“Contradiction exists when you are not dealing absolutely with what is actually happening.”
Madras, 1977
Fear is the feeling that incites us to look for and identify dangerous conditions or developments. The feeling is the inchoate response to sights, sounds, or smells that incite alert attention to our environment and situation. This ability to detect danger is what keeps us alive.
But this sense is not infallible or entirely reliable. It makes mistakes. A coil of rope mistaken for a snake. A shadow mistaken for a being. Of course no security system is flawless, and we’re as prepared for false alarms as we are for valid alarms.
Or are we? Is our alarm system prone to error because it is inherently flawed? Or is it because we have created our own reality in spite of the danger of doing so?
Ever since we chose to abide in our own reality, the alarm has been sounding to alert us to what a dangerous, reckless thing we’re doing. But because the alarm is the danger itself, i.e., the sound of thought creating our reality, we are not alarmed by it. What we find alarming is the thought of not imagining our reality. Our thoughts about reality are more meaningful than the reality that makes thought possible. We’re more at home with our imaginings than with solitude and silence; more at ease with comforting, empowering ideas than with actualities we have little understanding of and no control over.
We’re conditioned to trust thought above all because without thought we are naked and afraid, whereas with thought, we are clothed and confident. But is it worse to be naked and afraid than to be confident that we’re living intelligently when the evidence is contradictory?
" “It” being your mind. " No, that which is happening. “Too many think so incoherently and write so unintelligibly, they’re incomprehensible. That is what is actually happening. It doesn’t change because you speak or write.”
Different in his case because he escaped being ‘conditioned ‘. His ‘goal’ to set man unconditionally free didn’t come from his own conditioning. Not ‘hoping’ or ‘wanting’ just acting from seeing the illusion we were caught in?
That’s a valid point, but there are a lot of people who, when they warn us of the need to reduce carbon emissions because of the effect our way of life is having on our environment, it isn’t their conditioning that moves them to act, but the incontrovertible evidence of anthropogenic climate change.
The conditioned mind can acknowledge facts and act on them. You can argue that it can only act on the outward effects of our conditioning, and not the conditioning itself, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the conditioned mind is capable of seeing a lot more than it chooses to when there’s more respect for empirical evidence (science), then there is for belief and persuasion.
The goals and intentions of the conditioned mind can be deeply evil and corrupt, but honest, humble minds, conditioned as they may be, are at worst, not wholistic.
Again, even though I took care to show the context, so that the words were not misunderstood, as before, another jibe of misinterpretation. Really, no wonder there is incomprehension. Is this a strategy of disengagement? Why bother?