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 newer 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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LIBERATION (Attaining Freedom from Personality via Realization)
“After the information given to you by the mother, that you are a boy or girl, all your further acquisitions [false identities] are by hearsay.”
--Sri Nisargadatta
Maharaj
Let’s pause to further explain this from the previous post:
Bottom line: one does not lose the role of being a ‘complete bastard’ or a ‘total bitch’ until they lose the role of being ‘an absolute saint.’ “Relevant?
Editor:” Absolutely.
Maharaj said, “If you want to sin, sin wholeheartedly and openly . . .
but
“Only that person will visit this place whose virtue and sin have come to an end.”
He said: “Discard all traditional standards. Leave them to the hypocrites. Only what liberates you from desire and fear and wrong ideas is ‘good.’ As long as you worry about sin and virtue you will have no peace.”
“Sin and virtue refer to a person only. Without a sinful or virtuous person what is sin or virtue? At the level of the absolute there are no persons; the ocean of pure awareness is neither virtuous nor sinful. Sin and virtue are invariably relative.”
“To identify oneself with the particular is all the sin there is. The impersonal is real, the personal appears and disappears. ‘I am’ is the impersonal Being. ‘I am this’ is the person. The person is relative and the pure Being - fundamental.”
“I do not ask you to stop being - that you cannot. I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning - it is not as hard as you think.”
Again, “Relevant?’
E.: Absolutely.
The question for today is, “What generation are you a part of?”
In the past, I gave those who came for satsang this task: “To unlearn, one must identify the key sources of the learning passed down to you which you accepted based on faith and without question (questioning, they taught you, being a sin punished by eternal burning). Go back to your hotel room and, alone, consider:”
Who are the two strongest influencers regarding (1) my (actually, their) beliefs? Then (2) answer the question in light of what your answer reveals, What generation am I currently ‘living in’?
In my first year of college in 1965, my English class professor made this assignment:
“Write an essay which exposes an illogical and nonsensical belief currently held by the masses here in the U.S.” My first inclination was to pen as essay about the belief that North Vietnam posed a real and actual threat to the U.S. as a result of the belief in “The Domino Effect.”
As I found that many of my classmates had chosen that topic, I continued to consider what else might be discussed. I eventually came up with, “The Belief That ‘The Good Ole Days’ Are Far Better Than the Present.”
When staying at Grandmother’s isolated cabin, I experienced a relative existence without running water; without indoor plumbing; with an outhouse instead (which was filled with red wasp nests and spiders); a cabin with no heat or filtered air;
an existence with a food supply which was dependent on the weather and her large garden getting enough - but not too much - rain; on her being able to “put up” enough vegetables to last through the winter, etc.
(I look back now and see that I may have penned the first “Anti-MAGA” writing in the U.S. when I wrote that first college essay.)
Interestingly, throughout history, the older generations slandered the newer generation, claiming that the newer generation is ruining everything that the older generation left intact.
They disparaged the lack of morals among the younger generation, many among the generation which was breaking free from the chains of guilt and shame and rigidity and up-tight-ness and inflexibility and severity and judgmentalism and stiffness, etc.
The elders in Rome complained about the youth who had no morals while the younger generation complained about the old provincial and hidebound men running the show.
The younger Roman poet Catullus said to his mistress:
“Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
And let us judge all the rumors of the old men
To be worth just one penny!”
(In other words, let the old people gossip; let’s make love instead.)
So, again, the consideration for today is this:
Who are the two strongest influencers regarding (1) my (actually, their) beliefs? Then (2) answer the question in light of what your answer to #1 reveals: “What generation am I currently ‘living in’?”
Over the years, the answers generally fell into two categories:
Family members and religious leaders.
The family members were usually those of the currently-passed generations and those of several generations who might still be among the living.
Grandmother passed down the wisdom of many generations. That being based in wisdom, she avoided the tendency among the masses to pass down generational nonsense and BS beliefs.
As for the religious leaders, most despise such considerations as those offered by Maharaj, including:
Maharaj said, “If you want to sin, sin wholeheartedly and openly.”
“Discard all traditional standards.”
“As long as you worry about sin and virtue you will have no peace.”
“Sin and virtue are invariably relative.”
As for unlearning what “those elders” programmed into you, “Just try. Make a beginning - it is not as hard as you think.”
There are so many generation-based names: Baby boomers; millennials or generation Y; gen X; the silent generation; gen Z; the greatest generation; the lost generation, etc.
