Freedom From Manipulation

You live in a mental environment as well as a physical environment. The physical environment is the world that your senses report—a world that you can see, hear, touch and feel; a world that you must navigate using your intellect and your physical skills. But the mental environment is more subtle. It is the environment of thought and influence.

Go into any home or place of business and you will experience the unique mental environment of that place. This is part of your daily experience. People describe this in many ways, of course. But fundamentally they are feeling something very different being in different environments.

If you were able to go into every house on any street, you would find a unique mental environment within their home, depending upon the nature of the relationships that exist there and the mental health of those who live there. Whenever you have a private conversation with someone, you create your own mental environment with that person. Here even in a restaurant, you can go from table to table, and there is a slight mental environment created at each one.

Ultimately, you as an individual create a mental environment around you, depending upon the nature of your thinking and emotions. Here people walk around with a cloud over them, enveloped in their own fear, anxiety or resistance. Or they can create much the opposite—there is a feeling of openness, trust and safety around them.

While you create your own mental environment to a slight degree, you are living in the mental environment that everyone is creating and continues to create every moment of every day. This is the world that humanity has created, not only as a physical landscape, but as a complex and immense mental environment as well.

It is within this larger environment that there are powerful influences—cultural influences, political influences, commercial influences, religious influences and the influences of powerful individuals in one’s life.

Here there are no neutral mental environments. For that, you must seek refuge in nature. But even in nature there can be subtle differences in environments, depending upon the creatures that live there and other forces in the mental environment that are beyond your visible range. People, however, generally seek refuge in nature to experience a neutral mental environment, an environment that is not activated or strongly influenced by human thought, feelings and emphasis.

People know very little about the mental environment, of course, and so they often lack discernment here and discretion. They become involved with people or environments that are generally unhealthy for them because there are no neutral mental environments where people are concerned.

Here who you associate with has a great bearing on your thoughts, your feelings and the degree to which you can become aware of yourself and your environment. Everyone is influencing everyone, but particularly those people with whom you are directly engaged. You can be in a mental environment, working there or living there or spending a great deal of time there, and the mental environment itself can have a profound influence upon you.

If you spend much time with a group of people who have a particular point of view, which they reinforce for one another, you will find yourself over time being persuaded by their point of view, and may even adopt it yourself. If you spend time with a group of people who are highly critical of the government, for example, you will find yourself falling into their line of thinking. This is part of your social adaptation, but it is also the influence in the mental environment there.

You live in a sea of persuasion—everywhere around you, occurring on so many different levels. People are often greatly influenced by one other person in their life, or by their parents, someone whose influence and sway are inordinate and very strong, and they are given to submit to it. Here you may even find yourself feeling constantly overshadowed by someone else because in the dynamic of your relationship with them, you tend to yield and they tend to dominate. Sometimes this is unexpected and unanticipated. It is just the dynamic of the relationship.

Certainly, a marriage and a family create a powerful mental environment, an environment of influence. In this regard, whoever you marry is really who you are choosing to be your primary influence in your life.

In people’s romantic pursuits, of course, this is almost never considered. But this is a chief factor in determining whether someone is an appropriate partner for you. You will be assigning them the role as your chief and primary influence if you unite with them in marriage or partnership. Do not think you are going to rehabilitate them through association with you. That is a very common mistake.

Who you surround yourself with represents your chief influences. Just as a political leader will surround themselves with a group of advisors who have great bearing on that individual’s decision making and perception, you as an individual surround yourself with people who will become your chief advisors and influences. Even if you do not wholly respect or agree with their views, they will still have great bearing on your own. This is the power of influence in the mental environment.

Do not think here that you as an individual, by the sheer intensity of your will or by living defensively, that you can overcome all of these influences upon you. That is underestimating the power of the mental environment. And do not think that you can create your own reality to a very great extent here beyond trying to change the way you interpret your experiences because you are living in the reality that so many other people are creating along with you.

This is one of the ways that people enter into fantasy or illusion. They create a set of ideas or expectations and reinforce these to such an extent that they are disassociated from the environment around them. But what they fail to see is that their disengagement does not mean that the general environment is not continuing to influence them significantly.

If you spend time with people who are unsuccessful in any regard, you will begin to share their attitudes and their experiences. Do not think that you alone can uplift them or alter their thinking and behavior. The collective intentions of others is greater than your individual intention in this regard. As a result, your ability to achieve goals or success in life will be greatly dependent upon those individuals with whom you surround yourself and who have a chief influence or function in your life.

This is the unseen power of the mental environment. Never underestimate it. It has a greater impact upon your thoughts and feelings than even the physical environment that you can see and discern with your senses.

