TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
Persons (the "non-realized") are also willing to enter onto a "path" and then end up staying on it, and willing to begin a "journey" which never reaches the destination but continue on that "journey" anyway, and 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, for this reason also:
54. Because of blind faith and unequivocal acceptance and unquestioning naiveté.
For years before a human can read, all of the concepts and beliefs they learn come by way of example - by being modeled - or by being told and taught what to believe.
The considerations offered here include these:
Who told you that there is a god or that there are innumerable gods and goddesses?
Who told you that you will be punished now and forever more if you do not believe in that god or in those gods and goddesses?
Who did all they could to force you have blind faith?
Who punished you if you questioned what you were told?
Who convinced you that persons in positions of authority are always right?
Who modeled their beliefs for you?
Might it have been an athlete who scored a touchdown or goal and knelled to thank God for the touchdown or goal or who pointed up (as if to heaven and god) to give credit to god for the score?
Is there really a god who is concerned with the outcome of sporting events?
Or might it have been the persons who pray in public, opening assemblies or sporting events or rallies or government meetings?
Or might it have been the people giving thanks in public for a meal that is about to be eaten in a restaurant, even though the supposedly holy words in their supposedly holy book tell them: "When you pray, go into your private room and shut the door and pray in secret" (instead of making a public spectacle of yourself)?
The fact is, people are being inundated with "the message" everywhere they are and everywhere they go.
And why?
For reason #51 (for image-building and image-maintenance),
and / or
for reason #52 ( to try to get a payoff).
So who told you that there is a god or that there are gods and goddesses?
Are not the only two possible answers to the question, "Is there really a god or gods and goddesses?" either "Yes" or "No?"
If the answer given is "Yes," then the question becomes, "Is your God really all-knowing and all-powerful?"
If "Yes," then the next questions become,
"Then why does that God allow children to suffer from congenital heart disease or other serious, debilitating and fatal conditions?"
and
"Why does your God allow children and adults to be killed in local gang wars and drug wars and international wars?"
"And why did God get mad and supposedly kill everyone on the planet except for the members of one family who built a boat on which they supposedly saved not other people but did save all of the lions and tigers and lambs and cows and horses and giraffes and elephants and mosquitoes and fleas and roaches and termites and two of every other living thing as well?"
and
"Why does someone who is all-powerful and supposedly all-loving allow famine and starvation and poverty and spousal beatings and sexual abuse to happen?"
and
"Why did God allow Hitler to survive several assassination attempts which allowed him to go on to kill 12,000,000 people in death camps with gas chambers and which led to a global war that killed as many as 85,000,000 people in all?"
and
"Why did God allow Mussolini and Stalin and Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe and Idi Amin and Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-un and Rodrigo Duterte and Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump [ :-) ] to come to power?"
So Option one is "Yes, there is an all-powerful and all-knowing and all loving and omnipresent God who could stop all of the chaos and disease and misery and suffering and killing on the planet, but for some reason he does not choose to do so."
Or, Option Two is "No, there cannot possibly be an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, all-present god who would sit by and let all of that happen when he could stop it."
Now some have said, "Floyd, He loves us enough to give us free will, and we can use that free will or we can abuse that free will."
The reply: "Really? So if your children wanted to play in the street and take a chance of being hit by a car and killed, and if you really loved them enough, then you would give them free will and let them play in the traffic if they chose to do so? Of course not, so you love better than your god does or you are obviously far wiser.
"In either case, I am not impressed with the way your God is running this show called 'the world.' Seems to be a lot of negligence, but maybe it's a result of having to process billions of prayers a day which have him tied up and unable to get to the rest of the business of running things on planet earth."
"All-powerful? You say, 'yes.' All-knowing? You say, 'yes.'
All-loving? You say, 'yes.' Omnipresent? You say, 'yes.' Able to multi-task? Hummm . . . maybe not."
Which side did Maharaj go with in the debate? He went with the "No's":
"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."
"In an effort to acquire good or to get rid of the bad," (payoff) "you have invented a God."
Next, programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing, and indoctrination generate blind faith, and blind faith – in turn - locks persons into assuming and playing the roles of “The Perfectionist,” “The Judge,” “The Reformer,” and “The Know-It-All”; thereafter, programming, conditioning, etc. become the tools of their trade.
So it is with those assuming the role of "Believers."
