MAHARAJ: “There’s No Such Thing As Peace of Mind,” Part Z

Today's Considerations

To review:

Though 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” – he did not ignore the role played by assigned and / or assumed personality identification in generating fighting and conflict and chaos (whether in a home, in an office, or on a global scale).

Why? For this simple reason: there can be no acceptance of personalities as actual identifications if there is no mind. If there is a mind, it will accept personalities as identifications. The two go hand-in-hand, so to speak.’’’

Some excerpts from the book There’s No Such Thing As Peace of Mind (There Is Only Peace If You Are Out Of Your Mind) have been shared.

In CHAPTER ELEVEN (entitled “MIND” and PERSONALITY: What Cultures Consider “Assets” Are Actually “Liabilities,” Part Four) the discussion of the mind-personality conundrum continues, and this is offered in that chapter:

Part of the solution to being free of the influence of personality is to understand why personality develops and to see how truly bizarre and perverted are its roots. Why did Maharaj teach that the relative problems of adulthood are rooted in the distortions of childhood? Genetic and body chemistry factors aside, personality develops primarily as children attempt to develop a strategy for coping with the circumstances that they face in their families of origin, circumstances that have become increasingly bizarre as the centuries have passed.

Those behavioral patterns developed during childhood (patterns which came about as a result of bizarre circumstances) then drive persons throughout the rest of their childhood and their adulthood as well, a fact which guarantees the continued cycling of lunacy and nonsense. Bizarre circumstances produce a bizarre personality which generates even more bizarre behavior and circumstances during adulthood. Subsequently, those adults will bear children and then another generation will face bizarre circumstances as a result of bizarre-thinking adults and the bizarre programming and conditioning and acculturation that they pass along. Such environments force another generation of children to develop defective personalities in an effort to cope with the defective circumstances presented by adults who are driven by defective minds and defective thoughts and defective personalities.

To understand that adults are being driven by the subconscious strategies of a child within makes clear why so much childish nonsense is being generated among adults. It explains why adults will childishly follow a leader as he guides them into the depths of hell-on-earth; it explains why adults will childishly and unquestioningly believe the most nonsensical claims about “the supernatural,” claims that have been dreamed up in the minds of controlling men dominated by their magical thinking; it explains why most of the 7 billion persons on the planet behave like children, no matter the chronological age of their bodies; it explains why persons erroneously think they have power and are making choices when they are choosing nothing but are being driven, powerlessly and unconsciously, by the personality / strategies of those remnants of a child within.

That is why the masses are sleepwalking: they are as children, children with warped minds and perverted personalities, who are walking about in adult-age bodies. To see the roots of personality and to see the foolishness that personality generates should inspire any person with any degree of wisdom at all to understand why the Teachings urge seekers to discard the distorted contents of the mind and to reject the influence of the always-defective personality.

The irony is that something that is an illusion (such as the personas that are generated by the circumstances described above) can impact the relative existence. Seekers are invited to realize how even a mirage can affect behavior if the mirage is taken to be real. An example used in the past involves the driver of a car moving along a road when a mirage appears, whereupon the driver jerks the steering wheel quickly (in order to avoid the mirage) and crashes into a tree. Though the mirage is certainly not real, the relative-existence effects of taking a mirage to be real are indisputable.

Eventually, persona-playing will always lead persons to personality disorders, to believing that their images are real, and to believing that they know why they do what they do and believing they know who they are when, in fact, they do not have the slightest clue. 

Here’s the way that novelist John D. MacDonald described that detachment from reality in the life of a man who is typical of all persons:

“The world is full of reasonably nice guys. They go through all the motions of home and family, but there is no genuine love or emotion involved. There is imitation. They are unconscious practicing hypocrites. They’re stunted in a way that they don’t and can't recognize. They go around with the unspoken, unrealized conviction that nobody else exists, really, except as bits of stage dressing in the life roles that they are playing. So wife and child and job and home are part of the image but without any deep involvement with anybody but self. But don’t fault him. He believes he is really in the midst of life and always has been. He doesn’t know any better, because he’s never known anything else. What a limited man believes is emotional reality is his emotional reality.”

Then an exchange between two characters follows that point:

“Doesn’t everybody fake a little in their own way?”

“Sure. And you’re aware of it when you do it, aren’t you?”

“Uncomfortably.”

“But he isn’t. And that’s the difference.”

That is (1) the description of the typical relative existence of any person being driven by strategies developed during childhood and accepting the limited identification with the body and the limited identification with “mind”-induced personas as identities. Persons (those identifying with their bodies and minds and personalities) are fakes, yet they haven’t a clue that they’re fakes. Most are self-absorbed (absorbed in their false selves, their false personalities) but they haven’t a clue. Nor do they have the slightest suspicion that they are suffering from “Seven Degrees of Separation From Reality” as a result of taking their false personalities and false beliefs and false concepts and false ideas to be truth.

For further consideration:

That is also a description of (2) an adult who is being driven by strategies and beliefs which have been used during adulthood to re-program him or her when what was really called for was complete de-programming. The fellow responded to yesterday is certain that he knows how to treat the illness being suffered by persons who join his group when, in fact, he does not have the slightest clue in regards to (a) the true nature of their real problem or (b) the proper method for treating the real problem. He is exactly like the character mentioned above who is unaware but is unaware that he is unaware.

