Everything As It Is

HUMAN BEINGS ARE ATTRACTED TO STILLNESS.  We are pulled toward spaciousness; we are drawn to silence.  We will travel great distances to find an external set of conditions that present these things.  Monument Valley in Arizona comes to mind as a sterling example of all three.  Of course there are many such places in mountain ranges around the world.  They are in deserts, oceans, islands, and deep, ancient forests.  They are in cathedrals, temples, monasteries, and mosques.  When we are in such places, if we look we will notice that there’s little or no resistance from within.  We breathe deeply; we close our eyes; we drop our complaining for a moment.  We are willing to just be.  And any time we are willing to just be, we notice that we are willing, or at the very least much more willing, to let everything else be just as it is.  Our external conditions have matched our natural, yet somehow hidden, internal condition.  We are stillness; we are spaciousness; we are silence itself.  In the absence of mental resistance, resting in our own stillness, our own silence, our own spaciousness, we can notice that everything somehow feels connected. 

IT FEELS CONNECTED, BECAUSE IT IS CONNECTED.  There is no such thing as unconnected; not for a star, or a galaxy, or a human, or a butterfly.  There can be a sense of being disconnected that arises in the mind of a human being, but that’s just a false reading of reality, because we are limiting our identity to that human being.  In truth, there is just one, and you are it.  The seeker is the sought.  You are always already perfectly complete, without anything else needing to happen.  What could you add to completeness?  You could add the process of seeking; you could add the hunger of wanting more, but really, there’s nothing addable, if you will.  Even the seeking and the hunger are a game you play with yourself, a hide-and-go-seek thing, like a dog chasing its own tail.  Conscious awareness of that Living Singularity, and the willingness of the previously dominant “character” in the play to remain essentially absent, thus allowing for presence to present itself, is what the entire field of Nonduality boils down to.  First we see the truth; then we gain some understanding of what it is we’re seeing, and finally we move toward living it.  That, at least, is the ideal.  Let’s sketch in a little basic background, just to make sure that we’re all on the same page.  It’s okay that you’ve heard it before.  Repetition is the mother of enlightenment.

EVERY APPARENTLY SEPARATE IDENTITY IS A WORK OF FICTION. There simply are no individuals, not in truth.  There are individual appearances; billions of humans, trillions of sentient beings, countless apparently insentient beings, just on planet Earth, just in this one dimension.  How many more galaxies and dimensions can there be?  As many as can be imagined by the mind of God.  Yet at heart, at core, there is just one; not “me and one”, but just one.  Please, take a moment, and really do this silly little exercise; we’ll refer back to it.  Hold up just a single finger and look at it.  That’s exactly how many things there are in the universe.  Get that image clear in your head.  If you look around, what do you see?  Objects.  Is that all?  Is it true?  What is in between the objects?  Space.  Without the space to accept and support the objects, where would the objects go?  How could they exist without their invisible background?  Look at the letters on this page.  What is in between the letters?  Space.  Without the space holding and breaking up the lines, we would have nothing but gibberish.  When there is talking, what is in between the words?  Silence.  Silence does not arise; it is constant and unchanging.  Noise arises from and then subsides into silence.  Without silence holding and breaking up the noise, you have nothing recognizable; nothing useful.  Watch any movement, whether it be of your hand, a car, a star, or a cat.  What holds that movement?  Stillness.  Without a background of stillness there cannot be movement, for without the ability for us to detect movement, there is no such thing. 

NOW, SUPPOSE FOR A MOMENT THAT THE SPACE is not dividing the objects, but rather that it is connecting them.  The space between the words is not dividing, but linking them.  The silence is not dividing the sounds, but organizing them through apparent division.  Hold up your finger again. See that space all around your finger?  Where does your finger stop and space begin?  Actually there is no hard line.  There is a mental hard line, but in the physical universe, science tells us there is no actual hard line.  Of what are molecules and atoms primarily composed?  Space.  Atoms look just like solar systems, do they not?  There’s no real boundary anywhere, including right there at the end of your hand.  Your finger and the space surrounding it, the space that is connecting it to everything else in the universe, are not-two, as the Zen masters say.  No boundaries, no barriers, no division anywhere.  Everything is, in reality, connected.  Everything is, in appearance, divided.  So what about reality and appearance themselves?  Where is the division between those two supposedly different things?  Can you find one?  Look at your finger again.  How many things are going on here?  Again from Zen we find a chant sung daily in monasteries around the world, the Heart Sutra.  It tells us, “Emptiness is form; form is emptiness.”  Not like, not similar to, but is the same.  One equals the other.  Without the “first” the “other” cannot be.  Reality is not other than samsara.  Truth is not other than maya.  Everything is no-thing, and no-thing is everything.

WE’VE LEFT OUT ONE SMALL THING IN THIS DECONSTRUCTION, which is the largest detail of all: we’ve left out you.  It’s the trickiest illusion to get past.  It stops most seekers cold.  We’ll just touch on it here.  Look around you.  Where, precisely, is the line, the demarcation, that divides what is is seeing from that which is seen?  Is there a sharp division somewhere?  Can you see one?  Could you mark it?  Could you point it out to someone if they came and asked you to show it to them?  You check for yourself, but I think the answer, which you can bear witness to with your very own eyes, right this minute, right where you are, is no.  There is an apparent “gap” between your finger and what’s seeing it.  What fills that so-called gap?  Ah.  We’re back to space, are we not?  We have the strong sense that we are these bodies exclusively, but that in itself is the dream.  That is the divine hypnosis.  If you back the “camera” up; if you place your “seeing lens” behind you, so that you include your own body as just another object, just another dream character, then you’re getting very close.  Peter Francis Dziuban, in his book, Consciousness Is All: Now Life Is Completely New, offers us one of the best and simplest pointers you’ll ever read.  It is—I’m paraphrasing him here—“You are not looking at Consciousness; you are looking from Consciousness.” 

MOVING FROM A DRY, ABSTRACT, INTELLECTUAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of this oneness, and into a living, present recognition of it is what is known as Self-realization.  Forget what you saw last week or last year, or how cool that moment was in meditation, or on retreat, or when you were talking to your teacher under the banyan tree.  Recognize yourself now. Seeing is being, so be reality now.  In the absence of that seeing and being, the door is left open for ego to operate and dominate, even though it’s not an actual entity.  Ego wouldn’t mind a little Self-realization, it thinks.  It might shine it up a bit, make it more special, and give it some advantage in the world.  Only it’ll never happen.  It can’t happen.  Ego will never recognize truth, because liberation is the living, present, recognition of the one-thing-going-on, which does not include a make-believe ego, which is just an ever-whimsically-changing set of mental objects. Individual “me’s” are seen to be stories, just a hazy collection of thoughts, memories, and opinions.   Will you have another lifetime?  Yes.  When?  As soon as you breathe again, and reinvent yourself.  The fiction of personal, or individuality, is reborn every time you draw and expel breath. 

THROUGH THE GRACE THAT IS NOT EXCLUSIVELY, but most often found to fall upon people who are doing some sort of spiritual practice, we can come to know what we are.  Well, usually we find out what we are not, followed by another movement sometime later that shows us what we actually are.  If you have had some seeing and now experience listlessness, or a sense of sliding despair, or flat nihilism, you have probably seen what you are not, but have yet to see what you are.  It’s a stage; you’re doing fine; keep on doing what you're doing.  From another way of describing the same essential movement, we often discover the emptiness of things, and then sometime later we discover the fullness.  It doesn’t have to work that way; there are no rules.  Reality can do anything it wants anytime it wants, because it’s the boss, and that is that.  A wise and beautiful quote from Eckhart Tolle is, “A sudden awakening doesn’t mean a sudden understanding.”  The individual ego (so to speak) tends to get full of itself immediately after seeing that it doesn’t exist.  Incredible, yes?  If you land there, remember this column, and try not to stay there.  Get a teacher; get some help.  Fast.  It is deadly to spiritual growth.  Adyashanti says of this entrenched position that it is the hardest one from which to pull an aspirant.

