WOKE!

CALL OUT CULTURE

BEWARE: we are all deceived AND unaware of the extent of our own conditioning. That is the nature of conditioning.* 

There seems to be a desire among young people to prove how “woke” they are by judging others online.

There is a balance that we must strike between self-examination and self-esteem. Just because we feel good about ourselves, does not mean that our minds are not playing tricks on us. Just because we think we are right doesn't mean we are.

 

Don't believe everything you think.

Don't believe everything you say.

Don't believe everything you hear.

Don't believe everything you read.

 

Like it or not, believe it or not, we have all been brainwashed since childhood by cultural conditioning through constant automatic downloading what we are told to think;

what to think,

how to think,

why to think.

This is sustained by its own invisibility and familiarity.

"As long as I don't see my own thinking errors, then 'I'm right.'" (invisibility)

"As long as those around me think like me, then 'I'm right.'" (familiarity)

This is an integral part of the lies we have been fed since childhood. A critical part of growing up and growing old is to learn to pay attention to the things we have been told that are not true. If we neglect the cognitive / spiritual discipline of discernment, eventually an alternative reality takes over and we never really become more wise as we grow old.

And now there are even more powerful lies being spread like a virus of the mind through social media and propaganda.

Does anyone know what "WOKE" means?

https://twitter.com/InsideWithPsaki/status/1637500132085182466?t=_U25nWzE5_zV9thhfaAeYg&s=19

BEWARE OF CONSTANT DECEPTION

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart." (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

"Two facts stand out as about contemporary electoral politics. The first is that almost nobody thinks they can be tricked or manipulated. The second is that almost everyone thinks lying politicians are manipulating the other side. These two facts ought to cause some pause for thought and introspection.

"Yet it is quite uncommon to think that this capability [of being tricked and/or misled] extends to our own side, let alone ourselves. This is our shared exceptionalism: the commonly held belief that everyone can be manipulated but ourselves.

"[An honest, needed response is] to admit that we are all capable of holding false beliefs, giving credence to bad arguments and having motivations other than we are aware of and tell ourselves we have."

The point is that they both presuppose that people are capable of being psychologically manipulated and being drawn to bad arguments.

 http://armchairideology.blogspot.com/2019/

""I have what I call an 'iron prescription' that helps me keep sane when I drift toward preferring one intense ideology over another. I feel that I'm not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I'm qualified to speak only when I've reached that state…

"That is probably too tough for most people, although I hope it won't ever become too tough for me… This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is very, very important in life. If you want to end up wise, heavy ideology is very likely to prevent that outcome.” {Charlie Munger]

CALL OUT CULTURE

 There seems to be a desire among young people to prove how “woke” they are by judging others online. “This idea of purity and that you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke — you should get over that quickly,” he said, to laughs. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”

 

The speaker continued to tie the issue to activism:

“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media — there is this sense sometimes of the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough. If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself. Did you see how woke I was, I called you out. Then I’m going to get on my TV and watch my show … That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”

 

(Obama speaking at an Obama Foundation event in Chicago)

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/obama-calls-out-call-out-culture-not-activism-905600/?fbclid=IwAR2x1k7pWiGQGziSIOT3s67o7gyYu0XhhfQlv4U2y79OmWZLKvMH-SLcE5o

* Conditioning according to Krishnamurti: Let us take the first question first. We are conditioned - physically, nervously, mentally - by the climate we live in and the food we eat, by the culture in which we live, by the whole of our social, religious and economic environment, by our experience, by education and by family pressures and influences. All these are the factors which condition us. Our conscious and unconscious responses to all the challenges of our environment - intellectual, emotional, outward and inward - all these are the action of conditioning. Language is conditioning; all thought is the action, the response of conditioning.

