Dr. Varius Blynd: "Unlearning"

• From "FUNKTIONARY, THE KEY HOLDERS ENPSYCHLOPEDIA"

Copyright 2016 Chocolate City Press 

Resonated & Orchestrated by Dr. Blynd, Ph.F.

unlearning - a process of eliminating obsolete and /or inaccurate foundational concepts by totally reorienting one's methods of accessing, coordinating, juxtaposing and internalizing data, perceptions, opinions, facts, truths and subjective reality. 2) awakening to one's fundamental Self-nature—our ground-state of Being. 3) the process of uncovering the nature of reality. 4) learning about the art of learning itself. 5) the ability to clear out one's default beliefs, programs, and self-doubts will open up one's consciousness to what you really want to create. By the time you reach your mid-twenties and beyond, your beliefs about yourself and the reality that you experience (or can experience) are pretty much already circumscribed and set in stone. The key to unlearning is to be a rolling stone—break away and then roll free. Unlearning involves reversing (undoing) the pedagogical technique that was applied in and during one's formative years of indoctrination, conditioning, education, programming, training, study, etc. Most of our learning has been unconsciously laced with limiting beliefs. The first step in unlearning is becoming aware of what is holding you back, holding you up or holding you down—in a word, what you deferred or settled for in life rather than what you preferred or dreamed possible. The technique of unlearning involves the following: Redirect Learning, Responsive Learning, Reflective Learning and Reverse Learning. Unlearning is akin to reverse engineering coupled with conscious re-imagineering. The conscious mind can only create what you desire in your reality if the subconscious mind doesn't present any stronger belief currents for why you can't. When the conscious mind knows how to unlearn (reverse the subconscious technique), it breaks the subconscious hold and breaks open as the processing mind breaks down. The degree to which ignorance falls away is the degree of enlightenment there will be. With a ruthless integrity we must scrutinize our own motives and make the honest effort to determine what our relationship to life is really based on. Those who learn think they are learning the ordinary that can be understood, while those who unlearn feel deep within they are embodying the extraordinary that is beyond understanding. Unlearning comprises a combination of learning {uncovering) something or realizing that something is possible and recovery (the removal of a block) of something that is aboriginal to us, something we've alienated, denied its rightfully belonging to us. Unlearning requires keen curiosity which embodies self-motivation. It is also about being aware of using concepts (which are static) without being fooled by them or getting lost in them, i.e., remaining in direct experience (which is dynamic). Unwinding a whole circuit of conditioned responses, inflexible seeing and fear-inducing habits requires an unimaginable amount of intellectual fortitude. R. D. Laing defines the depth of the challenge: "Our capacity to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell is so shrouded...that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love." Unlearners leart at will by their own will. Learning consists of filling; unlearning consists of emptying. "The chief object of education is not to leam things but to unlearn things." ~G.K. Chesterton. We have to wean ourselves from overdependence on the expertise we've labored so hard to accumulate as stores of knowledge. "We must avoid letting our education interfere with our learning." -Albert Einstein. Unlearners are more favorably disposed toward the unexpected. Instead of filling with answers, empty of questions. Questions confine answers. When you are clear of questions, answers are unbound—free to arise of their own volition no longer held hostage by them. Unlearning is reformatting our gestalt in order to uncover and recover one's dormant or arrested potential through Self-Overstanding—the inner quest to the realization of the Overself. We must welcome the insecurity, the uncertainty and the wisdom of courting the unknown while making the familiar strange—to see or unblock the view totally anew. "We are too used to learning and too dependent on being taught. Over-reliance on the need to learn is making our society into a world of experts, ever more selective, divisive, and complicated." ~Dr. Ilchi Lee. Everything in Consciousness-based education starts with freedom from the need to leam. As you let go of your dependence on "learning" (in pursuit of earning a living), and simply listen, observe and reflect, life will naturally begin unfolding its secrets, mysteries and lessons to you. Unlearning reduces the frequency and extent of our pervasive misapprehension of reality—both its nature and attributes. Out from the shadows of familiarity and the cocoon of conditioning lies a vibrancy of life rarely encountered—and those that do, are mostly unlearns of the highest magnitude who recenter their perception and awareness into the actuality, the immediacy of the here-and-now. When you move from your deepest knowing, all the right doors will fling open for you. The more you learn the less you know; the more you unlearn the more you know that you don't. We gravitate with celerity those who think like us but learn slowly (and unlearn even slower) from those that don't. You know it's like that, 'cuz that's the way it is. When you're unlearning, you're burning—putting out a lot of self-made fires in the tender box of your unexamined life and unquestioning mind. When you're all burned up and the false self consumed, then you become the light. Drop what you've been taught so you can recollect what you know. "I got a pretty good education. It took me years to get over it!" While spirituality is all about unlearning all the garbage you've been taught. Unlearning has to do with awakening. (See: The Tao, Aw-akening, Unanswering, Questions, Overself, True Self, Questioning, Searching, False Self, Third Sight, Ego, Attention, Awareness, Stillness, Innocence, Truth, Seeing, U-Turners, Love, Truth Editing, Creative Seeing, Wisdom, Dream, Third-Door, Insecurity, Uncertainty, Unseeing, In-Seeing, Consciousness-Based Education, Unstuck & Seeking)

