What sort of idiot are you?

I think I'm a born idiot! I have been an idiot for as long as I can remember!

Or perhaps I'm a doubting idiot 'cause I question everything I'm told....
 
I'm a mobius idiot. I'm a round idiot who keeps thinking they've seen another side to a problem, but ends up in the same place. The length of my thoughts becomes double what it was before.
 
I am unsure as to what kind of idiot I currently am, however this thread caused me to wonder:
Perhaps, given understanding of STS principles and working to apply understanding of STO principles, it could then be stated that (from a certain "point-of view") the biggest "mistake" the Predator ever made was to give man the Predator's Mind. I wonder this because it seems that, if one is of STS alignment and able to only see what one wants to see, control of 3rd Density STS Man through confusion/perception is all but ensured, "hopefully" indefinitely.

Well it appears so far that I am an unsure, wondering idiot....I guess that wasn't so hard to figure out :)

Moving on, from another "point of view", however, the Predator's Mind may be seen as a gift. What comes to mind is this (little heavy on the bolding, but it seemed to stand out):


Predator`s Mind


This is the Castaneda term for that which aligns man with the thought center of service to self.

In Active Side of Infinity, Don Juan tells Castaneda of the Earth being invaded in the mists of time by creatures of condensed darkness, the so-called Flyers which use man as food.

The key idea as that these cosmic predators gave man their own mind. This is reasonable in light of much other material. At the human level, a system based on exploitation and consuming and control is seen to shape people in its own image: The slave tends to dream of becoming a master rather than of abolishing slavery. Any organization based on dominance naturally takes the form of a pyramid with few at the top and most at the bottom. For man to be the bottom or in some cases intermediate level of such a system, man must have the attributes of the dominators, only at a reduced scale.

At the metaphysical level, many channeled sources point out that while STS beings eat what they can, energies emanating from STO oriented beings are not edible.

Castaneda's writings in large part deal with ways of claiming one's own in terms of energy and free will from such a system. The battle is in large part internal. One must unmask and stand up to one's internal predator first. Otherwise one's external actions, even if well motivated, take place in the paradigm and mode of the predator.

The internal predator can be extremely subtle. Still, it has some general recognizable characteristics: Castaneda puts it as follows: [excerpted]

"They [the sorcerers of ancient Mexico]discovered that we have a companion for life. We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so." […]
You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics,. I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico." " […] They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, gallineros, the predators rear us in human coops humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them." […]

"I want to appeal to your analytical mind. . Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal." " […] In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engage themselves in a stupendous maneuver-stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now. "I know that even though you have never suffered hunger, you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear." " {end quote]


Castaneda further explains that infants are born with a glowing coat of awareness and that this is what the predator eats, to the point where only a narrow fringe is left. This narrow fringe is sufficient to keep man alive. This narrow fringe is man's self-reflection, where man is irremediably caught. From the book: '

By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns.'

From Don Juan:

'[The sorcerers of ancient Mexico] reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man." […]

what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic." […]

"The only alternative left for mankind," he continued, "is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don't mean harsh routines. I don't mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you're blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.') "Sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat of awareness unpalatable to the flyer," […]

"The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times, was to burden the flyers' mind with discipline. They found out that if they taxed the flyers' mind with inner silence, the foreign installation would flee, giving to any one of the practitioners involved in this maneuver the total certainty of the mind's foreign origin. The foreign installation comes back, I assure you, but not as strong, and a process begins in which the fleeing of the flyers' mind becomes routine, until one day it flees permanently. A sad day indeed! That's the day when you have to rely on your own devices, which are nearly zero. There's no one to tell you what to do. There's no mind of foreign origin to dictate the imbecilities you're accustomed to. "My teacher, the nagual Julian, used to warn all his disciples," don Juan continued, "that this was the toughest day in a sorcerer's life, for the real mind that belongs to us, the sum total of our experience, after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and shifty. Personally, I would say that the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely preparation." "The flyers' mind flees forever," he said, "when a sorcerer succeeds in grabbing on to the vibrating force that holds us together as a conglomerate of energy fields. If a sorcerer maintains that pressure long enough, the flyers' mind flees in defeat. And that's exactly what you are going to do: hold on to the energy that binds you together."


Castaneda's account is on many points in substantial agreement with other tradition. We will briefly compare Castaneda with other sources discussed in this work:

The invasion of the predators would roughly correspond to the Fall. The Cassiopaeans have spoken of man finding himself cut off from former capabilities, as if amnesiac after a head injury, all this reflected in scrambling of DNA. The choice of increased physicality and service to self essentially amounts to even inviting the predator's mind into one's own.

Gurdjieff's 'organ kundabuffer' approaches the theme from another angle. There, the organ is forcibly installed into man in order to generally anesthetize him against reality and see the insignificant as great and the great as insignificant. This event too is depicted as taking place at the very beginning of man's existence on Earth, in response to a cataclysmic situation. Again, we have radical shift of perception and cataclysm together.'

