TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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If you watched the Lennon / Ono video of Imagine yesterday, you saw a visual metaphor of the shifts which can come if the non-dual understanding manifests. The video and the lyrics can be regarded as being, metaphorically, "representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract" such as:
moving out of the fog that one has been in;
entering the darkness but then slowly taking the steps which allow the light to come in;
shifting from a condition in which one is not able to see clearly because of the darkness to being able to see all as it truly is because of the light;
leaving "The World of the Miasma" behind and "going home."
Maharaj was asked, "How does a gnani feel as an old man?" He replied:
"As he gets older he grows more and more happy and peaceful. After all, he is going home."
In the video, going home was not enough. The couple had ventured out into "the world," a world in which the masses are driven by the thousands of beliefs which are stored in their fiction-filled minds.
Away from home, the couple is surrounded in fog, in the same kind of near-universal miasma which blocks almost all humans from being able to see truth clearly, rendering them incapable of differentiating between true and false.
Out in the fog, one is walking about on a planet where the masses are suffering from the Ultimate Sickness and are trapped in its symptoms (which Maharaj identified as "ignorance, stupidity, and insanity").
Out in the fog, the masses are subsumed in a miasma which drives persons to accept the bogus information passed on via programming, conditioning, etc. and to, therefore, accept unquestioningly the beliefs . . .
that there's a heaven
that there's a hell
that imaginary lines drawn by humans have really created different countries
that all kinds of flags in supposedly different countries are to be revered
that there are an infinite number of things / people that need to be killed
that that are an infinite number of things that people should be willing to die for
that religion actually creates peace and fosters love
that possessions are to be accumulated and are worth fighting over and dying for
that greed is normal
that those who are in poverty and are therefore hungry should just go get a job
and
that people who talk about "The Oneness" are failing to see the so-called reality of "the vast multiplicities" and "the obvious differences" and the scarcity of "those who are really better" as opposed to the high incidence of "those who are worse."
The relative problem with living in a miasma is that an "an oppressive and unpleasant atmosphere will emanate from it" and will then contaminate all that is around it.
Miasmas will always eventually generate a fetor. Miasmas will always produce a stench. Miasmas will always reek and will always cause everything nearby to reek as well.
Live a life that is marked by being trapped inside the miasma and that life will stink and will reek, and as those with a life that stinks and reeks move about, they spread their stink and their stench and will think and talk and behave in a way that is disgusting, that is most unpleasant, and which passes on their stench to all around them.
A man who said that he "was raised in the heartland of the U.S." had been so trapped in the "American" brand of xenophobia that he volunteered to go to Vietnam in the 60's to "help in the fight with the communist enemies of America there who wanted to spread their beliefs around the globe and who would eventually take us over the U.S. if we did not defend ourselves."
He said, "I bought into another bit of nonsense that has long been popular with our leaders: 'Better to fight them there now than have to fight them here later'."
He said, "I bought into another bit of nonsense that has long been popular with our leaders: 'Better to fight them there now than have to fight them here later'."
The man - who now considers himself to be "progressive" - admitted, "My Iowa upbringing made me love our flag and our country and our military above all else." He said, "I really did buy into the programming that convinced me that we were the greatest country on earth and that we had not only the right but also the obligation to go around the globe and give what we had to others so they would be just like us."
That led him to abandon his medical practice in the states and to join those who had invaded a land that was 8500 miles away and to use his medical skills "to treat our soldiers and get them back into the fight as soon as possible." He shared the details of his experience which he now sees as a metaphor for his "journey to realization."
He explained that during two tours of duty, he saw few cases of dry gangrene - which can develop over the course of months - but many cases of wet gangrene which can develop quickly, sometimes in a few hours. There were cases of young men who were injured but were not transported out of a jungle quickly because U.S. forces were under heavy fire. Helicopters could not land and pick up the wounded and they could not be carried out on foot, either.
In some of those cases, the delay was so long that wet gangrene had set in, followed by gas gangrene. That necessitated the amputation of limbs. Such was the case with one nineteen-year-old whose right arm had been severely damaged. It was days before the young man finally reached the field hospital where the doctor was working, so the infection in the wounded arm and the loss of a supply of oxygen-rich blood led to a progression from wet gangrene to gas gangrene.
