TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
Today we continue to move through an analysis of "the reasons" which drive persons to behave obsessively and compulsively and renders them unable to relax and leads them to be driven instead to go and do and zoom, whether that going and doing and zooming involves religious and / or spiritual workaholism;
or their jobs; or their "relationships" (or their seeking a relationship); or their politicking; or their hobbies or recreation; or their efforts to reform the world; or their efforts to rescue others in order to try to get others to give them the love they did not receive from their parents;
or perform in public - forever putting on a show, with a hope that can get mass approval and applause and admiration; or trying to escape the relatives and the responsibilities of the AM-ness; or accumulating knowledge; or finding organizations of people to take care of them; or controlling; or avoiding; or dissociating.
The analyses will also look at what causes the reasons to manifest and what must happen in order to be freed from their usually-subconscious influence.
Reason #3 also drives persons to behave obsessively and compulsively and renders them unable to relax and leads them to be driven instead to go and do and zoom and follow "paths" devotedly and faithfully and fervently and fanatically, though they never consciously chose the path at all or chose to end up where they are. That all happens because of reason #3: they have been lulled into a sleep state while thinking that they are awake and erroneously believing that are choosing to do what they are doing. The causes:
CONDITIONING and ACCULTURATION
This is offered online: "In behavioral psychology, conditioning points to the fact that a person's or animal's reaction (a 'response') to some object or event (a 'stimulus') can be modified by 'learning' or by use of a repetitive training process"
and
"Conditioning refers to a behavioral process whereby a response becomes more frequent or more predictable in a given environment as a result of reinforcement, with reinforcement typically being a stimulus or reward for a desired response."
The following was first shared on the site in October of 2010:
Conditioning involves "associating a response with a previously unrelated stimulus" and "repeated use of a specific stimulus in order to create a predictable and controlled response."
The Russian Pavlov first noted the way that conditioning worked when a stimulus was controlling responses among his dogs. He began his experiments that established the validity of his theories about conditioning that have been described thusly:
The original and most famous example of classical conditioning involved the salivary conditioning of Pavlov's dogs. During his research on the physiology of digestion in dogs, Pavlov noticed that, rather than simply salivating in the presence of meat powder, his dogs began to salivate in the presence of the lab technician who normally fed them.
From this observation he predicted that, if a particular stimulus in the dog's surroundings were present when the dog was presented with meat powder, then this stimulus would become associated with food and cause salivation on its own. In his initial experiment, Pavlov used a bell to call the dogs to their food and, after a few repetitions, the dogs started to salivate in response to the bell.
Note that conditioning displaces that which is nisarga - natural - with unnatural behaviors. (Among persons, conditioning can also replace that which is natural with that which is thought to be supernatural, that is, spiritual or magical or metaphysical, separating them even more from that which is natural and real).
It is among persons that conditioning results in misery and suffering for it is conditioning that leads to the ignorance of taking appearance for Reality, and such ignorance will always lead (as Maharaj noted) to calamities in the relative existence. Conditioning can lead persons to see the intolerable as tolerable, encouraging a tolerance of pain (which is physical) and / or misery (which is mental and emotional).
Acculturation is the process of changing psychologically as a result of adopting the ways and beliefs and thinking patterns of the surrounding culture in which one lives.
An example of the results of acculturation has been discussed here in the case of Dylann Roof:
On the evening of June 17, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina, a white 21-year-old male named Dylann Roof entered a church with a mostly black congregation and sat with some members for about an hour during a bible study session. Afterwards, Roof drew a gun and stated that he was going to shot everyone there.
Twenty-six-year-old Tywanza Sanders asked Roof why he was attacking churchgoers and he responded, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go." When Roof aimed to shoot Sanders’ aunt, he dove in front of her and became the first to be shot. Roof shouted racial epithets as he shot the others.
One image from Roof's Facebook page shows him wearing a jacket decorated with two emblems that are popular among American white supremacists: the flags of the former Rhodesia (Zimbabwe now) and apartheid-era South Africa (which was being run by a white separatist minority government which was supported by U.S. President Ronald Reagan who fought all efforts by Nelson Mandela and others to establish a democracy).
Roof’s website includes a “manifesto” which includes a racist diatribe about "Blacks," "Jews," "Hispanics" and "East Asians” as well as photos showing an image of Roof posing with a handgun and a Confederate Battle Flag first used 150 years ago by a confederacy of Southern states who were trying to overthrown the U.S. Government in order to preserve the institution of slavery.
(These are the same Southerners - playing the role of "The Greatest Patriots in the U.S." - who would go to war immediately with anyone displaying an ISIS flag which is flown by another confederacy that also wants to overthrown the U.S. Government).
The website of the Council of Conservative Citizens was cited by Roof as a source for his radicalization. The group's president, Earl Holt III, stated that the group's website "accurately and honestly report[s] black-on-white violent crime.”
The Council of Conservative Citizens, founded in 1988 in Atlanta, Georgia and then relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, is an American political organization which supports a variety of conservative causes as well as white nationalism and white separation and the concept of white supremacy.
Its "Statement of Principles" says that they "oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind."
