NO END "PATHS"? A LIFE-LONG "JOURNEY" WHICH NEVER REACHES THE DESTINATION? A LIFETIME OF TREATMENT WITH NO CURE AT ALL? Sensible and Sane? Or Senseless and Insane? Part "M"

TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS 

Yesterday, Bill added some additional reasons that some persons are willing to enter onto a "path" and then end up staying on it, or are willing to begin a "journey" which never reaches the destination but continue on that "journey" anyway, or are willing to accept a treatment plan which they are told offers no cure for what ails them but normalize that and stay with that ineffective plan, all dealing with humankind's addiction to control and power / Power. 

For some, those reasons include these:

26. Guilt is preferred over the feeling of helplessness. At least if I am guilty of something, I can repent and thus, have some control. 

27. If I repent, my chosen but non-existent deity may feel kindly toward me and do what I want him / her / them to do, and that takes away my perceived hopelessness and helplessness. 

28. I have someone to pray to that way, someone who will part the heavens and enter and change the path of the storm to kill someone other than me. 

29. Thus religion makes perfect sense to one who desperately desires to control his world. 

And #29 leads to an understanding of other reasons why persons unquestioningly follow whatever "paths" that their parents (or their other programmers and domesticators) set them on and that is why they unconsciously undertake endless "journeys" which someone else told them to take: 

30. Post-programming, post-conditioning, post-domestication, post-acculturation, post-brainwashing, and post-indoctrination, the case among the masses is that, to them, the senseless seems to make "perfect sense." Their perceptions and perspectives are the 180-degree  opposite of reality and truth.

The next reason that persons don't stop with all their long and arduous "paths" and "journeys" is . . . 

31. They believe in "the other." 

Because of ego-states and body identification, seemingly real but actually baseless fears are learned which lead to a mindset which says that which is familiar is "good" and "right" while the unfamiliar is "bad" and "wrong." 

But Maharaj made clear why he was free of the duality-based pain and suffering and problems which were so commonplace among the masses, saying,

"There is nothing which is different from me. There is no duality and, therefore, no pain. There are no problems."

Indeed, if there are no ego-state-based beliefs about "the other" and no ego-state-driven fears about "the other," there can be no problems. 

The non-dualist called "Jesus" made clear how instability (and thus problems and disharmony and chaos) are outgrowths of the duality which plague all human minds, saying, "A dual-minded person is unstable in all ways." 

Unstable when parenting? Yes. Unstable in the workplace? Yes. (Seen what's happening lately with employees and their associates in the U.S. airline industry?) Unstable in traffic? Yes. Unstable in all of their "relationships"? Yes, be it in the home, with neighbors, with the persons driving around who are on the receiving end of their road rages? Yes. 

Unstable when their religious fanaticism drives them to try to destroy verbally those who do not believe what they believe or try to destroy literally all who do not believe what they believe by way of beheadings and suicide missions and suicide bomb vests.

And involved in all those cases and any others, is duality and the resultant belief in "the other." 

Again, Maharaj: "There is nothing [and, therefore, no one] which is different from me."

Post-realization, Maharaj could not accept as true any concepts / beliefs, much less accept a belief in  two of the most commonly-held concepts among the masses, namely, "different-from-ment" and the always-accompanying "better-than-ment." 

Since the U.S. election for president last year, the pundits have continued to set forth their theories about why the outcome was as it was, and news pundit Danielle Moodie-Mills set forth what she saw as the underlying factor: 

“This is so much bigger than that, this is about . . . this is literally white supremacy’s last stand in America,” Moodie-Mills explained. "This is hatred on a level that we have not seen since Jim Crow. We underestimated as Americans how deep our hatred was of the ‘other,’ how deep white, uneducated Americans felt about the demographic shift. We underestimated that level of insidious hatred.” 

When seeking "cause" (which Maharaj says always involves an infinite chain of causes, the "cause of all being . . . all"), if the topic is finding "voter motive," then it must be understood that 50% of voters in the U.S. are single-issue voters and will explain that the cause of their way of voting is always linked to their "moral values." They have assumed the false identity of "The Super-Values Voter." 

(In all other issues, the rule of thumb for finding hidden motives and agendas is that persons leave a Hansel-and-Gretel-type trail of bread crumbs - that is, of money - which can allow their motives to be traced; that is, "Follow the money.") 

So Maharaj made clear that the problems of humankind ultimately always involve the dualistic sense of being "different from the other" . . . that is, that there are many who are "different from me"  (and, therefore, "not nearly as good as me").

Recall the observations of Zeba Blay who wrote about duality and "the other" when she shared her take on the presidential election outcome: 

And so, the so-called “unthinkable” has happened. Donald Trump, the racist, sexist, xenophobic candidate of the Republican alt-right, has been elected President of the United States. Across social media, white anti-Trumpers are expressing shock and disbelief, unable to recognize the America they thought they knew. Well, wake up. This is the America that people of color have always known. This is the America that has always existed. 