Knowing that we are conditioned we invent a divine agency which we piously hope will get us out of this mechanical state. We either postulate its existence outside or inside ourselves - as the atman, the soul, the Kingdom of Heaven which is within, and who knows what else! To these beliefs we cling desperately, not seeing that they themselves are part of the conditioning factor which they are supposed to destroy or redeem. So not being able to uncondition ourselves in this world, and not even seeing that conditioning is the problem, we think that freedom is in Heaven, in Moksha, in Nirvana. In the Christian myth of original sin and in the whole eastern doctrine of Samsara, one sees that the factor of conditioning has been felt, though rather obscurely. If it had been clearly seen, naturally these doctrines and myths would not have arisen. Nowadays the psychologists also try to get to grips with this problem, and in doing so condition us still further. Thus the religious specialists have conditioned us, the social order has conditioned us, the family which is part of it has conditioned us. All this is the past which makes up the open as well as the hidden layers of the mind. En passant it is interesting to note that the so-called individual doesn't exist at all, for his mind draws on the common reservoir of conditioning which he shares with everybody else, so the division between the community and the individual is false: there is only conditioning. This conditioning is action in all relationships - to things, people and ideas.

https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/conditioning 

Being Open to Me

A reminder to myself…

We tend to beat ourselves up over our imperfections because we are culturally conditioned to do so. The nature of conditioning is that often we do not even know we are doing it. Conditioning sustains itself through its own invisibility.

We are human and we cannot change who we are. We can only accept ourselves as we are and move forward. Actually, accepting ourselves as we are is the first step to moving forward. If we do not fully accept ourselves, then we cannot accept others either.

‘Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me.’ That’s one thing I’m learning.” ~ Maya Angelou

Our judgmental thinking is a constant and hard-wired into us. Thought has a mind of its own. We

must learn to pay attention to our thoughts and observe them. We are constantly making assumptions, judging, labeling, categorizing ourselves and others. Thought constantly is creating an image of ourselves and of others. Then thought tells us that this is the way the world really is, without reminding us that these stories in our heads are just that, stories in our heads. We are caught in a viscous cycle of thought creating the world and then saying, I didn’t do it. We are automatonic illusion machines with thought running away with reality, especially in the middle of the night.

So how do we begin? First we accept and love ourselves unconditionally. Then we guard our hearts by paying attention to our thoughts and the tricks they are playing. This requires time alone in silence. It is a discipline.

The Violence of the Machine

I AM what I AM.

I AM a man of peace and justice.

I AM a man of equality and community.

Trying to live a life of integrity and simplicity.

I AM what I AM.

This is my identity.

How does a man of peace

Live while being swallowed up

By the violence of the machine?

A machine of our own making.

A machine that by its own nature

Must carry on and on and on

Institutionalized within our culture

With us being good little cogs

In the machine.

The machine must work

as it casts out the outcasts

Spewing the broken

and the misfits.

Into the margins go

The poor and downtrodden

The battered and the bruised

The tattered and the torn

The shattered and shocked;

Occupying the margins of society.

A sort of fringe landfill of people

Invisible and voiceless

Because they are useless,

Meaningless, pointless to the machine.

Inward Deepening; Outward Expansion

Letting go and letting come...

I have, of necessity, developed an inner impulsion to grow, to deepen toward my source, uncovering and uprooting my illusions and myths, stories and fairy tales that I can no longer live by; revealing raw reality, unvarnished truth, unmasked authenticity, true integrity. This impulsive drive became a fire in my belly fueling an unstoppable passion to understand that which is real and true while attempting to resolve some of the cognitive, emotional, and spiritual dissonance that is a sort of tinnitus constantly piercing  and clouding my soul.

But this fire in my belly has been dormant for close to 50 years. The domination of cultural influences had its foot on my neck exerting  pressure, very subtly and imperceptibly; just enough to keep my face in the dirt, keeping me unaware that life is so much more than the canned world and life view that I have downloaded. 

Under this impalpable duress, I settled into knowing that I know, content with what I thought I knew; with the status quo remaining rigidly and palpably sacred. This is the natural tendency for most people. That is precisely how cultural myths are sustained. Apart from trauma and crisis and broken dreams; my world view, my myth, would have remained intact. That’s what I wanted. I liked my life except for the heartbreak. But these disrupted the settled illusion of status quo to the extent that I could no longer survive. The foundational values and beliefs that had sustained me crumbled in the face of this upheaval. I felt the storms washing away the sand upon which I had built my All American, Christian house. It was either do or die. I could no longer survive with the same thinking and patterns that had worked for so long. It was then that my eyes began to open and I began to “See” beneath the surface, through the facade that had sustained me.

Righteous Savior Syndrome

What is this foundational, insatiable drive to be right and righteous?

What is this foundational, insatiable drive to be a savior and to save others?