Just as parents use those tools to try to make their children into a mirror image of themselves, so those who are programmed, conditioned, domesticated, acculturated, brainwashed, and indoctrinated from early on can spend an entire relative existence absorbed in the process of trying to program, condition, domesticate, acculturate, brainwash, and indoctrinate all those whose paths they cross.
And all of that nonsense is a result of having never questioned any of their blind-faith-based beliefs which they were programmed, conditioned, domesticated, acculturated, brainwashed, and indoctrinated to believe.
That is one of the key points to understand if one would understand the wide range of effects which are cultivated by blind faith: not only does it put persons to sleep but it also generates judgmentalism, rigidity, inflexibility, severity, strictness, stiffness, and an overall anal view of - and anal approach to - life.
There is no “relaxing and taking it easy” among obsessive, perfectionistic, forever-uptight, fanatical, controlling persons who are driven by their beliefs which are being sustained by blind faith.
Assuming the role of “The Perfectionist,” “The Judge,” “The Reformer, and “The Know-It-All,” their focus of attention will be on “What’s wrong?”
and on the following:
“How I can I change what's wrong and improve the world and make it right?” (Duality)
and
“How can I make people think and talk and behave exactly as I think and talk and behave?” (Narcissism)
and
“How can I make everyone believe exactly what I believe?” (Malignant narcissism)
Maharaj’s take on that mindset?
“The idea of responsibility is in your mind. You think there must be something or somebody solely responsible for all that happens.”
Thus, there’s another result of abiding in the grip of blind faith: a desire to control people, places, and things; to control everyone’s thoughts and words and actions. Talk about “malignant narcissism.” Talk about levels of arrogance that are usually only reached by sociopaths and psychopaths.
An additional by-product of the programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing, and indoctrination which generate blind faith and a belief that one is perfect will be a personality-driven individual who focuses on the hidden agendas of his or her assumed but hidden agendas. And the same happens with any blind-faith perfectionist, employed or not; Christian or not; Muslim or not; supposedly intelligent or not; or obsessed with “helping” or not.
The point has been offered often here: “There is no ‘one’ here who believes in anything, so there is certainly no one here who wants you to believe anything, either.” This deal is about un-learning, about un-teaching, and about emptying minds (in those cases where one is interested in being truly and totally free). Why cling to a mind-full-ness state when all minds are filled with nonsense and contradictions and when the beliefs stored therein only inspire disagreements (not only with “others” but also with “self’)?
Those blind-faith, perfectionistic types are unable to see their own character / personality defects but are self-appointed experts at finding the defects of others, and persons of that ilk who have come here only saw their own personality liabilities if they came to understand psychological projection and came to understand that all which they are seeing that is wrong with the world (and all which they are seeing that is wrong with others) are really their own traits . . . that is, the traits of their own false, phony, assumed selves (which they are now projecting onto “the world” and “others”).
Maharaj explained the process of projecting this way: “There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer, and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you, and what is outside you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion”
and
“Once you realize that the world is your own projection, you are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist, except in your own imagination!”
What was his explanation to those who are functioning in the blind faith, rigid, judgmental fashion which results in warped perceptions about “the world” and in the arrogance-based belief among those types that they “can make a huge difference” and that they “really can change the awful, horrible, hideous world” for the better?
Maharaj: “You are the maker of the world in which you live.”
Maharaj also said, the world which you think you see
"exists only as a dream in [your] consciousness”
and
“You are not in the world; the world is in you” (that is, in your mind); so, an awful, horrible, hideous world can only be generated by a mind filled with thoughts and beliefs that are also “awful, horrible, and hideous.”
Furthermore, he said, “As one only knows the contents of the consciousness, and an outside world is unprovable, all perceivables are only in the mind”
and
“Is there a world outside your knowledge? Can you go beyond what you ‘know’? You may postulate a world beyond the mind, but it will remain a concept, unproved and unprovable. Your experience is your proof, and it is valid for you only. Who else can have your experience, when the other person is only as real as he appears in your experience?”
In that regard, Maharaj advised seekers: "'The world' appears to you so overwhelmingly real because you think of it all the time; cease thinking of it and it will dissolve into thin mist.”
See? Obsessed.
