Friday, February 8, 2008

The Nazis in Germany was possessed by weird ideas. Today the Islamists are possessed and so are fundamentalist Christians and neo-liberals. We can be possessed in so many different ways. We can get all sorts of crazy ideas in our heads. We can be deeply convinced about things that we later understand was completely idiotic. To wake up from such misunderstandings is very painful.

1 comment:

:Doreen said...

Waking up is a radical shift in "function" for the mind. It is not denial of the extreme misery and brutality that still exist on this planet. It is not replacing one thought with a different thought. It is not: substitute a negative thought with a positive thought. If one encounters a brutal fight in the street an immediate action to get help will ensue. This is natural action. A person who has not woken up may have the ability to ignore it and turn away rather than respond to this fear. (Unfortunately, the ongoing help needed for the people involved in this fight will never happen. One of the fighters(or both) may go to the hospital and then to the jail. The endless cycle of violence; never broken unless we wake up.

Waking up is the only solution to ending the misery. One person at a time, ending their own. What is the aberration that created Hitler and all the "little" Hitlers? Doesn't the mind become insane by its conditioning? Some torture outwardly; some torture inwardly due to the mind's conditioning. Do people learn to use their thinking in "positive" ways. Can anyone actually use their mind? Don't seemingly random thoughts just pop in sometimes? Can you keep them from coming? Can you worry endlessly about an event that never occurs? Isn't this some kind of malfunction, insanity, madness? To say that the way our thoughts function is madness is not an excuse for a person's actions but is a statement of fact about the way it is. Or maybe to know that the mind is mad is the beginning of sanity.

Awareness of suffering is what brings us to the wake up call.
If you are trapped in endless suffering yourself, either through past events or future doom then you have to kill yourself or someone else. Just like the egoic mind kills continually. What would be the point to living?

I can't demand that you "see the light" because then I fall back into the darkness, myself. Acceptance of the "NOW" or "What Is" is a start to our r/evolution to see that the other(who is wrong) is also me/you. I/You have made others wrong in my/your "own" life. The protest that will be effective is: "Be Kind to your mind...Stop thinking"

Can a person actually "try" to do their best? Does a person have a "worst" they can do? We tell our children: "Do your best!" How can they not? Eventually they become beaten down by their conditioning, having to "find" their true essence that was shining bright from the very beginning but got completely obscured by clouds. ("The sun is still shining behind the clouds.") If I am the best then someone has to be lesser than me. Doesn't hatred come out of fear...a fear system that is malfunctioning? A fear system that destroys the glowing star in each child. In nature, fear works beautifully when it is needed. In the animal queen/kingdom fear functions for survival. An animal does not have constant "thoughts/feelings" of fear. In "civilized" society we have created hundreds, perhaps thousands, of "false" stimuli for our fear mechanism. Fear of flying, fear of crossing the street, fear of strangers, fear of authority, fear of teachers, fear of fathers, fear of mirrors, fear of the boogie man, fear of nature, even fear of mothers.

There is absolutely no clear rationalization for Hitler and the Nazis. Isn't that the problem? Clearly we have learned nothing from the past. And we are talking about an Age of Reason. And Enlightenment. Obviously the mind-made solutions have not worked. If close to 3000 people(and rising) were killed in 2 buildings doesn't it make sense to kill 30 times(and rising) that number of people in Iraq? Logical? Terror is terror no matter who sponsors it. And we all sponsor it, unwittingly, by living in this world. Of the mind. A one-dimensional world. But there is another possibility. A balancing act/action: straddle the divide...one step in the dimension of Heart-thinking, one foot in the mind-made world. Do we stay in the vicious circle or take one "step out" of it?

We, actually, owe it to all the victims of murder, genocide, female infanticide, suicide, inquisition, holocausts, wife killings, on and on and on to create this possibility for the end of suffering--by waking up. This burden of collective insanity is also what we are born with/into.

Becoming like a child is the answer. The children are our teachers not the other way around. Children know how to love unconditionally until an adult "teaches" them how to attach conditions to their love. This is the root of all evil. "Sin" is not in us when we are born it is unconsciously done to us. We "think" we know what is best for "our" children. But is this the truth of the matter? People also have fear of parenting. We all know what it is like to be children. When we forget that then we are lost. I think, mostly, we remember the pain of an unnatural childhood. To stick with the awareness of that suffering is to know that everyone's birthright is to receive unconditional love. And in that realization you give it. And are it.