JUST SETH

Mass Health & Belief Systems

    You cannot begin to understand the nature of mass events of any kind unless-you consider the even greater framework in which they have their existence.
    A person’s private experience happens in the context of his psychological and biological status, and basically cannot be separated from his religious and philosophical beliefs and sentiments, and his cultural environment and political framework —
    All of the issues form together to make a trellis of behavior. Thorns or roses may grow therein. That is, the individual will grow outward toward the world, encountering and forming a practical experience, traveling outward from his center in almost vinelike fashion, forming from the fabric of physical reality a conglomeration of pleasant or aesthetic, and unpleasant or prickly events.
    The vine of experience in this analogy is formed in quite a natural fashion from “psychic” elements that are as necessary to psychological experience as sun, air, and water are to plants. I do not want to get too entwined in this analogy, however; but as the individual’s personal experience must be seen in the light of all of these issues, so mass events cannot be understood unless they are considered in a far greater context than usual.
    The question of epidemics, for example, cannot be answered from a biological standpoint alone. It involves great sweeping psychological attitudes on the part of many, and meets the needs and desires of those involved — needs which, in your terms, arise in a framework of religious, psychological and cultural realities that cannot be isolated from biological results.
    I have thus far stayed clear of many important and vital subjects, involving mass realities, because first of all the importance of the individual was to be stressed, and his power to form his private events. Only when the private nature of reality was emphasized sufficiently would I be ready to show how the magnification of individual reality combines and enlarges to form vast mass reactions — such as, say, the initiation of an obviously new historical and cultural period; the rise or overthrow of governments; the birth of a new religion that sweeps all others before it; mass conversions; mass murders in the form of wars; the sudden sweep of deadly epidemics; the scourge of earthquakes, floods, or other disasters; the inexplicable appearance of periods of great art or architecture or technology.
    I said there are no closed systems. This also means that in world terms, events spin like electrons, affecting all psychological and psychic systems as well as biological ones. It is true to say that each individual dies alone, for no one else can die that death. It is also true that part of the species dies with each death, and is reborn with each birth, and that each private death takes place within the greater context of the existence of the entire species. The death serves a purpose species-wise while it also serves the purposes of the individual, for no death comes unbidden.
    An epidemic, for example, serves the purposes of each individual who is involved, while it also serves its own functions in the greater species framework.
    When you consider epidemics to be the result of viruses, and emphasize their biological stances, then it seems that the solutions are very obvious: You learn the nature of each virus and develop an inoculation, giving [each member of] the populace a small dose of the disease so that a man’s own body will combat it, and he will become immune.
    The shortsightedness of such procedures is generally overlooked because of the definite short-term advantages. As a rule, for example, people inoculated against polio do not develop that disease. Using such procedures, tuberculosis has been largely conquered.
    There are great insidious variables operating, however, and these are caused precisely by the small framework in which such mass epidemics are considered.
    In the first place, the causes are not biological. Biology is simply the carrier of a “deadly intent.” In the second place, there is a difference between a virus produced in the laboratory and that inhabiting the body — a difference recognized by the body but not by your laboratory instruments.
    In a way the body produces antibodies, and sets up natural immunization as a result of, say, inoculation. But the body’s chemistry is also confused, for it “knows” it is reacting to a disease that is not “a true disease,” but a biologically counterfeit intrusion. To that extent — and I do not mean to overstate the case — the body’s biological integrity is contaminated. It may at the same time produce antibodies also, for example, to other “similar” diseases, and so overextend its defenses that the individual later comes down with another disease.
    Now, no person becomes ill unless that illness serves a psychic or psychological reason, so many people escape such complications. In the meantime, however, scientists and medical men find more and more viruses against which the population “must” be inoculated. Each one is considered singly. There is a rush to develop a new inoculation against the newest virus. Much of this is on a predictive basis: The scientists “predict” how many peogple might be “attacked” by, say, a virus that has caused a given number of deaths. Then as a preventative measure the populace is invited to the new inoculation,
    Many people who would not get the disease in any case are then religiously inoculated with it. The body is exerted to use its immune system to the utmost, and sometimes, according to the inoculation, overextended [under such] conditions.⁴ Those individuals who have psychologically decided upon death will die in any case, of that disease or another, or of the side effects of the inoculation.
    Inner reality and private experience give birth to all mass events. Man cannot disentangle himself from the natural context of his physical life. His culture, his religion, his psychologies, and his psychological nature together form the context within which both private and mass events occur. This book will, then, be devoted to the nature of the great sweeping emotional, religious, or biological events that often seem to engulf the individual, or to lift him or her willy-nilly in their power.
    What is the relationship between the individual and the gigantic mass motions of nature, of government, or even of religion? What about mass conversions? Mass hysteria? Mass healings, mass murder, and the individual? Those are the questions we will devote ourselves to in this book.
    Dying is a biological necessity, not only for the individual, but to insure the continued vitality of the species. Dying is a spiritual and psychological necessity, for after a while the exuberant, ever-renewed energies of the spirit can no longer be translated into flesh.
    Inherently, each individual knows that he or she must die physically in order to survive spiritually and psychically. The self outgrows the flesh. Particularly since [the advent of Charles] Darwin’s theories⁵, the acceptance of the fact of death has come to imply a certain kind of weakness, for is it not said that only the strong survive?
    To some degree, epidemics and recognized illnesses serve the sociological purpose of providing an acceptable reason for death — a face-saving device for those who have already decided to die. This does not mean that such individuals make a conscious decision to die, in your terms: But such decisions are often semiconscious. It might be that those individuals feel they have fulfilled their purposes — but such decisions may also be built upon a different kind of desire for survival than those understood in Darwinian terms.
    It is not understood that before life an individual decides to live. A self is not simply the accidental personification of the body’s biological mechanism. Each person born desires to be born. He dies when that desire no longer operates. No epidemic or illness or natural disaster — or stray bullet from a murderer’s gun — will kill a person who does not want to die.
    The desire for life has been most flaunted, yet human psychology has seldom dealt with the quite active desire for death. In its natural form this is not a morbid, frightened, neurotic, or cowardly attempt to escape life, but a definite, positive, “healthy” acceleration of the desire for survival, in which the individual strongly wants to leave physical life as once the child wanted to leave the parent’s home.
    I am not speaking here of the desire for suicide, which involves a definite killing of the body by self-deliberate means — often of a violent nature. Ideally this desire for death, however, would simply involve the slowing of the body’s processes, the gradual disentanglement of psyche from flesh; or in other instances, according to individual characteristics, a sudden, natural stopping of the body’s processes.
    Left alone, the self and the body are so entwined that the separation would be smooth. The body would automatically follow the wishes of the inner self. In the case of suicide, for example, the self is to some extent acting out of context with the body, which still has its own will to live.
    I will have more to say about suicide, but I do not mean here to imply guilt on the part of a person who takes his or her own life. In many cases, a more natural death would have ensued in any event as the result of “diseases.” Period. Often, for example, a person wanting to die originally intended to experience only a portion of earth life, say childhood. This purpose would be entwined with the parents’ intent. Such a son or daughter might be born, for instance, through a woman who wanted to experience childbirth but who did not necessarily want to encounter the years of child-raising, for her own reasons.
