TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
Specific "reasons" cause persons
• to be obsessive and compulsive
• and render them unable to relax
• and lead them to be driven to go and do and zoom (whether that involves religion; spirituality; employment; "personal relationships"; politicking; reforming; rescuing; seeking love; seeking mass approval and applause and admiration; trying to escape responsibilities; accumulating; finding caretakers; or controlling).
• We are looking at what causes "the reasons" to manifest
• and what must happen in order to be freed from their influence.
We are looking at what causes "the reasons" to manifest
and
at what must happen in order to be freed from their influence.
So, to continue:
Persons obsess, act compulsively, are unable to relax, are fanatical, are driven by subconscious motives, and do whatever authority figures tell them to do - unquestioningly - because of reason #60: the paths and journeys and programs which persons dedicate themselves to - and which they even make a second, workaholism-plagued job out of - offer supposed perks (especially those involving conscience-clearing for persons who still have a conscience) as well as "soul"-saving, forgiveness-assuring, punishment-escaping and reward receiving "benefits" . . . both now during the relative existence and supposedly forevermore after the relative existence ends.
The causes behind reason #60?
PERSONALITY ASSIGNMENT AND ASSUMPTION, CONDITIONING, ACCULTURATION, FEARS, DESIRES, DISTORTION AND DELUSION
PERSONALITY ASSIGNMENT, (STARTING WITH "THE GOOD BOY" "THE BAD BOY," "THE GOOD GIRL" "THE BAD GIRL")
CONDITIONING
Most children with an average-functioning brain are at least as smart as Pavlov's dogs, so most children can be conditioned rather easily. It matters not if one is regularly repeating "Good dog!" (with the accompanying smile) and "bad dog!" (with the accompanying scowl) or if one is regularly repeating "Good boy / girl!" (with the accompanying smile) or "bad boy / girl!" (with the accompanying scowl), the effects will be the same:
Most children with an average-functioning brain are at least as smart as Pavlov's dogs, so most children can be conditioned rather easily. It matters not if one is regularly repeating "Good dog!" (with the accompanying smile) and "bad dog!" (with the accompanying scowl) or if one is regularly repeating "Good boy / girl!" (with the accompanying smile) or "bad boy / girl!" (with the accompanying scowl), the effects will be the same:
the object of duality-based praise and scorn will, if an average-functioning brain is present, become conditioned to do the things which earn rewards / smiles / admiration and will become conditioned to avoid the things which earn punishments / frowns / criticism / condemnation.
The only thing separating (a) the little boy standing at the edge of a pool yelling "Watch me mommy! Look at me mommy!" while his mother lies on a chaise lounge ignoring him and (b) a male strutting about in a club while prowling for women to look at him and admire him or a man doing all he can to get an "Attaboy!" in one form or another from a mate for bringing home a mammoth / check / present is . . . about twenty-four years in age.
And the same ego-and-egotism-based games are being played out by females and gays and lesbians and trans and all "non-realized," conditioned persons.
Once conditioned, always conditioned unless realization happens. How insane can conditioning make any living thing?
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 the bell on a metronome to call the dogs to their food and, after a few repetitions, the dogs started to salivate in response to the sound bell.
Note that conditioning displaces that which is nisarga - natural - with unnatural behaviors. Dogs normally salivate when they smell an edible. Conditioned, Pavlov's dogs abnormally salivated when they heard a particular sound.
(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
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 used here to illustrate 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." See? Believing in the duality-based and ego-state and egotism-and-ignorance-driven concepts of eugenics and "different-from and therefore better-than," Roof was going about the business of "making America great / white-dominated again" (at least in his warped, duality-driven mind) long before anyone printed that white supremacist-based slogan on a cap.
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 "socially 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, a host of other right-wing anti-progressives, 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.
FEARS AND DESIRES
All fears and all desires are rooted in the hidden, subconscious agendas of personalities. Each type has a specific fear and a specific desire. Personality Type Three Performers have a desire for applause and mass adulation and "success" and have a fear of being scorned and not looking good in public and being a "failure." Personality Type Six Loyalists / Dependents have a desire to use their loyalty to attract dependent and co-dependent types who will meet their relative needs and a fear of not being taken care of for life by some person or institution.
PERSONALITY ASSIGNMENT AND ASSUMPTION
PERSONALITY ASSIGNMENT AND ASSUMPTION
And persons trapped in their "good personality identities" who are - therefore - obsessive about a path or journey or program which reinforces their "good image" desire an endless stream of rewards now and for eternity and fear being punished both now and forevermore. Thus most of the 97% of the planet's population who report they are affiliated with one religion or another, and the millions more who claim to be spiritual, are in pursuit of conscience-clearing and "soul"-saving and getting forgiveness and benefits and perks and avoiding punishment.
