Tag Archives: Mystics

Organized religion has committed many important blunders

Yet for centuries Christianity provided a context accepted by large portions of the known world, in which experience could be judged against very definite “rules” — experience once focused, chiseled, and yet allowed some rich expression as long it stayed within the boundaries set by religious dogma.

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If a man or woman was sinner, still there was a way of redemption, and the immortality of the soul went largely unquestioned, of course. There were set rules for almost all kinds of social encounters and religious experiences. There were set ceremonies accepted by nearly all for death and birth, and the important stages in between. Church was the authority, and the individual lived out his or her life almost automatically structuring personal experience so that it fit within the accepted norm.

Within those boundaries, certain kinds of experience flourished, and of course others did not. In our society there is no such overall authority. The individual must make his or her own way through a barrage of different value systems, making decisions that were largely un-thought of when a son/daughter followed his or her father’s trade automatically, for example, or when marriages were made largely for economic reasons.

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So our present experience is quite different than that of those forefathers who lived in the medieval world, say, and we cannot appreciate the differences in our [present] subjective attitudes, and in the quality, as well as the kind of, social intercourse that exists now. For all its many errors, at its best Christianity proclaimed the ultimate meaning for each person’s life. There was no question but that life had meaning, whether or not we might agree as to the particular meaning assigned to it.

Men’s and women’s dreams were also different in those times, filled far more with metaphysical images, for example, more alive with saints and demons — but overall one framework of belief existed, and all experience was judged in its light. Now, we have far more decisions to make, and in a world of conflicting beliefs, brought into our living room through internet, newspapers and television, we must try to find the meaning of our life, or the meaning of life.

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We can think in terms of experiments. We may try this or that. We may run from one religion to another, or from religion to science, or vice versa. This is true in a way that was impossible for the masses of the people in medieval times. The improved methods of communication alone mean that we are everywhere surrounded by varying theories, cultures, cults, and schools, In some important areas this means that the mechanics of experience are actually becoming more apparent, for they are no longer hidden beneath one belief system.

Our subjective options are far greater, and yet so of course is the necessity to place that subjective experience into meaningful terms. If we believe that we do indeed form our own reality, then we instantly come up against a whole new group of questions. If we actually construct our own experience, individually and en-masse, why does so much of it seem negative? We create our own reality, or it is created for us. It is an accidental universe, or it is not.

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Now in medieval times organized religion, or organized Christianity, presented each individual with a screen of beliefs through which the personal self was perceived. Portions of the self that were not perceivable through that screen were almost invisible to the private person. Problems were sent by God as punishment or warning. The mechanics of experience were hidden behind that screen.

The belief of [Charles] Darwin and of [Sigmund] Freud alike have formed together to give us a different screen. Experience is accepted and perceived only as it is sieved through that screen. If Christendom saw man and woman as blighted by original sin, Darwinian and Freudian views see them as part of a flawed species in which individual life rests precariously, ever at the beck and call of the species’ needs, and with survival as the prime goal — a survival, however, without meaning. The psyche’s grandeur is ignored, the individual’s sense of belonging with nature eroded, for it is at nature’s expense, it seems, that he or she must survive. One’s greatest dreams and worst fears alike become the result of glandular imbalance, or of neuroses from childhood traumas.

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Yet in the midst of these beliefs each individual seeks to find a context in which his or her life has meaning, a purpose which will rouse the self to action, a drama in whose theme private actions will have significance.

There are intellectual values and emotional ones, and sometimes there are needs of an emotional nature that must be met regardless of intellectual judgments. The church provided a cosmic drama in which even the life of the sinner had value, even if only to show God’s compassion. In our society, however, the sterile psychic environment often leads to rebellion: People take steps to bring meaning and drama into their lives, even if intellectually they refuse to make the connection.

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When God went out the window for large masses of people, fate took His(or her) place, and volition also became eroded.

A person could neither be proud of personal achievement nor blamed for failure, since in large measure his or her characteristics, potentials, and lacks were seen as the result of chance, heredity, and of unconscious mechanisms over which the or she seemingly had little control. The devil went underground, figuratively speaking, so that many of his or her mischievous qualities and devious characteristics were assigned to the unconscious. Man and woman was seen as divided against oneself — a conscious figurehead, resting uneasily above the mighty haunches of unconscious beastliness. He or she believed oneself to be programmed by his or her heredity and early environment, so that it seemed he must be forever unaware of his own true motives.

Not only was he or she set against oneself, but he or she saw oneself as a part of an uncaring mechanistic universe, devoid of purpose, intent, and certainly a universe that cared not a whit for the individual, but only for the species. Indeed, a strange world.

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It was in many respects a new world, for it was the first one in which large portions of humanity believed that they were isolated from nature and God, and in which no grandeur was acknowledged as a characteristic of the soul. Indeed, for many people the idea of the soul itself became unfashionable, embarrassing, and out of date. Here I use the words “soul” and “psyche” synonymously That psyche has been emerging more and more in whatever guise it is allowed to as it seeks its vitality, its purpose and exuberance, and as it seeks out new contexts in which to express a subjective reality that finally spills over the edges of sterile beliefs.

The psyche expresses itself through action, of course, but it carries behind it the individual — and it automatically attempts to produce a social climate or civilization that is productive and creative. It projects its desires outward onto the physical world, seeking through private experience and social contact to actualize its potentials, and in such a way that the potentials of others are also encouraged. It seeks to flesh out its dreams, and when these find no response in social life, it will nevertheless take personal expression in a kind of private religion of its own.

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Basically, religion is an activity through which man and woman attempts to see the meaning of his or her life. It is a construction based on deep psychic knowledge. No matter what the name it might go by, it represents man’s and woman’s connection with the universe.

Mechanics of Experience

Our world and everything in it exists first in the imagination. We have been taught to focus all of our attention upon physical events, so that they carry the authenticity of reality for us. Thoughts, feelings, or beliefs appear to be secondary, subjective — or somehow not real — and they seem to rise in response to an already established field of physical data.

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We usually think, for example, that our feelings about a given event are primarily reactions to the events itself. It seldom occurs to us that the feelings themselves might be primary, and that the particular event was somehow a response to our emotions, rather than the other way around. The all-important matter of our focus is largely responsible for our interpretation of any event.

For an exercise, imagine for awhile that the subjective world of our thoughts, feelings, inner images and fantasies represent the “rock-bed reality” from which individual physical events emerge. Look at the world for a change from the inside out, so to speak. Imagine that physical experience is somehow the materialization of our own subjective reality. Forget what we have learned about reactions and stimuli. Ignore for a time everything we have believed and see our thoughts as the real events. Try to view normal physical occurrences as the concrete physical reactions in space and time to our own feelings and beliefs. For indeed our subjective world causes our physical experience.

