TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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WHY MAHARAJ ABANDONED RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL VERSIONS OF THE ULTIMATE MEDICINE AND TURNED HIS FOCUS TO PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALING INSTEAD
GOING SANE
How the Going Crazy to the Going Sane process unfolded here:
Previously, some of the most common personality disorders and their effects were identified and discussed in an effort to allow readers to see clearly why sages for thousands of years have advised seekers to abandon personality and the assumption of personas as identities.
Consider the way that personality sets the stage for disintegration that can move a person through levels of mental and emotional deterioration, moving from mild to average to serious personality-related problems.
One of the men
who trained me in The Netherlands in the use of the Enneagram Personality
Inventory Testing and Analysis Process explained how persons can move from
being psychically healthy at some point and then developing a full-blown case
of, say, the Sociopathic Personality Disorder:
At a certain level, the following is observable in one moving through the
ever-worsening stages of personality disintegration:
At first, you might witness in that one the following: self-sufficiency,
financial independence, and having enough resources are important concerns:
becomes an enterprising, pragmatic, "rugged individualist," a
wheeler-dealer. Risk-taking, hardworking, denying one's own emotional needs.
Soon, the ego-dominated “mind” can tolerate neither the stillness nor the
silence.
As disintegration continues, the following can be seen:
Begin to dominate their environment, including others: want to feel that others
are behind them, supporting their efforts. Swaggering, boastful, forceful, and
expansive: the "boss" whose word is law. Proud, egocentric, want to
impose their will and vision on everything, not seeing others as equals and not
treating them with respect.
Later, the following can be witnessed:
Become highly combative and intimidating to get their way: confrontational,
belligerent, creating adversarial relationships. Everything becomes a test of
wills, and they will not back down. Use threats and reprisals to get obedience
from others, to keep others off balance and insecure. However, unjust treatment
makes others fear and resent them, possibly also band together against them.
As even more psychic unhealthiness manifests, the following can be witnessed:
Defying any attempt to control them, become completely ruthless, dictatorial,
"might makes right." The criminal and outlaw, renegade, and con-artist
manifest. Become hard-hearted, immoral and potentially violent.
As more disintegration occurs, the following can be seen:
Develop delusional ideas about their power, invincibility, and ability to
prevail; megalomania, feeling omnipotent and invulnerable manifest. Recklessly
over-extending self.
Finally, this state of extremely serious disintegration can happen:
If they get in danger, they may brutally destroy everything that has not
conformed to their will rather than surrender to anyone else. Vengeful,
barbaric, murderous. Sociopathic tendencies.
And that kind of personality-based deterioration of psychic health is why sages
for thousands of years have invited seekers to abandon all personality.
Consider another definition of insanity: "the inability to tell the true
from the false."
[NOTE: Some
people intentionally lie. That does not mean they are insane. Some people pass
on the lies that they were told without ever checking to see if what they were
told - and what they are telling - is true or false. That form of prevarication
might evidence ignorance more than insanity, except when what persons are
passing on is totally nonsensical.]
Back to the original definition of "insanity" being used here:
"extreme foolishness and / or irrationality; a state of serious mental
illness; or, a state of total madness."
At best,
passing on nonsense is foolish, the mildest form of insanity according to the
definition. Yet even more severe cases of insanity can be addressed by the
teachings offered here.
So why such confidence and conviction here that the non-duality understanding
can free persons of the belief that personas actually define who they
are? Can free persons of the effects of personality (and, thus, personality
disorders)?
Can free persons of extreme foolishness and irrationality? And can free persons
from the bondage of certain levels of insanity itself?
Because the confidence and conviction here is a result of experience. Maharaj
said: “I have no faith in anything which has ever been told, not even what
has been told by the Vedas. Only my own experience.”
The same is the case here, and that accounts for the confidence and conviction:
if this understanding was able to free "floyd" of the belief that personas
were real, of the effects of personality and personality disorders, of extreme
foolishness and irrationality, and from the bondage of certain levels of
insanity itself, it can do the same for many of the seekers who come here as
well.
But "no faith"? Absolutely. No faith. If you have an illness and the
medicine you are taking does not work, then why keep taking the medicine?
Here, faith was
one of the medicines used to try to treat The Ultimate Sickness. It did not
work, so why would there be any clinging to something that does not work? That
in itself would be evidence of insanity, would it not?
Moreover, all that is shared here (including sharings about the way you were,
what happened to cause you to assume false identities as real, what led to the
personality disorders that now plague the masses, how the masses have ended up
insane to one degree or another, and how the non-duality teachings can address
much of that) all of that is based in, as Maharaj said, "Only my
own experience."
Neither "floyd" nor "Floyd" is special. If clarify and
reason and logic and freedom from personality and freedom from the bondage of
insanity happened here via the non-duality understanding, then it can happen
for many other seekers via the non-duality understanding.
Many have asked about "that journey here," so the following will be
shared, also excerpted from the book "Going Crazy, Going Sane:
How the "Going Crazy" to the "Going Sane" Process Unfolded Here:
Here, learned ignorance and insanity came later than in some cases, but it
eventually came. The delay was for one reason only: the Type Four Personality
developed here (as happened with Maharaj) as a result of rebelling against
authority figures and their messages of distortion and delusion.
