TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
One final point about effects will be offered before moving on to treatment.
You may have noted that, as with other illnesses, the symptoms and effects overlap. Consider these symptoms of the flu which doctors might use to diagnosis your illness in order to determine whether you have the flu or a common cold. The flu is marked by:
Severe aches in muscles and joints
Pain and tiredness around your eyes
Weakness / extreme fatigue
Warm, flushed skin and red, watery eyes
A headache
A dry cough
A sore throat and runny nose
Notice:
What is a symptom of the flu? Weakness and / or extreme fatigue.
And what is the effect of the flu? It makes you weak and fatigued.
The same similarities apply with the Ultimate Sickness.
TREATMENT
No competent doctor discusses treatment plans for what ails you without giving you some explanation about your sickness, how you contracted it (and, therefore, an understanding of what will be involved with avoiding it and its symptoms and effects in the future).
For those who would understand all involved with (a) why persons contract the Sickness and thus (b) what is required to address all of the issues involved, some additional passages from the eBook entitled 'THE ULTIMATE SICKNESS - THE ULTIMATE MEDICINE" will be shared.
From the chapter entitled
"THE PROPER ADMINISTRATION OF THE ULTIMATE MEDICINE"
The Ultimate Medicine - which is required for being free of all of the symptoms of the Ultimate Sickness - must be administered and taken in exact, clear-cut stages. There are three different sets of stages that seekers have used over the ages, so seekers actually have an option to choose the set that each feels can be most effective in her or his case.
To that end, there will be a discussion of the similarities and the differences in the four stages as outlined in the Eastern Tradition, the six stages of Maharaj's "journey," and the four stages that the author uses to offer the Ultimate Medicine to seekers who come his way.
The stages by which the Ultimate Medicine is administered to seekers will determine if they shall become willing to accept the "nectar of immortality" as the full and final dose of the Ultimate Medicine and if they shall become willing to live naturally for the remainder of the manifestation.
It is during the fourth of four stages that the Ultimate Medicine is administered (in seven specific steps) to address the Ultimate Sickness, so understand that all of the elements of the Ultimate Sickness (which were listed in "Chapter One" and which are addressed by heavy doses of the Ultimate Medicine) are not provided until Stage Four of the Four Stage "Journey" to wellness where movement along the actual "path" begins and where the exact steps are actually taken.
Difficult enough it is to find a teacher who even knows "the reverse path out" of the sickness, let alone that has the ability to actually teach "the way back" to seekers. To understand why so few become totally well, the reader will be invited to consider the other obstacles that must be surmounted and that compound the difficulty of finding a teacher that has the Ultimate Medicine and that understands the one and only proper way that the Medicine must be administered.
Even before reaching Stage Four where the entrance to the "path" is located and where one can begin the "journey," a seeker must move beyond (must "get past") forty years of programming, conditioning, acculturation, and domestication as well as the levels of faux seeking. All of that will be discussed in detail in the following chapters.
THE FOUR STAGES
The seven steps to Realization which are discussed in detail in the book FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE will be alluded to here, but those are really a sub-set of the "bigger picture," a part of the Four Stages:
Stage I: Being Programmed to Accumulate (Ages 1-20)
From very early on, children (especially in the West and in countries that are arrogantly labeled as being "developed") are programmed to "get," to accumulate.
For example,
"Get a good education so you can get a good job and then get a good mate and then get a nice home and fill it with nice things and have a lot of children and then buy the bigger house you will need for all of that and lease a storage building to hold the excess possessions that cannot fit in the house and then expose two cars worth $80,000 to nature's elements by parking them in the driveway because you have filled your garage with boxes contained $500 worth of junk."
Stage II. Accumulating (Ages 20-40)
Once persons who have been programmed to accumulate, asking for things throughout their childhood and teen years, they typically accelerate their effort to collect and gather and amass and add and hoard by the age of twenty. For the next two decades, they will try to massage the ego by buying and then showing off what they have bought. That will include things and places and even people who are willing to sell themselves. It should be obvious that such programming to accumulate will automatically block the receipt of any message that invites such persons to consider de-accumulation as a means to a lighter, happier existence.
