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NoME Part Three: Chapter 9: Session 863, June 27, 1979 3/39 (8%) paranoid spider schizophrenic web values
– The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events
– © 2012 Laurel Davies-Butts
– Part Three: People Who Are Frightened of Themselves
– Chapter 9: The Ideal, the Individual, Religion, Science, and the Law
– Session 863, June 27, 1979 9:10 P.M. Wednesday

[... 10 paragraphs ...]

In those terms, animals have values, and if the quality of their lives disintegrates beyond a certain point, the species dwindles. We are not speaking of survival of the fittest, but the survival of life with meaning (intently). Life is meaning for animals. The two are indistinguishable.

(Pause.) You say little, for example, if you note that spiders make webs instinctively because spiders must eat insects, and that the best web-maker will be the fittest kind of spider to survive. (Long pause, then with humor:) It is very difficult for me to escape the sticky web of your beliefs. The web, however, in its way represents an actualized ideal on the spider’s part — and if you will forgive the term, an artistic one as well. (Louder:) It amazes the spiders that flies so kindly fall into those webs. You might say that the spider wonders that art can be so practical.

[... 3 paragraphs ...]

(Pause.) There are communions of consciousness of which you are unaware. While you believe in theories like the survival of the fittest, however, and the grand fantasies of evolution, then you put together your perceptions of the world so that they seem to bear out those theories. You will see no value in the life of a mouse sacrificed in the laboratory, for example, and you will project claw-and-fang battles in nature, completely missing the great cooperative venture that is (underlined) involved.

[... 22 paragraphs ...]

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