“Mass Meditations.”
Health Plans for Disease.
Epidemics of Beliefs, and Effective Mental
“Inoculations” against Despair
“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 ON.” 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 awhile 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 unworthy. 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 it 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 self worth and purpose. A generalize 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 to 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 are sought. It is impossible to meditate without a goal, for that intent is itself a purpose. Unfortunately, many of you public health programs, and commercial statements through the various, 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 given as the blue prints 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 such and such a disease.”
The breast cancer suggestions associated with self-examinations have caused more caners than any treatments have cured (most emphatically). They involve intense meditation of the body, and adverse imagery that itself affects the bodily cells. Public health announcements about high blood pressure themselves raise the blood pressure of millions of television viewers (even more emphatically).
Your current ideas of preventative medicine, therefore, generate the very kind of fear that causes disease. They all understand the individuals 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 individuals sense of alienation from the body, and 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 it 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 defense’s, it 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 such a 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, using them to his advantage.
When man feels powerless, however in a state of generalized fear, he can turn the most natural Earthly ingredients against himself. Your television, 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 individuals existence(as being) without meaning, in which no action is sufficient to mitigate the private puzzlement or anguish.
Many-not all plot less 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, for they 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 action counts. 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 a way 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 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 suppose 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 the medical men or their profession alone. Your economic well being is part of your personal reality. Many dedicated doctors use medical technology with spiritual understanding, and they are themselves are victims of the beliefs that 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 individuals beliefs of each person in it. There is no stratum in 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 backrounds. Your most advanced thinkers emphasize the rape of the planet, or focus upon the future disaster that will overtake the world, or see men once again as the 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 back 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 a greater existence, rather than portrayed as the unique, creative, living experience it should be. The body becomes disorientated, 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.
End of session.
The Individual And The Nature Of Mass Events
A Seth Book
by Jane Roberts