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 LL - A REVIEW OF "THE REASONS"

TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS

THE RATIONALE FOR UNDERSTANDING "THE REASONS" AND BEING FREED FROM THEIR INFLUENCE, PART ONE

At the beginning of this series, it was noted how often Maharaj declared that this deal is so simple, that "realizing" is a simple process because it requires neither adding anything nor accumulating more knowledge nor going to any place deemed to be "special" or "different" or "holy" (which also means "different from");

thus, as Maharaj said, Realization is simple because all you are doing is discarding all of the learned ignorance which you have been taught from early on (much of it by way of "reason #1" in this series): 

1. because they have all been programmed, conditioned, domesticated, acculturated, indoctrinated and brainwashed. 

So, yes, it is a simple process to be free of the effects of (A) having been programmed, conditioned, domesticated, acculturated, indoctrinated and brainwashed and free of the effects of (B) body and mind and personality identifications and free of the effects of (C) the ego-defense mechanisms which are used to support false identities - mechanisms such as egotism (and its partners grandiosity and excessiveness), denial, projection, blame, justification and rationalization, victimization, and many others). 

The process simply involves seeing - and seeing clearly, for a change - which provides an alternate perspective from the one that was taught. 

When my daughter was fourteen, she and I spent several weeks traveling through the Four Corners area of the U.S. Along the way, she saw something she had never seen before: the Grand Canyon. She only had to see it one time to be able to recognize it forever. She does not have to take a refresher course in geography to understand what the Grand Canyon looks like. 

She does not have to join a travel club and go to daily meetings and talk about the Grand Canyon and read and study books about the Grand Canyon. She does not have to listen to taped talks from so-called "experts" on the Grand Canyon. She does not have to watch slide shows presented by people in the group who have been there. She does not have to stand before the group and describe how emotionally-intoxicated she was in the past when she had a pink-cloud experience the first time she saw the Grand Canyon. 

She has not longed to repeat that experience and has not been driven to go to the Grand Canyon every day in order to "feel good." She does not have to listen to other people share their experience and listen to them drone on and on about when they first saw the Grand Canyon, and she does not have to share the same on a daily basis for as long as she lives. She saw the friggin' Grand Canyon. End of story. 

Now, she is not driven to revisit it to understand exactly what it looks like and how it came to be a canyon in the first place. She saw the Grand Canyon. She understands the Grand Canyon. She can recognize it every time she sees it or looks at pictures of it. Again, end of the dang story. 

For a fourteen-year-old, was it magnificent when she experienced it first hand? Yes. Did she respond emotionally? You bet. But does she have to rely on it now to try to feel magnificent and "emotionally-up" throughout the day? No. She's okay just being. She does not have to seek emotional highs. She does not have to feel magnificent all day long. 

Many with even a tiny flash of clarity would leave that Grand Canyon group because they finally reach a point where it dawns on them: "Okay. We get it. You experienced something Grand. It made you feel grand. In fact, you think because you experienced something Grand that, now, you not only feel grand but you think you are Grand. If that were truly the case, then why aren't you able to shut up about how grand you are and just go live a normal, natural life? Please!" 

By contrast, for those functioning with duality-based perceptions, the AM-ness can be like a roller coaster ride with really high highs and really low lows; that is, it can be chaotic. Remember that once Christ had been exposed to pointers rooted in non-duality, he said, "A dual-minded person will be unstable in all ways." 

So what's required for realizing in the simplest manner possible? Seeing the roots of duality and understanding those roots and seeing what it looks like and then turning away from it every time when you recognize it. To see the effects and results of the roots of duality is to be done them. Eventually, you will turn away from all nonsense and never go back again. 

In this series it has been asked, 

"So why do humans continue to prefer the complex over the simple?" 

and 

"Why do humans become willing to do what they are told, become willing to follow whatever "path" they are put on as if they are some kind of wind-up toy car; become willing to do what they do in a blind and unquestioning manner, and become willing to do that for as long as they live rather than march to the beat of a different drummer?" 

Put another way, the questions might be phrased thusly:

"Why do humans live as if they must drag along a 16-foot burlap bag with a strap hanging over one shoulder and must put each rock they come across into the bag?"

and 

"Why, once their 16-foot bag is full of heavy rocks, do they continue to drag it along with them all day long, throughout every week of every month and every year?" 

Seven years ago, this was shared in a discussion about 

HOW THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING IS BLOCKED WHEN YOU CARRY ALL OF YOUR PROGRAMMERS ON YOUR BACK 

My father was raised on a farm in East Texas where the crops they grew were used to feed a very large family while any surplus was sold to buy other essentials. In 1928, at the age of twelve, my father sought employment after his father died from a ruptured appendix. It became dad's responsibility to earn money for the family in July and August by picking cotton by hand. 

At harvest time, he found work on some of the small, rural cotton farms in East Texas and in West Louisiana where he hand-picked cotton from daylight to dark for a few cents total in order to earn some of the money needed for Grandmother's large family to survive. Even to stand in a field in East Texas during those two months (when heat indexes often reach 110°F) can seem debilitating. Imagine working in such temperatures. 