Dr. Blynd: The Definition of "Belief"

• From "FUNKTIONARY, THE KEY HOLDERS ENPSYCHLOPEDIA"

Copyright 2016 Chocolate City Press 

Resonated & Orchestrated by Dr. Blynd, Ph.F.

Belief- the psychological calm of imagined certitude safely beyond de-stabilizing doubt and troublesome reality-entanglement. 2) a construction of approximate truths, absolute truths, mass truths and primary myths, based on genetic predisposition, and environmental and socio-psychological conditioning. 3) the institutionalization of the unknowable, i.e., a conviction that is not necessarily based upon any empirical, direct-mind or experiential knowledge. 4) a non-physical surviving thought-form. 5) any conclusion based on a fundamental assumption; the evidence of things not seen, no longer actively sought. 6) an intellectual
rationalization surrounded by (based on) "'proofs," reasons and arguments. 7) that which springs out of cultural ideology. 8) the greatest fiction. 9) a trick of the mind to repress doubt. 10) a mental doubt-suppression tactic. A suppressed doubt is neither faith nor even trust. 11) repressed doubt. 12) an explicit or implicit assent to dogmatic propositions (with or without overgrown religious foliage) on someone else's authority. 13) reverential blindness that thwarts fresh perception and intuitive apperception. 14) a prejudice without any experience to support it. 15) a peculiar blend of fatiloquent assertion on one hand and adamant
denial on the other. 16) a manic flirtation with the terminally unprovable. 17) certainty based in the unknown. 18) having another "see" it for you while seeing him see it (for you)—in effect being for another. 19) a conclusion without the verification of direct experience—make-believe made real. 20) the inability or unwillingness to master the requisite logic or reason to counterbalance (or overcome) the willingness to be misled. 21) the abnegation of internal authenticity for outside authority. 22) ego-consoling faith. 23) acceptance of a statement, tenet or creed with available verification and substantive evidence to its contrary. The word belief in English comes from the Anglo-Saxon root 'leif, which means, "to wish." Belief is the inability to formulate the necessary suspicion that there is something seriously missing. Sin means missing the mark—and belief is the mark that's missed in the very act of merely believing. Belief is the blind spot of what's not. It's beautiful—you can't see what's not really there. When people believe something, their beliefs take form and appear real to them. Belief, even in the most arrant nonsense, often finds the greatest audience with the highest credulity. When you utter the creed, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth..." you are really saying, "I fervently wish that there exists God the Father Almighty." With belief, you have to believe only in lies; you don't have to believe in truth. Remember, you cover a lie; you discover truth. A belief is an unwarranted, unchallenged or cherished assumption that is elevated to the status of a conclusion or absolute truth without examination and verification through observation, direct or authentic experience, critical thought and contemplation. A belief is a stub (proxy-rung) in one's personal ladder of truth. Each belief carries the embedded doubt in itself. A belief is the violation of epistemological integrity in which something one doesn't really or truly know is feigned as something one knows. Most belief is founded on the form—not the content—of the words believed in. Once a belief is rigidified or solidified as dogma, individuals (believers) will predictably limit themselves only to the experiences that validate their belief (wishes). Don't believe or disbelieve, because in either case, '"you" will never undertake the effort of direct experience to really know. Belief is external absolute-truth-based blindness. Belief is something fixed, static, stagnant, frozen— a conclusion we have reached (albeit not on our own and based on the unknown). Once we believe something, we shut the door to everything outside of, or opposed to, that belief and stop inquiring or questioning. Belief is a cultural conditioning imposed on you by others; it is a slavery. Belief is our substitute for truth: truth our substitute for reality—thereby stultifying our opportunity for awareness. Belief is what we cling to when we have no true overstanding or comprehension (knowingness) of the nature of reality, existence, or the Totality. Only the blind must believe in sunlight. For those who can see with a single eye, belief plays no part in the experience of seeing. A belief is a question we have put aside so that we don't have to seek an answer from reality. Belief is present when you don't know, yet believe anyway. A belief cannot be questioned—its very nature is to end the quest in the very believing. To believe a statement or proposition "P' is to act as if 'P' is held to be true; and if so, it too holds true for others.   It is not necessary that the belief be neither conscious nor certain.   Confusion arises from failure to overstand the essential difference between theoretical (i.e., intellectual) belief, and vital (i.e., unconscious) belief. Most beliefs are merely the result of indoctrination, acculturation, programming and conditioning.   Only vital beliefs have the power to transcend the exigencies of life, and of death. The highest belief is the belief in reality, and even that position is an unenviable one.  