Reflections on phishing scams and self deceptions

In a computer list-group the subject of phishing and malware scams comes up - as does frequently in news articles relative to hacking and snooping and using personal data for private agendas.
I started reflecting on the nature of scams and wrote the following:

Increasingly I feel that 'scams' are substituting for relationships of shared honour and integrity.

Phishing operates to seem like a known and trusted communication that purports to warn and or protect a danger or threat, or simply to offer special access to services or powers.

In a way a scam operates to take advantage of those who do not want to check in consciously with the legitimacy of a communication. This may because they want something offered such as a cheap or desirable bargain, to be true, or because they do not want a warned or reported danger or threat to come about.

In this way most of us are manipulatable in significant degree.

If a group of people dressed as policemen tell you to do something you will likely do it regardless that it goes against your natural inclination because we are conditioned to obedience simply from recognition of a uniform and associated behaviours.

Most people mostly 'play by the rules' most of the time, but increasingly, those in positions of power as a result of our extending such trust, act as if they own and have a right to such power, while we generally feel powerless and subordinate to be led or protected or receive service from such corporations or organisations.

'Keep one's head down and don't provoke reaction', seems to be what is masked within the sense of 'keep calm and carry on'. It isn't really calm for it is not a condition of peace in which joy and a discernment of what does not belong to joy are clearly and obviously communicated. It operates a kind of conflict avoidance. A risk aversion strategy that tends to back off and let 'others' or 'the rules' deal with or sort out any conflict situation.

contd...

In private mode, one might well engage in strong but private opinion and emotion, but this teds to 'express itself' in fantasy - apart from where dissatisfactions leak into our daily relationships. Hence the 'outlet' and apparent escape into tv, movies and computer games - but which generally feeds a negative loop rather than truly refreshing or recreational activity.

Conflict avoidance operates as a withdrawal of presence, a limited form of 'playing dead'. It is not that 'good men do nothing' which allows negative agendas to rise unchecked, but that true presence is blocked of its natural communication. In some sense guilt or a sense of personal invalidity operates to undermine ones sense of being able to tell the difference between true and false, as well as one's capacity or authority to call it out or give witness for what it is.

Clearly the nature of 'scam' is an art of deception that has evolved over generations and part of human consciousness for millennia.

Our first experience of deception is perhaps that of fooling oneself and blaming it on others. One can set up a mask of relative innocence as a protection from a conflicted sense of self. As a kind of escape from situations that in their moment are intolerably fearful or painful.

My sense is that all who come into this world learn 'the mask' and in a sense become it - or at least become confused with it in various ways and degrees.

the sense I have of negative agendas rising increasingly fearful within our world is a natural consequence of the confusions implicit to a masked sense of existence. It operates as a sort of tacit 'conspiracy' of negatively defined self interest. For fear is the substitution for a true sense of identity and existence, and if we do not challenge it and discern its true message, we consent to be dictated or ruled by it in exchange for a surface reality in which we are forever hiding from or even warring what lies beneath. It is true that the strategies of fear are loveless to all excepting a special and segregated sense of oneself alone - even when that sense extends to one's special others or group. 

To be exposed in such a mind is generally humiliating because one loses 'face'. One is revealed 'sinful' and thus rejected, reviled or invalidated as a human being. But no matter who might engage or join in such activity, the one whose judgement really cuts and invalidates... is one's own against oneself.

Once one acquires the belief of an evil or a shameful or inadequate sense of oneself, a split or segregated mind seeks to hide or mask it. While much of our social adaptation can accomplish this in ways such that this becomes invisible - because 'everyone else is doing it too' - there are pervasive aspects that remain active as an ongoing defence all the time that we seek to make unconscious - as if to thus make escape into a world without such fears - or at least a sense of our self free of them.

Truth needs no defence for it rests in its own appreciation, but a lie asserted in place of a true appreciation must be perpetually asserted, protected and maintained. This is what gives rise to a mentality of self-justification - which I sometimes call self-justifiction. In symbolic terms it is the mentality of the 'fig-leaf' in terms of a separated self-sense that lost awareness of Eden and took upon itself alone, that which once came naturally as a communioned sense of Life.

