Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Irrelevant definitions and labels.

Some people label themselves Jews and some label themselves Muslims.
Some label themselves Sunni Muslims and some label themselves Shia Muslims. There are so many definitions and labels to attach to oneself and to others, Catholic, Protestant, atheist, realist, spiritually awake, deluded, stupid, Brahmin, Shudra, left-winger, right-winger…

Many definitions and labels are just insubstantial mental creations and imaginations. Cultural differences exist only in our fantasies. They don’t represent any "real" differences. So many terrible wars have been fought because of these insubstantial mental constructions. The results have been, and still are, misunderstandings, horrors and madness.

Man and woman can perhaps be relevant labels. Men and women are different. However, in what sense is a Palestinian woman and a Jewish woman different? They hate each other because of their different labels. The Palestinian woman is upset because people who label themselves Jews oppress her and her family.

If you insist that your religion is important to you because it brings meaning, sacredness and a sense of coherence to your life, but refuse too see all the horrors it has been responsible for, then you are deluded.

Only if you are painfully aware of how many terrible things that have been caused by your religion can it possibly bring true meaning, sacredness and a sense of coherence to your life.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Destructive cults

You are probably also a member of a destructive cult but you are not aware of it yet. Cult members are seldom aware of the fact that they belong to a destructive cult. We are all indoctrinated. We need deprogramming, all of us.

You are born into a family of Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan or into a family of evangelical right-wingers in the American mid west. Maybe you happened to be born in a liberal upper middle-class family in Connecticut or in a conservative Brahmin family in Tamil Nadu. Wherever you are born, you are born into the idea that your belief system is sensible and other people with other beliefs are deluded.

You might say to yourself, “Some people are caught up in destructive cults, yes, but I’m not. I’m not a fanatic. I‘ve been working hard all my life. I’ve set up goals for my self. It’s not my problem if thousands of children starve to death every day Life is about to eat or be eaten. It‘s a jungle out there. It’s not my problem if people are exploited in Asia or if carbon dioxide emissions ruin the atmosphere. The kids in the Asian sweat shops are, after all, better off than the street kids, you can’t deny that, and I drive an environmentally friendly car”

Wherever you are born, you are born into a world of ideas and beliefs. The question is, is it possible to leave your belief system behind? Is it possible to live a life without a belief system, no religion, no atheism, no agnosticism, no political ideology? I believe it is possible, but it takes time to realize that one is misled by ideas. It takes time before it sinks in. Sudden, spontaneous awakenings are rare. Nevertheless, more and more people begin to understand now that the earth is not flat and that there are no gnomes or ghosts in the real world.

You are a Muslim or a Jew, a Catholic or a devout Neo Liberal. If you can’t leave your beliefs behind how can you expect other people to do it?

It is of course very difficult to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a group of neo Nazis or a mafia family, but it is possible. It is also possible to leave the mainstream western “shop till you drop philosophy“.

It’s painful to take this step, it’s sometimes extremely dangerous, you will feel lonely, but it is necessary if you feel that awakening is important to you or if you feel that you need a deeper understanding of life. It is like an initiation to a mystery order but there is no order, no rules, no rituals and no doctrine.

If you, on the other hand, feel that awakening is not your top priority, or that a deeper understanding of life is unimportant nonsense, then you don’t have to consider these things at all.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Illusions

If you find yourself sitting on a beach, on an east coast, somewhere near the equator, watching the sunset, you can clearly see how the sun is sinking under the horizon. However, this is an illusion. The sun isn’t sinking. The sun isn't moving. The earth is turning.

You know that the sun is not moving. You know it because this is something you have learned, but this does not change your experience. You can clearly see, with your own two eyes, that the sun is moving.

