TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
[See the offer following this post for details on how you can watch a retreat on video which includes a detailed discussion of all seven of the steps on the path as used by Maharaj]
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.
REALIZING WITHOUT DOGMA, WITHOUT CONTINUOUS SPIRITUAL PRACTICES, AND WITHOUT A PREOCCUPATION WITH “THE NATURE OF REALITY AND THINGS NOUMENAL":
The bondage of world concern, self-concern, material concern, religious concerns, and spiritual concerns
"The Bondage of Religious Concern"
Bertrand Russell wrote: "Religion is based primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things."
The book entitled The Twice-Stolen Necklace Murders
is a partly-autobiographical, partly-fictional murder mystery / international adventure rooted in the non-dual message. In "Chapter Three," there is a recounting of an actual event that occurred when I was in the fifth grade, an event which was typical of the kind of religious terror which I was exposed to by my evangelical parents, my evangelical teachers, and by the city's governmental leaders, the police, the business leaders, etc., all of whom were driven by the totally-pervasive, community-wide evangelical belief system which prevailed.
The event described in that chapter was neither unique to me nor rare among my peers. It shows the kind of cruelty which was typical among the adults in that fanatically-religious community where fear and terror were the tools which they used on a daily basis to control the children and to impose on them a belief system which generated obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors and fear and paranoia and even terror so that the children would become "God-fearing people," just like the adults in that culture.
Any adult in our community could attack us mentally and emotionally and physically (such as with the boards used in school to strike us and raise huge, water-filled blisters on our butt cheeks) when we did anything deemed to be "displeasing to God." Even the so-called "public schools" were actually parochial schools in terms of their ideologies and beliefs.
Moreover, no parents "came to the rescue." To the contrary, they made clear that the use of corporal punishment and mental and emotional abuse and the use of any other pain-or-misery-or-suffering-generating tools available to "whip the kids into shape" was not only acceptable but was encouraged and preferred.
Sixty-one years later, little has changed in the U.S. except in a few progressive pockets. For the most part, the evangelicals still form the majority and still rule local and state governments and are in control of all three branches of the federal government.
The names of the people involved in the event recounted in "Chapter Three" were changed in the novel. Patty was actually named Betty, Mrs. Mannheim was actually named Mrs. Moss, and Kirk Wildman is the name used in the novel for me. Here's the recounting of that formative event:
Chapter Three
April, 1958
Portable Schoolhouse,
NW Louisiana
“Patty McLemore! Bring that note to me, now!” shouted Mrs. Mannheim. Patty stiffened, immobilized except to look to her left at Kirk, from whom she had just received the note. She obviously did not understand the message he tried to convey to her with his eyes, a message desperately pleading, Eat it! Eat the piece of paper now! It’s not that big, really! In fact, it would provide an excellent source of roughage! So eat it!
Mrs. Mannheim’s right arm extended to the far corner of her desk, there to lift her twelve-inch wooden ruler from atop the Bible where it usually sat. Standing slowly, she began to walk to the right of her desk, then veered left, and then headed down the aisle between the rows of desks in which Patty and Kirk waited in their assigned seats. Looming over Patty, Mrs. Mannheim said in a slow manner that violently enunciated each word but emphasized the last word even more, “Patty, I said . . . to . . . give . . . me . . . that . . . paper . . . now!”
Trancelike, Patty’s arm seemed to levitate itself, the note now crumpled in her hand. Concurrently, as her arm rose, Kirk’s heart sank. Once Mrs. Mannheim had taken the note from Patty, Patty allowed her hand to fall. Wishful thinking, her classmates thought. “Patty McLemore—you get that hand back up here, now!” the teacher demanded through clenched teeth behind stretched lips. Patty wanted to protest but knew Mannheim would come up with a harsher punishment if she did. She lifted her hand.
