AUTO-PILOT'S MANUAL: V. Control Room and Ground Control

1. At some point in the pilots apprenticeship course he will become automatically aware of control room and ground control.
2. He will learn that the control room is an extension of the ground control. 
3. He will learn that the learning of control lies in accurately reporting to the control room or ground control ALL THAT COMES TO AWARENESS without editing. It is the Hijacker who Edits.
4. In training his craft to more and more accurately 'log', 'report', ALL THAT COMES TO AWARENESS, through whatever channel - mind, dream, eye, ear, muscle, word, thought, feeling, all the nerves etc., without editing, annotating and amplifying, and such other habits introduced by the Hijacker, the pilot does his job and the ground control does the needful. It is the Hijacker who thinks that with the limited information he has at his disposal, he can reform, transform the ports of call or his craft etc. The ground control has a more total or global information and can use the information you give to the best advantage. If you have separate interests of your own, then Editing becomes necessary and YOU WILL KNOW WHO YOU ARE! The Ground Control keeps no secrets from you - see that you do not keep any secrets from the Ground Control. The Hijacker loves Mysteries and Secrets.

Falk Lademann - Ground Control

REMEMBER!
To establish the Age of Light and Delight on earth You must establish them first of all, in the bit of the Earth given you, called your own body.

       5. The pilot will soon learn that:

Expressing love, oneness, truth, joy, positive speech, learning the controls of the craft, accurately reporting to the control-room, being in constant contact with the ground control, all these are just the different facets of the same process.

WORK, REWARD AND LEARNING

It is well known that in the process of learning, concepts of reward or reinforcement, and withdrawal of reward, or punishment play a crucial part.

The details of the process can be summarised.

Certain actions involving a certain pattern of neural connections produces for the subject a reward which satisfies him, and which induces a readiness to repeat the performance. Here one must carefully observe that the most important element in the process, the man who is conducting the learning experiment, is not in the foreground. But, for a full appreciation of the totality of the process of learning, he has to be pushed into the foreground.

Now, this man called the scientist offers the monkey a banana or stops an electric current, if the monkey succeeds in doing something - work a typewriter, or play the piano, or add two and two. (Obviously, if the whole object of the man, if we may call him thus, was merely to give a banana to the monkey or relieve it from pain of electric shock, simply because he loves the monkey, the whole exercise is useless. What new knowledge arises in such a mutual interaction between the man and the monkey is of another domain.)

What the monkey does in this business is useless for its existence - typing banging the piano and adding two plus two - left to itself without the kind tutorial of this very objective scientist. Therefore, the whole business in the objective science of learning-theories consists of a man who makes the monkey do some things that interest the man, things it would not normally do, using its love of bananas and fear of pain as the palpable intermediary goals for the monkey. The experimenter being an objective phantom does not need any rewards excepting the salary he gets for this business or the thunderous cheers he gets for his thesis from fellow phantoms. Such rewards are not at all stressed out of sheer modesty and scientific humility.

The least obvious aspect is that which happens to the nervous system of the monkey and its teacher. Since the monkey has not yet been taught how to do brain surgery and examine slides, the benevolent objective scientist cuts open the monkey’s brain to go to the roots of the learning process. The teacher, no doubt, is successful in learning the steps of man’s evolutionary descent into ape - its idle and destructive curiosity and its tendency to pull things out to expose the roots.

These, then, are the four cornerstones for the edifice of learning theory: Reward for the subject, reward for the objective scientist, and that which happens to the nervous system of the subject and that which happens to the nervous system of the scientist.

Let me examine the case further:

Just as basically a monkey wants a banana or avoid pain, so does a man, presumably, wants food and wants to avoid starvation. The social experimental situation is thus arranged. A rich man wants a chair. That is his reward. He cannot make a chair. So, he catches hold of a subject who can make a chair. This man and his friends so arrange affairs that the chair maker cannot get food which is his primary aim or reward and unless he produces a chair which is perfectly useless for himself. So far so good. Society organises itself so that everyone is made to produce rewards which he himself does not need in order to get the rewards he needs from the first lot.