Had the initial trauma destroyed an artery, the fellow would have bled out almost immediately. That did not happen, but the negative effects continued to progress slowly.
When the doctor cut away the bandages to inspect the wound, he became nauseous from the foul-smelling odor being emitted from the wound. He said that first there was a sweet-sour smell that invaded his nostrils, and then a scent that was not unlike the rotten odor he smelled as a child when his family returned home from a vacation, only to find that the power to the refrigerator / freezer had gone out and that the meat in the freezer had first thawed and then decayed, after which the rotten fluids had seeped out pass the door's gasket and pooled on the kitchen floor.
The odor that day in the field hospital triggered a gag reflex as it took him back to the stench in the kitchen as a child. Still, to this day, he said that when something triggers a reminder of that day when the wounded lad was brought into the hospital, the doctor can literally smell once more the offensive odor which came from the dead flesh in that soldier's right arm.
The doctor said he knew immediately that he was going to have remove the entire arm up the shoulder if the fellow was to have any chance of survival, so he performed the amputation.
Later, the patient developed a fever the doctor so the doc said that he had to go back in and clean the wound as well as find a still-bleeding vessel and address that issue. Eventually, after several more procedures, the patient stabilized.
Now, after having been exposed to non-dual pointers for years, the doctor said he sees not only how futile "American's Vietnam Experience" was but also sees how vile it was and how contemptible the arrogance was which drove U.S. political and business leaders to send this nation's youth off to a place on the other side of the globe to kill others that neither could nor would have ever harmed anyone on the U.S. mainland.
Then, he shared how his own "non-dual journey" had paralleled the amputating of that arm nearly fifty years ago:
Growing up under the influence of that "heartland programming and conditioning" led him to develop a life-threatening injury which was going to kill him, but the injury had nothing to do with anything physical. His was an injury of the mind.
Like the flesh that had died on that soldier's arm, the doctor said, "I saw that what they had put into me was rotting me away from the inside and was going to have fatal consequences if it was not removed. I had lost my ability to feel. I was rendered dull and numb. I was living in total darkness while thinking I was in the light and believing that I was smarter, wiser, stronger, and better than most other people.
I had thought I was better than others merely by having been born in one particular country. And I had thought I was better than most people in the country because I was born in a particular region where the people were more patriotic, where we were more loyal to the country and its values, and where the people there were all morally superior to the liberals living on the coasts in their ivory tower, fantasy world. I had thought I was the one in touch with reality and that others were all a bunch of naive, idealistic, romantic fantasists, and that was my first impression of you, too."
"Eventually," he continued, "I went ahead and read some of your writings anyway and I began to see that I had been an actor on the stage of the 'Theater of the Lie' that you write about. I came to see I was living a lie and had been doing that since early childhood. I came to see that my life was like that useless arm on the kid who had been brought in and laid out on my operating table decades ago:
It was useless. It was stinking. It was foul."
He then said, "I finally saw that my entire life was like that arm. There was some things that had become attached to me. I wanted them. I valued them. But they were killing me. They were, as you've pointed out, my beliefs. I did not want to give them up any more than that kid wanted to give up his right arm. But he finally understood that he either had to sacrifice his arm or his life. He understood that he could not go on living in the condition he was in. He finally said, 'Cut it off,' and that's what I had to say about everything that they had attached to me and everything that I had attached to me."
How to be free of the stench? In the Lennon / Ono video, the invitation is to imagine - or consider - the possibility that everything you have ever been told or heard or read and now believe to be the absolute ("gospel") truth is a lie.
See the insanity of not being able to differentiate the true from the false.
See the insanity of walking about in a fog, in the darkness, in the miasma.
See the insanity of being blind but believing that you can see.
See the insanity of being in the dark while believing that you are in the light.
Of those trapped in what he called their "kindergarten-level spirituality," Maharaj said:
"They are functioning under the delusion that they are standing in the full light of the noonday sun when, in fact, they are actually only standing in the dull light of dawn."
Lennon and Ono, via Imagine's non-dual lyrics, invite you to walk out of the fog, to go home, to see that even at home you can still be trapped in darkness, and to open the blinds and allow the light to come in and remove the darkness.
See.
See?
To be continued.
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