Today's Considerations
28. Eventually, Maharaj abandoned the use and endorsement of all "holy" texts; he abandoned Hinduism; he abandoned the popular and traditional non-dual teaching methods; he abandoned spirituality; and he began to share his mastery of psychology (that is, his mastery of the functioning - and, especially, the dysfunctioning - of the mind).
He had long touted the shift to "The Child Ignorance Stage" to any seeker willing to heed his advice to "follow the path back out in the same manner by which you came in, except in reverse order." Here, that stage is pointed to with the term "The Child No-Knowing State."
The more he worked with seekers, the more he came to understand that the Ultimate Sickness is rooted not in "the heart" and not in "a soul" and not in "the spirit" but is rooted in the mind. He came to understand the mental dysfunctionalism in which humanity was trapped. He also came to understand (even without knowing any of the particular terms used nowadays by professionals who have been trained to work with the dysfunctional mind) that humanity's mental problems are rooted in the fact that humans engage in "modeling" or "merging with" and / or "mirroring" or "internalizing" or "mimicking" or "enmeshing with."
That is, humans model or mimic the words and behaviors of others, starting with children modeling and mimicking the adults they are around at home, in school, in religious venues, in their communities, and on television. Psychological merging and / or mirroring happen in cases when boundaries are not clearly defined as adults interact with children. In such cases, children never develop any sense of independence or any "sense of self" (much less any "sense of Self") and become a mirror image of a parent or guardian. Of course egotistical, love-starved adults love it when their children become exact clones of them.
Internalizing involves children adopting the personality types of the adults around them while also developing other personality styles in an effort to try to placate the adults in charge of the dysfunctional environments in which children are having to try to function and to which they are having to try to adapt.
Enmeshing takes the process of "creating a mind which will eventually be able to think only in a totally-distorted fashion" to a new height. As a result of the widespread lack of wisdom-based parenting skills, cross-generational bonds can form within a family. When that happens, children are not only trapped within the basic personality types that all children adopt to one degree or another; instead, via enmeshment, they also assume another identity and play the role of "A Surrogate Spouse" to the mother or father or to some other adult female or male who is present.
That does not suggest that some kind of sexual child abuse happened, only that mental child abuse happened. A result of enmeshment is that the Dependent Personality Disorder and the Co-Dependent Personality Disorder will take root and develop. Unless (a) extensive, effective professional counseling or (b) Full Realization happens, then that unhealthy, symbiotic relationship which comes into existence during the childhood years of many persons will continue to plague a person throughout her or his entire relative existence.
What Maharaj understood is that the masses suffer from the Ultimate Sickness and that they are passing that Mental Sickness down to their offspring, so if offspring are "modeling" or "merging with" and / or "mirroring" or "internalizing" or "mimicking" or "enmeshing with" adults who are suffering from the symptoms of the Ultimate Sickness (identified by Maharaj as "learned ignorance" and "stupidity" and "insanity" along with the other traits of the sickness, including a host of personality disorders which usually disintegrate into full-blown neuroses and psychoses) then the children will be guaranteed to exhibit those same symptoms as well.
Maharaj also saw that such children who grow into adulthood often find "new adults" or "role models" or "Big Name Teachers" (or preachers or priests or popes or rabbis or ayatollahs or politicians or gurus or monks or sponsors or life coaches or employers, ad infinitum) with whom they can also engage in "modeling" or "merging with" and / or "mirroring" or "internalizing" or "mimicking" or "enmeshing with."
As is the case here, Maharaj wanted no one modeling him. As here, seekers that sought someone to "model" or "abide as" were re-directed by him to their "inner guru" or their "inner resource" or "Their Original Nature." Before the Original Nature is understood, they are invited to abide as they did in "The Child Ignorance State" or as they did during "The Child No-Knowing Stage."
All of those options can begin to shift one away from the insanity which follows the modeling of ignorant and insane "others."
[Recently, one who intended to try to model the composite unity which he viewed as "floyd" or "Floyd" said, "I would like to pay for a one-hour Skype session to have you describe for me minute-by minute and hour-by-hour the way you live and what you do from morning to night each day." After the laughter here died down, he was told to save his money and to "find something else to model, such as 'Your Original Nature' or 'yourself,' during 'The Child No-Knowing Stage'."]
That said, the movement along the "path" here was facilitated by seeing how much more peaceful and happy and sane my life was when around Grandmother and while in the forest surrounding her cabin; thus, for a time, there was some "modeling" of her (or, more accurately, some witnessing of what she could reveal until an understanding of the Original Nature could manifest). To that end, another excerpt from the eBook below entitled YOUR ORIGINAL NATURE will be shared:
He had long touted the shift to "The Child Ignorance Stage" to any seeker willing to heed his advice to "follow the path back out in the same manner by which you came in, except in reverse order." Here, that stage is pointed to with the term "The Child No-Knowing State."
