TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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DE-AWESOME-FYING NON-DUAL TERMINOLOGY
The Rationale:
There have been millions of religious and spiritual and philosophical and ideological and Eastern and, yes, even non-dual concepts / beliefs which billions of humans have taken to be “awesome.” None of them were, and none of them are.
This series is offering a different perspective about those concepts / beliefs / pointers / whatever.
So far, it has been shown that - far from being “awesome concepts or teachings” - there is actually no validity or logic at all to such concepts or teachings as . . .
continuity;
WHO-NESS and / or who-ness;
“SELF-Actualization”;
“SELF-Realization”;
“self-realization” (unless referring to the fact that one has realized that all assigned or assumed selves are illusions as are all assumed Selves as well)
and
liberation.
The point? Those who proudly claim “I am spiritual, not religious!” or who claim, “I’m a realized non-dualist!” have just as much to be un-taught and just as much to un-learn as those who proudly claim “I am a Hindu or a Christian or a Buddhist or a Taoist or a follower of Judaism or Islam,” ad infinitum.
If contentment is to manifest consistently, it is vital to be as free of belief in what was taught during childhood as it is to reject what has been learned and accepted as “the truth” since childhood and which has been used during adulthood to supplement or replace those beliefs accepted blindly and unquestioningly during one’s childhood years.
So, to continue with the invitation to consider what might be unlearned or what might be rejected because it has, erroneously, been thought to have been understood but is not.
Today’s words for consideration are “enlightenment, awakening, and spiritual awakening.”
ENLIGHTENMENT
Some define enlightenment as “a state of having knowledge” or “a state one enters if spiritually-educated or having been illuminated with ‘other-worldly’ insights.”
Maharaj shared that “all knowledge is merely learned ignorance.” (So much for ennobling "enlightenment.")
It has been witnessed by the wise that all which comes via external gurus or teachers or sources is false; that which comes from an inner guru or an inner resource will be closer to the truth.
Typical children with an activated BS detector are in touch with what can rise from within and can easily reject what comes from externals such as gurus or teachers or parents or preachers or priests or rabbis or ayatollahs - etc., etc., etc.
In most cases, the BS detector will remain active until those external sources threatening them or punish them for questioning what they are told by persons in positions of authority.
Early on, when my BS detector was active, I was taught that there was only Adam and Eve who had two sons named Cain and Abel and that Cain killed Abel and that all of the humans on planet earth who would ever live descended from that original family. My internal resource - my BS detector - inspired me to automatically and spontaneously ask at the age of five or six, “So Cain made babies with his mother Eve?”
When my rebelliousness was reported to my father, I received corporal punishment, but that act only strengthened my resolve that these people had something to hide because they were trying to silence me; for the rest of my existence, I was not going to believe anything they said.
I was further convinced it was all BS when I was told that a man was swallowed by a whale but survived for three days and was regurgitated and then lived;
when I was told that God loved me but that if I disappointed him, he would burn me forever and would cause me to suffer mentally and emotionally forever;
when I was told by a Catholic neighbor that I would go to hell if I ate meat on Fridays;
when I was told by often-drunk evangelicals that it was sin to drink alcoholic beverages;
etc., etc., etc.
Of course more corporal punishment followed when I called “BS!” on all that. No one had ever told me that it was all BS. No one every had to tell me to question everything I was being told. No one ever had to say that blind faith leads to blind ignorance and stupidity. I simple understood - intuitively, from within - that it was all BS.
Again, childrens’ BS detectors are always in an ON position early on but are turned off by ignorance-based programming, conditioning, etc. which is imposed by ignorant adults.
In the end, the only enlightenment Maharaj referenced involved the fear persons felt if they entered a barn that was mostly dark inside and became afraid because they were convinced that there was a snake coiled in the corner that was ready to strike.
But Maharaj explained that humans can become free of their fear if light is cast on the supposed snake and it is seen to actually be nothing more than a coiled rope.
Yet even that kind of "enlightenment" involves seeing clearly during the relative, not seeing “other-worldly” things clearly.
AWAKENING / SPIRITUAL AWAKENINGS
Beyond “coming to” after having being physically asleep, “awakening” has been assigned an "awesome, noble, other-worldly status" by many all around the globe for thousands of years.
For the past forty years, and even recently, I have heard persons “give testimony” about their "awesome spiritual awakenings." Many claimed it came after they “hit a bottom” following years of substance abuse.
Others claimed their awakening came after they lost a job, a family, a bank account, or a home or after a car accident, a life-threatening illness, an acrimonious divorce, a war, a pandemic, a “midlife crisis,” the ‘death’ of a loved one,” etc.
For some, their so-called “spiritual experience” came about when they had been able to dodge death in a way that they could not explain, when they believed they had seen something that was supposedly an alien or a UFO, or when they suddenly came into an unanticipated monetary windfall.
(A site visitor shared that one popular singer claimed to have had a spiritual experience after having seen a UFO and that she recently sang a song to an extraterrestrial. Helloooo. Earth to spiritual singer.)
Interestingly, all of those happenings were rooted in things relative but those happenings were supposedly able to put them in touch with non-relative things. So (misunderstood) phenomenal things can supposedly connect persons with (misunderstood) noumenal things?
Might it be that those who have no skills at processing their trauma might end up trying to “escape mentally to another world” wherein they are as far removed from the “relative realities” which they cannot tolerate?
Might they mentally and emotionally relocate into a Foo Foo Land of Dissociation and Non-Attachment and Denial and Imaginings?
Might they use ego-defense mechanisms which supposedly upgrade them from human status to super-human, super-being, super-spiritual status in order to be freed from “experiencing what they do not want to experience in what they take to be 'this' world”? Might that be a case of self-imposed insanity where one is totally detached from reality?
Yet upon review and consideration, might it be that all of those happenings which supposedly triggered their “spiritual awakenings” can be seen to have been rooted in their false identities - in their personas, in their phony roles, in their bogus ego-states - which had been threatened or stripped away by happenings which they did not choose and did not want?
So according to those in the groups above, spiritual awakenings really don’t have anything to do with spiritual things and are imposed from relative events which they deem to be “negative” or “misunderstood but surely supernatural.”
Understanding that possibility would certainly seem to strip away any “awesome,” “noble,” or “other-worldly status” which has been bestowed on something believed to be extraordinary, exceptional, distinctive, and exclusive but which is actually quite common and which is rooted in the psychological games and machinations which are generated by a nonsense-filled, suffering-inducing mind under stress over what are actually all-relative issues.
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.
