PEACE EVERY DAY…OR NOT, Part One

From a site visitor: “…Just been introduced to the ideas of Vedanta: How does one overcome day to day frustrations and feelings of anger etc that may arise during a normal working day? While alone, reading, or with friends (bascially pleasant situations) i find it obviously easier to be in a peaceful state, but when i am at work the general frustration and complaining that is part of my job takes over and everything i may read or meditate on just goes out of the window. I guess im saying, how does one start to make spritiual practice and the journey of Self-realization a part of ones working day? I simply find my feelings of frustation in a chaotic workplace overwhelming! Thanks for your time, Jaime

F.: Hello Jaime. Your question is typical of the inquiries raised by “beginners” and is valid. For now, you want benefits, and that too is understandable at the beginner stage. Yet most people want solutions without digging deeply enough to expose and completely understand the actual source of their problems. The fact that you’ve been introduced to the Advaita philosophy might accelerate your finding the peace you seek since your words have revealed the source of your frustration and anger: duality.

For the following to make any sense at all, you must (ideally) sit in the presence of a Realized Teacher or you must complete some additional readings and take the pointers into contemplation.

The newest version of the book CONSCIOUSNESS/AWARENESS explains how peace every day can happen after SELF-Realization, but you are not ready for that book since the prerequisite is a completion of all seven steps on the “path” to Reality as outlined in FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE.

That process not having been completed, consider this: is it possible that the real source of your frustration and anger has nothing to do with where you are throughout the day and has nothing to do with what is happening around you? Is it possible that the source of your anger and frustration is rooted within, in jaime’s beliefs? Is it also possible that every role that jaime has played in life has brought with it a plethora of desires and expectations as well as a plethora of fears? Is it possible that fears can produce overwhelming chaos and that unmet expectations and desires can produce anger and frustration?

Persons (that is, those who have not fully realized all that they are not and who have not Realized That Which They Are) will try to experience a compartmentalized (and therefore dualistic) existence, such as the one you describe: OK alone vs. not OK at work; pleasant situations vs. unpleasant situations; spiritual vs. not spiritual; stable feelings vs. unstable feelings, ad infinitum.

Stability (and therefore peace) will not happen when a person is identified with, and attached to, anything that is “relative.” Only an existence marked by abidance as the Absolute can be stable and peaceful, as opposed to “chaotic” and “overwhelming.” Such abidance can only happen post-Full Realization. Either take all of the steps required for abidance as the Absolute to happen or know that your anger and frustration and chaos will continue with only the brief respites that you mentioned.

How brief will those respites be? If employed full time, over half of the hours in a week will be spent at work or in sleep (if sleep comes). If sleep is peaceful, it is a preview of what the waking hours could look like if Realized: you can be unaware of self; contentment can happen while not being attached to the happenings of “the world”; and peace can happen as you are unaffected by the surrounding chaos that continues on the planet while you remain "at rest." If abidance as the stable Absolute does not happen, then you will be driven to participate in the instability of the “relative run.”

THE “RELATIVE RUN” PROVIDES ONLY A TEMPORARY RESPITE, AT BEST
The non-Realized are always on the run: they run from the partner that they blame for their unhappiness; they run from a job that they blame for their unhappiness; they run to people and places and things that they think will make them happy. It could be that your job really is chaotic and overwhelming, relatively speaking.

It could also be that the influences of your personality type (possibly an Enneagram Type Four) make your current employment situation totally intolerable. Type Fours often feel fine in the solitude but miserable if in a crowd or a chaotic workplace. Running to another job might provide a temporary respite, but do you see how limited an existence becomes when external forces and/or personality determine what jaime can do and what jaime cannot do?

Are you beginning to see that jaime can either take the steps to be fully free or will be hostage to personality, to externals, and to relative influences? Are you seeing that one who is not free can never be at peace with any consistency? Do you also see that anyone who is not free is also co-dependent, always allowing people, places and things to determine how one feels and to determine whether one is “happy” at times but “frustrated,” “angry,” “chaotic,” and “overwhelmed” at other times?

There is much for jaime to understand if peace and stability are to replace all of those current traits of a relative existence. If being "spiritual" and "meditative" were the final solutions, that would have happened by now. In fact, "being spiritual" is only the third of seven steps to Full Realization. For now, that should be plenty to ponder. The discussion will continue tomorrow. Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
READINGS RELATED TO TODAY’S POST:
SEEKING “PEACE OF MIND”?