Now, let us see what happens if the monkey can hoodwink his teacher, the reward-bestowing God and manages to snatch away a banana which is what it really needs. When the human being is the subject of the experiment the possibilities are quite interesting. Many human beings manage to directly snatch the banana without having to go through the beastly bother of making chairs and the learning process. The whole human society is completely arranged around the laws of learning so ably revealed by the objective scientists who need no reward. The man who is in the position to offer rewards is first of all in a position to withhold rewards, and is certainly not in need of any vulgar rewards. Only, he wants a chair for the sake of the chair, art for art's sake, food for food’s sake, sex for its own sake and objective science for its own sake.

Now, if you offer ten bananas for making a chair, and if the subject of learning experiment is able to get at the bananas more easily by making a hollow chair made of cardboard, or if he is more enterprising and can waylay his reward giver, mug him and take away forty bananas instead of the miserable ten, the name given to this very unscientific but extremely sensible biological activity is lawlessness, corruption etc., because it flouts the laws of learning laid down by the professors.

A few in this jungle come out of the trap of reward and are concerned with the drive of their inner urge to find out if they can train their nervous system to do without bananas, if they can get out of the terrible limitation which binds them perpetually to bananas and the laws of learning.

The Sufi speaks of two harvests which are the result of any work done by man: the external harvest, the yield, the grain produced which gives food, which also gives frustration and pleasure according to the yield, putting the whole of the man's compex being at the disposal of the vagaries of the wayward yield.

Statue of Nasreddīn Hodja in Bukhara. Faqscl, Wikimedia Commons

The other harvest is what happens to himself during the work - the patience he developed, the joy in putting his muscles to work, the joy he gave and got in looking after the trees and cattle and workers, and his own ascent into higher and higher and more and more harmonious expressions of behaviour he and his body are capable of. The second learning is the ascent of man to something higher than himself as he is, and his miserable dependence on numerous things for his comfort, where comfort is seen not as a state of being, but is seen as a sum of articles and objects.

One of the most important objectives of science and technology is to provide comforts to man. The immediate and ultimate object of these comforts is to prove that man's body is totally unnecessary. The degree of comfort is measured by the degree to which a man need not use his organs. A man has two legs. The first sign of civilisation is when he has found it unnecessary to have legs when he found it easier to apply the laws of learning and climbed on a horse or on other men's backs.

The logical end object of a comfort-offering science and technology is to abolish man, all men, excepting the objective scientists who will find a hole in Mars. This abolition of organic man can be achieved by subtle or gross means. The subtle means are to provide cars so that the legs may be found unnecessary, learning theories to show how you can make another man work for you; theories of human personality founded on scientific investigations to show that man is really an ape and it is better to stop there; the gross methods are by mass murder with bangs or hisses or completely noiseless lasers.

What the work does to you is the reward. The rest is biological theory propounded by objective science and made by self-declared robots who have left their humanity in the cupboard or bank vaults.

Real human inquiry begins with the subject himself, not as subject of this or that inquiry or operation.

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A LIST OF ITEMS ON LEARNING

1. Learning is constantly going on.
2. Learning involves change in behaviour: the replacement or modification of past behaviour by a new set.
3. A behavioral pattern becomes a habit by repetition, by practice. It may get broken by non-repetition.
4. Behaviour has components: here are a few obvious ones:

1. Verbal: thought/spoken or written speech. (Try thinking without words!)
2. Autonomic or visceral behaviour.
3. Muscular behaviour. Including mime, gesture and other expressive behaviour.
4. All behaviour may be seen to require a stimulus (obvious or implied), a response, an effect of some kind or other on the stimulus; and wider or deeper eradication of the zone of this behaviour.
5. Behaviour may be good, bad, purposeful or useless; creative or destructive - depending on the reporter. For the self-realisation aspirant the evaluation rests with himself.
6. Behaviour may be within one’s own full awareness, sometimes only parts of it; sometimes parts may come to other’s awareness. Of course, such awareness by oneself or others are all subject to the processes of awareness learnt by the person.
7. A unit of behaviour is really not a single unit, but a chain of many links; a sort of  chain of switches in time or space. Awareness of the link can give greater control in the manipulation of behaviour. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. Thus a troublesome pattern of behaviour may be tackled at its weakest link, thus breaking its hold. Charting out the series of small and big links that ultimately lead to an outburst of anger or depression may give us the handle to break up the chain reaction.

