The majority of manipulative people, spiritual teachers, and cult leaders each share are an affinity for removing other people’s preferences.

They will usually try to remove our preferences by making whatever preferences we may have wrong in some way, or by blanketing a false fact that to have preference is an act of ultimate ego, so unless you remove your preferences, you cannot progress spiritually or in whatever way it is that the manipulator, spiritual teacher, or cult leader has put into plan.

Preferences are our autonomy. Within our own context of limits, each of us has the equal freedom to choose our own preferences as individual free people, and so long as preference do not intentionally cause harm to ourselves or others, our preferences are what bring us contentment in our lives.

When we choose our own preferences we are healthily meeting our own needs. It can be a marker towards how much happiness you experience in life.

Living by others preferences means that we suit the needs of others, not ourselves. Our lives remain unfulfilled whilst we blinker ourselves into thinking that service or seva makes us happy and fulfilled, and other excuses such as we were evil or wrong to have such preference.

The truth remains, that if you have no preference you have no autonomy, therefore you are not free.

Incidentally, those who disallow others preference remain rigid, stuck in the very programming that they themselves try to impose on the beings around them.

Take good care every one, and hope you’l enjoy having a preference of some kind after reading this.. no matter how simple it may be.

I choose a nice herbal tea :-)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/27/2020 05:48PM by facet.

I've experienced this a great deal. Since I broadly agreed with the beliefs of my group I didn't understand how much it hurt to have my decisions taken away from me. Especially since there was always some justification about why my own choices were either influenced by demons or perpetuating all the world's harm. Even after years of recovery it's hard to give myself permission to like what I like, or live however I wish to live, because the way the group framed their own personal beliefs and preferences as the only things that could ever be right.

Hi Jupiter,

It is very hard, you are right, very hard and it hurts. It greatly changes us as individuals and a lot of the time without us even realising.

A good takeaway to consider is to remember the root, that it was other people’s wishes imposed rather than what was presented to us. The reasons given were masks for the true agenda, the root, which was to control.

Remembering this could be seen as a big validation of ourselves.

It invalidates the other, though this is a good thing in the sense that they are no longer imposing themselves and intruding on our own person, of which we are all free to be.

It has to be remembered that it isn’t invalidating the imposers personal feelings, just the masks they bring, they are false after all.

I think we all have to invalidate lies. They are not worth our investment.

Finding a sense of validation in ourselves is absolutely worth it, always, and it might mean that decision making and choices become a bit easier as we go along.