In Beelzebub's Tales we have the constant theme of vibrations being required of the Earth. When man would not produce the right quality consciously, nature shifted the circumstance to cater for accidental shocks which would provide the required amount of flashes of awareness, or 'higher hydrogens.' The predator feeds man problems and crises upon crisis. {Castaneda] 'Planetary influences arrange for wars and catastrophies simply to obtain required vibrations' [Gurdjieff] Man may also play his role consciously, at least in theory, and thus be free from these arbitrary influences and serve the universe in another manner, suggests Gurdjieff.

Man is born sane and spoiled by contemporary education, inculcated with the 'values' of ego, hypocrisy, self-calming, empty wiseacrings, vanity and self-love. [Gurdjieff] When man reaches adult age, only the fringe of the glowing coat of awareness is left, barely covering the toes. This fringe is the center of self-reflection, the only awareness left to man. [Castaneda]

The Cassiopaeans and Ra speak of man's consciousness being food in many places. In order not to be food, one needs to change internally. These sources call this alignment with STO and objectivity, Castaneda calls this discipline, impeccability, being a warrior fighting to be free. Gurdjieff calls this objective reason, Impartiality, acquiring being and objective conscience and being as a man ought to be.

The parallels go further. Castaneda's sorcerer, having caused the predator's mind to flee, is akin to Gurdjieff's description of the real I, when it is first glimpsed through the veil of personality. It is small, insecure, unsteady and shifting. Nurturing this and bringing the personality into unity through fusing it with shocks is a characteristic of all the paths discussed here.


Working to understand STO principles...


All To Those Who Ask
From Cassiopedia

The Cassiopaea material states that a Service to Others being gives all to those who ask. This invites the question of what is meant by giving and by asking and who truly are the parties of the exchange.

The crux of the matter is the difference between asking and manipulation. Manipulation seeks to control the manipulated and thus by definition limit the other's free will. Asking is an open-ended request which leaves the response up to the other party. Manipulation generally implies covert intent whereas asking generally does not. Distinguishing the two is difficult and not always clear-cut. Furthermore, humans generally neither ask nor manipulate as a single, unified being. More often than not, people are amalgams of contradicting programs and impulses, some of them tending towards STS, some maybe towards STO.

Acceding to manipulation generally amplifies the STS-ness of the manipulator. Thus for STO to be expressed, manipulation should be refused. Asking by people can be highly ambiguous and contradictory. For example, some people may actually ask to be refused when they make excessive demands. With proper discernment, one can give to the STO-tending parts of another and deny from the STS-tending parts of the same person. Denying manipulation may be seen to be doing a favor to the part which does not wish to take unfair advantage, should there be such a part.

We may consider for example lies to be an indirect request for truth. Thus giving all could be said to be giving all things their due, in accordance with upholding the principle of service to others. Discerning the true nature of the asking/request/manipulation is key here.

As with any general principle, this cannot be applied mechanically, without awareness of context. While our first connotation for giving is an exchange between persons, the idea is not limited to this. We can speak of giving all to a principle, as in dedicating one's life to a cause. We could say that making service to others oriented esoteric information available is a giving to the principle of free will. This is on one hand a response to a spirit of spiritual questing that exists among people often disillusioned with standard religion or the New Age, on the other hand a response to the lies and half truths promoted by the control system under the guise of these same movements.

In this world of mixed contents, the motives of giving, whether for personal satisfaction or as an expression of alignment with an impersonal principle cannot always be distinguished nor do they occur separately. Pure expressions of STO or STS are rare.


From Ra:

RA: I am Ra. Picture, if you will, your mind. Picture it then in total unity with all other minds of your society. You are then single-minded and that which is a weak electrical charge in your physical illusion is now an enormously powerful machine whereby thoughts may be projected as things. In this endeavor the Orion group charges or attacks the Confederation armed with light. The result, a stand-off, as you would call it, both energies being somewhat depleted by this and needing to regroup; the negative depleted through failure to manipulate, the positive depleted through failure to accept that which is given. QUESTIONER: Could you amplify the meaning of what you mean by the "failure to accept that which is given'" RA: I am Ra. At the level of time/space at which this takes place in the form of what you may call thought-war, the most accepting and loving energy would be to so love those who wished to manipulate that those entities were surrounded and engulfed, transformed by positive energies. This, however, being a battle of equals, the Confederation is aware that it cannot, on equal footing, allow itself to be manipulated in order to remain purely positive, for then though pure it would not be of any consequence, having been placed by the so-called powers of darkness under the heel, as you may say. It is thus that those who deal with this thought-war must be defensive rather than accepting in order to preserve their usefulness in service to others. Thusly, they cannot accept fully what the Orion Confederation wishes to give, that being enslavement. Thusly, some polarity is lost due to this friction and both sides, if you will, must then regroup. It has not been fruitful for either side. The only consequence which has been helpful is a balancing of the energies available to this planet so that these energies have less necessity to be balanced in this space/time, thus lessening the chances of planetary annihilation.



