Years ago there was a cartoon character who was in the newspapers whose name was Pogo and he was a little creature who lived in the swamps, he was a possum. One of the more important Pogo cartoons had Pogo saying the following, “We have met the enemy and it is us” and that is a very important concept to understand.
Pogo hit upon one of the major truths that most people are absolutely not aware of; the enemy that is us is a section of ourselves called “the mind”. The mind is our recording machine and our thinking process that delves with the surface of existence. And, we have concluded that this thinking process is who we are.
A French philosopher once said, “I think, therefore I am” and he sort of missed the mark. He should have said something like, “I think, and if that’s all I do I’m limited” or, “I think, and if that’s all I’m involved in I’m within the animal qualities”. He should have begun to understand that there is a place beyond thinking. There is a place beyond our ability to deal with the surface world.
The surface world is the illusory world that we spend our sensory life in, and our sensory life consists of our ability to see, and our ability to hear, and our ability to smell, and our ability to taste and our ability to feel. Somehow we have to go beyond our sensory perceptions and we have to become cognizant of the fact that we have to go beyond our sensory perceptions.
You’ll often hear scientists say something like, “I made this discovery because I was able to stand on the shoulders of giants” and what they mean is; they learned from what was done before and they’ve added a little bit to it and they’ve changed things dramatically.
So, break that down and what’s it mean? It means, “I saw and I copied, and I made an improvement on what I copied” and this is the nature of the monkey mind. It acts like a monkey in that it improves on what it sees, or imitates what it sees.
If a monkey runs off with your keys and runs up a tree, the way to get your keys back from the monkey is to throw things at it, because after a while, it will throw your keys at you because it will imitate what it sees.
So, we have this part of us that is conformative and imitative. Conformative means it conforms to what it sees by reiterating, repeating, doing what it sees. And, we are trained, from the time we are children that it’s appropriate to learn from our parents, learn from our surroundings and conform to that which we see.
When the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, came to new people often their first remark to him was, “We have enough from what our parents gave us and from what we have been given as children, we don’t need anything new, we don’t need innovation.”
Now, herein lies the difficulty that we have; when we’ve spent a lifetime imitating what we see, it becomes incredibly important what we’re looking at. It becomes incredibly important what we’re interfaced with because that’s what we imitate.
Now, to go from the phase of imitation to inspiration is a leap in personal advancement. And how does that occur? How do we go from the phase of imitation to inspiration?
First we need to talk about consciousness just a little bit…
