By Cathy Eck

The Drug of Repetition

The drug of repetition is painfully obvious during the holiday season.  The television stations play the same programs.  The radios play the same songs.  People pull out the same decorations that they carefully stored away last year.  They attend the same events and services with the same family members.  They tell the same lies to their children.  We call this tradition; but it’s really fast food for the false self.

The false self loves routine and repetition–it resists change.  Our false mind works exactly like a computer, operating from memorized commands.  Unless you delete the programmed commands, you get the same output.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Repetition isn’t necessarily bad or evil; it can be useful.  I’m glad that buses follow a repetitive pattern; it makes them easier to find.  But buses weren’t born to create.  Humans were!

The Neighborhood of Make Believe

As children, we’re all loaded on the trolley to Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood of Make Believe.  Mr. Rogers taught us that people are predictable machines.  He changed his shoes and hung up his sweater in the same way everyday.  He repeated the same horrible songs.  He talked in a monotone; he never displayed emotion.

The Neighborhood of Make Believe was his projected world.  True Selves create; false selves believe and project their shadow.  Mr. Roger’s world was presented as creative because things happened in the Land of Make Believe that didn’t happen in the real world, like talking animals and trolleys.

Mr. Rogers was simply projecting his own issues on to outer characters so that he could remain calm and collected on the surface.  He could be good because the bad was out there in make-believe land.  Watching him, we were programmed to accept this sort of mind game as normal.

Mr. Roger’s characters don’t get along; and the king can be a royal asshole.  But Mr. Rogers is perfect, like a God.  In make believe, we see the shadow of Mr. Roger’s mind; and like all “good” men, after make-believe time, he gives us a moral lesson (beliefs) based on the bad behaviors of his characters.  That bullshit is as old as the sands of time.

I Want My Fucking Dream Back

Eons ago, in the newly civilized world, the Lord’s (or King’s) dreams became everyone’s dreams.  The leaders wrote the myths, they turned off the people’s desires with beliefs and rules, and they created reasons for the humans to serve them.

These false leaders were not creators; they were power mongers.  They had big false, win-lose dreams; and their false selves had big limitations.  But they had strong wills.  They had masses of people to project on.  Today these types of men run our countries, religions, businesses, and households.  We’re trained to believe they’re good; we don’t see that they’re actually machines that look good and feel bad, creating confusion for those who still have emotions.  When you let go, you realize that the bad man is far less dangerous than the good man.  By man, I mean person in the masculine role; that could also be a woman.

Children and Repetition

Children appear to seek repetition.  But, children mirror their parent’s repetitive beliefs without effort because they’re marinating in the same sauce.  As young children, we learn by monkey see, monkey do–memorize and repeat what you see and hear.  Children insert their authority figures’ rulebooks into their minds and follow them to the letter to avoid punishment.  When someone refuses to do this, they’re labeled bad or crazy.

OCD is the extreme of left-brain repetition.  The victim’s mind repeats the same meaningless instructions over and over.  OCD isn’t a disease; it’s a mind that won’t let go.  It’s like a broken record.  Leaders don’t tell us that we can let go because then we wouldn’t be obedient slaves.  We’d invent our own fantasies and live our own dreams.  We’d write and direct our own stories instead of being walk-on characters in their self-serving dramas.

Repetition Hits the Wall

Often we reach a point in our life where nothing external makes us happy anymore.  We’re sick of the status quo; tradition makes us vomit, and we find superficial conversations and social protocols intolerable.  Our True Self is screaming to do a U-turn and go back toward freedom.  If we don’t listen to this call, we might get sick or die.  Death happens when the false self has snuffed out every last ray of hope for fulfilling our True Self’s dreams.  But, it’s never too late to fulfill our desires if we can let go.

The rules for moving toward the True Self are 180 degrees from the rules that we consider normal in society.  But we must watch for traps.  The New Age was a big trap.  It recycled old traditions, beliefs, practices, and rituals.  Much like that 1950’s skirt that looks cool after half a century, the old traditions seemed like radical change when they weren’t discussed for a century or two.  However, they’re just updated versions of the same old program, viruses included.  There is nothing new in the illusion.  That’s what Mr. Roger’s teaches the children.  Life is a boring routine; you need to find the little pleasures in that routine.  That makes you a good person like Mr. Rogers.

If traditions and repetition got us into the illusory world, the way out is to break tradition and to shake things up.  We must challenge our thinking and let go of our beliefs and limitations.  The outer changes follow the inner changes.  Simply changing the outer is no change at all; it’s fixing the effects.  Eventually, with letting go, our True Self breaks free and leads the way again; we come to see that the illusion that we were living was all just an illusory Neighborhood of Make Believe.

Caught in the trap of friends and family, read crabs in a pot article.