Turf Battles in Heaven
The objective and the subjective, fact and fantasy, can mix without accounting for in this conscious matrix known as my reality.
Most religions depend upon the individuals location to appear true; In the US we tend to be Christian, in Iran, Muslim, in India, Hindu or Buddhist. Wherever you happen to be, you likely have heard of these other religions or beliefs, You know what they are about and are not buying it. For some reason; wherever you are, you do not need to examine your beliefs tenets to the core, or compare them in any objective fashion to these other systems. This subjective bias is a curious truth.
Why do you believe in God or not? Most of us will never admit that we believe what our culture told us to. We do not “admit it” because it is like the nose on our face; right in front of us, a part of us, yet mostly seen only on reflection. We are convinced by repetition, and more repetition, to reinforce our confirmation; that our concept of things is correct, for we seem to be operating from within them, everyone seems to be.
As for having a doubt about culture, what credentials does one individual have? After all, most “authoritative”experts will agree their culture is most relevant and good. By inference then, what do I know, me, I’m not an expert? Not on the reason why our culture is the way it is. We are in it, and likely not outside looking in with comparative information to question basic structures that form the bedrock to the whys that we do things the way we do here. Most often we go with the flow, and have since birth. This does create a potential endemic problem; an inability to question fundamentals. We are in an automatic pilot driven confirmation bias; we just are not presented with contrary or other information compared to our cultures dialectic.
This is a first step in manifestation of the Great Denial. Denying legitimate questioning, by being instilled with a perception, by apparent place or situation; that certain legitimate questions are illegitimate, or else they would have rearranged culture to their truth. We have an effective consensus reality that culture is true and valid, and an implied assumption that truth wins over lies and falsity. We know many good and honest people, we might be one ourselves, insinuating that we are somehow or someway wrong, would seem to be wrong. At least it would seem to instigate a disturbance that I might feel was not called for. Some questions will have a way of appearing illegitimate. This should be cause for concern, instead of certainty.
This kind of nature, and, or nurture issue continues to the factors individuals use to compare and evaluate themselves and one another. I decide the kind of hair style, or lack of, that represents me. I may force myself to act in ways that seem to be not what I wish, conditioning myself to accept most of these “right ways” in time. If I grew up under the old Egyptian Pharaoh culture, I would know I could only create the human image in a distorted form following an established formula—-for a millennium. Likely, to break this taboo back then would have seemed wrong, and just as likely a threat for its apparently wrong reason.–Why are you challenging what is? Why do you not respect what we do? You are trouble.
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But mostly, we do not acknowledge our bias of point of view, not honestly and fairly, and not with open and intelligent questioning characteristic of a healthy minds critical thinking ability. We may be unable to legitimately question important notions of the individuals appropriate behavior in culture, even though we have acknowledged that society must enforce some inhibitions on some behaviors for everyone’s own good.
We see many taboos as self evident to an intelligent person; I do not do some things I wish, for they would bring harm to me. They might well bring harm to others, and so they are suppressed for their obvious inappropriateness. Society, me included, wish not to permit much harmful behavior, particularly when directed at others. If I feel rage, it is not OK to just go and physically harm those I might emotionally wish to.
Culture, or society, or peer pressure, forms aspects of my will into its own image, and at times for good reason.–Some freedom and liberty is not good for the whole of society which I am a part of, but just as with the Pharaoh’s not allowing true human form to be represented; we may not know the truth as to why society is suppressing something that to us seems both real and not harmful. The converse can be true as well; I can consider taxes an evil; someone taking the opportunity to take my will away: I cannot do what I want with my money.
{The tax issues always deserve critical analysis. I am not endorsing pork projects and the like as being in the common interest. Here I am examining tax as an extension of the public will, and where the individuals will and responsibilities interact with societies. So I am for constructive critical analysis of societies institutions.}
This detached abstraction of money, and specifically “my” money, does not consider all the interrelated aspects that the concept of money exist in. Though I may need one more dollar to buy a meal, that meal comes across roads, I expect it will be wholesome and not harmful. When demanding a meal by intending to consume a meal, I enter into the interrelationships that create that meal; the corporations, the farmers, the middle-people and meal makers. This too is connected to “my” money, and yet to deny these relationships I need only alienate myself from the connection and consider it instead an imposition.
