Love & Sympathy

(Originally printed in Psychic Life, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1981)

Lewis S. Bostwick (1918-1995), Founder of BPI:

I am amused at having to play intellectual games. Intellectualizing the writing of this column does not require psychic ability. Being a psychic is doing—one using one’s abilities in order to function more capably in a body.

Although the intellect of the body and the psychic ability of a spirit present a clear dichotomy, like yin and yang, cosmic and earth, there is also a very strong connection between these two about how to play out the game for a number of years.

Understanding the relationship between body and being requires knowing their distinct and separate functions. It is like a game being played in two parts. One breathes, eats, pumps blood, and thinks. The other does none of those, but does have the ability to take full advantage of each and every one of the other’s activities in order to keep the game of having a body going.

Often this game is perceived as a given single human task, leaving off the being role. In this game of life you get to create and control the way in which it is played. Also you get to be spectator, too.

But few can have this understanding of how to play the game. It is because the intelligent creativeness of a being in a body is affected by one great misunderstanding: You have to love—namely—ME.

When this bad word—love—enters the game, the relationship between body and being becomes confused or chaotic. When someone says, “I love you,” are you looking at his own personal definition of the word love or are you looking at your own and assume that he means the same thing you do? Where is a person who is a hypochondriac: “You must love me because I’m ill all the time. The more that you love me the more illness I will create for you to love.”

Then the word takes on another valence: sympathy. The more you can match or sympathize with the illness of the hypochondriac, the better the love relationship is perceived by others. “You don’t love me,” says the mother to the son. “What do you mean I don’t love you?” “Well, if you loved me you’d do as I say.”

So we have a problem with all human beings. The problem is sympathy. Sympathy means to copy the emotion of the other person.

Sympathy works so well and so fast. An example: if you had a fractured arm in a cast and two years ago I had a broken arm, I would rush up to you and say, “I know exactly how you feel.”

The other person is totally invalidated when I say, “I don’t even remember when I broke my arm and it only hurts just a little bit. Besides, I had my cast off in two weeks.”

“I’ll have my cast off in a year and a half,” says your friend.

To a psychic, the painful experiences of a body are a lie. Spirit does not feel pain. It has a very recognizable reaction to the body’s pain. It leaves. Denying pain ever existed. (We often hear people in the medical trade respond to this with: You don’t have any will to get well.) All that really happened was you couldn’t connect, you couldn’t get back into your body.

To the being—soul person—to get well has no meaning because it has always been well.

To a psychic, to look at these tremendous forces of energy, is wondrous to behold—how the energy flows, and how that energy is interpreted as freedom to create.

As a psychic, you are able to watch the body’s machinery create another body and experience that part.

Somehow this all gets tied up in everyday life in the emotion of sex and the game of survival of the body. The being gets into creation of a sympathetic love for another body. He loses his creativity and she loses hers.

When you lose individual creativity you lose the ability to communicate. When you allow your ability to communicate to be lost, your spiritual freedom is then stopped.

Love is the ability of one being to grant another being the total right to be and not change the other body or being to be in sympathy with what one believes is right.

If you don’t believe this is all true, I’ll give you a code of ethics to live by so I can really control you!