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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Robert Sapolsky’s “Scientific Laboratory”
on
The African Savannah
“Understand that the behavior of apes does not differ at all from that of human primates; thus, the invitation is to view the apes as humans and the Savannah as every place on the planet where humans abide.”
--floyd
“One of the main contributors to the Ultimate Sickness and to the high levels of stress, tension, worry, and anxiety among troops of apes is the same contributor to stress, tension, worry, and anxiety among humans: the toll taken by hierarchies (which have long been disparaged by the non-dual message).”
--floyd
The apes on an African Savannah are “a perfect model for westernized stress-related disease.”
--Robert Sapolsky
That being the case, the discussion can continue with how Sapolsky’s research supports the efficacy of the non-dual understanding for humans.”
I became aware at the age of five or six that something was “different” about my Cherokee grandmother - especially different from the way she was in comparison to her son (my father) and different in the way that she perceived “things” and “people” and “life” and “death” and truth and . . . everything.
I never knew her to be anything but calm or anything other than relaxed, exhibiting none of the stress of her many children who had moved to nearby cities to find employment and to begin playing the “accumulate-a-lot-and-then-do-all-possible-at-all-costs-to-hang-onto-your-accumulations” game.
The simple cabin in which she lived and in which she would eventually take mahasamadhi had no central heat, never had air conditioning, had no running water, and had only a wood-burning stove / oven.
There were only about fifteen years from the time I really became aware of her (and aware of the ways that she was different from everyone else I knew) until the day that she took mahasamadhi in her 90’s. Yet one of the most different things about her was the fact that she never thought she was different from or better than anyone or anything. She truly abided in an “At One” manner.
The Cherokee language which she originally heard had no words for “different from” or “better than” or “hierarchy” and no words for such concepts as “own,” “accumulate,” “gain,” “lose,” or “being attached to”; of course, therefore, there was no word for “stress.”
The introductory scene of the Sapolsky film mentioned in the last chapter - a film entitled “STRESS: PORTRAIT OF A KILLER” - notes the preponderance of stress in the lives of most people on the planet today and shows how daily stress affects humankind.
In the opening scene, a man is tossing and turning in his bed at night, unable to sleep. He asks the typical kinds of questions that many stressed-out persons ask:
“What am I thinking about? Mortgage, debt, money pouring out? I felt a lump. I know cancer when I feel it. Where is she? What is she up to? Never calling, never saying a word.”
The narrator explains. “Stress . . . it is everyone’s inferno, bedeviling our minds, igniting our nights, and upending our equilibrium, but it hasn’t always been so. Once, its purpose was to save us.”
The scene shifts to the African veldt and the point is made that, “If you’re a normal mammal, what stress is about is three minutes of screaming terror on the savanna, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. But everything changed. What once helped us survive has now become the scourge of our lives.”
Then the scene shifts to a man who is describing what his relative existence was like when working in a stress-filled environment in which he was “at the low end of the totem pole,” that is, at the bottom of a strict, rigid, hierarchical culture in the U.K.
And that is the same culture which they would eventually spread around the globe as they conquered one country after another and imposed on one “colony” after another their strict, rigid, hierarchical lifestyle and culture on others, just like that of their Germanic ancestors and just like the one that the Romans had earlier imposed on the British.
The man said, “I just burst into tears and wept and wept” as he described what his existence was like working for a strict, rigid boss in a strict, rigid hierarchical culture.
The narrator explains, “Today, scientific discoveries in the field and in the lab prove that stress is not just a state of mind but is something also measurable and dangerous.”
One acquainted with the toll then says, “This is not an abstract concept. It’s not something that maybe someday you should do something about. You need to attend to it today.”
Then the audience is told by several being interviewed:
“In some of the most unexpected, places scientists are revealing just how lethal stress can be”
and
“chronic stress could do something as unsubtle and grotesque as kill some of your brain cells”
and
“the impact of stress can be found deep within us, shrinking our brains, adding fat to our bellies, even unraveling our chromosomes”
and
“This is real. This is not just somebody whining.”
Then the message at the core of the film is shared: “Stress: savior, tyrant, plague . . . its portrait revealed.”
From there, the documentary reports that the original purpose of stress was to protect; that it has now become the “scourge” of almost all humans; and reveals that stress can harm us in many ways, according to scientific studies.
It is shown how stress kills brain tissue, how it adds fat to our bodies, how it hardens arteries; and how stress can even be lethal.
The non-dual connections to the problem: (a) hierarchies (the film revealing how frequently stress is generated in both baboons and in people at the lower end of hierarchies as they are suppressed and abused by those at the top);
the way that hierarchies support the dualistic concepts of (b) “different-from-ment” and (c) “better-than-ment”; (d) the mental and emotional toll that takes on those among the non-Realized masses; the toll of the dualistic concept of (e) “attachment to”;
and (f) the way that hierarchies infect persons all around the globe with the debilitating and often lethal symptoms of the Ultimate Sickness (including the misery and suffering of near-endless stress).
Next, it is explained that
1. “the impact of stress can be found deep within us, shrinking our brains, adding fat to our bellies, even unraveling our chromosomes”;
and
2. “this is real”; and
3. “all of us have a personal relationship with stress, but few of us know how it operates within us or understand how the onslaught of the modern world can stress us to the point of death. Fewer still know what we can do about it.”
[And a “personal” relationship it is indeed.]
Yet the roots of stress nowadays are not as often based in reality (AM-ness) or in Reality (THAT-ness) but they are based in the dualistic and monomaniacal mind, an anomaly that is a prerequisite for feeling a version of stress which is (A) far from the type that is “normal” among most life-forms and which (B) comes in short bursts and leaves as quickly.
The audience is told, “But over the last three decades, Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has been advancing our understanding of stress - how it impacts our bodies and how our 'social standing' can make us more or less susceptible.”
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.
