TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
SYMPTOMS (Continued)
To review the symptoms of the Ultimate Sickness which are displayed by those suffering from the illness, these have been discussed so far:
1. The Ultimate Sickness is a mental sickness, so those with the illness display many psychological problems.
2. Those with the Sickness lose the ability to question the totally false hand-me-down concepts which have been passed along to them.
3. They believe in ancient fictional myths and ignorant superstitions and that leads to their present-day beliefs in fictional and ignorant concepts.
4. They show a susceptibility to believing lies.
5. Why? They cannot distinguish between the true and the false.
6. They display evidence of distorted thinking and delusions.
7. They are willingness to accept without question the nonsense taught via programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing, and indoctrination.
8. They are often angry, they devalue peace, they can have a tendency toward violence, they believe that they have the right to interfere, intervene, raid, control, and conquer.
9. They feel superior . . . socially, mentally, racially, etc.
10. They have a sense of entitlement.
11. They are often control freaks, but some hide that with their passive-aggressive mode of operating.
12. They have a dualistic sense of "separate from" and "apart from, rather than a part of"; a sense of "different-from-ment" which feeds the belief in "better-than-ment"; and a sense of arrogance and conceit and superiority and egotism and self-importance, all of which the non-dual teachings reject.
13. According to Maharaj, they display all three key symptoms of the Ultimate Sickness are "ignorance, stupidity, and insanity."
14. They may be intelligent or not, but that fact does not prevent the manifestation of "ignorance, stupidity, and insanity" in the least.
15. They are often blindly loyal to "authority figures" and exercise blind faith which leads them to accept without question whatever anyone in authority says.
16. Those with the Ultimate Sickness are often noisy and talk to excess. [Westerners love to brag about their "freedom of speech." In the past, Easterners enjoyed "freedom from speech", though as they have become more westernized, that preference seems to be falling away].
17. Identified with a host of ego-states / false identifications, they become driven by the fears and desires of the multiple personalities which they have been assigned or which they have assumed.
18. They display a propensity for substituting unnatural thinking and magical / supernatural thinking for simply seeing all naturally and just as it is.
19. They emote rather than feel and witness.
20. They lack empathy and can be sociopathic and / or psychopathic.
And today:
#21: They are usually emotionally intoxicated.
ASPECTS
That symptom of being emotionally intoxicated brings us to a discussion of the key aspects of the Sickness, "aspect" being defined simply as "a particular part or feature of something."
A key aspect of the Ultimate Sickness is that those with the Sickness display the same traits and behaviors as persons with the Addictive Personality Disorder and anyone else who is intoxicated.
For nearly thirty-seven years of his life, a man named Bill Wilson wrote a great deal, and had a lot to say as well, about addiction. The fact that he was interested in, and highly influenced by, Eastern philosophy was often evidenced. After some years of working with addicts, he reported that his experiences had shown him that those with addictions all suffer from four levels or types of intoxication.
He identified those as:
1. physical intoxication
2. mental intoxication
3. spiritual intoxication (that type showing up in persons in treatment programs or step groups who are programmed to believe that spiritual giantism is a treatment for addiction, a belief which he contributed to early on but which he disputed later on)
and
4. emotional intoxication.
Thus, he said, there are four levels of sobriety which all should seek:
1. physical sobriety (what he saw as "the lowest" and least significant level of sobriety)
2. mental sobriety (which comes if persons become freed from their distorted thinking and their delusions and illusions and their inability "to differentiate between true and false")
3. spiritual sobriety (that is, being freed from assuming and playing the role of "The Super Religious One" and / or "The Spiritual Giant")
and
4. emotional sobriety.
Emotional sobriety he described as the highest level of sobriety and the one which only a very few will ever reach. [Remember that those with the Ultimate Sickness emote rather than feel.] He witnessed that most of the addicts he worked with might have been physically sober but that few would ever reach the "higher" states of mental, spiritual, and emotional sobriety.
So it is with those who have the Ultimate Sickness, which is prevalent among all addicts of the type whom Wilson worked with for decades and which is prevalent among the masses all around the globe.
As has been noted here many times over the years, 99.99%+ of all persons on planet earth have the Addictive Personality Disorder and display evidence of the two basic addictions which have been commonplace among humans, likely for millions of years:
The primary addiction which almost all humans share is an addiction to control. They want to control the weather (where hurricane go and do not go, for example); they want to control the members of their family; they want to control people in nearby regions; they want to control people in faraway lands, etc., etc., etc.
The secondary addiction is an addiction to power (or some other-worldly "Power" or "Powers") in order to be able to control.
Maharaj: "First of all you identify something as being good or bad for yourself. Then, in an effort to acquire good or to get rid of the bad, you have invented a God. Then you worship such a God and . . . you pray to that God for something good to happen to you."
What are the common characteristics and traits and behaviors shared both by addicts and by all other persons with the Ultimate Sickness?
They all have warped perspectives.
Truth is usually the 180-degree opposite of what they believe. Just as intoxicants distort the perception of persons, so too does the Ultimate Sickness.
The senses are dulled and sight is blurred, so clear seeing of anything is nearly impossible.
Paying attention and focusing are handicapped; brain functioning is adversely affected; the ability to make conscious and wise choices becomes limited or totally absent; self-destruction replaces self-preservation as a priority;
their ability to analyze clearly is lost; the ability to multi-task and concentrate are lost; reflexes are slowed; and psychological problems manifest and multiply.
Many affected persons will speed and race while some become slow and immobilized.
They lose the ability to stay inside their lanes and try to interfere and control or harm others; they suffer depression; their moods become darker as their level of emotional intoxication worsens; they become unpredictable.
And they become fanatics.
More on that tomorrow.
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
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