ANNOUNCEMENTS
[Walter Driscoll asked to interview me in order to preserve on video some of the latest modifications and evolutions in the versions of the message offered here since 1989. He would label the discussion, "Unlearning with Floyd Henderson."
Please note: For those who have a problem hearing what is being shared, the video offers a fairly accurate set of closed captions which some listeners might want to activate.
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1. [See the offer in gold text following this post for details on how you can watch a retreat on video which includes a detailed discussion of all seven of the steps on the path as used by Maharaj]
2. Here, with those who are still driven to talk about "god," the "Son of god," the "Holy Spirit," "Buddha," "Krishna," etc., etc., etc., the invitation to them is to view those as verbs, not nouns. See the green text after today's post for the full meaning and implications of that.
3. A new video ("Number Ten: Awakening Together Satsang, March 2018") has now been added in the far right column of this page, offering the opportunity to view a recent 2018 satsang session with Floyd being interviewed by Regina and Jacqueline of "The Awakening Together Group." (See the details in the blue text after this post.)
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CAUSATION and RELATIVE EVENTS AND BEHAVIORS:
“Evil?” or “Ignorance, Stupidity, and Insanity”?
Yesterday’s post ended with this: While non-duality dismisses the validity of all dualistic pairing including “good vs. evil,” it also ignores many of the typical definitions of “insanity.” Non-duality teachers leave it to the courts to deal with defining and debating “impaired by a mental disease or defect at the time of any given act” and “cognitive insanity” and “volitional insanity” and “irresistible impulse” and “mental diseases or defects that render persons incapable of controlling their actions” and “mental incompetency.”
Instead, at the root of duality-based insanity is unchecked arrogance; belief
in hierarchies and a desire to rise in whichever ones are deemed significant; a
lack of awareness of the Oneness; a belief in the concepts of “two-ness” and “multiplicity”
which in turn support a “me vs. all others” mentality;
unconstrained attachment to ego and egotism; and a level of preoccupation with self and self-ish-ness and self-centered that preempts anything in the relative that might be even remotely labeled as “social skills” (known among professionals as the Antisocial Personality Disorder).
[Note: at one point, a child had to spend fifteen years or more in a dysfunctional family to reach that point; now, some psychotherapists have shared that they are diagnosing seven and eight-year-olds with that disorder.]
To continue: the type and level of insanity that non-duality teachers are willing to address is the type that is rooted in duality and self-interest (which is what all insanity is about until one reaches the level that Mary reached four decades ago when she was admitted to a mental healthcare facility)
Here, the discussion having moved beyond the bogus, duality-based concept of “evil,”
the focus is on certain levels of insanity that can still be addressed by the
teachings (which as far as Nisargan or realized non-dualists are concerned does
not refer to the relative condition or state of being “seriously mentally ill” or
“totally mad” as much as it refers to being “extremely foolish or irrational”).
Why? Because “serious mental illness” and / or “total madness” cannot be
addressed by the Ultimate Medicine that Nisargan or realized non-dualists can
offer; however, it is possible that the Ultimate Medicine might be able to
address extreme foolishness or irrationality or some levels of insanity if the
Ultimate Sickness is treated before personality disorders reach the lower
levels of psychic health.
[Generally, the intervention must happen before “Level 5” is reached - see below for an example of “Level 5” - yet there have been cases of those who have come this way that reached the understanding even though their personality disintegration had reached even lower levels.]
What does psychic health look like in contrast to average or unhealthy psychic health as one begins to disintegrate? The following is an example from the Enneagram Institute that shows what happens as psychic disintegration moves through the nine levels. This particular example applies to a Personality Type Eight:
Type Eight - Healthy Levels of the Psyche
Level 1 (At Their Best): Become self-restrained and magnanimous, merciful and forbearing, mastering self through their self-surrender to a higher authority. Courageous, willing to put self in serious jeopardy to achieve their vision and have a lasting influence. May achieve true heroism and historical greatness.
Level 2: Self-assertive, self-confident, and strong: have learned to stand up for what they need and want. A resourceful, “can do” attitude and passionate inner drive.
Level 3: Decisive, authoritative, and commanding: the natural leader others look up to. Take initiative, make things happen: champion people, provider, protective, and honorable, carrying others with their strength.
Type Eight - Average Healthy Levels of the Psyche
Level 4: Self-sufficiency, financial independence, and having enough resources are important concerns: become enterprising, pragmatic, “rugged individualists,” wheeler-dealers. Risk-taking, hardworking, denying own emotional needs.
Level 5: 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 or treating them with respect.
Level 6: Become highly combative and intimidating to get their way: confrontational, belligerent, creating adversarial relationships. Everything 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.
Type Eight - Unhealthy Levels of the Psyche
Level 7: Defying any attempt to control them, become completely ruthless, dictatorial, “might makes right.” The criminal and outlaw, renegade, and con-artist. Hard-hearted, immoral and potentially violent.
Level 8: Develop delusional ideas about their power, invincibility, and ability
to prevail: megalomania, feeling omnipotent, invulnerable. Recklessly
over-extending self.
Level 9: 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. Generally corresponds to the ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER.
Note: Those are not the “Nine Levels Of Good and Evil.” Those are the nine levels that trace personality disintegration from a healthy psychic level to an unhealthy psychic level.
[To help seekers recognize Eight’s, consider some of the more famous Type Eights in history: Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.
Next, consider some of the more famous Type Eights in modern days including politicians, entertainers, etc.:
Putin,
Kim JungUn, al-Sisi, Mohammed bin Salman, Clint Eastwood. Mark Cuban. Bernie
Sanders. Donald Trump, and Dr. Phil McGraw, to name but a few. Watch bosses at work
for evidence of the possibly that they are Type Eights as well.]
