I'll begin this post by letting you know I will add more to it.
When I was doing my intensive learning, at a New Age group called ASPECTS (see http://home.vicnet.net.au/~johnf/welcome.htm), in the early 80s, one of the biggest "sins" we could commit was "control" - in the sense of controlling others. It is called lack of respect for free will in Wiccan circles, and I have seen some very interesting debates on it.
I agree that that lack of respect for free will, which I will continue to refer to as "control", is a major problem. I also consider that it is very, very, very prevalent in Australian society in other circumstances. The most common example of this is someone trying to pressure others into going to a party by saying "What are ya - a party pooper?" Similar types of control - and make no mistake about it: that is exactly what it is, and it is as evil as someone casting a spell to deliberately influence another - include pressuring people to drink ("What are ya? A ").
Swinburne University of Technology's "National Centre for Women" (now the "National Centre for Gender and Cultural Diversity") did a study of male engineering students in the 1990s, and found that humour was used as a weapon to control other (male) engineering students. (See http://www.sisr.net/ncgcd/ for more, including exploring getting a copy of the paper - the lead author was Dr Sue Lewis). This is a perfect example of the problem behaviour I am referring to as "control".
As with my post on anger (see http://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2007/10/anger-is-noit-emotion.html), control can be viewed - at what I will call, for want of a better term, less progressed spiritual development - as a problem in it's own right. So, someone who is at an early stage of their development may acknowledge their problem behaviours as anger, smacking people in the teeth and control. As they get a little more experienced and evolved, they will start to look into this in more detail, and possibly identify their problems as suppressing problems until they explode, lack of of confidence in communication (leading to aforementioned suppression of problems), inappropriate ways of expressing frustration owing to lack of communication skills, confusing respect for people and inappropriate tolerance of behaviour leading to undue tolerance instead of smacking people in the teeth, lack of faith in the universe, wanting to be popular causing controlling behaviours, etc.
It is like training to become an elite athlete. Early days may involve learning to run around the block, whereas more advanced training may involve development of tactical running skills up hills, improved use of abs to maintain core stability in uneven ground, etc.
This does illustrate how important it is to "know thyself" when doing spiritual, psychic or personal growth work. It is fairly easy to develop one's psychic skills without developing oneself as a person, and then to take action which one genuinely thinks is helpful, wheras it is actually perhaps more based on what is personally comfortable for oneself. An example of this may be a spell to "encourage" someone to give up a life of crime: the other person involved may be trying to reinforce a lesson by learning something the hard way. in that case, talking to the person and doing some energy work to help heal them, or being an example oneself, or doing spells they ask for (for instance, to get a job to develop self esteem) may be more constructive.
Another point I will mention is the importance of not forgetting, as you start to identify more lessons, to remember that that in itself is a sign of progress :)
Love, light, hugs and blessings
Gnwmythr
This post's photo is also taken from the same trip I raved about in my last post, and is another view of the Ninety Mile Beach at sunset.
Tags: life lessons, interpersonal interactions, karma, control
First published: Sunday 14th October, 2007
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