When you are free of belief you are ready for truth; when you're free of truth, you're ready for reality, and when you're ready for reality, you're ready for Phfreedom (not having freedom but being freedom itself). With belief, you can only see your way out of it; you cannot see through it or into it. Seeing your way out provides the false impression that you can make your way out (of it). A belief may be comforting, but only through experimental transformation into knowingness, by way of revising one's truth, does it become liberating.   Shed your belief for existential relief.   Belief is always unnecessary (and a hindrance) to action but a salve to the ego. "There is no idea so stupid you can't find people to believe in it."~H.L. Mencken. Belief may console the ego-personality, but it simultaneously deludes, confines and supports it. "Belief is only as good as the ability and willingness to give it up.   Beliefs only betoken intention and doubt and that when doubt is laid to rest through experience, belief dissolves as naturally as stitches after an operation.   When you really know something, if you have the experience to back it up, belief becomes more of a hindrance than help. But its most useful function—and its most profound accomplishment—lies in its ability to disappear." -Adam G. Fisher.  The very idea of belief implies a residue of doubt, but knowing leaves no trace of skepticism. Don't believe a word of what you read here in the Funktionary. Belief is being locked into an idea; an unalterable understanding. We fail to realize how dangerous (and limiting) blocking out new information can be simply because it is new, foreign or inconsistent with our tradition or religious conditioning.   If knowledge is not constantly changing you—then you're full of shit.   How much?   It all depends.   When we're "smellin' ourselves" in our beliefs, rest assured, others are smelling us too—because it reeks from a distance. All the dangers of belief lay close to the shore of dogma. Once one has broken through the spiritual shoals and religious reefs, the expanse of the ocean of Being brings great relief. Why should many consider it a virtue to believe something or "believe in" something without any supporting evidence, or in spite of contravening evidence?   Whatever you now believe, you believe only because you were willing to release a prior belief. Knowledge comes into existence by shedding belief—it is but a natural progession from superstition to reality-based living and quantum physics experienced as a quantum leap forward into and through consciousness.   You don't have to take any responsibility for belief—that shifts responsibility or romoves it altogether from the believer, as contrasted to knowledge, wherein once you know, once you are aware, you have to take responsibility for an action based on that knowledge. With belief, you can willfully ignore knowledge and facts and remain in ignorant bliss. Challenging and questioning the void, blind spot, or fear supporting the need to defer experience and knowledge for belief presents us with the prospect of reinventing our lives anew from scratch—not the outer life, but our inner lives, our essence.  A reorientation from belief to knowledge takes tremendous courage.   Belief blocks us, i.e., stands between us and the reality-based truth we so eagerly dodge, avert or fail to even acknowledge or recognize its presence always there just beyond our fears to engage or entertain. Belief is a personal claim that doesn't matter because it has no impact on the outcome of the encounter or exchange between two people or events. Sure, you can exercise a modicum of faith to practical things in the world but that doesn't denote belief. Faith is belief sustained by some reasonable test of its validity. If a belief cannot be tested, it moves into superstition or faith. Faith (like truth) can be tested against reality and will yield either temporary knowledge or conclusive disrepute.   However, once a claim "matters," even though the question or answer may not change (what's your name and the factual response), the stakes are raised. A formula can be generated that depicts belief. Belief equals the claims divided by reason, times the evidence minus an uncertainty factor to the power of change driven by infinity.   [B = (C/R)E - Un].  We should approach a claim with some reasonable expectations (because we understand and have experienced the world and events to follow a certain pattern or be a certain way).  It is most prudent to dissect a claim from our reasonable expectations of our understanding of the world especially its uncertainty factor amidst ceaseless change. This is the safest and most sane manner or method to determine if the claim comports with the nature (attributes) of reality. Once you substitute knowledge and reality for belief and truth, your life (the substitute life you're leading will never be the same.   The end of belief is a challenging moment.   Don't be afraid to live your life without the binky of belief—it will come to you as a life-changing and most joyous relief.  Once you know—back to belief you cannot go. Not in belief, but rather in knowingness and openness to change we grow. In belief we're off to the religious races, but we never go far. Flow it down for a change and be where we really are; be who we truly are!   (See: Faith, Vital Belief, Sin, Belief System. Certainty, Phfreedom, Dogma, Knowingness, Liberation, Ego-Personality, Epistemology, Space, Seeing, True Believers. Essence, Human Beams, Overstanding, Atheism, "God," Absolute Truth, Proof, Mythology, Undoism, Subconscious, Self- Identity, Religion, Ideology, SLIP, Evil, Good, The Unknown, Guilt, Understanding, Religion, PC & Trust)

