The Teaching creates reactions

In all departments of human endeavor, people react to those who bring new ideas, new visions, and new goals.

First of all, when someone speaks to us about the Teaching and about what the Teaching expects from us, we feel a reaction from our lower self. The reason for this reaction is that the crystallized habits, emotions, and thoughtforms feel that they are under attack. It is not easy to break our habits, our mechanical responses and reactions, our ways of thinking, not only because they are set in certain patterns but also because they are associated with our immediate families, churches, businesses, and traditions. Yet, nothing can change within us without changing all those things with which we are associated. This is often painful for ourselves and for others.

For example, the Teaching suggests that we not eat meat, drink alcohol, or smoke. When you decide to abstain from these things, your friends and family will probably wonder if you have lost your mind. This creates family and social problems, and sometimes in changing yourself you may lose your family, friends, and job. Sometimes you even lose your church, if the people in your church see that you are really entering the path of transformation. Thus we can see that the Teaching not only creates reactions from your lower self, from your habits, from your crystallized emotions, beliefs, traditions, and religions but also from your environment and everyone in it.

For an advanced human being, his family, group or society becomes like his lower self. Just as his lower self reacts to the Teaching, similarly and for almost the same reasons his family, group, and society attack and react to him.

-Torkom Saraydarian

The Ageless Wisdom, p.61