    Such a mother would attract a consciousness who desired, perhaps, to reexperience childhood but not adulthood, or who might teach the mother lessons sorely needed. Such a child might naturally die at 10 or 12, or earlier. Yet the ministrations of science might keep the child alive far longer, until such a person [begins] encountering an adulthood thrust upon him or her, so to speak.
    An automobile accident, suicide, or another kind of accident might result. The person might fall prey to an epidemic, but the smoothness of biological motion or psychological motion has been lost. I am not here condoning suicide, for too often in your society it is the unfortunate result of conflicting beliefs — and yet it is true to say that all deaths are suicide, and all births deliberate on the part of child and parent. To that extent, you cannot separate issues like a population explosion on the part of certain portions of the world, from epidemics, earthquakes, and other disasters.
    In wars, people automatically reproduce their kind to make up for those that are killed, and when the race overproduces there will be automatic controls set upon the population. Yet these will in all ways fit the intents and purposes of the individuals involved.
    Now: To a certain extent, epidemics are the result of a mass suicide phenomenon on the parts of those involved. Biological, sociological, or even economic factors may be involved, in that for a variety of reasons, and at different levels, whole groups of individuals want to die at any given time — but in such a way that their individual deaths amount to a mass statement.
    On one level the deaths are a protest against the time in which they occur. Those involved have private reasons, however. The reasons, of course, vary from one individual to another, yet all involved “want their death to serve a purpose” beyond private concerns. Partially, then, such deaths are meant to make the survivors question the conditions — for unconsciously the species well knows there are reasons for such mass deaths that go beyond accepted beliefs.
    In some historical periods the plight of the poor was so horrible, so unendurable, that outbreaks of the plague occurred, literally resulting in a complete destruction of large areas of the environment in which such social, political, and economic conditions existed. [Those] plagues took rich and poor alike, however, so the complacent well-to-do could see quite clearly, for example, that to some extent sanitary conditions, privacy, peace of mind, had to be granted to the poor alike, for the results of their dissatisfaction would have quite practical results. Those were deaths of protest.¹ Individually, each “victim” was to one extent or another a “victim” of apathy, despair, or hopelessness, which automatically lowered bodily defenses.
    Not only do such states of mind lower the defenses, however, but they activate and change the body’s chemistries, alter its balances, and initiate disease conditions. Many viruses inherently capable of causing death, in normal conditions contribute to the overall health of the body, existing side by side as it were with other viruses, each contributing quite necessary activities that maintain bodily equilibrium.
    If [certain viruses] are triggered, however, to higher activity or overproduction by mental states, they then become “deadly.” Physically they may be passed on in whatever manner is peculiar to a specific strain. Literally, individual mental problems of sufficient severity emerge as social, mass diseases.
    The environment in which an outbreak occurs points at the political, sociological, and economic conditions that have evolved, causing such disorder. Often such outbreaks take place after ineffective political or social action — that is, after some unified mass social protest — has failed, or is considered hopeless. They often occur also in wartime on the part of a populace [that] is against a given war in which [its] country is involved.
    Initially there is a psychic contagion: Despair moves faster than a mosquito, or any outward carrier of a given disease. The mental state brings about the activation of a virus that is, in those terms, passive.
    Despair may seem passive only because it feels that exterior action is hopeless — but its fires rage inwardly, and that kind of contagion can leap from bed to bed and from heart to heart. It touches those, however, who are in the same state only, and to some extent it brings about an acceleration in which something can indeed be done in terms of group action.
    Now if you believe in one life only, then such conditions will seem most disastrous, and in your terms they clearly are not pretty. Yet, though each victim in an epidemic may die his or her own death, that death becomes part of a mass social protest. The lives of intimate survivors are shaken, and according to the extent of the epidemic the various elements of social life itself are disturbed, altered, rearranged. Sometimes such epidemics are eventually responsible for the overthrow of governments, the loss of wars.
    There are also even deeper biological connections with the heart of nature. You are biological creatures. Your proud human consciousness rests on the vast “unconscious” integrity of your physical being. In that regard your consciousness is as natural as your toe. In terms of the species’ integrity your mental states are, then, highly important. Despair or apathy is a biological “enemy.” Social conditions, political states, economic policies, and even religious or philosophical frameworks that foster such mental states, bring about a biological retaliation. They act like fire applied to a plant.
    The epidemics then serve many purposes — warning that certain conditions will not be tolerated. There is a biological outrage that will be continually expressed until the conditions are changed.
    Even in the days of the great plagues in England there were those smitten who did not die, and there were those untouched by the disease who dealt with the sick and dying. Those survivors, who were actively involved, saw themselves in a completely different light than those who succumbed, however: They were those, untouched by despair, who saw themselves as effective rather than ineffective. Often they roused themselves from lives of previously unheroic situations, and then performed with great bravery. The horror of the conditions overwhelmed them where earlier they were not involved.
    The sight of the dying gave them visions of the meaning of life, and stirred new [ideas] of sociological, political, and spiritual natures, so that in your terms the dead did not die in vain. Epidemics by their public nature speak of public problems — problems that sociologically threaten to sweep the individual to psychic disaster as the physical materialization does biologically.
    These are the reasons also for the range or the limits of various epidemics — why they sweep through one area and leave another clear. Why one in the family will die and another survive — for in this mass venture, the individual still forms his or her private reality.
    In your society scientific medical beliefs operate, and a kind of preventative medicine, mentioned earlier, in which procedures [of inoculation] are taken, bringing about in healthy individuals a minute disease condition that then gives immunity against a more massive visitation. In the case of any given disease this procedure might work quite well for those who believe in it. It is, however, the belief, and not the procedure, that works.²
    I am not recommending that you abandon the procedure when it obviously works for so many — yet you should understand why it brings about the desired results.
    Such medical technology is highly specific, however. You cannot be inoculated with the desire to live, or with the zest, delight, or contentment of the healthy animal. If you have decided to die, protected from one disease in such a manner, you will promptly come down with another, or have an accident. The immunization, while specifically effective, may only reinforce prior beliefs about the body’s ineffectiveness. It may appear that left alone the body would surely develop whatever disease might be “fashionable” at the time, so that the specific victory might result in the ultimate defeat as far as your beliefs are concerned.
    You have your own medical systems, however. I do not mean to undermine them, since they are undermining themselves. Some of my statements clearly cannot be proven, in your terms, and appear almost sacrilegious. Yet, throughout your history no man or woman has died who did not want to die, regardless of the state of medical technology. Specific diseases have certain symbolic meanings, varying with the times and the places.³
    There has been great discussion in past years about the survival of the fittest, in Darwinian terms,⁴ but little emphasis is placed upon the quality of life, or of survival itself; or in human terms, [there has been] little probing into the question of what makes life worthwhile. Quite simply, if life is not worthwhile, no species will have a reason to continue.
    Civilizations are literally social species. They die when they see no reason to live, yet they seed other civilizations. Your private mental states en masse bring about the mass cultural stance of your civilization. To some extent, then, the survival of your civilization is quite literally dependent upon the condition of each individual; and that condition is initially a spiritual, psychic state that gives birth to the physical organism. That organism is intimately connected to the natural biological state of each other person, and to each other living thing, or entity, however minute.