Here you can begin to recognize the value of your own experience. For you have experienced many different kinds of mental environments, some of which were attractive and some of which were not and some of which were just confusing. You did not know how to interpret them.

Being with certain people felt good. With others it did not. Sometimes it even was felt to be dangerous. This is part of your experience of living in the world. If you are more sensitive to these things, then your experience of the mental environment is more pronounced. This could be helpful to you if you learn to develop skill in the mental environment, which is something that very few people have achieved to any degree whatsoever.

Sometimes people that you meet are very attractive. They seem powerful or charming or very determined, and you are attracted to this aspect of them. Perhaps there are other qualities about them that are not so impressive at the outset that end up being critically important for you to discern. Should you pursue a relationship with this person for any reason, whether it be for personal companionship or for goals in your work, you will find that these unforeseen tendencies will have a great bearing on the outcome.

If you observe people objectively without condemnation, without criticism, they will tell you a great deal about themselves. And if you learn about their past experience—what they have achieved, what they have not achieved, how they have dealt with uncertainty, how they have dealt with loss and disappointment, how they view their past relationships and so forth—you will learn a great deal about how they will function in the future and whether or not you should become engaged with them.

Part of this is based upon their appearance, of course, and their behavior and the nature of their communication. But then there is the more subtle experience of someone. Someone can appear to be quite attractive in all the normal respects, but there is something about them that gives you caution, that makes you feel reserved, that is like a warning. If you do not look at someone with this greater sensitivity or heed the sense of restraint you might feel around them, you could make a critical mistake in participating with that person. And, of course, these mistakes are made continuously everywhere, in all realms of human engagement.

In innumerable ways people are trying to influence each other to achieve their goals and to get what they want. Sometimes this self-serving attitude is very overt. It is very obvious. People are manipulating others or trying to manipulate you to get you to buy what they want you to buy, or do what they want you to do, or to surrender to them or to agree with their point of view, or to join their political cause, or to adopt their own set of views.

But even in more subtle ways, people want their relationships to support their goals. So it is very important in relationships that you become acquainted with the other person’s goals, not only the goals that they proclaim, but their more subtle ambitions as well.

Skill and discernment here are critically important. For failure in life largely occurs as a result of being with the wrong people, of not discerning the nature of the relationship fully, of not discerning the problems and the warning signs. It is fundamentally a problem of not following the deeper Knowledge that lives within you.

The real secret here to being able to avoid manipulation and to avoid making critical mistakes in your relationships and in engagements with others is the discovery of Knowledge within yourself. Knowledge represents the deeper Mind within you, a Mind very unlike the mind that you think with; the mind that you use to speculate and compare, contrast and criticize. The deeper Mind within you is quiet. It is discerning. It is watchful. It is not conflicted, and it is not afraid of the world.

It is so very different from your intellect, your social mind, your mind that has been conditioned by your environment, your family and your culture. There is really no comparison here. Knowledge is the Mind that God created in you. But your surface mind where you live every day is the mind the world has created in you. It represents the chief influences of your culture, and your responses and reactions to the world. It contains your desires, your fears, your regrets, your hostilities, your unforgiveness, your tendencies, areas where you are aware, areas where you are not aware and so forth.

Knowledge within you cannot be fooled, and it is immune from the forces of persuasion, wherever they might come from. This is the source of your strength, your integrity, your discernment and your personal power in the world. God has given you this perfect guiding Intelligence to guide you, to protect you and to lead you to the discovery of the greater purpose that has brought you into the world, and those key relationships that will be essential in helping you to discover and to express this greater purpose.

This is the great endowment from the Creator of all life. It will protect you in the mental environment because only Knowledge is free in the mental environment. It is not influenced by conventional thinking or religious views or government proclamations. It is not persuaded by powerful individuals who hold sway over you. It is not seduced by fear or desire or preference. It is beyond the dichotomy of love and fear, which is very confusing for most people since most people really do not understand what love is or what fear is, or where these come from.

In order for you to think freely, creatively and independently, you must have Knowledge as your foundation. Otherwise, you are just mimicking other people, your culture or your circle of friends, your network of people that you identify with or associate with. Together you just reinforce each other’s preferences and prejudices. You reinforce each other’s weaknesses and blindness. You gather together for security and for reinforcement. You see this all around you, of course, as different groups of people associate with each other and reinforce each other’s perception of the world.

But Knowledge within you really is the source of your clarity and your integrity as an individual. And yet it connects you with the Creator of all life because Knowledge is connected to God—not in a religious sense, not in the sense of religious teachings or religious institutions, for Knowledge will guide you whether you are participating in a religious faith tradition or not. It will guide you no matter what your religious faith, or even if you do not adhere to a religious faith.

