And we are the product of all those hundreds of millennia of violence. As a result there is in man a powerful homocidal instinct. Most of us at one time or other have experienced the urge to kill.
Now you know where that comes from.
In civilized people this instinct is usually sublimated into something mild like character assassination. That word assassination is the right word, it is a psychological murder. And warfare in civilized societies is sublimated into battles on the playing field, what is called sports.
Genocide is not something new; the word is new, but not the practice. You can see the psychological residue of genocide in modern man. Things like racism and xenophobia.
The mind of man, you see, is millions of years old the day we are born. This is something the psychologists have only recently found out. They could have found it out long ago through meditation. But, like most people, psychologists do not meditate. I am reluctant to use that word because there is now all kinds of nonsense called meditation which is not meditation at all. For instance, 30 years ago there was a form of mantra yoga that was popular. It was called Transcendental Meditation. Trouble is, it's not transcendental and it's not meditation.
True meditation means looking at your own consciousness, and looking is the wrong word.
There really is no word for it because no one is doing it. We have words for things like walking and eating because everyone does those things. Of course, I don't mean looking visually; the word awareness probably comes closest.
Meditation leads to self-knowledge which is far more important than any other kind of knowledge and it is also the last thing on earth that anyone wants. This is the tragedy of the human race: the most important thing is life is also the last thing anyone wants to know. The great Chinese philosopher Lao Tse said, "The sage is concerned with the inner and not with the outer world."
On the temple to Apollo in Delphi are engraved the words "Know Thyself."
My conjecture is that the reason the ancient Greeks accomplished so much was that some of them actually did follow that edict. Bertrand Russell said, "In all history nothing is so surprising or difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece." These extraordinary people invented mathematics, science, philosophy, drama, democracy, athletics, and arts and architecture that have never been surpassed. And ancient Athens was a population of only about fifty thousand.
Today no one tells you to know yourself; over the ages that wisdom was lost. You are told to control yourself, but the problem is the controller is the controlled. And the controller has been conditioned by the insanity and immorality of the world. Most people do not even know they are conditioned. I think the reason Sigmund Freud had such great insights was that he was one of the few people in history who looked at his own consciousness. Which is to his credit. Benjamin Franklin said, "There are three things extremely hard: steel, diamond, and to know oneself."
The only thing you get from self-knowledge is sanity and clarity. There is no gratification to it. Which is why so few people pursue it.
Now you know where that comes from.
In civilized people this instinct is usually sublimated into something mild like character assassination. That word assassination is the right word, it is a psychological murder. And warfare in civilized societies is sublimated into battles on the playing field, what is called sports.
Genocide is not something new; the word is new, but not the practice. You can see the psychological residue of genocide in modern man. Things like racism and xenophobia.
True meditation means looking at your own consciousness, and looking is the wrong word.
There really is no word for it because no one is doing it. We have words for things like walking and eating because everyone does those things. Of course, I don't mean looking visually; the word awareness probably comes closest.
Meditation leads to self-knowledge which is far more important than any other kind of knowledge and it is also the last thing on earth that anyone wants. This is the tragedy of the human race: the most important thing is life is also the last thing anyone wants to know. The great Chinese philosopher Lao Tse said, "The sage is concerned with the inner and not with the outer world."
On the temple to Apollo in Delphi are engraved the words "Know Thyself."
My conjecture is that the reason the ancient Greeks accomplished so much was that some of them actually did follow that edict. Bertrand Russell said, "In all history nothing is so surprising or difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece." These extraordinary people invented mathematics, science, philosophy, drama, democracy, athletics, and arts and architecture that have never been surpassed. And ancient Athens was a population of only about fifty thousand.
Today no one tells you to know yourself; over the ages that wisdom was lost. You are told to control yourself, but the problem is the controller is the controlled. And the controller has been conditioned by the insanity and immorality of the world. Most people do not even know they are conditioned. I think the reason Sigmund Freud had such great insights was that he was one of the few people in history who looked at his own consciousness. Which is to his credit. Benjamin Franklin said, "There are three things extremely hard: steel, diamond, and to know oneself."
The only thing you get from self-knowledge is sanity and clarity. There is no gratification to it. Which is why so few people pursue it.
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