TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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THE RATIONALE FOR CHOOSING SCIENTIFIC FACTS OVER THE EMOTIONAL INTOXICATION GENERATED BY RELIGIOUS / SPIRITUAL FANATICISM:
While Religion and Science Are Not Always Incompatible, Logic and Reason and Wisdom Make Clear That If a Choice Between The Two Is To Be Made, Only One Choice Is the Sane Option
Here, "God," the "Son of God," the "Holy Spirit," "Buddha," "Krishna," etc., etc., etc.: are viewed as verbs, not nouns. See the end of the post for the full meaning and implications of that.
EDITOR’S INTERVIEW (Part Two) from the non-duality-based novel, The Twice-Stolen Necklace Murders
[NOTE: In the interview, the terms "True or Real Self" refer not to a "pure witness" but to "pure witnessing" or to authenticity and clarity as opposed to any sense of "self-ness" or "you-ness." At the most, what is real during the manifestation are the elements which form a space or body in which - among humans and non-humans "beings" - both air and conscious-energy can circulate. Note, too, that while Maharaj and I endorsed Self-Inquiry at one point, later self-inquiry - and finding via that process all that one is not - is now deemed to be enough. The following interview took place 15 years ago. For current perspectives, newer readings and posts on this site provide the different perspective which came to Maharaj and to me via never understandings.]
[Continued from yesterday]
K.: Think of it this way: an ice cube is really just H2O. If it melts outside on a hot day, it can become vapor, ascend into a cloud, blend with the cloud, become a raindrop and fall back to earth. In each case, it might have a different form: solid, liquid, vapor, etc. But it is still just H2O, though to observers it’s thought to be all these different things we dreamed up and gave labels to. We are lying to ourselves. H2O is H2O, not water, fog, steam, vapor, raindrops, oceans, streams, pools, puddles, etc. Now we cannot destroy the H2O though we can affect the visible form, proving my point that what you see is never the real.
And just because the H2O that was the ice cube in our example might be recycled and fall back to earth in the spot where the ice cube originally melted, it does not mean that the same ice cube will re-form. Nor does it mean that the same H2O will ever be in an ice cube again. It might, or it might not. There is no controlling plan. The cycling just happens, as does the spontaneity and the diversity and the unpredictability. So it is with that which we call ‘humans’ and the elements that make up the body-mind’s form and shape.
That which is real, the energy-consciousness-life-force, will last; like the H2O of the ice cube form, the energy-consciousness-life-force may remanifest, and it may not. But it will not remanifest as the same form or with the same mind. So the current Pope (John Paul II at the time of the writing) is correct: heaven and hell are not geographic places but are states of mind, nothing more than concepts dreamed up by men.
One thinking he is his body can be said to be in hell now; one with the knowledge of what He Really Is can be said to be in heaven now. When the life-force and the breath leave the body, so ends the body form and so ends the body-mind. I AM THAT, that energy-consciousness-life-force that is eternal, without form or shape.
E.: Forgive me for pressing, but I suspect the readers might not consider that answer ‘hands-on’ enough. Is there anything applicable in all this that can help them in their relations, specifically?
K.: Fair enough. Let’s try this example from a couple I worked with. Her life-long dream was to be a flight attendant. The opportunity, coming at age forty, arrived for her at a later time in life than for most and came on the heels of her recent marital engagement. She was thrilled about the job offer.
Now, great pressure was being applied by ‘him’ to force her not to go to New Jersey for training for six weeks. He wanted her to give up this career opportunity, and their impasse was becoming a deal-breaker. She asked if they could visit with me to discuss the effects that their role-playing was having on possibly destroying their relationship, since she had the understanding in this regard. I’ll give you the shorter version of what I did.
I took them back to when they first met and eventually first became intimate. He was also dating other women; she was seeing other men. He admitted that was fine, at the time. He was not trying to control her. He accepted her right to do what she wanted, when she wanted. Then, they began to date exclusively. At that point, she no longer had the freedom, in his eyes, to go out with other men. Next, they became engaged, and she lost even more freedom. She became, in his words, "my fiancée."
The possessive pronoun became the key identifier when he spoke of her: my fiancée, my wife-to-be, etc. I showed him how, as they shifted from the roles of ‘stranger’ to ‘acquaintance’ to ‘friend’ to ‘lover’ to ‘fiancée’ that she lost more and more freedom. I asked him if this is his current ‘reality’: that the deeper someone becomes involved with him, the less freedom she is going to have and the more demands and expectations she is going to have heaped upon her. Then, I asked if he thought that was ever going to work to create healthy relationships.
