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.)
Let’s pause to clarify the “objectives” behind the sharing of the non-dual message:
THE RATIONALE FOR
OFFERING TO GUIDE SUFFERERS THROUGH THE “JOURNEYS” TO WELL-BEING
and
THE RATIONALE FOR
EVERYONE TO SEEK TREATMENT FOR THE ULTIMATE SICKNESS
Why do some few pay attention to the Ultimate Sickness and why do most never search for the Ultimate Medicine to treat it?
Ironically, such disregard is occurring even though the Ultimate Sickness is far more widespread and even though it results in far more pain and suffering and misery than all other sicknesses combined and all causes of annual deaths combined.
In fact, 97% more humans annually will suffer from the Ultimate Sickness than from the top nine combined annual reasons for death. Consider the sicknesses here in the States which do receive considerable attention, a circumstance that is adumbrated throughout many nations around the globe:
#1: Heart Disease (8.7 million deaths per year)
#2: Stroke (6.2 million deaths per year)
#3: Lower Respiratory Infections (3.19 million deaths per year)
#4: COPD (3.17 million deaths per year)
#5: Lung, Tracheal, Bronchial Cancers (1.6 million deaths per year)
#6: Diabetes (1.58 million deaths per year)
#7: Alzheimer / Dementia (1.54 million deaths per year)
#8: Diarrheal Diseases (1.38 million deaths per year)
#9: Tuberculosis (1.37 million deaths per year)
#10: Road Injury (1.34 million deaths per year)
(Additionally, up to 440,000 die every year from "medical errors." If you are among those with any of the top nine sicknesses above, your odds for recovery are even worse if you seek “professional” medical care.)
So annually, there are always twenty-four million people per year who are suffering from a fatal illness that is going to kill them while another 1.34 million don't have a clue but they will be killed in a road accident.
For the top nine causes on the list, millions upon millions of researchers and medicine developers and medicine testers and an assortment of doctors and assistants are working every year to try to relieve the suffering of 24 million humans . . . but will fail.
Yet when it comes to the Ultimate Sickness, there are – using Maharaj’s gauge – more than 7.7 billion humans today who are suffering from that Sickness and millions of them will die as a result of the warped thinking and insane behaviors which the Sickness generates.
Yet where is the urgency to treat that Sickness? It is non-existent because the Sickness does not receive the international attention which other sicknesses do. The mind-root of its symptoms are the most misdiagnosed of all, and its symptoms are usually believed to have something to do with the masses having mastered too little dogma or to their each having a "sick spirit" or a "spiritual malady."
Here, certain energies are dedicated to trying to relieve the suffering of billions who may (1) die this year because of – to use Maharaj’s words - the "ignorant or stupid or insane" behaviors which the Ultimate Sickness will inspire or, more likely (2) continue to live but suffer the misery of the most prevalent Sickness on the planet.
To that end, the discussion of the treatment options for the most pervasive sickness of all continues:
THE STAGES WHICH MUST BE PASSED THROUGH BEFORE THE ACTUAL “JOURNEY” CAN BEGIN
Stage I: Being Programmed to Accumulate (Ages 1-20)
Stage II. Accumulating (Ages 20-40)
Stage III. The Forest Dweller Stage
Stage IV. the De-Accumulation / Actual "Journey" Stage”
Earlier this point was offered:
“The Forest Dweller Stage” will be discussed in detail because it is there that so many seekers (and even non-seekers) fixate.
Stage III: The Forest Dweller Stage (continued)
Some space will be allotted to the discussion of the third stage because it is there that many fixate. The point was offered earlier: "During this stage, some activities might legitimately move seekers along the 'path,' but most do not."
One of the last ego-states to be abandoned is "The Seeker," often held to as firmly as the Step Three ego-states of "The Religious One" and "The Spiritual Giant."
When one is truly identified with "The Seeker" role (which is soon upgraded to "The Super Seeker") then the ego-defense mechanism of egotism is triggered to defend that ego-state. The question then becomes, what would happen in the warped mind of "The Super Seekers" if they finally "found"?
In their minds, they would actually "end." Just as Personality Type Three Achievers never really want to achieve a goal (constantly raising the ante if they approach a defined goal so that they can continue to achieve, that is, can continue to "be") so too is the case with the persona of "The Super Seeker."
"The Super Seeker" never really wants to "find" and put to rest once and for all the seeking, the knowledge-gathering, the going, the doing, the zooming, the spiritual workaholism. What a setup for misery! How dull a boy shall Jack be in that mode?
Nowadays, seekers do not typically go to the forest to seek in the quiet, in the solitude, and within. Instead, most who are trapped in the third stage are forever engaging others, seeking without rather than within.
Here sometimes, a team effort is offered where the non-duality message is combined with professional counseling. One woman recently faced serious problems with even booking the first of those sessions because of the manic level in which her seeking was happening:
in one month alone, she had sought out "a native American spiritualist" and had conducted a series of sweat lodges; had engaged in "aura cleansing" (to allow her "to better attract love into her life"); and had visited an ashram where she allowed a shaman to inject some liquid into her head. Yes, she - who speaks no Spanish - actually allowed a Spanish-speaking man who speaks no English to use some sort of "sign language messaging" to convey to her that she needed to have the potion he had in a hypodermic needle injected into her head.
