[Still responding to a stockpile of e-mails]:
FROM A SITE VISITOR: If you’re wrong and there is a God and judgment, what will be your fate?
F.: Hidden behind your question is your own belief in, and desire for, body-mind-personality continuity. Understand that there is no cure for “death” and you’ll not be concerned with illusions such as “the future,” and eternity for “you,” or any “judgment” either. My teacher said, “Only that person will visit this place whose virtue and sin have come to an end.”
FROM A SITE VISITOR: [Regarding the content of the Meditation CD]: The feelings received in the cave make all else prior in life extremely boring…to be in that state where the beingness crosses over to the non beingness …. Gerard in NY
F.: Indeed, many report that they experience the bliss of no-mindedness by using the CD. After the full understanding of the content of the CD happens, the seven steps from belief in the false “I” to understanding the functioning of the totality happens so even the “experiencer” disappears.
FROM A SITE VISITOR: You mention “Realization,” “awakening,” “liberation,” “Full Realization,” “Awareness,” “Enlightenment,” all sorts of terms that I thought meant the same. Do they or not? And what about self knowledge, self realization and self actualization? I’ve seen those too. Thank you. Greg
F.: Mainly for entertainment and somewhat for clarification among seekers, the terms will be explained this week. The words and terms you’ve listed don’t have the same meaning but can be used instead to point to the various stages that seekers “reach” if they travel the “path.”
First, understand that there is no real path and there is nowhere to go. You are that which you seek; however, for the sake of guiding seekers through the steps that must be transitioned, words must be used until no words are required.
Maharaj said that “there is no question of elevating to a higher level. Here it is only a question of understanding." Why specific steps? What does the “journey” that is a “non-journey” entail? He said, “…You should go back, reverse to the source” and “Follow the same path by which you came.” The words you mention are just “guideposts” or "markers" along the path.
So, begin by considering the message behind a metaphor for the way non-Realized persons function during the relative existence: they are asleep, dreaming that their dreams are real, dreaming that they are awake and doing things and talking in the dream and thinking that part is also real. Then they awake, so the discussion of your word list will begin with the term, “awakening.”
In spite of its “connotations of nobility and lofty height” among seekers and among people who called themselves “religious” or “spiritual,” the word is overrated as far as the entire “journey” is concerned.
Consider your own experience and contrast “awakening” with “Full Awakening.” Most go to bed at night and awake in the morning. If that is your pattern, reflect upon the stages you went through this morning. If an alarm clock sounded, it was the first step of your movement toward a fully conscious state, but being fully awake, aware and conscious did not manifest instantly.
After shutting off the alarm, for example, how aware were you after your awakening? 10%? 25%? You probably had to ask a few questions, mentally. What day is this? What time is it? Much had to happen before you could be called “100% awake,” yes? On “floyd’s” “journey,” there was a sense of skepticism early on.
For example, there was a nagging suspicion during those early years in “Sunday School” that the tales being told by Ms. Myrtle (the volunteer teacher for 6-10 year olds) were nonsense. The same assessment applied to words being spoken from the pulpit.
People walked for forty-year in a desert and survived when today most could not survive for a week? They got water from rocks by striking them with a magic rod? Food rained from the sky for 14000 days? A virgin got pregnant? Adam and Eve had two sons, one killed the other, but all humans came from those three? Who had sex with whom? The “Loving Father” killed everyone on the planet except for a few? He loves me but he will burn me in hell if I’m not good?
So the awakening happened like yours this morning…over a period of time. Some questions had to be asked and some answers had to be found, but it was all on a piecemeal basis during the long awakening process.
It was discovered that the tale told by Moses was stolen…that it had been around for 500 years…that an ancient pagan religion had been telling the tale for 500 years, complete with the magic rod and freed slaves and water from rocks and food from the sky.
It was learned that Christianity was not the first religion founded on the basis of a virgin birth but was the 23rd. All kinds of searching and seeking and researching led to debunking one magical tale after another. It was seen that all of the modern religions evolved from ancient pagan ones. It was seen that the god of Abraham was a product of rolling all of the ancient gods into one.
Then, just as the religious tales were debunked, more seeking and finding revealed more and more bogus tales that had no factual foundation but were rooted in ancient myths and superstitions. It was only after finding the Advaita Teachings and reading pointers and taking them into contemplation that a “Eureka” moment happened.
More and more began to be questioned, and more and more was found to be unsubstantiated. The awakening came one evening when it flashed into the consciousness that had undergone a long cleansing process: “I’ve been exposing a lie here, a mistaken belief there, a bogus tale here, a piece of fiction there, all of which is taken by the masses to be truth."
But that evening, the first stirrings of a real awakening flashed into consciousness: “Oh my gosh! I’ve focused on the lies told by politicians…the tall tales told by the religious people of all ages…the nonsense spouted by those who claim to be on an even higher plane because they are spiritual, not just religious.
“The focus has been too narrow…too limited. Oh my gosh! It’s all nonsense. It’s all BS!” That was the first moment of an actual awakening, yet that was still a beginner’s stage because immediately this flashed into the consciousness that was undergoing a re-purification process:
“OK, so now I see that it was all just so much fiction and fabrication. But if all of that was invention and falsehood, what is the truth?” Please enter into the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
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To order, go to http://floydhenderson.com/order.htm , complete all of the information, and in the “Special Message” box, type in the name of the collection or package(s) being ordered.