Who are the so called "whole" condescending and called to help the "broken," "the least of these?"

When I first started working with at-risk youth and youth with disabilities, I did so with a sort of savior complex; albeit unknowingly. My religious training infused in me the need to convert the lost. But since I was working in the public sector, I was not allowed to use my words to convert anyone to Christianity, of course. So in my mind I prided myself that I could BE the image of God to the lost through my actions, role modeling. My thinking was that working with these kids, there is no way they could understand a message like, God is your Father. Their understanding of father is a person that abandons them, beats them, and is never happy with them. Or God is Love, conjuring images of abuse, domination, and/or sexual atrocities, often to children. So my sense of saviorhood is that I would be that representative image of God that would demonstrate unconditional love by my own consistency, calmness, and caring everyday. I could be like my parents were to me, examples of love. This is all well and good, but the reality is that I am nothing more than a human being. no better than anyone else. I am not god to them. There is no "them." I have no right to label them the "least of these" or label myself like Jesus, a friend of sinners. It is nothing more than us. We are all in this together, equally. And yet, deep down, this was my foundational motivation so deeply implanted and embedded that it was invisible to me. Of course, looking back, I know am begging to see that this is the way that our conditioning sustains itself, by being invisible, silent, or even subconscious.

For more of my credentialing as a righteous savior, check this out:  https://livingwithopenhands2.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-image-of-god.html  

We, as humans, have this need to be more than we are, to be little gods in our little worlds, our self-defining bubbles, so that no one would be lost. If I'm on a mission from God, or doing the work of God, then my life becomes something more than what I am, simply human. I can be God's messenger or missionary. I can be a part of a greater scheme that is eternal and includes eternal consequences. My work was to prepare these broken kids to be able to eventually receive the saving words of God. Now I am beginning to see that preparing a person for "saving" including myself means that humans are all broken, despised worms that need saving. More and more I see that under this world and life view and conditioning, after being "saved" I was still the same person with a good heart trying to do my best to make a difference in this world. Calling myself a "child of a god" that reveals himself through invisibility and silence doesn't seem to be what I signed up for.


Also see, Why do We Make Gods?

I was always taught that the ultimate achievement as a Christian was to “go ye into all the world and preach the gospel” in order to save their souls from hell. I had ulterior motives beyond purely unconditional love. I had my own agenda to change them to think, believe, and act like me, since I am the righteous savior, a friend of sinners. During one spring break at Grand Rapids Baptist College, as a good evangelical that I was, I joined an evangelistic trip to New York city to work with evangelist Tom Mahairas of the Manhattan Bible Church as they preached the gospel on the streets of New York. Secretly, I hoped that I would finally capture my first soul for Christ and appease my guilt about being the best Christian possible, and yet not to save one soul. What was wrong with me? My words are not good enough from this stranger on a mission from Michigan to save their soul? The next spring break, I joined a trip to Jesus People USA, a Christian community in Chicago, ministering to the poor with the ulterior motive of saving their souls from hell.


This conditioning took root in middle school, after I walked the aisle to get saved at age 9 and was baptised the next year. Now I am ready to save the world as I have been told I am saved, so during an evangelistic campaign at my church, I got all fired up and, because I was afraid to preach the gospel to strangers, would reconvert my peers because I felt the need for myself to be reconverted during those evangelistic services. I wanted for them the euphemistic high that I felt before it wore off, not being told of course that it would wear off like any emotional high. My feeling of being born again inevitably faded and I began to feel lost, so charging those born again batteries by being born again and again and again appeased my guilt and so I logically felt that I needed to do that with others that I know, like my siblings and the neighbor kids. Going to Christian Bible Summer Camp also had that same result of recharging my batteries so I could charge on being the righteous one. 

Looking back, I’m astonished by how deeply ingrained that conditioning was. I also remember how often I felt a need to make my opinions the truth. So even regarding cultural things like where I lived, what cars I drove, what clothes I wore, along with many other values and beliefs, I would take a fundamentalist stance that “I’m right, making you wrong.” As I have been awakening I feel guilt for this kind of thinking and how demeaning and alienating this was to others. Why did I feel such a drive to “know”, to be right, and to “convince”??? As I mature in my unbelief, I'm beginning to see how often I have carried over the militaristic, fundamentalistic rightness when talking about living without religion. Conditioning can be so insidious.