belief-based truth - a description or perception of reality, (the content of which comprises what we call "truth"), that one desires or hopes to be true, despite external scientific, natural, or reproducible proof-based truth to the contrary. People all-too-often compromise their integrity and/or intelligence by devising truth which disallows any proof by design, as part and parcel of its ruse to allure its believers)—and even the truth that carries proof cannot be proven against the undeniable uncertainty of Reality. You fall prey to (or fall for) the illusions of proof if you ignore the pure subjectivity of reality. Illusions of scientific proof follow illusions of limits, and illusions of religious proof follow illusions of truth. Science makes truth out of proof, while belief-based religions make proof out of truth. (See: Infinity, Proof, Revelatory Truth, Absolute Truth & Belief System)

belief exams - self-administered tests of one's assumptions (cherished beliefs); testing one's beliefs. The only way to recognize the limits under which you have been living is to test them. If you do not test your beliefs they will become your warden an; you their hostage.   Unquestioned beliefs own you. If you don't confront your beliefs they will only comfort you in you: imprisonment to them. (See: O.D., Belief Systems, Belief Pushers, Guilt, ludgment, Fear, Sin, Fate & Convictions) [MORE]

OSHO: And the Flowers Showered 1-2

Osho: Zen is a Deprogramming

From [HERE] In his book, ‘The Way of Zen,’ Alan Watts writes, “One must not forget the social context of Zen. It is primarily a way of liberation for those who have mastered the discipline of social convention, of the conditioning of the individual by the group. Zen is a medicine for the ill effects of this conditioning, for the mental paralysis and anxiety which come from extensive self-consciousness.”

Beloved Master, First, I don’t see any need to master social conventions to be ready for the way of Zen. On the contrary, trying to master dead, old rules shows stupidity. Why not drop them immediately?

Second, do you see Zen as a medicine for the ill effect of conditioning?

Whenever you are reading a book, remember the man who is writing it, because those words are not coming from the sky, they are coming from an individual mind.

Alan Watts was a trained Christian missionary. That training continues to affect his effort to understand Zen. And finally, when he came a little closer to Zen, the Christian church expelled him. That brought a crisis in that man’s life. He was not yet a man of Zen, and he had lost his credibility as a Christian. Under this stress he started drinking wine, became an alcoholic and died because of alcoholism. If you know this man you will understand why he is saying what he is saying.

His statement that “One must not forget the social context of Zen,” is simply saying something about himself – that if he had not forgotten the social context and remained a docile Christian, things would have been better. His interest in Zen, rather than bringing him freedom, brought him catastrophe. But Zen is not responsible for it; he could not go the whole way.

He tried somehow to make a Christian context for Zen. Neither did Christians like it, nor the men of Zen. They don’t need any Christian context; they don’t need any social context. It is an individual rebellion. Whether you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian does not matter. Whatever load you are carrying, drop it. Whatever the name of the load, just drop it.

Zen is a deprogramming.

You are all programmed – as a Christian, as a Catholic, as a Hindu, as a Mohammedan… everybody is programmed. Zen is a deprogramming. So it does not matter what kind of program you bring; what kind of cage you have lived in does not matter. The cage has to be broken and the bird has to be released. There is no social context of Zen. Zen is the most intimate and the most individualistic rebellion against the collective mass and its pressure.

Alan Watts is not right. His understanding of Zen is absolutely intellectual. He says, “It is primarily a way of liberation for those who have mastered the discipline of social convention.” All nonsense. It has nothing to do with social convention. There is no need to master something which you have to drop finally. There is no point in wasting time. In other words, he is saying, “First, get into a cage, become a slave of a certain conventionality, a certain religion, a certain belief system, and then try to be free of it.”

He is simply showing his mind, unconsciously. He was encaged, and for years trained as a Christian priest. You can expel a Christian, but it is very difficult for the Christian to expel the Christianity that has gone deep into his bones, into his blood. He could not expel it, hence his advice for others who may follow: “It is primarily a way of liberation for those who have mastered the discipline of social convention, of the conditioning of the individual by the group.” Absolutely no.

