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

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 Spiritual Concerns" 

One of the most exhausting times of my life came when I graduated from college and began a career as a public school teacher in Louisiana, one of the lowest paying states in the U.S. for educators at that time and to this day. 

There were no written standards, no curriculum guides, and nothing more than an outdated grammar text and an outdated literature book to point the way to the content of the courses I was to teach. It was up to me to write my own curriculum, to come up with lesson plans which would address that curriculum, and to provide everything else needed to fulfill my self-determined job requirements.

Each day during the school year, I arrived at work at 7 A.M. to continue preparation for the day's activities which had begun the evening before. Each day, when the students were dismissed for the day at 3 P.M., I began working on lesson plans for the next day, scoring homework papers collected that day, preparing quizzes and tests, and marking the essays which were turned in on a weekly basis. 

At 5 P.M., I left the school, taking the stacks of paperwork home with me, paperwork which would occupy my attention until well after midnight. I would sleep for six hours, arise, shower, dress, eat a bowl of milk and cereal, and leave for school where I would arrive by 7 A.M. and start the whole cycle over again. 

Then came my first payday, the end of the month when a check in an envelope was finally placed in my mailbox by Mrs. Clark, the principal's secretary. I took the envelope and went to a far corner of the teacher's lounge, anxious to see how much I would have left over after paying the $330.00 per month required for the four basics which came off the top of my monthly income first: $130 for a month's rent on my apartment, $40.00 for gas, electricity, and water for the apartment, $125.00 for my car note, and $35.00 for gasoline. 

I opened the envelope slowly, peeking inside at the check before taking it out of the sleeve. As I peered at the right hand side of the check, I saw a post-withholdings total of . . . $321.88. I looked down at the floor and then back at the check, thinking that somehow, some way, magically - when I looked at the total again - I would see that I had misread it and I would see double or triple the amount initially seen. 

I removed the check from the envelope, turned it so it was right side up, and looked at the amount again. It was still $321.88. Doing the math, I took $321.88, subtracted $330.00 from that, and . . . wait a minute. Something was very wrong. That did not compute. There had to be some mistake. After paying the four basic bills each month, I was going to be $8.00 in the hole even before I paid for such luxuries as food, clothing, toiletries, student loans, car repair, dental bills, etc., etc., etc. 

I looked around the lounge at fellow faculty members who were holding their first check of the year in their hands, immobilized, while otherwise looking like cast members from "The Night of the Living Dead" movie. 

I walked up three flights of stairs and moved down the hall as if dazed by a blow to the head from the heavyweight boxing champ at the time, Muhammad Ali. 

I stopped at the door of the classroom of the woman assigned as my mentor, the door open to try to help generate a cross draft of air from the open windows in a building which was not air conditioned (in a city where temperatures hovered around a 93 to 102 degree F. range in August). 

She saw me, told her students to open their texts to read the next three pages, and then approached me. She asked: "What's wrong, Floyd?" I handed her my check and asked, "Can that possibly be right?" She replied: "Looks about right to me." 

I gave her the short version of the math involving that check and my bills and she smiled and patted me on the shoulder and said, "Now you see why my husband and I have usually worked two jobs a year. You'll find something else too, to make up for the shortfall." With that, she turned and went back into her classroom. 

I began looking for a night shift job that could supplement my income and found work as a night watchman at a steel fabrication plant. I worked dark to light, looking at blurry monitors and taking occasional walks and drives around the property. The pay was lousy, as I explained one day to a fellow faculty member named Ralph. 

When he heard about my predicament, which was the same predicament of most teachers then and now, he told me he had the answer for my financial problems. He told me to give the steel company a two-week notice and then to meet him in the faculty parking lot at 7 P.M. on a Monday two weeks down the road and to bring a change of clothes and my toiletries and my school paperwork. 

After grilling him, he only said, "Be here at 7 in the evening on that Monday" and walked away. I gave notice and then on the Monday scheduled to meet Ralph, I went home at 5 P.M. as usual, worked on my paperwork for an hour, gathered up a change of clothing and toiletries, and drove to the school parking lot. 

I pulled up next to his car and he said, "Follow me." We drove for a half hour, leaving the city and entering one of the surrounding forests and then taking a dirt road to a site where an oil rig came into view after I rounded the final curve in the road. He drove up near the door of a free-standing trailer near the rig and parked. I pulled in next to him. 

I asked, "What the hell's going on, Ralph?" He said, "Welcome to the world of teaching. Come on in." We entered the trailer where I saw a man sitting in front of a row of electronic equipment which ran along one entire wall of the trailer. After being introduced, the man picked up a clothes bag and a shave kit and said to my would-be "financial savior" Ralph: "Have a good evening, Ralph, Floyd. See you guys tomorrow," and he left. 