Want a "second opinion" about "America having always being that way"? Look at the fate of the indigenous peoples of what is now called "the Americas." Look at the fate of the blacks who were rounded up in Africa and sold as human chattel to whites in the U.S. Look at the fate of the Vietnamese and Cambodians in the 60's and 70's; the Grenadians in 1983; the Nicaraguans and the Falkland Islanders and the Afghanis during the Reagan years; and the fate of millions of Iraqis during the Cheney-Bush years. 

Always - among the masses - the majority (trapped in their dualistic thinking patterns as they are) will accept unquestioningly the way that their religious and spiritual and political leaders define "the other," define "the enemy," and define "the ones who want to kill you, and will, if you do not attack those I say we should attack." 

An acquaintance who received a communication from the IRS about his tax returns said: "Nothing pleasant has ever come to anyone who has had dealings with the U.S. government." There are millions - and maybe billions - all around the globe who would agree.

32. Being asleep while dreaming that one is awake.

Being asleep even as they are certain that they are awake and making conscious choices though they are not, most among the masses will never find the actual cause of their problems, will never - as a result - find a solution, and will, therefore, never  abide naturally, will never abide calmly, and will never be free of being driven by obsessions, compulsions, and fanaticism.

Consider: 

In 325 A.D. at the Council of Nicea (Nicaea) men gathered to revise the original version of the bible and produced the version used nowadays by Christians. Along with removing over 1000 chapters containing content which ran counter to their agenda (such as chapters with passages referring to the humanity of Christ, his marriage, etc.), they also invented a concept which codified the religion’s attachment to dualistic beliefs and dualistic thinking. 

The concept: there exists a god of evil as well as a god of good. They capitalized the old Hebrew word for “enemy” (which was “sa-tan” and which also often referred metaphorically to egotism and pride) and then used that name as a personal identifier of "The Adversary of God." (The same crowd took the name of the pagan "Lord of the Flies" or "The God of Insects" - specifically, "Beelzebub" - and made that synonymous with "Satan" as well.) 

Next, they inserted passages which identified that rebellious former angel as the current source of temptation and wickedness and thus the source of humanity’s troubles (thereby blaming something outside persons as the cause of their problems). Then, trouble came to the council in the person of a well-read cleric who pointed out to the bible revisionists that one verse in "Ecclesiastes" seemed to challenge their The-Devil-Makes-Us-Do-It claim. 

The verse: “You have been given a simple life; your complex problems are of your own making.” 

Oops. Obviously that could not be true if they wanted to cling to their new claim that Satan is actually the cause of humankind’s problems, so the council faced a dilemma. Eventually, they determined by vote that the verse obviously failed the-test-of-being-divinely-inspired. On the other hand, their vision of a devil incarnate passed the-test-of-being-divinely-inspired, so they removed that verse from their final version. 

[That verse still appears in the old Jerusalem Edition, but not in the versions which have evolved out the council’s altered text.] 

Of that belief, Maharaj said: "It is you who are deeply complex, mysterious, hard to understand. I am simplicity itself." 

The result of the actions of those meeting in Nicea: an arrangement of laws, rules, and principles which organized duality into a complicated system of rights and wrongs and “do’s” and “don’t’s” which would pass down to trillions of persons a codification of dualistic thinking and dualistic beliefs which continue to be held to this day and which continue to inspire some two billion or so persons nowadays to believe that their problems are not rooted in the mind – as Maharaj would eventually point out – but are caused by their spiritual sickness which prevents them from being able to fight off the influence of a god of evil. 

Maharaj explained that the belief in a concept of “God” (and therefore “Satan” as well) were dreamed up by men and that the concept of gods and goddesses for 5000 years - or the concept of a single God for many thousands of years – is just one more concept which blocks humans from understanding why they think the way they think, why they say what they say, and why they do what they do: 

Again, 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." 

33. The refusal to face the facts and admit that all gods and goddesses and "The One True God" were "invented" by humans.  

There was a time when almost all Greeks believed in and worshiped a god named Zeus and when almost all Romans believed in and worshiped a god named Jupiter. They came to see that those were nothing more than myths, but they did not discard their beliefs in multiple gods and goddesses until they were introduced to a replacement God as a substitute.

Now, Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in and worship the same "God" . . . "the God of Abraham." Nevertheless, the followers of those three religions, even though they share a belief in the same God, have been about the business of killing each other throughout their existence.

Now, it is asked, "Who will reject outright all non-dual pointers and cling to their duality-based sense of 'the other'?"

The same ones who function from the position of blind faith. The same ones who never question what they have been told, what they supposedly see, or what they read.

And those are the same ones who are willing to enter onto a "path" and then end up staying on it. The same ones who or are willing to begin a "journey" which never reaches the destination but continue on that "journey" anyway. And the same ones who are willing to accept a treatment plan which they are told offers no cure for what ails them but normalize that and stay with that ineffective plan anyway.

To be continued. 

Please enter into the silence of contemplation. 

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