It does not matter whether you are conditioned this way or that way. Conditioned fifty percent, sixty percent, or one hundred percent – it does not matter. From any point freedom is available. And you will have to drop it, so the less you are conditioned the better, because you will be dropping a small load. It is better if your cage is very small. But if you have a palace and an empire, then it is very difficult to drop it.

When Jesus asked the fishermen to drop their jobs and “come follow me,” they really dropped. There was nothing much to be dropped – just a fisherman’s net, a rotten net. A good bargain: dropping this net and following this man, you will enter into the kingdom of God. But when he asked the rich young man to drop everything and “come and follow me,” the rich man hesitated and disappeared into the crowd. The less you have, as far as conditioning is concerned, the easier it is to drop it.

And he is asking that first you should be conditioned by the group, and master the discipline of social convention. Strange… Do you have to become first a soldier just to get retired from the army? If you don’t want to fight, you don’t have to become a soldier. Why not be fresh? But he was not fresh.

He was contaminated by Christianity, and he hopes – according to his programming – that everybody first should be conditioned, chained, handcuffed, put into a jail, so that he can enjoy freedom one day. A strange way of experiencing freedom!

When you are free there is no need of being conditioned by any group, by any belief. There is no need. As you are, you are already too conditioned. Society does not allow their children to grow like the lilies in the field, pure, uncontaminated. They pollute them with all their conditionings, centuries old. The older the conditioning, the more precious it is thought to be.

Click to read more ...

OSHO: 'Turning the other cheek: the masochist's slap-up feast'

OSHO,

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE PHILOSOPHY OF NONVIOLENCE AND PARTICULARLY ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN DOGMA OF TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK?

I am not a philosopher. The philosopher thinks about things. It is a mind approach.

My approach is a no-mind approach. It is just the very opposite of philosophizing.

It is not thinking about things, ideas, but seeing with a clarity which comes when you put your mind aside, when you see through silence, not through logic.

Seeing is not thinking.

The sun rises there; if you think about it you miss it, because while you are thinking about it, you are going away from it. In thinking you can move miles away; and thoughts go faster than anything possible.

If you are seeing the sunrise then one thing has to be certain, that you are not thinking about it. Only then can you see it.

Thinking becomes a veil on the eyes. It gives its own color, its own idea to the reality. It does not allow reality to reach you, it imposes itself upon reality; it is a deviation from reality.

Hence no philosopher has ever been able to know the truth.

All the philosophers have been thinking about the truth. But thinking about the truth is an impossibility. Either you know it, or you don't. If you know it, there is no need to think about it. If you don't, then how can you think about it?

A philosopher thinking about truth is just like a blind man thinking about light. If you have eyes, you don't think about light, you see it.

Seeing is a totally different process; it is a byproduct of meditation.

Hence I would not like my way of life to be ever called a philosophy, because it has nothing to do with philosophy. You can call it philosia. The world "philo" means love; "sophy" means wisdom, knowledge - love for knowledge. In philosia, "philo" means the same love, and "sia" means seeing: love, not for knowledge but for being - not for wisdom, but for experiencing.

So that is the first thing to be remembered. Nonviolence is a philosophy to Mahatma Gandhi; it is not a philosophy to me, it is a philosia. That's where I have been constantly struggling with Gandhian philosophers, thinkers. Gandhi wrote his autobiography entitled EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH. Now that is an utter absurdity; you cannot experiment with truth.

When you are silent, truth is there in its fullness, in its absolute glory. And when you are not silent, truth is absent.

When you are silent, truth does not appear like an object before you. When you are silent, suddenly you recognize you are the truth.

There is nothing to see.

The seer is the seen, the observer is the observed; that duality no more exists.

And there is no question of thinking. There is no doubt, there is no belief, there is no idea.

Gandhi was trying to experiment with truth. The simple implication is: you know what truth is; otherwise how are you going to experiment with it? And for a man who knows truth, what is the need to experiment? He lives it For him there is no alternative. To Gandhi everything is philosophy, to me everything is philosia. Gandhi is a thinker, I am not a thinker. My approach is existential, not mental. Non-violence - the very word is not appealing to me, it is not my taste, because it is negative. Violence is positive, non-violence is negative. Nobody has paid any attention to the simple fact that you are making violence positive, solid - and non-violence is simply negating it.

I call it reverence for life, I don't use the word non-violence. Reverence for life - it is positive; the nonviolence happens just of its own accord.

If you feel reverence for life, how can you be violent? But it is possible you can be non-violent and still you may not have any reverence for life.

Click to read more ...