Step 6: Threats, opportunities, obligations and desires
Every one of the functions I have listed in the last step is itself driven by external inputs. We would to a large extent do nothing without something outside us that drives us on, so we need to look at what drives us into action and here we get a new classification of the drivers to activity in general:
You are driven by your own desires, by the external obligations that you have, by the threats you perceive with your 5 senses, nervous system, and autonomic system or the opportunities you perceive with your 5 senses, nervous system, and autonomic system.
We can thus either overload or suppress external inputs as well and this will have an effect on spiritual experience as these feed through via our perceptions to our will.
If for example we eat something really nasty that might hurt us, we have effectively created an overwhelming threat [overload]. If, however, we create a legal system that really works then we have reduced threats [suppress]. If we live in a safe house then we have reduced threats [suppress] . If we stand on the side of an active volcano or live in a hostile environment, we have increased the threats [overload].
If we create a tax and legal system so complex we seem to spend all our time filling out forms and worrying about the outcome, we have increased our obligations to overload proportions [or at least the government has done], if we move to a country which is less bureaucratic and imposes few if any obligations, we are free of that worry [suppress].
We can thus incorporate ways in which these inputs are deliberately manipulated via external functions in order to promote spiritual experience. And by looking at these extra factors we might be able to work out why we had a spiritual experience