Lesson 14
One of the great tragedies of vanity in mankind is that it makes him believe he knows much he does not know. When many of us come in contact with a technical word in a subject that we are not really acquainted with, we at least look it up in the dictionary. But if we are studying a very technical subject about The Science of Man, and there are several textbooks about The Science of Man, there are things that are written down that are a challenge to man if he should find them. They are highly technical, highly scientific, but they use ordinary words in a very technical sense. We read these books that we know are loaded with many kinds of information, but vanity says we already know it because we know one meaning for the words that are there and we assume that we, of course, know all the meanings of the words. One of those common words is the “world.” One man said, “Fear not I have overcome the world.” Really, a better translation of it is, “I have risen above the world.” In another place it says, “Keep oneself unspotted from the world.” Most of the time we think of the world as the Earth or at best the society all over the earth. We never possible stop to find out how it’s used in this very technical sense in the way of The Science of Man. So suppose we inquire into it a bit, and as it has been said before, take nothing for granted, take nothing because it is said, but investigate, experiment with it and find out for self.
The conditioned self is a picture of the world. There are four basic ideas that make up what is called the “world” in the technical sense of The Science of Man.
1. The first of these ideas is that there are IDEALS, there are what ought to be, that man is capable of knowing what ought to be, that he knows what is good, what is bad, and he thinks in opposites. He knows what is right and what is wrong. He thinks in opposites. He judges constantly. There is an old, old story that says they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were told that if they ate of it they would die. Of course, man doesn’t believe that today because everybody thinks he knows the opposites, is capable of judging, and he believes he is not dead. But I, the awareness function of X is dead. The conditioning operates in the name of I and tells X false information. And it is death to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and every one of us ate of it and we did die. And we are in this effort of slowly, carefully studying the self, attempting to arise from among the dead and be alive by being aware of the self. So the first idea of the world is that there are ideals of what ought to be and they are, of course, opposite to those things that ought not to be, and that man thinks he is capable of judging. Many places he reads, JUDGE NOT, and he thinks of it as a moral code and then he justifies it by saying, “Well, I will judge justly,” and he still judges compared to the ideal, and he is still dead.
2. The next idea of the world is that it’s possible to SELF-IMPROVE the self as it is, only just improve it and thereby actualize the ideals to have everything like it ought to be. Of course, the basic decision, the basic motive, the basic purpose of living is the four dual basic urges to be non-disturbed. That is what one has set as the ideal. Then the next six decisions, three in A and three in B on your picture of man, are attempts at self-improvement. If you go through all the ideas of self-improvement that you may have ever been in contact with, you will find they’re all there. You can behave differently, which is number 5. You can believe different things because someone told you to believe it, number 4. You can do certain ritualistic performances or you can do all sorts of things that are commanded in one form or other, behave in a certain way, believe and do as you’re told by your authorities. You can blame all manner of things, number 6. You can blame negative thinking and you can try to think positive and, of course, thinking positive is trying to believe something you believe to be a lie or you wouldn’t be thinking positive, you’d just agree with it and go on. So all the efforts at self-improvement, and the libraries are full of books on self-improvement, there are institutions from one end of the earth to the other bent upon self improvement of the man and of other selves. We are always trying self-improve, whether it’s to improve this self or to improve that other self so I won’t be disturbed.
3. The third idea of the world is that one will have SIGNS AND DEMONSTRATIONS as to how well one is self-improving. If one is reasonably comfortable and has a reasonable amount of wealth, one takes that as a sign that one has improved considerably.
4. If one should suddenly lose their wealth they will find something to BLAME, which is fourth idea of the world. So one has a sign that one is either succeeding in self-improvement when things are going reasonably well or has a sign that something is interfering if one is not doing so well. If one loses one’s health one finds something to blame, a diagnostic term. One says, “I am a victim of arthritis.” So arthritis, some sort of entity which is flying around in the air and says, “There is John, I will bite him or there is Mary, I will attack her.” Another one is a victim of multiple sclerosis. There is something called multiple sclerosis that floats around in the air and periodically it sees someone and says, “I am going to attack them.” So we have something to blame when things are not going well, and we have self-esteem that we have succeeded in our efforts to self improve when things are going fairly well to our liking. In other words, we’re having a certain amount of pleasure and comfort and not very much pain. We’re having a considerable amount of attention and very little being ignored and rejected. We’re having quite a bit of approval and not too much disapproval right now, or none. We have a certain number of people that we can control, we feel important. If we can’t control them we feel inferior. For every time we have a pain we look for something to blame. We never accept that maybe I am doing something. That is only reserved for, when things are going well. When things go like we want them we say our self-improvement techniques have worked. When things don’t go like we want them to, according to the four dual basic urges, we find something to blame.
