MAHARAJ: “Lightment” vs. Enlightenment, Part “M”

Today's Considerations

Maharaj eventually discontinued the use of a Hindu / non-dual version of the Ultimate Medicine and discontinued the use of a spiritual / non-dual version of the Ultimate Medicine after he became determined to address the actual roots of the Ultimate Sickness, namely, the psychological, mind-centered roots of the Sickness.

He saw that the Sickness was transmitted from person to person (that is, from persona to persona) by way of faulty programming, distorted conditioning, bizarre domestication, duality-reinforcing acculturation, idiotic indoctrination, and bizarre brainwashing.

Via those processes, false personal identities become commonplace and are assumed to be real, and - because each personality has its own subconscious, hidden agendas - they each trigger emotional intoxication. The “realized” feel, but they do not emote. Emoting is the province of the masses.

Maharaj said, “Emotional reactions, born of ignorance or inadvertence, are never justified.” He warned that emotionalism, rooted as it is in the agendas of false identities, must go if one is to be in touch with reality, much less understand Reality. He explained, “Your emotional make-up” is “powerful” because it “affects your actions.”

How to end personality-inspired emotional intoxication? “Clear the mind,” Maharaj said. How? By reaching what he called a state of “zero concepts.” He said, “I have no  mind.” How could that be? Simple. He cast aside all beliefs, which is actually all that the content of the mind amounts to. In that regard, he emphasized that “All illness begins in the mind. Take care of the mind first, by tracing and eliminating all ideas and emotions.” He said, “It is the emotional link that perpetuates the bondage.”

Does being free of emotional intoxication call for tuning in and turning on and dropping out? Absolutely not. He said, “By all means attend to your duties. Action in which you are not emotionally involved does not cause suffering and will not bind you.” He clarified: “It is the emotional involvement, the pattern of likes and dislikes which we call character and temperament, that create the bondage.”

Sages that have reached certain levels of the non-dual understanding have long warned listeners about the impact of instability which is rooted in duality-driven emotional intoxication.

Two thousand and sixty years ago, the Roman leader Mark Antony used his understanding of the emotional intoxication which has always been prevalent among the masses to motivate an angry mob (which was initially sympathetic to the senators who killed Julius Caesar and who were initially hostile toward Antony because of his friendship with Caesar) to change their view in a matter of minutes, switching 180-degrees and turning their hatred toward the conspirators.

Within a period of twenty minutes or so, the masses shifted (1) from being in favor of Caesar and (2) being against those who killed Caesar to (3) being in favor of those who killed Caesar and to (4) being against Caesar and Caesar's friend Antony to (5) being in favor of Antony and Caesar and being (6) against the conspirators and ready to kill them.

Side note: Years ago while working in Western Europe as the owner-operator of a tour company with a mostly U.S. clientele, one of the places in Rome, Italy that was the most popular with those travelers was the rostrum in the ancient forum.

It was on that platform (shown as it appears nowadays as outlined in red below )

where the body of Julius Caesar was laid out for two funeral orations, the first by Gaius Cassius and the second by Mark Antony. At first the crowd was ready to kill Cassius and the other conspirators because the masses supported Caesar. Within minutes, Cassius was able to tap into their emotional intoxication and turn their opinions against Caesar, claiming that Caesar was intent upon becoming a king and enslaving the people. Thus when Antony took to the rostrum, the masses were ready to kill him because of his friendship with Caesar. Within minutes however, he turned the fickle masses against Cassius and the conspirators and the masses broke into riot, seeking out the conspirators to kill.

Such was the case among the masses then and such is still the case among the masses now who are always trapped - as Maharaj said - in their “ignorance and insanity” and who are driven by what Maharaj termed their “emotional reactions born of ignorance.”

So that was the case two thousand and sixty years ago.

And it was the case two thousand years ago when the Advaitin Yeshu’a (Jesus) said, “A dual-minded person is unstable in all ways.” (He could have as easily said, “A minded person is unstable in all ways.”) 

It was also that way over four hundred years ago when the Advaitin poet William Shakespeare wrote of the emotional intoxication of the Roman masses discussed above in his 1599 play Julius Caesar.

Nothing regarding mass ignorance and insanity changes because the nonsense handed down from one generation to the next does not change. The masses, as Maharaj said, are likely to remain trapped in their “ignorance and insanity,” so they continue to this day to be driven by what he characterized as their “emotional reactions born of ignorance.”

On Monday, this was noted:

Visitors to this site from South America, Europe, and the Far East are asking, “Floyd, what the heck is the deal with [Republican Presidential front-runner Donald] Trump?

Some outside the U.S. have asked what they referring to, so consider some "Trumpisms":

Recently, when an opponent suggested that Trump's small hands indicated something about the size of his male organ, the Republican debate being shown on national television networks disintegrated into a discussion and defense of penis size with Trump declaring:

"Look at those hands, are they small hands? And, [Republican rival Marco] Rubio referred to my hands: 'If they're small, something else must be small.' I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee."

and

“My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well-documented, are various other parts of my body.”

Earlier, he touted his sexual prowess with this comment: “You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.” 

