Good Evening Friends,

One of the meanings that I take away from the statement consciousness is not what it is but what it is not is this: there are times when we literally do not think with our own minds and feel with our own hearts, that is our uncorrupted minds and hearts.

Have you ever had this experience? Someone has accused you of something that was not true - something minor. You deny the accusation repeatedly and sincerely (perhaps this person is or was a friend of yours) but he insists on imposing this false guilt upon you. He is unrelenting because he has made up his mind and cannot be swayed. Finally you give up, resigned, and you say something to yourself like; "Fine! If that's what he wants to think, then let him!"

The crime could be anything. Maybe you were accused of trying to steal someone else's girlfriend or boyfriend. Maybe you were accused of undermining a co-worker or spreading vicious rumors about someone. Remember we are proceeding on the assumption that the allegation is not true. Most of us could probably summon anecdotes at will, its routine.

But if we look at such instances very closely, I think we find that something very interesting has happened, to you, the accused. Your personality has been virally infected and the infection stays with you over the coming days, weeks, months, and even years. The Self has become infected, strangely enough. But when I use the word 'infected' I am talking about routine infections of the Self that are encountered that are just as ordinary as the viruses, germs, bacteria, and the like that the physical body picks up every day, but that people with adequately or normally functioning immune systems, render inert.

But this, in part, is the reason why vacations are so important for the body and the Self, or mind, or even "spirit," if you like. To borrow language from the computer field, the most important thing to do during a vacation is to defrag or defragment your Self of external impositions of dark renderings of motives concerning your actions, or the allegations of actions you have not engaged in. The failure to do this can account, at least in part, for somone taking a month-long holiday and returning not in the least refreshed. And some extol the benefits of meditation. They say that twenty minutes of transcendental meditation confer upon them similar benefits as several hours of deep sleep.

But I have not explained what I mean by infection of the Self or infection of the personality. Someone has accused you of something. At first you vigorously deny it but your accuser persists and will not be convinced to the contrary. You give up and resign yourself, leaving your, perhaps former friend, to his opinion. At this time you have actually been infected with a tiny portion of the dark motives that your accuser sought to impute to you. Your motivation matrix [* that's why I love philosophy, you get to have fun making up words!] has been virally infected by a tiny portion of a fraction of the dark motives that were imputed to you.

Your very act of pushing them away, in frosty resignation actually opens the pathway to the infection. There is no smell, no taste. There is no pain, no sensation at all. But you have been infected. Thereafter your feeling about the matter is a combination mostly of your own self-orginated thoughts, feelings, and motivations, and those foreign bodies, those outside orignated dark motives which are imputed to you.

Let me put it this way. Suppose someone threw a germ ball at you. You swat it away. The germ ball flies away from you in the direction you slapped it - mostly. The act of slapping it breaks the germ ball up somewhat, and a few of the spores fly into your body,yes, the opposite direction to which you slapped the germ ball. And these germ spores penetrate the pores of your skin and work their way into your bloodstream and so on and so forth.

Tomorrow I'll give my version of a case study. But for now just know that this dynamic, in part, comes into play in the destruction of relationships, friendships, marriages, and even what may drive nations into war, as both sides rachet up the propaganda. That'll do it for now.

Good Night,

wingedcentaur