TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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THE ULTIMATE SICKNESS and THE ULTIMATE MEDICINE
Four Stages
Stage I: Being Programmed to Accumulate (Ages 1-20)
From very early on, children (especially in the West and in countries which arrogantly label themselves as being "developed") are programmed to "get," to accumulate.
For example, "Get a good education so you can get a good job and then get a good mate and then get a nice home and fill it with nice things and have a lot of children and then buy the bigger house you will need for all of that;
next, lease a storage building to hold the excess possessions that cannot fit in the house and then expose two cars worth $90,000 to nature's elements by parking them in the driveway because you have filled your garage with boxes contained $500 worth of junk."
Stage II. Accumulating (Ages 20-40)
Once persons who have been programmed to accumulate, asking for things throughout their childhood and teen years, they typically accelerate their effort to collect and gather and amass and add and hoard by the age of twenty. For the next two decades, they will try to massage the ego by buying "stuff" and then showing off the "stuff" they have bought.
That will include things and places and even people who are willing to sell themselves. It should be obvious that such programming to accumulate will automatically block the receipt of any message which invites such persons to consider de-accumulation as a means to a lighter, happier existence.
[Of course, de-accumulate efforts will be futile unless the first thing that one "gets rid of" are all beliefs which are rooted in Ultimate Sickness-based "ignorance, and stupidity and insanity" which were set in place by ignorant, stupid, and insane programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing, and indoctrination. Maharaj would eventually explain that "getting rid of of all beliefs, getting rid of of all taught and learned ignorance, is all that realization involves."]
By the age of forty, many reach "the fork in the road" which has been discussed in other series. At that point, one of two possibilities will often occurs:
1. With some persons, a brief but lucid moment flashes across the otherwise blocked consciousness. A lucid interval interrupts the otherwise continuous talking in their sleep and walking about in their sleep, actions which mark and mar the existence of "the non-realized" after years and years of programming and conditioning and acculturation and domestication.
Some few might begin to ask, "Is this all there is?" or "Who Am I?" Some might express the wonderment in the fashion of an e-mail received several weeks ago with the inquiry, "What the hell is this all about?"
and the admission that
"I'm forty-two years old and would be considered 'a success' - someone who has it all. But I still feel empty in spite of everything I've gained."
That "beginning to question" is one possibility. The other is . . .
2. No such moments or ponderings occur. That is the "fork in the
road." Most stay the course which they were put on via ignorant, stupid, and insane programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing, and indoctrination.
If no such questioning happens, the effort to accumulate and treat the inner emptiness with more stuff, with more people, with more sex, with more drugs, with more accumulating, etc. can continue to the end of the manifestation.
If such questioning or wondering happens, then "the search for something else" might begin. "The Seeker" role might be adopted and (as is the case with all assumed or assigned but false personal identifications) will later be self-inflated and self-upgraded to "The Super Seeker" identity.
At that point, some enter Stage III. During this stage, some activities might legitimately move seekers along the "path," but most do not.
Stage III. The Forest Dweller Stage
PLEASE NOTE: The stages as identified in certain Hindu traditions differ slightly from the four stages taught here and in other books by the author. A visitor to Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's loft made reference to one of those stages:
Visitor: "Living the worldly life and being a person of the grihastha ashrama (the "Householder" stage of life) drudging, working, sleeping, laughing, mixing with people of all nationalities, is it possible just to be, and not identify oneself entirely with the body?"
In certain Hindu traditions, four successive stages of life are sometimes identified as:
brahmacharya (celibate disciple), grihastha (householder and family man), vanaprastha (forest dweller) and sannyasa (wandering monk, renunciant). While Maharaj tried using the approach as outlined in those stages, he found that they did not provide the answer he sought. They do not provide for natural abidance.
G.K. Damodara Row reported on Maharaj's "experience" with Stage III and showed why Maharaj abandoned that phase (or transcended that chapter in his "journey" to Full Realization):
" . . . He took Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj as his guru and clung to him till his Guru attained mahasamadhi in 1936. The following year, Maruthi (later, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj) suddenly decided to abandon his family and also his prosperous business, and wandered about aimlessly visiting temples and places of religious interest.
His mind was restless. He travelled north, determined to spend his time in the Himalayas and never to return home. It is said that he walked barefoot in the Himalayan region. There he happened to meet a fellow-disciple of his guru who told him that such wandering was of no avail and was really not necessary for "a spiritual aspirant."
He suggested that Maharaj should go back home and live an active life as a householder. He advised Maharaj that selfless service to the poor would be far more meaningful.
"After deep thought Maruthi returned back to Bombay. He found all his shops taken away except one, but he was not in the least perturbed and got reconciled to the situation and calmly decided that one shop was enough for his worldly needs.
"After some time when his son was able to look after the shop, he retired to to the small loft room he had added to his flat, which later became an ashram of sorts to the devotees, both Indian and foreign, who came to visit him. He met groups in that small room two times per day, till his final Nirvana in 1981."
On the "journey" in "floyd's" case, the Forest Dweller Stage lasted twenty-five months. With few exceptions, time was spent on a daily basis in the forest, camping out in a tent, cooking meals on a portable, propane Coleman stove, facing a charging brown bear that was driven by her innate drive to protect her two cubs, dodging copperhead snakes that were sunning on open spots in the middle of deer trails, as well as drawing lessons from the natural happenings I witnessed there.
I saw that spiders did their work by building their webs and then relaxing, taking it easy, and waiting patiently. I said, "Hummm."
I had gone to the woods, first, with the intent of reconnecting with the earlier feelings and the earliest sense of peace which I had enjoyed when abiding at a young age with Grandmother in her small cabin, working beside her in her one-acre garden;
helping her gather herbs from the forest, plants she would use to make special teas to remedy the ills of those who came to her for healing; gathering wood to heat water in the large cast iron pot behind her cabin; drawing cool water from her well; starting a fire in her wooding burning stove to assist with her cooking the cream peas I had picked and shelled with her earlier in the day, etc.;
and secondly,
I had gone to the woods with the intent described by Henry David Thoreau who also participated in "Stage III activities" (or "inactivities") on Walden Pond:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
During that period of silent contemplation, many Stage III awarenesses came forth. Thoreau wrote,
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them"
and
"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not
fish they are after"
and
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me . . . truth."
When Thoreau transcended Stage III and returned to a home outside the village, his abidance there was still governed by the joy of independence that he came to understand during the Forest Dweller Stage. He wrote, "I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls!"
Stage III 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."
