--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <curtisdeltabl...@...> wrote: > > As I go though the list of how I communicate with people here > I can pretty much group them that way. Those who have taken > a personal shot in varying degrees of vitriol, and those who > have not.
What I have noticed, Curtis (and making this a "generic" rap, not about anyone in particular), is that the personal shots tend to happen immediately after you have presented an idea that causes the "personal shotters" some cognitive dissonance because it conflicts with and challenges an idea that they hold to be true. I think I know you well enough to know that most of the time when you present such ideas, to you they are Just Ideas. They're an interesting new way of approaching a subject and looking at it. But it's as if a few people here react to them as if the idea itself *caused them pain*. And in a sense it did. Cognitive dissonance -- encountering an idea that, if true, renders one of your own ideas false or at the very least not as true -- is perceived by some AS pain. I think the issue is that we don't perceive these ideas that way. To us they're Just Ideas. And after all this time thinking about and analyzing our exper- iences with meditation and various follies along the spiritual path or just life path, the "out of the box" ideas are Just Another Way Of Looking At Things, no biggie. When we think about one of these ideas -- say the implicit wrongness of the caste system, or the unden- iable sexism of a tradition that wouldn't even allow women to be near it -- we DON'T tend to feel pain. No cognitive dissonance arises at all because we are years or decades away from justifying the caste system just because Maharishi did, or ignoring the sexism of the Shankaracharya tradition because we still identify with it and consider ourselves part of it. But others don't have that distance on things, and when they encounter ideas that to us are Just Ideas, they perceive them as ATTACKS, because what they feel inside when they hear these ideas is pain. We didn't cause the pain; all we did is present an idea. But to them the idea ITSELF causes pain, because it causes cognitive dissonance. So in their mindes we are very definitely the "cause" of their pain, because we said the horrible, offensive, unforgivable thing that they consider heresy. If our idea that the caste system is wrong has merit, then Maharishi's defense of it his entire life may have less merit, or be actually w...w...w...wrong. If our idea that Guru Dev and other teachers within the Shankaracharya tradition just might have been being less than honest about their desire for the liberation of their fellow man by restricting their teachings to...uh... their fellow MAN, with "no women allowed," then maybe they weren't the perfect saints they've been portrayed to be. I suspect that contemplating either of these ideas doesn't raise a single hair on your neck or cause you the least amount of pain. They certainly don't cause me any dis- comfort in the least. But these same ideas cause some people so MUCH pain that their first impulse -- an impulse that they seemingly cannot control -- is to lash out and aim a well-placed personal shot across your bow. On the whole, I think you've dealt with such cheap shots better than I have, and with consistent grace and humor. A great deal more grace and humor than the ones *taking* the cheap shots have, that's fer damned sure.
