TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
The causes, symptoms, effects, and aspects of the Ultimate Sickness have been discussed. Next, the treatment will be discussed.
As has been noted, the proper treatment for any sickness cannot be administered unless the sickness is first diagnosed properly.
Some regular visitors to this site know that I spent as many of my early days as possible away from the inner city, slum-like environment in my hometown in Louisiana and with my Cherokee grandmother in her isolated cabin situated in the piney woods of East Texas.
One of my chores each day was to go to the well behind the house and lower the bucket into the cool water below by using a pulley.
It was the morning after I had chased two tomato-stealing fellows out of Grandmother's garden that my water-drawing chore faced an obstacle: someone (and my guess was that it was most likely the tomato thieves) had come during the night and tied knots every twelve inches or so in the rope between the pulley and the end of the rope, rendering the rope useless since the knots prevented the rope from moving through the pulley.
I spent a considerable amount of time removing all of the knots which had been tied very tightly into the rope.
Compare the knotted rope to a mind after a person has been programmed, conditioned, acculturated, domesticated, indoctrinated, and brainwashed, and consider that those with knotted mind might be deemed to be "knot heads."
The Urban Dictionary defines "knot head" as
(A) Any person that is unwilling to listen to, learn from and heed the counsel and the wisdom of someone who has gone before them and foresees the pain, consequences and heartache that lie ahead in the path the person has chosen; or,
(B) someone who only learns by suffering and / or sad experience; or,
(C) a person who has trouble thinking in a logical progression, usually caused by a profound amount of circular reasoning tying their brain into a knot; or,
(D) a dumb ass.
The "knot" which Maharaj spoke of - saying that it needed to be "cut" was "the knot of self-identification":
"What makes you come here is your being dis-pleased with your life as you know it, the life of your body and mind. You may try to improve them, through controlling and
bending them to an ideal, or you may cut the knot of self-identification altogether and look at your body and mind as something that happens without committing you in any way."
If you consider and understand the continuum along which the unmanifested (un-trapped) awareness-energy can manifest as conscious-energy within a confined (trapped) human space, you could see the seven steps which Maharaj spoke of but which he never enumerated 1 though 7.
The only step farther removed from the previously-unadulterated awareness / consciousness than mind identification is body identification.
Add in personality identification and the stage is set for the Ultimate Sickness to settle into the part of the human brain which can store and recall information - that is, "the mind" - which is the seat of the Sickness . . . the seat of the knots which bind.
See, a piece of rope can be used to assist humanity during the manifestation, the way that the rope holding the bucket above Grandmother's well allowed me to retrieve each day the life-sustaining water from below.
That rope facilitated in freeing us from thirst, and even worse, relatively speaking. But that same piece of rope was useless when cursed with knots; furthermore, that same piece of rope could be used to bind persons if wrapped about them and tied off with knots.
That is exactly what happens when a mind becomes knotted up with ideas, concepts, perceptions / misperceptions, warped perspectives, distortions, and delusions (a.k.a., "beliefs") and turns programmed, conditioned, domesticated, acculturated, indoctrinated, and brainwashed persons into "knot heads."
A person with the Ultimate Sickness will behave as a knot head, or - as Maharaj put it - will be completely driven by "ignorance, stupidity, and insanity."
The person or persons who knotted up Grandmother's rope had obviously placed each knot in the rope and then pulled the rope in opposite directions to insure that the knot was tightened to such a degree that undoing it would be no easy task. The treatment for Grandmother's knotted rope involved forcing two screwdrivers into the knot and twisting them in opposite directions in order to painstakingly un-do each knot.
The treatment for the Ultimate Sickness is similar in that it is no easy task to un-do the knots which have been twisted so tightly into the minds of the masses via twisted programming, conditioning, etc. Those knots include Maharaj's "knots of self-identification" and his knots of "ignorance and stupidity and insanity"; moreover, the greatest obstacles to undoing the knotted mess of the minds of those with the Ultimate Sickness is that knotted minds see all in a way that is the 180-degree opposite of reality.
A twisted, knotted mind rejects all invitations to partake of the Ultimate Medicine because such a mind cannot look at itself and see the "ignorance and stupidity and insanity" stored therein; instead, it thinks it sees "wisdom, intelligence, and sanity."