In this, of course, man is blind, but these are the ideas of the world and we would like for you to write down the four ideals of the world. We would like for you to observe if the self lives by these four ideas: That there are IDEALS of what ought to be and, of course, what ought not to be which are good and bad, right and wrong, should and should not. The land of opposites, what are used for a basis for judging self and others, conflicts, struggle, resistance, all the way up to wars. That one looks at all the efforts that one puts in to improve the self and improve other selves. That one also keeps somewhat of a record of all the time things go fairly well and one takes the credit. One never gives any credit to X. I can walk, I can type, I can eat, I can digest my food, and all these many things of which one hasn’t the faintest idea of how it even takes place; I can see, I can do all these things. You see no credit or glory or honor is ever given to X; it all is taken. And then when things don’t go well, according to the four dual basic urges, one doesn’t take credit for that. One finds something to blame which we have looked at as building accounts against people, which is to load a grievous burden again on self to carry around, and one which we have looked at, somewhat.
Man has built many philosophies on how to self-improve, how to achieve the ideal, how to achieve that which he lists as being good. The Science of Man is not a philosophy. It is a series of experiments and observations that are given to us that we may experiment with them and observe with them. We could say that it might be a light with which we could look in dark places, places we have never looked before, and then we are using it. If we accept it as a philosophy or as an ideology, something to be quoted, argued about, organized, build an institution about, of course, we have not understood it, we have not valued it; it is only some interesting words to use. It is a series of instructions as to experiments. It is a series of possibilities of something existing that we have not looked at. It throws a light on many things, but it is always left for each one of us to experiment with, to use it, to verify, to find out for self. Without doing this we, of course, only heard the Teaching and did not use it.
There have been many people who have heard the Teaching and they have attempted to make a philosophy or an institution or an ideology out of it. We will look and see what some of these efforts have resulted in. We are not condemning them or justifying them. We can only turn a light on what happens when one attempts to use the Teaching other than for experimentation and for self-discovery, when one tries to use the ideas it presents as an ideology or to build an institution about.
1. The first thing in using the Teaching as an ideology and as a method of self-improvement, if you please, which is an ideology, is that we will be TOLERANT of people. Tolerant means, when we verify it and use it for a minute and experiment with it, is that “I see that you are very inferior to me, you are very much less intelligent than I am and you are not as good a person as I am. But I will tolerate you because this is a technique of self-improvement and it will help me achieve the ideal of being non-disturbed. So I will tolerate you and you possibly will give me some attention and you might even give me some approval.” Now tolerance is, of course, to look down on another person and to put oneself in an exalted position. One has a picture of oneself as much better than that person that one is tolerating. This is another expression of vanity, and further vanity that one knew what the Teaching meant without experimenting with it.
2. The second idea that the ones who heard about the Teaching and used it as a philosophy was FAITH. They have twisted faith into meaning gullibility. Believe what you’re told by someone who set up an institution or some such ideology. And you believe it because some authority said to believe it under pain of future punishment, or possibly if you do it and are gullible and say, “Yes, I believe,” that you shall gain a great reward.
3. The next term is what is meant by GRACE? Grace to the person who is using it as a method of trying to explain, to make a philosophy, finds that they can say, when things don’t go well, “Well, it was the will of God, it was the will of the Father.” In other words they even blame God for things not going well. Certainly they would not accept the responsibility of saying, “I goofed,” because pride must defend that beautiful picture of self. And so they’re always saying, “Everything was the will of God.” So they define God as having whims of a capricious being who one day gives you something and lets you get it because you worked for it and did all the good things. Really, you very seldom hear anybody give credit and say it was the will of God when something went well; they brag that, they did it. But when things don’t go well, then it was the will of God. So they have defined Grace, they used the world Grace but they define it so that it comes out to be the whim of a capricious God. When things don’t go well it was the will of God. When things go pretty well, though, “I am very successful, my techniques of self-improvement have really worked.”
4. And the next one they used was SELF-KNOWING, which was an idea, but they twisted into being identified with an institution or with an ideology. “I am a Communist, I am a Baptist, I am a Methodist, I am a Hindu, I am a Zen Buddhist.” All of these would be to identify with some ideology, and they used that in the place of self-knowing.
So when they attempted to make a philosophy out of the Teaching, they heard the ideas and they wanted to self-improve. So they took the ideas, which we have been looking at of self-knowing, and turned it into identifying with an ideology. They made faith into gullibility. They made grace into having God to blame when things didn’t go well if one wanted to be pious and not blame someone. It sounded like they weren’t blaming, saying that it was the will of God. “It was a cross I must bear,” which means a burden to them. The other one was that love really meant “tolerance,” to look down on you.
There are certain experiences that the Teaching tells us will come about. We’ll take them up in our discussion next week. But we are now looking at it when it is turned into an ideology or a ritual.
1. The first thing that they took in their hope of self-improving was the idea of CONFESSION. Confession, when it’s used as an ideology, means, “Come tell me all the places you didn’t live up to the ideal I have set for you.” Now you have all manner of things to confess, do you not? You didn’t do some of the things you were told to believe and do and you did things you were told not to believe and do. You didn’t put on the front. You didn’t behave differently every time and some way or another you didn’t please. Now you’re loaded down with all sorts of things that you must confess. You’ve sinned. Now the word sin is from an old word meaning “miss the mark.” One had an aim and didn’t quite make it. If one of us has an aim to observe the self today and somewhere we went sound asleep and identified with the self, we missed the mark, we sinned. It’s nothing to get all upset about, it’s to wake up from it and go on again. Here one failed to live up to doing what one was told to believe and do according to one’s authorities, and so they confessed. One man goes and tells another how he didn’t live according to the ideology, according to what he had been told, so he felt miserable, regretful. B is accusing because A got the nod. A got the word in and used the name of I to get to X and got something done and B woke up a few minutes later and sets up all this noise how one should confess. Of course there is a simple bit of relief. B got its revenge for a few minutes and so it felt better, but very shortly wants more, better and different and the person wonders if they really meant their confession as it’s used in the ideology, as a philosophy.