ONE OF THE RAMIFICATIONS OF REALLY penetrating the illusion of division is to see for yourself, beyond the shadow of a doubt that everything is going on in every moment just as it should.  It’s going on just as it must.  It’s all happening the only way that it can.  There is no should.  There is no should not.  All the world is clicking away—click, click, click—with the beauty and perfection of a finely crafted and tuned Swiss watch.  There are no mistakes, even when we don’t like what’s in front of us, or what’s happening to us. There is no room or reason for error.  There is just What Is.  “What isn’t” is the lie we choose to live in when we choose to resist What Is.  The reason we are drawn to stillness, spaciousness, and silence, is that they remind us of what we already know: all is well; all is well, just as it is.  It’s more difficult to see that when we’re working hard at our demanding jobs, when caught in traffic, or in an argument, or when we’re talking to the income tax man, but it is no less true.  We can more easily relax when we’re in a natural setting, because there’s simply less going on.  In our busy lives there is a lot going on, and we agree with almost none of it.  We resist and we complain; we argue and we fight; we push and we shove.  We attack anything that doesn’t meet our approval, which is damn near everything.  We are at constant war with the world, because we’re right and we know; you’re wrong and you don’t know.  A woman was arrested today for pepper spraying a crowd so that she could get to the head of a line at Wal-mart for discount Black Friday shopping of stuff no one needs to begin with.  What can be said about that?  Insanity reigns wherever sanity does not.  Insanity is the default position of our planet; not sanity.  When we know where we’re supposed to be, and where everyone else is supposed to be, and what should and shouldn’t be going on, and those opinions don’t match the facts on the ground, God is out of a job, and we're suffering so long as we're pulling Her duty.

IT MUST BE SEEN WITH THOROUGH PENETRATION that there simply is no “what isn’t” beyond our crazed imaginations.  Our minds are in an ongoing war with life, complete with commentator and enforcers, but this is literally insane.  To argue with something that already is, is attempting to turn back the clock so that we can rearrange the pieces to suit ourselves.  There is no turning back the clock.  There is just this: this moment, this oneness; there is only this right here, this right now.  Whatever is in front of us is perfect.  It’s showing us what we need to learn.  If we can’t see that, it’s because we’re coming from and are devoted to a personal center.  We’re coming from make believe and trying to implement our make believe with mental yoga, and we don’t care if the change we believe needs to take place for us to be happy is in the past, present, or future.  Who gives a damn?  It’s all in our heads anyway.  The physical world and what’s going on within it is fact.  It rolls on along, fact after fact, after fact; What Is, after What Is, after What Is.

WHEN WE RESIST, WE SUFFER. When we don’t, we don’t.  It really is our choice.  We can’t make it once and be done with it.  We have to make it over and over again, as each new situation arises, as the scene in front of us changes moment to moment.  Will we choose resistance or surrender to this?  Will we choose resistance or surrender to that?  Choose well.  The next choice will be fresh, but the momentum of either resistance or surrender accelerates with each new choice, and then we call it habit.  We call it outlook.  We call it “us”.  Go figure.

  

Housekeeping Notes:
First, please note that Awakening Clarity now has an official second page!  It's called, unsurprisingly, The Nondual Diary, and a link for it is located just under the Buddha statue and text that tops off the right-hand column.

Next, let me welcome Brazil to the growing list of countries visiting Awakening Clarity.   Forty-nine countries are now helping to awaken Clarity in conjunction with this blog. 

 

AC saw another surge in readership this past week, and I got a number of emails from you, which was very pleasant.  If you’d like to suggest a topic, please feel free to do so.  If it’s on one mind, it’s likely to be on many.  If I feel qualified to address it, I will.  Maybe one day I can get these columns to run a bit shorter? Until then, it is what it is.  As ever, thank you for your precious attention. 

In surrender,

Fred

On Passion, Intention, and Hitting the Mark Completely

1.

On Passion, Intention, and Hitting the Mark Completely

To hit the mark completely means you have no new nest in which to settle.
~ Dogen

NISARGADATTA SAID THAT THE ONE THING required to reach enlightenment is earnestness. It’s quoted a lot. It’s probably referred to so often because it’s a plain-as-day truth that is overwhelmingly ignored, and thus those wiser than we are feel compelled to remind us of it again and again. What Nisargadatta did not do was define either earnestness or enlightenment.  Let’s look at both.

 

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines “earnest” as:

1: a serious and intent mental state

2: a considerable or impressive degree or amount

The same source defines “enlightenment” as:

1: the act or means of enlightening; the state of being enlightened

2: a final blessed state marked by the absence of desire or suffering

SO, FOR THE MOMENT, let us agree to accept those definitions, even if it’s only for the purpose of beginning this essay with some sense of outside objectivity to guide us.  Having agreed, then we can go on to say that Nisargadatta appears to be telling us that in order to legitimately end suffering (barring some unaccountable, and therefore non-replicable miracle that defies the Law of Large Numbers), we must maintain a serious and intent mental state for a considerable length of time.  Apparently this is where the line at the enlightenment door drastically thins.  There are easily hundreds of thousands of seekers of all manner and stripe, in every conceivable geographic, political, spiritual and socio-economic position and damn few of them are finding stability within Nondual awareness.  While the combined numbers could probably fill quite a large room, the percentages are surely infinitesimal.  Granted, those who hold close to Nondual teachings for a while often get a glimpse or three.  They could go on having them off and on for a lifetime.  Most people never get off that merry-go-round.  “Now I’m riding the pony, and next I’m watching the ride pass before me."  Sadly enough, as Adyashanti says, “One of the hallmarks of truth is that any piece of it always feels like all of it.”  In this case, however, perception is not Reality.  Can you say enlightened ego?  God save us all.

WHAT ADYASHANTI DOESN’T SAY, at least not beyond his report of his own story of “pushing ever further”, is that if one holds to the integrity of the individual do-it-to-yourself task of maintaining a serious and intent mental state for a considerable length of time, meaning if one simply hangs on while exhibiting some small measure of humility, and dedication-to-task, then one can first come to distinguish between spiritual experiences and genuine awakening, and then come to distinguish the edge of truth from the center of truth.  We can never feel what’s to come, but we can begin to feel what has not come.  Once we quit trying to hold onto our preferred version of enlightenment, we can begin to open up, feel and find the actual Understanding.  And not before.

THE GOOD NEWS BEING OFFERED HERE—the gospel of apparent individualism—is that none of these dismal numbers need apply to you.  Any individual can agree to step down from specialness, and employ the Law of Large Numbers in reverse in regard to your own salvation.  Find out what everyone else is doing and don’t do that!  Stephen H. Wolinsky, a direct disciple of Nisargadatta’s, reports that early on the Sage asked him—I’m paraphrasing here—“Are you willing to stay the entire eight days, for the entire process?”  So, by the great Sage’s own word, the primary “transmission” at least could take place in just over a week.  From that point on, in was a matter of the seed working its way through earth and into air.  The problem arises when the seed thinks it’s already a tree.  It’s a common, predictable, understandable, ego-driven mistake that can best be avoided by our willingness to “remain open to outside teachings”, as Scott Kiloby has said.  If we want to stay out of trouble, we can't just reference the grandiose thoughts shooting around in our heads while believing we're referencing truth.

