s and woman’s physical survival. Children — change that to “infants” — dream of their past lives, remembering, for example, how to walk and talk. They are born with the knowledge of how to think, with the propensity for language. They are guided by memories that they later forget.

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In time’s reference, the private purposes of each individual appear also in the larger historical context, so that each person forms his corner of his civilization — and all individuals within a given time period have private and overall purposes, challenges that are set, probables actions that they will try to place within history’s context.

 

 

We are a living portion of a vast “conscious grid” of perception.

Every cell, is a sender and a receiver. All of the larger divisions of life — the mammals, fish, birds, and so forth — are an integral part of that living grid-work.  The picture of the world is not only the result of those messages transmitted and received, however, but is also caused by the relationships between those messages. In our terms, then, all of life’s large classifications were present “at the beginning of the world.” Otherwise there would have been vast holes in that grid of perception that makes possible the very sensations of physical life.

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In a manner of speaking, the physical universe is “transposed” upon another reality that must be its source. The world was and is created in dimensions outside of time, and outside of space as we understand it.

Other realities quite as legitimate as our own, quite as vital, quite as “real,” coexist with our own, and in the terms of our understanding, “in the same space” — but of course in terms of our experience those spaces and realities would appear to be quite separate. No systems are closed, however, so that basically the living grid of perception that causes one world or reality is also “wired into” all other such systems. There is a give-and-take between them.

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The grids of perception that compose our world give us the world picture as we experience it because our physical senses put us in a certain position within the entire grid. Animals, for example, while part of our experience, are also “tuned into” that grid at another level. The large classifications of mammals, fish, birds, men and women, reptiles, plants, and so forth, are each an integral part of that larger perceptive pattern — and that pattern in those terms had to be complete even in the beginning of our time.

In various periods that “grid-work” might “carry more traffic” along certain circuits than at other periods, so that there has been some creative leeway allowed, particularly on the parts of the species that make up our larger classifications. There were always birds, for example, but in the great interplay of “interior” and exterior communication among all portions of this vast living system, there was a creative interplay that allowed for endless variations within that classification, and each other one.

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Our technological communication system is a conscious construct — a magnificent one — but one that is based upon our innate knowledge of the inner, cellular communication between all species. Saying that, I am not robbing the intellect of its right to congratulate itself upon that technology.

The large classifications of life give us the patterns into which consciousness forms itself, and because those patterns seem relatively stable it is easy to miss the fact that they are filled out, so to speak, in each moment with new energy. Man and woman do not in his and her physical development pass through the stages supposedly followed by the hypothetical creature who left the water for the land to become a mammal — but each species does indeed have written within it the knowledge of “its past.” Part of this, again, is most difficult to express, and I must try to fill out old words with new meanings. The reincarnational aspects of physical life, however, serve a very important purpose, providing an inner subjective background. Such a background is needed by every species.

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Reincarnation exists, then, on the part of all species. Once a consciousness, however, has chosen the larger classification of its physical existences, it stays within that framework in its “reincarnational” existences. Mammals return as mammals, for example, but the species can change within that classification. This provides great genetic strength, and consciousnesses in those classifications have chosen them because of their own propensities and purposes. The animals, for example, seem to have a limited range of physical activity in conscious terms, as we think of them. An animal cannot decide to read a newspaper. Newspapers are outside of its reality. Animals have a much wider range, practically speaking, in certain other areas. They are much more intimately aware of their environment, of themselves as separate from it, but also of themselves as a part of it. In that regard, their experience deals with relationships of another kind.

These grids of perception “do not exist forever” in our dimension of time, for our dimension of time cannot hold anything that is outside it. Once a world exists, however, it becomes imprinted or stamped upon eternity, so that is exists in time and out of it “at once.”

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When we ask: “When did the world begin?” or “What really happened?” or “Was there a Garden if Eden?” , we are referring to the world as we understand it, but in those terms there were earths in the same space before the earth we recognize existed, and they began in the manner that I have given in earlier blogs. The patterns for worlds — the patterns — continue in our time dimension, though in that time dimension those worlds must disappear, again, to continue “their existence outside of time.” The patterns are filled out again.

In the case of earth the grid of perception is simply used differently, certain areas becoming prominent in some eras, and less prominent in others. Using our idea of time, I can only say that when the entire gestalt of consciousnesses that formed a particular earth have formed its reality to the best of their abilities, fulfilling their individual and mass capacities as far as possible, then they lovingly turn over that grid to others, and continue to take part in existences that are not physical in our terms. And that has happened many times.

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Our tale about the Garden of Eden, then, is a legend about earth’s ; past beginning. Each world is so cunningly constructed, again, that each consciousness, regardless of its degree, plays a vital part. And each of our actions, however inconsequential, becomes connected in one way or another — in one way or another — to each other reality and each other world.

Now in a manner of speaking — though I see that little time has passed while writing this blog — we have transcended time to some extent this afternoon, for in what I have written there are indeed hints and illusions — cadences — that can, if we are ready, give us a feeling for existence as it is outside of time’s context. Even to try and verbally present such material necessitates alterations involving perception, for while that grid-work appears quite stable to our senses, giving us a reliable picture of reality, this is also because we have trained ourselves to pick up certain signals only. Others at other levels are available. We can tune into cellular consciousness, for example.

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Since this material must be comprehensible, my readers and I together form our own pathway of perceptions — they from their end and me from mine, so that we thread back and forth as if through the writing of some vast computer — but a computer that is alive.

We know we can have more that one dream at a time. we can also experience versions of dreams of probable selves, but there will always be some point of contact — that is, there will always be a reason why we pick up such a dream. All of the dreams people have form a mass dream framework. Dreams exist at other levels, and physically of course they affect the body state. In such ways, the world’s actions are worked out in mass dream communications that the same time public and private.

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The country works our national concerns in that fashion. We think when we are asleep as well as when we are awake. But when we are asleep our thoughts have a richer dimensional cast: They are fattened by symbols and images.

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Mammals are animals of highest class of warm-blooded vertebrates, The Mammalia. They are usually hairy, and their young are fed with milk secreted by the female. Dogs, cats, manatees, lions, dolphins, apes, bats, whales, shrew, sloths, and deer are mammals, to name just a few.

Scientific , systematic categorization of organisms. For man alone the arrangement goes in this descending order from the most inclusive: The kingdom Animalia; phylum Chordata; class Mammalia; order Primates: family Hominidae; genus Homo; species name Homo sapiens; common name Man.

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In our terms the earth we know is but the latest in a series of earths that have existed in the same “space,” or “value climate of psychological reality.”

There are endless planes upon our earth, or rather endless planes occurring simultaneously with our earth. Our solid earth is not a solid to inhabitants that would seem to take up the same space as our earth. The idea of taking up the same space is erroneous to begin with, but I don’t see how we can avoid such terms and still make any sense.

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The value climate of psychological reality.

I had always thought of transmigration (or metempsychosis) as meaning the birth of a human soul in just animal form. Actually, however, the term refers to the journey of the soul into any form, whether human, animal, or inanimate — thus differing from the ordinary doctrine of reincarnation, or rebirth into the same species. Various interpretation of transmigration are ancient in man cultures.

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There is no transmigration of souls, in which the entire personality of a person ‘comes back’ as an animal. Yet in the physical framework there is a constant intermixing, so that the [molecular components of the] cells of a man or woman may become the cells of a plant or an animal, and or course vice versa. I want to avoid tales of the transmigration of souls or men and women to animals, say — a badly distorted version of something else entirely.

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In some submerged manner all fragments of a personality exist within an entity, with their own individual consciousnesses. They are not aware of the entity itself. The entity operates its fragments in what we would call a subconscious manner, that is, without conscious direction. The entity gives the fragments independent life, then more or less forgets them. Even thoughts, for instance, are fragments, though on a different plane. Fragments of another sort, called personality fragments, operate independently, though under the auspices of the entity.

The Garden of Eden represents a distorted version of awakening as a physical creature

Man and woman becomes fully operational in his and her physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him and her. He or she now encounters his or her experience from within a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws. He or she must use physical muscles to walk from place to place. He and she sees himself and herself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension, as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment, but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.

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The sense of separation is, in those terms, initially almost shattering. Yet man or woman is to be the portion of nature that views itself with perspective. He and she is to be the part of nature that will specialize, again, in the self-conscious use of concepts. He and she will grow the flower of the intellect — a flower that must have its deep roots buried securely within the earth, and yet a flower that will send new psychic seeds outward, not only for itself but for the rest of nature, of which it is a part.

But man and woman looked out and felt himself and herself suddenly separate and amazed at the aloneness. Now he and she must find food, where before his or her dream body did not need physical nourishment. Before, man and woman had been neither male nor female, combining the characteristics of each, but now the physical bodies also specialized in terms of sexuality. Man and woman has to physically procreate. Some lost ancient legends emphasized in a clearer fashion this sudden sexual division. By the time the Biblical legend came into being, however, historical events and social beliefs were transformed into the Adam and eve version of events.

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On the one hand, man and woman did indeed feel that he or she had fallen from a high estate, because he and she remembered that earlier freedom of dream reality — a reality in which the other creatures were still to some degree immersed. Man’s and woman’s mind, incidentally, at that point had all the abilities that we now assign to it: the great capacity for contrast of imagination and intellect, the drive for objectivity and for subjectivity, the full capacity for the development of language — a keen mind that was as brilliant in any caveman or cavewoman, say, as it is in any man or woman on a modern street.