So now, as I reduce my cognitive dissonance by letting go of "all" dogma, I find myself without anything to stand on. I still have strong values about equality, peace, nonviolence, and how people are treated, but I’m learning that I cannot hang on to anything in a absolute sense. I need to stay open to learning and open to following the truth, as it reveals itself through life, and be willing to go anywhere it leads me. My angst of groundlessness is growing because I know that the first step in learning something new, in learning anything, is to say and believe that "I do not know." And now I'm learning to question the very concept of truth and reality. There truly is nothing that I know.

In this process, more gods have emerged, sort of like “whack a mole.”

Gods #1-3: My insatiable drive for comfort, security, and certainty 

God #4: My insatiable drive to be right and righteous.

God #5: My insatiable drive to be a savior and to save others.

I have a hunch that I'll spend the rest of my life uncovering subconscious gods made in my image for me to cling to and create stories in my head about.

Is my goal in life to change others to be like me? If so, what a nightmare I’ve conjured up. What an unhealthy illusion of nothing good. What insidious pride.

And yet, this constituted my identity, my purpose. It was who I was for 50 years. Too bad deconversion isn't as quick and easy as conversion, like a quick (un)born again prayer. Religious and cultural conditioning is so deep seated by its very nature that it stays submerged just under the surface of our consciousness. It sustains itself by its own invisibility and refusal to reveal itself. Therefore, apart from the severe mercy of life's devastating events, we remain stuck, asleep under the influences of the principalities and powers that rule this world and our lives. I suspect it will take the rest of my life to unlearn my knee-jerk responses that are so deeply conditioned.

The Enlightened One
Recently, a couple of days after I wrote this post, I came across a facebook post (memory) that struck me deeply, illustrating everything that I wrote about. I reposted it, 5 years later (now) with these observations.

Here it is:

When I posted this, it seemed so true. But now, 5 years later, I'm taken back with the sense of pride that I had thinking that I could look at others and know that they are unthinking automatons. How can I presume that about those that I do not know, or even those that I do know? Isn't this simply another way of showing that I too am an automaton living out what I have been taught, what I have downloaded from culture?

For me this gives me a sense of progress in my own growth. I've been conditioned to think that I am the enlightened one. I'm right, you're wrong. I think, you're unthinking. I'm conscious, you're unconscious. I'm woke, you're not.

It has been only in the past couple years that I have been able to let go of my own pride and ego, my own righteousness and dogmatism; that I have begun to see my own sense of "righteousness." I am no savior. I am no teacher.

I am simply a country boy trying to make it in the big city!

"All of us have a secret desire to be seen as saints, heroes, martyrs. We are afraid to be children, to be ourselves." 

— Jean Vanier (Community and Growth)

Now, I am grateful to be able to write this from a perspective of being outside looking in at White Western Christianity .

But as an awakening Christian for the past 15 years or so, here is an interesting emerging perspective I was beginning to see regarding some of these same ideas, and yet falling so far short because I was still trying to see it from within White Western Christian bubble:

"Though I was never a missionary in the standard sense of the word, never proselytized or attempted to save souls, the engine driving me was the white savior complex. I thought the dark bodies living in the developing world needed us white, Western, Christians. The other Westerners I worked with believed we had it all pretty much figured out. We had the right theology. We had the right answers. We had the expertise. We were the so called 'whole' condescending to help the 'broken.'”
https://sojo.net/articles/6-harmful-consequences-white-savior-complex

For more, check these out:

What is this Drive to Convince? … to Be Right?

Being Human Together

From Dissonance to Wholeness

Grounded in Groundlessness

See resource pages at the top on White Fragility and on Racism (White Saviorism)

... and many other posts in this blog.

Downloaded Thinking / Cultural Conditioning

Living from the inside out.

“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6.

This is usually quoted as a command or an admonition telling us how to raise our children. But the context of this proverb shines a different light. The whole chapter is a list of statements of reality,

warnings of how life works.

For example, the next proverb says that the rich rule the poor and the borrower is slave to the lender. This is not telling us that the rich SHOULD rule over the poor or that the lender SHOULD become the master of the borrower. This is simply a statement of fact, the way of life, and a warning of how life works.

