TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
ANNOUNCEMENTS
1. [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]
2. 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.
3. A new video ("Number Ten: Awakening Together Satsang, March 2018") has now been added in the far right column of this page, offering the opportunity to view a recent 2018 satsang session with Floyd being interviewed by Regina and Jacqueline of "The Awakening Together Group."
THE SEEDS OF DUALITY WHICH PRODUCE DUALITY'S PROGENY:
Offspring Number Twenty-One-
An Inability to Care About Anyone Other Than Oneself
Yesterday it was shared that Maharaj endorsed "an orderly life." In that same talk, he also mentioned "the search for truth" and "helping others."
First, those comments only deal with the AM-ness, with the relative existence, and have nothing to do with what happens post-manifestation.
Secondly, what he shared was always one-seeker-specific. He might offer a piece of advice to a seeker in one talk and in the next offer the exact opposite advice to another seeker. It all depended on where on the "path" the enquirer was at that moment. Then, whatever was shared was intended to facilitate the movement of that seeker to the next step.
A seeker at the second step would not be told what a seeker at the fourth step might be told. A pointer offered to a seeker at the second step was ultimately intended to move the seeker to the third step; a pointer offered to a seeker at the fourth step was ultimately intended to move the seeker to the fifth step.
To that end, when Maharaj shared with a seeker a point about "helping others," he knew full well that there was no "person" to offer "help" and that there was no "other" to receive "help."
Instead, the comment applied only to the relative existence and where the seeker was on the "path" at that point.
He said to a different seeker at a different point on "the path" . . .
"There are no others to help."
He told another: "The only thing that can help is to wake up from the dream."
When might he be able to "help" someone in the relative? He said when asked:
"Surely, I can help. You too can help. Everybody can help." [Referring to suffering during the relative existence.] He continued:
"But the suffering is all the time recreated. Man alone can destroy in himself the roots of pain. Others can only help with the pain, but not with its cause which is the abysmal stupidity of mankind."
He advised one man trapped in arrogance who was putting his search before a not-well spouse, "Go home and look after your wife with love and care. Nobody else needs you. Your dreams of glory will land you in more trouble."
Yet all that involves . . . things finite. There is no infinite pleasure or pain, no infinite bliss or suffering because there is no "one" who survives the relative existence. There being no one alive post-manifestation, there is no one to experience suffering or joy either one.
So any talk about "helping" is about that which is finite so it is totally irrelevant as far as things noumenal are concerned.
That said, when a friend had surgery and stayed here a few days to recover, was she helped by the bringing of compresses, cool water, Tylenol and broth? What was "helped" was an elemental plant food body which was circulating air and conscious-energy. The registering of pain in her case only happened because sensory receptors in the plant food body can send a message via nerve fibers to the spinal cord and brain stem and then on to the brain where the sensation of pain is registered, where the information is processed, and where the pain is then perceived.
So yes, the Tylenol administered did interrupt the natural functioning of the plant food body's sensory receptors and, to that end, to the extent that what I provided helped reduce the pain being registered, I "helped." But did I really? Nothing I did addressed the cause of the pain. I merely triggered a scenario where parts of the friend's body were dulled. She was rendered less aware. How could that be said to have helped? Treating symptoms rather than cause did not actually help, did it?
So if Maharaj said to seekers at one point on the path who were bent on helping to yes, go ahead and help, he did so while actually knowing better. And yes, he did say that the job of the "realized teacher" was to offer a means by which suffering could end if one sought him out with that goal. But suffering is finite as well. Again, post-manifestation there is no "one" to suffer. Kind of blows away the concepts of "hell" or "eternal punishment" once that is understood, yes?
Actually far more than "helping" though, Maharaj was concerned with caring, with empathizing, with showing compassion. He asked one visitor who showed up in the loft and was commiserating about the death of someone he knew . . .
"Why do you fret at one man dying and care little for the millions dying every day?"
He recommended "compassion" to a different visitor. To another, he recommended "Love, goodwill and compassion."
He noted that, among the realized, "There will not be the least flaw in their understanding and compassion"
and he said regarding the sharing of the non-dual understanding that
"To wake one up from a nightmare is compassion."
He said that "the realized are full of compassion for the suffering"
and that
Love and compassion are their very nature."
Yet there are those who cannot and will not "help" by any definition of the word or even by a strictly relative use of the term or with as many asterisks as one might want to put after "help."
Those are incapable of feeling compassion. They are incapable, in fact, of feeling at all so they substitute emoting in its place. They are rendered emotionally-intoxicated by their warped programming, conditioning, etc. Who are they? What's going on with them? To see, consider a time when I was in a similar condition which was caused by sickness.
