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cherished notions of motherhood and apple-pie vary from culture to culture
Herodotus (writing circa 450 BC), in his treatise on the Greco-Persian wars, comments on “nomos,” the Greek word for “custom, convention, or law.”
He talks about the arbitrariness of “nomos,” of how people become accustomed to what they know and what they’re taught in a particular culture, religion, or society.
Herodotus offers a disturbing and graphic example of the mutability of “nomos,” which I will refrain from detailing as it might turn your stomach. However, let’s call the custom in question “X.”
barbarity to one, the good life to another
In Greece, Herodotus says, a certain activity “X” is considered a barbarity, something, according to his sensibilities, beyond the pale of what any person of even modicum advancement would tolerate. But, he asserts, in another society of the Near East, “X” is considered a normative expression of “nomos,” indeed, a reasonable, even honored, course of action, with the refusal of “X” deemed to be an atrocity and appallingly distasteful.
who wrote the html-code for your programming, what you believe
The great “father of history,” Herodotus, is correct, of course. That which the average person believes is simply a product of what Grandma said, the Nice Young Man at Church said, what teacher in third grade said. These early pedagogues “wrote the html code,” our cultural programming, for what would become our personal sense of propriety, of right and wrong. In popular parlance, we refer to this burdening weight of prejudicial assumption as our “baggage,” which is not easy to set aside.
It’s not easy to set aside because the “little voice in the head,” the dysfunctional ego, wants to revel in a personal sense of “I’m right” with the rest of the world as “wrong.” In this kangaroo-court dialectic, the ego serves as early developmental “scaffolding” and “training wheels” for what will yet become a perfected autonomy, an awareness of sacred individualization.
As I mention these things, some will say, “Yes, ‘nomos’ might be an arbitrary flight of mere convention or custom for others, but I belong to the ‘one true church’ and I was taught the ‘one true doctrines,’ so in my case I really am right.” Well, that’s what everyone says, don’t they?
Do you want to know the truth? - no, really, do you? I don’t mean what Grandma said, dear heart that she was, because she was a human being, too, struggling toward the light as anyone else, and likely just as deluded as the rest of the world.
Do you want to know the truth? The process begins with great discomfort, great cognitive dissonance: you'll have to admit that you might be wrong - about everything.
Anything that you’ve not proven – which is probably almost everything you believe – you must put to the side. You must learn to doubt. You must examine, scrutinize, each tenet of belief, rigorously, carefully, to see if there’s evidence for its support. You must rebuild your mental life, your world paradigm, brick by brick, in this manner.
You must “open a channel,” allowing yourself to be taught. It’s not easy – rather, it’s so easy -- that most will not do this and will continue to live in a fairy-tale world of insubstantial “nomos,” the shifting sands of culturally-determined, society-approved good and evil.
Let's say it again: If you do embark on this journey of sifting through all of one’s closely held beliefs, you will find that the vast majority of what you currently hold to be "the truth" to be expressions of mere, arbitrary “nomos,” with no basis in hard-core reality.
We are headed for Summerland, as we’ve often discussed in these pages. Over there, people can continue with their privately defined visions of “nomos,” and they can live as they want to live over there; that is, until it doesn’t work for them anymore; until the sense of emptiness in one's life sends one to overwhelming malaise.
Existential crisis will yet come knocking on one’s door, and then, to preserve one’s sanity, one will be forced into the “mandated solitude and introspection.”
you can be conditioned to believe anything
Krishnamurti's lecture, Brockwood Park, England, Sept 14, 1969
"You know, there is a whole section, the Communists, who do not believe in spirit, not in a spirit, nor in a soul. The whole Asiatic world believes that there is a soul, that there is the Atman. You can be conditioned to believe anything. The Communist doesn't believe in God; the others believe in God because that is the way they have been brought up. The Hindus believe in a thousand different gods, conditioned by their own fears, their own demands and their own urges. Can one become aware of these conditionings - not only of the superficial conditionings but also of those deep down - and be free of them? If one is not free, one is a slave, always living in this rat race, and that we call living."
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