Showing posts with label anagnorisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anagnorisis. Show all posts

Saturday, April 28, 2007

THE REALIZATION MOMENT: Exiting the Stage of the Drama of the Lie, Part Three, The Conclusion

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F.: Many confuse the Realization moment with a momentary elucidation, with an occasional glimpse of truth, or with certain transitional moments. Thus, many mistake the dawn for the noon, convinced that they “have it” rather than knowing there is no one to have anything or to gain anything. They want to “have it” when the Teachings are an invitation to “lose it.” Why is there no “one” to “have it” or to “get it”? There is only the consciousness that is either corrupted or that becomes re-purified after the understanding comes. You might review the post of two days prior, note the three drama terms that describe the “shift,” and then understand what happens on the “path” to Realization:

Rather than any “one” to claim “I have it” or “I’ve finally got it,” the understanding is that It Is Consciousness that can speak temporarily…not some person/persona. And the Consciousness, being a form of energy, could never say “I have gained something.” (Remember the anagnorisis, the “discovery” or “recognition”?) The Consciousness merely recognizes that it had been warped via programming and conditioning and enculturation. So what happens next is a sudden change. (Remember the peripetia, that “sudden change”?) The change involves no longer taking oneself to be a body or mind or person/persona, including a dogmatized persona or a spiritualized persona.

Once the consciousness is concept-free, it can witness all that is false and then know THAT Which Is Real. Then, Consciousness can speak, and knowing that there is no “one” to gain or lose anything, Consciousness can say, "I now know all that I am not, I now understand that I Am (that is, that 'I Am a quantity of energy that is temporary manifested in a temporary space')" and that "I realize that THAT Which I Truly Am is beyond both beingness and non-beingness as well." An awareness of the functioning of the totality happens, abidance even as the Consciousness is transcended, and abidance as the Absolute continues for the remainder of the manifestation. It really is all so simple, once the miasma lifts (namely, the miasma of concepts and dogma and ideas and beliefs) so that the Consciousness can see the Truth clearly. (Then the catharsis comes and there is a sense of freedom and peace that happens after the purging of the impurities of programming and conditioning and enculturation.)

When a seeker moves from one of the seven steps to the next on the “journey” to Reality, that can be called a “transitional moment,” but that should not be mistaken for Realization. All seven steps must be transitioned, and to move from one stage to the next is not Realization. For example, look at Stage Three, where a seeker may have cast aside a prurient fixation with body and has begun to seek via a religious or spiritual approach. That is a required step, but “The Religious Person” and “The Spiritual Giant” are nothing more than newly-adopted, but false, personas that must also be transitioned eventually if the seeker is to continue on the “journey” and Realize Fully. The movement from (a) a focus on the body only to (b) an undertaking of religious or spiritual practices and study is a transitional moment. To stay in either role will prevent movement along the “path” to the actual Realization moment. At that third stage, more than half of the yet-untraveled portion of “the path” still remains. Here’s an example of the way one transitional moment happened with a Stage Three seeker who visited for satsanga:
The seeker had been unable to move beyond the third stage. The fear instilled by years of religious programming, combined with threats of punishment “if faith was not firm,” had caused a 32-year old woman to experience a paralyzing fear whenever she even thought about questioning things that she found ludicrous on one level but sacred on another. (Talk about duality…talk about the fact that “a dual-minded person will be unstable in all ways.”) At one session, she had finally begun to question, timidly, but the questions dealt with concepts that she found so baffling that she had remained fixated at the third of the seven steps on her “journey,” clinging to identification with her dogmatized persona. At best she could only ask “Well, how do I find out which part of the dogma is true and which part is false?”

She had not seen that all of the puzzling questions were coming from a standpoint of complete deception. She was obsessed with making some kind of sense of “limbo” and “purgatory” and “heaven and hell” and her contradictory “God of unconditional love who was, nevertheless, capable of withholding forgiveness and punishing her eternally.” She was shown that she had been calling herself “a Christian” but had been ignoring the words of Christ which he spoke after he was exposed to the Advaita Teachings: “Before Abraham was, I AM”; “When you speak of Me, speak of Me as I AM”; “No one will ever see the kingdom of heaven—it’s within”; and “Heaven and earth shall fade away.” After considering those words and their implications, the anagnorisis happened. She recognized that his words and “their” teachings could never be reconciled, that she had spent frustrating decades in her efforts to try to fit a square peg into a round hole, that she had been engaged in maddening exercises that were trying to make sense of nonsense.

