TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
Again, the proper treatment for any sickness / Sickness cannot be offered without first making a proper diagnosis of what is ailing the sick / Sick.
With 97% of the planet's population subsumed with the dogma of their various religions, the most frequent blame for global chaos and misery and suffering is "People have turned their backs on God and are ignoring His Will. The only hope for humanity is for everyone to turn to God."
The remainder who brag "I am not religious! I am spiritual!" are nevertheless just as attached as are the religious to one or another supposed source of "Power."
When "Maharaj" was in his Diet Maharaj phases and when "Floyd" was in his Floyd Lite stages, the same sentiments were held and were blended with certain non-dual pointers and offered as the Ultimate Medicine.
During those phases, there was much talk about "Self-Inquiry" and about "finding the True Self" and about "Realization being the process which can elevate one to the status of 'The Supreme Self"'; or about "being unified with the GodHead" or "Ishvara" or "Saguna Brahman" or "Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu" or "The Impersonal Transcendent Brahman"; or about finding and existing as "The Infinite Self."
But once Maharaj understood that the Ultimate Sickness was not a Sickness rooted in persons having mastered "too-little-dogma" and understood that it was not a Sickness rooted in a "spiritual malady" or "a sick spirit" and was instead a mental illness, centered in the mind, his message shifted away from the religious and the spiritual and to treating the actual psychological sources of the Sickness . . . the actual psychological sources of the Dis-ease.
At that point, Maharaj stopped recommending Self-Inquiry and recommended "self-inquiry," saying "Enough to know what you are not."
"Understanding" fell in stature as he realized, "It's enough if you do not misunderstand."
Rather than "Realization" being some lofty, surreal, moving, supercilious, towering, soaring, electrifying, grand, exalted, noble, admirable, distinguished and elevating experience, he came to see that "realization is nothing more than being freed from the bondage of learned ignorance."
See why he said, "It's so simple?" Now the human mind, once warped via programming and conditioning and domestication and acculturation and brainwashing and indoctrination, is not simple at all. It is quite complex, convoluted, complicated, and - yes - even tortuous; but the solution to being free of all that is simple.
It begins with questioning what one has been taught and what one accepted unquestioningly and with blind faith; it progresses not by taking each concept and idea and notion and investigating each of the hundreds of thousands of concepts which have been accumulated and stored in the mind and checking each one for its validity or lack thereof. That would take a far greater number of years than any human will live.
No, it progresses by seeing that all concepts, ideas, notions, perceptions, etc. amount to one thing: a "belief system" (that is, an entire set of beliefs or body of "beliefs") and then determining that all beliefs will be discarded. With that purging of the nonsense stored in the unnatural and supernaturally-spiritually-magically-oriented mind, one can then abide under the natural auspices of the natural brain.
All personality identification is about the self, and all self-ness involves the belief that ego-states are real and truly define who one is. When ego-states manifest, then self / self-ness / identities become trapped in a continuous loop wherein ego-defense mechanisms, including egotism, are triggered and are used to defend assumed ego-states / identities / selves; strengthened ego-states will then generate even greater degrees of egotism and arrogance and conceit and haughtiness and pride.
The evidence of the presence of the Ultimate Sickness, therefore, include self-importance; vanity; narcissism; pomposity; brashness; and a plant food body posturing and assuming a particular kind of strut and swagger and prance as it moves about.
Because the "self" is all-important, then further evidence of the presence of the Ultimate Sickness is made obvious by way of stratospherically-high levels of self-aggrandizement, self-centeredness, self-consciousness, self-deception, self-esteem, self-image-fabrication-and-maintenance, self-indulgence, self-pity, self-righteousness, self-absorption, self-delusion, self-justification, self-love, self-focus, and - yes - Self-Focus.
[And no greater evidence of the presence of extreme arrogance exists than in the words of those who tell you, "There are things you do not know and that you need to learn, and I am the one who can teach you those things." Here, the message has long been that "You do not need to learn more, you need to un-learn all; you do not need to be taught more, you need to be un-taught all." What does "un-teaching" involve? Merely pointing seekers to what Maharaj called "the zero concept" state; merely pointing seekers to the no-mind state.]
Is it any wonder that Maharaj eventually said "Enough to know what you are not"?
Take all who have ever claimed that they have found the Supreme Self and you will have uncovered certain quantities of egotism, but most among the trillions of humans that have ever walked the face of the planet never cared a whit - not a single iota - about finding the "True Self"; therefore, if one could undo the effects which came about as a result of those quantities of Self-inspired egotism, the impact would be negligible.
However, if one could uncover the extreme quantities of false-self-inspired egotism (along with the resultant sense of separation and different-from-ment and better-than-ment and then endless conflict) and could erase those from the total human experience, then a momentous shift in the history of humankind would be seen.
And that is why Maharaj abandoned all talk about "The Self" and focused on the need to find and eliminate "the self" - all of the false selves which humans assign or assume.
