Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation) today we look at one of the aspects of our personalities, “The commanding self”, highlighted through this news and a record of a theatrical incident, contributed by a correspondent in the London Observer (25th August; 1968), page 30);
Also as we begin today ‘let us remember this about ‘Attention’. Our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. Attention: is important and most of the times we are so indifferent to it. It is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. We feed the hunger blindly. Once the mechanism is brought to our attention and we begin to study it, it is as if a veil has been stripped off ordinary life, and we become freer in our action and choices.
“The Commanding Self” here points to the “mixture of primitive and conditioned responses, common to everyone, which inhibits and distorts human progress and understanding”.
THE PIT
A young woman who had been sheltered from many experiences of life found herself one day in the glittering foyer of a London theater.
She had not been to a theater before and she was almost totally unprepared for what she saw. Her indoctrination at home had been of an emotional religiosity which dwelt upon the delights of heaven and the horrors of the ‘pit’ of hell.
The lavish decoration of the entrance hall, where she had to wait her escort to collect the tickets, was a completely new environment for her. The people were not only all strangers to her, but were dressed in a bewildering variety of colours and were characterized by a liveliness and sophistication which she could relate to nothing in her own life.
Suddenly in the midst of the bemusement engendered by these impacts, she saw and read a sign which pointed towards the orchestra stalls. It indicated, The Pit.
What else could she do but give a scream of horror, run from the theater, and – as soon as she could – seek solace and forgiveness in earnest prayer? And this is what she did.
Accounts of this nature, assuming them to be true, indicate both conditioned behavior and the persistence of what we can easily recognize as a primitive pattern of reactions in the present day. The grafting of emotion based ideas on top of the primitive, without maturing the later, produces the “Commanding Self”, which affects much of everyone’s daily thinking. The woman had been conditioned to respond with horror and an emotional storm to certain stimuli. Today in the most barbaric and the most advanced societies, there are millions of people many of them certainly in positions of authority and importance, who will react in a similar manner.
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