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. Also, by clicking on NUMBER FOURTEEN,” visitors can also see the introductory discussion on non-duality on Walter’s non-duality site and then a Q and A session which followed.]
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 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.
5. Would you like to have us send to someone as a gift from you a copy of any ebook in our inventory?
6. 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.
“DO NOT SEARCH FOR THE ANSWER TO ‘WHO AM I?’ IT IS ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND ‘WHO / WHAT YOU ARE NOT’.”
THE THIRD DEGREE OF SEPARATION FROM REALITY:
Religious and / or Spiritual Identifications
(Excerpts from a satsang session conducted in 2004)
Q.: “You have a knack for turning around my statements in a way I don’t mean them.”
F.: “I’m not trying to turn statements around or even offer a different perspective. All perceptions are illusions, so I suggest their dissolution. The personas you’re trying to defend are just more states of being 'this' or being 'that.' Some want you to adopt all of their beliefs. I invite you to abandon all of your beliefs.”
Q.: “So you’re claiming that these two states have never helped anyone?”
F.: “What is ‘help’? [Pause] Let’s try this: can a canoe help one cross a river?”
Q.: “Of course.”
F.: “Then imagine that four rivers separate you from a destination. Imagine also that at each crossing point is a canoe. I ask you, if you use a canoe to cross a river, do you need to drag that canoe along to the next river if a guide assures you that another canoe will be ready to help cross the next obstacle? Is there any reason you should carry along the first and second and third canoes as you approach the fourth river?
Why drag along the first, second and third canoes when the fourth canoe awaits? Why burden yourself by dragging along all those canoes that can only inhibit free movement along the path? Now, did the canoes help? They were there and you used them. So be it. But to say, 'Well, I had to do everything I did on my journey' is a lie.
The truth is that you could have crossed the rivers in other ways, and some of those other ways might have been much easier. Not far from the canoes were footbridges. In some places, the rivers narrowed to shallow streams that you could have walked across. Large traffic bridges crossed the rivers elsewhere.
Did the canoes help . . . or hinder? The more relevant question now, since you've gone the canoe route, is 'Don't the canoes now need to be abandoned so you can move on effectively?' The answer to that is, 'Yes'.”
Q.: [Raises eyebrows]
F.: “I’ll take that look as an affirmation that you get the point. When I speak of transcending, I refer to the fact that you must transcend all body identity, all mind identity, and now . . . all religious or spiritual personalities as well. You might feel they have helped you along, but they are not the end and they need not be taken along after having served whatever purpose you think they served.
All identities must dissolve between now and the end of the fourth degree of separation. It will be impossible. We have reached the point along the path where religious and spiritual roles must be transcended. Any benefit that you believe they might have provided up to this point, so be it. But in order to continue, these roles too must dissolve.”
Q.: “If all roles are dreamed up in the mind and played out by the body, why are these two in a separate category from the other mind identifications you discussed?”
F.: “Excellent question. The answer is, first, because in the vision, awareness of these multiple degrees of separation came to me. Those awakenings included humankind's widespread separation from reality (the AM-ness) and from Reality (THAT) and from realization and from being free of believing nonsense and lies willingly without questioning, (based in blind faith only). All that came to me via the vision, along with seeing that these two roles were the third degree."
Q.: “What vision?”
F.: “The vision I’ll share later at a more appropriate time. That said, these personalities also deserve a category that allows for their thorough investigation since they have far greater impact in the relative existence than any other body or mind identifications. Look to yourself and see how they are 'fighting for their lives.'
Typically, these personalities are the earliest to be planted in the programmed and conditioned mind. Being the oldest ego-states, these personas are the longest held. Like an obnoxious guest at a party, they are often the first to come and the last to go. Even if the roles are assumed during the adult years, their power to dominate the behavior of those with a conditioned mind is demonstrated daily.”
Q.: “So why do they have a greater impact than other roles?”
F.: “For several reasons. First, playing a religious role will either prevent the journey from beginning or will end a journey that has begun. The shift to realization requires that we question everything. Faith in dogma requires that you question nothing. The journey only begins when questioning begins. The journey only continues if questioning continues.