THE CANDY OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE is so sweet and bright that it’s blinding.  It’s just what the ego ordered.  Spiritual experiences are deliciously sensual.  The Understanding is not.  Spiritual experiences make the host body feel special.  The Understanding makes the host body feel ordinary.  Spiritual experiences are, by and large, incredibly enjoyable.  The Understanding just is what is.  That may or may not be pleasant.  Following its dissolution, the absence of spiritual experience hurts, creating the craving  for more, and the suffering of withdrawal.  There is no absence of the Understanding.  It’s always right now, or it’s not the Understanding.

IF WE LOOK AT NISARGADATTA’S WORK CLOSELY, we will see that he wasn't much on candy. His teaching falls under the heading of Nondual philosopher as much or more so than it does spiritual teacher.  He was as much of a spiritual adherent as he was a spiritual teacher, thus his daily devotions and bhajans.  He never saw a reason to give them up.His personal practices were a conventional Hindu way of expressing love and gratitude.  In his turn, he certainly allowed devotees to gather around him and offer gifts.  Why not?  To disallow personal devotion, or the devotion of others, is to arbitrarily divide reality up into what's okay and what's not.  We call that dualism.

BUT HOW DID NISARGADATTA ACTUALLY TEACH?  With logic, argument, and reason. He was often a difficult man, quick to anger and equally quick to drop it.   Nisargadatta loved to debate; he thoroughly enjoyed engaging with his audience.  He was above all, passionate: often loud, impatient, gesticulating wildly in the air.  In a manner much like Shri Atmananda Krishna Menon’s, he would employ questions, examples, and concepts that took the individual and the assembly to their highest levels of thought again, and again, and again.  With many tiny seeds planted he then waited for the watering of them, via the intuitive leap.  Krishna Menon called this method accessing Higher Reason, which he said is beyond the mind.  I'm not pretending to really comprehend Krishna Menon, but I visualize a sponge resting figuratively above the relative mind, and slowly soaking up esoteric lines of thought and ethereal concepts from the guru.  As it gets full, the knowledge seeps downward, so to speak, in much the way that water does.  The transfer is slow, subtle and almost entirely sub-conscious, therefore it occurs without noticeable resistance.  We might note that the open use of logic, argument and reason also helps to put coming to the Understanding more into our own hands, and less in those of some lofty and capricious God of our own invention.

THINKING IS A GOOD THING.  We are not trying to rid ourselves of thinking.  I notice we can’t anyway.  Granted, it’s good to be able to calm the mind, or at least to hold lightly the mind’s propensity to believe what it thinks, if we are going to be able to pay proper attention to inquiry, observation, reflection, or an organized teaching.  In the end, however, mind is the only tool we have to slip around and go beyond it.  As Ramesh Balsekar used to say, “We use the mind in the same way that we use one thorn to dig out another.  When the job is done we throw away both thorns.”  We don’t throw away thinking however; we simply let loose of the concepts that got us near home once we are home.

THE PRACTICE OF THINKING AND READING can’t directly cause enlightenment any more than meditation, chanting, drumming, japa, or any other practice could.  Nothing directly causes enlightenment.  It’s always already here; it can’t be caused.  It can only be noticed.  But practices of almost any sort can court and encourage awakening.  Helpful potential is always available when we are expressing earnestness in action.  And, perhaps even more importantly, thinking, reading, and frank, honest dialogue with a teacher can help one offer further invitation to whatever grace has already spontaneously arisen.  Only ego would want to get to “the end” of enlightenment.  What end?  (What enlightenment, for that matter, but that's another column.)  Only ego would see peace and freedom as a pair of goal posts to drive through so that we can spike the ball in the end zone.  That arrogant movement is utter nonsense.  Yet it’s quite common, and always leaves suffering—and enlightenment, in its wake. Again and again and again: Self-realization really is all about right now. 

ABIDANCE, ONE OF THE MOST MISUNDERSTOOD terms in modern spirituality.  At least as it is considered here, it is simply the ever-present recognition of Reality as it is.  It’s not volcanically mystical.  It’s not blissfully spiritual.  It is the calm, quiet, plain old, everyday conscious awareness of the extraordinary ever-present nature of reality which is underlying and supporting the altogether common and ordinary.  Thus, it it is seen that there is no "ordinary". So long as we remain open, there is endless room for further opening.  Abidance, like an initial true seeing, is not the end of the line.  It is the beginning of another.  Like snakes, we shed our skins so that we can continue to grow.  Enlightenment is a verb.  No, the Absolute doesn’t need broadening, or deepening, or growing. Yet let’s not forget that it’s still coming through a markedly limited being.  The relative presence or absence of filters and conditioning will still color the perceptions of the host.  It’s not about being perfection; it’s about seeing perfection as it already is--through the maze of apparent flaws that serve to construct all of Life, and all of humanity.  The Understanding is not about bailing out of, or off-loading of our humanness.  The true Middle Way is about being open to, and experiencing both the absolute and relative aspects of Oneness simultaneously.  It is entirely about inclusion, not exclusion.

IN CONTRAST TO THE “END OF ENLIGHTENMENT”, the end of seeking is a fine thing indeed!  One soon finds, however, that the end of seeking is also about right now.  Are we enlightened to this current movement, or are we still seeking something with it or beyond it?  Resistance is seeking.  It’s seeking an out, an alternative to what is right in front of us, whether it’s mental or actual; whether it’s past, present, or future.  The end of seeking for any period of time is like a cleansing shower for anyone who’s been caught up in the compulsive seeking cycle for any length of time.  Many people would be delighted to return to complete unconsciousness rather than be caught in the seeker cycle.  Lots do.  Some can’t.  For the “can’ts” it is discovered that the seeking process is not at all about the individual.  Somewhere along the way our path (far further back than most of us suspect) has been totally commandeered by an “outside force”.  We can’t go back and we can’t go forward, and it is rather like a self-reinforcing disease.  It is the complete, penetrative witnessing of this inherent helplessness that stems the collapse of the dream self—at least long enough for the crucial passing through the “Gateless Gate”.  Any attempt to then personally claim, or personally grasp that spontaneous happening is like Sleeping Beauty touching a thorn.  We are back soundly asleep in an instant.

THIS IS WHAT DOGEN MEANT by “no new nest”.  The natural movement of the still-present conditioning is to utilize any new information toward its own self-interest.  It’s not wrong or wicked; it’s hard-wired human nature.  It’s fine.  What isn’t fine, at least if we want to remain consciously nestless, is to believe what our minds are telling us.  Mind is a clever master, and the brain is a powerful tool that’s going to used either for us or against us.  It takes the combination of a lot of willingness and at least a little humility—which we might label as "earnestness"—if we are to maintain a serious and intent mental state for a considerable length of time, and thus remain nestless among opinions and positions, and thereby remain free from personal suffering. 

Housekeeping Notes:

Let me welcome Israel and Latvia to the growing list of countries visiting Awakening Clarity.   They join 46 other countries that are already helping to awaken Clarity.  We are growing like a weed; with a large leap in the number of visits-to-a-single-post recorded this week. Thank you for your kind attention, and thank your graciousness in passing this site on to others.  It’s this kind of feedback that lets me know how well I’m communicating This, as it is seen and experienced from here. I hope to see you next week! 