Similarly, you may feel miserable because nothing is going your way. You may feel that you are a looser and that you have nothing to live for. This is also an illusion. You are all set. You have all you need. In fact, you might even be rich. You have a house, food in the fridge and friends. You know this. You have read tons of books on psychology, you have a therapist and you eat Prozac pills, but this doesn’t change anything right now, you feel unhappy anyway about your miserable life situation.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Hitler

The Nazi party got 33 % of the votes in the November elections 1932. They formed a government in January 1933 together with the German National People’s Party. Hitler became Chancellor (Prime Minister).

In mars, 1933 there was another election and the Nazi party now got 44% of the votes.

On mars 23, 1933, Hitler proposed a bill to abolish democracy and to give him dictatorial powers. All the right wing parties, the liberals as well as the Nationalist Party and the Catholic Centre Party voted for the bill. The social democrats voted against.

The Catholic Church, the Pope in Rome, the protestant bishops, the big business people, the small business owners, farmers, intellectuals, professors, the vast majority, were on Hitler’s side. They were shouting, drunk with enthusiasm: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

Indoctrination

Today people are indoctrinated with the belief that nothing but money counts. If you are rich and beautiful you are a winner, if you are poor and don’t look good enough you are a looser. We all know this. Kids of today know that this is a fact. They watch commercials, advertisements, movies and TV series all day long and everywhere they learn the same thing. Be rich. Be beautiful. Be positive. Be fantastic. If you don’t look good enough, have a surgery. If you’re poor, roll up your sleeves and set a goal for yourself. If you feel down or blue, get yourself Prozac pills.

Hide your greed behind smart clothes, charity, religion or spirituality because greed and egoism doesn’t look too good. Be fantastic! Be wonderful. Remember, there is absolutely nothing else to live for but money!

Saturday, November 13, 2010

We are only able to see as much as we need to see in order to survive. We need to find food, protect ourselves from enemies and find a partner. Our eyes have not evolved to sense infrared light simply because we don’t need this ability to get by. This is the biological point of view.

Our eyes can sense red, green and blue. Birds and insects are able to sense also ultraviolet light. Radio waves, X-rays and infrared light are invisible to all of us.

So, what we can see is only a small fraction of the whole spectrum.

Similarly, we can only understand what we need to understand in order to survive. We need to find food, protect ourselves from enemies, find a partner and have some fun. Our brains have not evolved to understand much more than this.

However, some people are not satisfied with what they have and what they can understand. They want to know it all. They want to see it all. They want to understand what they are not able to understand. Are there many more universes out there? Are there angels out there who protect us? What is God like? Is he a he, really? Maybe he is a she. Is the brain a prism that filters the universal consciousness or is the brain like a radio receiver? This is the spiritual perspective.

Most people are not interested in understanding things. They are like old people with bad hearing who only hear what they want to hear. They try to turn off as much as they can of the world. They put blinders on, and head sets. They live in very, very small worlds, like cage birds. This is the mainstream point of view.

I have arrived at this: Scientific speculations or spiritual speculations are the same to me. It’s fun with wild speculations. I love to read about cutting edge science, spiritual exploration and philosophy, but it is not that important. It is a pastime.

It’s so much more important with what I can understand, what I can see with my own two eyes, how I live my life and how we ought to live here on earth.

Is it really necessary with war and competition? As far as I can see, it is not. The idea that war and competition is important is an idea propagated by those who like war and competition. They believe that without war and competition there wouldn’t be any evolution. This is a justification, a thought, a mental construct.

We are not baboons. We are not chimpanzees. We are not living in caves anymore. We are not peasants filled with superstition. We are not living in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries any longer. We are living here and now, in this time period, after the Second World War, after the Vietnam War, after the discoveries made by the quantum physicists.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

 
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Beliefs

Beliefs can make you cynical and bitter. Beliefs can make you think that life is totally meaningless. Beliefs can make you think that you are a complete idiot and that life is not worth living.

However, beliefs can also make you happy. And beliefs can make your life worth living even under terrible circumstances.

It was a common belief in Germany in the nineteen thirties and the beginning of the nineteen forties that the German people was a superior race and that their destiny was to subjugate other inferior “races”. Those beliefs made the Germans feel self confident and strong. Those beliefs gave them a meaning to life.