    Despite all “realistic” pragmatic tales to the contrary, the natural state of life itself is one of joy, acquiescence with itself — a state in which action is effective, and the power to act is a natural right. You would see this quite clearly with plants, animals, and all other life if you were not so blinded by beliefs to the contrary. You would feel it in the activity of your bodies, in which the vital individual affirmation of your cells brings about the mass, immensely complicated achievement of your physical being. That activity naturally promotes health and vitality.
    I am not speaking of some romanticized, “passive,” floppy, spiritual world, but of a clear reality without impediments, in which the opposite of despair and apathy reigns.
    This book will be devoted, then, to those conditions that best promote spiritual, psychic, and physical zest, the biological and psychic components that make a species desire to continue its kind. Such aspects promote the cooperation of all kinds of life on all levels with one another. No species competes with another, but cooperates to form an environment in which all kinds can creatively exist.    You live in a physical community, but you live first of all in a community of thoughts and feelings. These trigger your physical actions. They directly affect the behavior of your 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 yours. They dream, and in their way they reason.
    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 your society this almost becomes a necessity. In a “purely natural” setting you 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 overproduces, 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.”
    The consciousness that became so briefly physical is not annihilated, however, but in your terms waits for better conditions.
    There are also “trial 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.
    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 “fragment personalities,” wanting to taste physical reality, but not being ready to deal with it. Each case is individual, however, so these are general statements.
    Many children, who, it seems, should have died of disease, of “childhood 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 you are acquainted.
    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 masse 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 — but instead are shunted aside, unwanted and unloved. An unloved animal does not want to live.
    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.
    An animal 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.    Your scientists are beginning to understand man’s physical relationship with nature. The species is obviously a part of nature and not apart from it.
    Environmental questions are being raised about man’s effects upon the world in which he lives. There is, however, an inner environment that connects all consciousnesses that dwell upon your 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 you with all exterior phenomena.
    Your sense perception, physically speaking, is a result of behavior on the part of organs that seem to you to have no reality outside of their relationship with you. 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 you, allowing you to perceive physical reality.
    Your ears certainly seem to be permanent appendages, and so do your eyes. You say: “My eyes are blue,” or “My ears are small.” The physical matter of those sense organs changes constantly, however, with you none the wiser. While your body appears quite dependable, solid, [and] steady, you are not aware of the constant interchanges that occur between it and the physical environment. It does not bother you one whit that the physical substance of your body is made up of completely different atoms and molecules than it was composed of seven years ago, [say], or that your familiar hands are actually innocent of any smallest smidgen of matter that composed them [even in recent times past].
    You perceive your body as solid. Again, 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 you perceive are formed in their own way in the same fashion.
    The physical world that you recognize is made up of invisible patterns. These patterns are “plastic,” in that while they exist, their final form is a matter of probabilities directed by consciousness. Your senses perceive these patterns in their own ways. The patterns themselves can be “activated” in innumerable fashions. There is something out there to observe.
    Your sense apparatus determines what form that something will take, however. The mass world rises up before your eyes, but your eyes are part of that mass world. You cannot see your thoughts, so you do not realize that they have shape and form, even as, say, clouds do. There are currents of thought as there are currents of air, and the mental patterns of men’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 you locally and en masse, then, with a physical version of man’s emotional states. Period.
    Now: The physical planet is obviously also ever-changing while it is operationally or realistically or pragmatically relatively stable. The physical matter of the planet is also composed of literally infinite hordes 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 mankind, 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.
    It is quite obvious that people must die — not only because otherwise you would overpopulate your 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, you would have to invent it (smile) — for the context of that selfhood would be as limited as the experience of a great sculptor given but one hunk of stone ¹.
    The sculptor’s creation is pragmatically realistic, in that it exists as an object, and can be quite legitimately perceived, as can your world. The sculptor’s statue, however, comes from the inner environment, the patterns of probabilities. These patterns are not themselves inactive. They are possessed by the desire to be-actualized (with a hyphen). Behind all realities there are mental states. These always seek form, though again there are other forms than those you recognize. [...]

    Each person’s thoughts flow into that formation, forming part of the earth’s psychic atmosphere. From that atmosphere flows the natural earthly patterns from which your seasons emerge with all of their variety and effects. You are never victims of natural disasters, though it may seem that you are, for you have your hand in forming them. You are creatively involved in the earth’s cycles. No one can be born for you, or die for you, and yet no birth or death is really an isolated event, but one in which the entire planet participates. In personal terms, again, each species is concerned not only with survival but with the quality of its life and experience.
    In those terms, natural disasters ultimately end up righting a condition that earlier blighted the desired quality of life, so that adjustments were made.
    The “victims” choose to participate in those conditions at spiritual, psychological, and biological levels. Many of those who are counted among the fatalities might otherwise die of extended illnesses, for example. At cellular levels such knowledge is available, and in one way or another imparted, often in dreams, to the individual. Conscious comprehension need not follow, for many people know such things, and pretend not to know them at the same time.
    Others have finished with their challenges; they want to die and are looking for an excuse — a face-saving device. However, those who choose such deaths want to die in terms of drama, in the middle of their activities, and are in a strange way filled with the exultant inner knowledge of life’s strength even at the point of death. At the last they identify with the power of nature that seemingly destroyed them.
    That identification often brings about in death — but not always — an added acceleration of consciousness, and involves such individuals in a kind of “group death experience,” where all of the victims more or less embark into another level of reality “at the same time.”
    Those people were aware just beneath consciousness of the possibilities of such an event long before the disaster occurred, and could until the last moment choose to avoid the encounter. Animals know of weather conditions ahead of time, as old tales say. This perception is a biological part of your heritage also. The body is prepared, though consciously it seems you are ignorant.
    There are innumerable relationships that exist between the interior environment of the body and the weather patterns. The ancient feelings of identification with storms are quite valid, and in that respect the “realism” of feelings is far superior to the realism of logic. When a person feels a part of a storm, those feelings speak a literal truth. Logic deals with exterior conditions, with cause-and-effect relationships. Intuitions deal with immediate experience of the most intimate nature, with subjective motions and activities that in your terms move far quicker than the speed of light, and with simultaneous events that your cause-and-effect level is far too slow to perceive.²
    In that regard also, the activities of the inner environment are too fast for you to follow intellectually. Your intuitions, however, can give you clues to such behavior. A country is responsible for its own droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes — and for its own harvests and rich display of products, its industry and cultural achievements, and each of these elements is related to each other one.
    If the quality of life that is considered spiritually and biologically necessary fails, then adjustments occur. A political problem might be altered by a natural disaster if political means fail. On the other hand, the rousing creative energies of the people will emerge.
    Excellence will show itself through the arts, cultural creativity, technological or sociological accomplishments. The species tries to fulfill its great capacities. Each physical body in its own way is like the world. It has its own defenses and abilities, and each portion of it strives for a quality of existence that will bring to the smallest parts of it the spiritual and biological fulfillment of its own nature.
    The body is a spiritual, psychic, and social statement, biologically spoken. It is obviously private, yet it cannot be concealed, in that “it is where you are,” in usual terms.[...]