But if man or woman felt suddenly alone and isolated, he or she was immediately struck by the grand variety of the world and its creatures. Each creature apart from himself or herself was a new mystery. He and she was enchanted also by his and her own subjective reality, the body in which he and she found himself or herself, and by the differences between himself and herself and others like him or her, and the other creatures. He and she instantly began to explore, to categorize, to point out and to name the other creatures of the earth as they came to his or her attention.

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In a fashion, it was a great creative and yet cosmic  game that consciousness played with itself, and it did represent a new kind of awareness, but I want to emphasize that each version of All That Is is unique. Each has its purpose, though that purpose cannot be easily defined in our terms. Many people ask, for example: “What is the purpose of my life?” Meaning: “What am I meant to do?” but the purpose of our life, and each life, is in its being. That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of our life, which simply by being is bound to fulfill its purposes.

Man’s and woman’s dream body is still with him and her, or course, but the physical body now obscures it. The dream body cannot be harmed while the physical one can — as man and woman quickly found out as he or she transformed his and her experience largely from one to the other. In the dream body man and woman feared nothing. The dream body does not die. It exists before and after physical death. In their dream bodies men and women had watched the spectacle of animals “killing” other animals, and they saw the animals’ dream bodies emerge unscathed.

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They saw the earth was simply changing its forms, but that the identity of each unit of consciousness survived — and so, although they saw the picture of death, they did not recognize it as the death that to many people now seems an inevitable end.

Men and women saw that there must be an exchange of physical energy for the world to continue. They watched the drama of the “hunter” and the “prey,” seeing that each could contribute so that the physical form of the earth could continue — but the rabbit eaten by the wolf survived in a dream body that men and women knew was its true form. When man and woman “awakened” in his or her physical body, however, and specialized in the use of its senses, he or she no longer perceived the released dream body of the slain animal running away, still cavorting on the hillside. He and she retained memory of his and her earlier knowledge, and for a considerable period he or she could now and then recapture that knowledge. He and she became more and more aware of his or her physical senses, however: Some things were definitely pleasant and some were not. Some stimuli were to be sought out, and others avoided, and so over a period of time he or she translated the pleasant and the unpleasant into rough versions of good and evil.

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Basically, what made him and her feel good was good. He and she was gifted with strong clear instincts that were meant to lead him or her toward his or her own greatest development, to his and her own greatest fulfillment, in such a way that he and she also helped to bring about the highest potential of all of the other species of consciousness. His or her natural impulses were meant to provide inner directives that would guide him and her in just such a direction, so that he or she sought what was the best for himself and herself and for others.

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In some ways the overall consciousness of United States continually becomes involved with — entwined with — the consciousness of adversaries like Russia and Iran: Such consciousnesses, once created, continue to grow and to complicate themselves in new ways within our concept of “time.” Obviously, on an even larger scale of activity, the consciousnesses of all the nations of our world contribute to the challenges, and dilemmas swirling around the Middle East situation.

Surface of Awareness

The waking state as we think of it is a specialized extension of the dream state, and emerges from it to the surface of our awareness, just as our physical locations are specified extensions of locations that exist first within the realm of mind.

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The waking state, then, has its source in the dream state, and all of the objects, environment, and experience that are familiar to us in the waking state also originate in that inner dimension.

When we examine the state of dreams, however, we do it as a rule from the framework of waking reality. We try to measure the dimension of dream experience by applying the rules of reality that are our usual criteria for judging events. Therefore, we are not able to perceive the true characteristics of the dreaming state except on those few occasions when we “come awake” within our dreams — a matter we will discuss later in a future blog. But in a manner of speaking, it is true to say that the universe was created in the same fashion that our own thoughts and dreams happen: spontaneously and yet with a built-in amazing order, and an inner organization. We think our thoughts and we dream our dreams without any clear knowledge of the incredible processes involved therein, yet those processes are the very ones that are behind the existence of the universe itself.

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Also, in a manner of speaking, we are ourselves the ancient dreamers who dreamed our world into being. You must understand that I am not saying that we are passive, fleeting dreamers, lost in some divine mind, but that we are the unique creative manifestations of a divine intelligence whose creativity is responsible for all realities, which are themselves endowed with creative abilities of their own, with the potential and desire for fulfillment — inheritors indeed of the divine processes themselves. Spontaneity knows its own order.

The world’s parts come spontaneously together, with an order that basically defies the smaller laws of cause and effect, or before and afterward. In that regard, again, our dreaming state presents us with many clues about the source of our own lives and that of our world.

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Computers, however grand and complicated, cannot dream, and so for all of their incredible banks of information, they must lack the kind of unspoken knowing knowledge that the smallest plant or seed processes. Nor can any amount of information “possessed” or processed by any computer compare with the unspoken knowing knowledge that is possessed by the atoms and molecules that compose such an instrument. The computer is not equipped to perceive that kind of knowing. It is not equipped for such an endeavor because it cannot dream. In dreams the innate knowledge of the atoms and molecules is combined and translated. It serves as the bed of perceptual information and knowledge from which the dreaming state arises in its physical form.