It seems that, when viewed from a STS/Predator standpoint, those working to understand the self and align towards STO would possiprobably cause those of said standpoint to become angry due to fear of losing control - for starters. This, I imagine, would lead to much emotion-driven activity over what could be viewed as a potentially..................Dangerous Idiot?

I'll stop here, as I am beginning to consider that I may be a noisy idiot as well.
 
Johnno said:
Idiots 17-21 constituted a spiritual hierarchy, reflecting
progressive gradations of objective reason

Well I think I am a round idiot. Also, if there was such a thing as a romantic idiot, well then I would be one for sure! Is there any chance that someone could please list idiots 17-21? I am very curios to see what they are according to Gurdjieff.
 
Question: What sort of idiot are you?

Answer: 'A kind of an idiot', I sure am, but which kind?

If I have no objective reason, how can I objectively ascertain my own idiocy level? Moreover if my 'I' is not established there may be several small I' each with there own peculiar type of idiocy.

Where in the list does one find man one, two, three, and the ones with black magnetic centers?
Are men four, five, six and seven those with objective reasons?
Are all people idiots of sorts, or are there some, who are not like robotoid humans?
Could there be other kinds of idiocy than those listed by Gurdjieff, why are there only 21 levels (3 times 7)? Does one progress from one to the other?

Well, perhaps I should not get lost in the kinds of idiots, but hold on to the one common denominator, 'Idiot' and more profoundly God, the Unique Idiot. That is why I liked this thought:

There's also appears to be a "green language" aspect to the word idiot. The Unique Idiot- Dio (Italian:God) is in the middle of "it"!
 
I think it's important to note here that the various idiots also represent 'stages,' that is, Gurdjieff said that about every three years ones idiot changes. The point was to change ones idiot consciously -- and that in order to ascend to the highest idiocy, one must consciously work ones way down to Ordinary Idiot, and then back up again. I'll need to dig around my books to find the precise references, but I think that's pretty close.

As for figuring out ones own Idiot, I think that may be akin to figuring out ones Chief Feature -- it may be more accurate to have another person, perhaps more advanced in the Work, inform you from the 'outside.' As my first group leader told me, "You are a zigzag idiot; one week you are headed to the devil, the next you are moving toward God." I remember it struck me quite deeply at the time, and later I found what Gurdjieff himself said about the zigzag idiot:

"He works against the shit he knows he is."
 
Nightmajic said:
I think it's important to note here that the various idiots also represent 'stages,' that is, Gurdjieff said that about every three years ones idiot changes. The point was to change ones idiot consciously -- and that in order to ascend to the highest idiocy, one must consciously work ones way down to Ordinary Idiot, and then back up again.


thorbiorn said:
If I have no objective reason, how can I objectively ascertain my own idiocy level? Moreover if my 'I' is not established there may be several small I' each with there own peculiar type of idiocy.

I think so, too.

Maybe I'm a "multi-idiot". ;)
 
I think I'd like to consider myself to be a Blooming Idiot -- at least I can grow and possibly get pollinated while I'm evolving.......
:D
 
Back in the early 90's, I was presented with the opportunity to acknowledge my idiocy.

(After several years of intense work on myself and my search for truth, I hit a wall. I reached a point where what I was doing was not "working". Or so I thought. I was not getting the results I wanted. I was in a lot of pain over this. I came to the conclusion that "Either the information I was operating from was wrong or I was a spiritual idiot".)

So what did I decide? In pure Aries fashion (Yes, I am an Aries), I decided the information was wrong. I could not accept that I was an idiot. I got angry and went on a years long temper tantrum rather than admit that I was an idiot. I "trashed all my belief systems" and entered the "Void" of meaninglessness.

I have since tried to figure out what happened. A big piece of the puzzle came on a thread I started - "Losing my mother to Yahweh" (http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=11040.0). It was there that I most clearly saw myself in this event. I saw how I had rejected "God", yet maintained my anger at "Him". Again, pride was my downfall.

Tonight, as I continue to reflect on what I learned on that thread, it occurred to me that yes, I am an idiot.

Based on my observation of my pride being a great source of my idiocy (by blinding me to reality), I conclude I must be a "12. swaggering idiot. "

To compound the pridefulness, I am proud to finally accept my idiocy. Perhaps, now I stand a chance of progress?
 
[quote author=jusdenny yesterday]wher does humble idiot fit on that scale? [/quote]

Probably on the same list as techno-idiot, jusdenny!

:-[
 
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