    At cellular levels the world exists with a kind of social interchange, in which the birth and death of cells are known to all others, and in which the death of a frog and a star gain equal weight. But at your level of activity your thoughts, feelings, and intents, however private, form part of the inner environment of communication. This inner environment is as pertinent and vital to the species’ well-being as is the physical one. It represents the psychic, mass bank of potential, even as the planet provides a physical bank of potential. When there is an earthquake in another area of the world, the land mass in your own country is in one way or another affected. When there are psychic earthquakes in other areas of the world, then you are also affected, and usually to the same degree.
    In the same way, if one portion of your own body is injured, then other portions feel the effects of the wound. An earthquake can be a disaster in the area where it occurs, even though its existence corrects imbalances, and therefore promotes the life of the planet. Emergency actions are quite rigorous in the immediate area of an earthquake, and aid is sent in from other countries. When an area of the body “erupts,” there are also emergency measures taken locally, and aid sent from other portions of the body to afflicted parts.
    The physical eruption, while it may appear to be a disaster in the area of the disease, is also, however, a part of the body’s defense system, taken to insure the whole balance of the body. Biologically, illness therefore represents the overall body defense system at work.
    I am trying to put this simply — but without some illnesses, the body could not endure. First of all, the body must be in a state of constant change, making decisions far too fast for you to follow, adjusting hormonal levels, maintaining balances between all of its systems; not only in relationship to itself — the body — but to an environment that is also in constant change. At biological levels the body often produces its own “preventative medicine,” or “inoculations,” by seeking out, for example, new or foreign substances in its environment [that are] due to nature, science or technology; it assimilates such properties in small doses, coming down with an “illness” which, left alone, would soon vanish as the body utilized what it could [of it], or socialized “a seeming invader.”
    The person might feel indisposed, but in such ways the body assimilates and uses properties that would otherwise be called alien ones. It immunizes itself through such methods. The body, however, exists with the mind to contend with — and the mind produces an inner environment of concepts. The cells that compose the body do not try to make sense of the cultural world. They rely upon your interpretation, therefore, for the existence of threats of a non-biological nature. So they depend upon your assessment.
    If that assessment correlates with biological ones, you have a good working relationship with the body. It can react swiftly and clearly. When you sense threat or danger for which the body can find no biological correlation, even as through cellular communication it scans the environment physically, then it must rely upon your assessment and react to danger conditions. The body will, therefore, react to imagined dangers to some degree, as well as to those that are biologically pertinent. Its defense system often becomes overexerted as a result.
    The body is, therefore, quite well equipped to deal with its physical stance in the physical world, and its defense systems are unerring in that respect. Your conscious mind, however, directs your temporal perception and interprets that perception, organizing it into mental patterns. The body, again, must depend upon those interpretations. The biological basis of all life is a loving, divine and cooperative one, and presupposes a safe physical stance from which any member of any species feels actively free to seek out its needs and to communicate with others of its kind.
    It is fashionable to believe that the animals do not possess imagination, but this is a quite erroneous belief. They anticipate mating, for example, before its time. They all learn through experience, and despite all of your concepts, learning is impossible without imagination at any level.
    In your terms, the imagination of the animals is limited. Theirs is not merely confined to the elements of previous experience, however. They can imagine events that have never happened to them. Man’s abilities in this respect are far more complicated, for in his imagination he deals with probabilities. In any given period of time, with one physical body, he can anticipate or perform an infinitely vaster number of events — each one remaining probable until he activates it.
    The body, responding to his thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, has much more data to deal with, therefore, and must have a clear area in which concise action is possible.
    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.
    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. You might be reading a newspaper headline, for example, as you cross a busy street. Long before you are consciously aware of the circumstances, your body might leap out of the path of an approaching car. The body is doing what it is supposed to do. Though consciously you were not afraid, there was a biologically pertinent fear that was acted upon.
    If, however, you 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.
    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 pseudothreatening situation, and is caught between gears, so to speak, with resulting biological confusion. The body’s responses must be specific.
    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 your own feelings and assessments. Usually, now, your entire medical systems literally generate as much disease as is cured — for you are everywhere hounded by the symptoms of various dis eases, and 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.
    The illnesses generally attributed to all different ages are involved. Those of the elderly, again, fit in with your social and cultural beliefs, the structure of your 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. You “catch” it because when you are young you believe that old people cannot perform. There are no inoculations against beliefs, so when young people with such beliefs grow old they become “victims.”²
    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.
    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 a certain level so that the individuals of a species — of any and all species — can develop. In your 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 too strongly.
    More and more, the quality of your lives is formed through the subjective realities of your 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.
    An animal has a sense of its own biological integrity. So does a child. In all forms of life each individual is born into a world already provided for it, with circumstances favorable to its growth and development; a world in which its own existence rests upon the equally valid existence of all other individuals and species, so that each contributes to nature’s whole. [...]

    During their lifetimes animals in their natural state enjoy their vigor and accept their worth. They regulate their own births — and their own deaths. The quality of their lives is such that their abilities are challenged. They enjoy contrasts: that between rest and motion, heat and cold, being in direct contact with natural phenomena that everywhere quickens their experience. They will migrate if necessary to seek conditions more auspicious. They are aware of approaching natural disasters, and when possible will leave such areas. They will protect their own, and according to circumstances and conditions they will tend their own wounded. Even in contests between young and old males for control of a group, under natural conditions the loser is seldom killed. Dangers are pinpointed clearly so that bodily reactions are concise.
    The animal knows he has the right to exist, and a place in the fabric of nature. This sense of biological integrity supports him.
    Man, on the other hand, has more to contend with. He must deal with beliefs and feelings often so ambiguous that no clear line of action seems possible. The body often does not know how to react. If you believe that the body is sinful, for example, you cannot expect to be happy, and health will most likely elude you,, for your dark beliefs will blemish the psychological and biological integrity with which you were born.
    The species is in a state of transition, one of many. This one began, generally speaking, when the species tried to step apart from nature in order to develop the unique kind of consciousness that is presently your own. That consciousness is not a finished product, however, but one meant to change, [to] evolve and develop. Certain artificial divisions were made along the way that must now be dispensed with.
    You must return, wiser creatures, to the nature that spawned you — not only as loving caretakers but as partners with the other species of the earth. You must discover once again the spirituality of your biological heritage. The majority of accepted beliefs — religious, scientific, and cultural — have tended to stress a sense of powerlessness, impotence, and impending doom — a picture in which man and his world is an accidental production with little meaning, isolated yet seemingly ruled by a capricious God. Life is seen as “a valley of tears” — almost as a low-grade infection from which the soul can be cured only by death.
    Religious, scientific, medical, and cultural communications stress the existence of danger, minimize the purpose of the species or of any individual member of it, or see mankind as the one erratic, half-insane member of an otherwise orderly realm of nature. Any or all of the above beliefs are held by various systems of thought. All of these, however, strain the individual’s biological sense of integrity, reinforce ideas of danger, and shrink the area of psychological safety that is necessary to maintain the quality possible in life. The body’s defense systems become confused to varying degrees.
    I do not intend to give a treatise upon the biological structures of the body and their interworkings, but only to add such information in that line that is not currently known, and is otherwise important to the ideas I have in mind. I am far more concerned [with] more basic issues. The body’s defenses will take care of themselves if they are allowed to, and if the psychological air is cleared of the true “carriers” of disease.

    While in this book I will point out some of the unfortunate areas of private and mass experience, I will also provide some suggestions for effective solutions. “You get what you concentrate upon.”¹ Your mental images bring about their own fulfillment. These are ancient dictums, but you must understand the ways in which your mass communication systems amplify both the “positive and the negative“ issues.
