Conditioning and duality (2)

Dear Friends,

Hypocrisy is a form of conditioning from which many fighter-cocks and well-meaning Muslims suffer. This post is aimed at those hypocrites among us who are hundreds of centuries behind the times.

They will never understand why there is a growing receptivity around the world to the inner treasures of the world's religions, and that every religion is unique.

They will never understand that what the world needs today is a new experience in inter-spiritual understanding to prepare for a universal civilization, a civilization with a heart, not a Muslim or a Hindu or a Christian heart, but a common heart.

They will never understand that such a universal society will draw its inspiration from perennial spiritual and moral insights, intuitions, and experiences, and not just from one book even if it is called the Book of Books.

Here's how conditioning sets in.

At age four or five, as we begin to socialize, we internalize the values of the family, peer group, religion, ethnic group, nationality, race, gender, and sexual orientation. Around that time, Muslim children are taught certain things, including how to maintain the divide between Us and Them. 

The combination of two forces -- namely, the drive for happiness (in the form of security, survival, affection and esteem, and power and control), and overidentification with the particular group to which we belong (Sunni, Shia, Ahmadiyya,  Wahabi or Pakistani) -- greatly complicates our emotional programs for happiness.

In our younger days, this development is normal. As adults, activity arising from such motivation is childish.

Our emotional programs are filtered through our temperamental biases. If we have an aggressive temperament and like to dominate as many events, conversations and people as possible, that drive increases proportionately over the years. Without facing these early childhood experiences and without examining how the human "motherboard" is programmed, and without trying to dismantle or moderate them through the exercise of reason and rationality, they continue to exert enormous influence throughout life without realizing that times are a-changing and old attitudes don't hold much water.

Some people will never understand this in a million years, I bet.

Rashid Mughal