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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:
“eXistenZ,” “Illusion,” and “Sliding Doors”
“eXistenZ”
A critic said: “One of the film's shrewdest moves is how it dissociates the viewer from any assumption as to what is supposed to be real.” "Non-dualists" have long warned that the same result comes with all programming, conditioning, etc.
The film is said to “tackle the subject of video games as they were in the midst of becoming more ‘real’.” The critic says: “A game can pretend to tell a story even as, really, there is only the game.”
Similarly, throughout the history, humans have been told stories about life even as, really, there is only life . . . the stories have all been fiction; thus life has long been misperceived by the masses because of the misconceived, fictional stories which they have been told throughout the history of humankind.
Yesterday in the discussion of “Pleasantville” a point which adumbrated one of Maharaj’s key pointers was offered, namely that “life has no inherent meaning.” So too is a Maharaj pointer adumbrated in eXistenZ which tells viewers that “there is only the game.”
Maharaj said,
“To me the entire commotion [about life] is meaningless”
and
“Living is life’s only purpose.”
The film has led some to wonder if things ever really mattered at all.
(See yesterday pointer regarding "much ado about nothing” as the Advaitin Shakespeare put it.)
The analyst observes that "eXistenZ presents us a veneer of reality and then emphasizes that veneer, in a way calling attention to its own artificiality.”
He says: “In games this is showboating. In eXistenZ it is meaning, because its meaning is the meaninglessness of our own lives, and how that meaninglessness becomes its own meaning.”
The game “illustrates how organisms are just more nodules in a larger system of programming,” noting that “the characters in eXistenZ derive their motivations by trying to figure out what the game wants them to do.”
How many - post-programming and post-conditioning - spend their entire existence trying to figure out what someone else wants them to do rather than discovering what they want to do?
The spectres of their parents on their shoulders watching everything done and cataloguing all as either "good" or"bad" can happen if those parents are alive or dead.
The spectre of a god watching everything
done and cataloguing all as either "good" or"bad" happens in the case of billions.
I have witnessed a 71 year old woman who spent her entire life trying to get and receive and inspire love from a mother who could give nothing to her children – from their childhood to the mother’s dying breath last year - except dogma-based judging and scolding and rejection. Love was never received because it was never given, and it was never given because it was never there to give.
As for trying to inspire a show of love from one who was devoid of any ability to love, that is the epitome of an impossible dream. The 71 year old woman would telephone her mother regularly, trying to receive love, only to hear more Catholic judgmentalism and a diatribe on how the daughter had disappointed her throughout her entire life because the woman refused to follow her mother’s demand that she become a nun.
Now, with that mother having died, one might assume that the daughter at 71 can finally relax, having no one remaining that she has to work constantly to try to please, only to be slapped down time and again. That is not the case.
For 71 years, she worked, “trying to figure out what the game [i.e., her game-playing mother] wanted her to do” in order to gain her love. After her mother died without ever having given that love, the daughter sank into a deep state of depression.
Her “raison d’être” has been lost. Her life-long goal had involved trying to make herself pleasing enough to be loved by her mother; then, that mother left before she could fulfill that desire.
“The Good Daughter” role was never attained, so "The Bad Daughter” identity reigns and a 71 year old Child remains trapped in the suffering and misery of knowing that, now, she’ll never have a chance to attain her dream.
Nowadays, she sits in the darkness for hours a day, “trying to figure out what [the game-player] wanted her to do” in order to be loved. Indeed, “non-dualists” have been spot on for thousands of years when they warned that “abiding inside a programmed human mind really is a sad and dark place to be.”
The critic notes a key message offered via the film: “Everything is just programming, laws of science and biology and psychology, and sex. It is all . . . Game. But it is a game within a game within a game, and these patterns move over and under and across each other.”
Oh yes, the insane games which persons play, and what happens in the games which the masses engage in, is determined by the thoughts and words and actions which evolve from human minds which have been filled with garbage, but garbage which is mistaken by the masses for treasure.
“Illusion”
There are dozens of films with this name or a close variation. Pick one or several to see the “illusion vs. reality” message offered in many of them.
“Sliding Doors”
The film addresses the notion of “life splitting into two versions.” Robert Frost begins his poem “The Read Not Taken” thusly:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other”
and ends with this point:
“Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
One semester when I was teaching Freshman English in a university, I taught a unit entitled, “Brief Encounters.” The stories and poems used in that unit all had one theme in common: the briefest of encounters can have life-long consequences, and when we reach a fork in a road, whichever fork we think we chose was not chosen at all but was driven by the subconscious agendas of assigned or assumed personas.
Similarly, “Sliding Doors” shows people at the moment when a brief encounter happens, shows what happens when the person follows one fork and what would have happened if the other fork had been taken.
The old adage, “Be careful what you wish for . . . you might get it” deals with the way that an existence unfolds when ego-states – false identities – are driving thoughts and words and actions. In that state, no possibility exists for conscious choices to happen.
According to the man who wrote the script, the film would go on to inspire long discussions “about fate, serendipity, they why things happen, the what-ifs . . . all that.” But what most will never discuss is the role that the subconscious, unconscious agendas of false personalities play in what happens throughout any given relative existence.
One critic suggested that the film “blends secular spirituality and magical thinking.” Of course, all religiosity and spirituality are supported by and driven by magical thinking.
She went on to say: “Pop psychology - as well as all kinds of therapists, from relationship counsellors to life coaches writing blog posts - urge their clients to consider their own “sliding door moments.”
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.
