BUDDHA IN THE MUD is a blog – a living book based on the Dzogchen teachings. Our teacher is life, and life is karma. We are all Buddhas in the mud of concepts.

What Tibetan Dharma Teachers do not know
(and neither do most westerners)

This, of course, sounds a terrible thing to say, because Tibetan teachers know the nature of everything. However, they see westerners (the modern world) as speedy, desperate people, but do not understand how this came about. Even though we may understand that our primary problem is our identification with a mental idea about ourselves, there is also insidious corruption in the outer world that is enhancing this belief: we’re facing a double whammy – but, with knowledge, this can be used to our advantage!

We became this way because of social engineering. If one hasn’t been brought up in the west, and, if one hasn’t studied George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and read the writing of Edward Bernays, one will never understand what “on earth” is going on. Most people in the west don’t realise what “on earth” is going on – and has been going on for a very long time!

In Orwell’s 1984, people are controlled by the infliction of pain.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, they are controlled by the delivering of pleasure.

Orwell warned that what we fear will ruin us.Huxley warned that our desires will ruin us.

(Historical context is important when reading both these authors. I believe that they were insiders, privvy to information about social engineering, and were trying to warn us of potential dangers: the point of both these books is that the general public is unaware of what is happening to them.)

I once attended a retreat when the lama explained how he was addicted to a certain cola drink and became fat. When it was brought to his notice that it was the drink, it took seven years to break the habit. The other students laughed when he told this story…well, it’s just one of those things. It’s not just ‘one of those things’: it is designed to have that effect without us noticing it!

We understand that the negative emotions are actually the wisdoms, and that the intensity of these emotions brightens the mind and heightens the awareness in the first instance, before we succumb to reactions: this understanding is similar to realising the effects of the Kali Yuga. Tibetans know this is the Age of Strife, but do not realise the extent to which human weaknesses are being used against people, in order to control them.

When we truly understand what is going on, it can accelerate our spiritual progress as, like the emotions, the mechanism and formulae are staring us directly in the face.

Understanding and exploiting human weaknesses
The Dharma explains how the human weaknesses of the three poisons of Desire Fear and Ignorance create suffering and thereby control us. We have to be aware that there are those who exploit these weaknesses, in extremely subtle ways, for evil ends.

The problem is that eastern teachers have not read George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and are therefore not fully of the use of fear and desire through social conditioning, where people are made to love their servitude. The media is full of new about terrorism – and updates on the latest iPhone…fear and desire.

Neil Postman (author of Amusing Ourselves to Death):
“Orwell feared that there were those who would ban books.
Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban books, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.

“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

“Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy 😉

“As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

Edward Bernays (the nephew of Sigmund Freud):

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928.