We are subjectively “alive” before our birth. We will be subjectively alive after our death. Our subjective life is now interpreted through the specialized state of consciousness that we call the waking one, in which we recognize as real only experience that falls within certain space and time coordinates. Our greater reality exists outside those coordinates, and so does the reality of the universe. We create lives for ourselves, changing them as we go along, as a writer might change a book, altering the circumstances, changing the plots. The writer only knows that he or she creates without understanding the spontaneous order with which the creativity happens. The processes occur at another level of consciousness.

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In the most basic of ways, the world is formed from the inside out, and from dreaming reality into physical one — and those processes happen at another level of consciousness.

Our body consciousness is like the consciousness of any animal. The love of excitement and activity with which man and woman and animals are innately endowed. Animals enjoy being petted, stroked, and loved. They react in their own ways to suggestion, and in the regard our body consciousness responds to our conscious treatment of it. think of our body, for the purpose of this discussion, as a healthy animal. Animals and our own body consciousnesses have little concept of age. In a fashion almost impossible to describe, those consciousnesses — of body and the animals — are ‘young’ in each moment of their existences. i am taking it fro granted that you understand that I am referring to the ‘mental attitude’ of animals and of the body consciousness, for they do possess their own mental attributes — psychological colorations — and above all, emotional ‘states’.

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I largely oppose science’s mechanistic model of the body wearing down within certain age limits, abetted as that model is by the power of the beliefs that say it will. I will have much to say about how the out-of-place stresses we impose upon ourselves through our fearful projections into the future adversely affect our body consciousnesses, which are focused in the present. telepathy, “molecular mentality,” and cellular consciousness are deeply involved in all of this.

In the beginning, while men and women had their dream bodies alone they enjoyed a remarkable freedom, of course, for those bodies did not have to be fed of clothed. They did not have to operate under the law of gravity. Men and women could wander as they wished about the landscape. They did not yet identify themselves to any great degree as being themselves separate from either the environment or other creatures. They knew themselves to be themselves, but their identities were not as closely allied with their forms as is now the case.

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The dream world was bound to waken, however, for that was the course is had set itself upon. This awakening, again, happen spontaneously, and yet with its own order. In the terms of this discussion the other creatures of the earth actually awakened before man and woman did, and relatively speaking, their dream bodies formed themselves into physical ones before man and woman’s did. The animals became physically effective, therefore, while to some degree man and woman still lingered in that dream reality.

The plants awakened before the animals — and their reasons for these varying degrees of ‘wakefulness” that have nothing to do basically with the differentiations of species-hood as defined by science from the outside, but have to do with the inner affiliations of consciousness, and with species or families of consciousness. Those affiliations fell into being as all of the consciousnesses that were embarked upon physical reality divided up the almost unimaginable creative achievements that would be responsible for the physically effective world.

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Again, the environment as we think of it is composed of living consciousness. Ancient religions, for example, speak of nature’s spirits, and such terms represent memories dating from prehistory. Part of consciousness, then, transformed itself into what we think of as nature — the vast sweep of the continents, the oceans and the rivers, the mountains and the valleys, the body of the land. The creative thrust of the physical world must rise from that living structure.

In a matter of speaking, the birds and the insects are indeed living portions of the earth flying, even as, again in a matter of speaking, bears and wolves and cows and cats represent the earth turning itself into creatures that live upon its own surface. And in a matter of speaking, again, man and woman becomes the earth thinking, and thinking his and her own thoughts, man and woman in his and her way specializes in the conscious work of the world — a work that is dependent upon the indispensable “unconscious” work of the rest of nature, a nature that sustains him and her. And when he or she thinks, man and woman thinks for the microbes, for the atoms and molecules, for the smallest particles within his or her being, for the insects and for the rocks, for the creatures of the sky and the air and the oceans.

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Man and woman thinks as naturally as the birds fly. He and she looks at physical reality for the rest of physical reality: He and she is earth coming alive to view itself through conscious eyes — but that consciousness is graced to be because it is so intimately a part of earth’s framework.

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What was it like when man and woman awakened from the dream world?

Life’s conditions need no justification

Our beliefs close us off from much otherwise quite-available knowledge concerning man’s and woman’s psychology — knowledge that would serve to answer many questions usually asked about the reasons for suffering. Other questions, it is true, are more difficult to answer. Men and women are born, however, with curiosity about all sensations, and about all possible  life experiences. They are thirsty for experience of all kinds. Their curiosity is not limited to the pretty or the mundane.

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Men and women are born with a desire to push beyond the limits : to “explore where no man or woman has ever gone before” — a bastard version of the introduction [to a famous television program], I believe men and women are born with a sense of drama, a need of excitement. Life itself is excitement. The quietest mood rides the thrust of spectacular molecular activity.