Click THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS “PEACE OF MIND” (There Is Only Peace If You’re Out of Your Mind)

WORKING ON BEING FREE OF PERSONALITY?

Click LIBERATION

READY TO TAKE THE SEVEN-STEP “JOURNEY” TO REALITY?

Click FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE (A Seven-Step Journey to Reality)

THE INSTABILITY OF DUALITY, Part Two

F.: The irony is that persons desire permanency but cling to the impermanent and fleeting and transitory while believing that those can have some permanence. They attach to their bodies, attach to their roles, and attach to the distorted ideas and beliefs which become known as their “minds.” While fearing impermanence and desiring continuity, they cling to things relative that are always in flux while having no clue at all about what is real and permanent and unchanging and eternal.

Anything involving the relative will be in a state of flux, while what persons desire is permanence. Most roles being played and cherished by persons will end during the manifestation. If an end to their roles is not forced upon persons during the manifestation, the roles will certainly end when the consciousness unmanifests (thus solving such Christian dilemmas as, "Which of my multiple spouses will I spend eternity with?")

A man in a recent satsanga session mentioned his fear that his wife was going to leave him. The wife of a different man e-mailed a few days later to express her fear that she might go to the grave without getting rid of her husband. One person fears a partner will go and thereby end one of his false identities; another person fears that a partner will stay and that she will have to continue playing the role of "The Wife." Either way, both are suffering the instability that always accompanies the duality of role-playing. Such is the case when placing some identifier after the words "I am" rather than being fixed in the I Amness only.

If true stability is being sought, however, then the seeker must move even beyond rejoicing in the beingness. Know the beingness, of course, but in order to end all duality and instability, you must allow all ego-states and identities to vanish and must abide in the Isness for a period. Then, you must transcend even that, must merge into the Absolute, and must then abide as the Absolute for the remainder of the manifestation.

Next, see that persons, even though they take themselves to be the roles they play, are no different from the Realized. Persons only think they are something different from what the Realized know They Truly Are. Only one of two scenarios can occur: either (1) consciousness manifested, became obstructed by concepts, and has not been unobscured (as with persons); or (2) consciousness manifested, became obscured, and has been unobscured (as with the Realized).

Post-manifestation, the exact same providence awaits those who take themselves to be persons as well as those who know What They Really Are: the untimate fate of all manifested consciousness is that it will unmanifest and be re-absorbed into the pool of universal energy. The only difference, then, is that (a) the manifestation can happen with stability or (b) the manifestation will be marked with instability or with fluctuations between happiness and unhappiness, or even with chaos.

The guaranteed cycling of conscious-energy means that those who believe themselves to be persons will eventually be free of all concerns (but only post-manifestation), just as is the case with the Realized (but also during the manifestation). When the consciousness unmanifests and merges into that vast pool of energy called “The Absolute,” it will know nothing, no matter what happened or did not happen during the manifestation.

At that point, it will be irrelevant if that speck of consciousness when manifested knew Itself or if it mistook itself for the roles that the obstructed consciousness leads persons to think they are. The only difference happens NOW: persons suffer instability and/or emotional intoxication and/or fear while the Realized do not, but after the consciousness is no longer manifested, the result is the same: consciousness will be unmanifested and unknowing.

If you complete the entire seven-step "journey" as outlined in FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE, you’re going to see exactly, step-by-step, how you got from the Absolute state to the false belief that you’re a body. And you’re going to see how to get from believing that you are a body to Realization of the Absolute. And seeing that complete cycle, then you’re going to understand all the cycles (including how the "cycling in" happens and how the "cycling out" happens).

You will understand each step of the "way in," all the way from the Absolute to body identification; then you will understand why the way to Realizing (and abiding as) the Absolute happens only when each of those steps is taken again, in reverse order.

As “His Majesty the Baby” illustrated yesterday, only from the conditioned mind of an assumed “self” can self-importance come. When the last “who” disappears, the understanding of THAT appears. The question is not, “Who am I?” The question is, "What am I?”

If it's instability and/or altering states of happiness and unhappiness and/or emotional intoxication and/or constantly having to process change that you find unacceptable, then know that You Are the Absolute. Know that You Are fixed, immutable, ineradicable, constant, and invariable. All that you perceive as being variable is misperception, merely fiction imagined via your “variable mind.”