Tax that went into the roads, the employment, the agricultural interest, the other relationships connected to societies healthy functioning, for some, this is now an evil imposition; they taking form you. Why are the interest of the whole of life being rendered irrelevant to the subjective truncated notion of “my” interest? The they of government in democracy is actually you and I through representation. The they in business, who take my money for their product or service, pass on their cost, their profit, and their tax to me. Yet in a fundamental way, aside from not engaging them, I have virtually no say. It is pay or don’t play. Or pay or do not receive health care, or… Both of these societal entities take my money, yet I am to consider the one I actually vote on as not being the one with my interest? Clever denial and diversion.
{As an example of all the libertarian like proclamations of getting rid of imposed taxes for many instances, through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, the tax burden has been being shifted over recent decades; from the wealthy, who among other things; use, abuse, and manipulate The Commons many times over the common folk, to the common folk, who suffer the consequence and pick up more of the tab. That— taking what I earned abstraction ruse, away from responsibilities and accountability, to the religion of detached individualism. Again. A clever denial and turf battle played out at public expense, but not owned up to.}
I believe that throughout history, some people have learned how to manipulate others for their own benefit. To cover this usage of The Commons, scapegoats and whipping boys must be targeted. Particularly in democracies, attention must be taken away from source causes, and have those felt individual injuries manifesting from exploitation of The Commons be targeted essentially onto those who have not much power. The equative power of democracy needs to be divided and conquered for the usual societal manipulators to proceed without much blow-back from common awareness.
Critical thinking must be dismantled and its alleged incarnation handed over to various amalgamations of belief and faith, where true reality checking is impaired or even considered evil. There are ready and willing ideologies that promote these diversions of attention and corralling of the will, particularly of its common interest, instead promoting a myopic focus upon the self and its travails, where the whole of Life then becomes its challenge and proving ground.
Here is a kind of Great Denial; where self centeredness is considered both holy cause of redemption and self consuming. Then this alienated, or separated/detached self, can be sold all manner of explanation as to how the non powerful are actually imposing their failed wills upon the righteously willful. Notice how much conservatism is actually about preserving the institutions of the conservative haves, and subjugating all the rest that be to second class citizenship or worse. Us and them become operational truths seeming to be established reality and verified by belief.
We tend to judge others and other cultures by our own values, and tend to feel ours are the true, right, or the only legitimate ones. This is how “The Other”, a kind of unknown, and so inherently threatening characterization, falls upon many of our fellow humans. Dropped on them by me. Covered in this veil of judgement, a kind of ignorance is both instituted, and in effect, worshiped as true, even for some, as God mandated.
All humans, unless perfectly honest, forthright and fair, do this interpersonal condemnation, and at times, even dump it upon themselves by the same standards. A culture, however, is somewhat like a meal. We may bite into it and survive for awhile, but we do not necessarily like what we chew, and it is not necessarily fully wholesome. We may go through life in a kind of starving for self realization state, and be kept there by the powers that be, who may have found a way to use our stress to their advantage.
We may think we are free to know whatever needs be known. For a culture to be self correcting, it would need some way of verifying truthfulness. Mostly we trust that the true, or accurate information will come to us somehow in a Democracy with a free press. Yet even that is a broad and foolish assumption. Do we know how free the press is? as in the information in it and why what is there is there and other information not? Can we be certain that our votes are even counted correctly and fairly? Are you sure? To make such cognitive dissonance unimportant, we must camouflage or otherwise deny relevance.—Who cares what the human shape allowed to be drawn is anyway? Troublemakers?
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But does anythings existence as a human concept mandate its continuance, rendering questioning existentially irrelevant? In an objective and open observation point of view, the liberal notion of cultural relativity is valid only to certain degrees operationally. Fortunately, to be an honest agent in determining this cultural validity factor that I presume, requires a completely honest and understanding mind, and most of us can be quite confident that we are not the ones to pass fair and just judgement, that is if we look and acknowledge when our confident judgments have been found wrong. We can, however, render comparative facts from professed belief as legitimate questions of true context.
We allow ourselves sound fundamental questioning, or deny what may well be each of our God (or Life) given right to think for ourselves and so live a life of true merit, instead of imitation merit by external fear based perception. To not so define truthfulness for oneself, is to live a life of unexamined robotic belief, as if following in the footsteps of the cause of some lemmings deaths, where huge numbers can plunge off a cliff to drown. Why? Cause the herd was pressing them over the precipice unknowingly; a movements assumption. For humans, belief in truth can be, in result, seemingly suicidal, for not much reason other than acting from our ignorance instead of the better angels of understanding. This is the trouble with thinking we already know the answer in a living and vibrant context of existence that is in fundamental ways One Thing.