Warning: Smoking spirituality may be hazardous to your enlightenment.

NOW THAT I’VE GOT YOUR ATTENTION, I’ll be spending the rest of this column trying to write my way out of the hole I just dug with this post’s title and the accompanying photo.  Still, there’s nothing like a little heresy to stir the pot and get things going. Let's have at it.

WHAT I’M PRIMARILY GOING TO ADDRESS here are my own flaws, errors and sins, because they are the ones I know best, but least like to talk about.  Contrarily, yours always seem like fair game, and easy to poke a stick at.  Some of my failings are already obvious to the long term reader, but they’re just now becoming obvious to me. Such is the way of self-awareness.  In a similar vein, mystics often tell us that awakening can be very much a layered thing.  I peel off this layer of narcissism and self-involvement only to find that layer of narcissism and self-involvement.  The only thing I’m sure has truly “improved” here over the last five years is my willingness to be honest.  Yet let us be clear that willingness is not the same thing as ability.  It is just as easy for me to fool myself today as it ever was; the mistakes are simply occurring on a more subtle level.

WRITING A SPIRITUAL BLOG at almost any stage of development is very much like taking your clothes off in public with every post—often followed by setting yourself on fire.  To be willing to step out into the public square with ever-evolving views one has to be either a slave of truth or a complete idiot.  I would guess I'm a bit of both, with the slant moving up or down the scale dependent upon the quality and clarity of that session's essay. I'm not declaring it noble, but I am declaring that it takes a certain courage.  What is so difficult to build up, would, I guess, be much easier to tear down.  Fortunately I've apparently fallen in with a patient and tolerant group--you.  I thank you for that.

IN BARING THE SOUL AND THE MIND, the pain of either inception or reception can help make one a quick-study, so to speak, and it certainly can truncate the learning curve, but as with everything decent in life, it comes at a premium cost.  One is the effect it will have on ego.  It's going to get inflated, just as it can in the rest of life, only here it is faster and more intense, which can be a threat to the host's legitimate intention. On the other side of the coin, which duality always springs on us, it’s going to get deflated brusquely and hurtfully as well, which is not a particularly bad thing, but it can hardly be billed as pleasant.  Still, it's good to learn about the polarities that play out within not just the world, but within oneself.  

TWO OF THE OTHER PRICES are foregoing self-satisfaction and rest, which are really two ways of saying the same thing.  Great artists are often said to never finish a painting, but to at some point to simply abandon them.  So I have found it to be with spiritual growth.  The moment we become sure and self-satisfied is the moment we have allowed our diligence and core intention to come to rest.  The self-satisfaction may have some duration--indeed, in some cases it can and does last a lifetime--but the rest aspect of the equation is wholly illusory.  Nothing is static in the universe, and that includes spiritual growth.  If we think we are holding our own, we are really moving backward.  If we think “now I’ve got it” it’s a sure sign that we do not.  I wrote someone this morning that I admired her for picking up the heavy hammer and chisel of real spiritual work.  It's something of a rarity, I think.  Yet if we are going to really move forward we are eventually forced to abandon coddling the whims and pains of ego, and the notions of either preening in self-satisfaction, or avoiding the truth in our ugly mirrors have to be dropped.  We must abandon our notions of grandiose spiritual advancement the very moment they are noticed.  Option B, as always, is to suffer.  That wake-up bell, or wake-up hell, is always available to bring us back around.

IN MY OWN CASE, which I won't dwell on, but which provides a stark example, I’ve made no secret on AC of the fact that there was a long stretch in my life during which I was a petty criminal.   One doesn’t have to be classified as an exalted being in order to see such behavior is both selfish, and in my case, inexcusable.  I was a drunk for 30 years.  Once again, one doesn’t have to stand on a high hill in order to see that a life led in that manner is not a fit goal for any of us.  If you start out spiritual life standing in the head-high hole I was in when I began in earnest to attempt a climb upward and outward, then you can make a great deal of progress, and still not be a shining example of moral or spiritual fitness.  Another way of saying this is that there was a hell of a lot of onion to peel before I ever even got to these quite numerous and challenging more subtle planes.  And how do even I know that these are truly subtle?  

WHAT CAN ANY OF US TRULY KNOW?  Not much.  The more I think I know, the less I truly do; that's just how the equation works.  I could still be a coarse cob in the human basket and not even know it.  Such is the power of denial.  Such is the power of Maya.  It would be a blend of pure arrogance and ignorance to assume that now, at long last, my development is over, complete, finished, and now “I’ve finally got it, and got it all.”  It’s a baseless, childish, ignorant notion that once seen through, we should not further cultivate, or allow to lie long within us.  It is the killer of actual progress.  And to get back to theme of this post, I'm here suggesting that this sort of flawed logic is often the unseen and accidental result of too heavy a reliance on "outside forces" to stimulate our long-wished-for transcendent transformation.  Too often this is allowed to creep into the spiritual community as a whole, where it fosters an unhealthy reliance on "transmission" from a much lauded teacher, and on God's workload instead of our own.

WE HAVE FINALLY COME TO THE HEART OF IT.  All the while that I was still fundamentally unconscious, and acting either completely, or almost completely from blind, looping patterns (assuming, for the moment, that I am not still so occupied), I had begun to clothe and frame myself in the trappings of Eastern religion.  I was not fond of the term "religion", so I used "spirituality" but it's six of one and a half dozen of the other.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that.  Everyone decorates their home in some fashion; it’s natural to want to see expressions of our interests in our living environment.  In that same vein, most of us who are considered to be currently informed and informative have quite likely always been eager, perhaps even compulsive readers.  Okay.  Certainly it’s better to set our sights on good literature and good direction than on poor ones.  The books themselves are not a problem, but a fine habit.  It is my innate tendency to model that I have to be careful about.  I can look at my artifacts and my books and think I'm doing something because I have them, when I'm not.  Conversely I can think they are doing something for me when they're not.  From black, Zen-like clothes and Chinese slippers to shawls and and bangles and sandals, it's all just stuff. As stuff it is harmless. As modeling clay it is dangerous to our enlightenment.  It is at this point that we begin to smoke spirituality instead of practice it.  It's a suit, an image, a projection.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD--this is true--I lived in a dream world; a world parallel to reality, but not of reality.  I kept mostly to myself and constructed a vast world of fanciful illusion and cooperative "hallucination", as creative and precocious children are wont to do.  There was my world and there was the world.  I was aware of the world, but I didn’t seem to fit into it very well, it wasn’t nearly as entertaining or controllable as my world, and thus I didn’t have any great love for it.  In my world, where I was the king, the star, the sheriff and the boss, I fit just fine and everything went according to my plans, or it didn’t go at all.  Take that. I knew what was just right for me and just right for you and just what should and shouldn't happen and when.  There's nothing great to criticize there if it's occurring within a child.

YET WHEN I WAS AN ADDICT AND A DRUNKARD, I held up this same model of utterly ridiculous and fanciful construction, only of course I no longer had the freedom of aloneness, the protection of childhood, or the great buffer of social acceptance.  As an adult, no one was particularly keen on my world except for me: Mr. Got It All Figured Out, But Just Can't Seem To Function Very Well.  And now I had to function in the world in order to make a living, secure a mate, create and protect credit, afford drink and drugs, and advance along the society-approved lanes.  Or I could lie around my house all day, be the All Seeing King, and suffer. It was an exasperating time, because I felt that all that sort of mundane stuff was owed me, because I knew I was special, although I could never satisfactorily present why that might be so.  I didn’t confuse myself by consulting the facts.  What I ended up doing was resisting, fighting, and tearing down whatever fell into my path that wasn’t to my liking, which was damn near everything.  The common term for my life modality as a child is fantasy.  The term for that same essential modality as an adult is insanity.

