Today's Considerations
Maharaj came to understand that the main problems of
humanity center in the mind, not in “a bad heart” or in “a sick soul” or in a “malady-plagued
spirit,” and wise it would be for all to understand that since
a. there is no soul to treat and since
b. there is no such illness as a “spiritual malady” and since
c. there has been no evidence of success among those who have tried for
thousands of years to treat “bad hearts and sick souls and sick spirits” with
religion and for nearly as long with spirituality and since
d. there has been for eighty years “a program” which claims to
be “spiritual, not religious” (though it is really a combination of both) and
since that program internationally has a 97-98% failure rate (per the findings of an international, multi-year, $20,000,000
study conducted jointly by a top U.S. university and the U.S. Government).
It is also wise to understand that the problems of humanity are
not centered in “a bad heart” or in “a sick soul” or in a “malady-plagued
spirit” because that awareness allows persons to continue to search for the true
source of their problems and allows some to realize that humanity’s problems are rooted
in mental sickness - in the widespread mental illnesses - which Maharaj saw were rampant
then and which are even more rampant now and which can often be treated effectively if persons are
properly diagnosed and if persons understand the true nature of what is behind humankind’s
problem and if persons heartily seek the proper, effective treatment.
Because of that realization, Maharaj abandoned the use of dogma
and spiritual exercises to treat the true source of the Ultimate Sickness and eventually
urged seekers to focus on finding the proper treatment for the true source (which he
eventually identified as the real problem: the mind and its content).
From yesterday:
The invitation offered here is to be rid of the mind
completely (and that proved really easy to do in the end), finally able to profess - as Maharaj did in the end - that "I have
no mind . . . ."
And that is “easy”? Yes. How? All ideas, notions, concepts,
etc. which are stored in the mind can be summarized in one term: “your beliefs.”
How to be rid of the mind then? Easy: just give up every belief.
Maharaj often spoke about how "simple" the process is, yet the
“path” he followed in order to arrive at that conclusion was not a simple “path.” It was
a long and winding and circuitous route which he took.
It has also been noted that the case here was the case with
most seekers who find that their “journey” - if reviewed objectively - has more
often than not been a long and arduous one. But why?
For the answer, consider the case of Jean Sharon Abbott from
Plymouth, Minnesota who spent thirty years fighting cerebral palsy and suffering and undergoing
operations until it was discovered that she has been misdiagnosed and that
almost all of her symptoms could be cured with just one pill.
At the age of four she had been told that she had spastic diplegia,
a form of cerebral palsy. Then, after three decades of suffering from muscle
spasms and weakness and near immobility as well as undergoing many painful
surgical procedures, she learned at the age of thirty-three that she did not
have cerebral palsy at all but actually had dopa-responsive dystonia (DRD) - a
rare, yet treatable, muscle disorder.
Jean, who was nearly immobile for thirty years, went on a
ten-mile hike just four months after she was given her new medication.
In the U.S. alone, there are an admitted twelve million cases of
medical misdiagnoses per year. Some claim that number is but a fraction of the actual
total. Last year, it was admitted that 400,000 people died in hospitals while under “professional
medical care” as a result of preventable mistakes and misdiagnoses.
Even without access to such statistics, Maharaj (by trial-and-error
and by his own experiences and by his own honest and objective observation) came to see that the same kind
of misdiagnosis was pervasive among those teachers and gurus and authors and speakers and sponsors and others who were offering a treatment for the Ultimate
Sickness.
I have dealt with people whose experience has been just like
Jean Sharon Abbott’s, although most of them never realize that fact. Who has been “A
Seeker” for over thirty years yet is still seeking now? Who has been in “the program”
for over thirty years but keeps going back? Who has remained faithful to the
dogma of their parents and claim that "it helps them so much" although they
remain trapped in fear and anxiety and resentment and anger and bear ill will
for people who think or talk or behave in ways that are different from the way that they think and talk and behave?
How many have been molested in the venues where those people have
been seeking, be the venue a church or a counselor’s office or the hallway of a guru's house, a guru
who had worked with Maharaj when he was alive and who began receiving visitors
in his home and who sexually harassed and molested female visitors? And how many who have been molested or who have never had their real illness treated properly in those venues have nevertheless continued to seek
in the same or similar venues?
Does that not scream: “Don’t you see that your problem is not
in your soul or your spirit but is obviously in your mind instead!”
If anyone has diagnosed you and told
you that your problem involves “a bad heart” or “a sick soul” or a “malady-plagued
spirit” or "your impure condition" or that “you need to stop sinning and to be virtuous” or that “you're being influenced
by the evil forces in the world” or that “you're being possessed or driven by demons or a devil”
etc., etc., etc., is it possible that they have misdiagnosed you and thereby trapped you in the same way that Jean Sharon Abbott was
trapped by those who were also sure that they knew what was wrong with her and what
she needed when, in fact, that didn’t have a damn clue about what treatment she actually
needed?
Here, that cannot happen because here, there is an invitation
to consider certain facts which may not
have been considered before and then determine for yourself if what you are
doing is working or if you might need to look outside the box you were put in
decades ago.
Here, there is no “one” with any belief, so there cannot be
any “one” here who wants you to believe what he believes. The space between the
ears here is a "belief-free zone," and that freedom must manifest first
if total freedom is ever to come.
The difference in a purely non-dual / Nisargan invitation
vs.
the message offered by all other non-dual teaching methods and by all religions
and by all cults and other such programs and by all philosophies and by all ideologies
is that you
will not hear anyone here asking you to learn more.
(That fellow visiting the U.S. from Rome, while being totally
trapped in his own religion-based ego-states, did have enough clarity to offer a warning last week against
what he called “ideological Christians” who are excessively “rigid” and
who are handicapped by their “obsession with gays, abortion and birth control.” Of course, the same applies to all ideologists and to all trapped in the Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder.)
It was “the later Maharaj” – the one who advised seekers to “stop
reading I AM THAT” and to “ignore the earlier talks and listen to the later
talks” – who came to understand that persons do not need to learn more dogma and
do not need to engage in more spiritual exercises in order to be treated for what ails them . . . and for what ails almost all humans. After he
finally arrived at a proper diagnosis of the Ultimate Sickness and its causes, Maharaj recommended what is also now recommend here:
the invitation here on this site for more than a decade has
been to “find one that can un-teach you, not one who wants to teach you more”
and to “un-learn it all” instead of learning more and more and more.
The way that Maharaj put it was that humanity is trapped in "learned ignorance and insanity" and, in order to treat that properly and to be freed from being driven by ignorance and insanity, then “just give up" all you've been doing and “reach a state of zero concepts” and “have no mind”
and then “abide naturally.”
He also made clear that there are two things which cannot possibly co-exist: "peace" and "a mind."
Want peace? No mind.
Want mind? No peace.
To be continued.
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
[NOTE:
The four most recent posts follow. You may access all of the posts in
this series and in the previous series and several thousand other posts as well by clicking on the links in the "Recent Posts and Archives" section.]
