The least to know about life (something to ponder)

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Understanding the struggle for freedom

The history of humankind can be viewed as a struggle for freedom, freedom from suffering, limitations, poverty, emptiness or whatever holds people back. The central aspect of this struggle is to overcome ignorance. The cave dwellers had very limited options for improving their circumstances because they had a very limited knowledge of themselves and the material universe. They did not know enough about the laws of nature to change their outer circumstances, as modern people have done. Neither did they know enough about their own psyches to change the way they responded to life, as modern people have the option of doing.

The central aspect of improving both your inner and outer circumstances is to expand your understanding of yourself and of life. Knowledge is the key to any positive change seen in the history of humankind. This is true both on the collective and the individual level. Thus, if you want to improve your personal life experience, you must begin by seeking greater understanding. You must study the knowledge that is available in the modern world, knowledge that simply was not available in the past.

Consider therefore how fortunate you are to be alive in a time when more information is available and accessible than ever before in recorded history. Indeed, you live in a time when anyone who is willing can find sufficient information and practical tools to systematically change his or her life experience to just about anything you want it to be. This book is an attempt to provide this information in a very concise form, but there are many other more voluminous sources of this information.

The logical question now becomes why you were not given this information as you were growing up? Why were you not taught how to master your life experience, if this is indeed possible? Why has humankind struggled for millennia to escape human limitations, oppression and suffering? Why has your life been a struggle to attain personal freedom from limiting outer and inner circumstances? The logical answer is that there are forces – both inside and outside yourself – that do not want you to know.

A brief look at history demonstrates the existence of outer forces, in the form of dictators and regimes – even political, religious and scientific institutions – that have aggressively attempted to suppress knowledge and keep it from the general population. As one obvious example, consider how a particular religious institution held the intellectual life of Europe in an iron grip during the so-called dark ages. The motivation for withholding knowledge has always been to control people, individually and collectively. Controlling people through physical means is always messy and leads to rebellion. It is far more efficient to control people’s minds. If people don’t know better, they might not realize they are being oppressed or they will not know how to attain freedom.

The conclusion is clear. If someone wants to control you, they must prevent you from knowing how you can free yourself from their control. What is the one piece of information that can help you overcome all forms of mind control? It is the knowledge that your life experience is NOT the automatic product of your outer circumstances. Indeed, by gaining a greater understanding of who you are and where you came from, you gain the power to take control over your life experience. You can choose your life experience instead of letting outer circumstances and your own psychology control your life experience.

If life is seen as a struggle for freedom, we now realize that the key to freedom is understanding. It is the truth that will make you free because when you know who you are and how the world works, you can make better choices. This book is designed to help you take command over your life experience. It will give you the full truth in a concentrated form. However, this truth will be given gradually so as to avoid blowing your mind. Thus, let us begin by looking at the importance of choice.

The main message of all true self-help and spiritual teachers is, “YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE!” Yet what does it take to change your life? Albert Einstein said: “Insanity is when you keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.” If your life is to change, something must change. If you keep doing the same thing, how likely is it that your life will change by itself?

There are two basic approaches to life. There are those who keep doing the same thing, always living in the dream that some day a stroke of luck, fate, magic or divine intervention will change their lives. There are those who realize that if their lives are to change, they must actively do something different to bring about change. They must begin by changing that which they have the power to change.

All true spiritual teachers talk about the eternal law that you cannot change your life without changing yourself. To change your outer situation, you must be willing to start by changing your inner situation. You must be willing to look in the mirror. You must be willing to look for – and remove – the beam in your own eye.

To change your life, you must understand the power of free will. You must choose change over stillstand. You must choose growth over comfortability. You must choose life over death. Life is all about choice. Life is a process of making choices, and only you can make the decisions that will change your life.

You are constantly choosing, and you can never turn off the responsibility of making choices. You can stop making decisions, but to do so you must make a decision. You can allow other people or institutions to make decisions for you, but to do so you must make a decision. And you can uphold this state only by continuing to make the decision not to make decisions.

Deciding not to make decisions puts you in a state of being spiritually dead. You can remain physically alive while being spiritually dead. You cannot remain spiritually alive without making choices. Life is a choice. Life is the choice to be more. Death is the choice to be less. If you do not consciously choose life, you have unconsciously chosen death.

Choices are not made in a vacuum. All choices have consequences. Being spiritually dead does not make you unconscious. Thus, it does not prevent you from experiencing the consequences of your life choices—regardless of who makes those choices. The equation is simple. Either you make your own choices or you allow someone or something to make choices for you. In either case, you are the one who must live with the consequences. Only by making your own decisions can you influence the consequences.

