TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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NEEDLESS WORK and COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE ACCEPTANCE and THE CURSE OF HABITS
A friend: “Why do you stay with him and keep putting up with his abuse?”
A wife: “I don’t know. I guess it’s easier than going out and starting over on my own.”
A curious questioner: “So how did you decide to become a Catholic and decide to stay a Catholic after you and your wife decided to use birth control and after you found out your priest - who just got caught molesting children - had been doing the same thing at his five previous churches?”
Answer: “I don’t know” or “Nothing can ever make me give up my faith and my religion” or “It’s just what we do in my family.”
A fellow seeker: “So once you’ve seen now that you’re trapped in religious or spiritual workaholism, why do you keep working and working and working at trying to get closer to god (or more spiritual or to become a spiritual giant)?”
*****
Many species are said to be “creatures of habit.” The deer that spend hours a day foraging typically follow the same path so much that they leave a trail which shows hunters where set up a deer stand and to wait for the deer to come along their same path and then ambush the deer with high powered rifles.
When I lived adjacent to a harbor where a heron hung out during the day, I could predict exactly where it would be in the morning, where it would be around noon, and where it would be in the evening before it flew across the lake to its nesting area.
Waitresses often greet some guests with the question, “Want the usual?”
And all of that is happening as the most rigid creatures of habits, humans, just "do what they do," often operating unconsciously, or being driven subconsciously, or walking about all day long while asleep.
So the abused will often stay with their abuser rather than abandon their dependency and codependency and go get a life marked by some basic safety.
The religious will stay in their “places of worship” after dozens of signs are screaming, “Get the hell out of there. Quit giving money to the richest institution on the planet, money they use to cover up the scandal that has been going on for centuries. Besides, you never consciously chose to join that religion . . . your parents took you there as a child and you were punished if you questioned what they taught you and eventually they broke you and you’ve stayed there ever since. Wake up, man!”
But they won’t wake up, most likely. They will continue to go and go and go and never take it easy and never stop burning so much energy and expending so much effort and money to make a second job out of seeking marked by excessive and endless doing and zooming.
While a few cultures throughout history have preferred the silence and the peace and have avoided the constant going and doing and zooming which marks almost all other cultures, those in most other cultures find that lifestyle to be anathema.
Among the go-do-zoom cultures, work is ennobled, money is ennobled, and accumulation is ennobled. And if some try to escape the workaholism, the worship of money, and the devotion to accumulating more and more and more, most will find that they are bored and fall right back into the same old personality-driven thinking and talking and doing.
Maharaj: “You are so used to the support of concepts that when your concepts leave you, although it is your true state, you get frightened and try to cling to them again.”
So fear is a key factor for those abiding under the subconscious influence of habits, and that can include the fear of boredom, the fear of independence over dependency, the fear of disappointing parents (even if they were - or remain - abusive and controlling) and the fear of . . . "a void."
Yet the void is exactly what they should be seeking, not continued dependence on an abuser; not continuing a relationship with child molesters and money grubbers; and not seeking to have one’s ego-states massaged by fellow fanatics.
At one time, it was believed that there are no voids in the universe, but it is now understood that there exist “cosmic voids” - that is, vast spaces between filaments, the largest-scale structures in the universe.
Those contain very few or no galaxies at all. Such voids are believed to have been formed by baryon acoustic oscillations in the Big Bang, collapses of mass followed by implosions of the compressed baryonic matter.
And what are the characteristics of those voids? Silence. Perfect quiet. No going and doing. Peace.
The case is a bit different on planet earth. This is an oversimplification, but basically, on earth, spaces happen but voids do not, as such. For example, if you raise a fist into the air, the fist displaces the air that was in that space. If you lower your arm, then air rushes back in to fill the void. See? Fist or air, it does not matter. There’s no void either way.
Most people cannot stand a perceived void in their lives. Twenty years of abuse from an asshole spouse? Finally left? What’s next? Find a replacement and set up the same kind of life that existed before, of course. Habits. Dependency. Codependency. Go here every Sunday. Go there every morning for breakfast so the waitress knows what your "usual" is.
What could a void in one’s rotten, relative existence offer? If freedom from learned ignorance and the insane effects of programming, conditioning, etc. were to happen, then the void, the nothingness, could manifest and the restless, ever-churning mind could stop and then peace (and maybe even contentment) could follow.
When freed from religious or spiritual workaholism, persons may feel as if a void has occurred. So what fills that? In the absence of supernatural ("spiritual") living, natural living moves in. In the absence of unnatural living, natural living moves in there, too. What else can move in when abiding naturally? More peace, more calmness, less chaos, less learned ignorance and more freedom from ignorance.
And that is why Maharaj made clear that non-dual pointers alone were not enough. Persons that are seeking true freedom and peace are called on to understand the Nisargan (Natural) Yoga as well. More on that tomorrow.
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.
