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.
“EVIL” OR TRAPPED IN THE IGNORANCE AND INSANITY OF THE ULTIMATE SICKNESS?
Note the “clues” referenced in part of the article shared
earlier:
“HOUSTON (KTRK) -- The Lone Star College Cy-Fair campus is back open while
investigators are working to figure out why a student slashed 14 people there
on Tuesday [9 April 2013]. Investigators are piecing together a motive behind
the attack at the school on Barker Cypress, and there are new clues that the
suspect may be mentally unstable.
Mentally unstable? Not “evil”? Not “a pagan”? Not “born bad”? Not “immoral”?
Not “sinful”? Maybe just “mentally unstable”? Yet that possibility is not even
a remote consideration for most persons.
So why do the majority of the persons in the U.S. believe
that the cause of “evil” things is “evil people” and the cause of “evil people”
is “Satan” or “a lack of religion” or “too little spirituality”?
Because of programming and conditioning and ignorance and persona assumption,
so those non-realized persons will never be ready for the truth, much less the
complete truth (which can be understood but not stated). Thus Maharaj taught: “Only that person will visit this place whose
virtue and sin have come to an end.”
See, seeking this understanding cannot even begin unless one has transitioned
the over-simplified, religious and spiritual beliefs that involve “how to be
virtuous” and that involve deciding who is “evil” and who is not and that
involve defining “sin”; and determining how best to impose and maintain “Biblical
standards” or “Christian ideals” or “Qur’anic values” or “Judaeo principles” or
“moral standards” or “global ethics rooted in spirituality.”
But consider: what if Maharaj’s pointer is spot on, and what if there is a
chain of causation that includes inestimable, almost-always-hidden factors,
none of which are “evil”?
In that case, there are some actual, concrete, tangible,
specific steps that can be taken - relatively speaking - that can sometimes
address the ignorance-and-insanity-based issues that the masses mistake as
issues rooted in “evil.”
So what do those issues involve? Some of the elements in the chain of causation
that generate what persons label “evil doings” or “wicked people” include
ignorance, stupidity, and insanity as well as personality assumption,
personality defects, and personality-defects-gone-wild, leading to psychic
disintegration and full-blown neuroses and psychoses.
The book entitled “FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE” contains the transcripts from
the last organized satsang sessions that were held here.
In that book, there is a chapter entitled “REALIZATION: No Single Cause,” and
the chapter includes the exchange that unfolded with four seekers when an
everyday occurrence was used to illustrate the way that what most persons take
to be “a single cause” is not that at all:
Floyd: “Upon realization, another duality disappears: the credit-blame duality.
The realized know that assigning credit to one source or assigning blame to one
source is to ignore the reality of an infinite chain of happenings. Here’s a
simple example that might be relevant.
Once, when driving along the road that leads out here,
the rear tire of a car ahead of me threw a pebble against my windshield and
cracked it. You’ve all probably had a similar experience? [Nods in agreement]
What caused that?”
Questioner 1: “The rear tire of the car ahead of you.”
Q.2: “Actually, the driver of the car was responsible. I think people who do
that should have to pay for the cost of the repair.”
F.: “I’m glad you said that since your comment will let us see how wrong that
type thinking is and let me offer the pointer about ‘cause’.” [Participant
displays a mock frown. Laughter from group]
As I passed that car and drove farther along the road, I
caught up with a truck that was hauling gravel … and spilling it all along the
roadway. The pebbles in the road, one of which was thrown into my windshield
earlier, most likely came from that truck. Now who’s to blame for my cracked
windshield?”
Q.2: “The driver of the dump truck.”
Q.3: “The manager of the hauling company who allowed the truck to haul gravel
without a cover over the top to prevent slippage.”
F.: “The manager? Or could it have been the owner of the hauling company who
was too cheap to provide covers or too negligent to be certain that covers were
being used?”
Q.4: “I’ll play along: it was the fault of the highway patrol that is not
efficient enough to pull over those creating hazards on the road.” [Laughter
from group]
F.: “Or the legislators who misappropriated funds to their pet projects and
underfunded the highway patrol? [More laughs] Okay, enough. You get the
picture. A series of events evolved in a way that, at a particular moment, a
particular set of circumstances also evolved that resulted in a broken
windshield on my vehicle.
“And if we wanted to play this game a little longer, you’ve already shown that we could trace the cause back millions of years to the circumstances that resulted in a boulder being broken down into pebbles, one of which millions of years later struck my windshield.
“But billions of years before that, an atom appeared in a vacuum, maybe even spit forth from an adjacent universe. And that atom split and then split again and then formed a mutated atom and those two collided and . . . bang . . . that collision caused a chain reaction that resulted in our boulder being formed billions of years later.
“And then millions of years after that, the boulder atrophied into huge stones and then rocks and then pebbles, and because of that happening and because of a truck and an owner and a manager and a driver and a construction project and an inefficient highway patrol and a driver and a car ahead of me, my windshield broke. Ha.
“Look at the billions of events that had to occur over a period of billions of years in order for my windshield to be damaged. Yet arrogantly, persons want to claim that they know exactly what’s causing any particular happening.
“Persons want to tell you the one cause that they think
is behind whatever is happening. They want to credit one thing or one entity or
one power. Or they want to blame one thing or one entity or one power.”
