MISTAKING INSANITY FOR NORMALCY, Part Five in This Series

From a site visitor: [Received 10 June 2007] Today you said history shows religion leads to separation and judging and even killing. That’s not true. For me, my religion leads to peace and power. I stay in conscious contact with Him with prayer all day, every day, and He empowers me and gives me guidance and peace so I can be happy for as long as by His grace I am allowed to live. I hope you can find your way to Him so that you can have peace in this life and joy forever. Signed, John (as in 3:16)--A Child and Agent of God

F.: Yesterday, it was shown how your religion is based in duality and that your own prophet said, “A dual-minded person is unstable in all ways.” Thus, the words of your own prophet guarantee that—trapped in the duality of your dogma—you will be guaranteed to be "unstable in all ways." You cannot compartmentalize the instability that results from your dualistic thinking and only be unstable on Sundays, for example. Next, persons who are unstable develop personality disorders and mental illnesses. Your words reveal that at least two of those illnesses have manifested in your case.

In order to be restored to sanity, you might first inquire into the ways in which professionals, such as psychologists and psychiatrists, treat those like you who are engaging in “auditory locutions with a being or beings from another world.” In the book SPIRITUAL SOBRIETY: Recovering What Religions Lost, Dr. Jeffrey A. Schaler is quoted as he discusses “psychosis,” a condition in which persons fail to differentiate between the symbolic (abstract) and the real (concrete). He said:

People are labeled psychotic when they refer to mental representations as if they were substantive and real. One example [involves taking] the 'voice of conscience' as the literal voice of another being, known as 'hearing voices.' The failure to differentiate between the symbolic and the real may be intentional (artistic license) or strategic (lying) or the result of a cognitive inability to differentiate between fantasy and reality.

The third case is likely yours, John, since supernatural thinking and supernatural living are based in fantasy and in magical thinking rather than being in touch with reality and living naturally. Schaler also discusses another illness that can generate belief in illusions:

Schizophrenia is said to be characterized by hallucinations, i.e., self-reported imaginings. Belief in God is a socially acceptable, self-reported imagining. Another example of self-reported imaginings, i.e., hallucinations, is the popular belief in the existence of angels. This belief is considered normal by mentally “healthy” people. Belief in the existence of aliens is considered abnormal and is a sign of mental illness. Yet, insofar as angels and aliens are both hallucinations (that is, self-reported imaginings), there is no difference between believing in angels and believing in aliens. When self-reported imaginings conflict with socially accepted norms of belief, speech, and behavior, the claims are considered psychotic. When self-reported imaginings are consistent with socially accepted norms of belief, speech, and behavior, the claims are considered normal.

Thus, that which is abnormal is now considered normal among the deluded masses, and that is the obstacle that seekers face when trying to break free of the bondage of enculturation and the nonsense circulated as truth via their culture's programming and conditioning. For more, visit http://floydhenderson.com/spiritualsobriety.htm

More revealing, might the truth be that your beliefs, your concepts, and your ideas are not really “yours” at all? You unquestioningly believed "them" when they told you that there is an unseen being that knows if you are sleeping and knows if you're awake and knows if you've been good or bad and who will bring your presents. You believed that tale with unswerving faith, and even after they admitted that they had lied to you about Santa, you now have unquestioning faith in their next tale about another unseen being that watches over you and knows if you've been good or bad and gives you the gifts of power and guidance when you're good.

The ease with which persons can be programmed to believe the most outlandish tales would be humorous if it were not for the fact that the end result is all of the insane-like behavior and misery and suffering and killing that mars the relative existence because of the sleepwalkers who are walking about the planet while doing things in their sleep, talking in their sleep, and spreading their tales in their sleep.

Might you be able to find which persona, which assumed identity that has resulted from the corrupted consciousness, generated the e-mail above? Might you be able to find why you think those guiding voices in your head are being spoken by a being from another world? Might you be able to understand how it is that you came to believe what you believe and why the above illnesses have manifested?

If you find what you were before conception and where you were in the weeks prior to conception, you will find that “you” were not born at all. And if you find that you were not born, you might give up the notion that you are “born again” (even as those adhering to the teachings of other religions can give up the notion that they will be born again and again and again). You’ll also understand that, if you were not born, you cannot die, even as you understand that there will be no continuity for the body or “mind” or personality.

Since you are not in touch with reality, you will likely give no consideration to being in touch with reality. Like a six-year-old who has been told that he was lied to about Santa, you want to cling to your magical beliefs in the hope of continuing to get your "rewards" (such as "power" and "guidance," in your case.) Those who are more willing, however, can begin the “journey” to sanity, to being in touch with reality, to being able to differentiate the symbolic from the real, and to being able to distinguish reality from fantasy. That is what the Advaita Teachings can bring into being, after all. As far as your religiosity or holiness or spirituality, Maharaj dismissed all of that when he said:

"Whatever spiritual things you aspire to know are all happening in this objective world, in the illusion. All this is happening in the objective world. All is dishonesty. There is no truth in this fraud."