Clearly we all experience what we believe to be true even if later we discover it was an illusion, trick or scam. So at the level of our experience it is ALL true and there is no contest as to THE Truth. But a true reflection or expression of who and what we are, is what truly resonates and is relevant to the choices that you accept into your heart - not least because the movement of listening to the heart uncovers them there.

Housekeeping is a basic responsibility for keeping order by setting a clear unified purpose. When conflicted and divided purposes arise that bring conflict and division - and corresponding lack of peace, then it is as if one has a house of unwanted guests who do not belong here. keeping house is a realignment with what wholly belongs - such that attention or hosting services are no longer offered to that which does not resonate with the clear frequency of your presence, and so either they leave or one chooses to live where they are not.

This is simply the effect of living out from a clear and consistent sense of one's innate worth - not specially above or below others. And the underlying scam that would prevent such a waking and conscious act of living is a deeply laid habitual program within our subconscious mind routines.

It takes persistence to break the habit - but only of a clear choice taken in the now of the noticing of the old choice. For habits are patterns of choice.

It seems too much to pay to live as a responsible consciousness, because so much of what was kept hidden in defensive hiding mode now comes to the awareness - and at first seems overwhelming to eyes that have not yet learned to see in the light.

But the actual cost of asserting, maintaining and defending a desire to make unconscious, that which is rejected or feared, is incalculable - and wears out such that the very fears and guilts and evils that were supposed to be hidden, rise ever more as the reflection of our 'world'.

It is said one cant teach an old dog new tricks and there is truth in that for the patterns become too set. But it is also true that an old trick that no longer works obliges one to learn new ways to live.

The times we now live in are obliging humanity to wake up because the scam that was hidden is increasingly becoming exposed - and so cannot serve as a successful illusion. This is the calling and the opportunity to align with the choice of our hearts rather than be led by the mind which seems to have gone off by itself and has forgotten what love is and what we are.

But the same calling can be seen as the witnesses and necessities for ever more fearful defence against an ever more evil world. The essential event or information is interpreted through the core beliefs by which we identify within our sense of self existence. A negative or segregating self definition will automatically interpret everything to obtain reinforcement of itself, as will a positive or re-integrating sense of self-definition.

It is not the advertisement or the politician, nor the peer group or the family or the cultural inheritance or past conditionings that give the Word as to who and what you are, it is through your own heart's acceptance that what you are finds expression and reflection and is thus shared and known truly - rather than through a glass darkly.

This paragraph was in my morning reading (shared after I had written much of this reflection):

"If you do not believe that which is not Truth, you shall experience Truth. But if you choose to believe the false as the truth about you, you shall experience the false and believe it is true". From 'The Holy Spirit's Interpretation of the New Testament' (NTI).

The term 'Holy Spirit' symbolizes that which knows you truly and which has never left your mind - though it has in a sense been turned away from, discarded and lost. Just as a cut will self-heal, so does consciousness reintegrate - if the cutting desisted and the healing was welcomed, because in truth what is Indivisible never could be separated from or attacked with.

The nature of the scam of an isolated ego power unto itself has been to initiate a journey within perception and experience. It is our perception that is healed or reintegrated to a higher or more embracing inclusion.

Once one sees through a scam one is no longer tempted to click the bait. It is then no longer an active liability. The forms of scams are innumerable and can multiply faster than one can learn to recognize their forms - indeed will mutate as the very means to 'protect' from scams. But a core honesty of self can discern the coercive intent in any or all of them without having to follow their branches to discover their fruits.

To be in a true foundation IS the capacity to discern the same and is the frequency of attraction to like kind as it is unavailable to that which has no belonging or conceivable existence in such open communication.

Sufficient be the evils unto the day thereof means, 'use that which is still residual to your own un-mindfulness to awaken and reintegrate as a wholeness of being' - instead of using it to persist in self-justifictions that no longer actually serve your desire. 

Thankyou for your attention