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PLENEURETHICS A New Concept in Healing |
| Volume
VII
/ Chapter 9 LIFE AND IDENTITY |
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Life on earth is an involvement of the mind in flesh through the brain. The meaning of life is enriched as this involvement is perfected. If the flesh is denied, the ethical mind abandoned, or the brain tissue abused, the meaning of life will be distorted, ugly, and unrewarding. If the flesh is acknowledged, the reach of the ethical mind is honored, and the brain is respected; life will come to have meaning beautiful to all.
Life on earth has meaning relative to the earth itself because the physical body is fashioned from the earth at hand. If the earth is poor and exhausted and corrupted, the meaning of life will tend to become deficient, restricted, and distorted. Neighbor will turn against neighbor, and man will rebel within himself. If the land is rich, fertile, and properly maintained, life will have all essential prerequisites for material excellence.
Life also has meaning in relation to other life. If one’s relationship with another life is unethical, this dereliction will impair civilization in general, deny the guilty individual full stature, and deprive his life of fullest meaning.
Life also has a reality set by brain performance. Dimension and statistics of reality for any particular individual are relative to brain capability and competence. As the brain is altered by experience, mental effort, physical trauma, or battery by drugs, so is the framework of reality shifted for the mind of that particular individual.
The deepest meaning of life is not to be found in a
mechanical brain; it is deeper in the nature of man. However, if a
mechanical brain is impaired, the inner nature of pure man will be
unable to determine
The meaning of life does not come from material possession. One may believe that happiness and real meaning will come from acquisition of this or that thing as a possession. But once acquired, the possession loses its value for providing real meaning of life. Possessions may make life more comfortable or more interesting, but they are not a substitute for more eternal meaning of life.
The meaning of life certainly does not derive solely from mental stimulation. New breakthroughs in experience will never provide a solid backbone of meaning. The youthful thrill-seeker who demands one titillating experience after another is doomed to eventual boredom and failure in life.
There are no brain-clattering ideas about the meaning of life which will keep a person forever youthful and in a constant state of elation or triumph. If there were such an idea, it would be pathological. The organism would be unable to withstand the tension-producing impact for long and remain alive. Nor is the deepest meaning of life to be found in the mentality generally. Some of the cleverest and most sophisticated people have the shallowest feel for life. The meaning of life can be generally rich if people identify with the inner source of their life on earth, even if their mentality is severely limited from lack of travel or advanced education or cosmopolitan experiences.
Does life have a particular and detailed meaning for a person as an individual? As individuals people can only guess at the detail of the meaning of their own life until they have spanned its extent. Looking back over the expanse of a lifetime they are then in the position to impose close interpretations on the specific events of the past and their reaction to those events.
Life in detail has a meaning as it is lived. Life for the
infant is limited to avoiding pain and finding comfort. Life takes on
more specific meaning as the experiences of the years accumulate. That
with which people identify, if they are left to their own haphazard
devices, will change as maturity in life shifts their viewpoint. Children will tend to identify with one sort of thing, adolescents another, young men and women still another, and so on, into middle age and beyond. Each age will think its particular identity best.
Each age will find difficulty in communicating with the other. The young are unable to communicate because they do not yet know how, and the older refuse to try because having once been young they know the futility of even trying.
The meaning of the detail of life is closely related to past decisions, and what people currently choose it to be. People can opt to condemn everything at first glance, ridicule it, accept it uncritically, or examine it thoroughly before deciding. Once having decided people can close their mind to further review, or change their decision in light of new evidence.
People must mold the meaning of their own life. The meaning of their life, like their destiny, is controlled in part by their past actions and their present reaction. Life in large part is what they make it.
In Pleneurethics the richest life is the one that has the most satisfying meaning, the one that has lived in best attunement with highest ethical consideration along with intellectual wisdom and knowledge. This means more than just paying lip service to high morality. It means actually living a life as best one can. It means molding life so that experiences are increasingly ethically rewarding as one advances in life.
There is one aspect of life that is much the same for each person. This aspect is derived from the inner life force or Inner Ethical Being. This Inner Ethical Force is identical from one person to another. Here is where life’s fullest meaning may be achieved. Through contemplation, meditation, and struggle to refine themselves ethically so that they can more clearly approach their perfect Inner Being, they find fulfillment of life’s deepest meaning.
Identity
There is a perfect Inner Ethical Being with which people may identify in Pleneurethics. This being is not a supernatural structure residing far away in some mystical realm, but it abides within each person—black or white, young or old, male or female. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to make immediate contact with this being. The youthful especially have difficulty.
In the beginning stages of advancement toward full Pleneurethical enlightenment, there are other objects and beliefs to serve as temporary foci for identity. People may identify with civilization as a whole, and with that which brings advancement and security to civilization rather than that which retards civilization.
To identify with things of nature is perhaps better than with unnatural items such as cars or guns or dollars. Even in the identity with nature, a person should be careful lest he identify with violence and death as represented by wolves, panthers, and the eagle.
Each person may, during various periods of his life, identify with the earth and spend part of his time exploring it, cultivating it, and keeping it clean and unblemished, rather than despoiling it through savage, thoughtless conquest, and exploitation of resources. But even as a person identifies with the earth, he must not neglect other fit areas with which he must ultimately identify if he is to live the proper life on earth.
A person may identify with his body and keep it whole. He must not neglect his brain, nor should he neglect to educate his mind so that his mentality is a properly educated and enlightened ethical structure of his own fashion. And, finally, a person should not neglect to identify with his Inner Ethical Being which resides in the still quiet of his central nature.
Since Inner Ethical Being is essentially identical in ethical dimension for all people, when a person finally achieves identity which his own Inner Ethical Being; he has also achieved identity with the inner nature of all other persons and living things.
Each person must ultimately find and identify with his true nature. If he does this he will leave a lofty, living edifice to mark his sojourn on earth.
One need not identify with Pleneurethics; rather he should identify with that which is above all else in his very own inner self. In this way he becomes truly integrated around an irrefrangible central structure of unassailable virtue and honor.
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