TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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THE EVOLUTION OF MAHARAJ’S MESSAGE:
From dogma to spirituality to psychology
"Science will someday advance to the point that it will confirm the validity of the non-dual teachings."
--Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
[Continued from yesterday]
Complaints and criticisms were lodged about Maharaj when he stopped offering a religious / non-dual version of the Ultimate Medicine; more complaints and criticisms were lodged when he stopped offering a spirituality / non-dual version of the Ultimate Medicine.
In both cases, the common criticisms went something like this one: “Maharaj’s egotism took over and caused him to have a problem with religion and God and spirituality.”
As explained yesterday, neither ego nor egotism had anything to do with the shifts; moreover, Maharaj did not “have a problem with religion or God or spirituality.” The same is the case here with an often-heard criticism over the years being that “Floyd / floyd has a problem with religion or God or spirituality.”
With Maharaj and here as well, it was seen that the only problem worth mentioning is humankind’s problem with so readily believing the lies and untruths and non-facts which have been taught via the use of ignorant and insane programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing, and indoctrination.
And what do ignorant and insane programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing, and indoctrination generate? They generate three of the key symptoms of the Ultimate Sickness which Maharaj identified as “ignorance, stupidity and insanity.”
Why are false beliefs which generate and / or reinforce “ignorance, stupidity and insanity” so easily accepted as truth by the masses? Because - almost universally - authority figures do not tolerate challenging questions about the nonsense they pass along.
Thus, false beliefs which are passed down by parents and grandparents and neighbors and teachers and those running such institutions as organized religion and religious cults and spiritual cults and political cults as well as big business become accepted as “the truth” because persons are conditioned to accept whatever authority figures or supposedly “holy books” have to say, unquestioningly and with blind faith.
So the illustration shared yesterday showed examples of some of the totally-false beliefs which have been universally-accepted over the years as truth, accepted as a result of the fact that ignorant and insane programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing, and indoctrination have long led to stripping away from humans any ability to differentiate between the true and the false.
Consider again what that illustration reveals:
Or see Galileo who was threatened by church officials with torture or killing and who was eventually placed under house arrest for the same "crime against God and the church" by also suggesting that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the sun revolving around the earth.
Or see Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who was known as a heretic because he was an advocate of the Copernican theory. Bruno became known as “the first martyr of the new science” after he was burned at the stake in 1600.
Or see Leonardo Da Vinci who "played the game" but nevertheless did have enemies within the church. Why?
1. He was the "illegitimate child" of a female peasant and a wealthy lawyer.
2. He became convinced that the earth is much older than Christianity suggested.
3. He argued that falling sea levels—not Noah's Flood—left marine fossils on mountains.
4. He became a Renaissance Humanist,
and Renaissance Humanism was a revolt — sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit
— against the "other-worldliness" of medieval Christianity.
(Humanists turned away from a religious preoccupation with personal immorality,
focusing instead on how to enjoy, make the most of, and improve this life for
the humans living it. That would later be the same focus adopted by Maharaj as
well, was it not?)
and
5. He was considered an "other," so different from the judgmental masses because he was a vegetarian, openly gay, left-handed, and deemed to be a heretic. (Only the open-mindedness and tolerance of the nation-state of Florence, Italy - interrupted by a fanatical monk for a time - led many citizens there to set aside prejudice and honor his talent.)
Yet Da Vinci had to become fairly successful at hiding many of his understandings from the church and its fanatical leaders and members; nevertheless, the church was used as a vehicle to attack him.
He was accused of sodomy - a tactic used in Florence at that time to attack competitors and enemies. The church court was unable to convict, but Da Vinci left Florence, knowing that to be hauled before the church court again could prove fatal.
In Rome, his free-thinking ways soon got him into endless trouble with his patrons and the Pope. One writer said, "He became involved in a growing rift with the Vatican, which attempted to call him to order, but Leonardo’s unquenchable thirst for scientific knowledge was not to be extinguished by anything as trivial as religion."
However, he did continue to walk a dangerous road – the road that consigned Giordano to the flames of the Inquisition and which gagged the mouth of Galileo. In the end, Da Vinci was forced by religion to go into exile in France.
Or see John William Draper who wrote "The History Of The Conflict Between Religion And Science."
Or look to Maharaj who was criticized because he, too, endorsed science from early on and in the end endorsed the science of psychology to formulate the final version of the Ultimate Medicine which he used exclusively in the end.
THE MODERN ANTI-SCIENCE MOVEMENT IN THE U.S. and OTHER NATIONS
The earliest European settlers in what is now the U.S. used a theocratic form of government. Eventually, the "Founders" - many of whom were Deists - wrote a Constitution which called for the separation of church and state.
That has never been adhered to consistently, but since the 1940s,
religion has once more been especially influential in politics, rising to a higher-than-usual level in the 1970s when far right-wing, ultra-conservative Christians engaged in vigorous and fanatical levels of political activism
and
from then until the present day became a powerful tool of the far-right to justify policies based most of all in their social agenda.
Indeed, from the 70's to the present, their political-religion actually focused more on social issues. That has been "the American way" since whites killed the majority of the indigenous peoples and set up a theocratic form of government.
That form of government
has continued for the most part to this day as religious fundamentalists advocate for
socially-conservative positions on issues including . . .
- the use of Christian-based school prayer in public schools on a daily basis
- the teaching of "intelligent design" and creationism in science classes rather than evolution
- an opposition to non-whites, even their churches having been segregated from their beginning to this day
- an opposition to stem cell
research and the use of stem cells to heal
- an opposition to any other than a literal interpretation of "holy scriptures"
- an opposition to homosexuality and to giving the same rights to homosexuals that all other citizens receive
- an opposition to transsexuals and to giving the same rights to them that what all other citizens receive
- an opposition to the use of birth control
- an opposition to women in the workplace instead of staying in the home
- an opposition to women being involved in politics
- an opposition to sex outside of
a church-sanctioned marriage
- an opposition to sex education, endorsing abstinence instead
- an opposition to equal pay for women
- an opposition to abortion, even in cases of incest or rape or saving the life of a pregnant woman
- an opposition to pornography
- the support of spreading "a Christian worldview" that is being endorsed with tremendous fervor even as they criticize Muslims when they fervently support the spreading of Islam and its views
- the support of Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism, the latter calling for the overthrow of democracy in the U.S. and the founding of a New American Theocracy which would use the Ten Commandments as its constitution
- an opposition to university-level education (deemed to be "too liberal" and "anti-Christianity")
and now,
- an opposition to public schools and public education as well as an
endorsement of "home schooling" with all content and curricula focusing on lessons containing
Christian principles.
To be continued.
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
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THE EXPLANATION
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"
and
"Heaven and earth shall fade away."
and
"Heaven and hell are not geographic places
"There is no hell."
