TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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and
"The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom"
and
"To know that you are a
prisoner of your mind - that you live in an imaginary world of your own
creation - is the dawn of wisdom."
--Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
"Realization is nothing more than a process which results in a person being freed from believing in all learned ignorance."
--Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The Anatomy of Human Memory Storage: The Elemental Brain vs. the Non-Elemental Mind
or
The Natural Brain vs. the Never-Natural Mind
WHY MAHARAJ TURNED HIS BACK ON RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY AND FOCUSED ONLY ON THE MIND IS HIS LATER TALKS
Even early on Maharaj made an occasional reference to the ineffective treatment plans which persons were using to try to heal the Ultimate Sickness.
Trying to awaken seekers to the inefficacy of any religion-based treatment plan - and to spirituality’s lack of any capacity to produce the long-term desired effect being sought - he said early on:
"Only that person will visit this place whose virtue and sin have come to an end."
"There is no progress."
“I have no faith in anything which has ever been told, not even what has been told by the Vedas. Only my own experience.”
"First of all you identify something as being good or bad for yourself. Then, in an effort to acquire good or to get rid of the bad, you have invented a God. Then you worship such a God and . . . you pray to that God for something good to happen to you."
Trying to awaken seekers to the inefficacy of any spirituality-based treatment plan and to spirituality’s lack of any capacity to produce the long-term desired effect being sought, he said early on:
“Whatever you have tried to understand during your spiritual search will prove false.”
“When the birth is disproved, the great noble meaning of spirituality and the meaning of this world—everything—is disproved.”
"There is no question of elevating to a higher level. Here it is only a question of understanding."
"Whatever spiritual things you aspire to know are all happening in this objective world, in the illusion. All this is happening in the objective world. All is dishonesty. There is no truth in this fraud."
Yet it took Maharaj years to break his dependency on his guru and that man’s instruction to . . .
(a) use religion to draw people into his loft and then introduce some non-dual pointers to them after the singing and dancing had been done
and
(b) years more to cast aside the influence of seekers from around the globe who began seeking out the loft in order to hear only the “spiritual talk” that they sought.
That is, it took him years to . . .
stop offering a religious / non-dual compounded version of the Ultimate Medicine
and years more to . . .
stop offering a spirituality / non-dual compounded version of the Ultimate Medicine
and to . . .
then offer a psychology / non-dual compounded version of the Ultimate Medicine.
Why did those shifts happen?
As alluded to, the offering of a religious / non-dual compounded version of the Ultimate Medicine happened because Maharaj initially refused to question his guru’s bait-and-switch advice to use religion to attract (and “trick”) persons to come to the loft and eventually hear the non-dual pointers he injected into those sessions.
And, as alluded to, the offering of a spiritual / non-dual compounded version of the Ultimate Medicine happened because Maharaj initially worked to satisfy an international audience of persons who came to the loft and influenced him to offer only “spirituality-based” sessions.
And it also took years for him to recognize that the religious messages he had offered and the spiritual messages he had offered certainly moved his audiences into an emotionally-intoxicated state which seemed to indicate some kind of shift or change;
however, after years of witnessing the results which manifested after their emotionally-intoxicated condition waned and seeing that the methods he used did not generate any long-lasting shift toward realization, he reflected on what might offer a better understanding of the Ultimate Sickness.
To find that Medicine, he sought out the true roots of the Sickness and came to understand that the Sickness is neither a too-little dogma illness nor a spiritual malady illness but is a mental illness.
He finally came to understand that neither of those methods which he tried earlier could possibly address a “mind-rooted problem” (and that both can, in fact, aggravate a seeker’s problematic mental condition instead).
He came to understand the same point which Yeshu’a (“Jesus”) tried to make nearly 2000 years earlier when he said:
“A dual-minded person is unstable in all ways.”
Note that Yeshu’a did not say, “An irreligious or agnostic or atheistic or secular or disbelieving or questioning or faithless person is unstable in all ways.”
Nor did Yeshu’a say, “A non-spiritual or ungodly or godless or unholy person is unstable in all ways.”
Let us pause to allow those pointers to be dropped into your tea of potentially-distortion-free understanding and to steep for a few moments.
[Please pause to consider.]
Now, let’s look again at what could be the two most revealing pointers which were never offered by Yeshu’a:
He never said: “An irreligious or agnostic or atheistic or secular or disbelieving or questioning or faithless person is unstable in all ways.”
And he never said: “A non-spiritual or ungodly or godless or unholy person is unstable in all ways.”
He did say, “A dual-minded person is unstable in all ways.”