Mrs. Mannheim took only the tips of Patty’s fingers and bent them in a way that created the greatest tension possible on the palm of the fifth grader’s hand. Then, Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! sounded five stinging blows, each crack of the ruler inspiring a louder yell from Patty than the one before. Once released, Patty took the wounded hand in its opposite, rubbing it tenderly, and then she lay across her desk to sob quietly. Smack! reverberated the next blow, this one across Patty’s lower shoulder. “You sit up straight in my classroom, young lady!” With Patty fully vertical again, the teacher redirected her attention to the note, preceded only by a shaming, sideways glance at its delinquent author.
Kirk’s peripheral vision detected a tear coursing its way from the corner of Patty’s left eye, running parallel with her nose and down her cheek, then dangling from the lowest edge of her jaw. He watched with great guilt growing within him as the tear finally fell onto her white blouse. The next tear that followed its predecessor’s trail eventually struck her blue plaid skirt. He paused to pay close attention to what Patty wore that day. In addition to the white and plaid, she had on her usual white socks—rolled down one turn—and her shiny, black leather shoes. She had withdrawn both feet beneath her desk and crossed them.
Her proper outfit stood in stark contrast to the attire of the one sickened by accepting the blame for her beating. Kirk never dressed nearly as prim and proper as Patty. She wore first class footwear; he, on the other hand, usually went barefoot by choice. Custodians oiled the pine wood floors regularly so they sent sharp splinters into the soles of his feet only infrequently—far less frequently that Mrs. Mannheim sent emotional splinters into the souls of her minions. Kirk’s white tee shirt—with its rolled up sleeves—was tucked into blue jeans, the life of which his mom extended with iron-on patches. While Patty folded her white socks down one turn, Kirk rolled up one turn the extra-long legs on his jeans, exposing about eight inches of the grayish-blue underside which contrasted with the slightly darker blue of his faded pants. Considering his growth rate and the preponderance of iron-on patches waiting at home, his current pair of blue jeans should take him from this fifth grade experience all the way into his seventh or eighth-grade year. He would not know for many years that during the time that Mrs. Mannheim worked on the “The Case of the Intercepted Poem,” he had taken the time to contrast their attire, thus preventing his remorseful mind from focusing on a beaten friend.
Since Patty had wadded the tiny paper into a ball, Mrs. Mannheim had to cradle her ruler in an armpit to free both hands for the task of unfolding the note. It seemed such a tiny little event, the paper and the poem upon it, but Mrs. Mannheim would make something very big of it. Her people had behaved that way for thousands of years. Kirk’s eyes moved upward and locked their gaze onto the ruler. He thought, Bet that thing’s gonna smell real good now, once she starts flailing it about. As she read, Kirk and all his classmates felt confident that she would soon administer his wallops. To that end, he already had his hand up and available, ready for abuse, but something quite different happened. As the teacher read his poem, the content of the note seemed to exert the same effect on Mrs. Mannheim that Kirk had experienced when doctors had recently removed his tonsils. He recalled how the anesthesiologist had poured chloroform over a mesh covering placed across his nose and mouth as he followed orders to inhale deeply and exhale fully. He remembered how his eyes seemed to retreat upwards into their sockets; he recalled that unconsciousness followed shortly thereafter, and he longed for such oblivion now. He would not see for years how The System inspires the desire to escape, the prerequisite for all substance abuse.
Now it appeared that his written words had become Mrs. Mannheim’s chloroform, causing a great swoon to begin to descend upon her. She staggered away from Kirk, and he knew how the prisoners of war in a concentration camp must have felt as Mrs. Mannheim’s fellow German Gestapo-types back then had entered a barracks, abused some, threatened to kill others, and then departed without doing so. Well, he thought, maybe that comparison is pushing it a bit. But for an eleven-year-old, the comparison seemed appropriate at first. She would not strike him today, it seemed. Little could he have guessed that the blows to come his way later—blows to his psyche—would so debilitate that he’d have found palm-swats far preferable. Those wounds could heal by the next day. The later wounds she would deliver would last forever.