To this day - more than six decades later - I recall vividly the sickest I ever felt physically, a time what I was around eight years of age. I was so sick that I was sure in the early days of the illness that I might die and was so sick by the tenth day that I did not care if I did.
I had double pneumonia but my parents had no insurance and no money to pay for a hospital visit so I was placed in bed and tended to by my mother. Dad was unavailable because he had pneumonia in one lung.
Mom pumped me full of over-the-counter syrups - higher in alcohol content than anything actually medicinal - to try to assist with my cough and my stabbing chest pains. She also gave me heavy doses of aspirin to try to address the fever, to try to reduce the combination of excessive sweating and shaking chills, and to try to dull the pain.
My lips and the skin around my nails turned blue from lack of oxygen, and I suffered hallucinations, feeling at times as if the ceiling and walls were actually closing in on me.
That being my condition, would anyone expect me to be willing or able to offer any version of "help" to anyone? Would anyone expect an eight-year-old in that condition to be conscious of others or to care about others or to feel compassion for others?
Of course not. Now, look at the non-realized masses, for they are even sicker now than I was then.
They all have the Ultimate Sickness, the worst sickness of all. They are really sick. But the Catch-22 with that Sickness is that those with it carry it about as if in a dormant state, unawake to its presence, unaware of its existence, and unconscious of its impact and effects.
When the masses are that sick, how could they possibly care about anyone else? They will not. How could they show any compassion for anyone? They cannot.
Instead, they will show hatred and contempt and even jealousy of those whom they think are better off than them.
Maharaj said to one such type:
"Your interest in others is egoistic, self-concerned, self-oriented. You are not interested in others as persons, but only as far as they enrich, or ennoble your own image of yourself. And the ultimate in selfishness is to care only for the protection, preservation and multiplication of one’s own body."
"By body I mean all that is related to your name and shape — your family, tribe, country, race, etc. To be attached to one’s name and shape is selfishness. A man who knows that he is neither body nor mind cannot be selfish, for he has nothing to be selfish for."
"Or, you may say, he is equally ‘selfish’ on behalf of everybody he meets; everybody’s welfare is his own. The feeling ‘I am the world, the world is myself’ becomes quite natural; once it is established, there is just no way of being selfish. To be selfish means to covet, to acquire, to accumulate on behalf of the part against the whole."
Thus Maharaj advised: "Just be understanding and compassionate, free of all self-seeking."
He advised one self-centered visitor: "The sorrows of others do not interfere with your pleasures. If you were really compassionate, you would have abandoned long ago all self-concern and entered the state from which alone you can really help."
The reason there is so little love and caring and compassion on the planet is because there is so much sickness on the planet, and the most serious sickness of all is the Ultimate Sickness, characterized by what Maharaj identified as the "ignorance, stupidity, and insanity" which it brings.
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"
--Yeshu'a (Jesus)
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 become a part of the Papal Magisterium.
[That said, would that the popes who have shown the courage to reject a core concept of their dogma - namely, "hell" - would find the additional courage required to question the very existence of their institution in light of the centuries-long cover-up of their history of raping children and in light of the mental and emotional and psychological scarring of billions of their members past and present.
And that need for courage also applies as questions need to be asked about why so many other sky cults are still being supported and allowed to continue to exist as well. When certain types of programming and conditioning have been shown to blind the masses, they should end. Will they? Not likely. Why?
Because what the masses think and say and do is most influenced by the international crime families which hold sway over the masses as criminals conduct their planet-wide operations. What are the major international crime families and which are the most influential and have the largest memberships?
The Mafia / La Cosa Nostra; the Catholic Church (with it 1.2 billion followers); Protestant and Evangelical Churches (with over 1.2 billion followers) like the one I was raised in where the youth director molested and sexually assaulted young girls; big business which has long created environments in which people have been abused; powerful political bodies like the U.S. Congress, etc., etc., etc.)
With all of those crime families, neither the followers nor the leadership ever voluntarily step down or shut down their criminal activities. Be they gangs, organized crime families, religions, big business, politicians, etc., they all want control and they all want power and they all want money, and nothing internal will interfere with the driving forces at play.
The masses must demand that all those in charge must step down and their groups and institutions must shut down, and there's the real problem because the continuation of their crimes are enabled not as much by the people running such crime organizations as they are enabled by the masses of people who - wanting some perceived "payoff" - remain involved with them and give them money and support them and aid and abet the continued existence of those criminal enterprises and thus facilitate the ability of church criminals and political criminals and other types of criminals to continue to commit their crimes.]
Here's
the direct link to the VIDEO VERSION
of the "Awakening Together" satsang session with Regina and Jacqueline referenced earlier, 18 MARCH 2018
If preferred, here's
the direct link to the AUDIO VERSION
of that session.