An ancient Jewish scientist, philosopher, and Rabbi, Ralbag, suggested an alternative, satirical interpretation of this proverb:

“Train a child in the way of evil and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

My paraphrase based on this interpretation is “Beware of this: the way you raise your child is what that child will grow up to be.” Remember that your most powerful way of teaching is you; your words and your actions (role modeling).

How Do We Know That We Know What We Know???

In a world full of people saying with such gusto, "I'm right and therefore you are wrong,"
how do we know what we know?
Why do we know what we know?
What does it matter?

“Each of us creates a picture of our world by connecting a dozen or so of the trillions of dots that would need to be connected to make a ‘true’ portrait of the universe.” — Sam Keen

Just because we think we know, does that mean we really know?
Just because someone told us so, does that mean we know?
Just because a person with power or authority tells us it is so, does that make it so?

"He who thinks he knows,
doesn't know.
He who knows that he doesn't know,
knows." (Joseph Campbell)
How do we know that we know what we know?

There is no authentic “knowing” outside the context of relationship or direct experience.

Those who know
don't talk.
Those who talk
don't know.

(Tao Te Ching)

“The path between the head and the heart is the longest journey.” Ojibwe saying.

Head knowledge is a form of passive learning that we are told. Its source is external. It is downloaded from culture and higher authorities. It is second-hand knowledge.

Heart knowledge is a form of active learning, learning by doing, learning through direct experience and through relationships. Its source is internal. It is knowledge that is ‘realized’ from within.

"The problem is that the knowledge we need originates underground. It comes from a place within us deeper than our intellects, a place the poet William Stafford calls "a remote, important region in all who speak," a place sometimes called the inner teacher or the soul. But rarely do we allow ourselves to go to that place. Instead, we fill our lives with noisy distractions, blocking our access to insights that might scare us but could also save us." (Parker Palmer)

"What is your life about, anyway?

Nothing but a struggle to be someone. 

Nothing but a running from your own silence."

(Rumi) 

TWO KINDS OF KNOWING 

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets. 

There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning. 

This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
-Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi 

FOUR dimensions of knowing

Known Knowns: things we know that we know.
Known Unknowns: things that we know we don't know.
Unknown Knowns: things that we already know, down deep, but have forgotten.
Unknown Unknowns: things we don't know we don't know.

1. Known Knowns: Knowing what I know. Certainty is a sort of “god” for many of us. We seek to learn only so that we no longer “don’t know”; which is "anathema" or cursed in our culture. We are uncomfortable with not knowing, and so we cling to any sort of idea that makes us comfortable. We fear what we do not know, and so we grasp hold of anything that will squelch our fears; an illusion of “knowing”. These are often opinions that are nurtured and developed within our bubble of sameness within which we exist. Out of our desire for comfortableness, we tend to gravitate toward ourselves, and those that are like ourselves. We get our ideas from what we are told, by those that think like us. Another way of referring to this tendency is “group-think” or “gang-think” or “confirmation bias” or “conditioning” or “conformity to the world”. It is not thinking at all. It is simply downloading the opinions of others, of culture, of the “educated”, of those in authority, of the powerful, of the influential. This then becomes a sort of Head Knowledge, sort of like a bank deposit. Knowledge becomes something that is bestowed upon us by those that know, those that are greater than us. We then can wash our hands of our responsibility to inner truth or our inner teacher; for we make it the responsibility of our external teachers to find and preach true truth, not fake truth. Part of “Known Knowns” are those things that we do know for sure. But these “knowns” are not bestowed upon us from any external source. They are more like an ancient knowing, recognition, or resonance. For me, discerning truth is not so much about being right as it is about resonating deep within. And hence, “Most of life is about remembering what we already know.” These are the things that we truly “know”. Often these ideas come to us through external sources, but until each downloaded idea is discerned and confirmed within through direct experience and/ or relationship, then it is simply opinion. It is not yet a Known Known.
2. Known Unknowns: Knowing what I do not know. The older I get, the more I realize how much I do not know. All learning begins with the realization and the admission that “I do not know”. But this realization and admission requires that we face our own limitations, the unknown, the mystery that engulfs us all. Our ego does not allow us to not know. As we let go of ego and pride, we begin to see things at a much deeper level. As we open up our hearts and minds, we can allow for a knowing that has no place in a closed mind that already knows. This emptying admission of the unknown gives birth to wisdom. And hence, we must remember that “If I already know, I can no longer learn.”
3. Unknown Knowns: Not knowing what I know. Far too often, we know, deep within, the path that we should take. We know how we should treat another person. But we forget that we know. Life usurps our knowing by its busyness and noise and confusion and complexity… and we are left confused and in fear of what we think we do not know. But there is an “ancient wisdom”, a “deeper understanding”, an “inherent knowing”, an “Implicit or tacit knowledge” that lies at the center of our being. We must learn to listen, to wait, and allow this “knowing” to emerge. And hence, “most of life consists in remembering what we already know”.
4. Unknown Unknowns: Not knowing what I do not know. (the bubble of indifference) We spend our lives in our self made cocoons where we know what we know; and where our limited opinions are nurtured. We feed on each others’ sameness, creating a life of comfort and security, safety from the “other” (an insidious form of symbolic cannibalism). That which we do not know is scary. Politics and religion build empires on fear mongering. Do we want to know what it is that we don’t know? Probably not, and so we anchor ourselves within our bubble of comfort and security, familiarity and indifference hoping that we never have to venture out into the scary world of mystery and difference, paradox and otherness. So we tend to slam our box shut, sufficiently ending any possibility of venturing into this world of the unknown.