FANTASY AND INSANITY ARE BOTH A MATTER OF DEGREE.  The great, great majority of our planet is living in either fantasy or insanity, or some mix of the two.  From the awakened point of view, the mystics tell us, everyone is thinking insanely, because they’re operating from what we could term a vacant point of view.  They are all in a dream and don't know it.  In general, the ones who are reasonably happy and well adjusted are living in fantasy, which is absolutely fine and acceptable. Enough of their world is going their way, and they are resigned to going along with the rest what's happening.  They understand the definitions and values of trade-off and negotiation.  This is the silent majority.  And there’s no reason to ever move from that position unless there’s one inside of you.  The ones who are generally unhappy and/or poorly adjusted despite their conditions, are living in insanity. This space is also absolutely fine and acceptable, but we couldn’t label it attractive.  Seekers arrive from both communities, but far more of us stem from the second category than from the first.  Life is not good.  It is not a fun dream.  We want out.  In Zen they call that predicament, “eating the red hot iron ball”.  You didn’t know what you were getting into, or why you ate it, or maybe even when you ate it, but you surely know now that you desperately want to be rid of it!  Enter the seeking community.  Nothing wrong with that either.  Yet.

IT IS MY OWN HABIT TO MODEL.  In fact, we can say that the human habit is to model; that’s why we’re so amazingly, perhaps too amazingly, successful as a species.  We note what works and copy it.  We note what fails, and avoid it.  This is a great way to learn how to build houses and bridges.  It is a fine way to discover that oysters are not some viscous poison, but a fine delicacy instead.  I would never in the world have ever eaten my first oyster on the half-shell had I not been properly prepped for it.  Modelling is an excellent methodology for almost anything worldly.  Monkey see, monkey do, monkey prosper.  But boy, can it ever be a lousy way to go through spirituality.  If we're using modeling as a spiritual strategy, what do we do?  We first find a model—a teacher, an author, a teaching, a path, a religion, a calling; whatever.  We don’t know shit from Shinola on our own, but we like what we see over there, because this person or that path or both are representative of a way that we feel we can adapt to aggrandize our egos.  That's not what we openly think, of course, but all too often it is what happens.  This is a way of using what is sometimes called, “the extraordinary ordinary” means of spiritual questing to attain “the extraordinary, special New Me” of Bohemian Station, or what have you.  We are cooked before we’ve even lit the stove.  Most of us will enter spirituality in this mode, and most of us will stay there.  For the authentic striver, at some point she or he will be forced to abandon that position if we are to aiming to not just (perhaps) get a glimpse of reality, and better decorate the dream and our egos, but to actually live it.

WHATEVER LEVEL OF CLARITY has arisen here, and I've no earthly idea what level that is, or even if it's worth your having, has done so despite all but my earliest modeling. All the rest of my modeling installed impediments.  I don't deserve any praise for my efforts.  I was looking for a better quality of dream just like nearly everyone else.  I was living the Bohemian lifestyle I'd always lived, only now I was an on-again-off-again vegetarian, and I recycled some of my plastics, so I thought I was doing something real.  I wasn't.  Had it not been for a crushing life blow that I wouldn’t wish on anyone anywhere, I probably could not have ever been pushed through the fence I’d built around myself and my idealized, cleanly contained and isolated brand of spirituality.  I got lucky, if you can call it that.  I can't, but I can certainly call it What Is, and I've learned enough to not fight that.  

THE SKELETON STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED is that my self-induced, sobered up, more mature and pleasant fantasy morphed literally overnight into exterior-induced insanity, the likes of which I'd never known.  The next thing you knew there was a real live hot iron ball in my gut.  Stuff happened.  But we just can't bet on that sort of thing happening.  Trust me, we can't even want it to, not like that.  We can end up with a new understanding after such an experience,  but they're neither predictable nor bankable, and those riveting results don't typically stick around long when it does.  This is my core issue with event-style spirituality. 

THE TRAP OF NONDUALISM as a definitively spiritual path is that it begins by setting up a future goal to acquire enlightenment for the personality at the center of the dream story, at some point in the future.  Thus right from go we are waiting for the enlightenment fairy to show up out of the ether and pop us on the head with whatever-it-is-that-enlightenment-is so that we can become a more fulfilled and special story character.  That will never happen; not in this lifetime, or a hundred others.  On the other end, once we’ve had even the tiniest bit of true seeing, we are suddenly all about graduation.  Like the Zen Ox Herding pictures point out, our prey has now been in our sights, so we're convinced we just need to adjust them once more, or better yet, have God do it for us, and then we'll get it right and get it now, and then we can move to the next phase, which is hanging out with movie stars and the Dalai Lama.  Or if we're more modest, we just want to get the "enlightenment thing" behind us so that we can get on to living our new lives of lovely, blissful, pain-free, problem-free, “enlightened” living.  This will never happen either.  So we are bookended into delusion, with personal achievement on one end and personal graduation on the other.  The chief problem here is that the mystics tell us there's nothing personal about enlightenment. So we are bookended by illusion that is sometimes unwittingly, but almost always actively promoted by the spiritual community, even when it is claimed otherwise.  We then we build a protective, comforting fence on everything in the middle, which we call a path.  It's a safe path, because it's coming from nowhere and headed to nowhere; nothing much is going to happen beyond the odd spiritual experience.  A spiritual experience and $3 will get you a coffee at Starbucks.  They are fun, but most often of little value.  Of course we want company within the fence of our safe path, so we invent and project exalted spiritual teachers to join us, and if we're not careful, and most of us are not, then we end up caught in the cult of personality.  Few mirror-image models of students-and-teachers avoid this.  Few of them even try.

IT IS A WONDER AND A MIRACLE that Self-realization ever occurs through any human.  That it does happen—and we are assured it does—is a testament to the Mystery's own infinite persistence.  The notion that it’s ever considered a closed, finite system by its victims is a testament to Mystery's odd sense of humor. 

I AM PROPOSING A NEW MODEL.  It is my hope that it is an unmodelable model.  In other words it is intuitive rather than instructive.  It is more effort-based and less reliant on cosmic magic.  First, we change out two words.  Let us throw “spirituality” back to the religions it came from.  We can still use the word, it's a nice word and I like it myself, but we must not believe what it has meant to us thus far.  The instant we believe that there really is something that is spiritual, that implies that there is something that is unspiritual, and the Nondual traditions tell us there is just One, so what is there to be either spiritual or unspiritual?  Oneness precludes either the existence or necessity of “other”.  So, out with spirituality as a belief system, and we’ll hang onto it only as a loose term indicating more of a lifestyle choice than anything else.

AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR THE TERM "spiritual path", which I again propose is primarily code for a particular (and attractive) lifestyle, I suggest instead that we use the word “philosophy”.  I know, it's not sexy.  Let's look at it anyway.  First of all, philosophy is "the love of knowledge".  That’s a great jumping off point for those who are genuinely looking for truth, and not a better crowd to drink white wine with.  Secondly, while some form of enlightenment could still be a loosely held and acknowledged goal, it need not be such a sought after object that the compulsive seeking of it precludes its attainment.  