(See Maharaj's point about the way that the Ultimate Sickness can inspired insane thinking and behaviors?)
The prior month, a guru from India had performed another soul cleansing ceremony that was intended not only to purge her body of diseases but that would also, in turn, allow her to "address more effectively her mental and emotional issues."
She had been following a vitamin regimen for a year that requires her to consume several hundred pills each week, and her pattern is that when she is about to finish one seminar or retreat with one of the big name teachers, she schedules the next. Of course, once she revealed how insanely she was attached to her seeker role and her going and doing and zooming, she was sent on her way.
Another example was shared recently of a person similarly trapped in the third stage of seeking which often inspires persons to "drop out," (literally or mentally) as they play with a frenzied passion their "seeking games":
One "Advaitin seeker" reported the following:
“Just had tea with a friend who spent four years in a Buddhist retreat centre; she is gearing up to sell up and go travelling. It’s a spiritual quest, she tells me. I asked her what she is looking for.
"To find the love in her own heart," she says, as well as "freedom" and "to reclaim her health from her forty-cigarettes-a-day smoking addiction as well as an eating disorder. From her retreat and her "mahamudra practices," she claims to understand "conceptually" the birthless state, yet she again and again reverts to identification with the person that has endless needs and flaws and that must seek and travel and find the “right” context. In other words, she has been exposed to the answer, yet reverts to persona identifications and then feeds the hungry ego-in-pain rather than rest in freedom.
At this stage, persons often seek because (in spite of all of the accumulation of things or places or knowledge or "spiritual experiences" and "spiritual exercises,") there remains a sense of emptiness rather than fulfillment.
Some seek to become "The Experts of Seeking"; some go and do and zoom to escape the self, the false self; some seek to avoid the chatter of a thousand monkeys that is going on between their ears if they sit still for even a moment.
Some seek because they can no longer dissociate from their misery or emptiness and truly want to find an answer that brings relief. But most of those, as the case with the two persons described above, have no notion at all that the seeking at this stage should move from seeking answers and power and external guides to being still, to being quiet, and to allow the focus of all of their outward-directed seeking to shift to an inward-directed seeking.
They do not understand that the religious or spiritual seeker, moving about within the third step rather than transitioning it, is still nowhere need actual realization. Still accumulating knowledge and roles and experiences, they are still totally removed from the understanding, a few lucid intervals notwithstanding.
It is not until that fourth stage that the readiness manifests, and then a seeker might be prepared to begin either the seven-step "journey" to realization or the four-step "journey" to freedom from all learned ignorance and assigned or assumed identifications, both of which can only happen with the guidance that can be provided by a "teacher" that understands the seven step method and / or the four-step method.
Yet here, the same kind of insane, manic seeking happened. First, there was the entrapment of seeking within the confines of a certain denomination of religion, the result of childhood programming and conditioning that would result in "floyd" being a recovering evangelical Baptist for decades.
After leaving home, there were periods when the seeking happened within the same religion but via a second denomination, and later a third. In that sleepwalking period, it was evidently believed that one person trained to sell dogma might not be able to guide me to truth, but two other persons trained in two different denominations to sell the same dogma might be able to guide me to truth.
Eventually, at least that much insanity was seen, so the search moved away from the venues of organized religion and the focus was on a variety of philosophies and non-Christian religions, including Deism, Buddhism, Hinduism and a host of others.
Then the focal point shifted to Shinto, Sikhism, and Taoism. From there, "floyd" sought out the big name teachers where a few words of each resonated but none provided the entire and clear teachings. None knew the specific steps on the "path" to full realization. All were warping the message in order to make it more appealing to the masses.
(Those were among the persons whom Maharaj disparagingly referred to as "The Big Name Teachers" and warned seekers to avoid like the plague.)
Meanwhile, "floyd" was totally subsumed in, totally trapped in, the seeking . . . the knowledge-gathering . . . the going . . . the doing . . . the zooming and . . . the spiritual workaholism.
Again, what a setup for the fluctuations between hope and disappointment, the chaos of believing, "Now, I've got it! I've got it!" I've got it!" only to find shortly the fact of the matter, expressed thusly: "Oops, I don't got it."
Consider how truly dull and unstable a boy Jack, or "floyd," shall be in that mode.
Eventually, the forest dweller stage saw a change that allowed all of that outward seeking to slowly begin to shift to less and less seeking of the outward variety to more and more seeking of the inward variety.
All of that was left behind and I went into the forest (not a requirement) to see what I might see on "my own," to look within, to look only at what is natural, and to see (as did Thoreau) if I might find the means by which persons can live deliberately rather than in a madcap and impulsive and impetuous and chaotic and dual-minded fashion.
In the next post: What "floyd" came to see during twenty-five months in the forest, how birds and spiders and the deer and a bear with her two cubs became "floyd's" teachers, and how, eventually, all external teachers gave way once the inner guru - the inner resource - was finally tapped into.
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 their god / their 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
or
You can click on video "Number Ten" in the upper right-hand column on this page.
If preferred, here's
the direct link to the AUDIO VERSION
of that session.
