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If I Can Turn You into a Bank Robber, You Can Imagine How Religious Indoctrination Can Blind People From the Tao

Very rarely do I find a really, really, really interesting video on the internet, but this one you have to see. It shows a British motivational expert, skilled in the principles of persuasion and NLP, who subtly implants certain thoughts in a group of seminar attendees that actually turns them into robbers.

Yes, he is so successful with just subtle anchoring that he can get normal, law abiding citizens to commit a felony and even threaten people's lives.

Go see right now:

Derren Brown's The Heist

Now you're going to come away with many lessons from watching this video, but probably not the lesson I want you to take away. In fact, what I want to stress takes a little stretch of logic and the imagination to see that it's linked.

What do I want to point out?

"If honest, law abiding people can so easily be turned into robbers, which is a gargantuan state change, then imagine what religions or cultures can and DO do to people's thought processes and impressing upon them various false doctrines or incorrect notions that therefore become the basis of standard behavior."

People slowly become brainwashed by traditional religions to think and act in certain ways, and those ways always hide the pathway to the Tao. They become filled with dogmas and ceremonies and rules and regulations rather than with methods for cultivating realization, and the explanations of gong-fu and mistakes of the path. They are not taught how to cultivate wisdom or flexible means or great merit for humanity.

That's one of the reasons that meditation to reach no-thought is absent in the ORGANIZED religions, but not in the religions wherein there is no central dogmatic authority. When a religion survives via separate units of monasteries, temples or learning centers that are run by individuals, including enlightened adepts, only then does the true dharma tend to survive. In the outside world, you get a sterile lake -- an orthodoxy of conformity to purely intellectual paths and artificial dogma creations. And so no one cultivates and no one achieves any dharma.

Over and over I teach people that religious rules, injunctions and dogmas for the most part were usually created as expedients for teaching the masses, and are not necessarily cultivation truths. They are created by sages to help guide the people away from error and help them accumulate merit.

Without wisdom, people tend to take things literally, especially religious teachings. The universe is so large with life everywhere, and people take their own little rules as being the measure of the cosmos. They cut off their wisdom life as well as turn their backs on logic, and within these dogmas are absent the road to cultivation, which is not even acknowledged as being existent.

In fact, what is acknowledged as the spiritual path is usually not even a cultivation path at all, and what is taken as the end point of the religion is unfortunately usually something that is not even real.

If you attain even a little bit of samadhi or pre-samadhi, most of the various falsities in religious dogmas usually quickly become apparent. You can sort through things rather quickly. After all, think about this: Christianity (as just one example) has over 30,000 different sects, so how can they all be correct? Some dogmas in these sects must be wrong, because obviously they don't agree with each other. Would that not be correct? They cannot all be right in their dogmas. That's why there are so many different sects to begin with, because they cannot agree with each other over points that clear up immediately with cultivation kung-fu.

How do you differentiate between truth and fiction in religious dogmas? By cultivating and gaining some stage of attainment. Then with samadhi powers, you end knowing FOR CERTAIN whether such and such is true. You can see that so many crazy ideas -- whether in Christianity or Islam or Judaism or whatever -- are just not true or don't make sense ... or you can easily realize they were just an expedient remedy for THOSE times and not THESE times.

Whether (as an accomplished adept who KNOWS) you can then say anything to correct others is a function of your time and place. If you said something that might correct an Islamic teaching in a Moslem country, it's possible that with the wrong time and place you might be killed. If you said something that corrected a Christian dogma, there certainly were times in the past that you would be killed, if not persecuted or censored. The same goes for every religion, even Buddhism and Hinduism....yes, even peaceful Buddhism. This is human nature we're talking about, not religious absolutes. When administrated by human beings, greed, hate, envy, persecution, etc. all come in.

This commentary on history and human behavior is common sense. Common sense, that is, if you have worldly wisdom. So what I want you to realize from this fascinating video is the following: you just might, you just might be missing part of the story about REAL spiritual cultivation because your culture or your religion has got you thinking along different lines. Just as these folks were easily swayed into a different set of beliefs that enabled them to rob an armored car, you just might be wrong about what you thought real spiritual practice was. It's blocked it out, or left it out, or has you going down the wrong path altogether.

If these people can be turned into robbers so easily after just a little bit of environmental persuasion, imagine what's done to people because of the constant cultural indoctrinations of religions and society. Just imagine what's done by religions...and then recognize the damage when those religions are absent of spiritual cultivation and the true spiritual path in the first place.

Now you know why Buddhas and Bodhisattvas keep coming to the world.

It takes great merit for people to come upon the road to the Tao and teachings that lead to it. That's why they always become extinct. If you think about it, this video helps explain part of that process of blindness or extinction. After all, how many religions even talk about the cultivation of the original nature, by freeing your mind of thought clinging, as we've explained over and over again?

All I want is for you to have that moment of doubt that all you've formerly been told or taught might not be ALL THERE IS. It might even be wrong, and you might take it as the gospel truth.

Think about that, and think about sharing this lesson with your friends.

And Yes, I could have written about how easy it is to manipulate people, brainwash them, or involve them in automatic unthinking states but you could have said so yourself. There's lots to realize from this video. Most of all, you have to break away from thoughts and feelings and inclinations that control you and prompt you to do this or that. That is how you change your fortune, as explained in White Fat Cow. If you just follow your thoughts and inclinations, it's easy to be controlled and go down wrong paths.

So review what I've taught you about cultivation and detachment from thoughts, and use this video to prompt some investigations in those directions.