Second, after one has been told he / she has been taught all the answers (and after having been duped into questioning nothing), how could anyone so programmed continue the journey?
Next, the programming and conditioning administered in such venues create minds with unwavering belief in dogma or theory, resulting in a rigidity that prohibits the consideration of opposing views. That I know from my years of being mired in both roles.
Further, no other ego-states trigger more emotional intoxication. Also, most persons have had their entire phenomenal existence frustrated by the dualities of ‘good and bad,’ 'reward and punishment,' ‘heaven and hell’ and the struggle for their souls by 'dual gods': the god of good and the god of bad.
These two false personalities are the seat of those concepts of dualism that are so debilitating, but to suggest that the concepts are harmful and should be questioned will usually earn you a new label, maybe something like, ‘New Age Agent of Satan.’ [Loud laughter]
Don’t laugh. That’s one my former wife - a religious fanatic of the highest order - applied to me. Ha. Next, imagine how difficult it is to shake off decades of such conditioning and programming.
Finally, all roles are ego-states and thus foster egotism. Once the stance that ‘Our way is right and your way is wrong’ is taken, no room remains for facts or truth or opposing views. Fix bayonets . . . cock and load.”
Q.: “Your talk about moving beyond these roles is scary because I’ve always been taught this is my only hope.”
F. : “How’s that 'hope' working for you? Can losing faith in false identities and coming to an awareness of what is true and what is just make up, can that harm what you at present are, namely elements forming a space through which oxygen and conscious-energy are cycling? Or would the loss of all false identities and a deeper awareness finally reveal what is permanent?
What you find ‘scary’ is not this talk. What you fear is the loss of continuity of the body and mind and personality. You want immortality for something that is temporary!
Set the personas aside and your fear will be replaced with peace. See the immensity of the Totality, not the limited life of a body-mind-personality. Get free of your unachievable desire to make the transient into the permanent. Seeking the unachievable will assure you a lifetime of feeling separate and angry. You'll exhaust yourself with needless effort.”
Questioner 2.: “You really bother me, saying religion and spirituality aren’t the final answer. I’m only alive today because I found a spiritual solution to my problem.”
F.: “The best question I could ask in reply would be, ‘Who - what ego-sate - is bothered?’ but I’ll go with second-best and ask, ‘Who said to let religion or spirituality dissolve?’ I see no likelihood that either will fade from the screen.
Each of you, on the other hand, has an opportunity to be free of two additional, limiting personalities. I identified the next two obstacles that must dissolve in order for the journey to continue: religious and spiritual personas.
Personas are false. How can anything false result in true realization? The journey halts when personalities believe they have “arrived.” Don’t consider the inseparable I Am / Absolute as ‘separates’ by believing that these ‘Degrees of Separation from Reality’ are real. They are the illusions.”
Q. 2: “I think that I’m a spiritual creature having a human experience.”
F.: “Cute. I read that book too, so you now think what another person thought. Aside from what any human or religious or spiritual person thinks, what do you understand?”
Q. 2.: “I know I have the power of faith, which it doesn’t sound like you have.”
F.: “Ha. Oh, I have faith, but it’s fact-based faith, not your myth-based faith. It's faith that the Totality will function. Faith that functioning will happen.
My guide said that there’s a current of energy which flows into and out of the space when manifested. He suggested that I understand that energy and its functioning; therefore, I have faith that happenings will happen, infinitely.”
Q. 2.: “I think your problem is that you must have been given a negative concept of God along the way. I came up with a God of my own conception. If you can’t like that God you were raised with, I suggest you come up with a God of your own understanding that you can be comfortable with.”
F.: “Yes, I’ve also read that book, but after making that suggestion to choose your own idea of God, it tells you to ‘cast aside all ideas.’ So which is it?”
Q. 2: “I don’t care what you say. The bottom line is, I have a Power that you don’t have.”
F.: “Actually, you’ve proved that your Power doesn’t exist.”
Q. 2.: “Hardly.”
F.: “You told us that you have chosen your own conception of god, that you 'came up with a god.' You 'created' god. That itself is a very interesting twist in the dogma.