Finding her desk in spite of her Kirk-induced haze, she collapsed. The class focused on her every move in an effort to solve the mystery playing out before them. The students heard the screeching of her swiveling chair as she turned her back on them and tilted her head upward, the better to read the “Ten Commandments” posted on a faux-stone plaque on the wall above her head. What is she doing? all in the class except Kirk wondered. He knew. She had read his salacious poem and was determining exactly which of the Righteous Rules he had broken.
“When in doubt,” she had often told the class in the past, “let the Decalogue decide. And if you don’t find the answer there, then sit quietly and pray for the voice of Jesus or God to speak to you. It’s called ‘auditory locution,’ and if you are spiritually fit, you’ll hear voices frequently.” In this case, the Commandments had evidently sufficed since it seemed that she had let the Decalogue decide; thus, she wouldn’t send Kirk to the principal again this day but would literally try her best to cast him into hell herself.
Those commandments had caused Kirk plenty of trouble in this room in prior days. The greatest mess—up until this current one, at least—started with an early return from lunch break as a result of the cold weather outside. It began with Kirk’s asking, “Mrs. Mannheim?”
“Yes?”
“You told us you are a Christian, right?”
“Kirk, you know that’s right. Lutheran. Maybe if your parents come to their senses some day, they’ll transfer your letter and get you into the denomination that is truly teaching the message of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
“Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Mannheim,” he responded, ignoring that Christian call for separating from other Christians. “Maybe they’ll move me. But if they don’t," he said in his pandering way, “then I’ll do it on my own as soon as I’m of age, ma’am.”
She glared at him, hating the fact that one so young seemed so adept at trying to manipulate her.
“But my question is this. If you’re a Christian, why do you have the Jewish commandments on our wall?”
“First off, it’s not ‘our’ wall. It’s my wall. And they’re on display for two reasons: one, because I’m a Judeo-Christian, and two, because each of you needs to know the commandments and let them govern your life.”
“Yes, well, thanks for your concern, but I wonder how come—what with you being a Christian and all—that you don’t put up the two Christian Commandments?”
The look of disgust on her face dissolved into one big, question mark. For a moment, she thought, I’ve taught long enough to retire. Why do I stay here to keep messing with these reprobates? Then she believed that she heard a voice saying, In order to save their souls. So finally, she asked,
“What on earth do you think you’re talking about?”
“Well, you know, like when they asked him which commandment he thought the most important, Jesus gave them two new commandments. They were in the New Testament part. You know…the Christian part. They are the ‘Christian Commandments,’ I call them.”
Once she thawed—Kirk having frozen her in her tracks—that same inane reasoning seen all year led her to reach for the ruler on her Bible. He knew that she stored the ruler and Bible together to fix firmly in the consciousness of her charges the link between “scriptures” and “punishment”—the future rulers in their lives, she hoped.
Mrs. Mannheim didn’t have to say a word. Kirk walked around her desk, looked at both hands, saw that the left one still bore red marks from the day before, and thus used that hand to grasp the fingertips of the right hand and pulled his palm taut. “Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack!”
Then, she placed her ruler on her Bible, and he placed his butt in his desk. And on the outside he offered for her amusement a repentantly-contrite expression, but on the inside he smiled. His pain had only a physical component, or so he thought back then; hers, he could see, was mental—the kind that lasts the longest, the kind that she most often dispensed to her pupils. Want to really screw ‘em good? Screw ‘em mentally, Kirk would later conclude.
Kirk’s contemplations faded as he observed her looking first at his paper, then at the commandments, then back at the confiscated note and back at the commandments again. Like a child at Christmas time, making her list and checking it twice, she read and reread the poem:
A Poem
by
The Greatest Writer
In this City,
And in this Parish,
And in the State of Louisiana,
And in the United States,
And on this Planet,
And in this Galaxy,
And in the Universe,
And in all the Universes,
the One and Only . . .
Kirk Wildman!
The girls in France
Had ants in their pants.
To be rid of the ants,
The girls in France
Stopped wearing pants.
I wish I was in France.