    I may for a while stress the ways in which individually, and as a civilization, you have undermined your own feelings of safety; yet I will also give you methods to reinforce those necessary feelings of biological integrity and spiritual comprehension that can vastly increase your spiritual and physical existence.
    Your beliefs have generated feelings of unworth. Having artificially separated yourselves from nature, you do not trust it, but often experience it as an adversary. Your religions granted man a soul, while denying any to other species. Your bodies then were relegated to nature and your souls to God, who stood immaculately apart from His creations.
    Your scientific beliefs tell you that your entire world happened accidentally. Your religions tell you that man is sinful: The body is not to be trusted; the senses can lead you astray. In this maze of beliefs you have largely lost a sense of your own worth and purpose. A generalized fear and suspicion is generated, and life too often becomes stripped of any heroic qualities. The body cannot react to generalized threats. It is, therefore, put under constant strain in such circumstances, and seeks to specify the danger. It is geared to act in your protection. It builds up strong stresses, therefore, so that on many occasions a specific disease or threat situation is “manufactured” to rid the body of a tension grown too strong to bear.
    Many of my readers are familiar with private meditation, when concentration is focused in one particular area. There are many methods and schools of thought here, but a highly suggestive state of mind results, in which spiritual, mental, and physical goals are sought. It is impossible to meditate without a goal, for that intent is itself a purpose. Unfortunately, many of your public health programs, and commercial statements through the various media, provide you with mass meditations of a most deplorable kind. I refer to those in which the specific symptoms of various diseases are given, in which the individual is further told to examine the body with those symptoms in mind. I also refer to those statements that just as unfortunately specify diseases for which the individual may experience no symptoms of an observable kind, but is cautioned that these disastrous physical events may be happening despite his or her feelings of good health. Here the generalized fears fostered by religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs are often given as blueprints of diseases in which a person can find a specific focus — the individual can say: “Of course, I feel listless, or panicky, or unsafe since I have suchand- such a disease.”
    The breast cancer suggestions associated with self-examinations have caused more cancers than any treatments have cured. They involve intense meditation of the body, and adverse imagery that itself affects the bodily cells.² Public health announcements about high blood pressure themselves raise the blood pressure of millions of television viewers.
    Your current ideas of preventative medicine, therefore, generate the very kind of fear that causes disease. They all undermine the individual’s sense of bodily security and increase stress, while offering the body a specific, detailed disease plan. But most of all, they operate to increase the individual sense of alienation from the body, and to promote a sense of powerlessness and duality.
    Your “medical commercials” are equally disease-promoting. Many, meaning to offer you relief through a product, instead actually promote the condition through suggestion, thereby generating a need for the product itself.
    Headache remedies are a case in point here. Nowhere do any medically-oriented commercial or public service announcements mention the body’s natural defenses, its integrity, vitality, or strength. Nowhere in your television or radio matter is any emphasis put upon the healthy. Medical statistics deal with the diseased. Studies upon the healthy are not carried out.
    More and more foods, drugs, and natural environmental conditions are being added to the list of disease-causing elements. Different reports place dairy products, red meats, coffee, tea, eggs, and fats on the list. Period. Generations before you managed to subsist on many such foods, and they were in fact promoted as additive to health. Indeed, man almost seems to be allergic to his own natural environment, a prey to the weather itself.
    It is true that your food contains chemicals it did not in years past. Yet within reason man is biologically capable of assimilating such materials, and using them to his advantage.
    When man feels powerless, however, and in a state of generalized fear; he can even turn the most natural earthly ingredients against himself. Your television, and your arts and sciences as well, add up to mass meditations. In your culture, at least, the educated in the literary arts provide you with novels featuring antiheroes, and often portray an individual existence [as being] without meaning, in which no action is sufficient to mitigate the private puzzlement or anguish.
    Many — not all — plotless novels or movies are the result of this belief in man’s powerlessness. In that context no action is heroic, and man is everywhere the victim of an alien universe. On the other hand your common, unlettered, violent television dramas do indeed provide a service lor ilicy imaginatively specify a generalized fear in a given situation, which is then resolved through drama. Individual action counts. The plots may be stereotyped or the acting horrendous, but in the most conventional terms the “good” man wins.
    Such programs do indeed pick up the generalized fears of the nation, but they also represent folk dramas — disdained by the intelligentsia — in which the common man can portray heroic capabilities, act concisely toward a desired end, and triumph.
    Those programs often portray your cultural world in exaggerated terms, and most resolution is indeed through violence. Yet your more educated beliefs lead you to an even more pessimistic picture, in which even the violent action of men and women who are driven to the extreme serves no purpose. The individual must feel that his actions count. He is driven to violent action only as a last resort — and illness often is that last resort.
    Your television dramas, the cops-and-robbers shows, the spy productions, are simplistic, yet they relieve tension in away that your public health announcements cannot do. The viewer can say: “Of course I feel panicky, unsafe, and frightened, because I live in such a violent world.” The generalized fear can find a reason [for its existence]. But the programs at least provide a resolution dramatically set, while the public health announcements continue to generate unease. Those mass meditations therefore reinforce negative conditions.
    In the overall, then, violent shows provide a service, in that they usually promote the sense of a man’s or a woman’s individual power over a given set of circumstances. At best the public service announcements introduce the doctor as mediator: You are supposed to take your body to a doctor as you take your car to a garage, to have its parts serviced. Your body is seen as a vehicle out of control, that needs constant scrutiny. The doctor is like a biological mechanic, who knows your body far better than you. Now these medical beliefs are intertwined with your economic and cultural structures, so you cannot lay the blame upon medical men or their profession alone. Your economic well-being is also a part of your personal reality. Many dedicated doctors use medical technology with spiritual understanding, and they are themselves the victims of the beliefs they hold.
    If you do not buy headache potions, your uncle or your neighbor may be out of business and not able to support his family, and therefore lack the means to buy your wares. You cannot disconnect one area of life from another. En masse, your private beliefs form your cultural reality. Your society is not a thing in itself apart from you, but the result of the individual beliefs of each person in it. There is no stratum of society that you do not in one way or another affect. Your religions stress sin. Your medical profession stresses disease. Your orderly sciences stress the chaotic and accidental theories of creation. Your psychologies stress men as victims of their backgrounds. Your most advanced thinkers emphasize man’s rape of the planet, or focus upon the future disaster that will overtake the world, or see men once again as victims of the stars.
    Many of your resurrected occult schools speak of a recommended death of desire, the annihilation of the ego, for the transmutation of physical elements to finer levels. In all such cases the clear spiritual and biological integrity of the individual suffers, and the precious immediacy of your moments is largely lost.
    Earth life is seen as murky, a dim translation of greater existence, rather than portrayed as the unique, creative, living experience that it should be. The body becomes disoriented, sabotaged. The clear lines of communication between spirit and body become cluttered. Individually and en masse, diseases and conditions result that are meant to lead you into other realizations. [...]

    While Ruburt was working at one of his books a few days ago, he heard a public service announcement. The official told all listeners that the flu season had officially begun. He sternly suggested that the elderly and those with certain diseases make appointments at once for flu shots.
