Skyblack wrote: ↑June 20th, 2021, 1:07 am
Now, how does the lover of wisdom accurately learn about himself and the world? Certainly not according to some analyst, some philosopher, some guru, some formula, some method. If we learn about ourselves according to an “expert” then we learn about that expert and what his/her thoughts are, not about ourselves. Besides, one simply has to look at the lives, the conduct, of these dime a dozen so called experts to get an accurate estimation of the value, or in most cases the lack thereof, of what they espouse. Their real lives indicate their clueless-ness.
One wonders why we submit to authority. Why are we always on the lookout for handouts? Whether the handouts are from the government, some holy book, the newest intellectual gimmick, the newest ideas so on and so forth. Interestingly, again, yesterday I saw a post which might explain this briefly. We submit to authority because all of us have this inward demand to be safe, this urge to be secure, to have an easy life. Desire for comfort and convenience trumps over sweat of the brow. It seems so long as we want to be secure in our possessions, in our power, in our thoughts, we must have authority. We will always be
followers.
But to learn about oneself, all psychological authority must come to an end, whether it be the authority of the church or of the local priest, or the famous analyst, or of the greatest philosophers with their intellectual formulas, and so on.
It seems there is a need for a psychological revolution within the person if he/she is serious. A revolution of our own psyche wherein, all psychological authority is uprooted and thrown out. This is very difficult, for there is not only the outward authority, which one can easily reject, but there is inward authority: the inward authority of one's own experience, of one's own accumulated knowledge, of the opinions, ideas, beliefs, which goads one's life. It’s harder to be free of the latter.
These are in brief some of the issues that confront an inquirer inquiring into
freedom.