Interesting to see this entry this week, as it dovetails very closely with a lot of conclusions I’ve come up with myself of late.
You use the term “Stockholm”, as in identifying with your oppressors, be they individuals or organizations, if not the entirety of human society. Me, I’ve used the term “institutionalized”, from the film Shawshank Redemption:
• Red: These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.
• Heywood: Sh*t. I could never get like that.
• Ernie: Oh yeah? Say that when you been here as long as Brooks has.
Whether you ascribe to this happening over many incarnations, or just the one, all the duality in this world gets to be a habit, no matter how painful or dead-ended it gets. The familiarity of the suffering becomes preferable to the unknown territory of total radical transformation, and that assumes one even perceives such an out as the whole culture continues to gaslight you that such a way out doesn’t even exist in the first place.
It thus takes a VERY strong will, typically rejecting the social milieu one finds onself in and its assumptions and coercions both subtle and overt, to overcome said conditioning.
Several of the wisdom traditions make it very clear that such downward forces work on a moment-to-moment basis, and not just (putatively) before any physical rebirth. Thus physical death likewise doesn’t necessarily provide any sort of “out” as all those inimical forces in one’s psyche are still at work trying to pull one down once again (be it moment-to-moment or incarnation-to-incarnation). So one doesn’t really “go” anywhere (such as heaven or hell) other than the mental “space” one has become habutuated to.
But the “outs” (transformative perspectives) likewise are always latent, even if the dissolution of the physical form may provide the best path out of said patterns.
If I get some engagement here I can go a bit into my personal journey along the above lines.
Interesting to see this entry this week, as it dovetails very closely with a lot of conclusions I’ve come up with myself of late.
You use the term “Stockholm”, as in identifying with your oppressors, be they individuals or organizations, if not the entirety of human society. Me, I’ve used the term “institutionalized”, from the film Shawshank Redemption:
• Red: These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.
• Heywood: Sh*t. I could never get like that.
• Ernie: Oh yeah? Say that when you been here as long as Brooks has.
Whether you ascribe to this happening over many incarnations, or just the one, all the duality in this world gets to be a habit, no matter how painful or dead-ended it gets. The familiarity of the suffering becomes preferable to the unknown territory of total radical transformation, and that assumes one even perceives such an out as the whole culture continues to gaslight you that such a way out doesn’t even exist in the first place.
It thus takes a VERY strong will, typically rejecting the social milieu one finds onself in and its assumptions and coercions both subtle and overt, to overcome said conditioning.
Several of the wisdom traditions make it very clear that such downward forces work on a moment-to-moment basis, and not just (putatively) before any physical rebirth. Thus physical death likewise doesn’t necessarily provide any sort of “out” as all those inimical forces in one’s psyche are still at work trying to pull one down once again (be it moment-to-moment or incarnation-to-incarnation). So one doesn’t really “go” anywhere (such as heaven or hell) other than the mental “space” one has become habutuated to.
But the “outs” (transformative perspectives) likewise are always latent, even if the dissolution of the physical form may provide the best path out of said patterns.
If I get some engagement here I can go a bit into my personal journey along the above lines.