    The official mentioned, by the way, that there was indeed no direct evidence connecting past flu shots with the occurrence of a rather bizarre disease that some of those inoculated with the flu vaccine happened to come down with.⁴ All in all, it was quite an interesting announcement, with implications that straddle biology, religion, and economics. “The flu season” is in a way an example of a psychologically-manufactured pattern that can at times bring about a manufactured epidemic.
    Behind such announcements there is the authority of the medical profession, and the very authority of your systems of communication as well. You cannot question the voice over the radio. It is disembodied and presumes to know.
    Once again, the elderly were singled out. It seems obvious that they are more susceptible to diseases. That susceptibility is a medical fact of life. It is a fact, however, without a basic foundation in the truth of man’s biological reality. It is a fact brought about through suggestion. The doctors see the bodily results, which are quite definite, and then those results are taken as evidence.
    In a few isolated areas of the world even today, the old are not diseaseridden, nor do their vital signs weaken. They remain quite healthy until the time of death.
    Their belief systems, therefore, you must admit, are quite practical. Nor are they surrounded by medical professions. Later in the book we will return to the subject. Here, you have, however, what almost amounts to a social program for illness — the flu season. A mass meditation, it has an economic structure in back of it: The scientific and medical foundations are involved. Not only this, however, but the economic concerns, from the largest pharmacies to the tiniest drugstores, the supermarkets and the corner groceries — all of these elements are involved.
    Pills, potions, and shots supposed to combat [colds and the] flu are given prominent displays, serving to remind those who might have missed them otherwise of the announcements [about] the coming time of difficulty. Commercials on television bring a new barrage, so that you can go from the hay fever season to the flu season without missing any personal medications.
    A cough in June may be laughed off and quickly forgotten. A cough in the flu season, however, is far more suspect — and under such conditions one might think, particularly in the midst of a poor week: “Who wants to go out tomorrow anyhow?”
    You are literally expected to come down with the flu. It can serve as an excuse for not facing many kinds of problems. Many people are almost consciously aware of what they are doing. All they have to do is pay attention to the suggestions offered so freely by the society. The temperature does rise. Concern causes the throat to become dry. Dormant viruses — which up to now have done no harm — are activated.
    Coat, glove, and boot manufacturers also push their wares. Yet in those categories there is more sanity, for their ads often stress wholesome activities, portraying the happy skier, the tramper through the woods in winter. Sometimes, however, they suggest that their wares will protect you against the flu and colds, and against the vulnerability of your nature.
    The inoculations themselves do little good overall, and they can be potentially dangerous, particularly when they are given to prevent an epidemic which has not in fact occurred. They may have specific value, but overall they are detrimental, confusing bodily mechanisms and setting off other biological reactions that might not show up, say, for some time.⁵
    The flu season intersects with the Christmas season, of course, when Christians are told to be merry and [wish] their fellows a happy return to the natural wonders of childhood, in thought at least. [They are also told] to pay homage to God. Christianity has become, however, a tangled sorry tale, its cohesiveness largely vanished. Such a religion becomes isolated from daily life. Many individuals cannot unify the various areas of their belief and feeling, and at Christmas they partially recognize the vast gulf that exists between their scientific beliefs and their religious beliefs. They find themselves unable to cope with such a mental and spiritual dilemma. A psychic depression often results, one that is deepened by the Christmas music and the commercial displays, by the religious reminders that the species is made in God’s image, and by the other reminders that the body so given is seemingly incapable of caring for itself and is a natural prey to disease and disaster.
    So the Christmas season carries a man’s hopes in your society, and the flu season mirrors his fears and shows the gulf between the two.
    The physician is also a private person, so I speak of him only in his professional capacity, for he usually does the best he can in the belief system that he shares with his fellows. Those beliefs do not exist alone, but are of course intertwined with religious and scientific ones, as separate as they might appear. Christianity has conventionally treated illness as the punishment of God, or as a trial sent by God, to be borne stoically. It has considered man a sinful creature, flawed by original sin, forced to work by the sweat of his brow.
    Science has seen man as an accidental product of an uncaring universe, a creature literally without a center of meaning, where consciousness was the result of a physical mechanism that only happened to come into existence, and that had no reality outside of that structure. Science has at least been consistent in that respect. Christianity, however, officially asks children of sorrow to be joyful and sinners to find a childlike purity; it asks them to love a God who one day will destroy the world, and who will condemn them to hell if they do not adore him.
    Many people, caught between such conflicting beliefs, fall prey to physical ills during the Christmas season particularly. The churches and the hospitals are often the largest buildings in any town, and the only ones open on Sunday without recourse to city ordinances. You cannot divorce your private value systems from your health, and the hospitals often profit from the guilt that religions have instilled in their people.
    I am speaking now of religions so intertwined with social life and community ventures that all sense of basic religious integrity becomes lost. Man is by nature a religious creature.
    One of man’s strongest attributes is religious feeling. It is the part of psychology most often overlooked. There is a natural religious knowledge with which you are born. Ruburt’s book The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James explains that feeling very well. It is a biological spirituality translated into verbal terms. It says: “Life is a gift (and not a curse). I am a unique, worthy creature in the natural world, which everywhere surrounds me, gives me sustenance, and reminds me of the greater source from which I myself and the world both emerge. My body is delightfully suited to its environment, and comes to me, again, from that unknown source which shows itself through all of the events of the physical world.”
    That feeling gives the organism the optimism, the joy, and the everabundant energy to grow. It encourages curiosity and creativity, and places the individual in a spiritual world and a natural one at once.
    Organized religions are always attempts to redefine that kind of feeling in cultural terms. They seldom succeed because they become too narrow in their concepts, too dogmatic, and the cultural structures finally overweigh the finer substance within them.
    The more tolerant a religion is, the closer it comes to expressing those inner truths. The individual, however, has a private biological and spiritual integrity that is a part of man’s heritage, and is indeed any creature’s right. Man cannot mistrust his own nature and at the same time trust the nature of God, for God is his word for the source of his being — and if his being is tainted, then so must be his God.
    Your private beliefs merge with those of others, and form your cultural reality. The distorted ideas of the medical profession or the scientists, or of any other group, are not thrust upon you, therefore. They are the result of your mass beliefs — isolated in the form of separate discipline!. Medical men, for example, are often extremely unhealthy because they are so saddled with those specific health beliefs that their attention is concentrated in that area more than others not so involved. The idea of prevention is always based upon fear — for you do not want to prevent something that is joyful. Often, therefore, preventative medicine causes what it hopes to avoid. Not only does the idea [of prevention] continually promote the entire system of fear, but specific steps taken to prevent a disease in a body not already stricken, again, often set up reactions that bring about side effects that would occur if the disease had in fact been suffered.
    A specific disease will of course have its effects on other portions of the body as well, [effects] which have not been studied, or even known. Such inoculations, therefore, cannot take that into consideration. There are also cases where alterations occur after inoculation, so that for a while people actually become carriers of diseases, and can infect others.
    There are individuals who very rarely get ill whether or not they are inoculated, and who are not sensitive in the health area. I am not implying, therefore, that all people react negatively to inoculations. In the most basic of terms, however, inoculations do no good, either, though I am aware that medical history would seem to contradict me.
