The Culture of Deceit, and How to Change It
We
are living in the culture of deceit. Brothers and sisters, sons and daughters,
fathers and mothers, friends and relatives—all are deceiving themselves and one
another. It
is nothing but self-deception when we think we can cheat ourselves and still come
out ahead. We deceive ourselves when we think our ego can make us happy.
We deceive others when we make false pretenses, when we pretend to be a
friend or well-wisher when in fact we are only out to satisfy our own desires,
fantasies, images, and hallucinations. Shallow
people are those who do not possess deep understanding. They live only on the surface level. Their commitment
is only skin deep, and they are very flaky—they are neither balanced
or steady, and they have no staying-power—they just flake-off like
dead skin. Shallow people
can never be good friends, or good husbands, or good wives.
They can’t even be good lovers, because they are really only
in love with themselves (with their own little egos).
Only a fool will put their trust in a shallow person, and
only an idiot will follow the footsteps of a fool.
We make idiots out of ourselves when we follow the advice
of our ego or listen to the whims of our mind. In
this world today, everyone is ‘into it’ for themselves. Nobody ‘has it together’ because everyone’s
loyalty is divided. On the one hand they
say they want to be helpful and do good, but on the other
hand they are hurting themselves (and others) with their bad, nasty habits like
sniffing around for a ‘one-night stand’, or a one-week stand, or a one-year stand.
Nobody has the courage and guts to stand up for principles
and good character, but everyone is ready to take off their pants or pull
up their skirts. In this country, at least 12% of the population (more than 30 million people) have incurable genital
herpes. That’s the only ‘staying-power’
they have, everything else is temporary. How
many young men (or fathers) would like to know that their sister (or daughter)
is someone’s leftover? Is their any mother
or sister who can feel protected when all the fathers and brothers have no balls—they’ve
been swallowed-up by the power of the black-hole.[1]Man’s
potency (his power to be a real man and not just a ‘male mate’) is sucked away
like the lustrous light drawn into the galactic abyss. People
think they can behave like animals and still be happy. They are
lying to themselves. People think they can hop from bed to bed and still keep
their dignity. They cannot.
So long as there are co-conspirators to smile upon them and edge them
on, they seem to be able keep up their façade of ‘having it together’.
But eventually, everything falls apart.
Nobody can hide from their own self forever.
The truth is always staring us in the face.
We might turn our back to the truth, or close our eyes, but the truth is
always there. The
truth is that all of us are really good
inside. We were born good,
but that goodness gets buried beneath our bad habits and selfishness. Everyone wants to be good because goodness is our nature. The tendency to be self-centered and selfish
is our enemy, and we need to stand up and fight, we need to exert ourselves against
our own weaknesses, we have to go against
the tide of our own mind. Otherwise,
we will be pulled into the sea of selfishness and will surely drown in misery. There
are many miserable people—but who made them miserable? They made themselves miserable because they
became misers. A miser is one who hoards
all his money and never uses any of it, neither for his own good or for the good
of others. Similarly, people go to school
and get a good education, and then they acquire all kinds of resources (monetary,
intellectual, material, etc.) but never do anything really worthwhile with it:
they just keep it to themselves and gloat over it.
Our good energy is meant to be shared—it is not
meant to be hoarded, and it is not meant
to be wasted either. If we are resourceful,
we won’t be remorseful. We can be truly
resourceful only when we have power of discernment. Without power of discernment, all our resources
are wasted: our money is wasted, our education is wasted, our health is wasted—everything
is wasted when we are whimsical, or when we are into ‘acceptance and rejection’
(i.e., when we are trying to be ‘people-pleasers’ or ‘ego-pleasers’).
Whenever we are pandering for attention and recognition, we are bound to
lose self-respect. When self-respect is
lost, self-denial, self-hate, and self-destruction follow. We
all need to take stock of ourselves. We
need to take a hard look at ourselves. We
have to stop being soft on ourselves. Our
life is what we make it. If we mess it up, we have only ourselves to
blame. But blaming ourselves is no consolation.
It won’t make us feel any better. The
only way we are going feel better is to start doing
better. We know
better, now we need to do better. We know what we need to do. If we don’t do it (change for the better) then
we are deceiving ourselves, we are contributing to the problem instead of the
solution. We
have to do better everyday. Whatever mistakes
we made yesterday, we don’t have to repeat those mistakes today. Remember: doing
nothing is also a mistake, because doing nothing is contrary to our nature.
Our nature is that we were born good—but good is not
good enough. We have to become better
than just good. When we become better,
we cannot rest until we have become the best. In other words, our nature is to pursue excellence.
Those who pursue excellence on all
levels (not just on the job or on the playing field), they become the happiest
people in the world, because they attain balance in their lives. When
we are truly balanced, all our problems will vanish (all problems
are born out of imbalance).
When balanced people come together to share wisdom, the culture
of love and understanding is born.
All of us come from that culture—that is our true cultural
heritage—the heritage of wisdom.
When wisdom is put into practice, the culture improves.
When wisdom is ignored, the culture deteriorates. Putting wisdom into practice is something each
of us must do—and only we can do it—no one can practice wisdom
for us. We have to put
the precepts into practice ourselves. Preaching without practicing is self-deception.
Teaching others through the example of our own practices
is the only way to help remove the self-deception of others.
When our self-deception is removed, and others remove their
self-deception too, then together we have created heaven on Earth.
In this true culture of real mutual respect and harmony,
everyone will prosper and no one will be treated as an object, because
no one will treat him- or herself as an object.
In this culture of wisdom, everyone will look upon one another
with the eyes of a true friend.
May
one and all come to this realization and engage themselves—mind, body, and soul—in
this noble work, in this labor of love. Then,
nowhere will there be misery, nowhere will there be the hand that steals away
the innocence and light, but everywhere we will find the helping hands, the open-hearts,
the pure minds, and the free souls. [1] In other words, they have no courage; it is lost in the endless pit of uncontrolled desire. Anyone (man or woman) who succumbs to their weaknessess (in the form of whims, selfish feelings, and negative emotions) becomes a weakling in this world, even though they may be a 250 pound football player, wrestler, or corporate kingpin. |
