Essays Essays II
Tablet Fifteen
PRESSURE
<1>Pressure is the instrument of the lower nature. When a person responds under pressure, in fact he is doing things that are not according to his deep motives, because he reacts from fear. <2>Any action from fear brings suffering.
<3>Indeed this world is the kingdom of the devil, because most of the people work and react to the pressures of the external world. <4>Their motivations are not from the self, but from their fears created in the external world.
<5>These fears, which are the very cause of tension and pressure, can be physical, emotional, or mental. <6>The physical pressures (physical slavery) are much easier to detect and in a great scale have been eliminated from human civilization (although still existing in some parts).
<7>However, the mental and emotional pressures still exist and are much subtler. They have replaced the physical pressures (slavery) of the past.
<8>In the time of slavery in history, man knew who made him a slave, so he had a clear picture of his situation and could identify the enemy. But in mental or emotional slavery, which is very subtle, he does not know his master.
<9>So the pressure and fear become tension, and tension creates a turbulent mind. This causes greater confusion and increases his fear so he conforms to the pressure more.
<10>With this vicious cycle, he truly becomes the slave of these subtle threads and goes further and further away from the self and truth.
<11>The cure to this problem is meditation! Only with deep meditation, creating a calm mind, facing the truth, becoming familiar with the subconscious mind, and recognizing these pressures and their sources (mentally and emotionally), can a person come in tune with his self and realize how and why he reacts to the pressures as he does.
<12>The emotional pressures come from deep desires and attachments. <13>So those who we think we love, are attached to, or can fulfill our desires, can easily put pressure on us.
<14>One of the most widely known is peer-pressure. Because we are not self-actualized, we need other people's approval so we conform to their pressures. <15>To overcome peer-pressure, we should know ourselves and then accept a profession according to our abilities (physical, mental, and spiritual). We should become highly proficient in that task, do our best, and not give in to pressure. <16>Whenever there is pressure and a person reacts to it, there is a problem in that situation.
<17>The mental pressures are those which make us believe we have to have or become something, but we truly cannot become it, do not want to become it, or do not need it, such as sale pressure to buy things we do not require.
<18>There is a direct interrelationship between emotional and mental pressures. They are complementary and help one another to create the reaction of the person to the pressure.
<19>A self-actualized person, or he who has a calm mind and control over it, never acts under external pressure, so he can never be enslaved.
<20>Those who give in to pressure (individually or collectively) might conquer the world but they will lose their Souls, and that is not a good bargain.
DAYDREAMERS
<21>There are people who hear voices, see visions, talk with spirits, and receive revelations which give them a hope of something that apparently would change their lives. They hope these things will come true some day.
<22>So they daydream of when these will happen, and they escape the reality. <23>But surprisingly if the fulfillment of their dreams is offered to them, usually it can be seen that they lose their artificial happiness and might even run away and find some fault in the fulfiller of the dream.
<24>Or in other words, they do not really want or expect that dream to be fulfilled, because the very reason they were drawn into this state has been their feelings of inadequacy and inability to cope with reality. So when the fulfillment of the dream is offered to them, there would be nothing left to escape to and the person would be forced to face the reality again. <25>For a person who has been out of touch with reality for so long, it is a hard step.
<26>Also if the dream was generated by a great ambition to be in a special position, when that position is offered to the person, he becomes very unhappy again because he truly did not want to have that position. It was really an escape to feel he is worthy enough to have it. <27>He either has to face the reality and improve himself, or find some fault in something that surrounds the situation, or fall into another dream to escape again.