Are we programmed robots?
by Vic Shayne
author
Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience
In a recent FaceBook post, bestselling author Graham Hancock wrote:“It should go without saying that we don’t HAVE to behave like programmed robots. But if we do we have no one to blame but ourselves…What I mean is that just because we have behaved in a certain way at regular intervals in the past doesn’t mean we have to continue doing so. We have minds. We should use them, not hand them over to others to manipulate. And please don’t misunderstand where I think the current round of violence and stupidity is coming from. It is rooted and grounded in violent, dysfunctional governments and grotesquely irresponsible political leaders who actively propagate hatred, fear and suspicion, who have forgotten they work for us and who seek to herd us like sheep.”
Hancock’s appraisal seems at least half correct — involving the actions and intent of political leaders. However, his opinion about whether we are programmed robots is erroneous, because we are indeed programmed robots.
The mind is programmed, conditioned, by authority figures, parents, teachers, society, religion, and so on. This conditioning from birth leads to the formation of the egoic self, the ego mind, which is the center out of which everything is appraised, judged, criticized, feared, and so on. This is a mind — a mindset, if you will — that never has never evolved over the course of history and civilizations, and keeps the human race in a perpetual state of confusion, fear, ignorance, and wanting. Although we have had great technological advancement since the dawn of history, the mind itself is stuck and perpetually the same — full of fear, hate, misery, suffering, judgment, pettiness, greed, attachment, and all the rest.
Waking up
Change begins with the individual waking up to this fact of a conditioned, or programmed, mind. You must observe this fact in yourself first before we can collectively hope to have a species-wide evolution of the mind and therefore of society. Without an evolution of the mind there cannot be an evolution of societal behavior and ideals. Change begins with you; it’s a tired old adage but it rings of truth.
The order of freedom
Much has been argued, including by certain physicists, about whether life gravitates toward order or toward entropy. Which is it? To know, you have to really take time to observe what is happening. My wife, Janice, and I had quite the conversation about this over breakfast Sunday morning in the middle of July.
It seems that the limited, psychologically conditioned sense of self tries to force order out of what it perceives to be chaos. It fears the chaos that it creates for itself in its ignorance. The totality of consciousness is too great for the mind to accept and receive, so it fragments this wholeness into parts. While this is useful to navigate the world, as well as to learn and differentiate betweens shapes, beings, and forms, it is the cause of suffering when applied psychologically. The fragmentation leads to internal conflict, desire, seeking, and judging. Although consciousness gravitates to order, the egoic self cannot know it. It only sees pieces moving around without purpose. This is the reason, generation after generation, people are looking for the purpsoe of life — What, dear God, is the meaning of life??! It is only the sense of self that asks such a question.
One must dislodge from the egoic self to grasp the entire movement of consciousness and to realize its order.
Like a robot
The egoic self is much like a computer, or robot, in the way it is conditioned, or programmed. Information goes “in” that dictates action, thoughts, interests, and all attachments and identities. The output is fear, disillusion, ignorance, unacceptance, intolerance, seeking, searching, the need to accumulate and attain, and so forth. For this reason, society cannot evolve.
How is it possible to use this conflicted, tumultuous, violent, frightened, fragmented, and distorted sense of self to create a better society? All of our societal woes — racism, hate, abuse, faulty education, inequality, economic disparity, reductionist medical practice, and the politics of power — are born of the egoic self and therefore cannot change until this false entity changes first. This begins with each of us taking a deep look at what or who we are so we can discover our essence of totality devoid of all of the contents of the egoic self. There can be no clarity unless this observation occurs first so that a new realization takes place.
