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. I have only two remaining 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.
The point in this series is that the non-dual message has long been widespread but has seldom been understood either then or now.
To continue:
THE NON-DUALITY MESSAGE AS OFFERED IN FILM
(Today: “About Schmidt,” “Shutter Island,” and “The Thirteenth Floor”)
“About Schmidt,”
One reviewer wrote:
The central character Warren Schmidt is a man without resources. He has no intellectual curiosity. May never have read a book for pleasure. Lives in a home "decorated" with sets of collector's items accumulated by his wife, each in the display case that came with the items.
“On his retirement day, he is left with nothing but time on his empty hands. He has spent his entire life working at a job that could have been done by anybody, or, apparently, nobody.
"’The mass of men,’ Thoreau famously observed, ‘lead lives of quiet desperation.’ Schmidt is such a man.”
"About Schmidt” is not about a man who goes on a journey to find himself, because there is no one to find. When Schmidt gets into his 35-foot Winnebago Adventurer, which he and his wife Helen thought to use in his retirement, it is not an act of curiosity but of desperation: he has no place else to turn.
The film's opening scenes show him suffering through a meaningless retirement dinner and returning home to ask himself, after 42 years of marriage, "Who is this old woman who is in my house?" His wife might ask the same question about her old man.
They have lived dutiful and obedient lives, he as an actuary for the Woodman of the World Insurance Co. in Omaha, Neb., she as a housewife and mother, and now that the corporate world has discarded them they have no other role to assume.
Then Helen drops dead. Warren is astonished and bereft, not at the enormity of his loss, but that he had so little to lose.
But within Schmidt is a slowly-developing hunger, a desire to start living now that the time is almost gone. Schmidt is told by a woman who hardly knows him, "I see inside of you a sad man."
Most teenagers will probably not be drawn to this movie, but they should attend. Let it be a lesson to them. If they define their lives only in terms of a good job, a good paycheck and a comfortable suburban existence, they could end up like Schmidt, dead in the water. They should start paying attention to that crazy English teacher they had in school.
“Shutter Island”
The protagonist turns out to be Andrew Laeddis, a demented killer. At some earlier point, guilt and hurt cause Andrew to invent a secondary persona - one in which he is still a war hero and is apparently a US marshal named Teddy Daniels.
He's a patient in a mental hospital who's been encouraged by his psychiatrist to act out his delusion in the hope that this will dispel it. The role play fails: after a brief recovery, Andrew relapses into insanity and is therefore taken off to be lobotomised.
It soon seems that Andrew is only faking his relapse. His unusual treatments made him aware of the terrible things he has done: guilt has therefore engulfed him, and he's deliberately getting himself lobotomised to escape it.
One principal explained that it is as if the character reached a point where he concludes: “I feel too guilty to go on living. I'm not going to actually commit suicide, but I'm going to vicariously commit suicide by handing myself over to these people who are going to lobotomise me."
The novelist who wrote the book on which the movie is based explained: “I think he has a momentary flash. To me that's all it is. It's just one moment of sanity mixed in the midst of all the other delusions."
One viewer wrote of the film's message:
“How blind to the truth we can actually be? Teddy and the viewers believed to the very end that he was an investigator although there were various hints that showed otherwise.
The movie also puts us in the mind of a delusional person like Teddy, so we experience and believe in Teddy’s worldview, which we finally learn is complete fiction, so it makes us develop a certain understanding for people with such problems. His thoughts don’t seem too crazy after all, and by the looks of it we may all be constantly deceived.”
“The Thirteenth Floor”
A man awakens to discover a bloody shirt in his house and his boss murdered the night before. Did he do it? Why can't he remember? "The Thirteenth Floor" is a sci-fi thriller that explores the ominous possibility of computer-simulated universes, where people only believe they are real.
The lead character realizes this truth: that his own world of 1990's Los Angeles is itself a fabricated simulation. Several revelations follow as he realizes that the fabricated virtual world is one of thousands but is also the only one that developed a virtual world of their own.
[Some said that The Thirteenth Floor was Columbia Pictures’ answer to the Matrix. One viewer said,
“I quite enjoyed the complexity of this film. Somewhat like ‘the Matrix’ in that the question is "What is real?"
As with all non-dual messages, most of the reactions by viewers reveal that they didn’t "get it” and ended up with no more understanding than they had before watching the film. That is likely the case when persons watch any of the films being discussed in this section without some prior basic exposure to the non-dual understanding.
Since most who visit this site have that basic exposure to one degree or another, the material today is offered without editorial comments, such as, “See? Get it? Do you see the non-dual connection right there?”]
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.