Circling back to that which “we know that we know,” often we don’t even test what we know to discern truth. Is what we know simply a second-hand knowledge that has been handed down, downloaded from external sources like people or larger cultural influences (conformity to the world)?
Or do we really know?

How do we know that we know what we know?

There is no authentic “knowing” outside the context of relationship or direct experience.

For me, truth is that which resonates deep within my bones.

But this "knowing" comes only through the inner work of the discernment of relationships and the confirmation of life experiences.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias,^{[Note 1]} is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.^[1]

It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

We can see only what we seek for,


We seek for only what we want to see.
We can see only what we are looking for.
We cannot see what we do not want to see.
We can see only what we want to see.
Our ability to see (to understand) is limited by our comfort zone
… by our self-defined bubble.

We can hear only what we are listening for.
We cannot hear what we do not want to hear.
We can hear only what we want to hear.
Our ability to hear (to understand) is limited by our comfort zone

… by our self-defined bubble.

Why do I consistently choose to listen to certain news stations?
Why do I read the books that I read?
Why do I gather with a specific group of friends?

“We find comfort among those who agree with us…
growth among those who don’t.” (Frank Clark)

See also,
The Backfire Affect: https://m.curiosity.com/topics/the-backfire-effect-says-when-you-hear-contradictory-evidence-your-beliefs-get-stronger-curiosity/
Why facts don't change our minds: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
Second Hand Person: https://livingwithopenhands2.blogspot.com/2019/04/second-hand-person.html 
The Bubble of Indifference: https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2014/12/02/the-bubble-of-indifference/

Second Hand Person

I've often asked myself if I am living out my own life, or the life I was told to live by society, by country, by politics, by media, by religion, by teachers, by preachers, by mentors.

When I boil it down, the question is, where is the source of my authority; out there somewhere, or within me?

“Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, 'Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.

“If I were foolish enough to give you a system and if you were foolish enough to follow it, you would merely be copying, imitating, conforming, accepting, and when you do that you have set up in yourself the authority of another and hence there is conflict between you and that authority. You feel you must do such and such a thing because you have been told to do it and yet you are incapable of doing it. You have your own particular inclinations, tendencies and pressures which conflict with the system you think you ought to follow and therefore there is a contradiction. So you will lead a double life between the ideology of the system and the actuality of your daily existence. In trying to conform to the ideology, you suppress yourself - whereas what is actually true is not the ideology but what you are. If you try to study yourself according to another you will always remain a secondhand human being.” (Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known)