We forget many of our quite natural inclinations, feelings, and inner fantasies as we mature into adults, because they do not fit into the picture of the kind of people, or experience, or species we have been taught to believe we are. As a result, many of the events of our lives that are the natural extensions of those feelings appear alien, against our deepest wishes, or thrust upon us, either by outside agencies or by a mischievous subconscious.

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The thoughts of children give excellent clues as to mankind’s and womankind’s nature, but many adults do not remember any childhood thoughts except those that fit, or seem to fit, in with their beliefs about childhood.

Children play at getting killed. They try to imagine what death is like. They imagine what it would be like to fall from a wall like Humpty-Dumpty, or to break their necks. They imagine tragic roles with as much creative abandon as they imagine roles of which adults might approve. They are often quite aware of “willing” themselves sick to get out of difficult situations — and of willing themselves well again.

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As i said, there are all ranges of suffering. In times past in particular, though the custom is not dead, men and women purged themselves or otherwise deprived themselves. They suffered, in other words, for religion’s sake. It was not just that they believed suffering was good for the soul — a statement which can or cannot be true, incidentally, and I will go into that later — but they understood something else: The body will only take so much suffering when it releases consciousness. So they hoped to achieve religious ecstasy.

Religious ecstasy does not need physical suffering as a stimulus, and such a means in the overall will work against religious understanding. Those episodes, however, represent one of the ways in which man and woman can actively seek suffering as a means to another end, and it is beside the point to say that such activity is not natural, since it exists within nature’s framework.

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Discipline is a form of applied suffering, as discipline is usually used. People are not taught to understand the great dimensions of their own capacity for experience. It is natural for a child to be curious about suffering, to want to know what it is, to see it — and by doing so he or she learns to avoid the suffering he or she does not want, to help others avoid suffering that they do not want, and to understand, more importantly, the gradations of emotion and sensation that are his and her heritage. As an adult he or she will not inflict pain upon others if he or she understands this, for he or she will allow himself or herself to feel the validity of his or her own emotions.

If we deny ourselves the direct experience of our own emotions, but muffle them, say, through too-strict discipline, then we can hurt others much more easily, for we project our deadened emotional state upon them — as in the Nazi war camps, men and women followed orders, torturing other people — and we do that first of all by deadening our own sensitivity to pain, and by repressing our emotions.

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Man’s and woman’s vulnerability to pain helps sympathize with others, and therefore helps him or her to more actively alleviate whatever unnecessary causes of pain exist in society.

Each person’s experience of a painful nature is also registered on the part of what we will call the world’s mind. Each, say, failure, or disappointment, or unresolved problem that results in suffering, becomes a part of the world’s experience: This way or that way does not work, or this way or that way has been tried, with poor results. So in that way even weaknesses of failures of suffering are resolved, or rather redeemed as adjustments are made in the light of those data.

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In that regard, each person lives his or her life privately, and yet for all of humanity. Each person tries out new challenges, new circumstances, new achievements from a unique viewpoint, for himself or herself, and for the entire mass of humanity as well.

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The idea that in their play children “try to imagine what death is like” certainly adds an intuitive dimension to my own activities as a child. “Cowboys and Indians” was our gang’s favorite game, and we roamed the nearby fields all of us made believe we killed our enemies and/ or were killed ourselves. We had great fun, and used to play such games to the point of exhaustion.

Children “are often quite aware of willing themselves sick to get out of difficult situations.” I remember very well doing that on certain occasions — usually to avoid some school activity — and that even then I was surprised because my parents didn’t catch on to what I was up to. ( Getting well after the danger period had passed was no problem!)

For centuries the Roman Catholic church held [Western] civilization together

The roman Catholic church gave western civilization its meanings and its precepts.Those meanings and precepts flowed through the entire society, and served as the basis for all of the established modes of knowledge, commerce, medicine, science, and so forth.

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The church’s view of reality was the accepted one. I cannot stress too thoroughly the fact that the beliefs of those times structured individual human living, so that the most private events of personal lives were interpreted to mean thus and so, as were of course the events of nations, plants, and animals. The world’s view was a religious one, specified by the church, and its word was truth and fact at the same time.

Illness was suffered, was sent by God to purge the soul, to cleanse the body, to punish the sinner, or simply to teach man and woman his/her place by keeping him or her from the sins of pride. Suffering sent by God was considered a fact of life, then, and a religious truth as well.

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Some other civilizations have believed that illness was sent by demons or evil spirits, and that the world was full of good and bad spirits, invisible, intermixed with the elements of nature itself, and that man and woman had to walk a careful line lest he/she upset the more dangerous or mischievous of these entities. In man’s and woman’s history there have been all kinds of incantations, meant to mollify the evil spirits that man believed were real in fact and in religious truth.