    At certain times, and most particularly at the birth of medical science in modern times, the belief in inoculation, if not by the populace then by the doctors, did possess the great strength of new suggestion and hope — but I am afraid that scientific medicine has caused as many new diseases as it has cured. When it saves lives, it does so because of the intuitive healing understanding of the physician, or because the patient is so impressed by the great efforts taken in his behalf, and therefore is convinced secondhandedly of his own worth.
    Physicians, of course, are also constantly at the beck and call of many people who will take no responsibility at all for their own well-being, who will plead for operations they do not need. The physician is also visited by people who do not want to get well, and use the doctor and his methods as justification for further illness, saying: “The doctor is no good,” or “The medicine will not work,” therefore blaming the doctor for a way of life they have no intention of changing.
    The physician is also caught between his religious beliefs and his scientific beliefs. Sometimes these conflict, and sometimes they only serve to deepen his feelings that the body, left alone, will get any disease possible.
    Again, you cannot separate your systems of values and your most intimate philosophical judgments from the other areas of your private or mass experience.
    In this country, your tax dollars go for many medical experiments and preventative-medicine drives — because you do not trust the good intent of your own bodies. In the same way, your government funds [also] go into military defenses to prevent war, because if you do not trust your own body’s good intent toward you, you can hardly trust any good intent on the part of your fellowmen.
    In fact, then, preventative medicine and outlandish expenditures for preventative defense are quite similar. In each case there is the anticipation of disaster — in one case from the familiar body, which can be attacked by deadly diseases at any time, and is seemingly at least without defenses; and in the other case from the danger without: exaggerated, ever-threatening, and ever to be contended with.
    Disease must be combatted, fought against, assaulted, wiped out. In many ways the body becomes almost like an alien battleground, for many people trust it so little that it becomes highly suspect. Man then seems pitted against nature. Some people think of themselves as patients, as others, for example, might think of themselves as students. Such people are those who are apt to take preventative measures against whatever disease is in fashion or in season, and hence take the brunt of medicine’s unfortunate aspects, when there is no cause. [...]

    You could not live without viruses, nor could your biological reality as you know it now exist.
    Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule you think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. These — and I am putting it as simply as possible — take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. Viruses that are “deadly” in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful a( given rates of action. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.
    As an example from another field, consider poisons. Belladonna can be quite deadly, yet small doses of it were known to aid the body in disease conditions.³
    The viruses in the body have a social, cooperative existence. Their effects become deadly only under certain conditions. The viruses must be triggered into destructive activity, and this happens only at a certain point, when the individual involved is actively seeking either death or a crisis situation biologically.
    The initial contagion in such cases is always emotional and mental. Social conditions are usually involved, so that an individual is, say, at the lower end of a poor social environment, a seeming victim of it, or in a situation where his individual value as a social member is severely weakened.
    Now: In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. So of course the resulting diseases are infectious. To that degree they are social diseases. It is not so much that a virus, say, suddenly turns destructive — though it does — as it is that the entire cooperative structure within which all the viruses are involved becomes insecure and threatened.
    I told you (in the private 836th session) that viruses mutate. Such is often the case. It seems quite scientific to believe in inoculations against such dangerous diseases — and certainly, scientifically, inoculations seem to work: People in your time right now are not plagued by smallpox, for example. Some cultures have believed that illnesses were caused by demons. Medicine men, through certain ceremonies, would try to rid the body of the demons — and those methods worked also. The belief system was tight and accepted, and it only began to fail when those societies encountered “civilized views.”
    If you call the demons “negative beliefs,” however, then you have, taken strides forward. People continue to die of diseases. Many of your scientific procedures, including inoculations, of themselves “cause” new diseases. It does not help a patient inoculated against smallpox and polio if [eventually] he dies of cancer as a result of his negative beliefs.⁴
    What I have said about viruses applies to all biological life. Viruses are “highly intelligent” — meaning that they react quickly to stimuli. They are responsive to emotional states. They are social. Their scale of life varies considerably, and some can be inactive for centuries, and revive. They have extensive memory patterns, biologically imprinted. Some can multiply in the tens of thousands within seconds. They are in many ways the basis of biological life, but you are aware of them only when they show “a deadly face.”
    You are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle. [...]

    You think of viruses as physical, and of thoughts as mental. You should know that thoughts also have their physical aspects in the body, and that viruses have their mental aspects in the body. At times you have both asked why an ailing body does not simply assert itself and use its healing abilities, throwing off the negative influence of a given set of beliefs and thoughts.
    When you think of thoughts as mental and viruses as physical, the question is understandable. It is not just that thoughts influence the body, as of course they do; but each one of them represents a triggering stimulus, bringing about hormonal changes and altering the entire physical situation at any given time.
    Your physical body is, as an entity, the fleshed-out version — the physically alive version — of the body of your thoughts. It is not that your thoughts just trigger chemical reactions in the body, but that your thoughts have a chemical reality besides their recognizable mental aspects. I will have to use an analogy. It is not the best, but I hope it will get the point across: It is as if your thoughts turned into the various appendages of your body. They have an invisible existence within your body as surely as viruses do. Your body is composed not only of the stuff within it that, say, X-rays or autopsies can reveal, but it also involves profound relationships, alliances and affiliations that nowhere physically show. Your thoughts are as physically pertinent to your body as viruses are, as alive and self-propagating, and they themselves form inner affiliations. Their vitality automatically triggers all of the body’s inner responses. When you think thoughts, they are conscious. You think in sentences, or paragraphs, or perhaps in images. Those thoughts, as clearly as I can explain this, rise from inner components of which you are unaware.
    When the thought is thought, it is, say, broken down again to those components. Your thoughts have an emotional basis, also. The smallest cell within your body contributes to that emotional reality, and reacts instantly to your thoughts.
    In those terms, thoughts move far quicker of course than viruses. The action of the virus follows the thought. Each thought is registered biologically. Basically, when you have an immunity to a disease you have a mental immunity.
    You think of viruses as evil, spreading perhaps from country to country, to “invade” scores of physical mechanisms. Now thoughts are “contagious.” You have a natural immunity against all thoughts that do not fit in with your own purposes and beliefs, and naturally, you are “inoculated” with a wholesome trust and belief in your own thoughts above others. The old ideas of voodoo-ism recognized some of these concepts, but complicated and distorted them with fears of evil, psychic invasion, psychic killing, and so forth. You cannot divide, say, mental and physical health, nor can you divide a person’s philosophy from his bodily condition. [...]

    When a civilization does not support creativity it beings to falter. When it distrusts its gifted people, rather than encouraging them, a nation is at least in trouble. Your psychologies, stressing “the norm,” made people frightened of their individual characteristics and abilities, because psychology’s norm did not fit the contours of any one human being. Ii did not touch the heights or the depths of human experience. People became afraid of their own individuality.
    Ruburt today read an article about gifted children — their background and development. Gifted children do not fit psychology’s picture. Gifted children do not fit the portrait of children that is sold to parents. The fact is that for many reasons gifted children merely show the latent quickness, mental agility, and curiosity and learning capacity, that is inherent in the species. They are not eccentric versions of humanity at all, but instead provide a hint of mankind’s true capacities.