Concepts Versus Reality

Knowing these things for so many years, I was still

determined to hang on to my worldview, my precious beliefs, and my concept of God, especially when I was in trouble and needed a savior to cry out to. It finally started to crumble when I turned 50, or should I say I started to crumble and that I finally began to see that there was nothing left to hang on to. It was all dust in the wind, ashes in my hand, sand in my mouth and under my feet. But even then, I clung to mysticism as a way of holding on to my faith without compromising my integrity and my intellectual understandings of the human problem of language and words, stories and myths. I was creating new stories, new fictions, that would allow me to be the religious person that I still longed to be. Even though I was learning to let go of certainty, and other ways of thinking, it was my deeply ingrained longings and desires that I could not deny or let go of. I felt like that was my identity because it had been for so long. But what is identity besides language and words, stories and myths? I began to see that I was not losing myself, I was losing my concepts of myself, my concepts of the world, my concepts of god, my concepts period. Shifting or switching my story is very different than losing myself. I can redefine my myths and stories without losing my identity and purpose, my values and beliefs. The more I can anchor these things in concrete realities, and less in abstractions, the more I can be true to me. For example, see My Mythic Guideposts.

I needed to lose myself in order to be true to myself

I would have been fine, just believing what I had been told if I did not have this growing cognitive dissonance that I could no longer ignore. The fact that I had been coming apart at the seams did not help! The more I cried out, the more I wrote my questions, the more dissonance. Then when life broadsided me with full force, everything unraveled, uprooted, overturned, total devastation. And I found that no matter how hard I tried, I could no longer put the pieces back together. Life had completely shattered every "concept" of everything I ever believed in and stood for. I was at ground zero. And if I were to survive, I had to wake up, get up, and stand up on my own two feet rather than on the shoulders of others. And yet, what freedom like nothing I had ever imagined. 

“But in the same measure the myth gives us security and identity, it also creates selective blindness, narrowness, and rigidity because it is intrinsically conservative. It encourages us to follow the Faith of our Fathers, to hold to the time-honored truth, to imitate the way of the heros, to repeat the formulas and rituals in exactly the same way that they were done in the good old days. As long as no radical change is necessary for survival, the status quo remains sacred, the myth and ritual are unquestioned, and the patterns of life, like the seasons of the year, repeat themselves. But when crisis comes -- a natural catastrophe, the military defeat, the introduction of a new technology -- the (conservative) mythic mind is at a loss to deal with novelty (and change). As Marshall McLuhan said, it tries to ‘walk into the future looking through a rear view mirror.’” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xiii)

I realized that I no longer wanted to be a second hand person. I wanted to be my own person, an original person, a radical person rather than a cut-out or knock-off, a generic or homogenized person.

"I have created mirrors in which I consider all the wonders of my originality which will never cease." 
(Hildegard of Bingen 1098-1179)

Original comes from the root word meaning origin or source.

Original: directly from Latin originalis, from originem (nominative origo) "beginning, source, birth," from oriri "to rise" 

Radical: The Latin word radix means "root." This meaning was kept when the word radicalis came into English as radical. I.E. Returning to its Roots.

A deeply resonating view from a friend in India:

Obsessed with Borrowed Identity
"Hindus are becoming more Hindu, Muslims are becoming more Muslim, Indians are becoming more Indian, Americans are becoming more American. Everywhere it's like humanity is becoming more obsessed with self definition, clinging to any and every kind of borrowed identity, terrified of standing alone in their own personal beliefs or thoughts.
"This is a full blown fear psychosis created by power hungry politicians who unite a people not through shared culture or shared ideology, but through shared fear.
We have to resist this with all our heart and stubbornly refuse to give in to these constant lies that divide rather than unite us." (Rajiv Pande)

Mass Conformity and Dogma Rob Us of Identity and Authentic Conversations
Far too often the asset of longing for community becomes our greatest liability. One of my favorite verses from the Bible is Romans 12:2. “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind;” for we are a “peculiar people”. And yet most religion goes about the business of mass conformity without any transformation or freedom. One of our greatest blindspots is that the “principalities and powers” that lie just out of sight are powerful influences using every channel of communication in society to force mass conformity; quietly, unknowingly, undetectably stealing from us our individuality, our uniqueness, our peculiarity, our wisdom, our insight, our authenticity; leaving us stripped of creativity, power, and voice… our birthright gifts.

I especially resonate with this statement from below: “My loneliness arises not from a lack of social opportunity, but because wherever I look, whoever I meet, has already been ‘taken’ or has become ‘occupied’ territory as it were, in that he or she is no longer an individual up for grabs, but has sworn loyalty to some other community, faith, ideology or other form of mass-conformity.” I long for true community where we can be perfectly ourselves; bands of misfits and outliers, gypsies and nomads, free to live out extremely different and unique lives of meaning and purpose… a people that have not been overloaded and bogged down with downloads; conditioned conformity driven by the principalities and powers of our age.

