TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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To review the key pointers being discussed at this point:
The most influential obstacles of all to realizing and being free 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."
A man who was abused as a child by a priest. man approached and asked for a way "to be guided to a state of realization and freedom without their having to buy into dogma."
The popular venues where seekers seek (or don't) have a 5000+-year history of failing to set persons free of their distorted and delusional and freedom-blocking and independence-blocking belief systems. venues.
Thus it should be clear why Maharaj eventually advised seekers to avoid those, leading to this totally different option:
REALIZING WITHOUT DOGMA, WITHOUT CONTINUOUS SPIRITUAL PRACTICES, AND WITHOUT A PREOCCUPATION WITH “THE NATURE OF REALITY AND THINGS NOUMENAL”
Continuing from yesterday:
Maharaj said that “it is enough to know who you are not” (namely, those false selves) and that one need know “Who You Are (namely, some “Supreme Self” or some other supposedly noble and elevated Identity / supposedly noble and elevated Self).
He also said, "There is no question of elevating to a higher level. Here it is only a question of understanding."
So what shifts can happen if the “self-inquiry” process is completed and one becomes freed of personality identifications, even if one never completes “Self-Inquiry”?
An example of one such shift which could have happened has been shared with some, a shift that could have prevented a fellow named “Mark” from taking his estranged wife and his daughters hostage and shooting his wife in the back when she climbed out of the bathroom window and tried to run away.
Some recall that the owner of an addiction treatment center as that I speak with Mark not about “The Self” but about the many false selves which were at play as his wife was petitioning for a divorce and custody of the children and ownership of their house and monthly income, etc., including “The Super Husband,” “The Super Father,” “The Finance Man,” “The Lover,” “The Homeowner,” “The Family Man,” “The One Being Victimized,” etc., etc., etc.
I spoke with Mark as he was becoming increasing nervous about an upcoming taping for “The Dr. Phil Show,” scheduled for the next day. In addition to the dread of facing one of his two daughters that had watched him kill her mother, he was also anxious about the fact that he would soon be leaving the treatment center and was wondering if he was going to be able to handle life any better than he had in the past.
The owner of the center wanted Mark to understand the toll which being driven by personality had taken in his life and the toll that it could take in the future if he did not find a way to be freed from being driven by the hidden agendas of the various ego-states he had assumed.
Again, the owner did not ask me to introduce Mark to the “Self-Inquiry” process but wanted me to take Mark beyond the personal inventory work he had completed (in order to find his “good” traits and his “bad” traits which were affecting him). At that point before Mark left the treatment center, the owner wanted him to move beyond the personal-inventory work and complete a “persona-inventory” – a "self"-and-"false-selves"-inventory – in order to find the ego-states which played a part in his committing an act of murder.
The sharing of the information surrounding that meeting with Mark would have remained private and nothing being shared here would have been shared here had Mark not gone through with the taping and made his story public in a series of shows, the first of which aired on 1 February 2007 with a segment entitled “A Difficult Reunion, Part 1” (available on the internet for those who might be interested).
When I shared with Mark that it may well be enough for him to find out who he is not, a look of confusion crossed his face. I introduced him to the means by which we are assigned and by which we assume scores of false identities as well as the way that those determine our every thought and every word and every action.
I explained to him the insanity of accepting as real the many false identifications which can be assigned by a culture and shared how the belief in those personas will lead to insane actions when the hidden agendas of those ego-states feel – to use the terms he had been introduced to – “hurt, interfered with, or threatened.”
I tried to show him just how insane one can become when driven by the fears and desires of a mirage – of a false identity. A “husband” and “father” can turn the relative existence of a family into a nightmarish, hellish existence when a wife and children experience a man being negligent, unavailable, unreliable, and downright abusive . . . mentally, emotionally, and physically.
Mark was shown the irony of role-playing when an assumed persona will believe that he is the one being mistreated and “hurt and interfered with and threatened” though the fact is that it is his perspective that is 180-degrees opposite of the truth: that he is the one being hurtful; that he is the one interfering with them and their peace and their sanity; and that he is the one being threatening.
