If you’ve ever seen a bullfight, either on television or in Mexico, or in Spain, where they still have these things, you would notice that the man fighting the bull has this long cape-type apparatus and he waves it at the bull in order to incite reaction. So waving the cape incites the bull, the bull charges, he gets out of the way, and there’s a sword hidden in the cape, and he stabs the bull.
The bull is reactionary; it reacts to the sensory inputs that it gets, and the man playing with the bull knows what those sensory inputs are, knows how to manipulate them, and knows how to get the bull to do what he wants the bull to do. The bull has vision, it has smell, it has touch, feel, it has a certain intellect, it thinks it’s going to kill the cape; it has all of the same sensory inputs that we have.
We are in constant battle with a different bullfighter; his name is Satan, and he knows our weaknesses and he knows how to manipulate us. And that’s why he’s called the whisperer, because he whispers into our ears, and then when we turn around he’s not there. Think of the cape; it’s there and as the bull charges, it disappears. The bullfighter has the bull on a string and uses it to get him to do what he wants. Satan knows the strings that pull and push us. Our mind is what he connects to, and he connects to our mind through the illusory nature of existence, and by that he’s able to manipulate us.
There are lots of reasons why we can be manipulated. The main one is that we have a constant ongoing affair with the world. We have a constant ongoing interaction with the things in the world. We are constantly trying to make the things in the world go in certain ways and in certain directions. We’re trying to push our will into the world and manipulate the world to do the things that we want it to do.
Imagine if you ended this affair with the world. Imagine if you were no longer trying to push and pull the world. Imagine that you are no longer interested in that which we perceive sensually. Imagine if your lust was gone, and lust deals with many things: lust for money, lust for fame, lust for possessions, lust for women, lust for men, lust for real estate, and all of these lusts make you like a bull. They make you charge, maybe not physically, but they make you charge; they incite you to get what you want.
If you look, the intellectual process is a little more complicated than the one the bull uses, but the end result is the same. So imagine if, instead of looking at things and trying to aggressively put them into a position that you want them to be, you had a different ability; you had the ability to see the result of your actions, and the consequences of your actions, as you did them…