Here, early one, there was an inner BS detector that could spot ignorance and
insanity which led to an early disgust with the general lack of authenticity
and with the widespread phoniness and stupidly and brutality I was witnessing.
That disgust resulted
in being driven to avoid the masses and the chaos of the inner city with its
gangs operating on the street where we lived and to search for any lack of
authenticity I might have acquired via faulty programming, conditioning, etc.
and to search authenticity and hold onto it when found.
As a child in an Evangelical Southern Baptist Sunday School Class, so-called
"facts" and "truths" were questioned (just as visitors here
are invited to do), often followed by corporal punishment from "floyd's
father" who thought his belt-on-the-butt approach could stop a "Seer
of the Lies" from "disturbing sweet Ms. Myrtle's Bible lessons"
by asking:
"If there was only Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, and if Cain killed
Abel, who did Cain make babies with if the only woman on earth was his mother?
That seems gross!"
or,
"If He loves me unconditionally, why are you teaching us the ten
conditions or commandments for going to heaven? And if He loves me
unconditionally, why is He going to send me to Hell to burn eternally (a fate
that I was convinced was my destiny, accepted as a better alternative than
spending an eternity in heaven with the people in that church);
and
"How can you possibly sit there and expect us to believe that a man
could load two of every non-human thing on a boat and keep all those pairs on
board? How do you keep two mosquitoes, two flies, two horseflies, and two birds
of every kind from flying away? How do you keep lions from eating lambs? And
how is that unconditional love, to drown everyone on the planet except for one
family?"
While the Type One children in the class who wanted to be perceived as being
good little boys and girls would shake their heads at "floyd's"
rebelliousness; and while the Types Two's that wanted to be loved pandered to
the adults and questioned nothing; and while the Type Sixes who are loyal to
authority figures rejoiced in seeing my father's belt flailing away, the one or
two other Type Fours joined in the mini-mutiny on "The Good Ship
Folly-Lot."
Soon, the requests to go to Grandmother's house and stay there for long periods
of time were seen as a wonderful option. And though there was no running water
and no indoor plumbing, and while wood had to be chopped for heating water
outside in a black kettle or for placement in the wood-burning stove to prepare
meals, the time spent there rather than in the city and in church was also seen
by "floyd" as a wonderful option.
As was the case with Thoreau, "I went to the woods" (just as I
went to that Cherokee-Medicine-Woman-Grandmother's house in the piney woods of
East Texas) "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."
Later, as an adult, during the "forest dweller stage," there was a
return to the woods for a twenty-five month period prior to full realization (though
that type of literal retreat is not required of you). It proved to be nothing more than another diversion.
Between being driven insane by adults and eventually reaching the point of realization,
the onset of personality disorders and insanity was delayed, but it arrived
nevertheless. The guesstimate is that the hold of those defects lasted for more
than two decades, escalating in intensity year after year, until the point was
reached where life with "no self" had a far greater appeal than life
"with self" (or selves - the false roles being played and the false
identities and images that required such energy to try to sustain).
I has gone completely crazy . . . completely mad . . . driven into that state
by The Ultimate Sickness that infects more than 99% of all persons on this
planet. I had caught what "they" have, and had caught a near-deadly
strain of it.
In most such cases, suicide can be one option for those who reach "the
point where life with 'no self' has an all-pervasive appeal." Unlike some,
the searching that happened off and on for decades led, in 1986, to certain
awakenings. From that year at the age of thirty-nine or so until 1989, a series
of enlightenments began to come.
The fruitless searches that led from one Western religion to certain ideologies
to certain spiritual programs to certain Eastern religions and to certain
Eastern philosophies led to a crossing of paths with Sri Nisargadatta
Maharaj.
Yet the study of his words never moved beyond reading "I AM THAT"
- time and again - not aware that he had later said, "That book and
whatever was expounded at that time was only relevant for that period. I am
speaking differently today and am emphasizing different aspects."
It was not known at that time that what he offered later differed considerably
from his earlier talks, making clear that the "spirituality-based"
pointers in "I AM THAT" can take you only to the midpoint of
"the race" but that his "beyond spirituality-based
pointers" in his final talks point the way to "the finish line."
Thus, no full realization came, even with such dedicated effort involved in the
study of what he offered in that book. Then, in late 1989, a vision came that
outlined the steps which could move me beyond identification with the false
"I" to an understanding of the Absolute, to an understanding of the
functioning of the totality, and to an understanding of the Void and the
Nothingness over all of the false "somethingness" of the relative
existence.
It was clear that everything I have ever been taught or told or believed was
false. It was clear that, back during those early years, the questioning of
what they were teachings was valid. It was clear that truth could be known but
not stated.
It was clear that the non-realized masses were mentally and emotionally sick
and that the hunch early on that the masses were trapped in learned ignorance
was also spot on. It was clear that I had caught "their" illness,
that I had finally found The Ultimate Medicine, and that I had finally been
cured of the Dream / Nightmare of the Planet.
I walked off the stage of "The Theater of the Lie," determined never
to return there again, determined never to assume again any of the roles which
had been played on that stage in that theater. I had gone completely sane.
Yet there was always that caution from Maharaj which redirected me and which can redirect you if need be, the warning that “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.” In other words, "Always beware." "Always be fully awake, fully aware, and fully conscious."
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.