I Am prior to beingness, prior to consciousness, and even prior to non-beingness. I have passed eternity being That, but for now I just happen to be in movement with other waves and particles of energy during this present temporary cycling into manifestation. This “floyd” is nothing more than the result a cosmic accident, an accident that was facilitated along the way by an act of friction that set into motion a series of happening that allowed conscious-energy to manifest temporarily. Among those who realize that, wherefore “pride”? Wherefore "happiness vs. unhappiness"? Wherefore the instability of getting caught up in the fiction and nonsense of relative doings and happenings? Please enter the silence of contemplation.
TIRED OF THE “MIND” THAT CHURNS OUT THOUGHT AFTER THOUGHT AFTER THOUGHT, INTERRUPTING YOUR DAYS AND PREVENTING SLEEP AT NIGHT? TIRED OF BEING DRIVEN SUBCONSCIOUSLY BY THE PERSONALITY? THE 15% OFF SALE ITEM FOR THIS WEEK IS THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS “PEACE OF MIND” (There Is Only Peace if You’re Out of Your Mind)
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HERE ARE THE SEVEN-STEPS OF THE DIRECT PATH METHOD TO REALIZATION

Click FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE (A Seven-Step Journey to Reality)

DE-ACCUMULATION…IN EVERY WAY

FROM A SITE VISITOR: So I read and re-read these words during the silence of contemplation that you always ask us to enter…“Do you grasp fully the functioning of the totality? Do you understand completely what cycles, how it cycles, what does not cycle, what remains forever, and what is only temporarily manifested?” Suddenly, it hit me. I have thought that I needed more and more knowledge to ever hope to understand “the functioning of the totality” but I see now that there really isn’t that much to grasp at all, is there? So this explains why you suggest getting rid of spiritual knowledge too, right? Also, does all other knowledge have to go as well? If so, how do I continue to understand the functioning? (PS. sorry for the length--just a lot being considered right now) Thanks, Robert

F. Hello, Robert. You've raised a wide range of issues, but each will be addressed in the response today.

First, yes, it’s all so simple, supposedly complicated only by the “mind” that is generated by the corrupting of the consciousness. To see that there is not much to grasp is to move further along the “path” and nearer to the Fifth Stage of “De-accumulation.”

NOTE: There are Seven Steps to Realization, and for some they are transitioned in short order while for others the process can take years. (Maharaj reported that it was a three-year process in his case…probably about the same in “mine.”) The transitioning of those seven steps should not be confused with “The Five Stages.” The first two stages provide a picture of the typical lives of persons. The last three stages provide a picture of those who turn to the road less traveled and ultimately realize.

Stage One: Twenty years of being programming to accumulate
Stage Two: Typically, twenty years of trying to accumulate
Stage Three: For most (up to 95% ?), the efforts to accumulate continue for the entire lifetime as most persons will never realize, but for the few who are awake enough to be aware of the emptiness of years of focusing on accumulation, Self-Inquiry begins
Stage Four: The Seven-Step Realization process mentioned above happens
Stage Five: De-accumulation follows

Seekers move through the fourth stage and towards the fifth stage when they truly grasp the simplicity of natural functioning. The relative is maddening to persons; as the Absolute, madness cannot happen since there is no “mind.” Similarly, “something” can always be maddening to persons; the Nothingness can have no effect at all…“good” or “bad.” The Nothingness is the essence of AS IF living after Stage Five de-accumulation.

If the fifth stage is reached, then de-accumulation happens in all ways. As with persons who are controlling and arrogant and delusional and deceptive, de-accumulation happens in all ways or not at all. None of those traits exhibited by persons can be compartmentalized. One cannot be controlling at work and not be controlling at home, in stores and in traffic; one cannot be arrogant with employees but not arrogant in other interactions; one cannot be reasonable and logical at some times and delusional at other times; however, dual-minded persons are unstable in all ways, so they can appear to be compromising, humble, reasonable and perceptive at those times when they are on stage in the Drama of the Lie and when deceiving themselves and others with their assumed images.

Four sure signs of Realization include the following: (1) stability happens and the mood swings associated with the emotional intoxication generated by personas ends; (2) the addiction to going and doing and zooming stops, so the love affair with chaos ends; (3) de-accumulating begins to happen in all ways; and (4) authenticity preempts phoniness. De-accumulation is not compartmentalized and applied selectively; instead, "less" becomes the new standard in every aspect of the relative existence, and it happens automatically and spontaneously. “Getting rid of” rather than “getting” starts to happen automatically, and it begins by getting rid of all of the ideas and concepts and beliefs and false identities that are at the core of self-deception, image-building, and image-maintenance.