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In titling this discussion I used the word “mechanics,” because mechanisms suggest smooth technological workings. While the world is not a machine — its inner workings are such that no technology could ever copy them — this involves a natural mechanics in which the inner dimensions of consciousness everywhere emerge to form a materialized, cohesive, physical existence. Again, our interpretation of identity teach us to focus awareness in such a way that we cannot follow the strands of consciousness that connect us with all portions of nature. In a way, the world is like a multidimensional, exotic plant growing in space and time, each thought, dream, imaginative encounter, hope or fear, growing naturally into its own bloom — a plant of incredible variety, never for a moment the same, in which each smallest root, leaf, stem, or flower has a part to play and is connected with the whole.

Even those of us who intellectually agree that we form our own reality find it difficult to accept emotionally in certain areas. We are, of course, literally hypnotized into believing that our feelings arise in response to events. Our feelings, however, cause the events we perceive. Secondarily, we do of course then react to those events.

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We have been taught that our feelings must necessarily be tied to specific physical happenings. We may be sad because a relative has died, for example, or because we have lost a job, or because we have been rebuffed by a lover, or for any number of other accepted reasons. We are told that our feelings must be in response to events that are happening, or have happened. Often, of course, our feelings “happen ahead of time,” because those feelings are the initial realities from which events flow.

A relative might be ready to die, though no exterior sign has been given. The relative’s feelings might well be mixed, containing portions of relief and sadness, which we might then perceive — but the primary events are subjective.

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It is somewhat of a psychological trick, in our day and age, to come to the realization that we do in fact form our experience and our world, simply because the weight of evidence seems to be so loaded at the other end, because of our habits or perception. The realization is like one that comes at one time or another to many people in the dream state, when suddenly they “awaken” while still in the dream, realizing first of all that they are dreaming, and secondarily that they are themselves creating the experienced drama.

To understand that we create our own reality requires that same kind of “awakening” from the normal awake state — at least for many people. Some of course have this knack more than others. The realization itself does indeed change “the rules of the game” as far as we are concerned to a rather considerable degree.

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As long as we believe that either good events or bad ones are meted out by a personified God as the reward or punishment for our actions, or on the other hand that events are largely meaningless, chaotic, subjective knots in the tangled web of an accidental Darwinian world, then we cannot consciously understand our own creativity, or play the role in the universe that we are capable of playing as individuals or as a species. We will instead live in a world where events happen to us, in which we must do sacrifice to the gods of one kind or another, or see ourselves as victims of an uncaring nature.

While still preserving the integrity of physical events as we understand them, [each of] us must alter the focus of our attention to some extent, so that we begin to perceive the connections between our subjective reality at any given time, and those events that we perceive at any given time. We are the initiator of those events.

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This recognition does indeed involve a new performance on the part of our own consciousness, a mental and imaginative leap that gives us control and direction over achievements that we have always performed, though without our conscious awareness.

Early man had such an identification of subjective and objective realities. As a species, however, we have developed what can almost be called a secondary nature — a world of technology in which we also now have our existence, and complicated social structures have emerged from it. To develop that kind of structure necessitated a division between subjective and objective worlds. Now, however, it is important that we realize our position, and accomplish the manipulation of consciousness that will allow us to take true conscious responsibility for our actions and our experience.

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We can “come awake” from our normal waking state, and that is the natural next step for consciousness to follow — one for which our biology has already equipped us. Indeed, each person does attain that recognition now and then. It brings triumphs and challenges as well. In those areas where we are not, remind ourselves that we are involved in a learning process; we are daring enough to accept the responsibility for our actions.

Look clearly, at the ways in which our private world causes our daily experience, and how it merges with the experience of others.

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Because of our individual and joint intuitive understanding and intellectual discrimination, we were able from an early age to clearly perceive the difficulties of our fellows. This helped incite stimuli that made us question the entire framework of our civilization. We are able to do something few people can: leap intuitively and mentally above our own period — to discard intellectually and mentally, and sometimes emotionally, the short-sighted, unfortunate religious scientific, and social beliefs of our fellows.

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Many of those old beliefs still have an emotional hold, however, and some helpful beliefs have also been overdone, or carried on too long. Because we can see so clearly the failings of our age, we each have a tendency to exaggerate them, or rather to concentrate upon them, so that we do not have an emotional feeling of safety. We react by setting up defenses.

Resurrection and then…

According to ordinary teaching Christ’s resurrection from the dead took place on Easter Sunday, the third day following his crucifixion (on Friday), while his ascension into heaven transpired at an indefinite time — up to 40 days later, as stated in the writings of St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles (AA 1:10). Christ’s resurrection and ascension took place of the same day is contrary to popular belief.

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Telescope the two events into one or refer to them together, as if the distinction didn’t exist . Implying that the ascension was the main issue in the Christ story, rather than the resurrection, or telling us that the two events are so intertwined thematically as to be treated as one.

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Of the four Gospels (according to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John), some scholars believe that Luke and John can be read as stating that Christ’s resurrection and ascension took place on the same day. Yet in Acts, Luke postulates the 40-day interval between the two events. (Originally Luke composed his Gospel and Acts as one treatise; the two were separated early in the second century.) Out of such contradictions as those implied in Luke’s case, however, confusion and opposing opinions reign when one studies the Gospels and related material. Christ himself left no written records, nor are there any eyewitness or contemporary accounts of his life. Most authorities still believe that the Gospels were written between A.D. 65 and 110. Since Christ was presumably crucified around A.D. 30, this means that some 35-40 years passed before the advent of Mark’s account. There are many consistencies in the Gospels, but also according to Matthew and John are now being questioned. A study of the New Testament books alone can quickly lead one into a maze of questions: Why isn’t the resurrection itself described? Why are there so few references to the ascension? Matthew doesn’t mention it at all in his Gospel, for example; and Paul alludes to it only once (1 Timothy 3:16) in his writings. Is the Gospel according to Luke merely schematic, rather than chronological? If time (as much as 40 days) did elapse between Christ’s resurrection and ascension, where was he physically during all of that period, other than on the few occasions cited in the Gospel and in Acts, when on various occasions he revealed himself to the women who discovered his empty tomb, to the apostles, and to some others? Sometimes Christ appeared as an apparition — “We could not have a world in which the newly risen dead mixed with the living. An existence in a spiritual realm had to follow such a resurrection.”

