TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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CONSIDER:
"Heaven and hell are not geographic places but are states of mind, nothing more than concepts dreamed up by men."
-- Pope John Paul II
"No one shall ever see 'the kingdom of heaven.' It is within"
and
"Heaven and earth shall fade away."
--Yeshu'a (Jesus)
Here, with those who are still driven to talk about "God," the "Son of God," the "Holy Spirit," "Buddha," "Krishna," etc., etc., etc., the invitation to them is to view those as verbs, not nouns. See the end of the post for the full meaning and implications of that.
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
In the previous post, it was shown what Maharaj came to see: those who fixate at the third step of a seven-step “path” – the step where religious and / or spiritual roles are played – are as delusional as those identifying with the body only or with the body and mind only or with the body and mind and personality only.
When that is the case, then persons who are fixated at that step are often more delusional than persons who are psychotic and totally out of touch with reality, not to mention totally out of touch with “Reality.”
Maharaj said to those, “Your talk shows you think you are being bathed in the full light of the noonday sun but you are really standing only in the light of early dawn.”
He informed them that he was a "spiritual pygmy” when compared to their self -concept of a “Spiritual Giant." He spoke to them of their “kindergarten-level spirituality,” explaining to them that they had progressed no farther than the mumukshu stage.
(A “mumukshu” is one for whom the desire to achieve enlightenment is the predominant goal in life but one who remains a seeker - making clear that seeking is still going on and thus proving that what is claimed to have been found has not been found at all. To those he said, “The mumukshu is one who is still in kindergarten . . . 'spiritually inclined' but identifying with the body-mind'.”)
In such cases, mental disorders such as the “Stockholm Syndrome” can activate and persons can feel as if they must love their abuser or that their assumed identity demands that they proclaim that they love their abuser and love all of their enemies. Some refer to that disorder as “capture-bonding,” a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors.
The same can happen with "The Super Religious Ones" or with "The Spiritual Giants" who are driven to display in public their false images and who are driven to talk in ways which are intended to show off the supposedly high level of their assigned or assumed religious or spiritual state.
As discussed in the examples in the last post, other issues which accompany religious and / or spiritual role-playing can manifest, including dissociation, thus allowing one to be out of touch with or to avoid dealing with their actual unpleasant feelings; and denial (which, like egotism, is a defense mechanism used by those trying to protect the image of an assumed ego-state in which the existence of unpleasant internal or external realities is denied).
By keeping the truth out of conscious awareness and by keeping the actual effects of trauma out of consciousness, persons can temporarily suppress the results of a traumatic event enough to delay anxiety yet the effects remain on an unconscious level.
Of course it is detrimental to one’s mental health when a person makes a conscious or unconscious attempt to disavow the true impact of an event in order to reduce anxiety or fear or anger or anything other feelings or emotions which would reveal the fact that such persons' levels of religiosity or spirituality are not as elevated as they would have others believe. (So much for the advice to "Love what is" or to use the mantra, "It's all good!")
Seeing all of that, Maharaj realized that the so-called “benefits” of a religious / non-duality version of the Ultimate Medicine or of a spiritual / non-dual version of the Ultimate Medicine is a total illusion in light of the overwhelming side effects of those versions of the Medicine.
Maharaj made clear that he continued with nothing that had not been verified and validated by actual experience. So does that mean that he abandoned not only the use of the religious / non-duality version of the Ultimate Medicine but also the use of a spiritual / non-dual version of the Ultimate Medicine because he had first-hand experience with those side effects? Absolutely. The fact is that “maharaj” and, yes, “floyd” also, vigorously played the religious and spiritual roles at Step Three. That almost always has to be done by all trying to traverse the seven-step “path.”
So, nothing shared here is being shared which is not rooted in experience. Thus, this was offered a year ago:
As with the doctors here last winter, the case was the same with “maharaj” and “floyd”: in both cases, it was realized that the traditional treatment methods were having no lasting effect on the sickness (or the Ultimate Sickness), so those traditional methods were set aside.