That leads to your question of being rid of “all knowledge.” As you may have observed, the single largest body of “learned ignorance” takes the form of religious and spiritual knowledge. Relatedly, it has been asked, “What of chemical imbalances and fluctuating moods due to physical conditions? Shouldn’t even the Realized be knowledgeable of what is required in those areas?” Those aspects of the relative existence have been recognized and addressed on the site before. It has been noted that physical imbalances—beyond the mental and emotional, but linked to them—can certainly impact the relative existence.

For example, the food supply has been bastardized, affecting body performance and mood fluctuations. Humans face variables that did not exist 35,000 years ago when Realization alone generated peace. Most persons do not have even the slightest clue that three different body types exist and that each type can only thrive on the one-of-three food plans that is designed specifically for their type. (So much for “government-recommended diets that everyone should follow.”) Being aware of one’s body type and following the specific food plan for that type could be an example of “knowledge” that could have relative existence application, of course.

(When a “spiritual guide” demands that all protégés follow the one, specific food plan prescribed by the guide, two out of three who take that advice will be committing slow suicide by following such uninformed advice: the sympathetic and parasympathetic aspects of the nervous system will crash; the base/alkalinity balance will end; and those effects along with other under-functioning organs will manifest mental and emotional, as well as physical, ills.)

But note: Realization does not prevent being reasonable and behaving in a sane manner, so the Realized address those issues. Awareness in regards to factual, not imagined, body requirements happens, and it happens without identifying with the body or attaching to the body or giving undue attention to the body. The space in which the consciousness is manifested is given common sense consideration as it functions in an AS IF style of living. (The deer living in a totally natural fashion never becomes so “at peace” or “so aware” that it stops eating and starves itself or that it starts eating substances that are not a part of its natural food plan and that harm its body.)

As for “spiritual knowledge,” the de-accumulation of religious or spiritual knowledge (a.k.a., “learned ignorance”) happens during the Realization process, not at the “end-point” of the Realization “journey.” If the third of the seven steps to Realization happens, such “knowledge” falls away at the instant that the persona of “The Religious One” or “The Spiritual One” falls away. Technically, then, every step on “the path” involves de-accumulating, discarding the various concepts previously considered valuable or sacred by the corrupted consciousness, and behaving in a sane-like fashion rather than in an insane-like fashion, relatively speaking. Thanks for writing. Please enter the silence of contemplation.

THE RELATIVE NATURE OF “GOOD” AND “BAD”: What Makes you Think you Know?

Tom and Jim met in a nearby mall:

Tom: Hey Jim. Long time no see.
Jim: It's been a while, hasn't it?
Tom: Fall of 2002, I think, at the state championship game when Jim Junior played. Did he go on to play college ball?
Jim: Yeah. He got a full scholarship to the University of Texas.
Tom: Well that’s good.
Jim: No, that was bad because the pressure was too much for him…football…studies…9-11 trauma and the aftermath…and then he broke a leg in a game.
Tom: Awww, that’s too bad.
Jim: Actually, he thought it was good. The time required to heal gave him time to think about what he wanted to do with his life.
Tom: Well then, that was a good thing.
Jim: Well, we thought it was bad. He decided he wanted to join the military and fight for his country. He said that was his calling and wanted to make a career of the army. The leg healed perfectly and they took him.
Tom: Well, that’s a good thing…at least he found a direction for his life, and he followed his heart.
Jim: Well, my wife and I think it was a bad thing...they sent him home a month ago.

Tom: Well, that sounds like a good thing to me.

Jim: Not really. He was in a flag-draped coffin.
Tom: Oh my gosh, Jim! That’s horrible!

Persons are trapped in ignorance because of their dualistic perspectives and because of their supposed "need" to classify everything as "positive or negative," as "good or bad," as "black or white" with no possible chance of any gray areas existing at all. Religious persons have been heard for nearly fifty-five years, explaining exactly what will get me a reward and exactly what will get me punishment, though their criteria vary by denomination or sect; judgmental persons have been heard as they share what they are sure is moral and what they are sure is immoral; politicians have informed the nation that “this country” or “that country” was evil, only to start a war, end a war, and then become their trading partners and allies decades later; spiritual persons have assumed me over the last several decades that they could teach me some spiritual disciplines that—if practiced on a daily basis—will guarantee a good life.