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In my opinion, I am not saying that Christ did rise from the dead or ascend into heaven, but I am referring to Christianity’s interpretation of its own creative Christ story. I maintain that Christ wasn’t crucified to begin with, in the facts of history, there was no crucifixion, resurrection, or ascension. In terms of history, there was no biblical Christ. In the terms of the biblical drama, however, Christ was crucified.

It was the Jewish tradition that nourished the new religion in its early stages. Christ, as we know, was a common name, so when I say that there was a man named Christ involved in those events, I do not mean to say that he was the biblical Christ. His life was one of those that were finally used to compose the composite image of the biblical Christ.

We are looking for a state of higher consciousness

A state of higher consciousness that represent a unique and yet universal source of information and revelation. Such a source does exist for each individual, regardless of how it is interpreted. White light is characteristically a symbol in such cases. The vastness.

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In our terms, speaking more or less historically, early man and woman were in a more conscious relationship with Conscious-mind-2 than we are now.

There are many gradations of consciousness, and early man and woman used his or her consciousness in other ways than those we are familiar with. He often perceived what we would call the products of the imagination as sense data, for example, more or less objectified in the physical world.

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The imagination has always dealt with creativity, and as man and woman began to settle upon a kind of consciousness that dealt with cause and effect, he no longer physically perceived the products of his or her imagination directly in the old manner. He realized in those earlier times that illness, for instance, was initially as much the result of the imagination as health was, for he experienced far more directly the brilliant character of his own imagination. The lines between imaginative and physical experience have blurred for us, and of course they have also become tempered by other beliefs and the experiences that those beliefs the engender.

Very simply here. It is far more complicated — and yet early man, for example, became aware of the fact that no man or woman was injured without that event first being imagined to one extent or another. Therefore, imagined healings were utilized, in which a physical illness was imaginatively cured — and in those days the cures worked.

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Regardless of our histories, those early men and women were quite healthy. They had strong teeth and bones. They dealt with the physical world through the purposeful use of the imagination, however, in a way now most difficult to understand. They realized they were mortal, and must die, but their greater awareness of Conscious-mind-2 allowed them a larger identification, so they understood that death was not only a natural necessity, but also an opportunity for other kinds of experience and development.

They felt their relationship with nature acutely, experiencing it in a far different fashion than we do ours. The felt that it was the larger expression of their own moods and temperament, the materialization of self-events that were too vast to be contained within the flesh of any one individual or any group of individuals. They wondered where their thoughts went after they had them, and they imagined that in one way or another those thoughts turned into the birds and rocks, the animals and trees that were themselves ever-changing.

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They also felt that they were themselves, however; that as humans [they were] the manifestation of the larger expression of nature that was too splendid to be contained alone within nature’s framework, that nature needed them — that is, men and women — to give it another kind of voice. When men and women spoke they spoke for themselves; yet because they felt so a part of the natural environment they spoke for nature also, and for all of its creatures.

Much is not understood in our interpretations. In that world men and women knew that nature was balanced. Both animals and men and women must die. If a man or woman was caught and eaten by animals, as sometimes happened, [his or her fellows] did not begrudge that animal its prey — at least, not in the deepest of terms. And when they slayed other animals themselves and ate the heart, for example, it was not only to obtain the animals’ “stout hearts,” or fearlessness; but also the intent was to preserve those characteristics so that through men’s and women’s experiences each animal would continue to live to some extent.

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Men and women in those times protected themselves and their homes against storms. Perhaps they never got any external help like Water and Mold Restoration Services to deal with the aftermath of the storms. Besides this, do not forget about the havoc wreaked by the storms on their homes– roofs
torn into pieces, windows broken, and the structure of their houses completely destroyed. However, they might have never got any assistance for window or Roof Repair. Yet, they were not bitter about the storm and its victims. They simply changed the alliances of their consciousnesses from the identification of self-within-the-flesh to self-within-the-storm. Man’s and woman’s and nature’s intents were largely the same and understood as such. Man and woman did not fear the elements in those early times, as is now supposed.

Some of the experience known by early man and woman would seem quite foreign to us now. Yet in certain forms they come down through the centuries. Early man and woman, perceived himself or herself as oneself, and individual. He or she felt that nature expressed for him or her the vast power of his or her own emotions. He or she projected oneself out into nature, into the heavens, and imagined there were great personified forms that late turned into the gods of Olympus, for example. He or she was also aware of the life-force within nature’s smallest parts, however, and before sense data became so standardized he or she perceived his or her own version of those individualized consciousnesses which must later became the elements, or small spirits. But above all he or she was aware of nature’s source.

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He or she was filled with wonder as his or her own consciousness ever-newly came into being. He or she had not yet covered over that process with the kind of smooth continuity that our own consciousness has now achieved — so when he or she thought a thought he or she was filled with curiosity: Where had it come from? His or her own consciousness, then, was forever a source of delight, it changing qualities as noticeable and apparent as the changing sky. The relative smoothness of our own consciousness — in those terms, a least — was gained at the expense of certain other experiences, therefore, that were possible otherwise. We could not live in our present world of time if our consciousness was as playful, curious, and creative as it was, for [then] time was also experienced far differently.

It may be difficult for us to understand, but the events that we now recognize are as much the result of the realm of the imagination, as those experiences by early man and woman when he or she perceived as real happenings that now we would consider hallucinatory, or purely imaginative.

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It seems quite clear to us that the mass events of nature are completely outside of our domain. We feel we have no part in nature except as we exert control over it through technology, or harm it, again through technology. We grant that the weather has an effect upon our moods, but any deeper psychic or psychological connections between us and the elements strikes most of us as quite impossible.

We use terms like “being flooded by emotion.” However, and other very intuitive statements showing our own deeper recognition of events that quite escape us when we examine them through reason alone. Man and woman actually court’s storms. He or she seeks them out, for emotionally he or she understands quite well their part in his or her own private life, and their necessity of a physical level. Through nature’s manifestations, particularly through its power, man and woman senses nature’s source and his or her own, and knows that the power can carry him or her to emotional realizations that are required for his or her own greater spiritual and psychic development.

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Death is not an end; but a transformation of consciousness. Nature, with its changing seasons, constantly brings us that message. In that light, and with that understanding, nature’s disasters do not claim victims: Nature and man and woman together act out their necessary parts in the larger framework of reality.

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Our concepts about death and nature, however, force us to see man and woman and nature as adversaries, and also program our experience of such events so that they seem to only confirm what we already believe. Each person caught in either an epidemic of a natural disaster will have private reasons for choosing those circumstances. Such conditions also often involve events in which the individual senses a larger identification, however — even sometimes a renewed sense of purpose that makes no sense in ordinary terms.