It is easy enough to look at those belief structures and shrug our shoulders, wondering at man’s and woman’s distorted views of reality. The entire scientific view of illness, however, is quite as distorted. It is as laboriously conceived and inter-wound with “nonsense.” It is about as factual as the “fact” that God sends illness as punishment, or that illness is the unwanted gift of mischievous demons.

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Churchmen and churchwomen of the Middle Ages could draw diagrams of various portions of the human body that were afflicted as the result of indulging in particular sins. Logical minds at one time found those diagrams quite convincing, and patients with certain afflictions in certain areas of the body would confess to having committed the various sins that were involved. The entire structure of beliefs made sense within itself. A man or woman might be born deformed or sickly because of the sins of his or her father.

The scientific framework is basically, now, just as senseless, though within it the facts often seem to prove themselves out, also. There are viruses, for example. Our beliefs become self-evident realities. It would be impossible to discuss human suffering without taking that into consideration. Ideas are transmitted from generation to generation — and those ideas are the carriers of all of our reality, its joys and its agonies. Science, however, is all in all a poor healer. The church’s concept at least gave suffering a kind of dignity: It did come from God — and unwelcome gift, perhaps — but after all it was punishment handed out from a firm father for a child’s own good.

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Science disconnected fact from religious truth, of course. In a universe formed by chance, with the survival of the fittest as the main rule of good behavior, illness became a kind of crime against a species itself. It meant we were unfit, and hence brought about all kinds of questions not seriously asked before.

Did those “genetically inferior,” for example, have the right to reproduce? Illness was thought to come like a storm, the result of physical forces against which the individual had little recourse. The “new” Freudian ideas of the unsavory unconscious led further to a new dilemma, for it was then — as it is now — widely believed that as the result of experiences in infancy the subconscious, or unconscious, might very well sabotage the best interests of the conscious personality, and trick it into illness and disaster.

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In a way, that concept puts a psychological devil in place of the metaphysical one. If life itself is seen scientifically as having no real meaning, then suffering, of course, must also be seen as meaningless. The individual becomes a victim of chance insofar as his/her birth, the events of his or her life, and his or her death are concerned. Illness becomes his most direct encounter with the seeming meaninglessness of personal existence.

We affect the structure of our body through our thoughts. If we believe in heredity, heredity itself becomes a strong suggestive factor in our life, and can help bring about the precise malady in the body that we believed was there all along, until finally our scientific instruments uncover the “faulty mechanism,” or whatever, and there is the evidence for all to see.

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There are obviously some conditions that in our terms are inherited, showing themselves almost instantly after birth, but these are of a very limited number in proportion to those diseases we believe are hereditary — many cancers, heart problems, arthritic or rheumatoid disorders. And in many cases of inherited difficulties, changes could be effected for the better, through the utilization of other mental methods.

There are as many kind of suffering as there are kinds of joy, and there is no one simple answer that can be given. As human creatures we accept the conditions of life. We create from those conditions the experiences of our days. We are born into belief systems as we are born into physical centuries, and part of the entire picture is the freedom of interpreting the experience of life in multitudinous fashions. The meaning, nature, dignity or shame of suffering will be interpreted according to our systems of belief. I hope to give the way a picture of reality that puts suffering in its proper perspective, but it is a most difficult subject to cover because it touches most deeply upon our hopes for oneself and for mankind, and our fears for ourselves and for mankind.

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We have taught ourselves to be aware of and to follow only certain portions of our own consciousnesses, so that mentally we consider certain subjects taboo. Thoughts of death and suffering are among those. In a species geared above all to the survival of the fittest, and the competition among species, then any touch of suffering or pain, or thoughts of death, become dishonorable, biologically shameful, cowardly, nearly insane. Life is to be pursued at all costs — not because it is innately meaningful, but because it is the only game going, and it is a game of chance at best. One life is all we have, and that one is everywhere beset by the threat of illness, disaster, and wa — and if we escape such drastic circumstances, then we are still left with a life that is the result of no more than lifeless elements briefly coming into a consciousness and vitality that is bound to end.

In that framework, even the emotions of love and exaltation are seen as no more than the erratic activity of neurons firing, or of chemicals reacting to chemicals. Those beliefs alone bring on suffering. All of science, in our time, has been set up to promote beliefs that run in direct contradiction to the knowledge of man’s and woman’s heart. Science has, we have noted, denied emotional truth. It is not simply that science denies the validity of emotional experience, but that it has believed so firmly that knowledge can only be acquired from the outside, from observing the exterior of nature.

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I spoke about the quality of life, and it is true to say that in at least many centuries past, if men and women may have died earlier, they also lived lives of fuller, more satisfying quality — and I do not want to be misinterpreted in the direction.

Now, it is also true that in some of its aspects religion has glorified suffering, elevated it to be one of the prime virtues — and it has degraded it at other times, seeing the ill as possessed by devils, or seeing the insane as less than human. So there are many issues involved.

