Sunday, May 21, 2006

SENSE OR FAITH: Freedom or Bondage for Humankind, Part One

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F.: “Senseless” actions are those of persons who are not in touch with all six senses, who do not sense the oneness, and who are therefore driven by a false sense of separation. When one is being driven, he has no say about where he will go; he may as well be blindfolded since he has no real input regarding where he will end up at any given moment. Only the driver—whoever or whatever is driving him—will determine the course that is followed, will decide which turns are taken, which turns are not taken, and what all the destinations will be on his total journey. Such persons may as well be in total bondage, and—in fact—they are.

Anyone being driven by anything or anyone has no freedom at all. Accordingly, those being driven by “their faith” have no choice. To be living a life without the ability to make conscious choices and to be driven blindly and unquestioningly by the beliefs of others is to be in bondage. Such persons are so blind that they even speak of “their faith” when it is not their faith at all: it is the blind faith of others that they have now blindly assumed as their own. Their circumstances differ not at all from those who speak of “their beliefs.” Persons do not realize that they have no beliefs of their own because they have never listed every component of their belief systems and then sat in the quiet to weigh the veracity of each belief and then determined if that belief can be factually proved or not. He who believes in non-facts and non-truths is out of touch with Reality and is therefore insane. The only journey that need be undertaken by any person is the journey back to Reality, back to sanity. That only happens after discarding every belief that one had claimed to be his or hers when it was really theirs; it only happens when one is sane enough to be able to differentiate between true and false; it only happens when one respects established fact over blind faith. Only at the end of that “journey” to Full Realization can true freedom be had.

Of course, the concept of “freedom” on this planet and in its relativistic existence must always be accompanied with an asterisk. Even as the birds in the wild are free to come and go as they please—as are all animals, fish, and insects—none are so free that they do not have to work to sustain the consciousness. That said, all of those other life forms are far freer than humans today. The possibility exists, however, for mankind to be freed of the suffering that comes from belief in concepts and lies and misunderstandings. The opportunity lies in following a “path” back to the Original Understanding.

At one time, humans were as free as birds (and all other life forms) when humankind grasped the “Original Understanding.” Cave paintings dating to 30,000 B.C. show that the walls of some caverns actually served as the earliest form of “blackboards” used by “teachers” with their “students.” The teachings—possibly the earliest examples of satsangas—offered the understanding of the unicity of the beingness and the sun, of the beingness and conscious-energy. [Recall the pointer offered by the scientist Szent-Gyorgyi who noted that “what drives life is thus a little electric current, set up by the sunshine.”] Thousands and thousands of years later, a dualistic notion of a separate element—a supernatural element—crept into cave drawings as some persons had obviously begun to teach concepts involving a subject-object duality dealing with a “you” and a “creator of you.” Persons began to ignore the “Original Understanding,” and dualistic thinking (along with the concepts generated by such distortion) began to take hold and steal from humans whatever degree of freedom they had.

The “newer” teachings, rather than offering true freedom, created dependency instead, and dependency negates independence. Humans lost the freedom that only accompanies the understanding of the functioning of the totality via the Original Understanding. They had been led into the trap of dependency (and thus bondage) because they blindly accepted by faith the bastardized teachings of so-called “spiritual” (and later “religious”) guides who began to offer the Original Misunderstanding that has now evolved into the world’s religions and the world’s spiritual movements. Today, billions across the globe are walking about blindly, accepting the bastardized versions of the Original Understanding because the teachings adumbrate just enough of the Original Understanding that the religious dogma and spiritual tenets seem to resonant as “truth” at some level:

“You will not die.”
[True, since there is no “you” to die.]

“You can have everlasting peace.”
[Call it “peace” if you like, but when merged into the Absolute, there is no awareness at all. If the deep sleep, no-thought, no-awareness state is peaceful, then, yes, peace shall be.]

“Atonement is available to you.”
[Awareness of the “at-one-ment” is certainly available to the Realized, but only while manifested.]

“An eternal existence follows this life.”
[True to the extent that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.]

Meanwhile, 1/3 of the population of the earth who claim to be “Christians” focus on the early talks of Christ as he repeated the Jewish dogma that he was programmed with during his youth while they totally ignore the Advaita teachings he offered as an adult, post-Realization:

“No one shall ever see the kingdom of heaven—it is within.”

“Heaven and earth shall fade away” (as shall all images fade away when the consciousness unmanifests).

“When you speak of me, speak of me as I AM.”

“Before Abraham was, I AM.”

His followers today cling to the comments he made for audiences of “wet charcoal” and ignore the pointers he offered to those at the level of “dry charcoal” or “gunpowder.” Only to the Realized do his statements above make sense. As for the billions of non-Realized persons, they shall cling to his pre-Realization talks and shall continue to believe that their bodies shall resurrect, that their minds shall re-form, and that their personalities will be in tact for eternity. Such has been the case since the Original Misunderstanding replaced the Original Understanding. Does the Original Misunderstanding drive you? Are you living in the bondage of blind faith and dreaming that you are free, or have you grasped fully the Original Understanding that comes via Full Realization? Please enter the silence of contemplation. [To be continued]

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