So, the instability and insanity which come via a need for realization - that is, the need to be free from learned ignorance - shall be discussed by using excerpts from the book INSTABILITY / INSANITY: What the Advaita Teachings Can (and Cannot) Address :
INSTABILITY / INSANITY INDUCED BY A NEED FOR FULL REALIZATION
Why do the Realized often prefer and enjoy the solitude throughout much of their existence?
1. When the "mind" goes, the formerly-racing mind also goes, so there is no need for the body to race about trying to match the pace of the "mind";
2. when the "mind" goes silent, the Realized find that event to be a contentment-producing circumstance, and when the Realized are content with the silence, the mouth becomes content with the silence and stops disturbing the peace;
3. once there is no longer any perceived need to try to escape, the subconscious "need" to run and go and do and zoom comes to an end;
4. once Realized, the Self becomes its own wonderful "company";
5. the Realized can remain contented and in a state of solitude even when relative responsibilities or activities require that they interact with people for a time (carrying along their "Medicine Place" everywhere they go);
6. the multiple "selves" - prior to Realization - had driven thoughts and words and deeds and were constantly seeking company to support their illusory nature; with their dissolution, there is no need for anyone or anything that had been required previously to reinforce illusions;
and probably more than any other reason
7. the understanding comes that it is far more sane to be alone - but free and independent - than to reside in a prison in order to have company.
How is it that the masses shun the solitude?
How is it that the noisiest and the most chaotic and the most unstable and the most disordered and the most disorderly and the most insane end up associating with the most chaotic and the most unstable and the most disordered and the most disorderly and the most insane?
A. Their eyes see only what their hidden agendas want them to see;
B. they will deny all facts to the contrary of what their hidden agendas want to see;
and
C. denial can be triggered not just by existing ego-states as an ego-defense mechanism but can also be triggered by the desire to generate a new ego-state.
(Remember, too, a point offered on other occasions: "love" in not blind; instead, it is color-blind: it cannot see red flags. Those who are unstable cannot see their instability or the instability of one admired, or they do not consider instability to be a liability.)
D. Water seeks its own level. It will keep going lower and lower and lower until it reaches the lowest point possible and then joins with the water at that lowest point and remains there.
Do humans not do the same during the accumulation stage of the relative existence?
After twenty years of programming and acculturation inspire persons to seek out other persons - and, finally, one "special" person - they move in the same fashion as the water mentioned above.
As more and more instability and personality disorders and insanity manifest
** as a result of the cumulative effects of domestication and conditioning which are heaped upon the already-existing effects of programming and acculturation,
and
** as a result of seeing instability and disorders and insanity modeled in homes and by relatives and by friends and in "relationships" and in the workplace and in government and in cities and states and nations,
then the result is that persons never pause until they sink to the level where they can find other persons whose level of instability and insanity match their own.
At that point, they stop and thus remain in an environment or in a relationship or relationships where stability and sanity will never be modeled but where, instead, their own instability and insanity will be reinforced.
Therein lies an understanding of how The Dream of the Planet - with the debilitated masses therein moving about in a condition of being unawake, unaware, and unconscious - has disintegrated into what is more common now, namely, The Nightmare of the Planet.
The stable might be misled for a time by one who is unstable but who is skilled at covering the fact, so the stable might interact with an unstable one for a time;
the sane might be misled for a time by one who is insane but who is skilled at covering the fact, so the stable might interact with an unstable one for a time;
and the one that has successfully transitioned personality - and thus the effects of personality disorders - might be misled for a time by one who is skilled at developing and maintaining an image that hides his or her disorders.
Yet the stable and the sane will soon detect the instability and insanity that was so well hidden.
Then, as a result of being exposed to a type of energy that is so totally opposite from that which the stable and sane are accustomed to, an internal vibration within the stable and sane will be triggered.
That, in turn, will generate such an internal sense of disharmony and discord within the stable and sane that the movement away from unstable and insane persons will happen automatically and spontaneously.
Thus, the Realized quite often choose the solitude, understanding that one need not be alone to enjoy the solitude but also understanding that the sane will not compromise and stay in a prison (with the unstable and insane or those driven by personality disorders) simply in order to have company or a sense of security or a better lifestyle.
Yet in the absence of Realization, that is what will happen.
In the absence of Full Realization, instability and insanity will be normalized, and the insane will congregate together; the insane will find and maintain each other's company; those with personality disorders will interact or even co-habitat with persons who suffer from personality disorders;
and they will all claim that they are fine and that those with whom they are in relationship are just fine.
That's the kind of talk that can be heard in any asylum or mental hospital, which is mainly what this planet is. And their denial will guarantee that persons will remain in the no-Realization darkness of their unstable and insane and personality-disorder-driven existence. So it is.
The result?
Most will never seek - much less find - the means to Realize Fully; most will continue to abide in their prisons in order to have company, as unstable and as insane as that company is;
most will develop an addiction to chaos and will then normalize that condition;
most will strut about the stage of The Theater of the Lie; most will be handicapped as a result of living in The Dream of the Planet; and most will also live within The Nightmare of the Planet but will likely never realize that, either. Again, so it is, but so it need not be.
Can the teachings address the dilemma discussed above? Most assuredly.
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
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