That is why Maharaj at first said that only "1 in 100,000" will receive the Ultimate Medicine and be healed. Later, amended that guesstimate to only "1 in a million"; and even later he amended that to "1 in 10 million." Why? Because he who knows not that he is sick / Sick will not seek a cure.
But consider: if one were diagnosed with a fatal disease and told that the odds were "1 in 10 million" that she or he could be cured but that "some have been cured by a little-known method we have available," such a person would likely say, "Well, Doc, let's give it a try." That is the invitation from the "realized teacher" that knows a way that worked for the teacher and that worked for some Sick persons whose paths crossed with that of the teacher.
Now even the wisest seeker of a cure might have looked in other venues and might have been convinced to try the plan(s) of certain practitioners who claim to know an effective treatment.
Maybe some of those practitioners are charlatans who know they are selling a scam; others might truly believe they have found a cure. Note that "maharaj" was among the latter for years; so was "floyd." Both had been led to believe that religion could offer some sort of cure; both witnessed what seemed to be some "improvement"; but both found eventually that religion did not work to cure the Ultimate Sickness.
Next, both came to believe that spirituality could address the symptoms of the Sickness; both witnessed what seemed to be some "improvement"; but both found eventually that spirituality did not work to cure the Ultimate Sickness.
In the end, both came to see that the Ultimate Sickness is not a too-little dogma sickness; both came to see that the Ultimate Sickness is not a sickness rooted in a "spiritual malady"; and both came to see that the Ultimate Sickness is a mind sickness and that the treatment must include removal of all of the knots in the minds of the person suffering from the Sickness.
Just as the mind does not need more knots added in an effort to untangle the mess that the programmed and conditioned mind is, so too is the case here:
it was finally understood that all of those charlatans and practitioners were adding more and more ideas, concepts, perceptions / misperceptions, warped perspectives, distortions, and delusions (a.k.a., "beliefs") to the minds of their followers who were suffering specifically because of the ideas, concepts, perceptions / misperceptions, warped perspectives, distortions, and delusions (a.k.a., "beliefs") which had been placed into their minds.
At that point it became clear that the Medicine would have to be something which removed the knots, not something which added more knots. It became clear that those with the Sickness did not need more teaching but actually needed to be un-taught and that those with the Sickness did not need to learn more and more and more but actually needed to un-learn all. The last thing Grandmother's roped needed was more knots.
Since that understanding came, the consideration offered to seekers has been:
"Is it possible that everything that you have ever been told or taught or now believe is false?"
If so, then one can reject all that is false, setting the stage to understand truth and to see reality (and "Reality") and thereafter be free. And only if free can one be happy. Only an "ignorant or stupid or insane" prisoner would be happy while being imprisoned.
Maharaj said at one point that "realization is simply about being freed of ignorance." The seat of ignorance is the mind - the "knotted mind." That being the case, then the effective treatment for the Sickness must focus on freeing the mind of all of the knots into which it has been twisted.
Maharaj said that "the ideas of movement, of restlessness, of pleasure and pain are all
in the mind," in the knotted mind. The knotted mind will prevent the one dying of thirst to refuse to drink the water of life.
Maharaj said: "Just as the taste of salt pervades the great ocean and every single drop of sea-water carries the same flavour, so every experience gives me the touch of reality, the ever fresh realization of my own being."
Want to taste the water of life, which is the water that is free of impurities, the kind of impurities which have contaminated the mind as a result of having been filled with nonsense via programming, conditioning, etc.?
Maharaj advised: "The same water is in all the wells. You just draw from the nearest. In
my case the water is within me and I am the water."
Want that pure water?
At Grandmother's house one morning, I had to un-knot the rope first before I could lower the bucket and draw up the pure water which sustained us. The same applies to the knotted mind.
Additionally, only the pure water can offer that sustenance. Only the pure truth, the unblocked consciousness, can cure the Ultimate Sickness.
Maharaj: "From a pure source only pure water will flow. I am not concerned with people’s desires and fears. I am in tune with facts, not with opinions."
The treatment relies on facts, not opinions; on truth, not untruths; on un-learning, not learning more.
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
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