THE THINGS FORMING US

My body started jerking and moving in a pattern of activity that was very unexpected. It expressed a feeling of being trapped or pinned down around the area of the chest and solar plexus. My body felt very stiff and immobile and from the feelings I could not rise from the bed because of being held down. A few shouted phrases accompanied this. I said that the father carries the pattern for generations. I was referring to the pattern of achievement or lack of it that is passed on to the children. It was the attitudes of how to cope with social activity or work – the external world.

The movements gradually led to feelings. These expressed a living connection existing between my ancestors in Italy and myself. This surprised me because I had years ago gone through the realisations of what I carried from my father and his fathers – the subjugation by church and state. But this was different. It was not that I was still carrying the attitudes and fears, rather that because I dared to step out of dependence and subjugation by such authorities, deeper levels of influence of a transpersonal nature were being squeezed out of my body. I experienced the sense of our family having lived for generations under fear – fear of death – fear of what people would do to us if we didn’t conform. My breaking away from such conformity was the activity that was squeezing it out of my body.

I saw that having lived in those conditions for generations our body had changed – altered. Like wasps that at one period were individuals and then for generations lived as a colony and their body altered. I felt that such alterations had occurred in our family and they were being got rid of.

The phrases coming out of me at this point were that – ‘Fathers are a dying breed’. ‘Not to soon either’. ‘A terrible thing to carry all by oneself’. ‘Put in the role of God and got to go out into the world and prove oneself against all odds’.

I wondered here what it was that I was carrying in my body that was emerging. I asked myself what I was breaking free of. Certainly fear of the church. Fancy kissing the Popes finger – the ring – as if he were holy. Why did we do it?

Now a rush of insight arose. I saw that the Pope represents a function in the state or society. He represented the function of cohesion. The power to act as one body, one group, one will. I saw the church, and its ministers as representing the power which causes a nation or group to become like an anthill, or like a group of animals such as the mole-rats, to act as one organism. The individuals have to submerge their will and personal needs for the needs of the whole. This was represented by Christ on the cross – the pain of sacrificing one’s life for others.

This insight was deepened by seeing that all the functions of the individual were taken on by the state. For instance, to act as a single organism – the body of Christ – the worker cells would not function like the brain cells. That is, they would not make decisions of decide policies. This was taken over by a special group of men acting as special cells – rather like in a termites nest some termites are workers, some soldiers. They are specially reared and chemically stimulated to fulfil these roles. Worker bees are fed differently to the queen for instance. Thus in the group organism of human society there are different casts or levels of function. The means of stopping workers from taking on the role of independent decisions was by the use of force, threats, fear, murder, or even integration into the new order.

Looked at in this light religion was a very functional process which both represented, induced, and enforced the life of the social organism. It acted as a self-regulatory or healing function in the ‘body’ of the people also. It encouraged individuals to lose themselves in the good of the whole – to gives their lives to it. The overall person – the collective person – was represented by Christ. Christ also represented the life of the individual within the mass of cells.

Many modern individuals are learning to break free of the influence of groups and organisations. This is difficult though, because for huge periods of time that is all we knew. The old patterns are very deep, even in our body. Feeling free is not enough. It only proves itself when we can maintain it in the face of outside authority. I felt that the pressure of the group – the pressure to conform would subdue the working of some aspects of the glandular system and other body processes. It would lead to a fairly low energy type of person or group.

To come alive one would need to become capable of making one’s own decisions outside of the influence of the protection of ready made rules of conduct such as religion, politics and philosophy. Being free is frightening but wonderful. One leaves behind the responsibility to God and the need to do what God or parents say.

This may lead us to feel we are not part of the playground of life. I meant this in a real sense like the ‘games’ which go on in a children’s playground – top dog and underdog – gang enforcement – nationalism and suppression and aggravation of minority groups. I saw that in recent years I have myself been standing back from this everyday ‘playground’ and not getting involved. I have broken free from sets of belief systems and have not identified with another. But I have looked at other cultures in an attempt to see ‘what they’ve got’.

I went on to consider what was represented by Eastern religions, and to consider the ‘solutions’ they offered such as the void, nirvana, samadhi, etc. I had been reading ‘I Am That’ previously and this entered into what I realised.

As I explored the states of being suggested in Eastern practices I saw something I had never seen before. Firstly it was to do with the whole social situation of Eastern countries. Always the individual cells – the individual men women and children – were in stress in the sense that society pushed them to conformity. The cast system of India, the killing of students in the recent social conflict, the conformity seen in Japan, and the recent feudal systems; all pointed to individual stress, pain. I saw the image of the termite hill as representing this. If the mound satisfies the individual members then their needs are met. But supposing there was not enough oxygen in the mound, this would show as individual and collective distress.

The other telling point was that the information I had received about the ‘answers’ to life in the Eastern system were always suggested as a release from pain. Buddha’s nirvana was an extinguishing of the ego so there would be a release from the pain of life. The sight of death, illness, suffering in Buddha’s life was what motivated his search for an answer. The path of Buddhism is a way toward release from suffering. This suffering I realised as the individual ‘distress’ such as the termites might feel if their ‘social system’ were not actually supplying the needs of its individuals. The massive concretization of the caste system suggests this from another angle.

The reading of ‘I Am That’ also told me the same thing. In reply to questions as to what was the point of finding the state of being in which there was no self, was that all pain was gone. The statements of people asking the questions was also suggesting this. To quote from memory; ‘Even though I have periods of pleasure, pain always returns.’ This theme occurred often, suggesting the questioning Indians felt a lot of pain in their life. Why did they not see that although there is sometimes pain in one’s life, one always returns to pleasure unless you are not dealing with traumas you are unconscious of? See Psychological Vomiting

So, I saw the Eastern Path as ways that distressed individuals could find release. A method had been found in which all self could be lost, and the usual pain of individual existence would no longer operate. This was tremendously informative and freeing to me. For much of my life I had investigated and pursued understanding of various cultural wisdom, but I had never seen that some of it had arisen from such enormous social misery. For the individual to change society was less easy than destroying the state of mind which led to a sense of oneself. In destroying this all pain was gone too.

I realised that our own society exhibited such signs of distress, as did America, and most of Western society. Léon and I talked about this at one point and Léon said that individuals in our own society who did not fit in with the social order – were not functional in the ant heap – might be allowed to live because the conforming members might be frightened to see them dying on the street – as happens in India, middle East, Africa, etc.

There seemed to be quite a long period when I went in search of some sort of answer to this awful situation. If I had access to a wider awareness, as appeared to be the situation in the session, then it might be possible for me to find a workable solution to this distress. I realised I had put this question on myself for many years. My quest inwards was largely an attempt to find an ‘answer’ which would be healing to the individuals who used or lived it. I kept reminding myself at times in the session, as in the last one, that I wasn’t Jesus Christ. I wasn’t the saviour of the world. I hadn’t found an answer. But I felt that people who were trying to exist outside of the old patterns needed love and support, that I give freely to those who reach out for it.

In the search I spontaneously felt myself going into the ‘Path of Death’ seen in the previous session but not explored. This time I went into the experience. The imagery was that lizards, frogs, snakes were pouring up from down below – the pelvis. They ran along an old dry river bed – to the head. As this happened I realised I was going into the ‘reptile’ aspect of my brain (See Reptilian Brain) in which my breathing slows right down. This happened and I felt I was going into the presence of the animal temple, a contact with instinctive wisdom. At one point there was some movement which I didn’t quite understand about giving a body signal and it not being responded to. But I got into feeling that I could find no answer and wondered what I was doing in this type of awareness. I did feel that whatever animal we have loved we have the pattern of it as a resource.