The Main Myth

The main myth through which we interpret our experience, is the one that tells us that all perception and knowledge must come to us through the physical senses.

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This is the myth of the exteriorized consciousness — a consciousness that we are told is open-ended only so far as objective reality is concerned. It seems to be closed “at the other end,” which in those terms would represent our birth.

The consciousness of that myth can indeed have no origin, for the myth precludes anything but a physically-oriented and physically-mechanized consciousness. Not only could that consciousness have no existence before of after death, but obviously it could have no access to knowledge that was not physically acquired. It is this myth that hampers our understanding most of all, and that closes us off from the greater nature of those events with which we are most intimately concerned. That myth also makes our own involvement with mass events sometimes appear incomprehensible.

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There seems to be no reason for many of them, simply because the intricate inner communication systems of consciousness go utterly unrecognized, generally speaking.

I am speaking largely to a Western audience, and so here I am using terms for a particular reason, to explain concepts in a way that will be understood. The inner ego is perfect as a term to suit my purposes. “Unconscious” is indeed conscious — and by conscious I mean that its reasoning is not irrational. Its methods are not chaotic, and its characteristics are not only equal to those of the known ego, but indeed are more resilient and knowledgeable.

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Conscious-mind-1 and 2 obviously represent not only different kinds of reality in normal terms, but two different kind of consciousness. To make this discussion as simple as possible for now, think of these two frameworks or states of consciousness as being connected by “undifferentiated areas” in which sleep, dreaming, and certain trance states have their activity. Those undifferentiated areas are involved in the constant translation of one kind of consciousness into the other, and with energy transferences. We constantly process those data that come to us in our private life, and that information includes bulletins from all over the world, through our news broadcasts and so forth.

The inner ego has access, to a much vaster amount of knowledge. It is aware not only of its own private position, as we are of ours, but it is also familiar with the mass events of its reality. It is intimately involved in the creation of our own private experience.

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The inner ego reasons, but its reasoning is not restricted to the cause-and-effect limitations that we apply to the reasoning process. The action of the inner ego within the wider sphere of Conscious-mind-2 explains many events and seeming coincidences that otherwise seem to make no sense within our world. Many realities within Conscious-mind-2 cannot suitably be explained as facts to us in Conscious-mind-1, simply because they involve psychological thickness that cannot be translated into facts as we think of them. These often appear in the symbolic language of the arts instead, and many of our dreams are translations in which the events of Conscious-mind-2 appear in symbolic form.

On any given day the events of our private lives fit within the larger patterns of world events, in which they have their context. On any given night the intimate events of our dream lives also exist in the greater context of the world’s dreams — in which they have their reality.

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The consciousness that we have, as generally described in psychology, is in a strange fashion like the bright shiny surface that responds to sun or rain or temperature, and to its surroundings; but for all of that a psychological fruit that has no pulp or pits, but contains at its heart a vacancy. In those terms we experience only one half of our consciousness: the physically-attuned portion. Fruit trees have roots, but we assign no ground of being to this consciousness.

Jung’s collective unconscious was an attempt to give our world its psychological roots, but Jung could not perceive the clarity, organization, and deeper context in which that collective unconscious has its own existence. Reality as Conscious-mind-2 is organized in a different fashion than it is in the Conscious-mind-1 world, and the processes of reasoning are far quicker. In Conscious-mind-1 the reasoning processes work largely by deduction, and they must constantly check their own results against the seemingly concrete experience of physical events. The reasoning of the inner ego is involved with the creative invention of those experiences. It is involved with events in a context of a different kind, for its deals intimately with probabilities.

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[Each of ] us, with our beliefs and intents, tell the inner ego which of an infinite number of probable events we want to encounter. In dream state events from both frameworks are processed. The dream state involves not only a state of consciousness that exists between the two frameworks of reality, but also involves, in those terms, a connecting reality of its own. I would like to emphasize that to one degree or another all species of plant and animal life “dream.” The same applies to the “psychological activity” of atoms and molecules, and any “particle.”

There are intensities of behavior, then, in which the activity, the inside activity, of any being or particle is directed toward [the] physical force [that is] involved in the cooperative venture that causes our reality. There are variances, however, when such activity instead into interior nature of reality. We have an inner system of communication, then, in which the cells of all living things are connected. In those terms there is a continuum of consciousness.

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To really understand our own connection with the events we encounter privately, and in relationship to others, we must first become acquainted with that medium in which events themselves are formed.

What part, for example, does chance play in our life? Is it chance if we arrive too late to board a plane, for example — to find later that the plane crashed? Perhaps our late arrival was caused by “a chance meeting” with a friend at the last moment, or by a misplaced ticket, or by a traffic jam that seemingly had nothing to do with us at all.

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We may have become a part of the drama of a natural disaster, or avoided it as a result of other seemingly chance occurrences. What appears to us as chance or coincidence, however, is actually the result of the amazing organizations and communications active in the psychological reality of Conscious-mind-2. Again, we form our reality — but how? And how do private existences touch each other, resulting in world events?

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This will not be a dry, intellectual exploration, because the intent itself will begin to trigger within our lives the emergence of hints and clues as to our own immersion in Conscious-mind-2’s creativity.

The Christ figure Symbolizes our idea of God and his relationships

The Man we call Christ was actually composed of three individuals who were the physical manifestations of the same nonphysical entity: John the Baptist, St. Paul, and a man historically known as Christ. None of these were crucified. Their roles became blended and distorted in history.

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Let us take tours through psychological realities

Or tours through psychic lands rather than physical ones. Such journeys “Take no time” in our terms.

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We have a storm. Weathermen or weather women speak of local conditions and merging air currents. We are in a realm where consciousnesses merge. A constant state of growth, expansion, and development. We can travel to many great universities of the mind.

Much of this is difficult to explain, for information and knowledge is constantly transformed — almost completely reborn, so to speak, through characteristics that are inherently a part of thought itself. Knowledge is changed automatically through the auspices of each consciousness who perceives it. It is magnified and yet refined. It is a constant language, yet one that transforms itself. We can exchange with each other a more complicated system of reality than any computer could handle. We do not understand or perceive the ways in which our reality contributes to the foundation of the mass-world reality that we experience. Unconsciously, each individual participants in forming that world. The primary encounter must be a subjective inner one, and intersection of consciousnesses that is then physically experienced.

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The encounters themselves occur in a Framed-mind-3 environment. That framework of course, again in terms of an analogy, exists another step away from our own Framed-mind-2. I do not want to get into a higher-or-lower hierarchy here, but the frameworks represent spheres of action. Our encounters initially take place, then, beyond the sphere that deals exclusively with either our physical world or the inner mental and psychic realm from which our present experience springs.

