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.
The interview is available for viewing by clicking on video "NUMBER THIRTEEN" in the column to the right.]
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.)
4. Some prefer paperback books even if they have to wait a day or so to receive it and have to pay more for a printed book and its shipment. Now, 10 paperback books by Henderson are in print and available in two anthologies through Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and over 40,000+ booksellers around the globe including in the Americas, Germany, India, Italy, Poland, Russia, China, Spain, Brazil and South Korea. See the end of this post in red text for details.
5. Would you like to have us send to someone as a gift from you a copy of any ebook in our inventory? See the offer in purple text at the end of this post.
6. Or, you may purchase a Floyd Henderson Shopify Gift Card here for someone and offer recommendations for the books in Floyd's store which might be of assistance to them.
7. You may click here to visit Floyd's bookstore which offers both digital books and paperback books which deal with non-duality, non-duality-based fictional adventures, recovery, financial sanity, financial planning, and more.
BELIEFS AND FEARS:
The Fathers and Mothers of Foolishness
BEING FREE OF THE EFFECTS OF FAMILIAL AND CULTURAL CONDITIONING
A frantic call by a wife for me to come to the hospital led to my walking into a room and seeing her husband with his entire head wrapped in bandages and a dozen tubes going into and out of his body.
He had been bicycle riding along a roadway and was hit by an automobile. The initial diagnosis by the doctors? Traumatic brain damage. The effects would be permanent, the injury having caused the widespread destruction and deterioration of brain cells.
For the remainder of his existence, he would never understand that he was brain damaged. Such is the case with 99% of the people on the planet who are suffering from subtle brain damage (with, nevertheless, major effects on thoughts and words and actions) but who do not have the slightest clue that they have such a condition.
While traumatic brain damage can result from a variety of trauma-induced brain injuries, visitors to this site are familiar with the way that the masses suffer brain damage in a more devious fashion, namely, via distorted, inane, and insane programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing, and indoctrination.
Non-dual pointers have assisted some in their efforts to be free of the effects of having been exposed to those processes.
Also, Galina Singer has written an article entitled “The Secret to Breaking the Cycle of Family Conditioning” which might be of interest to some.
To quote her:
Reality doesn’t always live up to the expectations we generate in the buildup. No matter the effort we put into preparations, there is often that residual, nagging feeling that we did not quite manage to conjure the emotional bliss we crave.
Meanwhile, my Instagram feed tells a completely different story.
As I look at people I know and people I don’t united in their relentless display of merriment and happiness, families in matching pajamas, all together for the holidays either in their perfect homes or picturesque holiday locations, a poisonous thought from my old repertoire seeps in: what is wrong with me?
The contrast between how we expect life to look and how it actually feels can be startling and is known to lead to depression.
The truth is that what we post on social media often has little to do with our inner state of mind, while we all strive to fit in with some imaginary life served up to us by lifestyle brands and influencers as the new standard.
I am reminded of an episode from several years ago when we had to move houses in December and, in a desperate attempt to make my life marginally easier, I decided to skip holiday decorations.
I expected my daughters’ disappointment, but I was not prepared to hear one of them announce that for her these holidays were always associated with, among other things, drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows by the fireplace. It was when she said “the fireplace” that I realized that no matter what I do I could never satisfy my daughter’s expectations: we never had a fireplace! Nor do we live in a climate that requires one.
Our expectations of life are now influenced by images that have little to do with our own reality.
Our children measure their childhood experience against every other parent on the planet’s attempts to give their children “the best” life, but also against the multi-gazillion-dollar marketing machine which plays up to all of our insecurities and inadequacies at once.
When my daughters were younger, I also was driven by desire to make their lives as perfect as possible. Why? Because my own childhood did not look like a Disney cartoon.
Born in the Soviet Union, as a child, I was entertained by one heavily censored TV channel, where the only thing they tried to sell us was Communist Utopia and the picture was in various shades of black and white. My imagination was much more receptive to the many luscious full-color channels of American TV, which I got access to when my family moved to the United States when I was a teenager. Consumerism is far better looking than communism.
I am not unique in my desire to make the life of my children everything that mine was not. The way we parent is often either to recreate the nostalgic and idealized memories of our own childhood, or to compensate for everything that it was not.
How we navigate our entire adult lives and all our relationships is basically a dialogue with our past.
Although we grow up and leave home, our childhood experiences are embedded in us: how we were raised and nurtured in childhood is how we feel about ourselves and all our assumptions about the world and other people in it. What drives us are our unconscious reflexes, not conscious choices. We are not really engaged with our reality but are compensating for the inadequacies and feelings of lack from the past.
It is no wonder our lives feel unfulfilled: we are not really focused on them.
To be an adult is to make our own decisions, not based on what we are told to think and believe. It is only when we liberate ourselves from the need to satisfy other people’s expectations and stop repeating inherited fears and anxieties that we are able to truly engage with life and the world as it unfolds in our lifetime.
Most of the people I work with are so paralyzed by their attachment to the way things have always been done and anticipated judgment of others that they are unable to initiate changes that would allow them to live on their own terms. No matter how accomplished, we navigate our whole lives from the perspective of a wounded child, forever feeling “not enough” and dependent on approval of higher authority.
We have to take the power over our lives back by becoming our own authority and learning to parent ourselves.
