Personalism 102

1 Timothy 6:5-12 wrote:5 Bitter talk of men who, being evil in mind and dead to what is true, take the faith to be a way of making profit.
6 But true faith, with peace of mind, is of great profit:
7 For we came into the world with nothing, and we are not able to take anything out;
8 But if we have food and a roof over us, let that be enough.
9 But those who have a desire for wealth are falling into danger, and are taken as in a net by a number of foolish and damaging desires, through which men are overtaken by death and destruction.
10 For the love of money is a root of all evil: and some whose hearts were fixed on it have been turned away from the faith, and been wounded with unnumbered sorrows.
11 But you, O man of God, keep yourself from these things, and go after righteousness, religion, faith, love, a quiet mind, gentle behaviour.
12 Be fighting the good fight of the faith; take for yourself the life eternal, for which you were marked out, and of which you gave witness in the eyes of all.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,  
But I have promises to keep,  
And miles to go before I sleep…….

RAW from Undoing Yourself wrote:The one sure way to make yourself unpopular in the United States these days is to mention the fact that Christianity and Democracy have been among the worst disasters to ever befall the human race. Nonetheless, as all students of history know, Christianity has been the bloodiest and most destructive religion in the long career of fanaticism on this planet; although Liberals and Rationalists keep reminding us of that tragic record of the Religion of Love.

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The blood-thirsty nature of Christianity and Democracy — which is obvious, psychologically, if one listens even for a few minutes to a typical speech by Rev. Jerry Falwell or his good friend Ronald Reagan — is, of course, based on arrogance, megalomania and a deeprooted sense of total moral superiority to all non-Christian and non-Democratic peoples. But beyond that, the violent nature of Christian/Democratic countries is rooted in the singular delusion shared by both the Religion of Love and the Politics of Liberty. This delusion is the belief that human beings are born with some sort of metaphysical “free will” which makes them unique in the animal kingdom and only slightly less exalted than the gods themselves.

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The “free will” delusion is much more serious than any of that. It is the kind of radical 180-degree reversal of reality that, once it enters a person’s mind, guarantees that they will be incapable of understanding anything happening around them; they might as well be deaf, dumb, blind and wearing signs warning the world, “ULTIMATE DESTINATION: THE MADHOUSE.”

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I do not speak flippantly, nor do I mean to be understood as writing satire or polemic. The facts of modern biology and psychology have demonstrated clearly and conclusively that 99 percent of the human race is in a robotic or zombi-like state 99.99999 percent of the time. This does not refer to “other people.” It refers to YOU AND ME. As the Firesign Theatre used to say, We’re all Bozos on this bus. The best that can be said of any of us, usually, is that we have occasional moments of lucidity, but that can be said of any schizophrenic patient.

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Buddhism, Vedanta and Taoism also recognize that each of these clever animals just mentioned, including the humans, have about equally as much “free will” as flowers, shrubs, rocks and viruses, and that the human delusion of being separate from and superior to the rest of the natural order is a kind of narcissistic self-hypnosis. Awakening from that egotistic trance is the major goal of every Oriental system of psychology.

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That is, Sufism and other Hermetic traditions recognize that robots will behave like robots, and does not “blame” them, but it also does not forget, for a moment or even a nanosecond, that we are living in a robotic world — “an armed madhouse” in the metaphor of poet Allen Ginsberg. Those of this tradition know that when a man spouts Christian and Democratic verbalisms that does not mean he will act with brotherly love at all, at all; he will go on acting like a badly-wired robot in most cases.

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The ego and its delusions must be undermined—either attacked openly and bluntly, as in the Gurdjieff system and this book, or subverted more subtly and slowly, as in certain other systems—before any real progress can be made toward “liberation,” “enlightenment,” “finding IT,” discovering the “True Will” in Crowley’s sense, or whatever is your favorite term for becoming less robotic and more aware—less the computer and more the programmer of the computer—less the conditioned rat in the Behaviorist’s maze and more the Beyond-Human that the Sufic-Hermetic traditions and Neitzsche have predicted.

The main reason you shouldn’t be afraid of this attack on your precious little ego is that the ego is infinitely resourceful and finds ways to sneak back into its habitual mechanical trance no matter how many times you think you have Awakened once and for all.

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Mechanical reactions are the statistical norm; full conscious attention remains very rare. (That’s why one Zen Master always gave the answer “Attention!” when he was asked what Zen “is.”)