Moreover, he is no different from the doctors who – for 33 years – did not have the slightest clue in regards to (a) the true nature of Jean Sharon Abbott's real problem or (b) the proper method for treating it. They, too, were exactly like the character mentioned above who is unaware but is unaware that he is unaware.

In Abbott’s case, the improper treatment which was offered to her left her debilitated; suffering; miserable; subjected to painful procedures and needless surgeries; and immobilized, all of which - instead of benefiting her - actually resulted in great harm to her (relatively speaking, of course).

Yet consider MacDonald’s point and see that there is no benefit to assigning “fault” to those playing the roles of “The Twelve Step Expert” or “The Medical Experts.” As MacDonald said: “They believe.” Ah, but there’s the rub.

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius is describing to Brutus how miserable life is in Rome under the rule of the dictator Caesar. Then he says to Brutus: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.” That is, the cause of our pain and misery and suffering is rooted less in "the universe" or in the actions of others but lies more in the fact that we are not questioning what is being imposed upon us and then taking the action to be free of that (and thereby free to find the real solution to our actual problem).

Yet when suffering from a condition which has led to total desperation and despair and hopelessness leads the sickest and most vulnerable to cross paths with those who erroneously tell that they have the proper diagnosis for their problem and that they have the solution for their problem, such vulnerable types can accept without question and with blind faith a misdiagnosis and can continue with an ineffective program for five or ten or twenty or thirty or thirty-three years or more.

It’s one thing for doctors to be totally wrong in a diagnosis and their choice of the treatment plan offered. It is something else entirely for someone to continue with a plan that is failing while putting a mental spin on the reality of one’s situation and not seeing that the plan is not really working at all and that one needs to take action in order to be free of what is being imposed upon them.

And it’s one thing for the members of a group to be totally wrong in a diagnosis and the choice of a treatment plan offered, but it is something else entirely for someone to continue with a plan that is failing while putting a mental spin on the reality of one’s situation and not seeing that the plan is not really working at all and that one needs to take action in order to be free of what is being imposed upon them.

And it’s one thing for 97% of all parents to impose their religion and their religious beliefs on their offspring while telling them that their dogma will provide every answer to every problem they will ever face, but it is something else entirely for the offspring to continue to believe that throughout adulthood without any study or questioning or considering at all a plan that is failing while they put a mental spin on the reality of their situations and refuse to see that the plan is not really working at all and that they need to take other actions in order to be free of what has been imposed upon them.

Whether the case involves persons in a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque who are trying to treat mental illness with dogma or involves persons in a group who are trying to treat mental illness with spirituality or involves persons in the medical profession who are misdiagnosing – and therefore mistreating – a patient with the wrong medicine and wrong procedures for what ails her or him, the lesson is the same:

in order to be healed, one’s sickness must be properly diagnosed and the treatment plan being offered must actually address the real sickness and must not be a plan that the would-be healer only believes is the proper method. In order for Jean Sharon Abbott to find a doctor who eventually understood what her problem was and to find a doctor who really understood what the proper treatment for her problem was, she had to finally give up on the advice being given by the first persons who erroneously told her what she needed.

She had to get the heck away from those people and then search elsewhere for the proper treatment and then find someone else who knew what the proper medicine was for her condition. And that proper medicine proved to be far more simple and far less painful and far more effective than the method she put up with for over thirty years.

She need not have been bed-ridden; she need not have undergone multiple surgeries; she need not have been trapped in a treatment plan which allowed her pain and misery and suffering to continue while giving her doctors a free pass to do whatever they came up with and then tolerate all that incompetence because of the belief that “their intentions were good” or because of the belief that “they must know what they are talking about” instead of wisely deciding, "You know, I’m going to go look around and get a second or third or fourth opinion and see if there might be some other means for treating what ails me and that is more effective.”

What she really needed foremost at that point was to ask: "Is this all there is? Is there not more than this that can really help me and stop my on-going misery? Hasn't it been insane to give them this long without saying, 'You've had your chance, and I am now seeing that you've blown it. You guys don't have a clue about what my real problem is so you don't know what you're talking about. I'm outta here, and I'm going to find an effective treatment elsewhere."

It was only after leaving that group of people which she had had such blind faith in that she was in a position to find an accurate diagnosis and to find an effective treatment plan and to find true healing. After leaving those who had misdiagnosed her and left her immobilized and left her stuck in their ineffective plan for over thirty years, it ended up that all she needed was a single pill, a pill which allowed her - after thirty+ years of having been rendered almost totally immobile – to complete a ten-mile hike just four months after she was given her new medication.

So note that Maharaj eventually came to understand that the relative problems of adulthood are rooted in the distortions of childhood (which is a psychologically-based problem, not a too-little dogma-problem and not a too-little-spirituality-problem).

For those who have been suffering or searching for ten or twenty or thirty years or more and who have normalized that process and who believe that they are receiving some benefits and who are far-too-patiently willing to continue with another thirty years of the same because it has not registered that what they are doing has fallen far short of healing them fully and setting them totally free, they will likely continue on the same path which they have been on.

They will likely allow whatever treatment they are using to continue to serve as an opiate (which only dulls their restiveness or their agitation or their anxieties or their worries or their tension or their distress or their boredom or their numbness) without addressing the real source of all that. So it is, but so it need not be.

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.]