Like as motes of dust might be swept along with a brisk autumn wind from one area to another. We are carried above the land of our usual perception so that portions of us glimpse subjective states. These arouse our curiosity even when consciously we are not aware of perceiving them. That curiosity acts as impetus.

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Our intents and concerns, our interests, our needs and desires, our characteristics and abilities, directly influence our material, for they lead us to it to begin with.

We want to make the material workable in our world — a natural and quite understandable desire. The proof is in the pudding, and so forth. Yet of course we are also participators in an immense drama in which the main actions occur outside of our world, in those realms from which our world originated — and we are, foremost, natives of those other realms, as each individual is; each being is.

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Those realms are far from lonely, dark, and chaotic. They are also quite different from any concept of nirvana or nothingness. They are composed of ever-spiraling states of existence in which different kinds of consciousnesses meet and communicate. They are not impersonal realms, but are involved in the most highly intimate inter-actions. Those interactions exist about us all the while, and I would like us in our thoughts to aspire toward them, to try to stretch our perceptions enough so that we become at least somewhat aware of their existence.

These frameworks, while I speak of them separately, exist one within the other, and each one impinges upon the other. To some extent we are immersed in all realities.

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If we could, try to sense this greater context in which we have our being. Our rewards will be astonishing. The emotional realization is what is important, of course, not simply an intellectual acceptance of the idea. Do not forget the vaster context. Which will trigger responses on our part, increasing still further the scope of knowledge that we can receive.

In our world knowledge must be translated into specifics, yet we also deal with emotional realities that cannot be so easily deciphered. In the atmosphere now, there are hints of those undecipherable yet powerful realities that will, in time, gradually be described in verbal terms that make sense to us.

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According to our understanding, our own comprehensions and perceptions will bring other clues, either in the waking or the dream state. Keep our minds open for them, but without any preconceived ideas of how they might appear. Development triggers certain psychic activity that then triggers further growth.

To some extent Framed-mind-1 and 2 is of course an example of an entire idea, for we receive a good deal of information of physical life. Still they must be colored by our ideas of what physical lives are.

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Even our concepts of creativity are necessarily influenced by Framed-mind-1 thinking, of course.

Acts of creativity best approach the workings of Framed-mind-2, for [those] acts always involve leaps of faith and inspiration, and the breaking of barriers.

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When we are writing, we draw upon associations, memories, and events that are known to us and others, that perhaps we had forgotten but that suddenly spring to mind in answer to our intent and following our associations. When an artist is painting a landscape, he might unconsciously compare hundreds of landscapes viewed in the past in multitudinous, seemingly forgotten hues that splash upon the grass or trees, or as he seeks for a new creative combination. Art is his or her focus so that he draws from Framed-mind-2 all of those pertinent data that are necessary for his or her painting. Not just technique is concerned, but the entire visual experience of his or her life.

Framed-mind-2 involves a far vaster creative activity, in which our life is the art involved — and all [of the] ingredients for its success are there, available. When we are creating a product or a work of art, the results will have much to do with our idea of what the product is, or what the work of art is — so our ideas about our life, or life itself, will also have much to do with our experience of it as a living art.

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If we believe in the laws of cause and effect, as accepted, or in the laws of polarity, as accepted, then we will be bound by those laws, for they will represent our artistic technique. We will believe that we must use them in order to, say, paint the living portrait of our life. We will therefore structure our experience, drawing to oneself from Framed-mind-2 only that which fits. We will not have the “technique” to attract other experience, and as long as we stick with one technique our life-pictures will more or less have a certain monotony.

Write and artist also bring more into his or her work than the simple ability to write or paint. In one way or another all of his or her experience is involved. When we pay attention to Framed-mind-1 primarily, It is as if we have learned to write simple sentences with one word neatly before the other. We have not really learned true expression. In our life we are writing sentences like “See Tommy run.” Our mind is not really dealing with concepts but with the simple perception of objects, so that little imagination is involved. We can express the location of objects in space, and we can communicate to others in similar fashion, confirming the physical obvious properties that others also perceive.

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In those terms, using our analogy, the recognition of Framed-mind-2 would bring us from that point to the production of great art, where words served to express not only the seen but the unseen — not simply facts but feelings and emotions — and where the words themselves escaped their consecutive patterns, sending the emotions into realms that quite defied both space and time.

Now and then people have such moments, and yet each private reality has its existence in an eternal creativity from which, our world springs.

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It is not as if that vaster reality were utterly closed to our perception, for it is not. To some extent it is everywhere apparent in each person’s private experience, and it is obviously stated in the very existence of our world itself. The religions, in one way or another, have always perceived it, although the attempt to interpret that reality in terms of the recognized facts of the world is bound to distort it.

Our world, then, is the result of a multidimensional creative venture, a work of art in terms almost impossible for us to presently understand, in which each person and creature, and each particle, plays a living part. Again, in Framed-mind-2 each event is known, form the falling of a leaf to the falling of a star, from the smallest insect’s experience on a summer day to the horrendous murder of an individual on a city street. Those events are not divorced from our reality, not thrust upon us, not apart from our experience. It often only seems to be because we so compartmentalize our own experience that we automatically separate ourselves from such knowledge.

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Creativity does not deal with compartments. It throws aside barriers. Even most people who are involved in creative work often apply their additional insights and knowledge only to their art, however — not to their lives. They fall back to cause and effect.

Framed-mind-1 life is, again, based on the idea that we have only so much energy, that we will wear out, and that a certain expenditure of energy will produce a given amount of work — in other words, that applied effort of a certain kind will produce the best results. In the same way, it is believed that the energy of the universe will die out. All of this presupposes “the fact” that no energy is inserted into the world. The source of the world would therefore seem no longer to exist, having worn itself out in the effort to produce physical phenomena. In the light of such thinking, Framed-mind-2 would be an impossibility.

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Instead, the energy of life is inserted constantly into our world, in a way that has nothing to do with our so-called physical laws. The universe expands as an idea does. The greater life of each creature exist in the framework that “originally” gave it birth, and in a greater manner of speaking each creature, regardless of its age, is indeed being constantly reborn. Couched in our terms of our world’s known reality, which deal with local properties of Framed-mind-2 as they have impact in our experience.

Men’s and Women’s private roles in the nature of mass events

We must first look into the medium in which events appear concrete and real. The great sweep of the events of nature can be understood only by looking into a portion of their reality that is not apparent to us. We want to examine, therefore, the inner power of natural occurrences.