Today, many are suffering - or even dying from - the Sickness because traditional methods are still being used to try to treat a far-more-potent strain of the Sickness. If persons were to wake up and realize that the traditional methods are not working, then they might seek a different treatment plan.
However, when one’s devotion is to a treatment plan that is “religious” or “spiritual” in style, then a fanaticism is sure to develop; then, devotion to that plan will be clung too with a fanatical passion and a fervor and a zeal that will block off the willingness to be receptive to any suggestion that another method might “work better” than the one they are trying.
After years of working with the Sickness, it was eventually seen (by both “maharaj” and by “floyd”) for what it really is, and for what it is not:
It is not a “sickness of the soul” or a “sickness of the spirit.”
It is not a sickness that is centered “somewhere in a human body, more specifically, in an area somewhere in the vicinity of the heart.”
It is not a sickness which results from “a dogma-deficiency” (but actually seems to flourish in an environment of “excess dogma”).
Its symptoms can be aggravated by the egotism that accompanies the assignment or assumption of “beyond the phenomenal, spiritual, Noumenal personas.”
It is a mental sickness.
It is centered in the mind.
It can, sometimes, respond to treatments that focus on the actual location of the Sickness but never to treatments that focus on imaginary locations of the Sickness. As noted earlier, the blocked artery in the heart here a few years ago was not treated by working on the head, and head problems are not treated by working on the heart / soul / spirit / whatever.
Via the experiences which came via his experiments, Maharaj eventually came to see that 99-100% of what humans do need not be done. What he saw early on – but then lost sight of - is what was seen here early on but was also lost sight of. The same happened with Andy Gugar, Jr., without whom the postings on this site and the books written in the last few years would not have happened. For example:
Maharaj looked to Nisarga Yoga for a name which could be used to “advertise” or make clear which yoga seekers would find being offered if they visited (though that did not prove totally to be the case for decades). As with most, he saw; then, he became “sidetracked”; then he saw again what had been seen years earlier.
The same here. As a five and six year old, “floyd” was calling BS on the nonsense he was being taught in “Sunday School” and during “revivals” and during “church services" and during “Vacation Bible School.”
But the pressures of acculturation - which here is identified as "a societal conspiracy being participated in at an unconscious level by the masses" – finally takes a toll, finally “breaks” one who is marching to the beat of a different drummer, and drives those (though they saw clearly early on) into the blindness of blind faith and into the role-assumption and role-playing that happens with almost everyone in the planet.
Yet the early seeing - though blocked - never really goes away with those that had the propensity to differentiate true from false early on. In those cases, there can remain the chance to "return" if one crosses the path of one that can point out what happened and what caused an inability to see clearly during that intermediary period. (What "remains" is at least some potential for a “restoration to sanity” or for a “restoration to clear seeing.")
The same also happened with Andy. Early on, he too was exposed to dogma, and early on he knew that something was wrong with the tales he was being told. Yet the pressures of acculturation set in and he became “sidetracked,” just as happened here and just as happened with Maharaj.
During that period of being sidetracked, Andy began to experience a recurring dream: the dream involved a white stallion which was confined in a small corral, so small that the horse could barely turn. It felt totally trapped, and it was. In the dream, the horse longed for a larger corral, one that was at least big enough to afford him the opportunity to get a running start and jump over the rails and run free. He wanted to break out, and that dream was a reflection of what Andy was facing in his relative existence every day.
Eventually, the peace and freedom which come via the understanding – and which were the goals of the white stallion in that dream – came after returning to the original state, prior to programming and conditioning and domestication and acculturation and brainwashing and indoctrination.
That is why the deal here is not about learning more and being taught more but is about being un-taught all and about un-learning it all and about reaching a state of zero concepts and about being free of the senseless machinations of a nonsense-filled mind.
The same could apply to all humanity. Consider:
Homo sapiens have been around at least 200,000, and maybe for as long as 400,000 years, but human or human-like remains predate homo sapiens. Anthropologists have found proof that about 1.5 million years ago, human ancestors walked upright with a spring in their steps just as modern humans do today.