Persons talk about “good weather” and complain about “bad weather”; about getting a “good job” but later about leaving that “bad job”; about finding “a good man” or “a good woman," only to leave after finding they had “married some kind of wicked devil”; about finding "a great lover" who would later be re-labeled as "a sex maniac" instead; about a man with "a good work ethic" who would later be re-classified as "a workaholic"; about a "really cool woman" who would later be labeled as "an emotionally-unavailable witch."

In an existence in which everything is relative, in which change is the only constant, and in which there are no absolutes, what (other than colossal egotism, self-satisfied arrogance, and total blindness) would make persons think they know—for a fact—exactly what is “good” and exactly what is “bad”? Please enter the silence of contemplation.

WHY MOST PERSONS WILL NEVER REALIZE, Part Three

FROM A SITE VISITOR: Dear Mr. Henderson, Re; your am post of this date.[8 Feb 2007] Can you speak about how to move beyond the fear of losing \"this\" to embracing \"That\". When I think about \"Why not Realize\". It is fear. Fear of losing parts of the little self that I have allowed to define me. Peace,Peace,Peace Virginia

F.: [Continued from yesterday]

DENIAL
When persons read the February 7th and 8th postings that describe the insanity that marks the relative existence of the non-Realized, most will deny that anything in those two postings applies to them. Even as validated research confirms that 95% of people in “developed nations” suffer depression to some degree and that most persons suffer from MPD/DID and that bi-polar disorders have reached an all-time high and that 95% or more are addicted to something, most persons will deny that they are depressed or that they have any really significant problems. The ego always reports to itself that “it is doing just fine” and then reports the same to any who would question that delusion.

Among persons, the case is usually that denial and distortion re-frame miserable experiences as “normal” or as “OK, really” or as "That's just the way it is." It is also usually the case than unbelievable pain—of the mental and emotional and physical varieties—must manifest before persons will take action. When people are asleep, they must be shaken to be awakened, and who that is sound asleep would want to be shaken or awakened? Even those who are having nightmares usually prefer that their nightmare-filled sleep continue as opposed to taking the seven steps that are required in order to be fully awakened.

GREED
Finally, persons are controlled by greed. At the root of that greed is, once again, the desires of false personas and the fear that there will never be enough or that they will not always have enough to sustain all the images that the non-Realized adopt. Whereas Realization is about not wanting and about de-accumulating, body-mind-personality identification is about wanting and accumulating. “Giving up” rather than “getting” is anathema in the planet’s cultures of accumulation. Simplification, therefore, is also scorned, so complications ensue. Trapped within those conditions, the corrupted consciousness will usually remain corrupted throughout its manifestation. (Relatedly, the question that triggered your question was, "Why not Realize?" That could as well be stated as, "Why not clean up the corrupted consciousness that you have become and be restored to the state of pure consciousness that You Were?" or "Why not get free of all the myth-based lies that you've been taught?" or "Why not take out the garbage rather than letting it stay inside and contaminate your home and infect your very being?")

If the consciousness were re-purified enough to understand that “this” is a mirage and that THAT is all that’s real, Full Realization would happen. That understanding happens only after seeing how many lies have been told to humanity for thousands of years. Yet most persons—driven by fear, desire, arrogance, denial and greed—will continue to take lies and myths and superstitions to be true. Furthermore, in cultures where fear, desire, arrogance, denial and greed are now taken to be “the norm,” little inspiration to be free of any of those will manifest.

Thus, most will never Realize because fear, desire, arrogance, denial, greed and chaos have become preferable among the persons of the planet; therefore, the results of Realization—namely, an awareness that there’s nothing to fear, that there are no real requirements that should trigger desires, that having less lightens the load, and that awareness of truth results in peace—have no appeal at all. Because persons have such low tolerance for self-awareness and for self-inventory that reveals their relative-existence liabilities, they automatically have no interest in self-awareness, in Self Awareness, in relative shortcomings and abnormalities, or in truth.

Therefore, most will remain trapped in their body-mind-personality identification. If one would hate to lose even one single finger, think how much more he/she would hate to give up the body. If one is proud of her/his learned ignorance and "mind," why would the person consider giving up the lie-filled mind as the path to peace? If a person is so proud of the roles being played, why would he/she even consider discarding those phony roles and stop playing all the phony games? Most never will, and so it is. But anyone reading this post certainly has the opportunity to begin the seven-step “journey” to Full Realization. Please enter the silence of contemplation.