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A scientist examining nature studies its exterior, observing the outsideness of nature. Even investigative work involving atoms and molecules, or [theoretical] faster-than-light particles, concern the particle nature of reality. The scientist does not usually look for nature’s heart. He or she certainly does not pursue the study of its soul.

All being is manifestation of energy — an emotional manifestation of energy. Man or woman can interpret the weather in terms of air pressure and wind currents. He or she can look to fault lines in an effort to understand earthquakes. All of this works at a certain level, to a certain degree. Man’s or woman’s psyche, however, is emotionally not only a part of his or her physical environment, but intimately connected with all of nature’s manifestations. Using the terms Framed-mind 2, man’s or woman’s identification with nature is a strongly-felt reality in Framed-mind 2. And there we must look for the answers regarding man’s or woman’s relationship with nature. There in Frame-mind 2 the nature of the psyche appears quite clearly, so that its sweeps and rhythms can be understood. The manifestations of physical energy follow emotional rhythms that cannot be ascertained with gadgets or instruments, however fine.

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Why is one killed and not another? Why does an earthquake disrupt an entire area? What is the relationship between the individual and such mass events of nature?

Before we can begin to consider such questions, we must take another look at our world, and ascertain its source, for surely its source and nature’s are the same. We make some distinctions between events and our interpretation of them.

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It certainly seems that our world is concrete, factual, definite, and that its daily life rests upon known events and facts. We make a clear distinction between fact and fantasy. We take it for granted as a rule that our current knowledge as a people rests upon scientific data, at least, that are unassailable. Certainly technological development appears to have been built most securely upon a body of concrete ideas.

The world’s ideas, fantasies, or myths may seem far divorced from current experience — yet all that we know or experience has its origin in that creative dimension of existence that I am terming Framed-mind 2. In a manner of speaking our factual world rises on a bed of fantasy, myth, an imagination, from which all of our detailed paraphernalia emerge. What then is myth, and what do I mean by the term?

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Myth is not a distortion of fact, but the womb through which fact must come. Myth involves an intrinsic understanding of the nature of reality, couched in imaginative terms, carrying power as strong as nature itself. Myth-making is a natural psychic characteristic, a psychic element that combines with other such elements to form a mythical representation of inner reality. That representation is then used as a model upon which our civilizations are organized, and also as a perceptual tool through whose lens we interpret the private events of our life in their historical context. For instance, while some might dismiss the story of primitive men and women separating from each other and living individually due to their emotional conflicts as a myth, they forget that this mere myth is something that might have laid the foundation for divorces in the modern world. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be professionals like a family lawyer bradford or institutions like courts or terms like “divorce” in the civilized world.

Remember that when we accept myths, we call them facts, or course, for they become so a part of our lives, of societies and our professions, that their basis seems self-apparent. Myths are vast psychic dramas, more truthful than facts. They provide an ever-enduring theater of reality. It must be clearly understood, then, that myths imply the nature of psychic events whose enduring reality exists in Framed-mind 2, and forms the patterns that are then interpreted in our world.

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If someone is caught in a natural disaster, the following questions might be asked: “Am I being punished by God, and for what reason? Is the disaster the result of God’s vengeance?” A scientist might ask instead: “With better technology and information, could we somehow have predicted the disaster, and saved many lives?” He or she might try to dissociate himself or herself from emotion, and to see the disaster simply as the result of a non personal nature that did not know or care what lay in its path.

In all cases, however, such situations instantly bring to mind questions of man’s or woman’s reality and course, his or her connections with God, his or her planet, and the universe. He interprets those questions according to his or her own beliefs.

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Myths are natural phenomena, rising from the psyche of man or woman as surely as giant mountain ranges emerge from the physical planet. Their deeper reality exists, whoever, in Framed-mind 2 as source material for the world that we know.

In those terms, the great religions of our civilizations rise from myths that change their characters through the centuries, even as mountain ranges rise and fall. We can see mountain ranges. It would be ridiculous to ignore their reality. We see our myths somewhat less directly, yet are apparent within all of our activities, and they form the inner structures of all or our civilizations with their multitudinous parts.

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In those terms, then, Christianity and our other religions are myths, rising in response to an inner knowledge that is too vast to be clothed by facts alone. In those terms also, our science is also quite mythical in nature. This may be more difficult for some or us to perceive since it appears to work so well. Others will be willing enough to see science in its mythical characteristics, but will be most reluctant to see religion as we know it in the same light. To some extent or another, however, all of these ideas program our interpretation of events.

In this discussion, we are more or less dealing with the events of nature as we understand it. It will seem obvious to some, that a natural disaster is caused by God’s vengeance, or is at least a divine reminder to repent, while others will take it for granted that such a catastrophe is completely neutral in character, impersonal and [quite] divorced from man’s and woman’s own emotional reality. The Christian scientist is caught in between. Because we divorce ourselves from nature, we are not able to understand its manifestations. Often myths get in the way. When myths become standardized, and too literal, when we begin to tie them too tightly to the world of facts, then we misread them entirely. When myths become most factual they are already becoming less real. Their power becomes constrained.

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Most people interpret the realities of their lives, their triumphs and failures, their health or illness, their fortune or misfortune, then, in the light of a mythical reality that is not understood as such. What is behind these myths, and what is their source of power?

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Facts are a very handy but weak brew of reality. They immediately consign certain kinds of experiences as real and others as not. The psyche, however, will not be so limited. It exists in a medium of reality, a realm of being in which all possibilities exist. It creates myths the way the ocean creates spray. Myths are originally psychic fabrications of such power and strength that whole civilizations can rise from their source. They involve symbols and know emotional validities that are then connected to the physical world, so that that world is never the same again. They cast their light over historical events because they are responsible for those events. They mix and merge the inner, unseen but felt, eternal psychic experience of man with the temporal events of his or her physical days, and form a combination that structures thoughts and beliefs from civilization to civilization. In Framed-mind 2 the interior power of nature is ever-changing. The dreams, hopes, aspirations and fears of man and woman interact in a constant motion that then forms the events of our world. That interaction includes not only man, of course, but the emotional reality of all earthly consciousnesses as well, from a microbe to a scholar, from a frog to a star. We interpret the phenomena of our world according to the mythic characteristics that we have accepted. We organize physical reality, then, through ideas validity. The physical body itself is quite capable of putting the world together in different fashions than the one that is familiar to us.

We divorce ourselves from nature and nature’s intents far more than the animals do. Nature in its stormy manifestations seems like an adversary. We must either look for reasons outside of ourselves to explain what seems to be nature’s ill intent at such times, or its utter lack of concern.