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Science, however, seeing the body as a mechanism, has promoted the idea that consciousness is trapped within a mechanical model, that man’s and woman’s suffering is mechanically caused in that regard: We simple give the machine some better parts and all will be well. Science also operates as magic, of course, so on some occasions the belief in science itself will seemingly work miracles: The new heart will give a man or woman new heart, for example.

Illness is used as a part of man’s and woman’s motivations. What I mean is that there is no human motivation that may not at some time be involved with illness, for often it is a means to a desired end — a method of achieving something a person thinks may not be achieved otherwise.

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One man or woman might use it to achieve success. One might use it to achieve failure. a person might use it as a means of showing pride of humility, of looking for attention or escaping it. Illness is often another mode of expression, but nowhere does science mention that illness might have its purpose, or its groups of purposes, and I do not mean that the purposes themselves are necessarily derogatory. Illnesses are often misguided attempts to attain something the person thinks important. Sickness can be a badge of honor or dishonor — but there can be no question when we look at the human picture, that to a certain extent, but an important one, suffering not only has its purposes and uses, but is actively sought for one reason or another.

Most people do not seek out suffering’s extreme experience, but within those extremes there are multitudinous degrees of stimuli that could be considered painful, that are actively sought. Man’s and woman’s involvement in sports is an instant example, of course, where society’s rewards and the promise of spectacular bodily achievement lead athletes into activities that would be considered most painful by the ordinary individual. People climb mountains, willingly undergoing a good bit of suffering in the pursuit of such goals.

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Determining not to worry should be the “first commandment.”

I hope I have touched upon a question that’s loaded with ethical and legal dilemmas; many of these have grown out of recent scientific advances in genetics. some moral philosophers, medical geneticists, physicians, lawyers, and religious leaders believe that those who carry genes for serious genetic diseases do not have the right to reproduce. Others of similar background maintain just the opposite — that the right to recreate one’s kind is inalienable. Questions abound involving amniocentesis (examination of the fluid in the womb to detect genetic defects in the fetus); therapeutic abortion; artificial insemination; reproduction by in vitro fertilization; embryo transfer (surrogate motherhood); the responsibilities of the legal, medical and religious communities; whether mentally retarded, genetically defective people should receive life-prolonging medical treatment, and so forth. Years are expected to pass before our legal system alone catches up with the scientific progress in genetics — but ironically, continuing advances in the field are bound to complicate even further the whole series of questions.

Dreamers subjective actions form the phenomena of “the self.”

During this period that we have labeled as belonging to the dreamers, certain subjective actions take place as the “structure’ of earthly tuned consciousness formed the phenomena of “the self.”

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What was needed is a highly focused, precisely tuned physical self that could operate efficiently in a space and time scheme that is being formed along with physical creatures — a self, however, that in one way or another must be supported by realms of information and knowledge of a kind that was basically independent of time and space. A knowledge indispensable, and yet a knowledge that could not be allowed to distract the physical focus.

In one way or another, that inner information had to connect each consciousness on the face of the planet. Earthly creatures must be able to react in a moment, yet the inner mechanisms that made such reactions possible were based upon calculations that could not be consciously kept in mind. In our time scheme, for example, we could never move as quickly as we do if we had to consciously work all the muscles involved in motion — or in speech, or in any such bodily performance. We certainly could not communicate on such a physical level if we first had to be aware of all of speech’s mechanisms, working them consciously before a word was uttered. Yet we had to have that kind of knowledge, and we had to have it in a way that did not intrude upon our conscious thoughts.

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Basically there are no real divisions to the self, but for the sake of explanation we must speak of them in those terms. First of all we had the inner self, the creative dreaming self — composed, of units of consciousness, awareized energy that forms our identity, and that formed the identities of the earliest earth inhabitants. These inner selves formed their own dream bodies about them, as previously explained, but the dream bodies did not have to have physical reactions. They were free of gravity and space, and of time.

As the body became physical, however, the inner self formed the body consciousness so that the physical body became more aware of itself, of the environment, and of its relationship within the environment. Before this could happen, though, the body consciousness was taught to become aware of its own inner environment. The body was lovingly formed from electromagnetic energy units through all the stages to atoms, cells, organs, and so forth. The body’s pattern came from the inner self, as all of the units of consciousness involved in this venture together formed this fabric of environment and creatures, each suited to the other.

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So far in our discussion, then, we have an inner self, dwelling primarily in a mental or psychic dimension, dreaming itself into physical form, and finally forming a body consciousness. To that body consciousness the inner self gives “its own body of physical knowledge,” the vast reservoir of physical achievement that it has triumphantly produced. The body consciousness is not “unconscious,” but for working purposes in our terms, the body possesses its own system of consciousness that to some extent, now, it separated from what we think of as our own normal consciousness. The body’s consciousness is hardly to be considered less than our own, or as inferior to that of our inner self, since it represents knowledge from the inner self, and is a part of the inner self’s own consciousness — the part delegated to the body.