I asked Ralph again, "What the hell's going on?" He said, "What's going on is that I am going to train you to take the place of the man who quit the night shift here. And what is going on is that I'm going to give you a job that is going to pay you nearly three times as much per week as the school district is paying you in a month. Now let me show you around." I was shown a bedroom with a loud alarm attached to the monitors I'd seen earlier. I saw a bath with a shower. I saw a ten-inch, black and white television. I saw a small refrigerator. I saw a Coleman two-burner, table top stove.

Then Ralph said, "Say hello to your new home away from home. You'll be here from 7 P.M. to 7 A.M. where you will work on your paperwork from school while you monitor the equipment here, where you'll go out when you're signaled to do so, where you'll collect a mud sample, and where you'll do an analysis of its contents.

Around 6:30 A.M., you'll shower, change clothes, greet your daytime replacement, and drive directly to school. You'll arrive there at 7:30 A.M. Monday through Friday and you'll be free until you return here at 7 P.M., seven days a week. 

Over the next few weeks, Ralph shared what he had learned during his years of being a Drilling Fluids Engineer and trained me in the basics of being a "mud logger." Mud logging is the creation of a detailed record (called "a well log") of a borehole by examining the cuttings of rock brought to the surface by the circulating drilling medium (most commonly called "drilling mud"). Mud logging is usually performed by a third-party mud logging company, and that's where Ralph came into the picture.

While I was not making half of ten thousand dollars a year teaching, and while Ralph was also still being paid less than $10,000 a year - even with all of his years of experience - he was making more than twenty times that running his mud logging company which was operating trailers scattered throughout the woods of NW Louisiana. 

A few months later, more challenges came as I "won" the draft lottery drawing used to recruit young males to fight in Vietnam. I soon received a summons from the U.S. Government ordering me to report for a physical examination, the hearing portion of which I failed. For the next few years, I was recalled regularly to see if my hearing had improved or if my skills at outwitting their low-tech hearing test equipment had diminished. 

(I did not know anyone in Vietnam whom I considered a threat to the security of the United States, I did not know anyone in Vietnam whom I wanted to kill, and I did not know anyone in Vietnam whom I thought deserved to die, so I did what I did for years to avoid being forced to take a job as a professional hit man for the U.S. military.

The sergeant on duty would say, "Strip down to your underwear and socks, place your clothes and shoes and valuables in the wire basket, lock it in the rack provided, go to the table in the testing room and have a seat, place the headset over your ears, and prepare to take the test."

Each time, I would reply to him, "Say what?" and he would look at me with disgust and flip me the finger before I headed to the dressing / undressing area to remove my clothing, none of which ever covered my ears.)

Pretty much working or being on duty 24 / 7 at the high school and at the drilling site left me exhausted. I considered quitting the teaching job, but it was the only job I had ever wanted to do, so I worked a second job - as so many teachers did and do - in order to be able to afford to do what amounted to the charity work performed by most public school teachers. 

Yet that was nothing compared to the exhaustion which would come once I became influenced to assume the role of "The Spiritual Giant." The only thing more exhausting than that came when several ego-defense mechanisms triggered and the ego-state of "The Spiritual Giant" was self-upgraded to the super-ego-state of "The Super Spiritual Giant." 

More on that tomorrow. 

To be continued.

NEW OFFER: 

Watch an updated seven-hour streaming video of a retreat with Floyd Henderson which can be viewed by anyone with internet access. (In this video, all seven of the steps on "the path" as taught by Maharaj are explained and discussed.) 

If interested; click the button below to pay the fee via PayPal. You will then receive an email which includes the link for you to view the private, unlisted video via an arrangement we have made with YouTube, Inc. You do not have to have a YouTube account to watch this privately streamed video. 

(If you do not receive the link promptly, your computer or email provider may have high filter settings. Check your spam and trash folders because some providers automatically transfer emails containing links to those folders.) 

To access the seven-hour streaming video of a retreat and begin watching right away, click this "Buy Now" button: 

  

Please enter into the silence of contemplation. 

[NOTE: The four most recent posts are below. You may access all of the posts in this series and in the previous series and several thousand other posts as well by clicking on the links in the "Recent Posts and Archives" section.] 

In addition to the five non-duality books made available without charge by Andy Gugar, Jr. (see “FREEBIES” above), you can now access nearly 3,300 posts for any topics of interest to you. 

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]