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Science often says that nature care little for the individual, only for the species, so then we must often see ourselves as victims in a larger struggle for survival, in which our own intents do not carry even the puniest sway.

The body’s defense system is automatic.

And yet to a certain degree it is a secondary rather than primary system, coming into mobilization as such only when the body is threatened.

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The body’s main purpose is not only to survive but to maintain a quality of existence at certain levels, and that quality itself promotes health and fulfillment. A definite, biologically pertinent fear alerts the body, and allows it to react completely and naturally. We might be reading a newspaper headline, for example, as we cross a busy street. Long before we are consciously aware of the circumstances, our body might leap out of the path of an approaching car. The body is doing what it is supposed to do. Though consciously we were not afraid, there was a biologically pertinent fear that was acted upon.

If, however, we dwell mentally in a generalized environment of fear, the body is given no clear line of action, allowed no appropriate response. Look at it this way: An animal, not necessarily just a wild one in some native forest, but an ordinary dog or cat, reacts in a certain fashion. It is alert to everything in its environment. A cat does not anticipate danger from a penned dog four blocks away, however, nor bother wondering what would happen if that dog were to escape and find the cat’s cozy yard.

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Many people, however, do not pay attention to everything in their environments, but through their beliefs concentrate only upon “the ferocious dog four blocks away.” That is, they do not respond to what is physically present or perceivable in either space or time, but instead [dwell] upon the threats that may or may not exist, ignoring at the same time other pertinent data that are immediately at hand.

The mind then signals threat — but a threat that is nowhere physically present, so that the body cannot clearly respond. It therefore reacts to a pseudo-threatening situation, and is caught between gears, so to speak, with resulting biological confusion. The body’s responses must be specific.

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The overall sense of health, vitality, and resiliency is a generalized condition of contentment — brought about, however, by multitudinous specific responses. Left alone, the body can defend itself against any disease, but it cannot defend itself appropriately against an exaggerated general fear of disease on the individual’s part. It must mirror our own feelings and assessments. Usually, now, our entire medical systems literally generate as much disease as is cured — for we are filled with the fear of disease, overwhelmed by what seems to be the body’s propensity toward illness — and nowhere is the body’s vitality or natural defense system stressed.

Private disease, then, happens also in a social context. This context is the result of personal and mass beliefs that are intertwined at all cultural levels, and so to that extent serve private and public purposes.

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The illnesses generally attributed to all different ages involved. Those of the elderly, again, fit in with our social and cultural beliefs, the structure of our family life. Old animals have their own dignity, and so should old men and women. Senility is a mental and physical epidemic — a needless one. We “catch” it because when we are young we believe that old people cannot perform. There are no inoculations against beliefs, so when young people with such beliefs grow old they become “victims.”

The kinds of diseases change through historical periods. Some become fashionable, others go out of style. All epidemics, however, are mass statements both biologically and psychically. They point to mass beliefs that have brought about certain physical conditions that are abhorrent at all levels. They often go hand-in-hand with war, and represent biological protests.

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Whenever the conditions of life are such that its quality is threatened, there will be such a mass statement. The quality of life must be at certain level so that the individuals of a species — of any and all species — can develop. In our species the spiritual, mental and psychic abilities add a dimension that is biologically pertinent.

There simply must be, for example, a freedom to express ideas, an individual tendency, a worldwide social and political context in which each individual can develop his or her abilities and contribute to the species as a whole. Such a climate depends, however, upon many ideas not universally accepted — and yet the species is so formed that the biological importance of ideas cannot be stressed to strongly.

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More and more, the quality of our lives is formed through the subjective realities of our feelings and mental constructions. Again, beliefs that foster despair are biologically destructive. They cause the physical system to shut down. If mass action against appalling social or political conditions is not effective, then other means are taken, and these are often in the guise of epidemics or natural disasters. The blight is wiped out in one way or another.

Such conditions, however, are the results of beliefs, which are mental, and so the most vital work must always be done in that area.

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Side note:

Photosynthesis is the imperfectly understood process by which the green chlorophyll in plants uses the energy of sunlight to manufacture carbohydrates from water and carbon dioxide. This “stored sunlight” can then be used as food.

Man’s and Woman’s physical relationship with nature

Environmental questions are being raised about human’s effects upon the world in which he or she lives. There is, however, an inner environment that connects all consciousnesses that dwell upon our planet, in whatever form. This mental or psychic — or in any case nonphysical — environment is ever in a state of flux and motion. That activity provides us with all exterior phenomena.

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Our sense perception, physically speaking, is a result of behavior on the part of organs that seem to us to have no reality outside on their relationship with us. Those organs are themselves composed of atoms and molecules with their own consciousnesses. They have, then, their own states of sensation and cognition. They work for us, allowing us to perceive physical reality.

Our ears certainly seem to be permanent appendages, and do our eyes. We say: “My eyes are blue,” or “My eyes are small.” The physical matter of those sense organs changes constantly, however, with us none the wiser. While our body appears quite dependable, solid, [and] steady, we are not aware of the constant interchanges that occur between it and the physical environment. It does not bother us one whit that the physical substance of our body is made up of completely different atoms and molecules than it was composed of seven years ago, [say], or that our familiar hands are actually innocent of any smallest smidgen of matter that composed them [even in recent times past].

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We perceive our body as solid. The very senses that make such a deduction are the result of the behavior of atoms and molecules literally coming together to form the organs, filling a pattern of flesh. All other objects that we perceive are formed in their own way in the same fashion.

The physical world that we recognize is made up of invisible patterns. These patterns are “plastic,” in that while they exist, their final form is a matter or probabilities directed by consciousness. Our senses perceive these patterns in their own ways. The patterns themselves can be “activated” in innumerable fashions. There is something out there to observe.

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Our sense apparatus determines what form that something will take, however. The mass world rises up before our eyes, but our eyes are part of that mass world. We cannot see our thoughts, so we do not realize that they have shape and form, even as, say, clouds do. There are currents of thoughts as there are currents of air, and the mental patterns of man’s and women’s feelings and thoughts rise up like flames from a fire, or steam from hot water, to fall like ashes or like rain.

All elements of the interior invisible environment work together, and they form the temporal weather patterns that are exteriorized mental states, presenting us locally and en masse, then with a physical version of man’s emotional states.

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The physical planet is obviously also ever-changing while it is operational or realistically or pragmatically relatively stable. The physical matter of the planet is also composed of literally infinite hoarders of consciousnesses — each experiencing its own reality while adding to the overall cooperative venture.