What generation do you think that you’re a part of? As long as generational nonsense is what you’ve been taught and learned and accepted as truth (and are now clinging to and being driven by) then you might think you’re part of a modern generation but - actually - you’re living under the influence of older family members, so you’re really a part of a generation that was three or four generations in past. Now, you think like they think or thought; you talk like they talk or talked; you behave like they behave or behaved.
And that family-member-crap is the least of the problem. Look next to religious beliefs and influences. In India, people are members of a generation that is 294 generations removed from the past they laud. Do you really want your present existence to be determined by what those people dreamed up and believed 294 generations ago?
To Israelis and devout Jews and Old Testament devotees around the globe, you are members of a generation that is 235 generations removed from the past. Do you really want your present existence to be determined by what those people dreamed up and believed 235 generations ago? Next thing we know, you’re going to be leaning against a wall, swaying back and forth and chanting like a bunch of fools.
To Christians, you are members of a generation that is 123 years in the past. Do you really want your present existence to be determined by what those people dreamed up and believed 123 generations ago? Next thing we know, you’re going to believe that virgins can get pregnant by a god and then deliver a baby / savior and still be a virgin. What?!!
So millions of persons lived a miserable relative existence and died early during what was called the “Dark Ages” because of their ignorance and the unchecked filth and disease and because all of the storehouses of useful information in the fields of medicine, engineering, science, geography, history, and the arts were gone. The great libraries full of scrolls became bonfires. Today experts estimate that 90% of all Greek and Roman wisdom in those fields above was lost forever during the Dark Ages.
Yet today, billions are attached to and being driven by what Maharaj called the “ignorance and stupidity and insanity” which came from the globe-wide floods of near-universal waves of the greatest inundation of ignorance and stupidity and insanity to hit the planet.
Moreover, billions today are lauding and praising and extolling those times and living under the influence of the ignorance and stupidity and insanity which was the best that those ignorant generations could come up with.
Millions nowadays are abiding under the influence of forebearers who believed in a rain god, a god who wanted children and virgins killed as sacrifices to him. Next thing you know, you’ll be sacrificing your money (and peace) to a similar god that wants, wants, wants and cannot love unconditionally.
Billions nowadays are still reenacting the ceremonies from long-gone generations who allowed priests to have sex with virgins and then cut out their beating hearts and passed them about, allowing all in the crowd to, supposedly, commune with the rain god by eating the sacrificial flesh and drinking the sacrificial blood.
And now, generations later, billions went into a church last weekend to reenact that barbaric act of cannibalism and vampirism and to teach their children that the ancient ritual (based in the “ignorance and stupidity and insanity” of days long gone) is normal.
They now model the members of past generations - generations of ignorant humans who have been gone for hundreds and thousands of years; and they are presently reenacting the most cruel and barbaric and uncivilized ceremonies while believing that same ceremony makes then “a good Christian” and “a truly religious person” or even “a spiritual giant” and “cleanses them” and “pleases their god” and “reconnects them with their god.”
Let’s look at one really simple example of the current generation and see how “bad / ignorant / immoral” they supposedly are. At my seven-year-old granddaughter’s BD party last Saturday, I noticed in the room which is reserved for serving lunch to the kiddos that there was a shelf with this scene:
They’re all aware of the significance of drinking enough water, especially in the 105-degree temps we’re experiencing.
As for religious influences in the Evangelical Church that I was hauled into several times a week, everything natural was deemed to be evil; having sex outside marriage was a surefire ticket to a pit of eternal flames.
(I figured, “Well, at least we can masturbate, huh?”
“HELL
NO! You might as well go ahead and commit adultery, you damn lowlife Offender
of God.” I just heard the “go ahead and commit adultery part of that.”)
In my non-air-conditioned elementary school during the 1950’s in the deep, hot South, if we wanted a drink of water, we had to wait for a brief lunch break where we stood in line at a fountain that barely dripped a small stream of water, placed our lips over the same portal that every classmate before us had just sucked on, and drank the water which the previous generation was delivering to us though lead pipes from a fountain next to a wall painted with lead in the paint and mounted under a ceiling that was flaking asbestos down upon us.
MAGA? The “good ole days?” “Sin” everywhere you look? “The worst of all times?”
Surely you jest?!!! Or are you serious and just putting your “ignorance and stupidity and insanity” on display for all with any wisdom at all to see?
“But floyd, you are sharing pointers first offered from generations ago.”
Indeed, but here - as with Maharaj - the pointers have evolved as the understanding has evolved. That “maverick” offered something quite different from what was dreamed up by the ancients. That is the case here as well.
The invitation is to join with the wise and abide in the Now, not in the then and not in the way back then.
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.