By the way, should you ever consider taking this “journey,” understand that it cannot begin by writing to this site to question the consciousness that speaks herein or by any acts of questioning “other” Advaitins or by seeking out people and trying to force your beliefs on them. The “journey” begins by questioning your self, by questioning what others taught you, by making an honest and impartial appraisal of all of your beliefs, your concepts, your ideas and your notions about who you are. And at the "journey's" end is freedom from all of "their" limiting beliefs and the ability to relax into the bliss of the nothingness...the bliss of zero concepts and zero false personas. Please enter into the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
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MISTAKING THE DAWN FOR THE NOON, Part One

From a site visitor: [Received yesterday] Today you said history shows religion leads to separation and judging and even killing. That’s not true. For me, my religion leads to peace and power. I stay in conscious contact with Him with prayer all day, every day, and He empowers me and gives me guidance and peace so I can be happy for as long as, BY HIS GRACE, I am allowed to live. I hope you can find your way to Him so that you can have peace in this life and joy forever. Signed, John (as in 3:16)--A Child and Agent of God

F.: Hello John. It is a wonderment that persons like you find a site such as this at all; however, it is no wonderment at all that when they do, they are driven by ego to submit a prescription for the “right” way that “others” should think and feel and behave (namely, the exact same way that you think and feel and behave). Evidently, you failed to relate to the content in the series on narcissism. It is also no wonderment that those programmed the way you have been programmed will assume that no one is happy or at peace if they do not believe what you believe. At the core of all dogma is the notion that “our way is The Way…the only way.”

You would have everyone add to their knowledge base those things that you believe, whereas Advaita invites you to discard all concepts and beliefs. There will never be an invitation from Realized teachers for you to think the way they think (because they do not think). There will never be an invitation for you to attain more religious or spiritual knowledge (for they have discarded all learned ignorance). You, on the other hand, have an “agenda of addition” rather than a plan for subtraction or de-accumulation.

At any rate, you did find the site, so your opinions and beliefs will be addressed since they provide an opportunity to share certain Advaitin pointers in response; however, your comments will addressed in light of a point offered by Dennis Waite in his most recent book: “Opinions and beliefs may be more dangerous than ignorance….”

[For more, visit: http://www.advaitaquotes.blogspot.com/]

First, a few remarks in general today before addressing later the specifics in your e-mail:

1. The religious and/or spiritual stage is one of the seven stages to Full Realization. There is no suggestion to skip that step, only an invitation to transition beyond a stage that most take to be the final step of the “journey” and that causes them to mistake the dawn for the noon.

2. You have ignored the historical record and claim that a pointer is “not true.” Look, then, at the current events that are resulting in separation and wholesale killing and see the prime identifier that the combatants have adopted and which inspires their conflict. Nowadays, combatants around the globe are not divided along national lines as much as along religious lines. As with all who are out of touch with Reality, the theory behind your beliefs does not match the actual practices.

The Advaitin Douwe Tiemersma—a member of the Philosophical Faculty at Erasmus University in Holland at the time—explained it this way in the 1980’s in his Foreword to the book I AM THAT:

There are various religions [that] suffer from certain inherent limitations. They couch into fine-sounding words their traditional beliefs and ideologies, theological or philosophical. Believers, however, discover the limited range of meaning and applicability of these words, sooner or later. They get disillusioned and tend to abandon the systems, in the same way as scientifc theories are abandoned, when they are called in question by too much contradictory empirical data.

3. Your own words support the link between religion and killing when you explain that you are alive by your god’s grace, the implication being that “he” is going to kill you someday, whenever “he” chooses. And most certainly “his” propensity for killing is well-documented in Jewish and Christian writings.

4. Now, to your hearing guidance from a god: the fact that an uncle was Chief Administrator of a state-run hospital for the clinically-insane afforded an opportunity to observe first-hand the effects of certain mental illnesses. Many of those suffering psychosis had lost the ability to differentiate the real from the symbolic, as you have. The schizophrenics often had hallucinations and self-reported imaginings, just as you report when discussing the guidance you claim to hear. You are less in "conscious contact" and more in "unconscious contact."

So, one result of the religious programming that you have been subjected to—and which you are now trying to subject others to—is faith-based psychosis and faith-based schizophrenia. Those mental illnesses will get you some Crusades; will get you some Inquisitions; will lead to decimating entire populations in order to establish religious nations; will lead to the gassing and incineration of the members of one religion by members of another; will get you 1,400 years of sectarian violence; and will inspire many among the faithful to strap on and detonate vests made of bombs. Again, variances in noble theories and actual practice are a “call to question” it all as a result of “too much contradictory empirical data.”

Yet your programmers accompany their promises of “peace and power” and their promise that “you” shall not perish with the perfect hook: if you question, you lose all that has been promised.

5. As for the two new ego-states that you have adopted (“Child of God” and “Agent of God”), remember in the verse you reference (3:16) that the best plan “he” could come up with involved killing “his son.”

6. If my 23-year-old daughter called me "all day, every day" for guidance, it would be clear that she is suffering a dependency disorder and has not realized that she has all of the provisions needed for completing her relative existence "journey" from a state of total freedom. Nisarga Yoga is about living naturally, not unnaturally or supernaturally. The deer calls on no one and does just fine.

Now, there is no assumption that any of that can change your “mind” (your warped consciousness) but there might be those who have reached the point mentioned by Douwe Tiemersma and who understand what it is to “suffer from certain inherent limitations” of their dogma; who have discovered “the limited range of meaning and applicability” of those teachings; who have become “disillusioned” and are ready “to abandon the systems”; and who are ready to “question” those teachings as a result of “too much contradictory empirical data.”

While fixated at the third of seven steps to Realization, the dawn is often mistaken for the noon. Persons think that they have arrived and haven’t a clue that they have not traveled even one-half of the “path” to Full Enlightenment and Complete Liberation. It was while trapped in two ego-states (a religious persona and a spiritual persona) that disillusionment finally allowed “floyd” to begin to question. The willingness to question led to a search for something beyond the distortions of programming and conditioning and enculturation, and it was then that the Advaita Teachings were found.

It was those teachings that led to the re-purification of the consciousness which, in turn, led to total freedom. This series will be offered for those who might be in that state of disillusionment, who might find the wherewithal to question, and who might find the notion of “total freedom” to be a saner option—relatively speaking—than the appeal of “total dependence.” Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
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