Obstacle #13: THE MOST INFLUENTIAL OBSTACLE OF ALL: Personality Identifications Generated by Religions and Families

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We continue to consider the enormity of the obstacles which one who works for 20 or 40 or 80 years with seekers of the non-dual understanding will witness and which led Maharaj to eventually conclude - after decades of working with seekers - that only "1 out of 10,000,000" will "get this understanding":

Obstacle #13: THE MOST INFLUENTIAL OBSTACLE OF ALL: Personality Identifications Generated by Religions and Families
(Continued from yesterday)

One of the recurring pointers offered here during the more than thirty years of satsang and blogging has been this: "Declare your independence." From what?

(1) From personality identifications passed down to you from generations of family members and ancestors

and

(2) from personality identifications passed down to you from the religion your family choose for you.

Families and religions are the two greatest sources of false identifications.

To review from yesterday:

Floyd: See that what you believe is just 'hand-me-down-nonsense,' passed from one generation of your family to the next, and to the next, and to the next, until it was handed down to you. See that it's based in ancient myths and superstition and is totally fictional, totally made up BS.

Julie Smith: People do what they do “because things had always been done that way" and that people do what they do “because someone else wanted them to do that . . . not because there was any point in hell in it.”

Prince Ea: “Just because our parents or grandparents believed something does not mean we have to continue that cycle."

Prince Ea: “Who are you is the question? Who are you at the deepest sense? I am not talking about your race, ethnicity, heritage, religion, ancestry."

Maharaj: “All you have to do is to give attention to the obstacles created by the foolish mind”

and 

“We believe in so many things on hearsay. We believe in distant lands and people, in heavens and hells, in gods and goddesses, because we were told. Similarly, we were told about ourselves, our parents, name, position, duties and so on. We never cared to verify. The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false, you must question your most inveterate beliefs."

Bill Maher: "Fire your family. Break the cycle. Think outside the crib. There must be 50 ways to leave your mother. You don’t have to do what your folks did. You don’t have to get married and have children if you don’t want to. Or go hunting or work in a coal mine. You don’t have to be the religion you were born into . . . or any religion. You can find an alternative way to look at the universe, a way not called 'batshit crazy'."

To be free from craziness, from the insanity which Maharaj identified as a key symptom of the Ultimate Sickness, one must have removed the cancers which generated the Sickness in the first place, including the cancer of personality identifications, the cancer of a distorted mind, and the cancer of ego-state-inspired fears, among others.

Consider the distortion which is driving the emotional intoxication which has generated the hysteria in which the masses in the U.S. and in other Western nations are presently trapped: Look at the distorted belief that "the other" - that is, all of those other people who have non-white skin - are the greatest threat to whites. That belief in the U.S. is foundational.

The U.S. was founded by racists who killed red-skinned people in order to take their land and "create a godly, Christian nation" and by racists who went to war with brown-skinned Mexicans and forced them to cede over one million square miles of land they held which would become California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas (much of which had also been taken earlier from the indigenous peoples).

Now, the widely-held distortion is that Jihadi terrorism - conducted by brown-skinned people from the Middle East - is the greatest threat to the nation so they must stopped from coming to the U.S. 

The fact: for decades, right-wing terrorism has been responsible for more killings on U.S. soil than all acts of Jihadi terrorism combined.

Another fact: family violence - not foreign violence - accounts for far more violent victimizations.

For all the lip service given to the importance of family and "family values," the irony is that persons worry about people with non-white skin who are thousands of miles away while they are actually sleeping with the real threat every night who is only a few feet away . 

The chances of being killed by a non-white-skinned terrorist are 1 out of 1,217,228, or higher.

By contrast, the odds are 6 out of 10 that a woman murdered in the U.S. will be killed by "a spouse" or "lover."

Also, people look to the male under their roof as a source of protections. Actually, during the last 15 years, eight in ten murderers who killed a family member were male. (Males were 83% of spouse murderers and 75% of the murderers who killed a friend or lover.)

Moreover, most family violence offenders (79%) are neither black-skinned nor brown-skinned but are . . . white.

So much for being tolerant of law enforcement when they gun down unarmed black men because the belief is that, "after all, those in uniform are protecting us."

And so much for being grateful for the service of "those in uniform who are protecting us in overseas wars by killing those brown-skinned people in the Middle East and by killing those brown-skinned people in the Far East. "

And so much for those separating brown-skinned families at our border and locking brown-skinned children in cages and allowing some of them to die in the custody of the U.S. Government.

Convinced by the propaganda shared by the white supremacists who have long run the government in the U.S., the white masses now buy into the distortion that the greatest threat to their physical well-being is someone with brown-skin even as they are, statistically and factually, actually sleeping next to a far-greater threat (who just happens to have white skin). 

And most of those who call themselves "Christ Followers" do not have a clue that the warning from Yeshu'a (a.k.a., "Jesus" / "Their Savior") was not to beware of strangers with a different skin from their own (as was the case with him) but was to beware of family members. After he was exposed to some non-dual pointers, he reported: "I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword."

(He was making clear that peace cannot come until the sword does its job, not to kill off humans literally but to kill off their faulty beliefs, their erroneous concepts, and their false, personal identifications.)

Then he focused on the obstacles that come with the acceptance of "family-based personality identifications" and said, 

"I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law."

So does "Jesus" literally mean that he wants to break up families? No, he means that all roles and role-playing and false identities must end if one is to be in touch with reality and be free of distortion. 

[That said, are the chances nowadays that the family will break up? Well, the odds are about 50-50, meaning the odds are that the belief that one's spouse can be unequivocally trusted to do no harm has only about a 50-50 chance of proving to be true.]

A man wrote to say he was suicidal because his wife left him. He felt as if he were dying, so the conclusion was that he might as well hasten the process to end the suffering.

The man had accepted the limited, “family”-based personality identification that had been assigned by his culture. The fact is that if persons cling to any false identity - in this case, the false identity of "The Husband” - they shall never find freedom from distortion.

If one realizes, then “husbanding” or “not husbanding” and "wifing" or "not wifing" can happen . . . and consistent freedom from distortion and fear can happen either way.

Again, all conflict results when one assumes an ego-state (false identity) because that assumption triggers the use of ego-defense mechanisms to defend the role. One such mechanism is egotism, so conflict will be generated. 

Assuming the roles of "a man," "a father," "a daughter," "a mother," "a daughter-in-law," and "a mother-in-law," etc. will set the stage for people to try to control, to resist control, and to argue. 

Chaos will result, followed by more effort to control, and the control / chaos cycles will continue unless all false roles and identities are rejected via the Realization process. Again, the Advaitin point that "Jesus" was trying to make was that peace can only come when persons are not being driven by the agendas of their false identities.

Why do the masses reject all of the warnings above about family and all of the invitations to be free of their influence? Egotism, the egotism which is generated when ego-states are assigned or assumed and thus trigger the use of ego-defense mechanisms to protect those false identities. 

Most might criticize family members but will come to their defense if anyone else does the same. Why? Again, egotism:

"My parents must have done a pretty damn good job. I've turned out just fine, thank you very much."

Uhhh . . . yeah. Right. So that means you have the courage to seek out a second opinion about that belief? 

A declaration of independence from the warped influence of anyone need not involve violence. It actually need only involve . . . wisdom and courage.

 
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.]

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