TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
Some years after graduating from college, two managers employed by the 10th largest of the 2000+ life insurance companies in the U.S. at that time made me an offer that I couldn't refuse, though I certainly should have. They offered plenty of up-front money, pay while training, and monthly draws during the first several months of selling. And certainly - they told me - there are plenty of great arguments in favor of the purchasing of life insurance.
In the agency where I began working, those who were selling business insurance profited the most and had the easiest sell. As for me, I was assigned to the personal life insurance division, which proved to be a totally different deal.
In that division, I had to convince people to spend an hour with me in order to discuss the fact that they could die at any moment. If I could convince them to go for that meeting, then I had one hour to convince people who were not prone to gambling to enter into a transaction which was, at its core, a gamble: I bet people that they were going to die; they were betting that they were not . . . but might.
And only the analysts (working in the home office where they were forever studying and revising Actuarial Life Tables and calculating the life expectancy of a potential buyer and determining the average number of years remaining in the life of any particular potential buyer) had the advantage in the gamble.
It's like walking into a casino without knowing that the house has the advantage and the cards are stacked against you in their favor. Moreover, in the life insurance gamble which was going on between a potential buyer and me, the buyer was the only one of the two of us who was putting up "front money" in the bet.
While those in the business division were bringing in fortunes for the company's coffers and then being given a big cut in return, those in the personal life insurance division accounted for a fraction of the company's profits and took home a fraction of a cut from the smaller profits.
Some know that the game ended for me the day one of the two co-owners of the agency came in to my office and set a check for $25,000.00 on my desk. I smiled until I noticed that the check did not say "Pay to the order of Floyd Henderson" but that a woman's name was typed onto the Payee line.
The owner said, "I'm going to help you make a sale today. That is the death benefit on a policy which was written by a man who worked here years ago but who died shortly after selling a $25,000.00 policy to that woman's husband. I want you to take that check out to her but I'll tell you how we deliver death benefit checks to widows:
"First you do all of the "So sorry for your loss" stuff. Then, I want you to ask her if that $25,000.00 will be helpful. She'll say, 'Yes.' Then I want you to ask if they had any children and then ask if she'd like to help those children the same way her husband helped her by leaving some funds behind for loved ones.
"Then try to get her to use part of the funds to buy a policy for their child or children."
I replied, "I couldn't do that in a million years."
He said, "You will do it if you want to keep your job."
I replied: "Then I guess I don't want to keep my job."
At that point, I picked up a box that held sales materials which had been sent to me from the home office, dumped the contents out onto the floor, packed the few items in the office which were mine, picked up the box, and began walking out.
He yelled that if I left that I was never to come back. Without looking back, I lifted my left arm in the air and shot him the finger as I kept walking down the hall and out of the building.
I got to my car which was parked in the company's underground parking garage, drove to the window of the attendant, handed him my company parking pass, and drove away, feeling as if a heavy weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
What I learned was that people did not want to hear me talking about their dying and about how soon that could happen. I often felt dirty after many sales, but never as dirty as I would have felt if I'd called on a woman recently widowed and tried to get some of the little remaining money that she was going to be able to put to far better use than the co-owner of a fine-tuned, money-making machine.
What does that have to do with offering a different perspective to persons who find everything about non-dual pointers to be anathema?
Everything.
Most persons are no more interested in hearing pointers about a Sickness which results in their being controlled by the "ignorance, stupidity, and insanity" stored in their minds than they are interested in hearing that they need life insurance because a sickness or accident could kill them as soon as tomorrow.
The same happened with Maharaj. When I began reading the transcripts of his talks, I saw that many idolized him but that many argued with him about the message he was offering.
Later, when he gave up religion and spirituality as versions of the Ultimate Medicine and began offering a psychology-based version of the Medicine to address the Ultimate (Mental) Sickness, some who had idolized him joined those who had been arguing with - and, yes, even hating - Maharaj.
The rub with the non-dual message which encourages the adoption of a different perspective is that most people do not want a different perspective. To the contrary, most are willing to fight for their perspectives, no matter how warped they may be, and many are even willing to kill for and / or die for those warped perspectives.