The more roles (the more false identities) she assumed with him, the more a co-dependency developed and the more a loss of freedom manifested because he had beliefs about the ‘right way’ a fiancée should act; the ‘right way’ a wife should act, the way people in public should see him being treated, etc. And his beliefs are based in what was modeled for him, not in reality. I tried to help them see that each time they accepted new roles to define who they are (and each time they accepted a new identity to define the parameters of what is or is not acceptable in their relationship) then the further away they shifted from who they Really Are, from the freedom they should actually have.
Only by being in touch with authenticity—and not falling into the role expectations as defined by this society—can they be happy. Let her be her; let him be him; and let ‘them together’ be only the parts where his circle and her circle intersect through mutual negotiation. Get Real. Forget roles and the old definitions of what your programming taught you that a fiancée should and should not do, what a spouse is ‘allowed’ to do or not do, etc. Since the couple had obviously shifted beyond the Stage One ‘Passion Level,’ the only alternative was to fixate in this ‘Battle Stage’ and allow the relationship to finally end or to get Real and move into the comfort of the ‘Unconditional Love Stage.’ That stage is reached through sharing, giving, accepting, loving, practicing Applied Tolerance, not judging, not controlling, and most of all, knowing the Real Self and experiencing the Oneness, the unicity, that follows knowing Self. Bottom line: one does not lose the role of being a ‘complete bastard’ or a ‘total bitch’ until they lose the role of being ‘an absolute saint.’ Relevant?
E.: Absolutely. Thanks for clarifying. Now, will you explain how you came to know that you are not the body and not the breath but are the energy-consciousness only?
K.: I did what my teacher suggested. I meditated on where I was three days before conception, before the body began forming, before the oxygen began circulating. I determined where I was, via contemplation, during the days before being manifested in a mother’s womb. I traced my ‘roots’ back to where I really came from in order to know What I Really Am. Anyone with a brain functioning without damage can do the same. If you are 35 years old, let’s say, then count backwards. That is how I reached the pre-conception state and the awareness of What I Am.
Literally say out loud, ‘I am 35; I will now go back. I am now 34; I am now 33.’ Continue to count until you reach ‘I am one year old’; then say, ‘I am 11 months old, I am 10 months old,’ etc. Then, ‘I am 30 days old, I am 29 days old,’ etc. Then ‘I am 23 hours old, I am 22 hours old,’ etc. Then, ‘I am 59 seconds old; I am 58 seconds old,’ etc. What happened with my countdown was, I got to ‘I am one second before conception, I am conceived.’ I anticipated originally that the count would stop there, but it continued. ‘I Am one second prior to conception; I am two seconds prior to conception. Where Am I? I Am minutes, hours, days before conception. Where Am I?’ The answer came.
Any sperm present in a man was not there much more than ‘x’ number of hours earlier, sperm having a ‘shelf life’ inside a human male body. Plant food (or plant food consumed via animal food) was consumed and ‘converted’ into living human cells, among them, sperm cells. The ‘I Am exercise’ took me to a plant. Continuing the count took me to where I was before being absorbed into the plant. So it went like this:
From ‘child born’ back to ‘child in a womb’ back to ‘egg fertilized by sperm’ back to ‘sperm delivered’ back to ‘sperm not yet delivered’ back to ‘sperm created as plant food energy remanifested into human cells’ back to ‘plants being eaten’ back to ‘the plant’ back to ‘the creative energy entering the plant’ back to ‘the field’—the field of energy-consciousness. I AM THAT.
Then the Realization came: Christ did not say, ‘I Am the Light.’ He repeated what some Advaitic teacher taught him: ‘I Am Light.’ Once we know We Are That which can take the form and shape of light/energy, then we can live out this manifestation of energy-consciousness in human form as if, as if the human existence/body is the real.
But we do not attach to the dogma or the drama or the lies or the conditioning and the resulting beliefs and false thinking. Freedom is freedom from all indoctrination, be it the indoctrination we got from parents, from preachers, from priests, from medicine men, from politicians, from TV, from teachers, from holy books, from wise writers, from me, from you, from any of the sources of man-made concepts being passed down. A pure mind affords an experiencing of peace in the manifest; a pure mind is one freed of all the lies, all the concepts, taught by humans to humans. And know that the greatest trick of all that one human can use to program another human is for the first human to tell the second human that he is not speaking for himself but is speaking for god. Wow! Now you’ve got some weight behind those concepts, huh? ‘Hey, pal. This in not me talking. This is god talking through me.” What arrogance. Let someone acquire the label ‘expert’ in this culture, then watch the power he gains to manipulate the minds of others. My dad told me to give no credence to ‘experts,’ telling me that ‘an expert is just a former spurt.’ Ha.
