Wednesday, July 21, 2010

HOW MISUNDERSTANDING CAUSATION REINFORCES MAGICAL (SUPERNATURAL) THINKING: The Universe Decides Nothing, Part Five, The Conclusion

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An Advaita forum focusing on Realisation, enlightenment, non-duality, Real Love, peace, freedom, Your original nature, abiding naturally, the Oneness, the Nothingness, and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

Here, there is nothing that is believed, so there is no one here who wants you to believe anything, either. Here, the invitation is to be free of all that you have been programmed, conditioned, acculturated, and domesticated to believe so that you can be free, period.

F.: Magical thinking is rooted in the early programming and conditioning to which children are subjected, but in most cases, such thinking continues, and is pervasive, throughout the relative existence of the adult-aged masses. The predominate carrier of this viral form of the Ultimate Sickness is "The Knower."

If seekers follow the entire protocol by which the Ultimate Medicine is administered (which is a seven-step protocol here) then the result will be as described in an earlier writing about what happens post-Realization :

an understanding of the functioning of the totality manifests; the Truth that cannot be spoken but that can be known is known; then, even the knower and the knowing fall away (along with all that is unnatural and all that was mistakenly thought to involve something supernatural), after which abidance happens naturally.

That is, "The Understander" displaces "The Knower" because "Knowers" actually know not but do not know that they know not. Meaning? The ego-state of "The Knowers," supported by egotism that elevates them in their own "minds" to the upgraded status of "The Super Knowers," cannot admit that they do not know. [Later, even "The Understander" dissolves.]

In order to try to explain why any given event happened when "The Super Knowers" do not understand either (a) the more immediate causal factors, much less (b) the entire chain of causation, their magical thinking patterns will move them to assign responsibility or blame either to some supernatural cause or to some cause rooted in prejudice or ignorance.

SUPERNATURAL
The belief that all is caused by some "supernatural causer" prevents "The Super Knowers" from having to admit "I don't know"; however, the faulty belief traps them in the mental illness of monomania: all is caused by one single cause (which is often reported to be "god");

or, they will identify the cause of all happenings as being "the gods or fate or destiny or the God-force of the universe or the universe itself"; therefore, the magical, supernatural thinkers will report that a singer died because god needed him; will assert that a child died because god needed a little angel;

and will report in the case of a man who died as a result of having abused the plant food body far beyond its capacity to remain intact actually died because "the universe" decided his time was up.

They will report that a hurricane devastated a certain city because of the "negative karma of the people there"; that the Twin Towers in New York fell because it was the will of Allah, "a fact that can be known with assurance because if Allah had not wanted them to fall, then the mission would not have succeeded," as one Islamic leader claimed.

Noted previously on this site, several Christians ministers claimed the towers fell because God wanted "to send a message to the non-Christians and to liberated women and to gays in the U.S. that he was displeased with them."

PREJUDICE
"The Super Knowers" who use this tool will suggest that "crime is high in that neighborhood because of the race of the people who live there"; or "god is punishing them because they are evil infidels"; or "the reason that the unemployment numbers are so high is because people don't really want to work."

IGNORANCE
Magical thinking prevents any chance for understanding actual cause(s) and leads to the ignorance that evolves from such distortions as this:

"If car 'A' hits car 'B' and car 'B' is then slammed into my car, then the wreck was most certainly caused by car 'B.' And if I were the driver of car 'A' and slammed car 'B' into car 'C,' then the fault lies again with car 'B,' not with me." Magical thinking blocks any chance for logic and reason to manifest among persons.

Shared earlier: It is not unlike the woman who reported that “God saved her life” because a man ran a red light but hit her in the front side of the car and that “if she’d been two seconds sooner his car would have hit her broadside and killed her.”

She was appalled by the response: "If there had really been a God watching over you, He could have moved you through the intersection five seconds sooner or five seconds later and then you would not have been hit at all."

When a child was playing beside a flooding river during a rainstorm, fell in, and was swept by the currents to the bank a mile downstream, her mother reported in a television interview that it was “the hand of God that pushed her to the side and saved her life.”

If there were truly a “hand of God” at play, why had the hand not done its divine intervention sooner? Would not "A Benevolent Intervener" have pushed the child back before she fell into the raging currents rather than having to push her out later on? And if a parent were competent and sane, would she allow her daughter to play beside a raging river during a storm? Double evidence of both insanity and ignorance, yes?

So much for the variety of inane reasons that magically-and-supernaturally-thinking persons offer as the cause of happenings. Maharaj said:

"Look, all kinds of things happen in this room. Do I cause them to happen? They just happen"

and

"All life on earth depends on the sun, yet you cannot blame the sun for all that happens, though it is the ultimate cause."

As noted in a prior post: Being in touch with Reality is being totally sane. Being trapped by magical beliefs and supernatural thinking is being out of touch with Reality and is, therefore, being totally ignorant, or totally insane, or both.

Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)

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CONSCIOUSNESS/AWARENESS: The Nature of Reality Beyond Self-Realization (Peace Every Day When Abiding as The Absolute)
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