DISTORTION AND DELUSION
With millions of distorted and delusional beliefs stored in the minds of persons all over the planet, how to prioritize them from "most to least debilitating"? Yet is there a basic teaching which might help identify one of the key distortions and delusions? The answer is "Yes."
Maharaj explained that one belief in particular is especially widespread and a key contributor to distortion and delusion, and that is the distorted and delusional belief in an "individual" with a "personal identity" who can experience "eternal continuity."
He asked: "What is an individual"? and then he explained: "There is a body created of elements, and in that body dwells [circulates] the vital breath and the consciousness. It is a composite unity."
He asked: "What is an individual"? and then he explained: "There is a body created of elements, and in that body dwells [circulates] the vital breath and the consciousness. It is a composite unity."
He said: "All living forms contain the vital breath and the consciousness, and although the forms are different, they all contain [are comprised of] the same elements. So I ask again: 'Where is the question of an individual'?"
And again he answered: "Basically, there is none. And this is my basic teaching which has to be grasped, but very few will ever understand."
Were the masses to understand that what they take themselves / "their self or selves" to be is really nothing more than an elemental plant food body that is circulating air and that is circulating conscious-energy, and were the masses to understand that upon taking mahasamadhi (a.k.a., "dying" in their belief system) that the elements will return to the universal pool of elements, that the air will return to the universal pool of air, and that the conscious-energy will return to the universal pool of conscious-energy, then hundreds of thousands of distorted and delusional beliefs would instantly vanish.
In the process, the pride of being affiliated with and associated with all of their supposedly-special paths and journeys and programs (which are inspiring them to engage is all sorts of supposedly "holy or sacred or aloof or divine" types of workaholism) would also vanish.
Some have asked: "But without the regulating influence of those paths and journeys and programs, wouldn't the masses become disorderly and create chaos and just do whatever they want - beat, rape, steal, kill, whatever?"
The response, "Have you missed the fact that the masses are already doing all of that? Those 'regulating influences' you've dreamed up have been proven over and over, for thousands of years, to be totally ineffective. So how long should it take to recognize the failure of an approach when its failure is so evident and then seek a different approach?"
Maharaj made clear that neither the concept of "sin" nor the concept of "virtue" are required and, in fact, should both be discarded.
As Yoko and John invited, "imagine" . . . "nothing to kill or die for."
With so much fighting and political division and wars and killing having been rooted in the concepts of sin and virtue, maybe their absence could reduce the number of killings and the number of things believed to be worth dying for.
And imagine being free of the belief that a composite unity can last forever and will either be rewarded or punished for eternity. Imagine how much wasted energy and angst would vanish.
Then . . .
Imagine there's no heaven.
It's easy if you try.
No hell below us,
Above us only sky.
Imagine all the people living for today.
Are you living for today rather than for tomorrow and for "eternity"?
To live for today is natural. Every living thing on the planet lives for today in a natural way, except for humans.
To live for a conceptualized "tomorrow" or with a conceptualized "eternity" as one's key driver and motivator is most unnatural and is the product of supernatural (magical) thinking.
To be preoccupied with all of "that stuff" and with fears and desires and the belief that a composite unity can and will last forever sets one up to drink the Kool-Aid when told to do so. But less dramatically, it sets persons up to sip the Kool-Aid for an entire lifetime, not driving them enough to "kill themselves off" immediately but enough to keep persons really sick for an entire relative existence.
To let "the self" / false "selves" die off via realizing the truth would preempt the perceived need to kill oneself to escape the chaos of a personality and mind and distortion and delusion driven existence.
I once told a fellow named Mark that the reason that people shoot themselves in the head instead of in the foot was to try to stop the incessant chatter of a thousand monkeys between their ears. He got a lot of mileage out of that, but how many truly heard and understood and internalized and acted upon that pointer when he shared it time and again?
The reason that Maharaj stopped using religion and spirituality as a form of the Ultimate Medicine was because he came to understand that the problems of humanity are rooted neither in their knowing too little dogma nor in their having a sick spirit but are, indeed, rooted in the nonsensical beliefs stored in their minds.
And when persons stay on a path or engage in a journey or stay in a program which perpetuates and reinforces the lie that humankind's problems are rooted in knowing too little dogma or in having a sick spirit, then that act will perpetuate and reinforce and add to the vast body of nonsensical beliefs which are stored in their minds and which are actually causing all of their problems and which will assure the continuation of all their problems as well.
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
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