TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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THE ULTIMATE SICKNESS and THE ULTIMATE MEDICINE
Four Stages
Stage III: The Forest Dweller Stage (continued)
Some extended discussion of the third stage will be offered because it is there where 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." For example, consider Personality Type Three Achievers who never really want to achieve a goal (constantly raising the objective 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, etc. 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 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 kind of liquid" into her head).
She could not identify the liquid because that South American guru spoke only Spanish and she only speaks English, but she says that just listening to him talk in Spanish each year for a week when she goes to his ashram is "enlightening."
[That is no different from a proud mom telling someone that her twelve month old baby's "gaga goo goo mumblings" have finally led her to a clear and complete understanding of the functioning of the totality.]
When her South American guru calls her throughout the year and asks for a "$1000-$2000 donation for some new pet project which "the universe" has told him to undertake, his English is much clearer and she happily fires off a check or money order or bank transfer, depending on which method of payment "The Guiding Spirit" has recommended.
Meanwhile, does she believe that she is fully realized, SELF-realized, totally enlightened, totally awakened, totally positioned to finally escape the birth-life-death-reincarnation cyclings, etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada? Oh yes.
The prior month, her guru from India had performed another soul cleansing ceremony which was intended not only to purge her body of diseases but that would also 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 if 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 to all of her endless 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 "the seeking games":
One
Advaitin 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. She replied:
"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 mahamudra practices, she claims that she understands 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 claims to have "found the answer," yet she regularly reverts to persona identifications and then feeds the hungry ego-in-pain rather than being able to rest in the freedom of the no-ego, no-egotism, no identity, no-Identity state.
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 . . . the false selves; some seek to avoid the chatter of a thousand monkeys which is triggered 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 persons described above, have no notion at all that the seeking at this stage should move from seeking answers and power and guides from without 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 stage rather than transitioning it, is still nowhere need actual realization (which involves deaccumulating all rather than accumulating more and more "knowledge" and more and more "spiritual experiences").
Still accumulating knowledge and roles and experiences, they are still totally removed from the understanding, a few lucid intervals notwithstanding.
(This stage is not to be confused with the third step to realization where religious and spiritual personas are again clung to. That happens in the fourth stage.)
It is not until that fourth stage that the readiness manifests, and then a seeker might be prepared to begin the "journey" to realization which can only happen with the guidance that can be provided by a teacher than understands those steps.
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 which would result in "floyd" being a recovering 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 other persons trained in different denominations to sell the same dogma might be able to guide me to truth.
Talk about insane.
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, and Hinduism.
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 appealing to the masses (and to fatten the coffers of those big name teachers whom Maharaj warned seekers to avoid like the plague).
Meanwhile, "floyd" was totally subsumed in, totally absorbed with, the seeking . . . the knowledge-gathering, the going, the doing, the zooming, 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: "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 came to a different perspective which 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 manner.
Next: 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.
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."
teachings which become a part of the Papal Magisterium.