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Understanding is the result of knowing context extends, yet knowing requires freedom, not just to question, but to assume freedom to question without that questioning being cast as illegitimate. In most religion and politics, for instance, this freedom to question is not only discouraged, except where advantageous for belief reinforcement, but often assumed to be the tool of evil; or that which seeks to destroy our view of an institution. I say that, for real Truth, true reality, is never actually destroyed or erased, but our opinions and beliefs about it can be. We fear change of basic perceptual parameters, for they may cast doubt upon ones cosmological assumption, or spiritual ones.–The true human forms shape exist in reality no matter how much authority says it is either wrong, or offensive to society to “allow”.
How many of us could handle all we know being found out to be wrong? We mostly avoid this perception from our lives, we wish to live our own life right, for perturbing basic logical conceptual assumptions can be emotionally unsettling. Culture supplies many ways to do this avoidance of truth checking, mostly by shaming questions, or otherwise define them as illegitimate. Most conservative movements are for damming critical thought understanding, and insisting that only their own way or view is the true one. These usually try to make their own belief constructs appear as the only legitimate ones. Questioning with a free and independent spirit is deemed offensive, or dysfunctionally eccentric.
Even communist movements that scorned religion, seek to establish their own kinds of religious like icons, and define fundamental questions as inherently illegitimate or falsely motivated. We would not know this as true without truthful examination of context. The words and proclamations can be what one claims them to be, but when the reason as to why the image is cannot be legitimately questioned is not allowed consciously in public without shame; someone is seeking to make unquestionable imagery. In effect, telling us that religion is the opiate of the masses, as they create their own opiates for the masses. Shame, blame, denial; claims of heresy and other means of purging questions; these all indicate kinds of manipulation control, not by understanding and its light, but by emotional prejudice and its reliance on darkness–unexamined areas held in confinement.
For all intents and purposes, the battle in heaven is carried out within our own minds, even though the causes fought for may have much outside influence and strategy. Unfortunate for us, these institutions that claim dominance and preeminence have their own self perpetuating forces operating to contain us, not unlike any viral influence. Ideas carry out their own potential pathology; expressing into form elements of their presence. Unless you and I are able and willing to be the cure to the providers of false reality, it will perpetuate itself even as claiming to be the one and the only cure to trouble.
Why if only I did not question, all would be peaceful, so questions are the problem. Can’t you just see that clearly!
Ah! the peaceful bliss of the silent, and, or ignorant mind.
This is the circular reasoning paradigm many institutions insist upon to continue as is unabated by the influence of now. Blank minds are minds that stand not in ones way. They do not, however, stand for the way of whole truth or light either. Blind following is not the meritorious virtue it is often presented as. Nothing advances in its real presence if it is not allowed to change with the times. This change seems to be the nature of Life itself; conserving what is true and real while always allowing new expression to fill into new space. Most ideology does not allow this dynamic truthful connection to Life. It is then suspect as an element of ignorance, even if shrouded in enlightenment’s garb.
Ignoring Shades of Deception; Ignoring The Whole
Our modern world’s corporate narrative is often taken in as Gospel; although the earths ecosystems may be reeling from pollution, resultant of materialism, environmental exploitation and overpopulation; if gas is cheep, car manufactures, along with oil companies, promote gas guzzling vehicles for their good, and not The Wholes. This is a natural byproduct of corporatism as an ideological bias; just as religious or political movements, it will use apparent stress to benefit itself. They wish us then to covet the larger, safer, faster, bigger vehicle; that is the spun slant for our reality framing to consider. Questioning the context of its existence however, becomes forbidden. To make things seem forbidden, shame and ostracism must be tagged to their holding.
Its need in your life is then promoted as an objective of desire, a truth for me, driving the consumption and materialist dependency loop.–Why are you against business succeeding or free choice? = Blamed for questioning whole context as being of any relevance. Now see how many of these kinds of Thought-terminating cliché’s the conservative movements possess. The political/economic/ and many religious ones are packed with them, to stop you from thinking objectively.
Corporatism has become a kind of materialistic religion, claiming to make all things right for the individual—if they can pay. Our culture is full of good advice in this materialistic regard; ones love becomes seemingly connected across it. I can advice you with all sincerity, to buy the monster truck that is built like a tank and guzzles gas; not because I wish to see how fast the earth can be consumed and laid waste, but to desire for your own safety. What is wrong with that? Perhaps nothing as long as questioning is denied one way or another.