THIRD, NO PHILOSOPHER WORTH THEIR SALT is waiting for the “enlightenment fairy” to show up and release them from bondage.  It's a do-it-to-yourself program until it's not.  We all know that philosophy means work on our part: dedicated study of the time-tested classics, not just the abridgement and modification of those classics that have been politely edited and spoon fed to us by…our teachers? Whatever happened to homework?  Philosophy means critical thinking and head-scratching; the trying on and relinquishment of ever higher realms and patterns of thought, living, and being.  Many of us avoided it in college for that very reason.  Fourth, no philosopher ever expects to “graduate” from philosophy.  The teacher-student model is entirely different.  They may change roles several times in a single conversation.  It is seen as an ever-broadening, ever-deepening experience of right now.  

WHO AM I RIGHT NOW?  How am I doing right now?  What am I really doing right now and how is it affecting others?  How am I getting along in the world?   Am I being unselfishly useful right now?  Is what I’m doing actually working for the benefit of, dare I say it—Oneness—and not self-ness and self-promotion?  Would I be willing to confess aloud my actions of the past month to a room full of my peers and teachers?  If not, why not?  Am I living truth, or am I spinning a personal lie?  What do I know that I don't want to know?  These are some of the fundamental questions philosophy answers, without the many dangerous and attractive tripwires that spirituality has unknowingly grown. I'm not saying This Is It, I'm saying, it might be worth taking a look at. It was for me.  Thank you.

Vote with your feet.  Hope to see you next week.

This blog will be updated next Sunday evening, November 20.

On karma and rebirth; continuums and DNA; and the one-shot, Wabi-sabi personality. (Part II)

SO, WE HAVE COVERED REBIRTH, which is happening in every moment, not at some time in the future.  We have taken a close look at the one-shot, Wabi-sabi body, which is here today, and gone forever at death. So where do karma, continuums, and DNA fit in?  Logic would tell us that if the personality is a one-shot deal, and rebirth is not about the personality re-becoming, then This Is It.  And that's the truth; indeed it is.  But it's not the whole truth.  We are back to paradox.

WHILE THERE IS NO SECOND CHANCE at life for this personality, there in nonetheless a continuum sitting in a chair within relative time, which is 10:00 EST, on November 9, 2011 (whatever THAT means) and in a relative location, called Columbia, South Carolina, USA, Planet Earth (whatever THAT means).  From whence did this continuum arise? And what is it?  I mean, why this body and not another?  This body has a lineage. We call it DNA.  My ancestors were quick to respond to danger and better than average at finding food, or I wouldn't be here.  My entire lineage, going back thousands and thousands of years, is chemically linked; bonded through time into right now, as if my ancestors were still alive and living in my house.  In a sense, they are, for surely I am them, and they are me.  Neither of us exists without the other. 

AND WHAT DO WE SENSE right away when we hear this kind of statement?  Duality.  This talk, so to speak, is all about the inner workings of the dream.  We're entertaining ourselves.  We seem to be getting some vital information that might spur us on toward enlightenment.  The former is true, but the latter is not; not directly, at least.  None of this has anything to do with the truth.  The value in it, assuming there is some, is that it does provide context, or background for truth.  Those who make light of spiritual context don't have much of it, I promise you that. A flower will bloom quicker with sun and water than it will under conditions of parched earth and darkness.  Very often we learn about Nonduality through using duality as the blackboard.  Actually there's no other way to do it.  But in this vein I mean we are consciously using examples, as in a classic teaching scenario.

BACK TO DNA.  Yes, on an absolute level there is just One.  Check.  But on a relative level, which we appear to live in and undeniably experience, there are degrees of relationship.  I am more kin to my parents than I am to yours.  Who's going to stand up and argue with that?  We put people into some prisons and let them out of others based solely on the mathematical truth of that statement.  Within the dream, DNA is as firm a statement of relationship as you get.  What I am saying here is that although the personality does not "return" (as if there was some other place for it go), the DNA does.  I don't know my science very well, and I'm not very tuned into either theology or myth, but I am very in tune with What Is, and somehow, DNA, which appears to disappear upon the death of the host, links itself like the rise and fall of an inchworm, into the dream world future through host after host after host. 

I'M CLEAR ON HOW TO MAKE A BABY.  This is quite beyond that.  This is a biological mechanism, not unlike a mechanism of physics; say for instance, gravity.  This mechanism uses bodies to accomplish its umbrella task, which is to keep the dream machine rolling and populated.  It is no more personal than a doughnut machine.  And we have about as much choice in what color and kind and flavor of doughnut we're going to become as a thrown rock does of defying gravity.  Whatever goes into the box is whatever went into the dough.  We can call that freshly arrived doughnut conditioning.  It has been conditioned and reconditioned since prehistory.  And what's the chief conditioner?  Our hero, karma.

WHAT REALLY ARRIVES HERE on Planet Earth, University Hospital, Maternity Ward 9,  Anywhere, USA, is a wrinkled, pink, probably squalling lump of conditioning.  Is it Mr. & Mrs. Jones' infant?  Hardly.  Mr. & Mrs. Jones are doughnuts, too.  The only thing in that chain that is real is the hole in the middle--the space.  The body is the new common carrier of its lineage.  It is the newest form taken by the karmic conditioning that is expressed through the vast math and untold science of DNA.

HERE I WILL SHARE A FANTASY OF MINE.  Please note that I am not passing this on as truth or even metaphor.  This is just a nonsensical story, something that has played across my mind's screen for a long time. I've never had the opportunity to express it before, so sadly enough, you are the luckless victim who it's going to be shared with whom it's going to be shared.  Think of near-death experiences, NDEs.  I've never had one, so I have no hard opinion on them one way or the other.  In the end I simply don't care much about them, because whatever they are, they are dream world manifestations, and thus of marginal interest to me.  I know they transform lives and all of that, which is wonderful, but where are the transformed lives taking place?  The dream.  So I'm just sharing this for fun.  Think about the shared elements of many NDE reports: we've all heard them.  A tunnel, a light, magnetic pull, and a sense of joy and freedom.  Does that about say it?  I mean, that's the classic thing, you know.

IN LIGHT OF THAT, I ASK YOU, how does an infant arrive on our planet?  Is it not via a tunnel?  You say cesarean sections.  That's delivery.  As I said, I am clear on how to make a baby, and if it doesn't involve a tunnel, I'll eat my keyboard.  Is there not light upon release from the cave, however it comes?  Is there not some "gravitational" pull of birth, of breath, of struggling to come to life?  Would there not be a sense of ecstatic freedom to pass from a space where you are bent low from a lifetime of layered conditioning into a fresh new space where at least to begin with there is no layered conditioning?  What was layered conditioning is built in now, and so for the moment at least, it's much lighter, because we aren't aware of it.  It'll show up, you can bet the ranch on that, but not for the first couple of years.  For those years there is bliss.  We know bliss, each and every one of us.  We know freedom.  We know peace.  It's all part of the early arrival package.  It's so powerful that it has an addictive quality to it.  And so we spend the rest of our lives trying to get it back.  Enter seeking. 

BUT AGAIN, IT'S JUST A STORY. I don't pass it off as anything more than a personal fairy tale that fell into my mind sometime ago.  My sense, however, is that as chock full of holes and utter bullshit as that scenario is, that there may nonetheless be some grain of truth to it--somewhere--even metaphorically.  Or not.  I don't know.  It tied in with the topic, so I present it for you to turn over in your mind as I have already done many times.  It is also the long way around the block to say, that however it happens, the channel that spirituality's fabled Witness is watching is changed upon the death of the old personality and flickers on again with the birth of the new.  That is what Nisargadatta said about suicide, should one go that route, rather than to ride out the indignities of a crushing terminal illness.  He didn't opt for it himself, but he didn't see anything particularly wrong with it.  I can't quote him directly, but he said something to the effect of, "Nothing really happens.  There's just a change of channel."  A one-shot, Wabi-sabi personality has mixed again into the emptiness that formed it.  A new, one-shot, Wabi-sabi personality has come out of that same emptiness.