And he said of his daughter:

“I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

And of the women on his TV show:

“All of the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.”

and

“I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.”

and 

When a female reporter at a debate asked him a question about his obviously-misogynistic attitudes, he dismissed her by suggesting that she must have been in her period.

Of course, such self-aggrandizement and transparent narcissism and blatant arrogance and misogynistic proclamations alone might have allowed him to usher in a new low in U.S. politics (no mean feat in itself) but equally rooted in his superciliousness and his dualistic sense of separation and being better-than are his comments about those of other races and religions:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists . . . and some, I assume, are good people.” 

“I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” 

And speaking of himself in the third person he said, “"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

In spite of all that, this man is being supported by about 40% of the Republican voters for the position of President of the United States.

So when asked “Floyd, what the heck is the deal with Trump?” why was the response “There is no deal with Trump?”

The full reply was: “There is no deal with Trump, just as there was no deal with Hitler or Mussolini. There is a deal with huge segments of the U.S. population who are trapped in astonishingly high levels of ignorance and insanity and are supporting him, just as astonishingly high levels of ignorance and insanity were commonplace among the German masses in the 1930’s and 1940’s and just all there were astonishingly high levels of ignorance and insanity in Italy during that same period.”

Yet non-dualists, be they Jesus or Shakespeare or Maharaj, have no monopoly on clear perspectives as opposed to ignorance-inspired, personality-based emotional intoxication. Part of an article published this week was sent here yesterday by a regular visitor to this site. He shared an excerpt from a piece in which the author also reached the same conclusion that the problems of humanity are rooted not in any single insane or ignorant leader but are rooted in the masses who are trapped in astonishingly high levels of ignorance and insanity and who are supporting such leaders.

The article, written by Jeff  Schweitzer and entitled “Trump Is the Symptom, Not the Disease,” arrived with this note from the site regular who forwarded the excerpt:

“Floyd, of course Maharaj was spot on when inviting persons to understand the real Sickness rather than focusing only on the symptoms. And your example about what is really behind Trump and other leaders who have exhibited their fascist mentality was also spot on. But Schweitzer shows that even if he never heard of Maharaj he also understands Nisargadatta’s take on the real problem with humanity. Schweitzer wrote this:

"The media frenzy surrounding Donald Trump has inverted the nature of our problem. That a demagogue will come along to foment dissent is no surprise; that his despicable views find such gleeful resonance with so many of our voters is the frightening story, not Trump. Trump is that ominous lump we first feel in our collective breast, an ill-omened warning of a more virulent disease about to attack our body politic. Trump's ascendancy is nothing more than the visible symptom of the underlying disease, a metastasizing cancer of ignorance and hate consuming our society. Trump is not scary - he is a buffoonish Mussolini with bad hair; but those who wish to vote for him are truly terrifying."

Schweitzer then quotes Hermann Goering – a 1930’s and 1940’s German politician, military leader, and leading member of the Nazi Party: “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Schweitzer is spot on. He would understand that the Ultimate Sickness is a “virulent disease”; he understands that “the ascendancy” of anyone trapped in a dualistic sense of “separate from” and “different from” and “better than” is “nothing more than the visible symptom of the underlying disease”; he understands “the cancer of ignorance and hate”; 

and he gets that those driven by the agendas of false identities and ego-states and egotism are not the problem. Millions and billions are now - and have been driven in the past - by the agendas of false identities and ego-states and egotism. The problems for humanity manifest, and suffering and misery manifest, when the masses - trapped as Maharaj noted in their hand-me-down ignorance and insanity” - elevate the most ignorant and most insane among them into positions of leadership and authority.

Such is the curse of the combination of (a) dualistic beliefs and (b) humans' minds. And that is the reason that widespread misery and suffering have never been caused by such tyrants as Genghis Khan or Caligula or Henry VIII or Ivan the Terrible or Robespierre or Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin or Pol Pot or Pinochet or Kim Jong Il. The cause has always been ignorance and insanity.

(For more on that, you may read without charge the book under “FREEBIES” above entitled “Good vs. Evil?” or “Ignorance, Insanity, and Stupidity?”)

But is it enough to hear the pointers and to see the darkness and then curse the darkness and praise the "lightment" or value "enlightenment"? No. Maharaj understood that it is far wiser to light a candle than to curse the darkness, and that is an action.

There will be no widespread freeing of persons on the planet from the curse of ignorance and insanity. That freedom can only come to one seeker at a time, and it can only come if one seeker at a time takes action. Maharaj would suggest, see the darkness but then light a candle; then “attend to your duties”; then, take the action necessary to be freed from the effects of faulty programming, distorted conditioning, bizarre domestication, duality-reinforcing acculturation, idiotic indoctrination, and bizarre brainwashing.

Take action, staying aware that (as Maharaj put it): “Action in which you are not emotionally involved does not cause suffering and will not bind you.”

The steps are there; taking the action of completing the steps is called for. If one reverses at least as far as the earlier "Child Ignorance Stage" or "Child No-Knowing State," freedom from learned ignorance awaits.

To be continued.

Please enter into 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.]