1 result for (book:nopr AND session:665 AND stemmed:who)
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
Now: Dictation: Again, there are no accidents. No one dies under any circumstances who is not prepared to die. This applies to death through natural catastrophe as well as to any other situation.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
Slow death in a hospital, or an experience with an illness, would be unthinkable to these same people. Some of this has to do with temperament, and with quite normal individual differences and preferences. Many more human beings are aware of their own impending deaths than is generally known. They know and yet pretend they do not know, but those who die in catastrophes choose the experience — the drama, even the terror when that occurs. They prefer to leave physical life in a blaze of perception, battling for their lives, at a point of challenge, “fighting” and not acquiescent.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
For many people, a natural calamity provides their first personal experience with the realities of creaturehood’s connection with the planet. Under such conditions men who feel a part of nothing, of no structure or family or country, can understand in a flash their comradeship with the earth, their place upon it and its energy; through suddenly recognizing that relationship they feel their own power for action.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
This recognition can lead them — and often does — to seize their own energy and use it in a strong creative manner. A natural catastrophe or a riot are both energy baths, potent and highly positive in their ways despite their obvious connotations. In your terms this in no way absolves those who start riots, for example, for they will be working within a system of conscious beliefs in which violence begets violence. Yet even here individual differences apply. The inciters of riots are often searching for the manifestation of energy which they do not believe they possess on their own. They light and start psychological fires, and are as transfixed by the results as any arsonist. If they understood and could experience power and energy in themselves they would not need such tactics.
[... 13 paragraphs ...]
(11:29.) There was some racial tension, hints of impending riots that did not occur. A very capable mayor who had been in office for some time was defeated. Politics entered in, for many reasons not necessary to this discussion. Politically oriented people felt that they had no really strong hold, so that effective communication with the federal government could not be expected. In that area a sense of powerlessness grew.
[... 10 paragraphs ...]
(12:02.) Many in the religious community said that the flood was the will of God at that level, or that people were being punished for their transgressions. In its own way the flood was a religious event, for it united diverse groups of people — who did not always have the most humanistic of intents — with the community. In a strange way it also served to isolate certain portions of the people, and to highlight their predicament in a way that no riot could.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
Crises such as this provide spotlighted views of reality, in which what has been hidden is suddenly only too apparent. In many cases the poor were saved, for most of the old homes and apartment houses survived while the newer ranch-style homes could not stand the onslaught of the water. Yet the college [Elmira College] still found itself with many of the dispossessed needy at its doorstep. Women who had no stronger purpose than playing bridge ended up struggling for survival beside their more destitute sisters. Many of the poor who lost their living quarters discovered qualities of leadership in themselves that astonished them.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
There were old people, laden with negative beliefs about age, who discovered great vitality and further purpose under the stimuli of survival. There were people blinded and lost by a belief in the supreme importance of things, who found themselves with nothing left. They realized the relative unimportance of belongings, and felt within themselves the stirring of a freedom they had not experienced since youth.
[... 15 paragraphs ...]