It is as if most of mankind is in the grip of some ongoing infectious disease that each child catches from the moment they are born. It is a disease called non-thinking acceptance of general attitudes that, for example, regard poets and poetry as something pointless done by rather silly people. Or the aims of people like the authors of this book as irrelevant delving into the obscure.
With these ingrained unthinking attitudes each of us stumbles through life. Because the status quo is judgemental and we conform to the status quo, automatically and without thought we become judgemental as well. We judge others by their skin colour, their nationality, and their accent, their position in the system's pyramid structure, their religion, their politics, their beauty or ugliness according to society's set standards, their wealth, and their poverty. Always we accept the sweeping, unfair judgements made by others as our own, because if we stand up and protest our ego may be bruised.
The same ego-controlled "me" that condemns the mistakes of others will often either make light of, or refuse to admit to, "me's" own mistakes. After a lifetime of using this weird and distorted system of judgement to confirm and harden our attitudes the energies of the virtues have had little opportunity to flow through us. As we near the end of our physical life it is no surprise that we have accumulated a generous store of emotional scar tissue. Maybe throughout those many years a person has used the judgemental role as an excuse to avoid trusting anyone who wasn't family or friend. The role requires a willingness to deliberately ignore any facet of the judged that doesn't confirm the judgement. Coupled with this hardened attitude may be a complete ignorance of, or a distorted knowledge of, why the person existed in the first place. It is with this inflexible attitude and with this ignorance that many people have to face their physical life, and will have also to face their physical death.
In short this means that many people face physical death with the fear based in uncertainty and fear based in an inability to trust.
Excerpt from 'Not just how, but why' written by David and Yvonne Brittain.
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