Several members of the Board of Directors are former leaders of the segregationist Citizens' Councils of America which was commonly referred to as the White Citizens’ Council which was a network of white supremacist organizations first formed in 1954 in the United States and concentrated in the South. Their aim was to stop the implementation of a Supreme Court ruling authorizing school desegregation and to fight all efforts at integration and to halt the civil rights movement completely.
They have long been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but that has not stopped many right-wing, mostly Republican politicians on the national and state and local levels from aligning with them and taking contributions from the group beginning in 1988 and continuing right up to the present. Their supporters in the U.S. Government even worked to attain tax-exempt status for them, so the group has never had to pay the federal taxes which are due from any partisan group.
The group is still actively supporting "social and morally conservative candidates," giving political donations to many of Republican candidates for the office of President of the United States including, among others, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum and, recently, Donald Trump (all of whom have received significant financial support from the group).
How do persons shift so drastically from being loving initially to being filled with hate? Children arrive with a "blank tablet," that is, with a no-mind brain. The brain provides an example of the way that consciousness functions automatically and spontaneously: it makes certain that the heart is pumping blood, that the lungs are circulating air, that plant cells are being converted into human cells, allowing a child to grow, etc.
At some point, the children will be taught words and then concepts and beliefs which will be stored in the parts of the brain which form "the mind" and which allow information to be filed away and later retrieved.
Prior to programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing, and indoctrination, children are race neutral . . . are color impartial . . . are bias-free.
In the high school my daughter attended, she had classmates from over 60 different countries, so she had many friends from the Far East and from Central American, from Western and Eastern Europe, and from the Middle East along with those whose parents were African-American or Hispanic.
My Cherokee grandmother passed along her understanding of the unicity to my father, and he modeled for me the race neutrality and color impartiality and bias-free understanding which he and I both received from grandmother.
As for my daughter, the message from her Cherokee great-grandmother was eventually passed along to a third generation. Friends and neighbors and associates from the workplace representing a host of racial backgrounds were welcomed into her childhood home; thus, my daughter was not affected by the typical Texas culture which is often class consciousness and often racially-bigoted.
Had she been raised in the same culture as Dylann Roof, the outcome would likely have been quite different. Such is the "power" of acculturation.
Instead, this has been the outcome: my granddaughter has a "godmother" who moved to the States from Eastern Europe; moreover, she regularly plays with children of all races and economic levels. She is (as all children are initially) race neutral, color impartial and bias-free. But in Roof's culture, most children are taught by word and example to be the exact opposite.
Thus are the effects of conditioning and acculturation.
As we move through the discussion of the other "reasons," it will be seen that the effects of conditioning and acculturation show up time and again.
To be free of being driven unconsciously by those forces requires understanding the forces, seeing how they work, being able to spot them in one's self when they activate, and turning away from their influence.
Reason #4 also drives persons to behave obsessively and compulsively and renders them unable to relax and leads them to be driven instead to go and do and zoom and follow "paths" devotedly and faithfully and fervently and fanatically, though they never consciously chose the path at all or chose to end up where they are. Reason #4 is because they have been misinformed by authority figures but remain loyal to those authorities and their teachings anyway. The causes:
INDOCTRINATION / PERSONALITY IDENTIFICATION (ESPECIALLY PERSONALITY TYPE SIX)
Indoctrination is a tool used by authority figures. It is the process of teaching a person or group to develop uncritical, unquestioning, obedient minds so that they will accept a set of beliefs based in nothing more than blind faith.
Once the Disciples of Christ pastor Jim Jones had completely indoctrinated the typically-ignorant members of his cult, then there was no questioning of their pastor's order when parents were told to give three hundred of their children a Kool-Aid-like drink which was laced with cyanide poison. Nor was there any questioning of their pastor's order for them to drink the same concoction as well.
Nine hundred and eighteen of the pastor's followers and their children died that day.
Some say they died from cyanide poisoning. The wise understand that they died from the indoctrination which robbed them of the ability to question and replaced it with blind faith. How insane can persons become via indoctrination? Completely.
Of the nine basic personality types which persons all have to one degree or another, fifty percent of all persons have the Personality Type Six as their primary type (and, therefore, as their primary driver which will determine their thoughts and words and actions).
That type will lead them to be loyal to authority and to never question orders from an authority; to be dependent and co-dependent and therefore willing to "serve their country" and willing to kill for their country and to die for their country; to be fear-based and paranoid and to enter into occupations which allow them to be armed.
(Sixes are especially drawn to jobs in the military and / or police, to join armed gangs, to join security or black ops forces, to be security guards, or to align themselves with any person who will - or any organization which will - take care of them and be a steady source of food, clothing, and shelter in order to satisfy their perceived needs which are rooted in their body identification.)
Therefore, fifty percent of all persons on the planet are set up to be driven by reason#4 and are susceptible to being misinformed by authority figures but still remain loyal to those authorities and their teachings anyway.
To be free of being driven unconsciously by those forces requires
understanding the forces, seeing how they work, being able to spot them
in one's self when they activate, and turning away from their influence.
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
[NOTE: The four most recent posts are below. You may access all of the posts in this series and in the previous series and several thousand other posts as well by clicking on the links in the "Recent Posts and Archives" section.]
In addition to the five non-duality books made available without charge by Andy Gugar, Jr. (see “FREEBIES” above), you can now access nearly 3,000+ posts for any topics of interest to you.