A non-dual consideration regarding part of an earlier point offered to a seeker:
several emails were received from people who ignored the request to hang on to
their comments, some of them charging that if I didn't understand that
20-year-old Adam Lanza was both evil and crazy - having shot his mom, twenty
elementary-age-children, six staff members at a school, and himself - then I
was also insane.
In fact, the non-dual take on insanity is rather unique, seeing that insanity
is rooted in a belief in hierarchies and ego and a competitive “us vs. them”
mentality that sets the stage for some persons to act out as the school shooter
did.
The insanity picked up by the shooter in a dysfunctional home was accompanied
by a series of ego-crushing events that set up a competition, and competitions
usually involve rivalry and antagonism and struggle and fighting and clashing;
with the insane who have withdrawn from society, though, the competition takes
place in the warped “mind” of an individual. Such was the case with that
shooter.
For example, reports are that the shooter had no friends, having been allowed by his mother to drop out of school and become “home schooled” because - as she reported - “he could not deal with school.”
Another report is that his home schooling amounted to his being allowed to sit in the windowless basement of his home, playing for many hours each day a variety of violent video games from the multi-thousand-dollar collection that his mother had bought for him, games in which he killed people.
(There is no connection being drawn between such games and violent acts. The conclusions of the research vary. There is a connection between parents who are not available and who use such games as electronic babysitters so that the parents can go do their thing.)
Lanza had no friends. He had no girlfriend. He had no relationships with teachers. He had no educational successes. He had been assigned by events - or had adopted the persona himself - of “The Loser” . . . “The Failure.” That may have come about as a result of his personality disorders and an enabling mother and other factors, but it set the stage for a mental competition that played out like this in that twisted mind:
“I am in last place in friend-accumulation. I am in last place in girlfriend-accumulation. I am in last place in accumulating scholastic accomplishments and the 'attaboys' that others receive.”
Thus, the stage was set for a competition that he wanted to win so he would no longer be in last place - in at least one category or another. And the mind that had undergone a 20-year process of warping eventually found something he could do that would made him #1. What did he find?
His mother's preoccupation with firearms was shared with him, so he began to focus on shooting. His mother had taken him again to the gun range for target practice just days before the mass killings. When not at the range, the video games he played allowed him to shoot “virtual-reality people.”
With a growing focus on guns and shooting people, he began to explore instances involving mass murderers who were “#1” in their involvement with guns and shooting people, the use of his computer having been totally unsupervised.
That led him to find information on Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik who, on 22 July 2011, bombed government buildings in Oslo that killed eight people, followed by a mass shooting at a camp on an island where he killed an additional sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers.
Now a competitive goal could be set: Breivik was, in modern times, #1 as a mass killer. His total: 77 dead. Adam Lanza, in order to take the #1 spot away from Breivik, needed to kill at least 78 people. Then the 20-year-old who was the last at friend-accumulation, at girlfriend-accumulation and at accumulating scholastic accomplishments and 'attaboys' would become #1 at something . . . specifically, mass murder.
The self-centered basis of the competition advanced: in the area of accumulating friends and a girlfriend and scholastic achievement and “attaboys,” Lanza was at the bottom of the dualistic hierarchy. He was dead last in having his former ego-states supported by ego-boosting feedback. He was dead last in regards to the stuff of ego and egotism, including “self-worth” and “self-esteem” and “self-love” and “a positive self-image.”
But now he had a plan that was going to move him to the top in a global
category: the highest number of people killed by a modern-day mass murderer.
And THAT is the stuff of duality, of false self, of persona identification, of
self-ish-ness, of belief in a hierarchy, of the belief that one's place on a
dreamed-up hierarchy matters, and of a complete absence of any sense at all of
the Oneness.
Thus, those with this understanding can see that among the insane, even a
remote understanding of the Oneness that allows for an understanding of Real
Love is absent; therefore, what many take to be “hatred” and “evil” involves to
one degree or another a failure to understand Maharaj's pointer that . . .
“Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, Love is knowing I am everything . . . .”
Lanza was not at-one with the children he intended to slaughter in his plan to finally be #1 at something. Were they the “others” in his “me vs. all others” mentality? Possibly, to some degree. But more than anything, they were the means to an end, pawns in the final competition that would make him #1;
then,
his egotism told his multiple ego-states that he could be remembered for many
generations to come. Finally, the fame and recognition that ego and egotism
long for was no farther away than the short drive from his home to an
elementary school.
The time was nearing to bring on the competition and address with extreme,
duality-based irrationality all of the frustrated and unmet “needs” of his
ego-states. Crazy? Yes. Insane? Yes. Trapped in the neuroses and psychoses that
come when personality disorders are allowed to run rampant? Yes.
(Do you see how the explanation that any given event is rooted in “evil” leads
to vast oversimplification and preempts any chance of understanding the entire
chain of causation involved?)
The dysfunctionalism and ignorance and stupidity and insanity that drive adults
to take a child's blank tablet and to write on it the most insane and dualistic
and nonsensical beliefs and ideas and concepts and notions and thoughts and
opinions and judgments and views and perspectives, year after year after year,
is the architect of the resulting ignorance and stupidity and insanity that
generate such widespread pain and misery and suffering all around the
globe.
Why do they do that? Because crazy cannot spot crazy, though it can most assuredly pass itself on. The Ultimate Medicine is available, but those who do not have a clue that they are Ultimately Sick will never seek that Medicine.
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.