Each cell, then operates so well in time because it is, in those terms, precognitive. It is aware of the position, health, vitality, of other cells of the face of the planet. It is aware of the position of each grain of sand on the shores of each ocean, and in those terms it forms a portion of the earth’s consciousness.

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At that level environment, creatures, and the elements of the natural world are all united — a point we will return to quite often. Our intellect as we think of it operates so clearly and precisely, so logically, sometimes so arrogantly, because the intellect rides that great thrust of codified,  “ancient,” “unconscious” power — the power of instant knowing that is a characteristic of the body consciousness.

Thus far in our discussion, we still have only an inner self and a body consciousness. As the body consciousness developed itself, perfected its organization, the inner self and the body consciousness together performed a kind of psychological double-entendre.

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The best analogy I can think of is that up to that time the self was like a psychological rubber band, snapping inward and outward with great force and vitality, but without any kind of rigid-enough psychological framework to maintain a physical stance. The inner self still related to dream reality, while the body’s orientation and the body consciousness attained, as was intended, a great sense of physical adventure, curiosity, speculation, wonder — and so once again the inner self put a portion of its consciousness in a different parcel, so to speak. As once it had formed the body consciousness, now it formed a physically attuned consciousness, a self whose desires and intents would be oriented in a way that, alone, the inner self could not be.

The inner self was too aware of its own multidimensionality, so in our terms it gave psychological birth to itself through the body in space and time. It knew itself as a physical creature. That portion of the self is the portion we recognize as our usual conscious self, alive within the scheme of seasons, aware within the designs of time, caught transfixed in moments of brilliant awareness, with civilizations that seem to come and go. That is the self that is alert in the dear preciseness of the moments, whose physical senses are bound to light and darkness, sound and touch. that is the self that lives the life of the body.

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It is the self that looks outward. It is the self that we call egotistically aware. The inner self became what I refer to as the inner ego. It looks into that inner reality, that psychic dimension of awareness from which both our own consciousness and our body consciousness emerged.

We are one self, then, but for operating purposes we will say that we have three parts: the inner self or inner ego, the body consciousness, and the consciousness that we know.

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These portions, however, are intimately connected. They are like three different systems of consciousness operating together to form the whole. The divisions — the seeming divisions — are not stationary, but change constantly.

To one extent or another, these three systems of consciousness operate in one way or another in all of the species, and in all particles, in the physical universe. In our terms, this means that the proportions of the three systems might vary, but they are always in operation, whether we are speaking of a man or a woman, a rock or a fly, a star or an atom. The inner self represent our prime identity, the self we really are.

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“Earth is a nice place, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” a twist on an old quote, I believe — but the fact is we are physical creatures because we do not like to live on earth, we do like the conditions, we do enjoy overall the particular kind of challenge and the particular kind of perception, knowledge and understanding that the earthly environment provides.

That environment, in our terms, certainly includes suffering. If joy has always been one of the characteristics of earth experience, so has suffering, and the subject will be covered in future blogs. Here, however, I only want to mention one facet, and that is the importance of physical sensation, of whatever kind — for the life of the body provides us, among all things, with a life of sensation, of feeling, a spectrum that must include the experience of all possible sensations within its overall range.

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Now as we will see, all creatures, regardless of their degree, can and do choose, within their spheres of reality, those sensations that they will experience — but to one extent or another all sensations are felt. We will later discuss the part of the mind and its interpretation, for example, of painful stimuli, but I want to make the point that those attracted to physical life are first and foremost tasters of sensation. Outside of that, basically, there are all kinds of mental distinctions made among stimuli. The body is made to react. It is made to feel life and vitality by reacting to an environment that is not itself, by encountering what we might call natural stress. The body maintains its equilibrium by reacting against gravity, by coming in contact with other bodies, by changing its own sensations, by glorifying in the balance between balance and off-balance.

The body consciousness is therefore given a superb sense of its own reality, a sureness of identity, a sense of innate safety and security, that allows it to not only function but to grow in the physical world. It is endowed with a sense of boldness, daring, a sense of natural power. It is perfectly formed to fit into its environment — and the environment is perfectly formed to have such creatures.

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The entities, or units of consciousness — those ancient fragments that burst into objectivity from the vast and infinite psychological realms of All That Is — dared all, for they joyfully abandoned themselves in space and time. They created new psychological entities, opened up an area of divine creativity that “until then” had been closed, and therefore to that degree extended the experience and immense existence of All That Is. For in so abandoning themselves they were not of course abandoned, since they contained within themselves their inherent relationship with All that Is. In those terms All That Is became physical also, aroused at its divine depth by the thrusting of each grass blade through the soil into the air, aroused by each birth and by each moment of each creature’s existence.

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All That Is, therefore, is immersed within our world, present in each hypothetical point, and forms the very fabric from which each portion of matter is created.