All concepts and beliefs are fictional, all made up. The Child-like mind must be attained for a state of peacefulness to exist in the manifest. The Child-like mind is the mind as it was before programming, free of ideas, of words, of word-thoughts, of all garbage in general. The realization makes clear that there is no separation, only at-one-ment, and that to say ‘I AM; I AM THAT’ implies no duality but only oneness. In the human form, I Am; but ultimately, I Am That. Those are not two things. And knowing that is true for Rob as well as for me, I was finally able to let go. Rob is not a son I lost; Rob did not lose his life; Rob is That, Rob is energy, Rob is forever, either as the manifest or the Unmanifest. So it is. Now, remember the discussion with Chief, using the lost arms-legs-organs exercise that shows we are not our body?
E.: Of course, and that experiment showed me that I am not what I’ve thought I was, that I am something, but I am still not sure what.
K.: Ha. OK. The ‘arms-legs-organs exercise’ reveals that you are not the body. The body sustains the mind, so if the body goes, the mind goes. That which goes cannot be the permanent, cannot be the Real You. Yet you know even without those parts that You Are still You. Right?
E.: Yes.
K.: Then what that is which you sense remains—even after arms, legs, organs are gone—is a PRESENCE. You sense Your presence.
E.: OK.
K.: But that sense of presence, that consciousness (of beingness, of presence) will only be sensed as long as the body-mind is sustained.
E.: Right.
K.: Since there is no duality, no subject-object duality, what is it that knows that consciousness, that presence?
E.: That’s where I got lost. I don't know.
K.: That which knows that conscious presence, since there is no duality, has to also be . . . CONSCIOUSNESS! It is that unprogrammed, unconditioned prior Consciousness/the Absolute that knows itself in the manifest form. Just as all “you” see in others is really the projection of “you,” so all that You perceive is the projection of You—or the reflection of You—the Real. The Real You cannot perceive anything but the Real, Your Real Self. I cannot perceive ego, I cannot be a false self, for the false is dissolved. (Of course the selves seen when you look at your self are false, are mirages, are images—the "Not Real." When we come to know the Great Reality, we distinguish the true from the false through knowing, through being the Real.) All known with the five senses is false, so all knowledge is false and is nothing more than learned ignorance. All which is perceived with the sixth sense, that inner resource, that working mind—which is the pure consciousness not warped by conditioning—is Real. But when the body-mind is gone, consciousness (the sense of presence, the "I Am" concept) is not there, and since there is no duality, the Absolute-Pure Consciousness is "not-knowing" anything any longer. My teacher asked, “What is there not to get?” It's so simple. Ha. You Are the Pure Consciousness which perceives the warped, manifested sense of presence until that sense of presence is gone, and then there's nothing to perceive.
But since consciousness cannot be destroyed, it cycles, as do the five elements from which the body is made—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What does not survive of the imagined triad (body-mind-consciousness) is the false thinking mind, and since nothing that is truly Real can be created nor destroyed, the mind and its imaginings were never the Real. All that is believed to be ‘known’ is truly fictional—including all ideas, false emotions, and beliefs—and all the fictional dissolves with the knowing of the false. But the truth cannot be said, so just as thorns that removed thorns are tossed away, concepts used to remove concepts are tossed away; then, only silence remains, and that nothingness is as close to truth as manifestation can approach.
To be continued.
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Here, "God," the "Son of God," the "Holy Spirit," "Buddha," "Krishna," etc., etc., etc. are viewed as verbs, not nouns.
THE EXPLANATION
If looked at as nouns, they point to illusions and are, therefore, a total waste of time to even discuss; if looked at as verbs which are resulting in certain sane but rare behaviors among humanity, then they are worthy of some attention during the relative existence.
Meaning? There are members of certain groups who say things such as "My concept of God in the past was of a weak God, an absentee God, A Santa Claus-type God, a mean, punishing, vindictive God, etc. Today, I am in close contact with a loving and caring God whom I worship and praise and glorify and give thanks to."
The reply to that usually goes like this: "If you are in contact with a God that wants to be worshipped and praised and glorified, then you're dealing with someone like yourself - a narcissist - and hanging out with narcissists will never bring an end to your narcissism. Next, in the phrase 'loving and caring God,' any supposed God that truly had her or his act together would tell you that the totally irrelevant part of that phrase is 'God' and that the only part to be focused on should be the 'loving and caring' part.
"That is, a non-narcissistic god / goddess would say, "I care not an iota about being worshipped and praised and glorified by you or anyone else. How arrogant and insecure and needy would I have to be to want that? Forget the man-made, dreamed up noun 'God' and focus on the 'God as a verb' understanding and then go forth and let loving and caring be verbs - not adjectives - and let them generate the act of love and the act of caring and let those actions manifest through you."
Again, Pope John Paul II was spot on:
"Heaven and hell are not geographic places but are states of mind, nothing more than concepts dreamed up by men."