The more he worked with seekers, the more he came to understand that the Ultimate Sickness is rooted not in "the heart" and not in "a soul" and not in "the spirit" but is rooted in the mind. He came to understand the mental dysfunctionalism in which humanity was trapped. He also came to understand (even without knowing any of the particular terms used nowadays by professionals who have been trained to work with the dysfunctional mind) that humanity's mental problems are rooted in the fact that humans engage in "modeling" or "merging with" and / or "mirroring" or "internalizing" or "mimicking" or "enmeshing with."
That is, humans model or mimic the words and behaviors of others, starting with children modeling and mimicking the adults they are around at home, in school, in religious venues, in their communities, and on television. Psychological merging and / or mirroring happen in cases when boundaries are not clearly defined as adults interact with children. In such cases, children never develop any sense of independence or any "sense of self" (much less any "sense of Self") and become a mirror image of a parent or guardian. Of course egotistical, love-starved adults love it when their children become exact clones of them.
Internalizing involves children adopting the personality types of the adults around them while also developing other personality styles in an effort to try to placate the adults in charge of the dysfunctional environments in which children are having to try to function and to which they are having to try to adapt.
Enmeshing takes the process of "creating a mind which will eventually be able to think only in a totally-distorted fashion" to a new height. As a result of the widespread lack of wisdom-based parenting skills, cross-generational bonds can form within a family. When that happens, children are not only trapped within the basic personality types that all children adopt to one degree or another; instead, via enmeshment, they also assume another identity and play the role of "A Surrogate Spouse" to the mother or father or to some other adult female or male who is present.
That does not suggest that some kind of sexual child abuse happened, only that mental child abuse happened. A result of enmeshment is that the Dependent Personality Disorder and the Co-Dependent Personality Disorder will take root and develop. Unless (a) extensive, effective professional counseling or (b) Full Realization happens, then that unhealthy, symbiotic relationship which comes into existence during the childhood years of many persons will continue to plague a person throughout her or his entire relative existence.
What Maharaj understood is that the masses suffer from the Ultimate Sickness and that they are passing that Mental Sickness down to their offspring, so if offspring are "modeling" or "merging with" and / or "mirroring" or "internalizing" or "mimicking" or "enmeshing with" adults who are suffering from the symptoms of the Ultimate Sickness (identified by Maharaj as "learned ignorance" and "stupidity" and "insanity" along with the other traits of the sickness, including a host of personality disorders which usually disintegrate into full-blown neuroses and psychoses) then the children will be guaranteed to exhibit those same symptoms as well.
Maharaj also saw that such children who grow into adulthood often find "new adults" or "role models" or "Big Name Teachers" (or preachers or priests or popes or rabbis or ayatollahs or politicians or gurus or monks or sponsors or life coaches or employers, ad infinitum) with whom they can also engage in "modeling" or "merging with" and / or "mirroring" or "internalizing" or "mimicking" or "enmeshing with."
As is the case here, Maharaj wanted no one modeling him. As here, seekers that sought someone to "model" or "abide as" were re-directed by him to their "inner guru" or their "inner resource" or "Their Original Nature." Before the Original Nature is understood, they are invited to abide as they did in "The Child Ignorance State" or as they did during "The Child No-Knowing Stage."
All of those options can begin to shift one away from the insanity which follows the modeling of ignorant and insane "others."
[Recently, one who intended to try to model the composite unity which he viewed as "floyd" or "Floyd" said, "I would like to pay for a one-hour Skype session to have you describe for me minute-by minute and hour-by-hour the way you live and what you do from morning to night each day." After the laughter here died down, he was told to save his money and to "find something else to model, such as 'Your Original Nature' or 'yourself,' during 'The Child No-Knowing Stage'."]
That said, the movement along the "path" here was facilitated by seeing how much more peaceful and happy and sane my life was when around Grandmother and while in the forest surrounding her cabin; thus, for a time, there was some "modeling" of her (or, more accurately, some witnessing of what she could reveal until an understanding of the Original Nature could manifest). To that end, another excerpt from the eBook below entitled YOUR ORIGINAL NATURE will be shared:
WHAT WAS REVEALED WHEN A GRANDMOTHER, ABIDING AS HER ORIGINAL NATURE, WAS OBSERVED
Just as noise destroys silence, silence breeds
silence. Afterwards, silence breeds peace, and silence and peace can become a
family's legacy.
The family of that speck of consciousness that would be called
"Grandmother" by "floyd" would pass down to her not only
their propensity for the silence and for peace but also their "philosophical"
teachings and their healing methods as well. She would eventually function as "a medicine woman,"
visited regularly by the infirmed, yet her curative abilities were not limited
to the physical.
Time with her could heal the troubled “mind” and emotions as well. With
Grandmother, the ancient teachings that found their way from Asia and India
to what would later be called "North, Central, and South America" were taught at times by word but were transferred more often in the silence of
example.
