I've been wondering...
1. What, if anything, could cause the world to expand its ideas about God?
2. What, if anything, could cause human beings to change their understandings about Life?
3. What, if anything, could cause you and I to alter our thoughts about ourselves and about who we are in relationship to each other?
IN SHORT: What, if anything, could cause our species to modify the drivers of our behavior?
A Discussion in Four Parts
THIS IS going to be a discussion in four parts, centering round what I have come to call behaviorifics - the causes and birthings of human behavior. I am rolling it out here in the Weekly Bulletin to see, frankly, if it makes any sense. Your comments and reactions as we go along will be happily received.
The four areas of our exploration will include:
1. An exploration of why we behave the way we currently do.
2. An exploration of the question: Is there any need to change our current behaviors?
3. An exploration of what could cause us to change our behaviors if we wanted to.
4. An exploration of the role each human being plays in all of the above.
1a. What causes behavior?
The cause of behavior is thought. All behavior is driven by an idea that we have about something.
All thought is belief. Every idea is a mental construction built upon previous mental constructions which are built upon previous mental constructions...which are built upon even earlier mental constructions, which are built upon our earliest memories of how things are.
Every thought is a memory, extended. In each Present Moment we pull up a memory of a Past Moment and apply it to a Future Moment. That is all that is happening; that is the entire process that we call decision making.
1b. Where do ideas come from?
Every idea is the re-application of an older idea. There is no such thing as a New Idea-although there is such a thing as a New Application of an old idea. Human beings, by their inherent nature, are incapable of having New Ideas. That is their eternal hardship, that is their eternal handicap, yet that does not have to be their eternal curse. For while they are not capable of having new ideas, human beings are capable of producing an endless variety of adaptations-twists and turns on, and modifications of-old ideas. And some of these adaptations are so ingenious that these are labeled New Ideas, and hold the very same value.
One form of adaptation is expansion. I have been told that what the world needs right now is a rapid expansion of its ideas about God, about Life, and about Each Other. We will speak more about that presently. But first...
1c. When Ideas become Beliefs
A Belief is an Idea turned to stone. It is no longer pliable. It is no longer stretchable or flexible or plastic in any sense of the word. It is a thought held so long in the human consciousness that it is no longer called an "idea" at all, but, rather, something that we say we know.
Ideas become knowledge when they cease to expand.
Ideas become dogma when they begin to contract.
Thoroughly contracted dogma becomes doctrine.
Doctrine becomes belief when the heart contracts to match the smallness of the mind. It is then that humanity becomes less humane. It is then that humanity becomes dangerous. It is then that humanity is in trouble.
All "belief" comes from small or closed perspectives-which is the only perspective that the Mind can have. This is because the Mind can only hold what it has collected. It cannot contain information or data about that to which it has not yet been exposed.
The Soul, on the other hand, has nothing to do with "belief." It has only to do with "knowing." The Mind "believes," and the Soul "knows." The Soul holds everything that it has collected-and it has collected everything. The Soul knows everything that God knows, for the Soul IS God, miniaturized.
Ideas do not and cannot exist in the Soul. Only Truth-what you would call "what is"-can exist in the Soul. Pure Awareness, or what might be termed Ultimate Knowing or Christ Consciousness, is all that exists in the Soul. An "idea" is impossible under these circumstances. All "ideas" that could possibly be, have already been "processed," experienced, and fulfilled. There is nothing left to be done. There is nothing left to be thought. There is nothing left to be experienced. God, and the Soul, has "been there, done that."
The only way for the Soul to continue its experience of life in any meaningful or joyful way, therefore, would be for it to find a way for the Divine Being that It Is to "forget" what it totally knows.
It has done so. It has found such a way. We calls this way, "life."
Physicalization is the way that the Soul has created for the Divine Being that we are to experience Its divinity again and again, as if it had never been experienced before. The process by which the Divine Being recreates its own experience of divinity is a process called that we call Thought. Everything begins with Thought.
The three Tools of Creation are Thought, Word, and Deed. Of these, Thought is the instigator, the originator, the Prime Force or Divine Creative Essence. Every experience you have, have ever had, and ever will have, is forged first in Thought. It is not real. It is simply your thought about it. Whatever the "it" is, your experience of "it" is nothing more than your Thought about it, realized (made real) through action and word.
Yet your Thought must emerge-it has no choice-from the collection of data that is stored in the Mind. Thus, your idea about everything is energy from the past about the past, having to do with all that has passed. It has nothing to do with the Present, nor can it, for the Mind has no way to perceive That Which Is Present.
All of this is a long way of saying that we behave the way we do because this is the way we have always behaved-or, as far back as we can collectively remember. The only way that we could ever change our individual or collective behavior would be to expand our thinking beyond the Past and into the Unchartered Future; into what we would call the "future," but what the Soul knows is not the future at all, but the ever-present Present. I call this the Unrealized Present. That is, the Present that has not been made "real."
To step into this expression of life we must move from Experience to Knowledge-from the field of energy that contains what we have done and what we imagine is true based on what we have done, to the field of energy that contains what we Know based on what IS.
That field of energy can only be accessed through the doorway of the Soul. It cannot be accessed through the Mind. In other words, in order to understand anything that I have just said here you have to be out of your mind.
More on this next week as we continue with this series on "behaviorifics," and a look at what, if anything, could change our supposedly "unwanted" global reality. I mean, I know of no one who says he or she wants or desires a world the likes of which we are now creating-yet we don't, any of us, seem to know how to change things in any major material way, in any really significant way, in any long-lasting or truly life-altering, experience-shifting way that affects all of humanity and moves us away, at last, from conflict and violence and misery and heartache and suffering and oppression and repression and depression-all of which, all of which, we are told by every spiritual master who has ever walked the planet that we can rid ourselves of, if we only wanted to.
Let's look at how this could happen, shall we? In the weeks ahead, let's take this exploration.