SO, TO WRAP THIS UP, we could say that a sentient body is part of a mechanism to allow the hosting of a string of DNA, in the same way that the purpose of a cup is to host hot tea.  Arriving on the scene slightly altered by its last life adventure, it is the product of karma and the representative of the DNA/karmic continuum.  It starts life naked and anew, but the layered conditioning begins immediately.  With each bit (or byte!) of conditioning, a rebirth is fostered.  It may be conscious, it may be unconscious, but change is being registered, and rebirth happens.  We never enter the same river twice, and the being that enters the river is never the same either. Namaste.




This blog will be updated late Sunday night, and every Sunday night after that.

On karma and rebirth; continuums and DNA; and the one-shot, Wabi-sabi personality. (Part I)

YOU CAN’T IMAGINE HOW DAUNTING it is to see a title like the one above spill out onto the page in front of you, with the blank page expecting illuminating action to now take through these fingertips.  Thank God I don’t have to write this post; I’m pretty sure I can type it. Let me take a second to explain a little more about that phenomenon, so that hopefully there’s less confusion.  There isn’t any “automatic writing” going on here, as some call it; nothing at all like that.  I’m not “channeling” anybody or anything.  The chief reason for that, of course, is that “the-Fred-most-people-think-I-am” doesn’t live here any longer (in fact, he never did), and when I’m writing Awakening Clarity, or teaching Nonduality through some other venue, there is damn little Fredness present either.  Some, I grant you, but not much.  Thus the question becomes, "Who's here to channel what?"  Instead of I-think-I-am-this-unit, there is only I AM. 

SPIRIT IS ACTUALLY WRITING THIS through a body-mind that is consciously vacant of personal self, and thus fully available to Spirit for writing, or dancing, or howling at the moon.  And over there in your chair there is another vacant-of-personal-self body-mind reading it.  The only difference is that I know and see my emptiness clearly and consciously on a constant basis, and most of you don’t.  I know that from the emails I get.  I'm sure, however, that many of you have glimpses the truth, and some of you may very well be living it.  Let’s remember that there is just ONE, so there’s no suggestion here of upper or lower, ahead or behind, greater or lesser going on; nothing at all like that.  All of that is utter nonsense.  But it's helpful to know who or what awakeness is currently consciously coming through if we want to orient ourselves toward discovering that view for ourselves.  We could spend our lives blindly following strangers in the hope that they are awake.  Or we could do some investigation, then look right in front of our faces and get a big leg up--if we open our eyes and ears.  And in the end, many of us, perhaps most of us reading this, will see it in our mirrors.  Even if that experience seems to be brief, or on-again-off-again, it's not.  And it will leave an imprint on you that you can never shake.  I know; I tried to deny it at one point, and ended up failing.  That was right after bragging about it, which was equally ludicrous.  But that's all just part of the well worn path, and it's all good in the end.  You just can't unsee what you've really seen.

GRANTED, THE EMPTY BODY-MIND sitting here still answers to “Fred” when that name is called, and at dinner time it knows to put a spoon of soup into this mouth and not Betsy’s, or the dog's, or into a potted plant.  We call that sort of identification biology conditioning, and it's not only handy, but vital if we're going to stay on this planet long enough to discover its wonders. Conditioning is not at all a bad thing; it’s a wonderful thing.  We are not trying to get rid of it, we are just trying to see through it. .

WHEN I SAY “ME” AND “YOU”, “my chair” and “your chair”, I’m using what Scott Kiloby calls “conventional language” about “conventional life”.  I like those terms so much that I am going to boldly borrow them from his terrific Living Realization text.  I’m confident he won’t mind.  Another way to say the same thing is that I’m utilizing my conceptual thinking to reach your conceptual thinking.  There’s nothing wrong with conceptual thinking—it can’t even be avoided—and it’s the just-fine-norm of communication.  However, when I differentiate between “typist” and “writer”, I'm indicating that at such point I AM is consciously coming through the relative in order to share the path Home, and intentionally using the concept of a “split persona” in order to get its point across in the least confusing way possible.  I suggest just running with it.

IT’S A GOOD TIME TO REMEMBER that all of this is actually beyond words.  We’re running in circles here; me trying to catch you, and then you trying to catch me.  In my never ending quest to be as clear as possible, I probably just lost about forty readers in the first four paragraphs.  Ah well, let’s hope not, and plow on.  Certainly I didn't lose you.  And if you are wondering, as I often do, “When is he going to start on the TOPIC??” I can tell you that in this case I already have.  I think that lead provides an excellent set-up to the remainder of this article.

I TALKED ABOUT THIS SUBJECT this past week, and I told someone at the time, “I’m going to write a post on it."  Here it is.  Let’s begin by talking about, and linking rebirth, and the Wabi-sabi personality.  There’s a paradox here.  If you’re going to hang with spirituality, you might as well get used to dealing with paradox right now, if you haven’t already done so.  What that means in the beginning is that you’re not going to be able to understand what I’m saying some of the time.  You’ll probably sense that there’s truth in front of you, but why is it diametrically opposed to the truth that was in front of you just a second ago?  Because it’s beyond words.  I’m pointing here, not telling the truth.  I’m lying at my very highest level; this is stuff you’re just going to have to grok, and you can’t make yourself grok something.  It just has to happen, all in it's own time. 

ALL YOU ACTUALLY NEED IS exposure to the truth.  I know you think I’m talking to the unit sitting in front of its computer over there, but I’m not.  I’m talking to Myself, which I know is what’s really over there, and all the clothing and makeup and intellectual bullshit stories in the world cannot hide Me from Me. You already know the truth.  I'm just, as Adya says, "an alarm clock I threw into the dream ahead of me."  Many of you will press the snooze button, especially the ones who think they haven't or won't.  There's nothing wrong with pressing the snooze button if you know you've pressed it. There's no hurry here, unless there is.  I had someone in my living room this week who said, "I don't think I'm awake all the time."  That was music to my ears.  "I know you're not," I responded, "but the fact that you know you're not, and that you're willing to admit that is what's really important.  You're staying true to truth."  He said he'd just keep coming to see me as he's been doing for a long time, read AC religiously--no pun intended--the occasional book by someone else, and simply let it evolve.  I may have actually applauded.  He's come a long way in the year since I watched him "pop off" in my living room.

IN A SIMILAR VEIN, Betsy was talking to me this afternoon in perfect Nondual awareness, and I actually shouted, "Yes, yes!  That's it exactly!  You can't imagine how happy it makes me to hear you talking like this."  I can't even remember what we were talking about, and I don't care, but I know she had it down, and it was flowing out of her mouth like honey.  She, too, has simply let it evolve.  It might have been a little sneaky for her to marry me, but it is what it is!