Suddenly, (remember perepetia), she saw how she had been fooled for so many years. She became very quiet as another puzzling set of concepts were beginning to fall away. She was seated on the floor and was looking down at her feet. Someone tried to add something, but a hand came up to stop the interruption. She was understanding, yet a few more moments of quiet were required. Then, she looked up and eyes met, and her mouth was slightly twisted, and her body moved when a quiet “humph” was expelled. And then she shook her head a little, as if to say, “I cannot believe that I have been so blind.” And then, eventually, she smiled. She was then told that she should not blame herself and that she need not blame those who had passed along their learned ignorance either: “They know not what they do.”

After another period of quiet, she said peacefully, “There’s no more a god of mass destruction than there were weapons of mass destruction, is there?” A movement of the head that indicated the negative happened...in order to confirm her understanding. Then, it was said to her, “It was all a lie, all intended to control you just as it’s all been intended to control the masses for thousands of years. For thousands of years as well as in the present, ‘they’ have wanted you to go along with their hidden agendas in their efforts to control and to have power and to get whatever their ego-states were driving them to desire or to fear at any given moment.” She nodded in agreement, in understanding.

What happened with her as she began to shift from the third to the fourth stage might be called “a realization,” but it was not the Realization moment. More remained that had yet to be understood, so she was experiencing only a transitional moment. Seven of those are required to reach the Realization moment.

When the Realization moment happens, persons exit the stage of the "Drama of the Lie" entirely and are fully in touch with reality after truly understanding just how fooled they have been for the entirety of their lives. Then, all questions end and an understanding of the functioning of the totality begins to happen. Cycles become understood, and what cycles and what does not cycle is understood. It becomes understood how trillions and trillions have been deceived. It becomes understood why one Advaitin said that only one in ten million will ever realize, meaning that 9,999,999 out of every 10,000,000 persons will be fooled, will remain a fool, and will never touch reality.

The Realization moment is the moment when all of the confusion ends. It is the moment that happens after a seeker who never questioned anything begins to question everything until even the questions end. Why? Because it is seen that all questions were being asked from a relative standpoint…from a standpoint of deception…from a standpoint of duality. To confuse momentary elucidations, occasional glimpses of truth, or certain transitional moments with the Realization moment will guarantee that the total “journey” will not be completed and that Full Realization, therefore, will never happen. Please enter the silence of contemplation.
INTERESTED IN TAKING ALL SEVEN STEPS AND REALIZING FULLY?
  • Click FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE (A Seven-Step Journey to Reality)
  • Friday, April 27, 2007

    THE REALIZATION MOMENT: Exiting the Stage of the Drama of the Lie, Part Two

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    F.: The drama terms offered yesterday are relevant to a discussion of the Realization moment (1) because the same techniques and pointers were used by Realized teachers before they were employed by dramatists, (2) because Realized writers for centuries have used the techniques identified by those terms in order to show characters coming to their Realization, and (3) because an understanding of the terms can help distinguish between occasional understandings or partial glimpses of truth as opposed to the actual moment of Full Realization.

    Realization, if it happens with you, must happen in the way that the early Greek dramatists, and some modern dramatists, had witnessed it happening "in real life." They merely passed on in their plays (or screenplays now) what they had experienced or what they saw persons experiencing. It happened in this order with them and it must happen in a manner similar to the same order with you:

    (A) you must first have been programmed to become an actor or actress and to play roles that you eventually assume to be actual identities; (B) you must be fooled by some key characters and believe wholeheartedly and unquestioningly in the content of the “Drama of the Lie”; (C) you must become so identified with your roles, and thus so lost in the drama, that you are willing to fight if your roles are challenged, really believing that you are actually being hurt, interfered with, or threatened; (D) you must lose freedom and free will as you are driven unconsciously and subconsciously by the machinations of the roles you are playing, yet you must (E) be deluded, believing that you are in charge of your life and in control; (F) next, you must fail to see that your roles are dictating everything you do, say or feel and that you have lost your freedom; (G) you must reach a point where you begin to feel trapped and don't even know who you are any more...and that is rare in plays since only one character out of them all is usually awakened to the Truth; (H) you must feel alone and empty and confused, no longer knowing who or what to believe as you begin to see that you have been misled and lied to; (I) that doubt and willingness to question will drive you to begin a search for the Truth; (J) next, an anagnorisis—a discovery or recognition—must happen as you see that what you had assumed to be real is actually false; (K) you must have an "Oh my gosh!" experience or awakening to the lies and delusions and deception that dominated you and that dominate all persons on the planet; (L) following that, your moment of peripetia can happen and a sudden change will occur; (M) a turning point will come after understanding how you were set up to believe their lies and after seeing how your belief in their lies has prevented you from finding the truth you have sought; (N) a catharsis will happen as the Consciousness That You Are is purified or cleansed of all of the nonsense that humanity has dreamed up for millenia and that humanity has passed down for millenia; and then finally, (O) you sit back and relax and watch the play as it unfolds, not attaching to the action or the phony characters or their histrionics and thereby remain at peace and at ease, enjoying it all and allowing work and/or play to merely happen, witnessing it all unfold as you feel but no longer emote. You will be moved along spontaneously by reason and logic and will never be emotionally-intoxicated again.

