Exploring the Unknown Factor and the Eightfold Noble Path : หน้า 119/164

Suzanne Jeffrey "The students you are teaching now will be the politicians when you retire. If you do not teach them properly, then who is to blame? We are!! We are to blame because we are probably not following the eightfold Noble Path. During the time of Prince Siddhartha, people thought he was crazy to practice the path, but He realized that there would be too many problems if they were not followed. "Throughout history, there are people in the world who always ask if there cannot be something or someone in the world to help with the problems of the world. We think: are we paranoid? Ignorant? And so people started to believe that something must exist. "We can call this anything that we want to: Nibbana, or God, or Truth, or the Unknown Factor, or Dhamma, or Supreme Knowledge. What we call it depends on where we are and the time we are alive. You have to remember that darkness is always balanced by the light. With right thinking, we can search for this dynamic force through the correct meditation. "There are all kinds of people in the world. People might think ‘let me stay here until someone else discovers whatever it is, and then I will take it for my own belief system.’ But there are others who believe it, and go in search for it. They search for the Unknown Factor until they discover it for themselves. "If the Unknown Factor is outside of the body, we think it can be attainable or unattainable by humans, by one's self. Some people think that IT must be a special power given to us, because this would indicate that IT gave us the sun, the moon, and the stars. So we must pray to IT and ask IT for services or favors. This thinking was the origin of Deism. There are others who think they can obtain IT themselves, and meditate outside of the body, or search the world around for IT. This thinking is, then, for people who believe that the Unknown Factor exists outside of the body. "There are some exceptions to this: There are hermit yogis who look for the Unknown Factor inside of the body, but practice meditation outside of the body and can go searching all around the world for the source. [Note: Remember that we must understand the sources of religion so we can understand the way people think.] There is another major group who think that the Unknown Factor is obtainable inside of"