By the age of forty, many reach the fork in the road that was mentioned in the last series, and one of two possibilities often occurs:
1. With some persons, a brief but lucid moment flashes across the otherwise blocked consciousness. A lucid interval interrupts the otherwise continuous talking in their sleep and walking about in their sleep, actions that mark the existence of the non-Realized after years and years of programming and conditioning and acculturation and domestication.
Some few might begin to ask, "Is this all there is?" or "Who Am I?" Some might express the wonderment in the fashion of an e-mail received several weeks ago with the inquiry, "What the hell is this all about?" and the admission that "I'm forty-two years old and would be considered 'a success' -- someone who has it all. But I still feel empty in spite of everything I've gained."
That "beginning to question" is one possibility. The other is . . .
2. No such moments or ponderings occur. That is the "fork in the road."
If no such questioning happens, the effort to accumulate and treat the inner emptiness with more stuff, more people, more sex, more drugs, etc. can continue to the end of the manifestation.
If such questioning or wondering happens, then "the search for something else" might begin. "The Seeker" role might be adopted. At that point, some enter Stage III. During this stage, some activities might legitimately move seekers along the "path," but most do not.
Stage III. The Forest Dweller Stage
PLEASE NOTE: The stages as identified in certain Hindu traditions differ slightly from the four stages taught here and in other books by the author. A visitor to Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's loft made reference to one of those stages:
Visitor: "Living the worldly life and being a person of the grihastha ashrama (The "Householder" stage of life) drudging, working, sleeping, laughing, mixing with people of all nationalities, is it possible just to be, and not identify oneself entirely with the body?"
In certain Hindu traditions, four successive ashramas or stages of life are sometimes prescribed: brahmacharya (celibate disciple), grihastha (householder and family man), vanaprastha (forest dweller) and sannyasa (wandering monk, renunciant). While Maharaj tried the approach as outlined in those stages, he found that they did not provide the answer he sought. They do not provide for natural abidance.
G.K. Damodara Row reported on Maharaj's "experience" with Stage III and showed why Maharaj abandoned that phase (or transcended that chapter in his "journey" to Full Realization):
". . . He took Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj as his Guru and clung to him till his Guru attained Mahasamadhi in 1936. The following year, Maruthi (later, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj) suddenly decided to abandon his family and also his prosperous business and wandered about aimlessly visiting temples and places of religious interest. His mind was restless. He travelled north, determined to spend his time in the Himalayas and never to return home. It is said that he walked barefoot in the Himalayan region.
"There he happened to meet a fellow-disciple of his Guru who told him that such wandering was of no avail and was really not necessary for a spiritual aspirant. He suggested that Maharaj should go back home and live an active life as a house holder. He advised selfless service to the poor which was far more meaningful.
"After deep thought Maruthi returned back to Bombay. He found all his shops taken away except one, but he was not in the least perturbed and got reconciled to the situation and calmly decided that one shop was enough for his worldly needs.
"After some time when his son was able to look after the shop, he retired to his small loft room in the house, which later became an ashram to the devotees, both Indian and foreign who came to him. He lived in this small room till his final Nirvana in 1981."
On the "journey" in "floyd's" case, the Forest Dweller Stage lasted twenty-five months. With few exceptions, time was spent on a daily basis in the forest, having gone there with the intent described by Henry David Thoreau who also participated in "Stage III activities" on Walden Pond:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
During that period of silent contemplation, many Stage III awarenesses came forth. Thoreau wrote,
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them"
and
"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after"
and
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."
When Thoreau transcended Stage III and returned to a home outside the village, his abidance there was still governed by the joy of independence that he came to understand during the Forest Dweller Stage. He wrote
"I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls."
The same applies here, though many will never understand exactly what Thoreau was referring to. So it is.
The Stage III discussion will continue tomorrow.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
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