Again, she swooned. The content of the prurient poem she found nearly overwhelming. Collecting herself, she swiveled to the front, and it became obvious to all that she had come up with a plan—a Divine Plan, she probably thought—and thus she said, “Kirk Wildman, you will stay after school today.”
Kirk’s eyes looked outside at the steadily falling rain, predicted to continue the entire day. A black wetness flooded his brain. His mind flashed forward to the end of the day and his mom's turn to pick up Kirk and four of his classmates and return them to their homes in a mostly-dry fashion. This could be bad. To have his teacher make him stay after class on a typical day when all the students would walk home would pose no problem. He could simply say he’d taken his time during the walk home, maybe even claim to have made a diversion through the park. But now, this set of miserable events combined in a way that would make his parents know that his teacher had . . . Kept Him After.
This could be very bad. This might develop into the worst Friday of his life. Or not.
The remainder of the day seemed like years to Kirk. Finally, the three o’clock bell rang and all—all except Kirk—walked to the cloak closets which ran the length of the back wall. When pushed on their ends, the wooden doors swung back to reveal the collection of bright yellow slickers and bright yellow hats and black rubber boots—the high-topped kind with metal fasteners that looped around a hook on one side and snapped down with tension when pushed to the opposite side. Thus, like musicians following a maestro, his classmates donned their same type coats and their same style hats and their same shiny plastic boots; then they all lined up single file like little soldiers and marched on command to the buses or cars. Kirk looked toward the closet and saw his rain gear—with its black coat and black hat and black boots. Damn their conformity, he thought. And damn her ignorant, closed mind, he cursed as he looked toward the front of the room at the glaring Mrs. Mannheim.
“Kraut!” he shouted to himself. What good did it do for dad to fight y’all overseas when you’re right here among us, brutalizing us just as much here in the States, right now, every day?
She reached for her ruler, and he began to imagine the number of swats coming his way. Five? Ten? Nope, not near enough. Twenty? Yeah, maybe twenty is the proper number of swats for writing a poem about wanting to be in the company of girls who don’t wear panties. I can take twenty. No problem. But she set her ruler on her desk and reached for her Bible, raised an index finger, pointed it upwards—in the direction of her heaven—then bent it time and again to beckon him. Bataan Death March II begins, he concluded.
He walked the aisle, stood before her desk, and suddenly felt an overwhelming need to urinate, fear gripping his soul. How would she use that Bible against him? The unknown around the Bible, as a result of years of negative conditioning, struck more fear into him than the known of twenty swats with a ruler. The Bible, long linked with post-life punishment, she now linked with earthly swats as well. Crime and Punishment they may as well have named it as far as his experiences had shown. Just like this classroom. Just like this state. Just like . . . everything, he thought. Then, one of the earliest of his many revelations came when he realized, And just like . . . me. Damn!
Yes, just like him. He suddenly flashed on his frequent schoolyard fights in which he hurt others. Pent up emotions and imposed repression will seek an outlet, and in that instant he got an inkling of another link—a notion coming that the abused might just become…abusers! Do victims of perpetrators become…perpetrators? Oh my gosh! How can I escape that cycle? he wondered at age eleven. And do the abused who become abusers still continue to accept abuse from others as well, even as they abuse? This is all very confusing, he realized. Will the answers ever come? In truth, the answers would come, but only after four decades of experiencing the nightmare of cycles while not knowing.
Mrs. Mannheim’s words yanked Kirk into the present moment again, but she looked way too calm as far as he could tell. She had actually programmed him to feel more comfortable in the presence of her expressed anger. It had become the norm in this big part of his life that school had come to represent. Seven hours a day with her, with the pain and suffering and tension—along with her scowls and the penetrating stares from her Saxon eyes—all of that crap had become the standard for every child in the class. As an adult, Kirk would recall his days in her room and know that in any sane community someone would have incarcerated her for her conduct. Instead, they considered her a hero and gave her plaques for having the most disciplined classes on campus. Herr Mannheim, the students called her. Teacher of the Year, the administration called her.