There are two types of consequences. Some consequences limit you and have a negative impact on your life experience. Some consequences liberate you and enhance your life experience. Consequences either make your life experience less or they make it more.

Limiting consequences are the results of choices that are based on incomplete or incorrect knowledge. Liberating consequences are based on full understanding. The truth will set you free to be more. Lack of truth will limit you and turn your life into a struggle.

Change must start with a desire to change, and the equation is simple. You must desire change so much that you are willing to reach for a higher understanding in order to bring about that change. What will it take to bring you to that point? It might help to know your options.

You have two basic options. Your life can be an upward spiral that constantly expands your life experience, leading to greater fulfillment, happiness and peace of mind. Or your life can be a downward spiral that limits your life experience, leading to lack, frustration, fear, anger and the sense of struggle. The difference is in the choices you make. You are always choosing. The question is whether you are making conscious or unconscious decisions.

If you make choices based on incomplete understanding, you will experience limiting consequences. In order to deal with these consequences, you are likely to make other unconscious choices and this inevitably leads to even more limiting consequences. Continued over time, this can lead to a state of mind in which it seems like all your available options lead to limiting consequences. This is a state of ignorance, a state of spiritual blindness. Taken to its extreme, it makes you feel as if you have no choices, you have no options, in life. This is a state of spiritual paralysis, spiritual death.

Choices based on ignorance lead to more ignorance, and this downward, self-perpetuating spiral can be broken only through an act of will. You must decide to take back your power to make conscious choices. You must be willing to make choices for yourself and you must be willing to reach for the understanding that will empower you to make conscious choices. Only by making conscious choices can you escape ignorance and spiritual death.

Once you have become enveloped in a downward spiral, it will take effort to break free. You cannot break such a spiral by continuing to apply the same approach to life that caused you to enter the spiral. You cannot solve a problem with the same state of consciousness that created the problem. Thus, you must be willing to change something.
If your life is to change, you must be willing to change yourself. You must change your attitude and your approach to life. You must be willing to reach for an understanding that you do not currently have, “With all thy getting, get understanding.”

In order to change your life, you must learn to make conscious choices, choices that lead to liberating consequences. Such choices must be based on a higher understanding of life, and to find this understanding, you must be willing to look outside your current knowledge and beliefs, outside your current mental box.

When people cannot break free of a downward spiral, there can be only one reason. They have become mentally or emotionally attached to a particular belief system or world view, and they are not willing to look outside their current mental box in order to find a higher understanding. This attachment to current beliefs, this refusal to leave one’s mental prison, is the main factor that keeps so many people trapped on a treadmill of struggle and suffering.

The key to all progress seen in human history is that in every generation a few people were willing to reach for a higher understanding of life—they were willing to think outside the box. Yet in every generation the majority of the people refused to leave their mental prisons. Thus, your first choice on the path to a more rewarding life experience is that you must choose to look outside your mental box. You must decide to look for an understanding that goes beyond your present beliefs. You must be willing to reach for the truth that will make you free.

To start the process of making your choices more conscious, you must begin by realizing that choices are not made in a vacuum. Any choice you make is an expression of your current state of consciousness. A choice is an expression of how you see yourself, how you see the world and how you see your relationship to the world. Your overall world view, your basic paradigm, has been built over a long period of time and it has been influenced by many ideas, some of which are incomplete or erroneous. The key to changing your life is to uncover the erroneous ideas and replace them with a higher understanding. When people fail to improve their lives, it is ALWAYS because they cling to an incomplete or erroneous idea that they refuse to question.

They might have been programmed to fear that “bad things” will happen if they question the “infallible” doctrine. Or they might have been lured into the prideful attitude that their belief system is the highest possible, is the absolute truth, and thus there is no need to question it.

The equation is simple. For every question you could possibly ask, there is an answer that will expand your understanding of the topic in question. Some questions do not have direct answers because they are formulated based on incomplete knowledge. Yet even for such questions there is an answer that will increase your understanding and thus empower you to ask better questions. So if you have a question and have not found the answer, there can be only one explanation. You have not been looking for the answer in the right place, you have not asked with the right frame of mind.

The reason is that you have confined your mind to a mental box, often defined by an outer belief system. As long as you refuse to look for answers outside that box, you are at an impasse, a spiritual catch-22. You will not be able to escape this paralysis until you decide to think outside the box.

Source: http://askrealjesus.com/F_LEASTKNOW/AAL ... wmain.html

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