The only way to escape being thought-controlled is for each person to get to the most fundamental level of understanding; where each recognizes the possible understandings; and each chooses his basic understanding of the nature of reality.
If someone can reach this level - he will realize that there is a reality; and/ but that reality needs to be chosen personally.
Once we have done this, we can be proofed against manipulation by those who seek to impose an unreal 'reality'.
Reality is real; choice is real - our personally-experienced reality is therefore unavoidably a consequence of our personal choices.
We choose our reality - but that chosen reality may be true or fake; real or unreal; based on deep conviction or passively gone-along-with.
Manipulation is only possible when we have chosen that reality which is imposed upon us, rather than that reality which really is - because we know it.
The fundamental level of understanding includes such matters as whether reality is ultimately chaos, or else directed, purposive. Deity or not; god or not - the nature of god and the possibility of having personal relationship with god. The question of how we, personally, can know reality. The question of time - and whether it is an ultimate reality or illusion. The question of whether we are free agents capable of acting from-ourselves, or whether we are wholly-determined by externalities...
But the above are abstract and linguistic descriptions of what needs to be a primary and direct experience of the fundamental issues.
For example - the nature of god. A Christian will need to realize not only that there 'must be' god - but needs to experience god. He needs not merely to have-learned the 'necessary' attributes of god - but actually to know god in the same way a loving child may know his loving parents.
A mother's love is not known by having been told, nor is it inferred from analysis of her actions; it is known directly; and it is this knowing that leads to faith. Faith in mother - or god.
That is faith for a Christian - it is confidence in god because god is known, god's personal love is known-from-personal-experience (not learned, reasoned or inferred).
A Christian with faith is one who has gone to the deepest level at which he realizes the reality and nature of god; and has decided (chosen) to live by that reality.
He knows he might have rejected that reality, and by default would have done so - he knows that he positively needed to choose it.
He also knows (from the way they speak and act) that many people never reach that level of direct and personal understanding.
He also knows that he cannot convince anyone else of this personal knowledge - because to convince someone else who lacks that experience would be to achieve the opposite of it!
Such a Christian knows that what matters ultimately is absolutely and necessarily personal to himself, and that it is also absolutely objectively true. It is a matter of completely personal responsibility.
Because controlled-thought is the default situation. It is the inevitable outcome of passivity and shallowness. We all already-have the habit of being-thought-controlled, until that habit is broken - as described above. And controlled-thinking has converged - so that the thought-controlled have become (and are-becoming more and more) alike. It has thus become easy to identify the thought-controlled.
Only from the deepest level of experience, knowledge, faith - can we become immune to thought-control.
Only those who are proof against thought-control, and who know real-reality can avoid the toils of evil-motivated and faked reality.
Only thus can anyone escape demonic manipulation into damnation.
2 comments:
Very good. And this reminds me of a passage from Zhuangzi.
Chien Wu went to see the madman Chieh Yu. Chieh Yu said, "What was Chung Shih telling you the other day?" Chien Wu said, "He told me that the ruler of men should devise his own principles, standards, ceremonies, and regulations, and then there will be no one who will fail to obey him and be transformed by them."
The madman Chieh Yu said, "This is bogus virtue! To try to govern the world like this is like trying to walk the ocean, to drill through a river, or to make a mosquito shoulder a mountain! When the sage governs, does he govern what is on the outside? He makes sure of himself first, and then he acts. He makes absolutely certain that things can do what they are supposed to do, that is all. The bird flies high in the sky where it can escape the danger of stringed arrows. The field mouse burrows deep down under the sacred hill where it won't have to worry about men digging and smoking it out. Have you got less sense than these two little creatures?"
I understand the bird flying "high in the sky" and the mouse burrowing "deep in the sacred hill" as images of being rooted in first principles so that the human manipulation and false thinking of men like Chung Shih, a bureaucrat, can't even reach you.
And when you feel the need to explain yourself in a way that the cold, dead, modern world will understand, you are allowing your thoughts to be controlled. That world will never understand the living world of God and spirits.
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