In this way, subjective context are claimed paramount, as would fit a one for everybody consumer driven expansionist culture living in a cancerous paradigm and denying the consequences. A holistic or inclusive view taking in the rest of the connecting context is not helpful to consumerism as an operational identity in consciousness. Who in business wants everyone second and more guessing or questioning what is for sale? Not the sellers!
And so objective reality is subjugated to subjective narrative’s of the quest for the good self actualized life. Shame those who would suggest otherwise. In this pursuit; many greedy narratives can be designed and anchored/tagged to the kinds of people who caution us about abusing the environment (implying consequence beyond sale price). It then becomes about directing questioning away from the objective, and instead, to the subjective, where little proof need be presented.
For some reason, possibly consciously known by leaders, true objectivity must be shamed and blamed, thus becoming not the kind of thing to identify oneself with. — Heaven conquered from within. If you wonder how so many conservatives can believe in so many outrageous and often contradictory ideas and allegations? They need not consider actual reality, but stay focused in their ideological sight, which is willing to see and believe all manner of insanity, as honest fact–true cause need not be checked by including contra questioning. They become trapped in their own world of logical association unattached to objective critical analysis. Confirmation bias may be an organic aspect of conservative myopia.
To test this out; watch the unsubstantiated fact associations chained together on any of the main conservative propaganda platforms. Attitude and innuendo truly are intended to lead perception to places not requiring objective examination. And a big YES; we all have what are called conservative and liberal tendencies, just do not acknowledge them if they seem not aligned with our take on things.
It, subjective reality mind framing in a business, does not have to consider the whole when corporate bottom lines are the business models deciding factor. We, as subjects of and to corporatism, will tend to go along with its narrative, and not question its sanity, nor its pathological and suicidal tendency. We will draw the given but not acknowledged distortion as the truth, not questioning its own actual motivation, nor its problematic consequence. Most of us succumbed to external controls this lazy way; by never questioning our context, pretending to be unattached to consequence. The Great Denial in action. (Our country has been conducting itself as if business interest are the leading ones, and the individuals a distant second to last place. This is why I call it corporatism.)
This denial can be operating within us as true and relevant to our survival, as those biases of our political and religious presumed choice, but actually often handed down to us by a seeming situational imperative. The best place for darkness to govern?–right out in the light, appearing to be the same as knowledge. Those following various forms of darkness (embedded ignorance) will know this, and seek the same out in others to use to their own benefit, no matter how delusional that benefit actually is.
You must decide if political or religious robes are true garments, or those of deception and denial, for if they deny thorough questioning, they likely are the latter. Your ability to ask fundamental questions will help expose the legitimacy of institution, or their disease. One thing is certain, deception will come wearing the garments of friendship, love, good advice and care, it must do this to commandeer identity, then anchor it somewhat invisibly to fear.
To Question is The Answer
To not fear question is the answer to perceptual and other problems in cognition; but who holds the key to opening true realities doorway of perception? This battle in heaven will decide for you which side wins. Consciousness, that area in which we operationally perceive our world, is under pressure to surrender, to align with the outside and inside realities; either it surrenders to reality and wins, or it surrenders to an ideology and is taken hostage. It is in our unabashed ability to question where this truth will play out.
The decision favors who or what is actually in control of ones soul; is it rightly ones own spirit connected to the All of Life, or in some definitions to God; or is it ideas and or books given to us that claim to represent the all knowing wisdom of Being that happen to require experts to tell us what things really mean?
You are the warrior in this battle over heaven. You decide if you stand for light and understanding; or exclusion and seemingly endless explanation, making you a kind of servant to someone else’s thoughts and alleged expertise. This awareness is achieved by questioning, as the mind was intended as a guide to truth. For love and belonging to Life to be true, it is necessary to care for the unknown as well as the known.
This is truths dictate; questions must be asked for deeper understanding to be held. Anyone or anything trying to prevent critical thinking out in the objective open, unhindered by bias or presumption, is trying to prevent Light from illuminating. That example will be most telling, despite the likely denial.
The denial is great; yet reality is always greater, for what is real exist on its own terms and not ours. To align with It, I must surrender my own illusion, to win what is my true life. To this ultimately most simple of task; most natural of pursuits; love is the answer. But don’t believe me; your love is your answer.
True love (for you, or for and of God) is never afraid of question.
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(As most always; I will check for, add or subtract words and ideas (sometimes for grammar and spelling) as this post progresses. Pics.—Some of my photo’s from this week)
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