Q.: We’re back to the pointer you offered before.”
F.: “Specifically?”
Q.: “About over-simplifying the ‘cause’ of anything. You said something like ‘the
cause of everything is everything that’s happened before’.”
Q.2: “And you said that if we don’t realize that, we’ll buy into the ancient
myths about a single causer and a single creator of matter and energy. And you
said that if one can imagine infinity beyond this manifestation, then one
should be able to know the infinity before this manifestation.”
F.: “Well, that’s not quite the way I put it, but your version is accurate
enough. The point is just as you said: the cause of all is all that has ever
happened. Forget seeking a prime cause.”
The invitation here is always to see things as they are, including things
relative (that is, things involving the AM-ness) and including things Absolute
(that is, things involving the THAT-ness).
It has been noted that those who claim that “nothing is real” are in error and
that - among the non-realized masses - the simple fact is this instead: things
are never as they appear. When the understanding of the functioning of the
totality manifests, then not only are things noumenal understood but things
phenomenal are also understood.
Therefore, the invitation regarding things phenomenal - including insane acts
that persons mistakenly label as “evil acts” and including insane persons who
are mistakenly labeled as “evil people” - is this:
if there is a relative goal to address effects and events and actions, that
cannot happen accurately and effectively unless the entire chain of causation
that led to any given effect or event or action is understood, and to assign
blame or cause to one single thing will always prevent the actual chain of
causes from being understood.
And what is the most common assignment of cause that is completely erroneous?
The assignment of a supernatural cause to a totally and solely natural event .
. .
1. . . . as was the case when the Dalai Lama blamed the 2005 flooding of New
Orleans, Louisiana on “the negative karma of the people in New Orleans” while
the Christian minister John Hagee said God caused the damage in order to stop a
gay pride parade that was scheduled in that city;
2. . . . as was the case when, after Hurricane Rita had caused widespread
damage along the Gulf Coast in the U.S., a woman was heard to say, “God is
trying to tell us something”;
3. . . . as was the case when Christian preacher Jerry Falwell said that the
cause of the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City on 9/11 was God
who was angry with “the American Civil Liberties Union, feminists, gays and
lesbians”;
4. . . . as was the case when the Christian minister Pat Robertson said that
the 2010 earthquake that struck Haiti was because the people there had made “a
pact with the devil”;
5. . . . as was the case when Jerry Newcombe (a spokesman for the evangelical
group Truth in Action) said that the theater shootings in Aurora, Colorado
happened because God wanted to send a message to mourners that some of their
loved ones were going to hell while a U.S. Republican Representative from Texas
said he believed that the shootings happened because Christianity is under
attack.
Never is what Maharaj called “stupidity verging on insanity” more on display
then when persons assign blame for natural events on a supernatural cause or
when persons suggest that the cause behind “evil” events is the presence of “Satan-driven
evil in the world” or “paganism” or “bad people as opposed to good people” or “immorality”
or “a lack of virtue” or “sin” or “non-believers.”
Again, Maharaj noted: “Only that person will visit this place whose virtue and
sin have come to an end.”
To understand accurately the chains of causation and then to find a relative
means for addressing relative issues, one must first abandon all magical /
supernatural / religious / spiritual thinking, including thoughts about “Satan”;
and thoughts about “an angry God that uses destructive events to send messages”;
and thoughts about who is “a pagan” and who is not; and thoughts about the
duality of “good vs. evil”; and thoughts about “immorality”; and thoughts about
“sin”;
and one of the most ignorant of all thoughts, namely, that if one becomes
religious or spiritual, that will cure severe mental and emotional and
personality disorders as well as neuroses and psychoses.
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
“THE NEWEST OFFER
If interested, click the button below to pay the fee via PayPal. You will then receive an email which includes the link for you to view the private, unlisted video via an arrangement we have made with YouTube, Inc. You do not have to have a YouTube account to watch this privately streamed video.
(If you do not receive the link promptly, your computer or email provider may have high filter settings. Check your spam and trash folders because some providers automatically transfer emails containing links to those folders.)
To access the seven-hour streaming video of a retreat and begin watching right away, click this "Buy Now" button:
In addition to the five non-duality books made available without charge by Andy Gugar, Jr. (see “FREEBIES” above), you can now access nearly 3,300 posts for any topics of interest to you.
If you prefer PAPERBACK copies
(collected in two anthologies).
Links for ordering are below with
BARNES and NOBLE presently providing better service
than AMAZON
when it come to fulfilling orders for
paperback and hardcover books
as opposed to delivering digital books.
[NOTE: Wherever you live, you can search for the books below by title with booksellers in your country. With 40,000+ retailers distributing my paperback books, you may order from U.S. stores or you may find someone nearer to you.]
SEND A GIFT BOOK TO SOMEONE
(1) 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.
Or,
(2) To make an arrangement for us to send in your name as a gift from you any of our books to someone you choose:
(a) Visit www.floydhenderson.com.
(b) Purchase the ebook you’d like to send.
(c) Contact us using the email below, tell us which ebook you just purchased, and provide the name and email address of the person you want to send the ebook to. (They will never be contacted again or solicited for any reason.)
Send your information to:
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.