A personal perspective on self-inquiry in response to the recent posts by Horowitz and Happytown.
Before I ever came into contact with the Moo Cult, I was well aware of self-inquiry as a method for spiritual development. For me, it was a helpful way of exploring my place in the world. I didn't meditate all that often, but when I did, I would often use some form of self-inquiry.
This was just a matter of asking myself quietly "who am I?"
I am not my age, or my name or my occupation. I am not my body (or not simply my body) and I am not my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings... I am not my social conditioning, nor my family conditioning.
I simply exist. That is all.
This feeling of simply "being here now" made me feel very peaceful. It was like a release from the pressure from all the things we think we should be or do. Because really, those things are just arbitrary. We could easily be or do something else... ultimately we could do anything we want (within the law) and it wouldn't really matter much. It's totally up to us....
We could choose to do nothing, of course. There is nothing wrong with doing nothing..... except that we need to eat, we need to earn a living to some degree and ultimately human beings are happiest when they are doing something.
It's really hard just to do nothing. It's kind of boring. :)
So, to sum up, self-inquiry was a pleasant and harmless experience. No doubt, in combination with meditation, abstaining from drugs and alcohol, living a good life and getting plenty of sleep, self-inquiry would lead to a happy, balanced life with a strong spiritual component to it.
It would help a person shed the weight of social conditioning that often binds us to a very limited life-style, where we are only doing things from habit or from (mostly imagined) pressure to conform to some ideal.
When you remove a lot of these ingrained ideas, you definitely feel freer and less restricted in your life. You feel very optimistic.
However, what Moo is teaching does not seem to be making people free. It seems to be enslaving them. They are looking to him to tell them what to do, rather than previously looking towards their social conditioning. They are hanging off his every word in an unhealthy way. They are parroting responses without thought.
It's like they have replaced one form of conditioning with another form of conditioning -cult conditioning.
Before I ever came into contact with the Moo Cult, I was well aware of self-inquiry as a method for spiritual development. For me, it was a helpful way of exploring my place in the world. I didn't meditate all that often, but when I did, I would often use some form of self-inquiry.
This was just a matter of asking myself quietly "who am I?"
I am not my age, or my name or my occupation. I am not my body (or not simply my body) and I am not my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings... I am not my social conditioning, nor my family conditioning.
I simply exist. That is all.
This feeling of simply "being here now" made me feel very peaceful. It was like a release from the pressure from all the things we think we should be or do. Because really, those things are just arbitrary. We could easily be or do something else... ultimately we could do anything we want (within the law) and it wouldn't really matter much. It's totally up to us....
We could choose to do nothing, of course. There is nothing wrong with doing nothing..... except that we need to eat, we need to earn a living to some degree and ultimately human beings are happiest when they are doing something.
It's really hard just to do nothing. It's kind of boring. :)
So, to sum up, self-inquiry was a pleasant and harmless experience. No doubt, in combination with meditation, abstaining from drugs and alcohol, living a good life and getting plenty of sleep, self-inquiry would lead to a happy, balanced life with a strong spiritual component to it.
It would help a person shed the weight of social conditioning that often binds us to a very limited life-style, where we are only doing things from habit or from (mostly imagined) pressure to conform to some ideal.
When you remove a lot of these ingrained ideas, you definitely feel freer and less restricted in your life. You feel very optimistic.
However, what Moo is teaching does not seem to be making people free. It seems to be enslaving them. They are looking to him to tell them what to do, rather than previously looking towards their social conditioning. They are hanging off his every word in an unhealthy way. They are parroting responses without thought.
It's like they have replaced one form of conditioning with another form of conditioning -cult conditioning.