Beginning shortly after “birth” and then continuing throughout the formative years, the low esteem levels that come with being raised by - typically - hypercritical parents (or the too-high esteem if raised by indulgent parents) set the stage from the very beginning for the development of beliefs which, in turn, lead to ultra-high levels of blind faith, arrogance, narcissism, judgmentalism, and a desire to show all people that one has all the answers - which leads to one presenting herself or himself as “The All-Knowing One.”
Of that, Maharaj observed: “The world comes into being only when you are born in a body. No body - no world”
and
“To be 'born' means to create a world round yourself as the centre” (as in "self-centered").
The end result of that? Such persons often feel overly-confident and overly-competent, developing an idealistic approach with a deep sense of responsibility. They are attracted only to the super-orderly and see themselves as being highly-principled.
They only see the potential for improvement, noticing what they deem (dualistically) to be “right or wrong” and become highly motivated to improve everyone and everything. Yet they often become frustrated, especially by people whom they see as “breaking the rules” or “doing it wrong.”
[By the way, to “save face,” they spin their ugly truth, whitewashing and distorting their actual motive - to control everyone else - by claiming that “helping people is the right thing to do.”]
The even darker side of that mindset especially manifests if they become even more stressed than they usually are or if being driven even more by egotism or other ego-defense mechanisms than they usually are.
One author explained the results this way:
One’s attention to “things being wrong” can lead to a compulsive need to criticize, judge, and “correct” both yourself and others. Sometimes that sounds like a “running commentary” to those around you. It can become a major challenge to ever see anything that is "good enough" or anyone who is "good enough."
With a tendency to engage in black and white (dualistic) thinking, then relationships, tasks, and even life in general are judged either “good or bad,” “right or wrong,” “fair or unfair.”
Such types often take on too much responsibility and then may feel resentful that others aren't doing their share or coming through on their commitments.
Forsaking pleasure in favor of what “should” be done adds fuel to the fire of resentment that burns inside. Fear of making mistakes or appearing foolish can lead to procrastination in decision-making; additionally, shame and guilt can become high on the list of their motivators.
When stressed, they shout out sometimes but suppress at other times (as was the case with the doc’s “silent treatment” and his walking out of the room).
Suppressing their anger about things and people being wrong - but not being able to change those things or people - can push those among this type to feel overly-emotional, melancholy, depressed, and less-connected to one's intuition / inner guru. These types can also feel driven to withdraw from others when trapped in their moodiness (exactly as happened with doc).
The overall result, therefore?
Whether you are being driven by blind faith and having to deal with yourself (your “self”); or whether one is with a mate being driven by blind faith; or whether one is like that and dealing with neighbors, co-workers, employers or employees, or persons in traffic; persons shopping; persons involved in city or state or county or national issues;
or whether one is dealing with others involved in international issues, then you (in your own case) or they (in their cases) are going to be dealing with someone who is subsumed in perfectionism and judgmentalism;
with someone with a tendency to “know-it-all” and to be rigid and inflexible; with someone who is obsessive-compulsive; with someone who is overly-serious and finding the faults in others while being blind to their own shortcomings;
with one being inflexible and having a tendency to be disapproving and having a tendency to micro-manage at home and / or work; with someone who avoids anything that might not turn out perfectly; and with someone focused on living up to the silly expectations of parents, teachers, preachers, priests, rabbis, ayatollahs, etc. . . .
. . . in all cases, such persons are forever going about the business of building walls, thus fostering more and more duality.
Maharaj: “There is no wall between us, except the one built by you.”
Moreover, “Whatever happens, happens to you, by you, through you; you are the creator, enjoyer and destroyer of all you perceive.”
Regarding that, Maharaj said: “However great and complete is ‘your world’, it is self-contradictory and transitory and altogether illusory.”
And things illusory can only be imagined to be real by those who are blind, and especially among those who are blinded by faith in what they are told rather than in what can be revealed via an inner guru or the inner resource (but never by outer gurus or outer resources).
Of such blindness which leads persons to believe that they alone see clearly the way that things are (and the way they should be), Maharaj said: “There is only imagination. It has absorbed you so completely that you just cannot grasp how far from reality you have wandered.”
And it is the willingness of the masses to be driven by blind faith and unequivocal acceptance and unquestioning naiveté - among many other reasons - which drives persons (the "non-realized," those not-yet-freed-of-ignorance) to enter onto a "path" and then end up staying on it, and to begin a "journey" which never reaches the destination but to continue on that "journey" anyway, and 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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