Now, in a way-too-calm-voice, she began. “I want to show you something.” He didn’t reply. “So you want to try to guess what I’m going to show you in here?” she inquired, pointing at her Bible.
He shook his head.
“Well, then, let’s just get right to it.” She flipped the book open to the exact page that she wanted, the exact page out of hundreds, so well did she know that book. Then, she cradled it fondly, turned it toward him, and set it on the edge of the desk nearest Kirk. He crossed his legs, applying pressure to his groin area to suppress his body’s desire to relieve itself. He longed for physical relief; one day, he would long for mental relief as a result of dealing with so many “Mrs. Mannheims” in his life.
Looking down, he saw not verses but a glossy black-and-white photograph instead. It has to be a photograph, he thought, for he had never seen a drawing that looked so real. What appeared before his eyes sent chills coursing through his veins. His back stiffened and his horrified mind caused his head to jerk back. He turned away from the page.
“Look at it!” she shouted. “I’m showing you your future. Look!”
What he saw at the age of eleven he could have reproduced exactly at fifty—were he to possess the skills of an artist—so permanently into his mind had she etched it. As he looked into the eyes of this portrayal of Satan, the villain stared Kirk down. Kirk took in first the face, a face with Mrs. Mannheim’s penetrating eyes, except these seemed pitch black. Later, as an adult, Kirk would flash back on this picture when his mate glared at him thusly as she would scold him for not being good enough. As an adult, he would experience the triggering of past trauma and feel as if he might die. A tolerance for abuse in the future Mrs. Mannheim had planted, and his passive-aggressive reactions she had helped arrange. All of it became nurtured in a tiny portable building suspended above the ground on stacks of gray cinder blocks, located in the far corner of a schoolyard in a northern Louisiana town. In fact, he would realize later, it found nourishment in almost every place he traveled in his society. But in that moment in which he stood in judgment before Mrs. Mannheim and her Bible and its Satan, he felt a million miles away from his nearest source of aid . . . and from the nearest source of reason.
Staring at the picture, he broadened his view from the eyes of Satan to the entire face. The visage had a triangular shape, sloping from a wide forehead to a pointy goatee surrounding both lips and chin. Kirk’s gaze moved from the spiky tip of the goatee, crossed the dark, evil lines covering the terrifying face, and rose past the forehead to the hair. “Look closely!” she yelled. He bowed over the Bible, looking more closely, and saw that each individual hair on Beelzebub’s head had transformed into an individual snake, rising up and coiling about, ready to strike the sinner standing before him with thousands of pairs of poisonous punctures. All the serpents slithered around the two horns protruding from the opposite sides of his head, those borrowed by Christianity from the mythological, horned-god named Pan.
Kirk broadened his view to see the physical setting of the picture more clearly, eyeing the naked devil only from the waist up since the rising flames covered him from the waist down. Visible through the conflagration, Satan’s right hand clutched a trident—an addition to Christian lore from Neptune, that mythological god of the sea. Neptune’s trident poked fish; Satan’s trident, the community would teach Kirk, poked bad little boys . . . and nasty French girls who don’t wear panties.
Expanding his field of vision, Kirk saw that the devil was shown standing in the center of a cave. The entire scene remained in darkness except for the portion of the area illuminated by the inferno. The light of the flames exposed rows of stalactites overhead; the tops of dozens of stalagmites rose from the floor of the cavern and protruded through the flames. No picture more horrible had Kirk ever seen.
Weeks before, the principal had used his paddle to whip Kirk after catching him in the bathroom while showing a black-white photo of a nude woman to some friends. Her body appeared lovely to Kirk. She had no shame. She smiled brightly in the picture, enjoying her natural nakedness and enjoying the fact that viewers would enjoy her in her natural state. That picture which the administration deemed “evil” got Kirk a board-beating on his bottom; this picture in the Bible—while also of a nude—they deemed “good,” conveying fear and redirecting wicked lives from the evil road to perdition and back onto the glorious path of righteousness. Ah, the value of Christian terror, of being a good, God-fearing boy. Suddenly, a tune came into Kirk’s consciousness and he began to hum to himself, Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the . . . of the . . . of the Devil?! Oh my gosh! Then, he shifted from that moment of living under the influence of Mrs. Mannheim and became restored to a sane thought: How totally screwed up these people are, Kirk concluded. I know which of those two nude pictures is evil and which one is good, and this one in the Bible ain’t the good one.
