TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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Reminders regarding the current focus:
The discussion at this point in the series is now focusing on "The Most Influential Obstacles Of All" which have come via dreamed up myths and superstitions and via "religious" and / or "spiritual" sources, including religious and / or spiritual thoughts, ideas, concepts, notions, views, theories, inklings, perceptions, a.k.a., "beliefs."
The focus is also on this pointer:
Of the relatively few who do seek, almost all of them will seek in religious and / or spiritual venues, few understanding that realization can come without dogma, without continuous spiritual practices, and without an exclusive preoccupation with "the nature of reality and things noumenal."
Why is that significant? Recall the man who approached me after a talk and said, "I was abused as a child by a priest. I've done years of work to try to get beyond that, but where I am today is, I still cringe when people start talking religion to me. So my question is, have you found a way to guide people to realization and freedom without their having to buy into the dogma you talk about?"
That question made clear that I had not even reached the "kindergarten level of spirituality" which Maharaj condemned, much less the understandings beyond that which awaited. It was that question which would send me along a "different route" and would eventually lead me to the entirely different version of the Ultimate Medicine which is offered now which allows for . . .
realizing without being fanatical about dogma and without engaging incessantly in spiritual practices and without a never-ending preoccupation with things noumenal rather than relaxing and taking it easy and then abiding naturally and then dancing lightly throughout the remainder of the manifestation.
Here's another way I've tried to assist some to understand the nature of Maharaj's talks - and what lead to the total altering of his "message" as his understanding "evolved - as he shifted away from the two earlier versions of the Ultimate Medicine and followed "a different route" for providing treatment for the Ultimate Sickness:
Phase One:
There was an "Easterners-driven agenda" behind his sharings in an attempt to attract Hindus to his loft; that led to his earliest teachings with a Hindu / spiritual / non-dual "flavor."
Phase Two:
There was a "Westerners-driven agenda" behind his sharings in an attempt to satisfy the new waves of Westerners who visited the loft but who had less interest in Hinduism and more interest in "spirituality" and in teachings which reinforced their personas of "The Spiritual Ones"
or "The Spiritual Giants." That lead to sharings which had some Hindu peppering but much more "spiritual" seasonings with non-duality herbs and spices stirred into the mix, thus giving a different "flavor" to his talks. Many Hindus abandoned him at that point.
Phase Three:
The talks came from an unblocked, uncontaminated, universal-consciousness-driven standpoint, resulting in a no-agenda "message" which was rooted in neither dogma nor spirituality but which were rooted in the sciences of basic biology, basic chemistry, physics, astrophysics (including astronomy and cosmology) and psychology.
To continue now with yesterday's discussion, note that there is a great irony in regards to which “path” or “route” seekers use or which of the five non-dual teaching methods (or their near-limitless sub-types) that seekers try to use in order to be freed from false personal / personality identifications. Through no conscious choice of their own (in spite of believing that choices are being made) the method or path which seekers are attracted to or which they reject or which they supposedly choose and attach to is actually determined by . . . their personality!
HOW THE PRIMARY PERSONALITY TYPE DETERMINES WHICH METHOD PERSONS WILL USE TO SEEK
Of the nine basic personality types which are common to all persons:
a Personality Type One will seek via a means which promises perfection and purity;
a Personality Type Two will seek via a means which provides service opportunities (in order to give help with the ulterior motive of getting back love from those helped);
Personality Type Threes will seek via a means which allows them to fabricate a public image of being so religious or so spiritual that they are admired by all – authenticity be damned and appearance being everything;
a Personality Type Four will seek via a means which allows for isolation (engaging in an excess of meditation, in extended periods supposedly spent in a samadhi state, etc.) or, if that is transitioned, will seek by way of a method which leads to authenticity;
a Personality Type Five will seek via a means dominated by study and reading and analysis, eventually using the accumulation of religious or spiritual or mythical knowledge to try to impress others;
a Personality Type Six will seek via whatever means is used by the majority of the people around him or her;
a Personality Type Seven will seek via a means which allows for escapism;
a Personality Type Eight will seek via a means which promises power; and
a Personality Type Nine will seek via a means which forges an image of being “The Peaceful One” or “The Divine Nine” and which best provides a means for avoiding.
Each of those personality types, save one, will guarantee that a plethora of fears, desires, and hidden agendas will determine what is believed and what pointers will be rejected and will also assure that, even when freedom from concepts might come for a spell, there will be a return to attachment to concepts the very first time that a fear or a desire rears its ugly head.