    [Note: Of course the word “change” is relativistic since, in fact, nothing changes. There is no “one” to change. You Are That Which You Truly Are, and have never been anything else, in spite of all the roles assumed along the way. Instead, one simply comes to understand what one is not and that prepares the way to find That Which You Truly Are. The only “change,” therefore, is the change from believing lies to knowing truth.]

    Here is the way that the Realization moment was discussed in the novel THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF WARS when Brett says to Kirk:

    “You seem at peace in the middle of this chaos. I want that peace,” Brett almost demanded.
    “Brett, you’ve been shown the answer all your life. It was there for you to see in every play, in every movie, in every mystery you’ve ever read. Shakespeare borrowed the dramatic technique from the Greeks,” Kirk began. “Today, it’s the basis of all mystery and suspense stories, and it’s also the basis of realization.”
    “I’m lost,” Brett confessed.
    “Well look at every drama you’ve ever seen. The main character, who represents you and me and everyone, runs around like a chicken with its head cut off. He is confused and in the dark. Those who are in a position to sit back and witness the drama objectively can see that he’s just an actor on the stage and that none of the drama is real. But for entertainment’s sake, he and the witnesses can pretend it’s real. Both, in fact, can get so absorbed in the role that they take it to be the real for a time.
    “But even amidst all of the drama, a time comes, that moment in the play when even the actor finds out the truth. It is called the peripetia in drama—that moment in the play or the movie when the lead actor finds out that everything he thought to be true is really false; when he sees that he was being misled at every turn; when those he thought he could trust the most, and who thought they were telling him the truth, were also wrong.
    “It’s the moment of freedom that comes when one finds out that everything he ever thought or believed or held sacred (or thought worth fighting for) was a lie. The freedom comes when he gives up all of the concepts he bought into, drops his head in relief and amazement, shakes his head back and forth, wonders for a moment at how he had bought into all their crap, smiles at how easily he was duped, watches how all of the rest of the play unfolds automatically until its end, and leaves the stage after saying to himself, ‘Well, sonofabitch. I’ll be damned.’ And then he laughs. He laughs at it all. And then he’s done with it, once and for all.”

    So the considerations for you today are taken from that non-duality novel entitled The Board of Directors of Wars:

    Are you truly and completely at peace in the middle of this chaos?

    Do you truly and completely want peace, or are you addicted to chaos?

    Can you see that you have been truly and completely confused and in the dark?

    Have you truly and completely seen that you’ve just been an actor on the stage?

    Have you truly and completely seen that none of the drama is real?

    Have you truly and completely experienced that moment of peripetia?

    Have you truly and completely seen that everything you thought to be true is really false?

    Have you truly and completely seen that you were being misled at every turn?

    Have you truly and completely seen that those you thought you could trust the most, and who thought they were telling you the truth, were also wrong?

    Have you truly and completely seen that everything you ever thought or believed or held sacred (or thought worth fighting for) was a lie?

    Have you truly and completely reached the point where you are ready to give up all of the concepts you bought into?

    Are you able to smile at how easily “they” duped you?

    Are you truly and completely ready to watch how all of the rest of the play unfolds automatically until its end?

    Are you truly and completely ready to leave the stage, the role-playing, the histrionics, and all of the dramatic nonsense that robs persons of peace and happiness?

