Theos-Talk Archives (June 2003 Message tt00119)

Hi all of you,

The following will almost only
interest the more earnest students of Theosophy.

Conditioning

Part 1 of 3:
All systems, cults, metaphysical groups and almost all human
conditions, practise conditioning. That is to say, they instil
into people a limited range of beliefs and requie certain auto-
matic practises. Unknowingly, the people concerned (which
can include the instillers) become 'servants' of the system.
Some systems are what we can call non-comprehensive.
These would include those which do not have a world-view,
and which function effectively enough within well-understood
and accepted limits. A group of people associated together for
the purpose of playing a game, carrying out a business or 
prusuing a limited objective could be called
non-comprehensive.
'Comprehensive' systems are those with world-view, or
with an outlook which causes their members to act as if they had
a world-view. Such systems are those which require (deliberately 
or in practise) their members to act with regard to a 
comprehensive set of beliefs which will cover all, or most,
eventualities.
It will be noted that the 'Comprehensive' type system
seems to include virtually all major religious systems. This is not, 
however, to say that the origimal form or understanding of the
system was comprehensive in the sense of being regarded as
immutable. Certain principles may have been held to be 
unchangeable: but others, some of them fundamental, can be seen
as having been absorbed, over the years and centuries, into the
kind of strait-jecket thinking which is a commen feature of
systems of belief. Understanding is replaced by dogma. The
origin of the dogma, and the stage at which it became crystallised,
are easily forgotten.
The importance of understanding this phenomenon, the
dogmatisation of the flexible, is great. Because so many beliefs
and pratices are taken for granted as central or essential to a
whole belief-system, people in general (in any culture) tend
to think in strait-jacket terms about a wide range of things.
Consequently, they find it hard or impossible to absorb new - or
unfamiliar - knowledge.

***

Feel free to comment or do your best



from
M. Sufilight with peace and love...





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