1 result for (book:notp AND session:799 AND stemmed:safe)
[... 29 paragraphs ...]
If you are safely ensconced in a comfortable room, in no present danger, your senses should accurately convey that information. Your conscious mind should assimilate it. It should be an easy enough accomplishment to look around you and see that you are in no danger.
Your conscious mind is meant to give your body an assessment of what I will call cultural conditions, for there are sophistications and specifications that in your terms consciousness alone can assess. If, under conditions naturally safe in the terms of primary experience, you become overwhelmed by unsafe signals from secondary experience — that is, from your reading or whatever — you show a lack of discrimination. You are not able to differentiate between the physically safe present situation, and the imagined, which is perhaps unsafe, calling forth the alarms of danger.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
Your body then might say you are safe, and your senses show you that no danger is present — yet you have begun to rely so upon secondary experience that you do not trust your creature reactions.
Because of man’s great gift of imagination, however, the alarm signals not only invade a safe present moment, but go jangling into the next one and the one following, and are endlessly projected into the future. To whatever extent, and in whatever fashion, each individual is therefore robbed of his or her belief in the personal ability to act meaningfully or with purpose in the present.
[... 12 paragraphs ...]
The most negative projection or prophecy seems to be the most practical one; when you are reading of the world’s ills, you say in all honesty, and with no humor: “How can I ignore the reality, the destructive reality, of the present?” In the most practical, immediate, mundane terms, however, you and your world are in that moment naturally and physically safe, as your bodily senses immediately perceive. In the most basic of bodily terms you are not reacting to present conditions.
[... 13 paragraphs ...]