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, and financial budgeting.
TWO KEY TRAITS OF THE MIND: CONFUSED AND CONFUSING
“There is no such thing as mind. There are ideas . . . .” and “Abandon the wrong ideas, for they are false and obstruct your vision . . . .” and “The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom” and “To know that you are a prisoner of your mind - that you live in an imaginary world of your own creation - is the dawn of wisdom” and “I have no mind . . . .”
--Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Consciousness is rooted in the Absolute. The brain is rooted in the elements. The "mind" is rooted in wrong programming and faulty conditioning and perverted domestication and xenophobia-based acculturation and warped indoctrination and distorted brainwashing as well as learned ignorance and lies and concepts and ideas and superstitions and falsehoods (a.k.a., “beliefs”).
---Floyd Henderson
“Realization is nothing more than a process which results in a person being freed from believing in all learned ignorance.”
--Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
"A dual-minded person is unstable in all ways."
--Yeshu'a
TWO KEY TRAITS OF THE MIND: CONFUSED AND CONFUSING
(Continued from yesterday)
Comedian Garry Shandling
may well have established
himself as the wisest comedian to ever step onto a stage during his later years when he better understood that the use of the ego-defense
mechanisms of ego and egotism and grandiosity and narcissism were
among the drivers of human misery and suffering (along with learned ignorance and insanity which Maharaj discussed).
Shandling's journey from his earliest years was marked by suffering and guilt around the death of his brother and the insanity of his mother. Those marks lasted up to the final later years of his manifestation before he finally came to understand.
Prior to that, his confused mind was a fount of confusing beliefs which blocked him off from attained the levels of peace and contentment which he sought for decades.
His mother required professional treatment for her mental illness and he spent most of his years trying to encourage her to accept his willingness to pay for the long-term care she needed. She never did.
He never married, the effects of her behavior throughout his existence blocking off the ability required for him to be able to attach to woman in a close relationship. Speaking of his overwhelming levels of depression and his being single his entire life, he once said that “eHarmony just matched me up with a gun.”
After he took mahasamadhi, his friends and fans and admirers gathered together to hold a bon voyage memorial service. Many of his fellow comedians tried to keep it light, understanding that Garry would have preferred it that way.
Some suggested that he had crossed to the other side, to use Shandling’s term, where he hoped to be reunited with his brother whose existence ended at the age of thirteen when Garry was ten.
One of Shandling’s most serious instances of trauma happened when his older brother whom he loved so much was in pain and eventually died from cystic fibrosis.
The next serious instant of trauma happened when Garry found that his mother had lied to him when she said that his brother had moved to live with their grandma. Shandling suffered from years of longing to go his brother but was refused, of course; then, he discovered his mother had been lying to him all along.
One friend told Garry, “That woman’s a monster.” Shandling replied, “Well you’re seeing her on her best behavior.”
At the memorial service, Kevin Healon got the biggest laugh of the night when he said, “The irony of all this is that Garry is reunited with his mother for all eternity.”
And that opens the door to a discussion of more of the confused and confusing beliefs stored in the mind:
If there is a heaven or heaven-like place, what age are people therein? Do they remain the age they were at their demise?
Would Garry's brother forever be 13? Would his mother forever be 88? Will Garry forever be 66 years old?
If insane, do they remain insane or does God restore then to sanity?
If god can intervene to restore persons to a sane condition once there, why did god not choose to use that option for the insane on planet earth? Why make them wait and let them generate so much misery and suffering during the relative existence?
So much confusion when one's mind have been filled with the nonsense rooted in magical thinking, yes?
[If interested, HBO is currently showing again “The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling” from 2018. He found as much freedom from the mind as he could via Buddhism but he never reached the state of total freedom from the mind which the Maharaj version of nonduality endorses.]
Shandling’s openness and honesty about his mental condition - and how it came to be - gives insight into how the mind can both confused and confusing.
His arduous relief-from-the-mind-“journey” occupied both his dreams / nightmares as well as his every waking hour as well for decades.
Most humans will never recognize why they need to seek and what they need to seek, and the few who are invited to confront their trauma experiences throughout their childhoods irrationally rationalize their inaction in that regard with a “My parents were great” comment or “They did the best they could” comment.
[So did Hitler. He did the best he could. He wanted to
kill every Jew on the planet, but he
only got to 6,000,000 of them before the allies arrived to shut down his quest.
Nowadays, Neo-Nazis and other racial supremacists have taken up the task where he left
off. One such person recently murdered shoppers at a mall in Texas. Here he is, showing off his Nazi tattoos and his Texas tattoo:
Several confused and confusing minds have been exposed around that event.
The governor of Texas, who has received money from the NRA, said we need to focus on mental health issues, not on gun control issues.
He’s the same guy who said that a 10-year-old pregnant child should nevertheless be refused an abortion even if raped. When challenged by a reporter, he said refusing to allow an abortion under such circumstances was going to become a moot issue because he was going to end all rapes in Texas.
Over 13000 rapes are reported annually in Texas, but since the estimate is that only about 16% of rapes are reported, that total in Texas is likely closer to 80000 a year. Get to work, Guv.
Meanwhile, confused and confusing minds prevail.
Tomorrow: The ego-defense mechanism of excessiveness.
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.