The Creator of all life is not bound by human understanding or human institutions or traditions of thought. This is your direct connection to God. This is how God communicates to you. This is how God assists you. And your ability to follow Knowledge, to experience Knowledge and to express what Knowledge will give you to express to the world represents your service to God.

Yet people’s awareness of Knowledge is so weak and fleeting, or even nonexistent, that they cannot give this great confidence. To give the individual this much power and this much authority over their life seems very threatening to governments and religious institutions and to people who feel that the individual must be controlled and restrained to a great degree.

Yet regardless of these infringements, Knowledge lives within you. Because you yourself cannot overcome all the forces of persuasion in the mental environment, you need Knowledge to guide you and to be your primary reference point.

People may call this intuition, but intuition is really insufficient to describe what Knowledge is. Knowledge is intelligence. It is not just fleeting moments of insight. It is not just momentary experiences of premonition. People think of intuition as a kind of adjunct to their intellect and to their intellectual understanding, a kind of adjunct to their belief system. That is because they cannot tell what is weak from what is strong, what is wise from what is unwise.

The intellect, to be really powerful, beneficial and effective, must serve a greater power. And this greater power is not a distant God or a government or an institution or some other powerful overbearing personality. The intellect is really meant to serve Knowledge.

In the true hierarchy of your Being, your body serves your mind, and your mind serves the Spirit, and the Spirit serves God. Here everything falls into place, and there is no discontinuity within you. You are not a bunch of sub-personalities or conflicting goals or contradicting intentions or motivations.

Here there is the power and the presence of Knowledge. And then there is the uniqueness of your personality with its strengths and weaknesses. And then, of course, there is all the social conditioning and tendencies that you have accumulated along the way, as if you were a traveler, traveling over land, and you have just accumulated a lot of dust and dirt and grime.

This is kind of how it is in passing through the world. You accumulate a lot of the world’s thinking and prejudices. In most cases, you just adopt them from other people or from groups or institutions. And sometimes you make up your own versions, and you make your own decisions regarding them. But still you have acquired all this excess. Much of it has nothing to do with who you are or why you are in the world. But it is all very effective in conditioning your thinking and your outlook. To unburden yourself of these things, and even to evaluate them clearly, you must have the power and the presence of Knowledge as a reference point within yourself.

People can be critical of their cultures. They can try to resist government manipulation. They can withdraw from society. They can become very distrustful. But they are still bound to those things that are influencing them.

Here being a rebel is not a position of freedom. You are still being governed by the forces you are resisting. Perhaps you are resisting them, but they are still determining your thinking and your behavior. This holds true for many people. Yes, they are resisting certain forces in their government and culture, certain tendencies that they see are prevalent in other people, but they have not yet found the power of Knowledge to liberate their minds. They are held in bondage by the very forces that they resist and have difficulty thinking apart from this.

This is why to resist manipulation, you need the liberating power of Knowledge. You need this greater Intelligence, which is free, which is uncontaminated, which is not threatened by the world.

You see, whether you are for or against a powerful influence, it still controls you and still dominates you. People do not understand this. They think resistance is freedom. But unless resistance gives you a kind of liberation, then you are bound. You are not free. You could spend your whole life resisting a government, or a political opposition, or certain other groups within your society, or certain tendencies within the human culture itself. But unless there is something within you that sets your life in a different direction, then you are not free. You are still bound by that which you resist. And around this resistance there will be ever-deepening hostility and resentment, judgment and condemnation. And all of these things attach you and chain you to that which you resist.

All the while, your life was meant to be something else, to do something else, to give something else. But you cannot get there because you are bound by your resistance and your hostility and condemnation. This is the case for many people, of course, and affects the general population as a whole. The energy that you take in resisting something or criticizing something or being opposed to something can be very all consuming—coloring your perception, limiting your thinking, shutting down your creativity, dominating your life.

Unless it is your mission to change governments or institutions, this becomes a great misfortune. You have not found your freedom to follow a deeper power within yourself. Here your freedom cannot be just from something—freedom from conventional thinking, freedom from certain political persuasions, freedom from certain kinds of human behavior. You need your freedom for something. Freedom from things is perhaps the emphasis at the outset, but really beyond this, freedom is for something.

Ultimately, only Knowledge within you knows what this freedom is for. This is why so many people do not know what to do with their freedom. It just becomes wasted in self-destructive behavior or opposition to others because they do not know what their freedom is for. They cannot figure this out with their intellect. And their social conditioning closes the door or prevents them from discovering what they are really here to do and what they are really here to serve.

