My dear friends…
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:
- An exploration of why we behave the way we currently do.
- An exploration of the question: Is there any need to change our current behaviors?
- An exploration of what could cause us to change our behaviors if we wanted to.
- 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."