Unfortunately, we prefer to climb into our little boxes of conformity where it is warm and sleepy, slogging and slumbering through life as we worship our gods of comfort, security, and certainty.

“I believe there can be no moral growth without the exercise of our own free will. It is indeed paradoxical that to grow morally, we need to move away from the comfort of conformity and actually become the devil for a while, even if inwardly tormented by our own self-doubt and loneliness.

“I think the denial of free will has a lot to do with the demonization of free will – the misplaced fear that disobedience is necessarily evil.

“And yet the greatest evil has always emerged from zombie like obedience and especially when this obedience acquires massive proportions and entire communities or nations are consumed by it.

“My loneliness arises not from a lack of social opportunity, but because wherever I look, whoever I meet, has already been ‘taken’ or has become ‘occupied’ territory as it were, in that he or she is no longer an individual up for grabs, but has sworn loyalty to some other community, faith, ideology or other form of mass-conformity. Even the neo-spirituals, light-worshipers, oneness zombies etc. have some form of internal discipline and group norms – so these so-called ‘non-conformists’ are actually behaving exactly as they thought they were rebelling against.

“Something weird happens when groups of people come together under a common banner. The anguish of being a moral lone wolf (and therefore a free will believer) is overcome through mutual forgiveness. However, in the process of this mutual forgiveness, moral conscience becomes dulled. The wolf is tamed. The soul is no longer restlessly seeking its own redemption.

“Religions offer this sweet surrender, this abundant forgiveness from an infinitely benevolent moral authority, but always at the cost of individual freedom. But strangely enough, it is not God that is to be found at the heart of any religion, but community. The forgiveness emerges not necessarily from some esoteric and metaphysical origin, but for the greater part from the very earthly and very palpable sense of belonging offered by the ordinary folk populating that religious community.

“Somehow belongingness, while in all respects appears to be a legitimate human need, also carries with it the innate risk of moral complacence. The ‘Greater Good’ has an identical twin co-existing with it as the ‘Greater Evil’. As long as you are within the community all is well. Otherwise ‘hell hath no fury like a community scorned’ (within itself and by its own).”

What determined, diligent discernment is required 

to stand radically alone without being consumed by society!

What profound paradoxes underlie being fully human, fully alive!

Thoughts on Thought

Don't believe everything you think!!!

"Thought creates the world and then says, 'I didn't do it!'" (David Bohm, physicist)

Thought is limited.

Attention is unlimited.

David Bohm, a physicist, in his books On Dialogue, and Thought as a System, examines the role of thought in our lives. Often thought takes on a life of its own, especially in the middle of the night. Thought is full of worry, regret, and fear. It creates inequality, racism, classism, ableism, sexism, and every other imaginable difference. It is the cause of hatred, domination, oppression, power, control, violence, and war. 

Thought creates boundaries and nations but then acts like it didn't do anything, like nations have always been there. 

Thought creates all these things. Thought also is the source of our actions. But then once we take the actions that we take, we wonder why these things have the kind of result that they have. We can't see that the source of the problems (thought) is the same thing that created the problem; thought.

Sit quietly and pay attention to your thoughts. Notice them. Count them. When you have a thought about the past, hold up a finger on your left hand. When you have a thought about the future, hold up a finger on your right hand. After a few minutes, notice that none of your thoughts are in the present moment. They are all caught in the past and future, regrets and worries, broken promises and failures, and also successes and joys. But never are they helping us be fully present, now. And that's all we have, NOW. So what good is thought if all it seems to be is a distraction from here and now?

Thought's primary purpose in our lives is to solve problems. We will always need that. But if it does not have problems to fix, then thought creates problems. It then keeps you awake at night trying to solve the problems that it created. Where do you think your worst nightmares come from? Or on a more subtle note, from whence do these things come: fear, worry, regret, failure, hatred, self-degradation, and on and on???

That's why Bohm's friend, neighbor, and coworker, Albert Einstein, said this:

"We cannot solve the problems that we created with the same thinking with which we created them."