Of course, this breeds immense unhappiness, disappointment and frustration because the great need of the soul is not being met. If you are not really doing what you came to the world to do, if you are not really discovering the power that lives within you, if you are not really finding your freedom in the mental environment to discover and express your greater purpose here, then you are suffering. Rich or poor you are suffering.

You can suffer in splendor. You can suffer in wealth. You are driven. You are uncomfortable. You cannot sit still for five minutes. You are overtaken with your desires and your fears, your issues and your problems. Even if you have great affluence and do not need to face the difficulties of trying to survive in the world, you can still be completely dominated by all this.

Therefore, to be free of manipulation, you must find that part of you that is free of manipulation.

You live at the surface of the mind. Like the surface of the ocean, it is made turbulent by the winds of the world and by external forces. But deep down in the ocean, there are currents that are moving the waters of the world all over the Earth. They are not affected by the daily weather.

There is a deeper current in your life that is not affected by daily events. It is this deeper current you must experience. It is there, but it is beneath the surface. From time to time, you have little reminders that there is a deeper current. You have a moment of intuition, or you have a lucid moment where you experience yourself outside of time and space. But these experiences are so rare and fleeting so as to have little impact upon your thinking and behavior in life.

This issue of manipulation now is very central to your own experience of yourself and your ability to think freely and clearly. When you listen to people’s thoughts, you realize they are not the author of these thoughts. They are just the general thoughts of their group or their associations. That is why everyone says the same things, depending upon their group and associations. There is very little original thought here. There is very little clear thinking. People are just mimicking each other to belong to whatever group or association they identify with.

When someone thinks creatively, dynamically, well they are considered a genius. If their thoughts are acceptable to society, they can be accorded great respect. They can innovate. They can think differently. They can be creative. They can innovate. But really it is because everyone else is so slavish in their thinking and so dominated by the mental environment that these individuals stand out.

It is a great loss to the human family that so few of its members can think creatively and dynamically in this way. This represents part of the great impedance that is holding humanity back, holding it back from advancing in every respect.

People may appear to walk about freely, but when seen from a position of Knowledge, everyone looks like they are in chains, as if they are gangs of slaves or gangs of convicts trudging around—oppressed, overwhelmed, dominated by their environment, dominated by their feelings, dominated by their group associations, performing for one another, trying to be accepted.

When you begin to gain your own freedom here, you will look at others and it will be shocking. People are not free to think. They cannot feel what they feel. They cannot know what they know. They are afraid to look at great problems. They feel so inadequate that they just avoid anything that challenges their thinking or that requires great attention and consideration.

They just want to be safe. They just want to belong. They just want to be focused on their little endeavors. They do not want to be bothered with the great problems of the world. They do not want to pay attention to their environment and to changing circumstances. And then when circumstances work against them, they feel like victims. They complain bitterly. They are outraged. This becomes so clear when you can see clearly.

It is a great tragedy for the human family that even with its affluence and the degree of freedom that most of humanity has been able to achieve at great expense, people do not take advantage of their freedom. They do not know what to do with their freedom. The wealthy squander it on addictions and ambitions and personal indulgences. It is a great tragedy for the human family.

But for you, it is time to find the power and the presence of Knowledge and to come to terms with the fact that your mind, thinking and feelings are in fact being dominated by so many different forces in the mental environment.

And now humanity is facing competition from beyond the world. Various groups from the universe are in the world today to try to take advantage of a weak and divided humanity. They will not use force to achieve their goals because they are more intelligent. They will use the powers of persuasion and intimidation to gain advantage here.

Strange craft have been flying in your skies increasingly over the last half century. Witnesses have been seeing these craft, encounters have been made, and people have been taken against their will by these forces. Their power is power in the mental environment—the power to persuade, the power to recondition people’s thinking and beliefs, the power to shape people’s perception. Humanity has very little skill in the mental environment, and so these persuasions can be cast upon people with great ease and little difficulty.

Some people even welcome this Intervention thinking that it represents a great spiritual liberation. They want what the Intervention has to offer: the promises of freedom, high technology and so forth. But it is all a deception being placed upon an ignorant and unsuspecting humanity.

Now you are dealing with a more powerful force in the mental environment. For these races have to compete with other races, and have had to develop great skill and discernment and great skill in manipulating the thoughts, the attitudes and expectations of others. This represents their primary strength. And this they will bring to bear on an unsuspecting humanity.

While everyone goes about their daily life, this Greater Darkness is in the world. You will have to face this because in the universe around you, the power of skill in the mental environment represents the greatest way that stable societies can influence each other and determine each other’s activities.