The breeze-less mornings were still tolerable since the body had rested overnight, since the temperature at 6 A.M. was generally around 80°F, and since the burlap sack being dragged along - soon to be stuffed full of cotton balls - was empty at that point. (Pre-teens used a smaller "toe sack," some average-sized teens used a "three-footer" or a "five-footer." A few of the physically-larger ones used an "eight-footer" or a "nine-footer.")

Dad, being very large for his age and being especially strong, followed the example of the hardest-working hands - usually African-Americans or Hispanics trucked north from the Mexico border - and used two "eight-footers" sewn together.) 

Whereas the younger children picked one row at a time, dad joined the adult African-Americans and a few adult Hispanics who picked three rows at a time, straddling the center row and picking it as well as the rows to either side. From early in the morning until late at night, pickers were bent at the waist. 

To take too long a break by standing erect and leaning backwards and trying to coax the muscles into relaxing would draw the wrath of the field foreman. The assignment was to bend over at the waist; pull cotton balls from the plants; ignore the fact that your hands were bleeding all day long because the plant's sharp prongs on the hull around each cotton ball cut like razors; 

stuff the cotton into the sack; and pull along behind you a sack that by day's end could weigh up to 700 pounds; tolerate the pain of carrying all of the weight along as it put more and more pressure on your back; and then start the entire process over again the next morning after a few hours of sleep. 

Imagine how miserable the persons must have felt who toiled in 95°F to 100°F temperatures in a shadeless field while losing blood and using shoulder and back muscles to drag along a weight that increased throughout the day. Then understand what an exact parallel is involved nowadays when persons carry on their backs the weight of their programmers. 

Consider the message in the following exchange which addressed the issue:

G.: I was going over one of the readings in the meditation guides about the "five stages." You mentioned that the 1st was (birth-20) that I am programmed to accumulate. At (20-40) I am trying to accumulate or "get things." I'm a bit confused here, because I feel like they have worked hand in hand since earliest memories on. Say, 5 years old I would see others kids with certain things that looked like it made them happy so I would fight beg and plead (sometimes violently) to get get get. Always trying to get - to gain a sense of self and for the world to see me as a success. I feel these two worked hand in hand. Is that possible, or am I not seeing the difference? Yes, the tastes and look of things have changed over the years now being 30 but it just seems like it has been a constant mix of being programmed to get and actually following out what I was taught to get from the start. Any feedback on this one to help me get clear? Peace! Gerard 

F.: Yes, it starts early on, but it is around 20 when most leave home and the intensive programming ends and what begins is this: persons are driven, usually for the remainder of the relative existence, by that which is supposedly "left behind" but never is. 

The point is, though persons might leave behind the key centers of programming, it is as if they actually have a burden on their backs and shoulders: it is as if they are carrying mom around and she's whispering in one ear; dad is also on your back, whispering in the other ear; one carries around the grandparents and they are telling you what to do without your even knowing it; teachers are there, along with friends and relatives; soon people have the burden of hundreds of people on their back - entire cultures, in fact - telling them what to do, and it's all BS advice. 

Is it any wonder that persons are often as exhausted at the end of a day as a 1930's cotton-picker who worked 14 hours a day in a sweltering East Texas field? 

Is it any wonder that persons are so frustrated and confused, answering not to one field foreman but to a crowd of foremen and forewomen whom they are dragging through life, a crowd always on their backs? 

Imagine that everything you do, you do while dragging along a sack with 700 pounds of rocks in it. Each of those rocks is a concept, a belief, or an idea that you are carrying, and they really are not even your rocks at all. The rocks are "theirs." They put them in your sack (a.k.a., "your mind") and you have bought into the notion that they are your ideas and that you must cling to them. 

The fact is, in the process of mind-fornication, you are barren . . . you are seedless. You have not given birth to even one single, solitary, original idea or belief or concept. All of the child-rocks you now carry are adopted. 

There is no such thing as "your mind" - there is only "their mind." Newton came up with gravity; Copernicus changed the beliefs about humankind's place in the universe; Galileo gave birth to modern science; but neither you nor I have come up with a single, original "thought" or idea or concept or belief. So why do you give such value to "their" beliefs? 

Why do you delusionally claim that you have given birth to something that was actually borne by others and passed down by one generation after another? Why are you settling for ignorance-based hand-me-downs and walking about with such pride, showing off what you think are "your children" (that is, your ideas, your beliefs, your concepts) when the fact is that you are actually barren? 

Wherefore this pride in those "children" when they are all the product of generations of learned ignorance? The question has been asked, "How can anyone be free of the ideas of meaning and purpose and still feel fulfilled?" 

The other relevant questions are:

"How can anyone be free and enjoy the lightness of being as long as they are dragging along an overloaded burlap-sack-of-a-mind that is filled with the weight of faulty programming and obtuse conditioning and distorted acculturation and the truly-perverted beliefs which were imposed during the domestication process?" 

and

"How can the lightness of merely being ever manifest when you add to the weight of your already-too-cumbersome load of mind-stuff the added weight of the quest for purpose and meaning, especially when the closest that you can ever come to finding any meaning or purpose in 'this life' is just the 'living' itself?"

In the final days of this series, we'll look at "the reasons" provided, find the root or roots of each reason, and then find how to stop being driven subconsciously by those ignorance-and-insanity-based roots. 

To be continued. 

Please enter into the silence of contemplation. 

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