“Realized, You know that You Are Light, that I Am Light, but employment can still happen, merely without attachment. Responsibilities can be met and challenges will be handled, but without emotional intoxication.”
F.: “I've mentioned five stages that can be transitioned if one takes The Seven-Step Journey to Reality. Persons are exposed to twenty years of programming and conditioning. In the Western cultures especially, the programming is to get, to accumulate. Afterwards, most persons pass the next twenty years in the second stage, consumed with the process of accumulating. Fears and desires mark their passage. Some few might ask, 'Who am I?' and move into the fourth stage as they begin a process of Self-Inquiry, investigation, and discovery. Most persons will never make that shift and will continue trying to accumulate until the relative existence ends. For the few who focus on the search for an answer to that critical question, some will complete all seven steps along the path and reach the fourth stage of realization. So what does the remainder of the relative existence look like for the realized? The fifth stage is AS IF Living. In the novel I’m writing, I’ve included these pointers [picks up papers and reads]:
De-accumulation is the mark of freedom from the early programming. After that, one can live AS IF, as if this life is the real but knowing it's not. The realized can then enjoy whatever remains of this relative existence, free for the first time—free of educational indoctrination, free of spiritual indoctrination, free of religious indoctrination, free of political indoctrination, free of economic indoctrination. Free. Independent. Period.
Let the exercises and concepts serve the purpose of bringing about an understanding of the differentiation in the true and the false, and then toss it all away and live simply and naturally, as if. To live AS IF is to know that THAT is all that is Real, but even the realized meet the requirements of a food-body and honor commitments made for the relative time that the consciousness is manifested. Realized, You know that You Are Light, that I Am Light, but employment can still happen, merely without attachment. Responsibilities can be met and challenges will be handled, but without emotional intoxication."
Q.: “As was the case when you were still employed to teach even after realization. You said that ‘teaching happened’ as opposed to ‘you taught’.”
F.: "Actually, I said, 'Teaching happened...or not.' Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. So it was."
[Continues reading] Know that all which is believed to be observable is ‘seen’ in the flickering images of the light that plays before our eyes. It is not the Real, any more than the actors flicking across the screen of your television are Really there. They are but images in the mind. So is all that is ‘seen.’ Be aware that the Unseen, the Unseeable, is the Real. Be done with worrying about the false images of this manifestation we call our ‘lives’ or ‘others’ or ‘self.’
Then, you’ll enjoy the present moment, the Eternal Now, as long as the consciousness is manifest. And you’ll have no expectations to meet nor any future rewards to long for nor any future punishments to spend a lifetime trying to avoid. Free of those, you are free of the control of those who dream up or pass along all those concepts that form the prison called ‘the mind’ that traps persons in fear, misery, depression, or all the addictive behaviors that follow those defects in an effort to try to escape them. As long as anyone tries to maintain a religious-spiritual image or role, he will be at the mercy of those who would manipulate him with religion or with spirituality. They’ll tell him that a religious person does this and a spiritual person does that, and to keep his religious or spiritual image, he’ll do what they say. Then, he’s theirs. For some, both states can serve a purpose, but both are to be transcended. They are but bridges that allow us to cross the degrees of separation. In one does not transcend those, he is vulnerable, and thus in fear, and frustrated eventually as a result of being controlled by others. There is no freedom, and thus no peace, living in ‘their’ world with ‘their’ mind doing the driving. After transitioning those steps, the journey can continue to full realization and then to the peace of living AS IF, as if any of the relative existence is real but knowing that it’s not." (From The Twice-Stolen Necklace Murders, subsequently published in 2003) Please enter the silence of contemplation.