    Are you truly and completely ready to laugh and then be done with it, once and for all?
    Please enter the silence of contemplation.
    INTERESTED IN THE NOVEL THAT OFFERS MANY ADVAITA CONSIDERATIONS AND THAT FEATURES A REALIZED ADVENTURER WHO OFFERS AN INVITATION TO UNDERSTAND THE ONENESS?
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  • Thursday, April 26, 2007

    THE REALIZATION MOMENT: Exiting the Stage of the Drama of the Lie, Part One

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    F.: Addicts often claim that they are “sober” or “clean” if they stop using for a time, yet physical sobriety is only one of four stages of sobriety. If non-using addicts continue to exhibit all of the traits and behaviors of the Addictive Personality Disorder on a regular basis, then they likely have not eliminated their mental intoxication or emotional intoxication and can very likely be suffering from spiritual intoxication as well. Such is exactly the case, too, with those who think they have Realized but are not truly free of mental intoxication, emotional intoxication and spiritual intoxication. How much sanity has been restored when one thinks he/she can give away something that they do not even have, be it all four levels of sobriety or be it Realization?
    Questions from two seekers this week who have not Realized fully were responded to thusly:
    Something is missing in your case. Realization is about being free of the dream and being fully awake, aware, and conscious. Post-Realization, a lightness of being happens, but the "pink cloud syndrome" does not happen. Post-Realization, functioning should happen more clearly...not less clearly. The Realized can still get a job, keep a job, pay bills, etc. Post-Realization, AS IF living happens, meaning you know that “none of it is real” but you behave as if it is. Then, the relative existence tasks required for providing food, clothing and shelter happen...but without attachment. Insane-like behavior ends, but the invitation to you, at this point, is that you "help yourself" before you go about trying to "save" others.

    Short of Full Realization, the only "change" (which is always a disingenuous change) is a change in personas as the acting continues. Persons only put on the cloak of a different character, only change the lines being spoken when in the spotlight, and only change from swaggering and blustering about on stage left to swaggering and blustering about, stage right. With Full Realization, there is no such thing as “I’m getting it.” Is there reading preparation? Usually. Is there some time spent with a teacher? Often. (Maharaj reported that the entire process took three years in his case, yet the exact moment of Realization was clearly fixed.) Can there even be further purification of the consciousness post-Realization? Certainly in some cases, including among some of the most revered Advaita jnanis/teachers/gurus; yet even then, the exact moment of Realization was obvious to them.

    Once the consciousness has been bastardized to the point that body identification is happening, there are seven degrees of separation from Reality. Every one of those stages must be transitioned (and never revisited) if Full Realization can be said to have happened. There are no “slips,” there is no “backsliding,” there is no “I had it but lost it,” and there is no “I’m moving through ‘levels’ of Realization.” If Full Realization has happened, the exact instant when Realization “strikes” is known, and from that point there is no “going back.”

    To understand that moment and to be able to recognize that particular instant if it happens (and to distinguish a "real happening" from all other assumed but fictional “moments of awakening”), the dramatic arts have provided terms that clarify that moment of true awakening. Realized playwrights have illustrated the awakening process for centuries and they (along with Realized screenwriters now) continue to do so to this day. Here are some theatrical terms that are relevant to the awakening of characters in drama and that are relevant to the Realization moment as well:

    “Anagnorisis” (or, “discovery” or “recognition”): a Greek term referring to an actor’s recognition of the fact that he had been representing something that was not real; the discovery by an actor that what he had assumed to be real is actually false; the realization of things as they truly are; an understanding of the basis of antagonistic relations with other characters; and according to Aristotle, “the discovery of one’s own identity and true character”; anagnorisis generates “peripetia”

    “Peripetia” (or, “peripeteia,” “peripety”): From the Greek “peripet,” meaning “to change suddenly” or, in drama, “a turning point”; or “the point in a drama when a character learns something he had been previously ignorant of”; Aristotle defined it as "a change by which the action veers round to its opposite”

    “Catharsis” (Greek, “Katharsis”): the “purification” or “cleansing” that accompanies “anagnorisis” and “peripetia”

    Further discussion of the Realization moment will continue tomorrow, but for today the invitation is to use the definitions above to look at your self/Your Self and answer honestly:

    Have you truly and completely recognized the fact that you have been representing something that was not real?

    Have you truly and completely discovered everything that you had assumed to be real but that was actually false?

    Have you truly and completely realized the way that things truly are?
    Do you truly and completely understand the functioning of the totality?

    Have you truly and completely understood the basis of every antagonistic “relation”?

    Have you truly and completely discovered Your True “Identity”?

    Have you truly and completely undergone a sudden (and permanent) change?

    Have you truly and completely reached that “turning point” and become aware of all that you had previously been ignorant of?

    Have you truly and completely undergone a change that has resulted not only in every action being the opposite of the way your personas acted in the past but has also resulted in your being free of all illusions about the existence of any “do-er” at all?

    Has the Consciousness That You Are been truly and completely purified and cleansed of all programming and conditioning?
    Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
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