TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
ANNOUNCEMENTS
1. [See the offer in gold text 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 green text after today's 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." (See the details in the blue text after this post.)
4. My assistant found two paperback copies of the book co-authored with Mark Houston, A Twelve-Step Journey to SELF-Transformation, a potentially-effective gift for someone struggling with an addiction to alcohol (or to anything else, really). The book lists for $19.95 + Priority Mail shipping. To purchase, you may use the donate button at the top right of this page and include a note that the $27.60 is for the Twelve-Step book. Regrets to international visitors but this is only available within the U.S. because international shipping rates are prohibitive and time-consuming and cannot be tracked.
So, to reach the Fourth Step is to reach a point where one is freed of false identifications, beginning with being free of body and mind and personality identifications.
In upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing my take on those three, sharing quotations from my journal writings, blog writings, and book writings over what will be in three more months, three decades of sharing non-dual pointers.
Again, the early approach dealt with the seven-step approach and the later writings dealt with the four-step approach, so some quotes from both of those stages will be shared. (Later, quotations from Maharaj will be shared and then some quotations from a man I’ve known for many years, a non-dual writer in the U.K. that has reached an international audience for decades).
NOTHINGNESS
from
Floyd Henderson
On The Nothingness
• Understand that everything which you take to be “spiritual” and “noumenal” is really nothing more than an accumulation of relative and phenomenal concepts.
• According to the earliest teachings shared among the Indigenous Peoples, that which is “true” is only the space between exhalation and inhalation. Close enough.
• “True Self” is not “God,” though many who have morphed this philosophy into a religion will adopt and defend that Self-God, false-self concept as well.
• Ultimately, to try to support any “identity” alongside “the no-concept, non-dual Reality” is itself contradictory.
• At the “highest level” of understanding, any “identity” is seen to be conceptual.
• “Bliss” is merely an undisturbed, unconcerned vibration.
• The ultimate, non-dual understanding is that there need not be any understanding. So relax.
• When a “state” of zero concepts is reached, it is understood that there is no “identity” at all. Nothing from nothing leaves . . . nothing, not “SOMETHING.”
• “Absolute,” “THAT,” “Brahman,” “God,” “energy,” “energy-matter,” “Consciousness,” “Awareness,” and “SOMETHING” are still man-made labels generated by persons.
• Ultimately, to find out “who or what you are” is useless since there is no who to benefit, no user to use; on the other hand, finding out “who you are not” could eliminate unnatural and supernatural living and allow natural, AS IF living to happen throughout the remainder of the manifestation.
• That is the rational behind completing at least the four step path process.
• That would also allow freedom to happen, and only if free can bliss happen.
• Only when the addiction to the sound and the fury ends can the joy and bliss of the silence begin.
• To look to the universe and to focus on the concept of “SOMETHING” prevents seeing “The Reality of the Emptiness,” “The Reality of the Void,” “The Reality of the Nothingness.”
• Ego always wants more; freedom from the bondage of ego results in giving value to less.
• Ego is about going and doing and zooming in order to collect more; freedom from the love of more allows the non-doingness (the beingness only) to manifest, at least temporarily.
• Persons search for “the divine” and for an understanding of all that is “supernatural” when, in fact, there is nothing that is supernatural at all.
• The result of their having been fooled is an endless stream of desires and fears among persons. Those create a constant sense of longing, and longing generates a constant sense of dis-ease.
• The non-realized never come to the understanding that it is only from a condition of emptiness (empty of concepts, of identities, of a “mind”) that a sense of fulfillment can happen during the manifestation.
• The realized can taste what the Italians call il dolce di fare niente—“the sweetness of doing nothing.” The “fully realized” will shift even beyond that and will understand something even simpler than “the sweetness of doing nothing,” namely, il dolce di Niente—“the sweetness of Nothing,” period.
• Trace your roots. Go beyond self and Self, beyond Consciousness, beyond Awareness, and even beyond the Absolute to the seminal Nothingness. Abide as such.
• All identities are limiting. Limitations restrict freedom. Restrictions of freedom prevent the manifestation of happiness during the relative existence. Preoccupation with finding identities and assigning labels has the same effect.
• If you would be free, align with the nothingness. Reach the space.
• If you would be unconcerned, then all of your knowledge must go into liquidation. Has that happened? Have you reached the space?
• “The supreme Absolute . . . is only a name for communication purposes.” (Maharaj)
• “This is all a big hoax, a big fraud, created out of nothingness.” (Maharaj)
• Ultimately, even “nothing” as a concept is abandoned.
• Non-duality (at the purest and most advanced level of the Teachings) endorses zero concepts.
• All of the mutated versions of Advaita, especially those which have been morphed into a religion by men with hidden agendas, are bastardizations . . . fabricated via the warped consciousness, accepted as truth by other specks of warped consciousness, and passed along now by such specks to other such specks.
• There is a process whereby, from the nothingness, a particle can manifest. This entire universe began with the instantaneous manifestation of an atom within a vacuum.
• It is from the nothingness that all manifestation happens spontaneously. After some groupings and ungroupings happen, the Nothingness will again prevail.
• Prior to “this universe,” prior to Awareness, prior to Consciousness, and prior to manifestation, there was a “time” when only a vacuum was. Your “ultimate root” is even prior to time.
• If you’re interested in oneness, understand that everything in this universe began as one, single atom that manifested within the emptiness of a vacuum.
• Purged of all identities, ideas, beliefs, and concepts, the consciousness can function as an empty vacuum. Originally, the empty vacuum was undisturbed, unconcerned . . . without burden, without activity, without any doings.
• The relative existence is miserable for those who are “full of it.” If you would be undisturbed, unconcerned, without burden, without activity, without any doingness, be the emptiness. Reach the space and abide as such.
• Fear not . . . nothing is coming. No judgment . . . no endless punishment. Desire not . . . nothing is coming. No endless celestial caroling . . . no heavenly brothels and no extraterrestrial orgies . . . no endless reward. Nothing, so enjoy, NOW.
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) whose Vatican Bank worked for decades with the Mafia while laundering mob earnings (for a 15% all-profit charge by the Bank); 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.
https://awakening-together.org/awakening-together-satsang-with-floyd-henderson/