The non-dual pointer that “a dual-minded person will be unstable in all ways” explains why the “I-have-it! I-have-it! Damn, I don’t have it” cycles and vacillations are so common. The return to duality-driven thinking will continue unless one fixates in the “no-beliefs, no-personal-identifications, no-mind, no-thinking, zero-concepts state."
Earlier, this was offered:
And all that “religious and spiritual stuff” is just the tip of the insanity iceberg.”
[Again, why see the pervasive ignorance and insanity around the globe? Not because you will say, “Oh, yes, I have also believed some of those crazy concepts and I have also verbalized some of those ignorance-based concepts.” No, the reason for offering examples and illustrations is so that seekers might be inspired to look within to uncover examples of distorted beliefs and reasoning fallacies of a similar class or category or type and then be free of those in order to be free, period. If persons do not notice the garbage which had accumulated inside the house and which has not been set out to be collected and hauled away, it will remain inside and stink up the environment. Distorted beliefs and reasoning fallacies which are allowed to remain inside - inside a mind - do the same to a relative existence.]
So additional examples of distorted beliefs and reasoning fallacies which have been heard over the years - beyond those shared yesterday which were only a few of those dreamed up by religious leaders and leaders of spiritual movements - include these:
“American exceptionalism is not a theory. It is real. Our nation is the greatest nation on earth and has been for its entire history.”
“My husband hits me when he’s angry but he doesn’t really mean anything by it. He calls them ‘love taps’ and says if he didn’t care so much about me he wouldn’t get worked up like that.”
To a third party: “She (my wife) is falsely accusing me of having sexual affairs. I did not have any sexual affairs. The four women she caught me with only gave me oral sex, not real sex.”
“I believe there is a God gene which explains why everyone knows deep inside that there really is a higher power.”
“There are times when I love my spouse 100%, unconditionally, but I’ve got to tell you that there are other times when I absolutely hate my spouse.”
“Sometimes when I was a kid, my dad made me drop my jeans and he beat with a belt or a tree limb until my legs bleed, but I can stand before you today and tell you that I not only deserved it (and, really, asked for it!) but that it definitely made me a better person in the long run.”
“I can promise you that I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for her / him” and “I could not live without him / her.”
“The earth is only about 6000 years old.”
“My spouse is the cause of 95% of the problems in our marriage.”
“Actually, slaves had it pretty good in the U.S. They were a heck of lot better off picking cotton and being fed and sheltered than they were when they were living in an African jungle like before.”
“I have learned over the years that my relationships are much healthier if I just do what I’m told.”
"All scientists are atheists.”
“If a woman is raped and it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
A college professor who taught for thirty years how programming, conditioning, etc. drive human behavior talked non-duality as eloquently as ever heard. He once said, “Maharaj was right: ‘Humans created God to get whatever they want or to avoid whatever they want to avoid’.” Yet when he was diagnosed with an untreatable form of cancer, he asked one day when it was becoming clear that the end of the manifestation was near: “Floyd, don’t you believe, when you look back over your life and the turns you took along the way that there was the hand of some higher power that was pushing you in the right direction or was placing a hand on your shoulder to guide you along and encourage you?” (Many have been witnessed, when they are suddenly driven by the fear of pending death, to “backtrack” and to try to cover all bases, just in case.)
Quotes from “Fundamentalist Christian Preacher One”
(which have been echoed by thousands more):
“If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being.”
“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”
“Jesus didn’t have to deal with gay couples because they were all stoned to death.”
“AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”
“Good Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.”
“Pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians in America caused the 9/11 attacks.”
Quotes from “Fundamentalist Christian Preacher Two”
(which have been echoed by thousands more):
“Men with rebellious wives should live where wife-beating is legal.”
“God punishes people for having too much education.”
“Abortion is a lesbian conspiracy.”
“The earthquake punished Haitians for overthrowing slavery years ago.”
“I think ‘one-man, one-vote’ would not be wise in South Africa. There needs to be some kind of protection for the minority which the white people represent.”
Next, consider that it is personality–based belief systems which generate and sustain the “personal traits” below (and yes, while the following are about the relative, that fact guarantees that these "personal traits" will impact the AM-ness throughout an entire manifestation in ways that only the insane would find tolerable):
1. Selfishness: Caring too much for one’s self, about the agendas of one’s false selves; caring solely about the fears and desires of one’s false selves; having no sense of the Oneness.
2. Judging: Ego-state-and-arrogance-based criticizing or evaluating those viewed dualistically as “others.”
3. Projecting: Believing that one can predict future events as a result of accepting myth-and-superstition-based fiction about “the next life,” “heaven,” “hell,” “multiple lives” or other such concepts.
4. Rejection: If to the extreme, being sociopathic and psychopathic, willing to kill those with different beliefs.
5. Inadequacy: Believing humankind is anathema and then reacting in extreme ways to compensate.
6. Envy: Discontented as a result of viewing "other persons" as superior or more successful; accepting the validity of a duality-based hierarchy and being angry because one has not attained “a higher place” within that system.
7. Jealousy: A personality-identification-based uneasiness because of suspicion or fear or rivalry that is rooted in a dualistic sense of better-than or worst-than, of more deserving vs. less deserving, etc.
8. Impatience: Restlessness generated by having fixated at a childish personality level; intolerance of delay and expecting or demanding immediate gratification as a result of being driven by the agenda of an immature persona.
9. Impulsiveness: Tending to act impetuously in order to satisfy the desires or to avoid the fears of one or more personal identifications; swayed by the emotional intoxication which is always generated by ego-state identifications.
10. Oversensitivity: The result of a personal identification taking something “persona-ly.”
11. Procrastination: Putting off or delaying; putting off to some future time, again, generated by having fixated in a childish personality state.
12. Dependence: The result of an ego-state relying upon another person for emotional or physical support, existence, or well-being, also generated by having fixated in a childish personality state.
13. Worry: Tormenting oneself with, or suffering from, disturbing thoughts which are rooted in a host of personality identifications; being driven by persona-based fears.
14. Indecisiveness: Being unable to make decisions because the fears and desires of multiple personalities are at cross purpose; being dual-minded and, therefore, unstable in all ways.
15. Isolation: Separation from others; cutting oneself off from contact with others, either because of ego-state-based arrogance or an ego-based sense of superiority. (Contrast that with the Realized that can be content in the solitude vs. being driven to isolate.)
16. Self Pity: Feeling pain or grief inspired by one’s false self or false selves; suffering which is exacerbated by one’s own false-identity-generated distress and one’s ego-based sense of not having received all that one’s ego feels entitled to receive.
17. Perfectionism: A "personal" philosophy rooted in the arrogance of ego-states and their always-accompanying egotism which generate a belief that one's sense of flawlessness is valid.
18. False Pride: Having a belief in the superiority of one's self over all others; inordinate self-esteem and / or “Self-Esteem.”
19. Guilt: A feeling of remorse caused by accepting “personal” responsibility for an offense or problem; the result of believing the lie that non-Realized persons can make conscious choices and dualistically believing that one can only be either good or bad and that one can - and should - always choose “being good” over “being bad.”
20. Resentment: A deep sense of some “self” having been injured; lingering anger arising from an ego-state-based sense of having been wronged or an ego-state’s anger over not having its desires met.
21. Intolerance: Refusing to tolerate considerations which do not reinforce one’s presently-held beliefs.
22. Demanding: Making authoritative requests or claims that are rooted in the agenda of one or more false identities; being driven by a power-seeking persona.
23. Vengeance: An ego-rooted trait sustained by a persona’s belief that it has been wronged or injured and cannot possibly rest until revenge is exacted.
24. Manipulation: Fraudulent management of "others" by an ego-state to have its desires met.
25. Alibis (Lying / Excuse-Making): Providing a fabricated excuse in order to maintain an ego-state’s supposedly positive image.
26. Dishonesty: The inclination – rooted in the desires or fears of a false identity - to deceive, cheat, steal, embezzle, or defraud in order to gain what a persona wants to receive (or wants to avoid) during the relative existence.
27. Fear: A misery-inducing emotion rooted in an ego-state’s expectation of pending loss.
28. Quarrelsome: The ego-driven tendency to argue for the sake of exerting one’s self-will; a willingness to argue or fight to impose one’s beliefs on others; a tendency to argue in order to prove one is right and someone else is wrong.
29. Controlling: An ego-generated action based in wanting to have the power to rule, guide, or manage others; wanting to be in charge at all times, which is based in the fears and desires of any number of personality identifications.
To be continued.
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