It was in her small cabin which had been built with secondhand boards and
secondhand nails and which sat on a knoll in a dense and isolated forest where I spent days and weeks at a time during holidays and where I spent all
three months of every childhood summer.
The trips by bus started early in the morning in the city and
ended late at night with the bus driver dropping me and my small suitcase
off alongside a remote stretch of road. The last, shortest part of the journey in the darkness was completed by walking up a hill to her cabin. No part of the trips ever
generated any fear, so powerful was the anticipation of the treats and retreat
that awaited in the forest.
[Yes, in the early 50's, a five-year-old could take a ride alone on a city's public transportation system in an electric trolley car and could visit every part of town. And the same child could take a bus from one city to another or, in the case of my trips, from the westernmost part of one state into the easternmost part of another.]
No matter how late my night-time arrivals,
Grandmother always had a fire going in her wood-burning stove, ready to prepare a slightly-heated and regularly-stirred pot of
fresh, unprocessed milk (which had been drawn that morning from a neighbor's cow) and ready to prepare two fresh cups of
hot chocolate for us to use in celebrating the beginning of my visit.
The home at first seemed to a young male from the city as if it left
Grandmother "lacking":
no air conditioning; no heat except for that small, wood-burning stove; no
indoor plumbing so no indoor bathroom or running water; no radio; no
television; no electricity . . . yet it would be seen by the age of seven or eight or maybe even earlier (and
would be seen far more clearly as an adult) that there was everything . . . everything that could possibly be required. A sense of "lacking" anything she never knew.
The orange-yellow
glow given off at night as the wicks of her lanterns drew the oil up to the
fire inside the globes and then cast shadows on the walls as we moved about
gave the house a surreal but charmingly romantic flavor.
Because she experienced no sense of "lacking" or "unmet
desires," she never once was heard to complain about plowing a one-acre
garden with a mule several times a year or about having to draw water from a
well or about having to gather wood or about having to build a fire outside
each morning under a large, black, cast-iron kettle in order to heat her water or about
washing clothes in a small tub while using homemade soap and a scrub board.
Never did she complain about the multi-mile walk to the nearest store or about
having to provide year-round food and shelter and healthcare for a mule. Never
did she complain about the red dust occasionally blown into her eyes from the
lane that paralleled her land.
Never did she complain about "being alone" in a very dense forest for
the last thirty years after Grandfather had died at the age of forty from a
ruptured appendix and after all of the children had married and moved away.
To the contrary, she was free of fear and free of desire, functioning as a
minimalist who was completely content, even as a forever-present, always-welcomed sense of "less-ness" marked each
aspect of her existence. She never had to "de-accumulate" because she
had never accumulated to begin with. All efforts by her children to provide
"the basic amenities" or "a nicer house" were refused, up until her very last years when
she could no longer draw water or chop wood or walk to town for lantern oil and
a few essential groceries. At the end of that manifestation, she took mahasamadhi in the same cabin in which she had lived for over nine decades.
Though "nihilism" would not have been among the words in her
vocabulary, in practice she lived in what dualists would have called "a
moral fashion," needing neither a defined, moral code nor an organized
religion nor a holy book nor a holy man to guide her nor dogma to define for her what
is "good" and what is "bad." (To use the words of Maharaj, she was beyond "both sin and virtue.")
Though she provided healing for many, she never did so to attain a sense of
"self"-value or to give "meaning" to "her life";
and what happened on any given day at any given time was never a result of
"preferences" or "intentions." Looking back later, it was seen that everything that
happened with Grandmother happened spontaneously or not at all.
She knew no dependency; she knew no time; she honored no days with dualistic notions about some days being
"more important" or "different from" or "holier" than
others; she honored no person with dualistic notions about being
"more important" or "different from" or "holier" than
others; she never looked for people to whom she could offer help in order to (selfishly) inspire them to like or even love her, but she did
share her skills and understanding with all who came in search of care and healing;
she was attuned to the cycles of the seasons but lived only in the moment; she
was at-one with all. Her manifestation spanned from the end of one century and into the next, so she obviously
cared for her body without caring about her body.
Dualists who knew her would swear that she loved a spouse unconditionally during her life's season for
love; that she bred during the seasons for breeding; that she gave birth during
the seasons for birthing; that she nurtured the young during the seasons for nurturing;
and that she lived alone during her many final seasons in a state of unconditional happiness. But she never saw those
"demarcations" or any others. She believed in no timelines. She understood that which
does cycle, and she understood what most assuredly does not.
Looking back, it is obvious that she has none of the delusions that cause many to confuse three-dimensional things or three-dimensional "beings" with the Real. And it is obvious that the abidance of that composite unity and a speck of conscious-awareness called "Grandmother" always happened as the Original Nature.
To be continued.
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
