My friend and fellow facilitator Dan McLintock came up with the term “cult of human programming” to describe the process of first being thrust out of a mother’s womb, forced into the energetic experience of being a separate person, and forced to learn how to survive physically, emotionally and psychologically.
AND THEN, ON TOP OF THAT . . . as if that weren’t already enough to traumatize a being . . .
We are then programmed in a myriad of ways during early to late childhood development, by parents and others.
We become like members of a cult we call “human life.”
The parents can’t really be blamed because they were programmed by their parents and society (it’s mostly unconscious). This programming becomes our operating system. Strangely, we don’t see it. The programming starts at such an early age that we do not yet have the capacity to question it. So instead, we learn it and pretty much treat it as gospel. Maybe years later we may question it during an introspective moment, while dropping acid or having some spiritual experience. But if not, we stay blind – completely blind usually – to just how enslaved we are to belief systems that were thrust upon us by others. We didn’t even have a choice in many cases.
Programming Leads to Suffering
The programming is NOT who or what we are. It’s what our brains learned as a way to survive living with unconscious parents in an unconscious world. This is why our world is so fucked up right now.
We haven’t yet collectively acknowledged that we are programmed humans who suffer and who are programming other humans to suffer because all programming leads to suffering.
And if that isn’t crazy enough, people who are programmed in one way constantly fight with people programmed in other ways: Christians v. Muslims, Republicans v. Democrats, gay v. straight, etc. We are spinning our collective wheels as a race.
We are Programming Deficiency Stories
When I say programming here, I don’t mean functional programming like how to operate a computer or become educated in useful fields of discipline.
No, I’m speaking of programming that pertains to the self – its wants, desires, its constant search for meaning or approval and its loneliness, trauma and shame. I’m speaking of the deficiency stories we believe like “I’m not good enough,” “I’m unlovable,” “I’m a victim,” “I’m powerless,” etc.
Every time we tell another person that we are disappointed in them in any way, or that they have not lived up to our standards, we must understand that this mere act alone can shape that child negatively forever, sending the child well into adulthood still chasing approval like a junkie chasing a heroin needle.
Every single word and action we do with regard to our children shapes them in some way.
This doesn’t mean we coddle or lie to children. It means we start telling them the truth – emotionally and psychologically.
For example, until 7th grade, I couldn’t sleep alone in my own bed. I was too scared. My mother would tell me that there is nothing to be afraid of. She lied to me. There was something to be afraid of – the feeling of fear itself scared me. I was also told boys don’t cry. That was a lie. Boys do cry and it’s ok for boys to cry. This is all part of the cult of human programming.
We are raised to conduct ourselves a certain way, to avoid being too honest, open, or vulnerable – to avoid being human and feeling what humans feel.
Instead of going within and inquiring and dissolving this negative programming contained within many people, we are literally giving birth every day to more children on Earth who are unconsciously uploading their parents’ belief systems, identities, and traumas. We are planting the seeds of future conflict here on the planet.
A Captive Audience
As a child is raised, many of the traumas, stories, and beliefs of the parents get imprinted on the child I’m not just referring to the dad who violates his daughter’s privacy and trust by sexually molesting her. Yes, of course, that is programming that leads to intense suffering. But I’m talking about a much wider array of ways we teach children to suffer and therefore join the cult of human programming.
Once we are born, we are a captive audience to our parents. They are in charge. We take on or react to their anxieties, shame and anger. We build our deficient identities as weapons and shields against the pain they haven’t yet resolved within themselves.
Instead – not knowing how to deal with that pain – they place (and in some cases force) it on us – the children. At the mercy of our parents, we know of no other way. They shape us, whether we like it or not. And it happens generation after generation after generation.
Many of us are forced to submit to our parents’ authority. It may feel like an easier path than fighting, since parents hold all the power. We take on the submissive role, trying to become who we think our parents want us to be instead of who we really are. We subvert our real thoughts, feelings, desires and needs. We experience deficiency stories when we don’t live up to our parents’ often unrealistic expectations for us. For example, a teenage girl could be the best basketball player on the team but could still beat herself up every night in her head as she hears her dad’s voice saying “You can do better than that!”.
Submission and Repression
When faced with an angry parent, the child learns to either rebel or submit, get in line or run. In submitting, the child disempowers himself. In rebelling, he only pushes up against the authority, which rarely leads to any progress. So children learn, more than not, to submit. And submission is repression. A child must repress his real thoughts, emotions and sensations in order to submit to the authority of his parents. Repression can lead to illness. I repressed anger for years and it was a very unhealthy experience for me. Plus repression can make life difficult for a child once he becomes an adult. The repression can become a way of turning pain in towards himself, leading to self-harming, extreme forms of self-control, acting out addictively, depression – to name a few.
Anger is not a problem. The problem is anger expressed in a way that is not coming from clarity, but rather only from pure pain and fear.
Shame is another emotion commonly repressed, and – like anger – the repression of shame can make us sick. I’ve worked with many men with sex addictions who experience shame as an aphrodisiac. So when we start dissolving shame through inquiry sessions, they begin to lose interest in the forms of sex that were driven by shame. This is why deprogramming from our societal views of sex are so important. The shame we place upon one another actually acts as a driver back to sexually acting out, because shame is a powerful emotion that longs to be self-medicated and that drives fantasies.
Peer Pressure From Dead People
It’s not just emotional stuff we upload from society, parents and friends. And sometimes our attempts at this other kind of programming are super damaging. Kids are often forced into gender and sexuality orientation roles without being asked if the role feels “right.” We get force fed all the political and religious debris of our parents and society at large. All the fighting between people who falsely believe they are democrats or republicans instead of humans (and we adopt that way of thinking as part of our own human programming – we continue the cycle and become our parents quite often).
From an early age, at least in most parts of the U.S., we are programmed to believe that boys act like this and girls act like that. We are taught that anger is bad, so don’t show it. Sadness is weak, so keep it to yourself. We are taught there is nothing to be afraid of, or ashamed of even though we feel those emotions. We are being lied to and misled from an early age. The lie is that emotions are bad. That’s a lie. Emotions are just emotions.
We are misled into thinking that the programming downloaded into us is actually the truth. It isn’t. It is some hand me down version of the truth. It’s a bunch of fear-based lies that the majority of humans have not questioned yet.
Not only is your mind not your friend., it is feeding you completely false information on a continuous basis. Don’t believe me. See for yourself through inquiry.
From Feeding the Cycle to Breaking it
Because we are unconsciously uploading our traumas into our children, we are cultivating more “addicts” because parents are not yet conscious enough to teach these children how to deal with the pain that we are placing on them. This teaches people/kids to find ways to medicate that pain.
If we don’t get clear of our own programming, it means we are teaching our children to live in pain, medicate that pain, and to act from that pain just as we do. We teach them to put their pain on others rather than processing it on their own. From pain comes action that is harmful, violent, addictive, destructive, sometimes even homicidal or terroristic. Therefore we are teaching our children to simply repeat the past and all its mistakes.
Unless we start to understand the delicate landscape of the brain and nervous system and how it acts like a sponge soaking up pain, the future of life on Earth starts to look pretty bleak. More trauma. More pain. More addiction. More unconsciousness. All of this can easily lead to a boiling point where our entire system breaks down. When people don’t function well, societies stop functioning well. One could argue that we are already on the brink of world catastrophe right now, as old structures die and new ones take over. Maybe the new ideas can save the day.
The new idea here (designed to break down old structures) is the invitation to everyone to heal pain instead of placing it on others.
If you want to break free of the cult of human programming, email us at kilobycenter@gmail.com.
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