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.)
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.
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OVERCOMING THE FEAR OF TOTAL FREEDOM
“ . . .You are afraid of freedom!”
-Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
“Insanity is universal. Sanity is rare. Yet there is hope, because the moment we perceive our insanity, we are on the way to sanity. This is the function of the Guru - to make us see the madness of our daily living. Life makes you conscious, but the teacher makes you aware.”
--Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
“It is impossible to state the truth. It is possible to point the way to the truth.”
--Floyd
After nearly 35 years of sharing non-dual pointers and being asked time and again why so few ever realize, why so few ever “get it,” I have seen that the pointers which are most often challenged, objected to, or ignored completely are those which deal with . . . beliefs.
When called upon by Maharaj to reach a state of “zero concepts,” that notion is so far removed from what has been embedded in the mind-parts of their brain via nonsensical-and-ignorance-based programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing and indoctrination that the suggestion is anathema to most humans.
Thus that suggestion can be rejected instantly; however, to understand why his no-beliefs solution is the key to realization, review from yesterday what the true function of a non-dual guide is:
1. To address the fact that “insanity is universal and that sanity is rare” and
2. to address “the madness of our daily living” and
3. to move seekers away from being driven by the “learned ignorance, stupidity, and insanity” which had been taught via nonsensical-and-ignorance-based programming, conditioning, etc. and
4. to lead seekers to realization which is simply a state in which no beliefs are any longer held and
5. to move the seeker away from dual-mindedness which results in “being unstable in all ways” and
6. to shift seekers away from chaos and to stability,
well, what is the common problem which all of those share?
They all involve the mind-parts of the brain. Yet when seekers hear that the prerequisite for being totally free of all of those common problems, they move on, seeking a more comfortable, only supposedly non-dual, message. They do not want to be totally free.
As a child, my dad would occasionally take me to the circus. I hated it. It was a hotbed of animal abuse where the animals had been conditioned to accept a totally unnatural and abusive manner of living.
I remember looking at an elephant that had a chain attached to one rear ankle and then to a stake driven into the ground.
I had seen the power of elephants, charging at trucks loaded with tourists and flipping the truck over and then tossing the former occupants into the air. I wondered why, when the restless animals in the circus tried to move away from the stake, the slightest tug on the chain stopped their efforts.
It would be explained to me that the circus elephants has been conditioned not to resist, which is exactly the case with humans.
During conditioning, a chain and a large pole firmly planted deeply into the ground were able to hold back the animal, and if the elephant tried to apply pressure and escape, he would be beaten.
Soon, the elephant came to believe, “I cannot escape, and if I even try, I’ll suffer,” so the slightest pressure from a stake in the ground at the circus - though incapable of physically restraining the elephant - was mentally capable of restraining the elephant.
So it is with humankind.
Throughout a thirty-five year period, I have had visitors showing up and being simultaneously conscious but totally unaware. The example I offered to many involved a trashcan full of garbage inside a house which contained five-day-old fish scraps and shrimp shells and crab remains and other shellfish waste and cat litter.
Then I asked, what would be the sane way to address the stinky content in the trash can: (a) take each bit and piece and spray it was an air freshener and return it to its place in the can; or (b) toss out the entire trash bag and be done with it all. Many thought the answer was so obvious that my metaphor itself was stupid.
At that point, I would suggest that they are using approach “a” and trying to address separately each and every individual problem which centers in the mind (which includes personality disorders and neuroses and psychoses and nonsensical ideas and views and thoughts and images and notions and opinions and theories, etc. and which can be bundled together and accurately labeled “beliefs”).
The conclusion: they cannot live long enough to “work on each individual mental problem” but have available a far simpler and far easier method available. As with the trash, don’t try to address each bit and piece that is generating a toxic odor;
instead, toss out the bag in one fell swoop and be instantly done
with the garbage and the odor.It will bring to end that which is stinking up their lives.
So many think that solution is impossible because they define “themselves” (their scores of false identities) with their beliefs about each false self.
When seekers concluded instantly that “That’s impossible!” I did not argue. I said simply, “You may be right” (meaning, you may be, but actually, you’re totally in error, based in my own experience).
And how egotism stands in the way! I could say, “Insanity is universal and sanity is rare,” and most would say, “Damn straight! I spend my every day dealing with crazy people,” but they are unaware that they are not running into craziness but are hauling craziness about themselves in the space between their ears.
Maharaj: “You are too quick to condemn. Do not worry about others. Deal with your own mind first”
and
“Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you.”
So consider:
It is the mind which is a storehouse for body and mind and personality identifications.
It is the mind which is a storehouse for dualistic and, therefore, bogus ideas and concepts and notions and misperceptions (a.k.a., “beliefs”) which generate instability and chaos and misery and suffering.
It is the mind which is a storehouse of the ignorant and insane beliefs which were planted therein by ignorant and insane programming, conditioning, domestication, acculturation, brainwashing and indoctrination.
It is the mind which is a storehouse of all which imprisons persons.
[John Milton said, “The mind . . . in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” and Richard Lovelace said, “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” So what did he identify as that which does make a prison? The mind, packed chock full of false identifications and false beliefs.]
It is the mind which is a storehouse to all which results in a false sense of different-from-ment which - in turn - always leads to a subsequent sense of better-than-ment.
It is the mind, being the storehouse of beliefs about different-from-ment and better-than-ment, which leads to a false sense of separation which then sets the stage for arguments, nonsensical disagreements, fighting, conflict, killing, wars, chaos, pain, misery, and suffering.
It is the mind which is a storehouse of learned ignorance, personality disorders, and the neuroses and psychoses which can follow as personality disorders disintegrate into a state of severe psychic unhealthiness.
At every step, the long and arduous “path” which was followed here for decades involved dealing with persons who were all determined to use their dogma or exercises or beliefs or methods to add more to the mind, touting the need for more dogma, more spiritual exercises, more philosophy, more ideology, more (but different) beliefs, ad infinitum.
The long and arduous search ended when it became clear that (1) all of the stuff in the mind was the actual source of every problem, the mind being the origin of every problem; and that (2) the solution did indeed call for de-accumulation . . . that is, called for entering into a process of being un-taught all of it, called for entering into a process of un-learning it all;
and called for casting aside all of the nonsense which had been added to and stored in a part of the brain which would be called “the mind” and which would lead to decades of ignorant and nonsensical and insane actions which led to massive levels of misery and suffering that did not end until the mind came to an end.
How to end the mind, the entire content of which can all be summarized with the term, “one’s beliefs”?
Abandon all beliefs. No beliefs? No mind. No mind? No stone walls. No stone walls? Freedom.
As has been noted here, each belief, each assumed persona, and each scrap of learned ignorance which is all stored in the mind . . . each of those becomes one of the many bars which are used to form the prison of the mind.
Want to be freed from prison? Cut away the bars of beliefs; the bars of identifications (or some “Special Identification”); and the bars of taught and learned ignorance.
Only then can you be free of dualistic thinking, and only free of dualistic thinking can you be truly free, and only if truly free can you be happy or at least content. (As Maharaj said, “It really is simple,” yes?)
It is the ever-churning mind which sets the stage for DID to manifest and to begin controlling every thought, every word, and every deed.
Maharaj’s own experience allowed him to explain how he tossed all the garbage / mind-garbage at once and what the result was after that:
“There is no such thing as a mind.”
“I have no mind . . . .”
Want to be free of the mind? Maharaj advised:
“Reach a state of zero-concepts.”
“As to my mind, I have no such thing. There is consciousness in which
everything happens.”
“I am double dead: not only am I dead to my body, but to my mind, too.”
“I find I have lost the mind irretrievably.”
And that is what “total freedom” involves.
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.