5. In the process of learning the following items may play a part:

1. Imitation
2. Identification
3. A behaviour that meets with some satisfaction tends to repeat itself and get strengthened: the item of reward.
4. Behaviour once established tends to seek and create the conditions necessary for its display. Child badly beaten for a fault my find itself creating the conditions necessary for getting beaten.
5. Behaviour may not be changed; but the effects of the behaviour may be altered by changing the ‘object’ of the behaviour. A shrewd and aggressive antisocial person whose object is attention and ‘heroics’ may become a useful commando. A need to love something very strongly may express itself differently if the object of love - money, power, sex, humanity country or God - were to be changed.
6. All behaviour involves energy exchanges, which can be experienced at different levels.
7. In behavioural change, a person or a situation can act as the stimulus.
8. Behavioral changes involve both quantity and quality. Changes that are not very obvious, might suddenly lead to a dramatic, qualitative change in a large pattern of behaviour. The student of self-awareness might also find that his prolonged attempts to change himself in one set of behaviour results in a change in a set of behaviour that he did not directly tackle.
9. Since man is not an isolated unit, but part of a collective communicating system called the others and everything else, his behaviour influences others and vice-versa.
10. Each component of one person's behaviour may act as an independent stimulus for another. A gentle speech of one may provoke fear or anger in another, merely because of some little gesture accompanying the speech.
11. Within one's own self, one component of one behaviour may trigger off another set. For example, do my thoughts have effect on others? It is a good starting point to know how your thoughts affect you. If your depressive thoughts upset your digestion or appetite, is it difficult to see that your depressive face does something to the others?
12. If I am a victim of other’s behaviour, it is obvious to me that I should take some responsibility for my own behaviour.

This very incomplete set of items has been set down to show the vast richness of response possibilities within us; and not to hopelessly complicate the issues.

Behavioral changes not a mystery, but a subject of study and practice.

This aspiration for changing one’s behaviour to fit a higher type of behaviour is the theme of all YOGA or should be.

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AHAM - FURTHER ABOUT AIM, LEARNING AND WANTING

FURTHER ABOUT AIM,

LEARNING AND WANTING

     When you say that you have chosen a profession, and undertaken to learn it, there are some obligations.

     Some teachers and institutions clearly state them, and expect them to be strictly carried out; some others do not clearly say so.

     Irrespective of the above, and irrespective of your true aim and how you fulfill the obligations, the obligations themselves are usually the following:

1. With regard to the learning of the profession, you agree to follow the instructions given for the lessons.
2. You agree to willingly show obedience to those instructions and really attempt to implement them. This is the minimum.

     The judgement with regard to the success or failure is not in your hands. That you will definitely succeed is not a necessary or usual part of the contract.

    Your teacher undertakes to teach you something, for which the minimum requirement is obedience to the instructions for a certain length of time, at the end of which either party may break the contract. The teacher kicks you out or you quit.

     However, how the obedience is carried out in practice depends on the aim. For example depending on the real aim in joining the professional school, one may really obey, one may pretend to obey, and one may grossly disobey to the extent permitted by the legal and philosophical loopholes in the contract.

If you meditate a little you will know that you are always constantly learning; learning something or the other. It is your body's fundamental property. So your body is all the time, ceaselessly learning. What you learn is a different matter.

     So when you bemoan that your son is constantly failing at the college and is learning nothing, you are mistaken. He is definitely learning pretension and learning to live at other's expense and effort.

    So if learning is unavoidable, one should learn the role of aim in this process. 

    One should also learn the subtle but powerful difference between

1. I want to be a doctor.
2. I want to learn how to be a doctor.

    If a person says 'I want to be a doctor', he does not automatically mean that he wants to learn how to become one. He is willing to do anything, play any trick necessary for getting a degree without the least effort to learn the trade.

    Similarly many patients say, "Doctor, I want to get cured", rarely do they say, "Doctor, I want to learn how to get cured". It is not their fault.

    All this is to overemphasize what is commonly ignored: that learning is an inherent property of the body; that what is learnt is a function of the aim; that there is a real and a professed aim; that there is a world of difference between wanting to get something and wanting to learn how to get it; and that chaos results from a lack of aware understanding of these facts.

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