Book 1:5 Ideas are mental infections; The infection of Identity

Book 1:5 IDEAS ARE MENTAL INFECTIONS and Identities

And idea of one's self as a self with an identity, is in fact an idea in and of itself. A self-identity is but the mental conceptualization of a perspective on the universe that is tensed in a certain manner, rather than tensed in another. As a female rather than a male, as if a female and a male existed - dualistically.

Be suspect of identities, your own and others. Work to kill them as the mental infections of your mind; ideas do not exist, save for but in the mind.

All conflict arises from Identification with external and internal thought forms. Usually these thought-forms only exist in the minds of the people in conflict and are not actual artifacts “out in the world”.

The world of human conflict is more often fought at the realm of disputing ideologies, rather than as conflict literally unfolding over the disputation of physical resources such as food or water.

An idea is a kind of infection, an infection of the mind. Ideas are mental infections, some can be benign, other ideas are deadly. Deadly as in, “I am a Muslim jihadist serving Allah by blowing up a market place full of other people from my third world village…I am a Nazi Guard at a concentration camp…I am a Christian abortion-activist willing to do anything to serve the lord including killing that doctor.”

Ideas range from simple to complex, and are the grist from which we create narrations of our lives, events, phenomena, processes, and ideas are our experience of the world of sense perceptions.

Ideas form the roots of our personal and collective identities, and ideas are the foundations upon which we learn to build our understandings of the world.

Thus, the power of an idea cannot be overstated – for and idea has the influential ability to penetrate, define, and determine our mental frames of reference and lenses through which we view the world cannot be understated.
Our collective and individual identities are formed and defined by ideas.

“I am a white, middle class man.”

This is the expression of a simple idea, tensed in time it is simultaneously both predicate and subject – maleness, whiteness, middle-classness and ME-BEING.

As an idea, it can literally infect my mind, defining how I view and present myself to others and how others perceive and react to me.

Self-identity

Ideas of identity are essentially thought-forms with which one has come to identity, transitively or intransitively, passively or actively.

Concurrently, ideas of self-identity are essentially concepts with which one has come to identify as one’s own essential nature, personality, being, and body. Ideas are literally “other-things” external to the self; ideas are linguistic, abstract, mental concepts, with which a person has come to invest him or herself, within. The idea of a self has become an investment of the self in the other thing that is, in fact, “THE IDEA OF A SELF.”

Speaking of the manner in which a person has come to define themselves as something else: “a republican, a Christian, A god-fearing Muslim” is certainly not a simple process. Nevertheless, it is critical and almost impossible to truly realize that an identity is but a fractured meaning; fractured meaning garnered from a semiotic, linguistic system of representation; an identity-idea is a non-living and essentialized thought-form that has become imbued with “a life of its own” – and ideas, like a Frankenstein, walk among us, as us, as one of us, as a “ME.”

Identities are infections of mind that create false categories which come to be identified by people as the essential nature of either themselves or of some other person. And identities have serious implications.
I am a Muslim. I am a Christian. I am a Buddhist. These are each implicitly different than “I practice Islam, Christianity or Buddhism.” The practice is not the self. One cannot fight over practice, one fights over identity.

To purge life of all conflict and unhappiness, purge all ideas of your identify; and all conflict will immediately disappear from life.