Culture?????

It just occurred to me that over the centuries, masses have been controlled using 2 tools -
stupidity and fear.

You keep people in ignorance and then scare the shit out of them, they transform into puppets!

NO WONDER girls were/ are married off SO very early and boys were/ are sent to religious schools deprived of modern education in such communities wanting to keep their youth ignorant!

Worse part of this tragedy is that these kids are made to believe these primitive acts are the order of Almighty God! WoW!

Thank GOD, God isn’t SO narrow minded and outdated!

May more minds have the courage to break free from oppression that imprisons their INNATE RIGHTS!

Religions teach children to fear their own thoughts by informing them that they MUST believe what they are told without question, and that to question is to be seduced by Satan.

A child who has been conditioned to be afraid of his or her own thought process grows crippled by that teaching, thus becomes susceptible to any new authority figure who then tries to condition that child's thinking toward what the authority figure wants the child to believe.

In this way humans have been crippled for thousands of years, destined to a life of perpetual adolescence where we desperately seek the appropriate authority figure - the messiah - who can lead us out of the tangled wilderness of our own confused and forcibly suppressed thought patterns.

The natural state of the mind is FREE. We are born free thinkers, with an insatiable curiosity to explore reality and discover truth.

Those religions and other domination institutions teach us to fear the power of our own minds separates us from our minds and literally is the cause of most human insanity.
It is their attempt to suborn free will so they can control human behaviour. The best way to control human behaviour is to so deeply condition the being that the being's own mind becomes the judge, jury and executioner of "unacceptable" thoughts, words and deeds.

Religion is an institute that's over lived its time. It's ironic that many of those who claim to be the most righteous are the most unholy & actually embody all the properties they claim to speak out against.

And if a free thinker should arise from such oppressive cultures, they ask in grief-
"What went wrong in how we raised you? We did our best and yet you turned out this way."

By THIS way they mean, not a puppet feeling obliged to obey the status quo of said traditions and culture regardless how outdated and obscene some of their normalcy maybe! Le Sigh!

The good news I can offer is this: the more stringently the world tries to coerce beings to think as it wants them to, using shame, blame, guilt, judgment, punishment, torture, violence and death, the more the indomitable spirit of Free Will stands up for itself and refuses to surrender to these external attempts to subvert its right to BE free.

It is precisely the mental suffering that arises from our deep conditioning (and our inner resistance to it) that prompts our awakening to the truth, and creates the necessary opening for us to shed our conditioned beliefs and step into the power of our own innate ability to embrace reality AS IT IS, not as others have told us it "should be," and from that place of wisdom, respond accordingly.

How it provokes the Spirit to break free even more powerfully. Yet, the only thing I wish we could save is the duration it takes some of us. The tug of wars usually takes years, decades, especially for those located in geographies where the communities opinions matters more than Inner Peace.

The way the conditioned have been conditioned to suppress free thinking in others when they encounter it. Free thinking, to one who has been conditioned to believe without question, is dangerous.
That's because the ideas of free thinkers will always challenge the unexamined beliefs of the conditioned, who feel fear when they encounter an idea that contradicts their conditioned beliefs.
Rather than allow it in - that would mean they had to THINK about it!  They denigrate the messenger, and will even kill the messenger if the message feels too scary to that mind.

Minds in chains are to be found wherever hatred and violence arise. It takes a mind in chains to be able to act violently against another simply because the other's beliefs contradict their own beliefs.
When we are not addicted to our own beliefs as a result of our conditioning, we can hear competing ideas and not feel fear around that.
We simply choose to accept the idea or reject it without emotional prejudice.

From what I see those we call religions have positioned God "out there" and us "down here" and themselves as the sole intermediaries with the power to connect us with God. In this way they ensure their power/dominator status indefinitely, because new people are born every day that need constant intercession by their religious authorities to ensure their connection to God.

Those who question that structure and seek their own inner connection are often martyred for their realizations.
Some are elevated to the status of prophets, saints and demy-gods, and then new religions are formed around their teachings to create a brand new field of separation between the enlightened being and any followers.
In this way the power/dominator system maintains its stranglehold on authority.

What I do know is that the more of us who wake up and free our own minds, the easier it becomes for others to do so and know that they are being held by a larger field of awareness than just their own.

It must have been VERY painful for the first enlightened beings to awaken to the truth and then realize they were the only ones who knew it.
Today, anyone can become enlightened because it's part of our evolutionary trajectory.
We no longer seek a messiah from without to inform us how to do it; we have been gifted enough tools and mental capacity to do it for ourselves in modern times.

Religion is about who has the power to forcibly coercing minds into blind obedience. Politics is about who has the power to use force against the people, and under what conditions.
Economics is about who holds the power to access the planet's natural resources, and to forcibly deprive others of the resources necessary for their well-being and happiness based on "ability to pay."
Education is about who holds the power to determine what is true about reality and to forcibly infuse that understanding into others through the use of rewards and punishments.

Justice is about who holds the power to determine what is "right" and what is "wrong" and to punish those whose behaviour has been deemed wrong.
Medicine is about who holds the power to determine what is healthy and what is unhealthy, and to then coerce people to behave in ways that have been deemed healthy.
Culture is about who holds the power to determine what is fashionable and what is unfashionable, and to use shame and desire to coerce people to comply with the cultural norms.

The difference now is that the world is changing so fast that we are being collectively pressured by life itself to change along with it.
The negative feedback we're receiving from reality is informing us that our behaviour is life-negating. That behaviour is a function of our conditioning, so in order to change the behaviour we have no choice but to shed the conditioning out of which it arises.
As we begin to see the chinks in the armour of our own conditioning and shed one belief system successfully, it becomes easier to shed the next one, and the next, and the next...until the mind is free.

Life is telling us now - with species extinction, pollution, resource degradation, soil erosion, desertification, climate change, etc. - that we are acting in short term self-serving ways that do not honour the web of life that contains us all.
We act this way because we've been taught to believe we have dominion over all else, and that we are free to exploit what is not 'as good as us' for our own gratification.

This behaviour violates the laws of nature, which demand all life forms find dynamic balance with all other life forms, thus is unsustainable no matter what we BELIEVE is true! Reality will trump our beliefs about reality every time.

I trust that the great coordinating process that is life itself knows exactly what we need to collectively wake up to the truth of our deep integration with nature, so we may begin to behave accordingly.