2. The next thing was SURRENDER. This meant something altogether different in the Teaching, as we will see later. But to the individual in the ideology it meant surrender one’s life and will and purposes to the institution that was built around some ideology or some philosophy of some man.
3. And then, of course, was REPENTANCE. Repent meant, when made into this idea, a feeling sorry, a guilty feeling, sit down and feel guilty and it was supposed to do something wonderful for you. Did you ever feel guilty long enough about something you might have felt guilty about to get over it? If you stole a 50-cent piece when you were a little kid, how long did you have to feel guilty in order to say I have truly repented, or was it always repenting as they use the word. Repenting is all together different, as we shall see next week.
4. And then came the word BAPTISM, which obviously is from a word that means to be washed. So we “dip ‘em in water.” We don’t necessarily use soap or anything. Dip ‘em under, a ritual, and it is supposed to be some great change. Great multitudes of people have been dipped under water and still found they had greed, pride, vanity, still struggling for ideals, still feeling they know what ought to be.
Then, of course, they heard the idea of a NEW MAN. So a new man obviously had to exist in a new environment. So there came the many ideologies of building a utopia which is still very much in evidence today. “We will build the ideal society, the ideal environment. We will build what ought to be. We will build the utopia.” And then the person who lives in this utopia will naturally behave differently because everything is so utopian. When he lives in this utopia he will have a different attitude; he will be very thankful to the builders of the utopia, he will be very obedient. He will not ever get upset, aggravated or annoyed. We will have a beautiful beehive with gobs and gobs of worker bees and one queen bee, never a king bee, just a queen bee. You know the mother always controls by using threats of punishment or threaten to cut off rewards. The male psychology says, “Earn it, man!” So there will be a queen bee when we have the utopia. So far, of course, no utopias have happened. The first utopia we read of is the Tower of Babel. They were going to build a tower that reached to Heaven, and, of course, it fell into ruins, and so far every utopian effort has fallen into ruins. After the new idea of the new man which was to be in a utopia, all we’ve go to do is to build the utopian society where there are no classes, where everybody is cooperating and everybody does all for the society. Everybody is going to behavedifferently, of course, and everybody is going to have a pleasant, peaceful, domesticated attitude. Then there was the idea of what it would be like in this utopia. Of course, they had that word tolerance; everybody would tolerate everybody else. How do you feel when you are being tolerated? Somebody is looking down on you, seeing you as very inferior, but they are tolerating you because they are putting you down by saying you’re inferior.
And then they would be condescending in this utopian world. Everybody would be condescending to everybody else, treating them like they were equals while you know very well they are not equal by any means, but I will be condescending to them. That is the philosophy of self-improvement, simply the old fifth decision, appear to be different to them.
And then, of course, is to be helpful. When we want to help someone, not work with them, the first thing we do, of course, is look down on them, we are tolerating and condescending. We are going to condescend to pull them part of the way up to our exalted height, to this exalted vanity picture of self, this entirely false picture. So we are going to condescend to help the person part of the way up to the exalted height. “I will get lots of approval, attention, good pleasant feelings, and a sense of importance because I’ve really controlled him while I was getting him up a little bit.” This is all done for show so everybody will see it. We write magazines about how well we’ve done this and what great work we have done and we have helped the downtrodden and we have raised them up. You know if you wanted to work with someone, you wouldn’t let it be known. A Teaching idea is, “Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” In other words, everything is done without even the recipient knowing that anything is being done. You are working with him and he thinks, maybe, he is doing you a favor by working with you.
Then there is the idea of COMPETITION, to gain, to get something, to see how much we can sell so that tells us how successful we are, and we call that making a contribution to society. We are really seeing how much we can sell them, how much we can get from them. This is what the Teaching turned into when it was not used as a science where one experiments with it and discovers for self, but is what happens when it’s used as a philosophy or as an ideology to build an institution around in order to have a power structure. Where it is accepted as fact without experimenting on it and accepted through that vanity that says, “I already know what each and every one of these things mean.”
For this week we would like for you to TAKE THESE IDEAS OF THE WORLD and the philosophies used to promoting these ideas as self-improvement. SEE IF YOU SEE THEM WORKING IN ALL THE THINGS THAT YOU COME IN CONTACT WITH, whether its in business, religion, healing arts, or whatever and the various transactions of your everyday existence. Check it out. Do not take anybody’s word for it; find out.
Next week we will take up, how the ideas work when they’re used as experimentation and there will be experiments to run on them.
Copyright © 1973 by Rhondell. All rights reserved. This material is for an individual student’s personal use; it is not to be duplicated or loaned to another.