Earlier Kirk had focused on his and Patty’s clothing to escape his mental torture; similarly, his wandering mind tried to remove him again from the presence of this abusive woman. He wondered why the class never discussed space exploration, a topic so important to him. After all, the Russians had launched Sputnik the year before, but the U.S. responded in January of the current year with its own success when a U.S. Army Jupiter-C rocket launched Explorer 1. Why was class time taken up with talking about commandments instead of cosmonauts, about guilt instead of going into space? he wondered.
Then she bore down, touching the picture of Satan with her spiky fingers, with her own mini-trident. “This is your Master. With him you’ll spend eternity. While I’m in heaven with God and Christ, you’ll suffer in hell, spending every moment in the fire, feeling the flames biting away at every inch of your body, engulfing in the combustion your hands, your arms, your shoulders, your head, your chest, your legs, your feet! You will scream in pain, but the pain will not end, for in each moment that you have a micro-second of respite from the flames, the devil shall plunge his three-pronged pick into your body and his snakes shall bite into your flesh forever. You think that you have such a great imagination that you can create poetry about those disgusting girls in France? Well imagine this: imagine eternity, like that!” she yelled, pounding away at the picture with her finger. “Eternity in Beelzebub’s bonfires, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, year after year after year, forever and forever and forever.” The Bonfires of the Vanities had nothing on this woman.
The prospect she promised finally overwhelmed Kirk. He began to cry as he had not cried in a long time and suddenly began fouling his pants. A warm sensation—flowing down the front of his jeans, streaming down to his ankles—dripped off his bare feet and onto the pine wood floor. She saw his humiliating release, and she delighted in it. She had broken his perverted mind and crushed his evil spirit; then, his body had broken in kind. She considered it a triumph in religion’s Holy Triathlon in which they win control all three parts—the body and the mind and the spirit—of each person on all four corners of the earth that they are to go to. Yes! she thought. Victory! The angels are singing my praises! She sat back in her chair, collected herself as Kirk continued crying, closed her eyes and expressed a quiet prayer of thanksgiving. Kirk heard her whispered words flow out and upward: “Thank you, God Almighty. Thank you for giving me the words that I needed to redirect this young man’s life. Thank you Jesus, for presenting me with the plan. All praise to You from Whom all blessings flow. Victory in Jesus. Amen.”
When she opened her eyes, Kirk continued crying. Now, she reversed her agenda. “Stop it! Stop that crying right now. Be a man.”
Be a man? he thought. I’m eleven years old, you damn freak. You stupid religious nut, you Teutonic bitch! Someone free me from this prison called ‘her’ room. He had come to understand that highly religious people are often highly repressed, and now she demanded that he join her and repress his feelings as well. And he learned at that point a lesson, but it would take years of study before he could verbalize it clearly: fundamentalists are just people who have fun damning anything that is mental.
Finally allowed to leave the room, Kirk stepped onto the small landing at the top of three wooden steps and paused under the overhang. Looking at his jeans, he saw that the center portion from zipper to rolled-up cuffs displayed a darker blue than the rest of the faded material. What to do? he wondered. Then, a solution came. He walked to the lowest step, sat on the second, and leaned back on the third. Within seconds, the rain had equalized the coloring on the front of his pants. Now, thoroughly-soaked but of a singular color, he could go to the car.