Natural disasters represent an understandably prejudiced concept, in which the vast creative and rejuvenating elements important to planetary life, and therefore to humankind, are ignored. The stability of the planet rests upon such changes and alterations, even as the body’s stability is dependent upon, say, the birth and death of the cells.

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It is quite obvious that people must die — not only because we would overpopulate our world into extinction but because the nature of consciousness requires new experience, challenge, and accomplishment. This is everywhere apparent in nature itself. If there were no death, we would have to invent it — for the context of the self-hood would be as limited as the experience of a great sculptor given but one hunk of stone.

The sculptor’s creation is pragmatically realistic, in that it exists as an object, and can be quite legitimately perceived as can our world. The sculptor’s statue, however, comes from the inner environment, the patterns of probabilities. These patterns are not them selves inactive. They are possessed by the desire to be-actualized. Behind all realities there are mental states. These always seek form, though again there are other forms than those we recognize.

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A chair is a chair for our purposes. As you read this blog you most probably lounge on a chair or couch or bench — all quite sturdy and real. The atoms and molecules within those chairs and couches are quite alert, though we do not grant them the quality of life. When children play ring-around-the-rosy, they form living circles in the air. In the game they enjoy the motion of their bodies, but they do not identify with those swirling circles. The atoms and molecules that make up a chair play a different kind of ring-around-the-rosy, and are involved in constant motion, forming a certain pattern that we perceive as a chair.

The difference in motion are so divergent that to us the chair, like our body, appears permanent. The atoms and molecules, like the children, enjoy their motion — solidly sketched in space from our perspective, however, with no “idea” that we consider that motion a chair, or so use it.

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We perceive the atoms’ activity in that fashion. [Nevertheless] the agreement takes place at mental levels, and is never completely “set,” though it appears to be. No one perceives the same chair [all the time], though perhaps a given chair will seem to be “the same one” seen from different angles.

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The dance of the atoms and molecules is continuous in our area. In greater terms, any given chair is never the same chair. All of this must be taken into consideration when we discuss mass events.

We live in a community of thoughts and feelings also.

We live in a physical community, but we live first in a community of thoughts and feelings. There trigger our physical actions. They directly affect the behavior of our body. The experience of the animals is different, yet in their own ways animals have both individual intent and purpose. Their feelings are certainly as pertinent as ours. They dream, and in their way they reason.

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They do not “worry.” They do not anticipate disaster when no signs of it are apparent in their immediate environment. On their own they do not need preventative medicine. Pet animals are inoculated against diseases, however. In our society this almost becomes a necessity. In a “purely natural” setting we would not have as many living puppies or kittens. There are stages of physical existence, and in those terms nature knows what it is doing. When a species over-produces, the incidences of, say, epidemics grow. This applies to human populations as well as to the animals.

The quality of life is important above all. Newborn animals either die quickly and naturally, painlessly, before their consciousnesses are fully focused here, or are killed by their mothers — not because they are weak or unfit to survive, but because the [physical] conditions are not those that will produce the quality of life that makes survival “worthwhile.”

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The consciousness that became so briefly physical is not annihilated, however, but in our terms waits for better conditions.

There are also “trail runs” in human and animal species alike, in which peeks are taken, or glimpses, of physical life, and that is all. Epidemics sweeping through animal populations are also biological and psychic statements, then, in which each individual knows that only its own greatest fulfillment can satisfy the quality of life on an individual basis, and thus contribute to the mass survival of the species.

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Suffering is not necessarily good for the soul at all, and left alone natural creatures do not seek it. There is a natural compassion, a biological knowledge, so that the mother of an animal knows whether or not existing conditions will support the new offspring. Animals instinctively realize their relationship with the great forces of life. They will instinctively starve an offspring while its consciousness is still unfocused, rather than send it loose under adverse conditions

In a natural state, many children would die stillborn for the same reasons, or would be naturally aborted. There is a give-and-take between all elements of nature, so that such individuals often choose mothers, for example, who perhaps wanted the experience of pregnancy but not of birth — where they choose the experience of the fetus but not necessarily [that] of the child. Often in such cases these are “fragmented personalities,” wanting to taste physical reality, but not being ready to deal with it. Each case is individual, however, so these are general statements.

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Many children, who, it seems, should have died of disease, of “children epidemics,” nevertheless survive because of their different intents. The world of thought and feeling may be invisible, and yet it activates all physical systems with which we are acquainted.

Animals as well as men can indeed make social statements, that appear in a biological context. Animals as well as men can indeed make social statements, that appear in a biological context. Animals stricken by kitten and puppy diseases, for example, choose to die, pointing out the fact that the quality of their lives individually and en masses is vastly lacking. Their relationships with their own species is no longer in balance. They cannot use their full abilities or powers, nor are many of them given compensating elements in terms of a beneficial psychic relationship with man and woman — but instead are shunted aside, unwanted and unloved. An unloved animal does not want to live.

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Love involves self-respect. The trust in individual biological zest and integrity. To that extent, in their way animal epidemics have the same causes as human ones.

Animals can indeed commit suicide. So can a race or a species. The dignity of a spirited life demands that a certain quality of experience be maintained.

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The infamous “Black Death,” were (and still are) spread to man by fleas carrying a bacterium from infected rats. Other forms of affliction are carried by other rodents. The complicated interactions and communications involving all forms of life, man’s and woman’s deep dissatisfactions would have periodically helped trigger the resurgence of scourges like the plagues: In 3rd-century Rome, for instance, several thousand people were said to have died each day; estimates are that over a 20-year period in the 14th century three-quarters of the population of Europe and Asia perished; there was the great plague of London in 1665, and so forth.

Many can thankfully praise a given doctor for discovering a disease condition ‘in time.’ so that effective countering measures were taken and the disease was eliminated. We cannot know for sure, of course, what would have happened otherwise. To those people who wanted to die. If they did not die of the disease, they may have ‘fallen prey’ to an accident, or died in a war, or in a natural disaster.

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They may have been ‘cured’ whether or not they had treatment, and gone on to lead productive lives. We do not know. A man or woman who is ready to die, if saved from one disease will promptly get another, or find a way of fulfilling that desire. Our problem there rests with the will to live, and with the mechanisms of the psyche.

The English naturalist, Charles Darwin (1809-1882), maintained in his theory of organic evolution that all plants and animals develop from their own previous forms by inheriting minute variations through succeeding generations, with those forms best fitted to the environment being the ones most likely to survive.

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Amazingly, another English naturalist, Alfred Wallace (1823-1882), independently developed a similar theory, and the two men had their work presented to science in the same paper in 1858. The next year Darwin published his The Origin of Species.