Paleoanthropologists working in Ethiopia have discovered a 2.8-million-year-old jawbone fossil in the human ancestral line. The archaeological “Lucy” is estimated to have lived 3.2 million years ago and is classified as a hominin. Other hominid remains date to a period some 6 – 7 million years ago, and evidence had shown that the hominid lineage diverged from the ape lineage anywhere from 5 to 8 million years ago.
Now the key point is this: all of those humans and ancestors of humans lived for at least 7,995,000 years without religion and without any spiritual teachings or spiritual exercises or spiritual awakenings or spiritual programs or spiritual groups. They lived naturally.
Out of millions of years in existence, it has only been for about 5,000 years now that humans have stopped abiding naturally and have begun to abide unnaturally and / or supernaturally.
Meaning? Unnatural living manifests in many ways, the most common of which is the unnatural living which happens as a result of religious training. Supernatural living happens when persons are preoccupied exclusively with things beyond the relative and when they have been trained to think magically.
How would a hominin likely react to witnessing humans nowadays who are suffering from the mental disorder of “Religious OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder)" or from "Spiritual OCD" who are joining cults or sky-cults (a.k.a., religions or spiritual groups), and who feel the need to kneel and hum and chant and sing and dance about wildly and ring bells and burn special sticks and smell special smoke and wear special clothes and sport special hairdos or no hair at all or wear expensive robes and use special sticks to hit special bowls that are placed on special pillows or who read supposedly “holy” books to find out “how to live?”
Would not the trillions upon trillions of humans who have come before and survived just fine – thank you very much – without any of that nonsense wonder, “What the hell do you people think you’re doing . . . and why are you doing it?”
The answer: it is all being done - unconsciously and without any conscious choice involved - because of programming and conditioning and domestication and acculturation and brainwashing and indoctrination. Because of those, humans are now being driven by something that humans for millions of years never faced, namely, an Ultimate Sickness with these symptoms identified by Maharaj: “ignorance, stupidity, and insanity.”
And that which offers the most obvious examples of “ignorance, stupidity, and insanity” - and a Sickness with the symptoms of “ignorance, stupidity, and insanity” - cannot possibly cure “ignorance, stupidity, and insanity.”
So Maharaj finally saw, and Andy finally saw, and Floyd finally saw that the cause of mental illness cannot cure mental illness; that you do not need to be trapped in the Religious Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder; that you do need to be trapped in the Spiritual Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and the Spiritual workaholism which inspire persons to focus on Self or a Supreme Self (as if that is any different from focusing on the self / selves).
To the contrary, Maharaj suggested that it would be enough if persons would complete a personality / psychological inventory (that is, a “self”-inquiry) and find out all that they are not and see all of the hidden agendas of their false personalities which are subconsciously controlling and driving every thought and word and action.
Then they might be freed from being controlled and dominated by those hidden agendas and thereafter abide naturally, just as does every living thing on the planet except for humans, and just as every human did for millions of years before some among them came up with “ignorant and stupidity and insane” concepts which have been passed down and which now trap persons into their going and doing and zooming mode and which rob them of any chance of abiding naturally rather than unnaturally and / or supernaturally.
Might it be possible that you are doing things that need not be done? Might you be focused on getting more of what has led to humankind's problems and sense of dis-ease rather than on getting rid of it all? Might de-accumulating it all be a wise course to follow?
To be continued.
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Here, with those who are still driven to talk about "God," the "Son of God," the "Holy Spirit," "Buddha," "Krishna," etc., etc., etc., the invitation to them is to view those 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 (that narcissism evidenced by the fact that you think you are "godly").
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."
Both Yeshu'a (Jesus) and Pope John Paul II were spot on:
"No one shall ever see 'the kingdom of heaven.' It is within" and "Heaven and earth shall fade away."
and
"Heaven and hell are not geographic places but are states of mind, nothing more than concepts dreamed up by men."