As he approached the auto with reddened eyes that revealed he had cried, the four students waiting with his mom began to laugh. When he opened the door, the voice of Jerry Lee Lewis blared from the radio—accompanied by the pounding of piano keys as he sang Great Balls of Fire. Kirk thought, Oh my gosh! It’s a message from heaven! Or would that be . . . from hell? Great balls of fire? I know exactly what those look like! In the car, his classmates mocked him for being such a baby, but when his mom inquired about the problem, he knew that his mates had not confessed his sin. Thus could he say, “I didn’t do well on a test, but I can do extra work and make it up.” Then, he thought, Dang it. Another lie. Another codicil to my already-written pact with the devil. I really am doomed.
That night, when a prayer mentioned something about “and if he should die before he wakes,” such terror settled in his brain that Kirk would stir for more than half the night. One day in the distant future, he would hear a man offer the advice that “each should reflect and find the five people who had the most positive effect.” But Kirk would advise, No, find the five who had the most negative effect on your life, for those influences are the ones that deserve the greater attention if one is to finally get well, get free and get happy.
End Chapter Three.
Over the years, I have dealt with thousands of persons who were stigmatized and traumatized and burdened with unimaginable loads of guilt and shame and disgrace and humiliation by religious fanatics. I have seen hundreds of marriages destroyed when a fanatical partner judged a mate and decided the mate was not "good enough."
I have seen the most despicable leaders elected by religious fanatics and empowered to force their will upon the "others" in their cities and states and nation.
For all the "good" that persons claim is being done by their religion, I have seen the actual, long-term psychological and mental and emotional effects which persons have suffering because of their exposure to one of the greatest sources of the symptoms of the Ultimate Sickness, symptoms which Maharaj identified as "ignorance, stupidity, and insanity."
Mrs. Moss was driven by ignorance, stupidity, and insanity; her peers were driven by ignorance, stupidity, and insanity; her superiors were driven by ignorance, stupidity, and insanity; most adults in her community were driven by ignorance, stupidity, and insanity; and - as a result of their thoughts and words and actions - hundreds of thousands of children over the years also became driven by ignorance, stupidity, and insanity.
That said, religious and spiritual roles are played at the third step on the "path" to realization and can - sometimes - lead persons to consider certain pointers that deal with something beyond their body and mind and personality identifications and might pave the way for a shift beyond.
A common reaction to the sharing of the content here is, "Floyd, I was raised in a family that believed in a kind and loving God. I can assure you I have suffered no harm from that."
So is there no harm in believing fables and lies and tales rooted in myths and superstitions and allowing all of that nonsense to drive your thoughts and words and actions and remove any real ability to make conscious choices?
And surely you would not have clung to the beliefs planted in your mind early on if you did not think they have made you "better."
Is it not a very short leap to "I am better than" from the belief that "I am better"?
Is it not a problem when anything encourages a sense of separation and the arrogance which comes with thinking your beliefs are right and everyone else's are wrong?
Have you been well-served if you were programmed to never question anything but to accept on blind faith alone everything from persons in positions of authority ?
Have there not been some concerns about retribution and / or eternal punishment or about a series of reincarnations which are less than the level of former incarnations?
Is their not some concern with keeping a tally on "good karma" vs. "bad karma"?
Is there not some concern about bombings and killings and beheadings in the name of God?
Has there not been some angst over the years which has been rooted in a concern about pleasing or displeasing those whose opinions you have cared about, be they parents or relatives or friends or mates or spouses or bosses or your god or gods or goddesses, ad infinitum?
Honestly?
Tomorrow: "The Bondage of Spiritual Concern"
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 that is relevant is 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."
Yeshu'a (Jesus) and Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis were spot on:
"No one shall ever see 'the kingdom of heaven.' It is within"
and
"Heaven and earth shall fade away."
--Yeshu'a (Jesus)
and
"Heaven and hell are not geographic places but are states of mind, nothing more than concepts dreamed up by men."
--Pope John Paul II
"There is no hell."
--Pope Francis, the current pope
[in an interview with journalist Eugenio Scalfari,
a writer used by the Pope to issue off the record
teachings
which are part of the Papal Magisterium]
