Α19. The long-standing influences of the environment.

The State of Freedom
A journey of Truth into the mind’s sanctuary
with the destination of inner Freedom.

Α19. The long-standing influences of the environment.

All these pain stories are permeated by the credulity of my tabula rasa[1] mind, who was born as a plain paper in an unknown world and naturally believed without discrimination and embraced all models and fears which the elder ones transferred to him by their words or their example, their eyes, their way of thinking, their body language and their total way of existence.

Dedicated to the task of my liberation, in a mood of cordial care, the mind now unrolls the old cinematographic film of my whole past on a large and sunny field. The film is many kilometers long; it covers the whole surface of the field. Each film frame corresponds to one admonition. Millions of frames, millions of admonitions, most of which were unintentionally implanted into the mind by his environment, have now for the first time been brought altogether in the sunlight, for the mind to watch them carefully and get acquainted with all of them one by one. By the admonitions, as the Latin root of the word implies, the environment managed “to monish” (ad + monere) the mind and make him stay within the socially acceptable frame. The mind out of ignorance and insecurity accepted all of them without discrimination, because he could not bear to remain uncompromised and marginal, as he was ignorant and did not know which other possibilities existed.

For the first time now he is able to see all admonitions one by one, statically, because until now he saw all of them together in a constant motion. With a velocity of 24 frames per second he could see only the result, the motion, not the components which composed the motion. In other words, he could see only the seeming reality, not the true reality of the static frames which altogether caused the motion. The cinema film in motion manifested only the external action of his life, whereas the static frames impress his internal life, as they register in snapshots instant emotions, body postures, gazes and expressions of the face which find their roots in all kinds of admonitions-influences from the environment[2].

The mind wants to tear down up to the core the prison of the webs which he has been weaving for all his years, in order to wipe it out; that’s why he starts the work from its deepest base. So, he bends very deep down in the heart, he snuggles in the center of himself, he backs away from the world and listens for a while to the silence and the blood flow. He deepens even more into the quietness, into the darkness; he surrenders to the warm lap of his existence. He takes off the residuals of his whole worldly life and remains absolutely naked, plain and untouched by the world, there, inside the total care of the center of himself, which surrounds him with love like a womb. Now, devoid of troubles, breathing the fresh and light air of the absence of expectations, in a state of deep serenity, he manages to remember little by little. The inner sealed curtains now rise, the artificial cloud of oblivion begins to disperse, the images become more and more limpid and he relives the whole theater play of his life.

He becomes again a fetus, inside his mother’s womb, and sees how many prejudices were implanted into his unconsciousness by the words he heard, before he learned the language of humans, before he saw the light of the world, before he even realized that he was not immaterial anymore and that he had now obtained a material body made of flesh and blood.

• The fetus heard his mother say “if it comes up ill, what shall I do, my God?” and he believed that without good health there can be only despair and misery.
• He received from her cells the dread that her child will not be born healthy and thus learned to be afraid.
• He heard his parents quarrel for trivial issues and was taught that the worldly matters are of higher value than love.
• He heard his father wish that he would be a boy and learned to consider women inferior.
• He heard his father say that he struggles anxiously to ensure material wealth for the growth of his children and believed that money brings happiness and that without it there can be only misery and despair.

These and many more conceived the mind already before my birth and set the foundation to build his own prison later with armed concrete, with convictions, models, expectations, fears and anxieties.

Indeed, no sooner had the mind seen the world’s light, than he heard the obstetrician congratulate his mother for having borne a son and saw his father and his whole family stare at him as if he were their liberating God, only because he was male[3].

But he set up even more convictions, which found their cause in his own material nature and not in others’ words. He learned, for instance, to yearn for the motherly lap and the nipple with the milk; without it he realized that it would be impossible for him to stay alive. So, he believed without resistance in the rule of dependence and thought it for eternal, thus forgetting totally and definitively that only a few months ago he did not even have a body and was immaterial and free from such dependences.

These and many more ideas registered the mind during his infancy. As a result, when he grew up and the conditions of his nature and of his environment changed, he either forgot these ideas written down there, or he did not know how to erase them, nor did anybody tell him that it would be for his own good to find away to erase them. So, already as an infant, he learned to believe outdated convictions, which made him live in his own imaginary world, for these convictions presented him the subjective registration as an objective reality and con-stituted for the mind from those years already an irremovable deforming filter for his relationship with people and with the whole world.

Later, in school, he found that, whenever he got an excellent, his mother and his teacher approved him. This made him believe that the process of learning and the knowledge can only serve his recognition and approval by people. He could not even imagine – and nobody told him so nor showed it to him by his example – that the deeper usefulness of learning and knowledge is the very joy of the revelation and the active spiritual participation in the world.

Only later he was told that knowledge and learning are a necessary evil, a donkeywork which he must undergo if he wants later as an adult to become a winner in the fight of survival and predominance against the other “competitors”, as he learned to see his brothers.

At about that time he was also informed that he must be likeable to the opposite sex; otherwise he had to taste the misery of being turned down by both girls and boys. He realized that he had to be cheerful, artful, sporty, courageous, and much more. He came then to the conclusion that happiness is an extremely difficult issue which depends on the acceptance of the peevish opposite sex and that the lonesome life constitutes proof of failure and unhappiness. So, he learned to hate to stay alone and was not able to exploit and enjoy his valuable lonely hours anymore.

Soon enough the anxiety about the future was added, as everybody told him that he is not a child anymore and has to take charge of himself. He then built above the anxiety of his parents his own anxiety as well as the conviction that without academic studies he would be lost in this tough world inside which he had found himself unwittingly entangled. Additionally, he learned to see all his male brothers in comparison to himself and look upon them either with envy or with haughti­ness, depending on their successes and failures with women, studies and carrier.

Models, prejudices, convictions, expectations, fears and innu-mer­able anxieties adopted the credulous plain mind, because apart from his dependent material nature and the insanely demanding environment he did not yet have any other teachers, while his spiritual nature had from the very beginning atrophied and been jammed by the world’s unbearable rules, before it even sprouted.

This contemplates the mind now inside the heart’s lap and, already knowing his tomorrow’s next step, he peacefully withdraws, in order to surrender for a few hours to the other sweet lap, the one of sleep.