We need to understand what happened in our past, where our wounds come from, accept our experiences, learn from them, conclude that it was not our fault, and then decide that we’ll never allow ourselves to become someone else’s victim again. It becomes a journey . . . [to] the realization that we are no longer the helpless and innocent children we were when our traumas occurred, as we step into our own power from here on out.
Our parents shape the nature of our reality in a way that is unquestionable when we are children.
However, what served our parents or grandparents well is no longer applicable to our rapidly changing lives, and will certainly be obsolete in the future world of our children. Moreover, some of the choices made by previous generations have led our planet to the brink of ecological disaster.
The whole future of our children depends on our and their ability to think critically and independently, in order to reverse the damage done by the wrong choices made in the past.
As we get to know and accept ourselves as we are, we let go of the desire to be perfect, and stop relying on achievement and acquisition for self-value. We free ourselves from the need to compare ourselves to others and from other people’s expectations of us, because we have become our own ultimate authority, secure in knowing exactly what we want and need.
As we become self-responsible, we understand that our life depends on our own choices and actions in the now.
It is no longer about proving ourselves to somebody else, but deciding how we want to lead our lives in accordance with our own values and truth.
Deconditioning from family and societal limiting beliefs requires courage and independence of thought, but is necessary for us to step into our full unique self-expression. What we are missing more than anything now are connections based on emotional transparency, which most of us did not learn from our families.
Our parents and grandparents lived in a world dramatically different from ours. Many have lived through wars or emigration, where the only way to survive was to detach from emotions and the pain of staggering losses.
When we were children, absence of emotion may have been taught to us as a display of character and strength, but this has not served us well, as reflected in the depression statistics and the startling rise in opioid and medication use, the divorces percentages and the ever-increasing suicide rates.
When we withhold emotions, pretending to find strength in hiding our soft spots under a veneer of perfection and smiley satisfaction, there is no space for vulnerability—no way to share sadness, express feelings of doubt, or to ask for help. As a result, our relationships are often built on a sense of obligation, rather than an authentic exchange of warmth, love, support, forgiveness, and understanding.
Family gatherings during holidays can reactivate in us a lot of our old conditioning and unhealed wounds.
It takes courage to initiate the honest conversations needed to upgrade some of our relationships. However, when we free ourselves from childhood “default settings” and act from the position of empowered adults, we can express ourselves without fear, knowing that we will not be unbalanced by someone else’s reactive behavior. We must also be willing to revise our own attitudes about our parents, understanding that children often focus only on certain aspects of their parents, unable to understand the complexity of their parents’ lives.
. . . Nourishment only comes from vulnerable connections, based on acceptance, forgiveness, understanding, and compassion.
As we master our own relationships with our parents and siblings, we can teach our children what honest communication means. Once our relationships become more authentic and nourishing, we no longer need to focus our attention outside of ourselves, making comparisons with other people’s lives. We can start accepting our children for who they are, allowing them to self-express in the safety of knowing that they are loved regardless of how they compare to others. Then we teach them to make decisions based on what feels right, even if different from what others are doing, reinforcing their confidence in remaining the unique individuals that they are.
So, what have I personally found is the key to more enduring fulfillment?
Unfiltered self-expression and greater simplicity of life.
Cultivating more honest communication without avoiding difficult subjects has transformed my own relationships with my parents. I have fewer friends, but with them I can express my innermost secrets without fear of judgment and rejection.
As I attune to my own needs and learn to instill clear boundaries, I try to shift the relationship with my partner from codependent to interdependent. Since I gave up seeking perfection, my relationships with my children have become grounded in honesty and telling it like it is, which gives them a much more realistic view on life and the complexity of relationships.
. . . I have simultaneously freed myself from all competition with others and let go of my attachment to possessions, dramatically simplifying my life and lightening the pressure on finances.
We cannot achieve the emotional bliss we crave immediately. Honest relating takes practice, self-confidence, and lots of love. But it is an excellent filter to see which relationships in our lives are real. Those who love us will be interested in staying on no matter what our lives look like. And nothing beats the comfort and feeling of coming home when we share our heart openly, not afraid to proclaim to the world exactly who we are.
That is the kind of safety and stability that an abundance of possessions we’ve been taught to strive for will never be able to provide us.
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
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For NON-DUALITY AUDIENCES
The Advanced Seekers' Series (344 pages) is an anthology of four books that share Advaita-based, non-duality pointers that can guide seekers to abide as their original nature. Included in the anthology are
"From the I to the Absolute (A Seven-Step Journey to Reality");
"Consciousness / Awareness: The Nature of Reality Beyond SELF-Realization (Peace Every Day When Abiding As the Absolute)";
"From the Absolute to the Nothingness";
and
"The Final Understanding."
from BARNES AND NOBLE by clicking here
or (sometimes less efficiently nowadays in terms of paperback delivery)
This anthology (438 pages) contains the six books that make up what has been called The Blissful Abidance Series for those seeking to live blissfully and happily for the remainder of the manifestation, including:
“What BLISS is and what BLISS is not”
“There’s No Such Thing As Peace of Mind (There’s Only Peace If You’re ‘Out of Your Mind’)”
“Liberation (Attaining Freedom from Personality via Realization)”
“Freedom from Shifting Between States of Happiness and Unhappiness”
“Why You Must Be Empty If You Would Be Full”
and
“When REALITY Is Overlaid on the RELATIVE.”
Order a PAPERBACK copy of The Blissful Abidance Series
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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.