Humanity is still brutish. It still thinks the use of force is the great way to achieve your goals. But in the universe amongst much older societies, the use of force is seen as mutually destructive and is avoided and suppressed. Other ways are found to gain information from others, and to control others, and to protect yourself from their scrutiny as well.

This represents a new threshold of learning for humanity. But again, what will free you even from these forms of manipulation and persuasion is the same power of Knowledge that lives within you every moment.

For nothing in the universe can overtake Knowledge. Your intellect can be overtaken. Your feelings can be overtaken. Your attitudes can be directed. Your thoughts can be conditioned. Your feelings can be aroused and manipulated. But Knowledge within you is beyond persuasion and manipulation. And this is why it represents the greatest source of strength and freedom for you and for everyone.

Knowledge represents your deeper conscience. It is ethical. It has a moral foundation. Regardless of what your culture has tried to condition you to think or believe, you know when you are doing something wrong. You know if you are hurting other people, it is wrong. And you know when you can honestly connect with someone and have an experience of real communication, it produces a deep and abiding feeling of well-being in you. This is not the result of culture and cultural imprinting. This represents a deeper conscience.

Yet people can lose their connection with this by having their minds overtaken by their societies and their families, their religions and the influence of others. But this deeper conscience still lives within them. Even if they have lost sight of it, even if they violate it, even if they carry out terrible acts in the world, there is still this deeper foundation. They have just lost contact with it.

It is hard to persuade a slave that they are actually free. They will point to their circumstances, but they are still actually free. It is therefore challenging to persuade people or to educate people who are slavish in their thinking and beliefs to realize they really have a source of freedom within themselves. They will point to their circumstances as a justification for their feelings, but really, the freedom still lives within them.

Humanity is now facing Great Waves of change in the world: environmental destruction, diminishing resources, violent weather, economic and political instability and the risk of war. And on top of this, humanity is facing a clever and hidden Intervention into the world. The challenge to human freedom by all these things is so immense. And it casts great doubt over humanity’s future and well-being, and humanity’s sovereignty as a free race within this world.

Therefore, the Teaching in The Way of Knowledge is fundamental in so many ways. Freedom is now being jeopardized as never before by powerful forces, both within the world and beyond the world. Humanity is now facing competition from certain races in the universe, races of physical beings who are motivated by the same things that motivate you. Human culture and growing instability in the world around you will threaten the fabric of human civilization, the stability of human civilization and the well-being of countless people all around the world.

Your quest for truth and peace and your quest for freedom must be based upon a deeper Knowledge within you if it is to be real, if it is to be effective, if it is to really free you from the dominance of the world around you.

This is not to take you out of the world or to have you transcend the world, but to give you the strength and the power and the wisdom to be able to contribute in the world according to the greater purpose that has brought you here. But first you must have the freedom to experience and to find this purpose; and to reorient your life towards this purpose; and to free yourself from those obligations, those commitments and those beliefs that keep you in chains here, that bind you to the past, that keep you from realizing the guiding power of Knowledge within yourself.

God has sent a New Message into the world to prepare humanity for the Great Waves of change, to prepare humanity for the realities of life in the universe, to teach about spirituality at the level of Knowledge, and to reveal to humanity its future and its destiny and the great decisions it must make and the great need for human cooperation.

This rests upon the power of Knowledge within the individual, the liberating power of Knowledge. Humanity’s well-being at any moment is a balance between people’s awareness of Knowledge and their own social conditioning. What prevents people from violence and degradation and cruelty is the power and presence of Knowledge within themselves.

In the future, there will be greater instability in your cultures and economies. What will keep people from preying upon one another, from attacking one another, from social violence and disorder? It will be the power and the presence of Knowledge. And what will give you the freedom to feel secure in an insecure world, and to find your direction while people all around you are in confusion and chaos? It is the power and the presence of Knowledge.

That is why God’s New Message has provided the preparation in The Way of Knowledge that people everywhere around the world can use, even today—by taking the Steps to Knowledge, by reconnecting with their deeper foundation, by being able to have their eyes and ears and senses liberated from the dominance of persuasion and manipulation in the mental environment.

This is the key to your freedom and your fulfillment in the world and your ability to serve a world in need rather than merely condemning it. This represents the source of your satisfaction and fulfillment and will give you the eyes to see and the senses to report the presence of those relationships that you are destined to meet, that are part of your greater purpose in life.

God has given you the perfect antidote to evil and the perfect answer to your needs. But you must experience this, and build a connection to this, and yield to this power, and allow it to free your mind and your perception. This is the greatest gift to you, and this will be your greatest gift to others who like you are seeking to find their freedom and their purpose and their true activities and destiny in the world.