It took years for Yeshu’a to become free of his attachment to the programming, conditioning, etc. to which he had been subjected in the Jewish temple. In the end, though, he did finally come to understand that the real problem with humanity was rooted in the content of the mind.
So, similarly, it also took years for that understanding to truly and irrevocably settle into that speck of consciousness known as “Maharaj.”
Yes, he referenced the problem of mind identification even during his earlier talks when he encouraged seekers to abandon all body identification and mind identification and personality identification; yet it was not until the last phase of his evolving understanding that he came to see what the actual, singular root of the Ultimate Sickness is and, therefore, what the Ultimate Medicine must address if it is to be effective.
For too long, it was as if the sick came to Maharaj seeking healing, but there was, as Shakespeare said, a rub.
It was no different from persons who were in the process of “bleeding out” from a cut artery and who went to a doctor and said, “I’ve been having headaches occasionally which are preventing me from sleeping. Do you have something for headaches?”
And it was as if the doctor ignored the gathering pool of blood on his office floor and said, “Oh, yes. I’ve had great success in helping people who have headaches. Here’s a powder to mix in water. Drink that solution three times each day and your headaches will end.”
Just as that doctor allowed a patient to divert his attention from their actual problem to some lesser issue, so too did Maharaj allow his visitors early on to influence him to talk about religious beliefs and spiritual beliefs instead of focusing on their real problem: the content of their minds.
Yet eventually, he came to see that in terms of
religion
and
spirituality
and
the mind,
only the mind was an issue worth addressing immediately.
As with a cut artery, a sick mind requires immediate attention. It never improves on its own, and a really sick mind can, relatively-speaking, prove to be almost as fatal as a cut artery.
So Maharaj eventually came to see that three of the key symptoms of the Ultimate Sickness are “ignorance, stupidity, and insanity” and he came to see that neither religion nor spirituality can address those issues because “ignorance, stupidity, and insanity” are centered in the mind.
Yet how many seekers (and how many “Super Seekers”) will ever wake up enough to see that their problem centers in the mind, that the mind is their cut artery which is causing them to bleed out, and that no religion or cult or spiritual movement or ideology or philosophy is able to address mind problems?
In fact, how many will ever see that religion and spirituality have historically contributed to – rather than healed – mental issues?
As for how many will ever realize the truth he shared in the end, Maharaj’s "guestimate" went down from 1 out of 100,000 to 1 out of 1,000,000 to only 1 out of 10,000,000 eventually.
During the Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush campaign for President of the United States, one of Clinton’s campaign leaders reminded his fellow campaign workers and staff to stop taking about tangential issues, saying something like, “It’s about the economy, stupid!”
Eventually, that is about where Maharaj’s talks ended up:
“It’s about the mind, stupid!”
So his final understanding of the fact that the Sickness is a mental sickness led him eventually to advise seekers . . .
To stop reading I AM THAT,
to stop with all their religious and spiritual seeking,
to address the mind problem which is at the root of the Ultimate Sickness,
to be freed from the learned ignorance which was taught and from the insanity which was imposed from outside (via parental and societal influences),
to stop abiding unnaturally,
to stop trying to abide supernaturally (magically, spiritually, etc.)
and then
to just abide naturally, the way that every living thing on the planet abides except for programmed and conditioned humans.
That understanding led him to say specifically:
“You take yourselves to be spiritual giants. I am a spiritual pygmy.”
"I do not follow the spirituality of the masses."
and
"Realisation is simply a process used to be free of all belief in learned ignorance."
and
"Subsequent to that 'I Am' and body-mind, and in the realm of the mind, there occurs what you call 'spiritual seeking' or 'spiritual knowledge'. This is nonsense."
and
"I appeal to you with my folded hands: don't get into this spirituality."
and
"The sum total of my spirituality now is nothing. Even that word 'nothing' is not there, so there is no spirituality left."
and
“You do not need to know ‘Who You Are.’ It is enough to know who you are not”
and
“Stop reading the talks in the book I AM THAT and listen to my later talks”
and
“Give up spirituality”
and
“Follow your normal inclinations"
and
"Forget spirituality”
and
"Just give up spirituality and abide naturally"
and
"I got involved in spirituality, in the business of spirituality, [but] finally I lost that love of 'the Self' also. I have no more love for 'the Self'"
and
"There is no such thing as spirituality; whatever is, is only this 'worldly' life, in the five-elemental play"
and
"Those who have apperceived my knowledge will not fall prey to the ‘logic’ or ‘spirituality’ expounded by others."
To be continued.
Please enter into 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."