People in England had similar beliefs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were deeply convinced that they were superior to Africans, Asians and Native Americans. Most people in Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Holland were also filled with such ideas. Slave trading and stealing other peoples land was not a crime to them.

They were also, somehow, able to reconcile their beliefs of superiority with their Christian faith. The various Christian churches saw no problem with this. The slave trade and the stealing of other peoples land and possessions were completely in consistency with The Bible according to the theological authorities.

It can be enormously liberating to realize that a belief is just a belief, a crazy idea, an illusion. It can be like waking up from a nightmare realizing that it was only a weird dream.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Social programing

Things in life are not just enfolding. We make hundreds of decisions every day but we are seldom aware of it. The decision-making is taking place in our subconscious mind.

The first unconscious decision we make in the morning is usually if we shall get out of bed or not. This first decision of the day makes us jump out of bed and do what we have to do in order to get to work in time.

When we sit in our car on our way to work, we are often not even aware that we are driving a car. We are somewhere else, listening to the morning news on the radio or lost in a daydream. Our subconscious mind is doing the driving for us. Isn’t this weird? We act like programmed robots. We are, it seems, to a very large extent programmed robots.

Anyway, life gets too complicated if we begin to question what we are doing. This is probably why we avoid the questioning. To question what one is doing is to throw a spanner in the works.

I have had many crazy ideas in my life and I have taken many decisions from this confused state of mind. I have been driven by stupid ideas, laziness, egotistical ideas and other people’s ideas. Those ideas took me to California, Mexico, India, Africa and many other places. Those stupid ideas have also showed me many interesting synchronicities, which to me is proof that there is a mystical dimension operating from underneath or outside my conscious and subconscious mind. This level of consciousness has also a finger in the pie. Isn’t this strange? Maybe delusions, self-deceptions and stupid ideas serve a purpose after all.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Transitions

The herd instinct in is very strong in human beings. We follow the herd. We have an inborn desire to belong to a group. We feel lonely and miserable when we don’t have a group to belong to. Some people can to do almost anything to be accepted by a group.

You feel safe and more relaxed when you have found a group who accept you; a group with a set of ideas and beliefs to fall in with, a gang, a pack, a religious or spiritual community, a political party, a bunch of pot heads, a bunch of activists, a bunch of would be artists, a bunch of down and outs, a workplace, a company, a family, an identity…

However, the flock behavior looses its grip over us when we grow older. Older people are no longer desperate to fit in. We loose interest in dress codes and social codes. We need a group who accepts us, yes, but not at all costs. We don’t need to become something anymore. We don’t need to prove how good we are. We don’t care too much about belief systems any longer.

Some older people, though, hold on too tightly to their beliefs and outdated worldviews. They have a problem with the transition. They have been conservatives, racists, or social climbers for so many years and they believe that there is nothing else in life to live for but status and money. It is similar to when teenagers have a problem with the transition to adulthood. It is like when thirty years olds act like teenagers.

It is similar to when 10 years olds still believe in Santa Claus.

It is also similar to, for example, when the Catholic Church refused to accept that the earth was not at the center with the sun and the moon revolving around it. The scholastic authorities refused to even look through a telescope. Galileo was wrong. If he was right, their worldview would fall apart and this was of course impossible. The church was infallible. The Catholic Church kept Galileo’s books on astronomy on the index of prohibited books until 1835.

Religious and political fanatics, mainstream fanatics, sports fanatics, criminal gangs, drinking buddies, there are so many different groups of people we can end up with and which we eventually have to abandon in order to grow.

It can be very hard, though, to abandon a group, a sect, a worldview, a false belief, a political opinion or a religious misconception. It can be as hard as it is for an alcoholic to give up alcohol.

We have to face it. Either we keep on drinking or we don’t. Either we keep on trucking, or we don’t. Either we wake up or we don’t.