This came into consciousness: "Damn, I thought that life insurance as a tough sale, but that doesn't come close to trying to 'sale' the understanding to someone that she / he is being driven by what Maharaj called 'learned ignorance' and that his or her thinking is 180-degrees opposite of the truth and the facts; that their parents and relatives and teachers and cultures have passed on to them many debilitating personality disorders;
that those disorders have disintegrated into serious mental and emotional disorders and neuroses and psychoses;
that they are miserable and suffering even as they think they are "doing fine"; that their minds are filled with nonsense; that they could be at far more peace and could enjoy far more happiness if they gave up every belief which they think is true but is not; that they are not different from or better than any other human; and that all of the living things on planet earth which they think 'they should have dominion over' are all living far more sanely than humans are."
It has been noted here that "Yes, the truth will set you free, but it is going to really piss you off first."
Most hate the truth, and knowing that, the different perspective is not offered to those who do seek it here.
A man approached me sometime back. He had been married for several years to a woman whom he knows I knew quite well, whom I knew "inside and out," so to speak. He was hesitant when our paths crossed and he seemed to be feeling quite awkward in fact.
It turns out that he was just beginning to see that, in their case, "all that glitters is not gold." He was seeing, indeed, that there really is something called "fool's gold."
Finally, he gathered the nerve to say, "I was an officer in the military and was used to giving orders. Now, with her, all I do is take orders."
My lips pursed spontaneously and my eyebrows may have spontaneously raised a bit, but all I said was, "Hummm."
I did not say, "So you see the desire to control. Have you also seen the narcissism? What about the perfectionism and judgmentalism? How about the cruelty and meanness and other sociopathic tendencies? What about the presence of the Borderline Personality Disorder - do you feel as if you are loved one day and then hated the next?"
As much as he pushed to try to get me to confirm that the personality defects and flaws he was seeing had long been present, I never added anything to the original "Hummm."
Why?
Because I had learned from Maharaj's experience and my own that hardly any persons really want a different perspective.
Because I had learned from Maharaj's experience and my own that hardly any persons want to accept that they mistook fool's gold for real gold.
Because I had learned from Maharaj's experience and my own that hardly any persons will accept a truthful assessment of their "current reality" - that is, of what is actually happening in their relative existence, in their lives - and that it would be a total waste of breath to share with them the truth of their circumstances.
Even if he came to see the narcissism, the desire to control, the coldness generated by the Sociopathic Personality Disorder, and the instability of moods generated by the Borderline Personality Disorder, the odds are that he will never be likely to take any action to change his circumstances.
And the same applies to the wives who have come this way and who are tolerating the intolerable from their husbands. I could agree with them when they describe their husbands' outrageous words and behaviors, but they are still most likely going to stay with them.
So that is the human condition, and that is why Maharaj said that few will ever "get this."
The trap - the holdup or the hangup - involves a two-fold "Catch-22":
(1) Any and all ego-states must end in order to stop the use of egotism (which is one of the tools used as an ego-defense mechanism);
but
(2) the use of egotism must end in order to be free of the attachment to any and all ego-states.
It's like two people aiming a gun at each other. How can the danger end if one says, "You, lower your gun" but the other says, "No, you lower your gun first" and the other says, "I'm not going to lower my gun until you lower yours," etc., etc., etc.? It cannot.
The danger will not end is such cases, and the "ignorance and stupidity and insanity" of fighting over the belief in a mirage, in an image, in a personal but false identity cannot end as long as a mirage, an image, or a personal but false identity is taken to be real.
Thus, the different perspective will seldom come, but for those who tire of the toll taken when there is a preference . . .
for the fake over the authentic,
for form over substance,
for the unreal over the real,
for the false over what is true,
for the invalid over the valid,
for fiction over fact,
for the phony over the legitimate,
for the artificial over the genuine,
for the insincere over the sincere,
for hatred over love,
for dishonesty over honesty,
and
for deception over accuracy
then only might the burden of that toll inspire one to seek authenticity and, thereafter, enjoy the stability and peace which can follow.
The prerequisite? A willingness to abandon all beliefs and all identifications and all arrogance and all warped perspectives and to seek a totally different perspective instead.
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
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