But more to the point, you admit that your god is a concept - an idea fabricated by a conditioned mind. You’re admitting that you dreamed up a concept and now believe in the dream.
Maharaj said: “First of all you identify something as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for yourself. Then, in an effort to acquire good or to get rid of the bad, you have invented a God. Then you worship such a God and . . . you pray to that God for something good to happen to you.”
Talk about nonsensical magical thinking!
If a man dreams that he's sleeping with his favorite starlet, he's no less alone. If he awakes from that dream and still believes that she’s there, an insane mind has generated a delusion which continues to exist.
We’re supposed to be moving away from the dream state and to the awakened state. All concepts are just notions or inventions or conceits. We’re on the path to ‘zero concepts,’ not to more concepts.”
Q. 2.: [Raising voice] “I know for a fact that my Higher Power is real. He’s given me the power and peace I never had.”
[Note: “Q2” was trapped in the bubble of a Twelve-Step program. Few persons in any such program seem to be aware of what their founders had to say about the “Higher Power” and “God,” but what they said is relevant to all readers at this point . . . whether “Twelve-Steppers” or seekers of realization.
In the appendix of their book, an appendix entitled “Spiritual Experience,” they make clear that, though earlier in the text the writer used gender-specific pronouns such as “He” or “Him” to refer to a male god with personal attributes, that is not what most of the founders took the Higher Power to be.
Q2 had the same gender-specific concept of the power. The appendix in their book reveals that those founders who had a “spiritual experience” no longer saw the Higher Power as a male entity but saw it as an “inner resource,” to use their words. (That resource is, of course, the pure, unblocked, universal consciousness.) The appendix goes on to say that it is only their religious members who speak of “God-consciousness.”
So according to their own literature, most of their founders who laid claim to ‘a spiritual experience’ were simply conscious of the consciousness within - of the “inner resource” as they called it. Only the religious members continued to speak of a male “God.”
The point made in their appendix is exactly in line with the non-dual understanding, as is their point that, after having had a so-called 'spiritual awakening,' they tapped into their “sixth sense” and “intuition” and lived in a fashion that was “automatic” - not unlike the “spontaneous living” of the non-dual understanding. Now the dialogue will continue.]
F.: “You seem to read a wide range of books and don't care about the fact that you are plagiarizing. You find in your books what you don’t know and then you believe you know it. The content of all those books you’re quoting amounts to nothing more than 'learned ignorance.' I hear you quoting what you’ve read, but I hear no evidence that you have found what you understand within.
You and I both know what’s in the books you’re quoting, but do you know what is beyond those texts? If not, whatever peace you claim to have received is tenuous, vulnerable to being shattered with a few words, as your voice seems to be confirming. Fix bayonets . . . cock and load.”
Q. 2: [Frowns, shouts] “I wasn’t angry until you started talking blasphemy!"
F.: “Make no connections where connections don’t exist. That’s just more duality. A common reasoning fallacy claims, ‘I am unhappy; I am in your presence; ergo, you are making me unhappy.’ See the truth: one, you are unhappy; two, it just so happens that you’re also in my presence.”
Q. 2: “You’re a real piece of work.”
F.: “Let’s stay with your conception. You’ve created a concept in your ‘mind,’ and now you depend on that concept. My guide cautioned against anything that makes one dependent. You also probably concentrate on that concept, you likely pray to that concept, you perhaps even try to model yourself after that concept, but you admit it’s just your conception - an invention of your ‘mind.’
Other ideas you've believed about that god were ancient concepts fabricated in the minds of other men. In the last session, you obviously didn’t grasp that the personal mind produces powerlessness, not power. The variable mind doesn’t provide peace. It robs you of peace.
If you want lasting peace, abandon your mind, your concepts, and your ego-states. Then, seek within to know the Real.”
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
To watch the most recent talk and Q&A with Walter and his guests, click:
Walter Driscoll and Floyd Henderson
To watch the interview when Walter and Floyd discussed the fact that the Ultimate Sickness is a mental / mind sickness and why learning more is not the answer and why unlearning is the answer, click:
