In my experience, seeing the common in all is crucial. It can only be done by withdrawing one’s attention from the external identity (I.e., race, country, culture, etc) and rooting it in the inner. Self knowledge, this way, leads to the realization that we are all one. But this rooting attention on one’s true nature and away from external identity must become a habit. Only then can we become truly aware of the oneness of all without having to rely on belief or dogma.
Tag: dogma
With Death as an Advisor, Identity Dissolves
Thought, ideas, dogma, beliefs, identity––this more than anything––keep us trapped in a form. Anything that threatens that form seems like death to thought, to the mind, to the ego. We react by retreating deeper and deeper into dogma, into our identity. We seek to affirm our false identity and we seek to make others respect our identity, requiring that they address us as if our identity is real. But that identity is going to end, like everything under the sun ends. The ending of that thought is perceived as death.
The ending of the false ego is perceived as a threat. Thus, I become unyielding. I become closed off to my surroundings. I become dull and lifeless.
That’s what happens to a lot of us when we feel the lightning that comes with the end of thought, and we encroach ourselves more and more into our dull ego, our plastic identity, because we are afraid of not being who we think we are.
Such rigidity is misplaced. Rigidity and strength should be applied, not to the identity, but to the discipline of being aware, of being true to oneself, of knowing that it is not the identity, but death itself, that will forever be with us.
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How body and mind become dull
How is it that the ancient and profound intelligence of the body become dull and inefficient? It is by the restrictions created by the mind conditioned by culture, religion, and education that we obscure the fluid intelligence of this organism that has kept us alive and evolving for millions of years.
The knowledge that we develop about the body is always separate from the intrinsic knowledge the body has.
They are both useful. Science has been teaching us a lot, but the body always possesses an intelligence that is older than the intelligence of the discursive mind. The problem is not that we don’t know. The problem is that we kill the intelligence of the body. We teach the body how to be insensitive. Then, we teach the mind how to be dull.
We make the body insensitive by regulations, restrictions and habits. We teach the mind to be dull with unconscious language, morality and religion.
What most people do out of love for their children, for their education and their moral standards, is what is stunting the sensitivity of the brain. After a while we cannot really think, investigate or observe. We only see what everyone sees. We only think what everyone thinks.
We learn to feel little: only that which has a name and only that which society permits. By that time we’re already slaves to this system.