    Your brains are not empty, but well-oiled machines ready to whirl into activity at your births. They are provided with a propensity to learn — and the rudiments of knowledge as you understand it exits within the brain. In those terms, now, the brain thinks before birth. It does not simply react. Each individual has its own unique abilities. Some that involve relationships with others, you do not even have words for. Parents, however, often half-disapprove of their children if they show unusual gifts. They are afraid their children will not get along with others. They are upset because the children do not fit the norm — but no child ever fits “the norm.”
    Many adults, sensing their own abilities in one field or another, deliberately play down those abilities because they are afraid of standing out from “the masses” — or they are afraid they will be attacked by their peers. They have been taught by religion and science alike that any kind of greatness is suspect. Yet each person alive contains an element of greatness; and more, a desire to fulfill those inner abilities.
    I am not speaking of greatness in terms of fame, or in terms of usually understood artistic or intellectual abilities alone, but also of people whose lives have the capacity for great emotional content. I am speaking also of other natural abilities — that of dream communication, the conscious utilization of dreams and creativity in daily life. There are dimensions of human sentiment and psychological experience, that remain latent simply because you focus your attention so closely within the idea of “the norm.” Any unofficial experience must then remain bizarre, eccentric, outside of your main concerns, and ignored by your sciences.
    Many children, for that matter, who are regarded as retarded by their teachers, are instead highly gifted. The same also applies to disruptive children, who are overactive and pin on drugs. Their rebellion is quite natural. Autistic children, in many cases, now, are those who have picked up the idea that the world is so unsafe that it is better not to communicate with it at all, as long as their demands or needs are being met. When the child is fed and clothed and cared for, then it continues its behavior, and the behavior itself does (underlined) serve its needs.
    The child feels that it is not safe to interact with the world, however. No one is going to deprive a child of food, and yet food can be used in such cases, in terms perhaps of treats, if the child must ask for them, or in some way indicate a choice. Autistic children are afraid of making choices. Some of this is often picked up from parents, so that the child expresses their own unacknowledged fears. The autistic child [can be] highly intelligent, however.
    To some extent, such a child symbolizes what happens when an individual believes that he or she is unworthy, that he or she cannot trust impulses, that choices present more problems than advantages. That it is safer to hide abilities than it is to use them. Life is expression.
    I will give the beginning of an answer (to my question about the relationship between the host organism and disease). You make your own reality. That should be your complete answer, but obviously it is not.
    First of all, if a sperm carrying cancer entered a woman’s uterus, and if she had no intentions of getting the disease, her body’s own system would make the cancer completely ineffective. In the second place, however, referring to the article, that is not what happens to begin with — and I am somewhat at a loss to explain, simply because of certain invisible assumptions that it seems to me you must necessarily make.
    I will explain as best I can, though some of what I say will certainly seem contradictory to scientific knowledge.
    Though scientists might find “cancer cells,” and though it might seem that cancer is caused by a virus, cancer instead involves a relationship, say, between what you might think of as a host and parasite, in those terms — and to some extent the same applies to any disease, including smallpox, though the diseases themselves may appear to have different causes completely. A host cell, say, is not simply attacked. It invites attack, though I am not pleased at all with the connotations of the word “attack.” I am trying to use words familiar to you to start.
    It is not simply that a cell suddenly “relaxes its defenses” against disease. As easily as I can, I will try to explain. A cell mirrors a psychological state. A cell exists by itself, as its own entity, but also in context with all of the other cells in the body. There are literally uncountable psychological states mixing and interchanging constantly, with the overall psychological stance being one of biological integrity: The organism holds together, maintains its functions, and so forth.
    Your body is the physical mirror of your psychological state. It is powered by the energy of the universe. It actually springs into being in each moment. Your mind and your body come from the same source, from universal energy. You are powered with vitality. You must seek meaning in your lives. When you lose the sense of life’s meaning, for whatever reason, this is reflected in your body. It is very difficult to separate all of this from the many connotations placed about disease, and I do not want the material to be misread. Cancer, for example, has become the symbol for the body’s vulnerability, in current years — the proof of man’s susceptibility to the body. It is a disease that people have when they want to die — when they are ashamed to admit that they want to die, because death seems to fly against sane behavior. If the species struggles to survive, then how can individuals want to die?
    I have mentioned before that many people have had cancer and recovered without knowing it. In your belief system, however, it is almost imperative to see a doctor in such circumstances, for many fears are unsubstantiated, and the fear alone, found groundless, gives the person new life symbolically and physically.
    In the case of your article, a woman’s cells would already have had to prepare themselves for the guest — granted that guest was cancerous, and was a sperm. There is not an attack. There is an acceptance, and a preparation for certain changes.
    A life crisis is formed. The “parasite,” or virus, plays its part in setting up such a psychologically-desired position. It is an emotionally-charged position, an imminent crisis. I am aware of the tormenting questions involved in such issues, and also of the gap between my explanations and the daily experiences of many people. The fact is that when death comes it is wanted; it has been chosen.
    The fact is that death in its way is the culmination of life, leading toward a new birth and new experience. The cells know this. So does the heart. People cannot admit that they want to die at certain times. If they could accept the fact of their own wishes, some could even change their minds. Many do: The psychological condition changes for the better, and the body cells are no longer amiable to the cancerous condition.
    Woman whose husbands have had vasectomies have themselves often resolved sexual problems that have bothered them. Fear is reduced in that area. Cervical cancer can involve — can involve — distortions of the growth process itself, because of the complicated distortions of belief on the woman’s part. In a way the very pain of cancer — of some cancers — often acts through its intensity as a reflection of the person’s belief that life is painful, tormenting. At the same time, the pain is a reminder of feeling and sensation. [...]

    Many viruses are vital to physical existence, and in your terms there are gradations of activity, so that only under certain conditions do viruses turn into, say, what you think of as deadly ones. The healthiest body contains within it many so-called deadly viruses in what you may call an inactive form — inactive from your viewpoint, in that they are not causing disease. They are, however, helping to maintain the body’s overall balance. In a way in each body, the species settles upon a known status quo, and yet experiments creatively at many levels with cellular alterations, chromosomal variations, so that of course each body is unique. There are kinds of gradations, say, in the lines and kinds of disease. Certain diseases can actually strengthen the body from a prior weaker state, by calling upon the body’s full defenses. Under certain conditions, some socalled disease states could insure the species’ survival.
    It is very difficult to explain. In away, some disease states help to insure the survival of the species — not by weeding out the sickly but by introducing into large numbers of individuals the conditions needed to stabilize other strains within the species that need to be checked, or to “naturally inoculate” the species against a sensed greater danger.
    At the minute levels — microscopic levels — there are always some biological experiments being carried out, in a creative effort to give the species as much leeway as possible for effective action. Your body is changed biologically by your thoughts.
    Your culture has its biological effect upon the species. I am not speaking of obvious connections in a derogatory manner, such as pollution and so forth. If you were thinking in old terms of evolution, then I would be saying that your cultures and civilizations actually alter the chromosomal messages. Your thoughts affect your cells, again, and they can change what are thought of as hereditary factors. Your imaginations are intimately connected with your diseases, just as your imaginations are so important in all other areas of your lives. You form your being by imaginatively considering such-and-such a possibility, and your thoughts ailed your body in that regard. In a way, illness is a tool used on behalf of life, for people have given it social, economic, psychological, and religious connotations. It becomes another area of activity and of expression.