I asked: "How insane is it to believe that a mirage can be 'hurt, interfered with, or threatened'?" Then, I shared the following example to illustrate the insanity generated by personality-based perspectives (which are all the exact opposite of reality and truth), asking him to do this:
Consider encounters I had with two females. One was a bear. One was a wife who was soon to be an ex-wife. I had spent the night at a lodge in Arizona and paid the owner the next morning for my lodging and for the right to park my car at the far end of his parking lot for the two weeks that I would be backpacking through the forest. For his fee, he also agreed to start the engine occasionally in order to keep the battery of the car charged.
He warned me to be aware that female brown bears were moving about with their cubs and that they were especially defensive – and offensive – that time of year. I was told that some bears had been seen moving through the chest-high grass in the multi-acre field across from the lodge and was advised to stay on the paved roads until I reached the trailhead. As I began walking away, feeling some sense of trepidation, I looked back and he waved the kind of wave one might give to a friend he knew he would never see alive again.
After two weeks, I left the forest and moved beyond the trailhead to the road leading back to the lodge. Goldilocks-like, I wanted a hot bath, a warm meal, and a soft bed. Totally exhausted, I did what I was told not to do and turned to the field with chest-high grass in order to take a diagonal shortcut back to the lodge rather than following the roads all the way around.
About halfway through the fifteen-acre field, I heard a terrifying growl and say a mama bear stand up, sniff in several directions, and then aim her nose directly at me. Then, standing erect, she raised her front legs and paws into the air. From claws to toes, I guessed that she was about forty feet tall, but ten to twelve feet might have been more accurate.
Suddenly, she dropped down and began charging. I saw her back rising and falling over the tops of the grass, and I watched a three-foot section of the grass tumbling forward as she charged me. I flashed back to time spent with Tom Brown (“The Tracker”) in the Pine Barrens in New Jersey when he told me during one of our visits that if a bear ever charged me, the charge might be a warning only.
If not, he suggested I fight with all my might, saying something along these lines: “Punch the bear in its sensitive nose; try to gouge its eyes; fight the fight of your life. The alternative is to roll into a ball and pray if you believe in praying.”
Three overpowering instinctive options flashed through my consciousness and led to ill-serving confusion: Flight? Fight? Or freeze? Fall down into a ball, or fight for my life?
In nature, there is no more threatening posture than having so large a female charging at you, knowing that the typical human might run eight to ten miles per hour at a burst while a brown bear could run thirty to forty miles per hour during a charge. I flashed back to Tom’s words, then rolled into a ball but determined I would fight if the charge was not a warning but a real threat . . . a real attack.
My wait went on for months. Okay, maybe it actually went on for twenty seconds or so before I mustered the courage to raise my head to a level just over the top of the grass, but a slight bit of courage or not, there remained a sense of being drowned in a variety of emotions. To my great relief, I saw three trails being formed in the grass, one large and two small, as the mama bear and her cubs moved in a direction that was away from me - away from where I felt paralyzed, as if I might burst right out of my skin.
I fell back again on the grass and lay still except for my fast breathing while looking up at the sky. After ten minutes or so, the heart slowed, as did the respiratory rate. Finally, I knelled, looking again across the field to see if the coast was clear. I slowly stood and then reassessed my wants and needs: now, I wanted a hot bath, a warm meal, and a soft bed, but now I also needed a laundromat or a cleaners . . . big time.
With that female bear, I had just witnessed one of the most threatening postures in all of nature. The threat of being “destroyed” was real. The fear was natural. The anticipation of being hurt was natural. The sense of threat was natural.
Fast forward to the day which followed a most amazing night with my wife. (No details, but her actions seemed to say, “It’s not just ‘all good’ – it’s ‘all great’!”) In light of the previous night, there was quite the shock when she said the next day, “Oh, by the way, I’m leaving you.” As I stood outside the house watching her drive away, there came a near-overwhelming sense of being “hurt and interfered with and threatened,” of being harmed by a real attack, of a sense of being drowned in a variety of emotions, of a sense of being “destroyed.”
The overpowering, instinctive options took charge and led to ill-serving confusion: Flight? Fight? Or Freeze? Fall down into a ball, or fight for my life? (And that “life” which I was feeling driven to fight for was actually just “the life” of the role of “The Husband”).
