In spite of the indoctrination of thousands of years, in each wondrous, individual human being there still lies a spark. This spark is greater than the spark of decency to do the right thing, to behave in the right way, to be moral or religious or selfless or self-sacrificing and all the apparent virtues you and I were taught to aspire to. We were taught to aspire to being good, conformist, acceptable, handle-able, tame, domesticated, and to forsake our wildness, our impulses, our ability to feel powerfully and express creatively and be individualistic, even anarchic. The spark I am speaking about is the spark of self-referral, of natural and whole intelligence, heart intelligence, intuition, higher instinctual nature, inner wisdom, authenticity, compassion, and love. These are not merely beautiful descriptions and they are not qualities for society to commandeer, to kidnap on our behalf and then feed back to us in a processed, sanitized form whereby we cannot go too far, too distant from the proposed "norm" of the normalizing society that—and please open your eyes and ears to this—has no interest whatsoever in your essential well-being, in the health and manifestation of your essence, since your becoming self-referring through contact with your essence makes you ungovernable, unsafe, a liability. You become uncontrollable, volatile, while the society is based on power dynamics, on subjugation. Slavery is not abolished, violence and prostitution, unhappiness, conflict, despair, and unthinkable struggle and misery are not something our politicians and our governments are fighting against in our name, in the name of the common human being, in our interest. On the contrary, the powers that proclaim they are acting in our interest are causing the harmful present situations in the world, both directly and indirectly, because they are concerned about world economy, world power dynamics, superior power, acting out of fear, creating the very enemies that we are then indoctrinated to fear and, as anyone with an inkling of understanding of how to control the masses must know, fear is the most powerful weapon they have, so fear and desire are used to control and turn people into puppies.

Content With the Smallest Things

When you withdraw from the education, advertising, social norms and mores, ways of acceptable behavior that govern your ideas about relationship and survival, how to live, how to love, how to be, relate, and behave—all the indoctrination you were raised with and taught to believe—you enter an inner space of self-referral. Instead of looking outside to schooling, politics, socialization, conformist groupings, and societal organizations for your reference, you look inside. You become content with the smallest things. You learn to love, to become familiar with self-love, with your inner knowing sense, with wisdom, innate and unbounded. Simple acts and simple pleasures proliferate and blossom in your life: talking to a close friend over a cup of tea, walking or cycling in the forest, rambling in the countryside, watching the sky at night, sitting with closed eyes and taking in the universe, allowing love to flow in and out of you, delighting in your very breath coursing in and out of your wondrous physical form. The pleasures and acts of fulfillment are endless and not one of them has a single thing to do with the economy or the politics of power or anything that your parent politicians who act in your name, for your own good, in your interest, are concerned about. How do you legislate for contemplation? What are the politics of happiness? What sanctions can you put on personal insight? How much money can you make from people who are already happy and not discontent? How can you oppress and subjugate people who possess an inner sense of their own authority?

You cannot make money out of an individual who is self-referring. You cannot exert power over such a person. You cannot indoctrinate him. You cannot control her. You cannot turn them into slaves or into collective, working, functioning automatons becoming insane for society, mad in the name of self-sacrifice and duty and so-called responsibility. Today the statistics for mental disorder are extraordinarily high. Take a look at them. The world has gone mad. The society is infectious. People become mad in response to a mad world. My life, for example, by modern standards is relatively simple, because I have made it that way. I have chosen it. But tax returns, phone bills, mobile phone bills accompanied by money saving options every month to try and digest, ordering plane tickets, credit card statements, bank transfers, internet tasks, emailing, purchasing gifts for occasions proscribed by state and church at Christmas, Ramadan, birthdays, anniversaries, births and funerals, mortgage repayments, purchasing food, maintaining transport with road tax, motor insurance, state required testing, life insurance, house insurance, holiday insurance, paying rent for your house and office, maintaining your property, paying plumbers, builders, serviceman, being available for deliveries, inspections, meetings concerning payments, benefits, social security... when all these on top of your occupation, your career, your job are performed and carried out how much time have you left to eat, to wash, to see your family, the people you live with, dress yourself, organize yourself for the day ahead... how much time is left?

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #182