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
“Realization
is but the opposite of ignorance.”
-Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
If you are attached to the personal, to anything relative (including the body and
mind and personality “stuff”) then if you hear the words spoken to “floyd”
years ago - “cancerous colon polyps” - you will feel no sense of liberation.
You will be tied to the body and thus tied to the panic and fear that comes
with having to picture its finite nature. The doctor could not understand how I
remained in a totally neutral condition after he gave me the news. He did not
understand being free of attachment to all things “personal.”
If you are attached to the personal, to anything relative (including the body
and mind and personality “stuff”) and you heard the words later spoken to me by a
team of doctors who said “angina pectoris” and “lung shadow” and “less than 75%
breathing function,” then you will feel as if those speakers are being most
aggressive.
You might feel as if they are attacking you, and you may
rightly conclude that they are trying to coerce you to follow their protocols
without questions, especially with threats about the limited length of time
remaining for the relative “unless you .
. . . ”
Consider the misery and suffering that come with the bondage and the slavery
when tied to a desire for more years and months and days and hours and minutes,
or even just a few more seconds, of the relative existence.
Note how many who are identified with the body and the mind and the personality
and who are tied to having their desires fulfilled and who are tied to the
avoidance of pain can become fixated on the notion of extending the
manifestation of the consciousness and become willing to undergo any processes
deemed necessary in order to have even a few more days or hours or, yes, even a
few more seconds.
In an act of the persona-driven arrogance and hatred that so often can only
come after years of logic-robbing religious programming and conditioning, a
group of dogma-infested fanatics used airplanes to attack the Twin Towers in
New York on 11 September 2001.
As smoke and flames and intense heat began to take their toll on the nearly
3000 bodies that would be no more by the end of that day, approximately two
hundred people broke out windows and jumped.
Most of their falls lasted ten seconds or so before the bodies struck the
ground or metal overhangs at 150 miles per hour. Ten seconds. Just ten seconds
more. And after ten seconds, no more pain. Just ten seconds more. The issue is
not “By choice?” or “No choice?” The jumpers probably acted spontaneously but
with coercion and aggression as mentioned above.
Jean Dunn was with Maharaj in the final days leading up to his taking mahasamadhi.
How did she describe the way he handled the awareness that the Laws of
Thermodynamics were at work and that the elements of the plant-food body that
had come together were about to begin coming apart?
“ . . . During the pain-filled days of
the illness (cancer),” she said, “it was abundantly clear that although the
body was in terrible pain, he knew he was not that body. We knew his body was
suffering because he told us; yet we never heard a moan or a whimper from his
lips. It was awe-inspiring simply to watch him.”
That “awe-inspiring” simplicity cannot be displayed if there is not total
freedom, that is, if total non-attachment to the personal has not happened . .
. if there is no longer any “tie.”
In most cases, the end of the manifestation will come far less dramatically
than for those 200 jumpers on 9/11. For most who are dealing with hospitals and
doctors or hospices or who have returned home knowing the end of the manifestation
is near, the question becomes, “Will the end be allowed to come quietly and
simply if there is a choice available, or will the fight for ten more seconds
be fought?”
If the fight is for ten seconds more in those cases, then the level of bondage
and enslavement to the body-mind-personality triad and to body-pain avoidance is obvious. So many are
presently dabbling with non-duality but are also covering all bases by clinging
to some vestiges of their formerly-held dogma. It often unfolds thusly:
“I know that neither energy nor matter can be created, so I know there is no ‘creator.’
Say what, Doc? I’m not going to make it? Excuse me for a moment: ‘Dear God, you
know that all along I had some doubts and some lapses in faith, but I want to
say right now that . . . blah - blah - blah.”
Or will you understand, right up until the end of the manifestation, what
Maharaj taught:
“Just as you are not the clothes that you wear, similarly you are not this
body. This is the most important step. You will slowly realize that you are
just like space, because space is the beginning and the end of everything.
“Suppose you are sick: you want to know all about your
sickness; the more serious the sickness, the more you would like to know about
it. Similarly, this ‘I Amness’ is also like a sickness. Now you must begin to
collect knowledge about that.”
If you allow the false beliefs about the consciousness to go, then WHO could be
left to be concerned at all with this consciousness or what happens with it?
Maharaj, speaking of conceptual consciousness and transcendent consciousness,
said: “This consciousness is dead to me; it is gone. I have transcended that.
So whatever it is, is that other consciousness, that one which is without
concepts.”
Realized fully, there is no duality, neither “I have always invited death to
come” nor “I will always try to prevent death from coming, no matter what I
have to do.” The deer has no such thoughts; the one freed of the influence of
the conceptualizing, fiction-filled mind has no thoughts about anything either,
one way or the other. What is, is.
The doctors’ games might be played for a time or not, but if played, there will
be no attachment to outcome. All in the relative is finite. WHO wants to ignore
that reality? Only he or she who is tied to the personal, the one who is in
bondage, the one who is in slavery.
The end might come now, or might be delayed for another ten seconds, or might
be delayed for twenty years. Freed from the bondage and slavery of
body-mind-personality, conceptual time is no more an issue to the realized than
it is to a deer that has become ill, that is not feeling quite as well today as
yesterday.
That deer might “die” in ten months or ten weeks or ten seconds; whatever
period of time is involved, the time will pass without fear . . . without
regret . . . without concern. So it is among those that are freed from the
bondage of self, from the personal, from things relative. They, like the deer,
are the only “living” naturally.
Then, whatever time remains, it can be passed with “no one any longer trying to
impress” and with the assurance that “all the things that seemed to matter at
one time really don’t anymore” and with the ability to simply “walk around and
enjoy a chocolate doughnut and coffee” and with the ability to “just be still
without any worry or doubt” in your head.
To review: Most will never seek, billions believing that they have already found, via their organized religion, either . . .
[a] the answers to all questions that can be asked or
[b] a way to explain away their religion’s inability to
provide all of the answers (viz., “He works in mysterious ways”).
Claiming that they have “been made whole and free,” they are actually slaves to
the (often contradictory) content of their supposedly holy texts and to those
persons who claim that they have been “chosen” to teach the lessons of the holy
texts and to tell all persons how they should think and talk and behave and
live and, yes, die.
Of the few who do claim that they are seeking freedom, most of them will never
find that because - as with pregnancies - there are no degrees of freedom and
because most are afraid of total freedom.
First, most will not seek total freedom because they are in denial about the
fact that they are imprisoned: “I have a great life”; “I have been blessed by
God - I have a truly blessed life”; or, “Hey, that’s just the way the world is:
sometimes there’s peace and sometimes there’s war . . . sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s
bad.”
Secondly, as Maharaj noted, persons do not want to let go of everything, of
every attachment. Specifically, they do not want to let go of their false
identities and the stroking of their egos; they do not want to let go of their
egotism-based hierarchies on which they have assumed a top spot;
they do not want to let go of the learned ignorance which they were taught
first by parents and then by relatives and friends and schools and by their
cultures in general; they do not want to let go of the notion that they have
all of the answers or let go of the admiration they gain by sharing their
knowledge (a.k.a., learned ignorance).
Third, persons do not want to give up their quest for love, though the only version
of love they understand is the type that forms dependencies and co-dependencies
and though they are seeking love mainly from those who are incapable of loving,
incapable of understanding the Oneness, and therefore, incapable of knowing the
difference in Real Love and the versions of (false) “love” that the masses
speak of. Too, the dependency and co-dependency that results from that quest
further blocks any aspiration for total freedom.
Fourth, most persons do not want total freedom because they would have to be
free of their desire for power, both “Unseen” and “seen” (the latter including
money; possessions; men of god who persons think can help them both now and
later; and, witnessed recently, the doctors they worship, imploring and
employing those persons in the hope that they can prolong the body’s existence,
even if that reaches such insane lengths that the adult-aged body once again
operates like that of a child who cannot control even its most basic bodily
functions while others stand by watching that travesty and talking in their
sleep, saying, “Life is precious”).
Fifth, most will never seek total freedom because they prefer their attachment
to the conceptualized consciousness rather than abiding as the transcendent,
universal consciousness which
(1) allows the Absolute to be overlaid on the relative and which
(2) allows the somethingness to be abandoned totally and which
(3) allows the total freedom of the nothingness to
manifest.
Last, most will never seek total freedom because they are attached to their
false identities associated with the body or the “mind” or the personality /
personalities.
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.