At that point in the telling of story I was sharing with Mark, I paused to provide an opportunity, maybe, for the full impact of the message to "sink in." Then I asked, “Can you relate, Mark?” He answered only with an affirmative nod.
Then I said, “Consider the two reactions involving my encounters with those two females. The feelings were the same. The emotions were the same. The beliefs about being hurt and being interfered with and being threatened were the same. The confusion was the same. What was different was the warped perspective.
"In the first case, I was facing the most threatening posture in nature: an angry, protective female reared up and growled and extended her claws to the max and then charged me.
"In the second case, I was facing the least threatening posture in nature: a female was not charging me but was showing me her back, was moving away from me. So why did I feel paralyzed, as if I might burst right out of my skin? Why were the reactions in those two very different circumstances the exact, same reaction? They should not have been. Why were they not different?"
Then I gave him the answer:
"Because of the warped perspective of a mind filled with a plethora of assigned and assumed personalities which were all feeling “hurt, interfered with, and threatened,” including “The Super Husband,” “The Super Father,” “The Finance Man,” “The Lover,” “The Homeowner,” “The Family Man,” “The One Being Victimized,” etc., etc., etc.
"That, I continued, is what personality-inspired delusion can look like; that is what personality-inspired insanity can look like; that is what the results of the warped perspectives that come with body and mind and personality identifications can look like. To be freed from being driven by the hidden agendas of multiple personalities might be enough to change the entire remainder of one's relative existence.
"The effects of my encounter with the second female, the one that moved away from me, were limited in duration only because I understood "who" was feeling emotionally-intoxicated around that experience. Freedom and peace can come if we understand that we are not really being threatened or destroyed and that all that is happening is this: a role that we had been playing is coming to an end because the required, co-dependent player of the counterpart role is not going to be playing the role any longer.
"If the female lead of a Broadway play decides to leave, a new female lead is found to fill the role. The lead actor did not have to kill the actress who decided she wanted to leave and look for other roles to play. In other cases, a play might run for as long as it is still productive, but if it is no longer productive, then the run ends.
The actors and actresses move on without being driven by insanity to try to kill each other or themselves. That's because they know they are just actors and actresses on a stage . . . that the play they are in is not what's real . . . that they are not being threatened, much less destroyed or killed. They have a clear perspective, knowing their roles do not define who they are."
Just as Maharaj predicted, Mark was stunned into silence.
I continued: "The real rub: most would be just like I was an hour after the first encounter with the bear: I had bathed, changed into clean clothes, and was enjoying a warm meal, smiling and laughing with the lodge owner.
"The greater rub: how long does it take for some men to get beyond their warped perspective when they experienced an encounter like the second one I just described? For most, not an hour, not a year, not a decade, not ever. You never got beyond your warped, personality-inspired distortion."
\
Mark sat bowed over with his elbows on his knees. After a long pause, he raised his head and stared at me. He could not say a word. That was as it should have been. I asked if, in closing, I might read a few lines for him to consider. He nodded again.
I opened my briefcase and took out a sheet of paper and read the lines typed on it:
"This is from a man they called 'Maharaj.' He said: '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! However is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it. Realize that there is nobody to force it on you, that it is due to the habit of taking the imaginary to be real. See the imaginary as imaginary and be free of fear'"
and
“What begins and ends is mere appearance. The world can be said to appear, but not to be. The appearance may last very long on some scale of time, and very short on another, but ultimately it comes to the same. Whatever is time-bound is momentary and has no reality.”
"I appeared, in my imagination, to be 'A Husband,' 'A Father,' 'A Finance Man,' 'A Lover,' 'A Homeowner,' 'A Family Man,' 'The One Being Victimized,' etc., etc., etc. Awakening to truth, I understood I was none of those and I am none of those. I was free. I am free. I was at peace. I am at peace."
Then, I handed the paper to Mark with no expectations that the lines would be understood or allowed to affect the remainder of the manifestation. My part was done. The rest was up to him, or not.
In the loft, that was always the case. Here, that's always the case, too.
To be continued.
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