An interesting metaphor-- although based on an experiment which failed to be replicatable -- involved the idea that a frog (cold-blooded, and thus having its internal temperature determined by outside temperature) placed in a pot of boiling water, would immediately perceive the danger and hop out. However, according to this metaphor, place the frog in a pot of cold water and gradually -- very slowly -- increase the temperature, and the frog would stay there until it boiled to death.
While untrue, I feel that the metaphor is still a useful one, because it reveals a lot about how people's belief systems evolve over time, and how the people holding these belief systems become unaware that they were either taught to them, or that they have over time come to regard the beliefs as fact. Take a belief that has arisen on this forum recently, that saying something less than flattering about one's spiritual teacher is not only questionable, but a Bad Thing, something that renders the speaker a Bad Person. Where could such a belief have come from? It's not as if anyone was born with it. It pretty much has to have been taught to them. And why does this belief center on "spiritual" teachers? If you heard of someone going a bit haywire and trying to demonize someone for saying less than flattering things about one of your university or high-school teachers, would you feel the same need or desire to get in their faces and call them names, or spend inordinate amounts of time trying to get others to see them as negatively as you do? I'm suggesting that this is learned behavior, and that the learning took place gradually, over many years or decades, and that as a result many have forgotten that is IS learned behavior, and that it was taught to them. They just accept the behavior as if it's not only natural and normal, it's high dharma or being a kind of spiritual warrior or following the will of God to bash those who dare to say something less than flatter- ing about the spiritual teacher *who taught them to believe in this meme*. Believers in the meme think nothing of considering a person who is -- bottom line -- nothing but a teacher, on the same level as any other teacher, as superhuman, or their Master. They make up bhaktified poems praising the teacher the same way that other seekers make up poems about God. They come to believe that the things the teacher said are synonymous with the word of God. Many develop an inability to distinguish the teacher *from* God. And they consider all of this natural and normal. It's this "natural and normal" thang that I think relates to the frog in a pot metaphor. People who have been taught this meme in my experience often lose touch with how they would be perceived by someone who doesn't believe it, someone who didn't experience the same year-after-year, decade-after-decade imprinting and (dare I say it) indoctrination they did. The "heat" was raised under their belief system so grad- ually, and over so long a period, that they have come to regard it as not only fact, but as something self- evident. Some will deny that it was, in fact, taught to them. And many, when their somewhat aberrant behavior is pointed out to them, are by that time so close to boiling that they are incapable of seeing themselves as other non-indoctrinated people might see them. They think these people are WRONG, or that they are "attacking" them personally by saying something less than flattering about the person who has taught them that saying anything less than flat- tering about him made them a Bad Person. I think it's a Good Thing to step back every so often from the belief systems and behaviors one assumes to be "natural and normal" and check oneself out in the mirror of Other People's Perceptions. These other people who hear your beliefs or watch your behavior and look upon them as the polar opposite of "natural and normal" just might be onto something. They might be warning you that you're starting to look a little pinkish, and that you might want to check the temper- ature of the belief system pot you're swimming in.