THERE’S NO NEED TO REMEMBER ANY OF THIS.  I wouldn’t bother highlighting or taking notes, though you're welcome to do both if you want to.  However, you’ll never make intellectual sense out of it anyway until it’s suddenly absolutely obvious.  You can’t make it happen, and you can't make it re-happen, although you can certainly make it unhappen.  When Realization occurs, however, you’ll look at your saved notes and start laughing.  Until that happens, it’s better to expose, expose, expose but not try forcible entry.  Did you know that Something created the Big Bang and the whole Universe after that?  Did you also know that it wasn’t the tiny human unit that’s been trying to figure out enlightenment?  Loosen up.  You're not in charge here. Let IT do the penetration; you just be amenable to exposure.  Mind can never comprehend the thing in which mind occurs.

THE PERSON WHO BEGAN reading this post is not the same person who is reading this sentence.  Physical cells have died and others have come alive to replace them.  If the temperature has dropped and you’ve tugged at your sweater, or it’s risen and you’ve cut on a fan, or someone has entered or left the room, then your current conditioning circumstances have changed.  In most cases, attention will have wandered from the page and briefly lit on something else.  The person who’s attention came back to the page is not the same person who’s attention left it.  Thoughts are arising in your mind all the time.  You think they’re yours, but notice that you can’t stop them; not for long.  That’s because they aren’t yours.  They’re spontaneous arisings within a single field.  If they’re yours, make a decision not to think them.  Make a decision to think only happy thoughts.  Make a decision to not laugh when you see or hear something funny.  Each of those thoughts conditions the thing they occur in; the thing that’s claiming them as his or her own.

WHAT I HAVE JUST DESCRIBED IS REBIRTH.  There’s no need for you to wait to die to experience rebirth.  If that was the case, I wouldn’t be qualified to write this, because even though “I” feel like "I" have essentially died, this body has not, and I think in this case the body certainly rules.  You are rebirthing now, and now, and now, and now.  There is no constant personality in there any more than there’s a constant—or controllable mood.  Both respond to conditions and conditioning and change as a result of them, either through resistance or surrender.  But everything is in flux all the time, including us.  Especially us.  Flux takes place in time, which is the outstanding feature of the dream.  I notice that unless I’m in front of my mirror shaving I still feel exactly like I’m 25.  I have to wonder who in the hell is that old man is in my mirror?  How did he get in there?  When is he going to leave?  He got in there 59 years ago as an infant.  The body changed, though the inhabiting presence did not.  That’s why I feel 25, but look every bit of 59.  And he’ll get out of my mirror when he changes just a little more.  He’ll leave my mirror when he dies and it’s no longer “my” mirror.  It’ll belong to whoever buys it at the estate sale, and then they’ll get to watch their body age as well.

SO LET’S BE VERY, VERY CLEAR.  When you hear Eastern religions or New Age teachers or followers talking about reincarnation, I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.  In my experience, that’s all hooey.  The reason I say that is that reincarnation implies—indeed is the principal term of—the transfer of personality from one body and era to another body and era.  That’s impossible.  I’m not guessing here.  This is not an opinion.  I have seen the truth of reality for my very own self and it does not include reincarnation.  Many of you will see reality for your own selves as well, so you’re going to either catch me in a lie or receive confirmation that, “Doggone it, that Fred Davis was telling us the truth the whole time.”  I'm happy to take that public risk and wait.

REINCARNATION IS PART OF A SALES PITCH to keep you coming back to the guru, the ashram, the classroom, the retreats, whatever; until either your patience or your wallet runs dry.  I’m not saying this misinformation is always intentional—no one leads the blind so effectively as those who are blind themselves—but I am saying, from where I sit, it’s always hooey.  The personality—which remains intact over here as Fredness, and seemingly hanging out within this body, will remain until the apparent host dies, at which point it will disappear forever.  It doesn't die, because it was never born, at least not anywhere but within imagination.  It's all false-linkage, which we can talk about another time.  Personality is a one-shot deal.  It’s completely unique, passing through this place—whatever the hell this place is—and then it dies in the same way every unique snowflake dies: through the yin-yang of change that is indicative of all duality.  Snowflakes are first moist air.  Next they evolve into snow, and then, after short and seemingly rather pointless lives, they melt into water, becoming air again, or perhaps a dandelion or a tree; who can know?  What we can responsibly assume is that as snowflakes, they're history.  If those molecules became water moisture in the air again, and then snowflakes, then when they wet our heads again, it won't be the same snowflakes.  Every one of them is different; that's what unique means.  When this Fred unit dies, that’s the end of the Fred play; pull the curtains down; send the audience home; tack a “show closed” sign on my bathroom mirror. That's why I call my body, and every body, Wabi-sabi.  From Wikipedia:

Wabi-sabi represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete".  It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence, specifically impermanence; the other two being suffering (dukkha) and emptiness or absence of self-nature (sunyata).

THAT PRETTY WELL NAILS IT, does it not?

SO, YOU MAY BE WONDERING, is reincarnation possible within the dream? Given the Dreamer, anything is possible within the dream.  I am not an expert on unconscious dreaming; I'm just a lucid driver speeding around within it.  But we don’t come here to talk about enhancing or embracing the dream, so I'm not even going to speculate.  We come here to find out how to wake up to it.  THAT, I promise you, is absolutely available to everyone in the most democratic of fashions.  Namaste.

To be continued later this week…

Housekeeping Notes:

First, let me welcome Ecuador and Cyprus to the growing list of countries visiting Awakening Clarity.  They join 44 other countries that are already helping awaken Clarity.  A great many of these countries are showing up regularly, which is very gratifying.

The Nondual Diary: Unsubscribe Nation (Part II, Conclusion)

The Nondual Diary: Unsubscribe Nation (Part II, Conclusion)

THE LAST AC POST, as you undoubtedly noticed, was almost all background and set-up.  It brought our attention to attention itself.  It was to drive home the keen understanding that we have a finite amount of attention at our disposal, and that the “mystical math” that we’re going to need a great deal of it if we’re going to wake up in this life. Adyashanti tells his students, “You can’t run away from yourself forever; everyone wakes up in the end.  But I wouldn’t take any comfort from that.”  He’s telling us in his clear and kind way that yes, that ongoing continuum, which we can call DNA or karmic database, will someday wake up, but if the-you-you-think-you-are want to be there when it happens, the-you-you-think-you-are had better apply yourself in this life, and there’s no time like the present right now.  This may be the last day we have to get there.  We don’t know; none of us do.  We have no idea when this life will end; only that it will. 

IN THIS SECOND PART, I want to primarily share the mechanics of how I’m steadily unbuilding Unsubscribe Nation, which I have also deemed the new U.N.  I say unbuild, because I’m not adding anything anywhere.  I am stripping away.  I am deleting.  I am saying goodbye to some content, some ideas, some things and frankly, some people, too.

AS THE TITLE SUGGESTS, I have been busily unsubscribing from the torrent of email that used to make its way through to my inbox every day. When I woke up in the morning my inbox would be full of stuff calling for my attention.  After I worked my way through that, it would periodically get pounded throughout the day.  Granted, some of it was well-meaning and spiritually oriented.  Another category was the stuff that used to be well-meaning and spiritually oriented, but has now left the sacred and gone Bright World—meaning conventional, mundane, and even mercenary.  There’s no lack of it.  Some of it I subscribed to at some weak point in the past, and the karma of that poor decision has been flailing by inbox and my attention ever since.  But an awful lot of it is just crap from people I’ve come into contact with who want me to cough up yet more money for yet more causes, goods, or services.  You know, I have to tell you, if I buy something from a web-based company it does not mean I want to hear from them twice a week, or once a month.  It means that I found you the first time and if I want you, I’ll find you again.  We have this really neat, powerful, Internet tool called Google.  Perhaps you’ve not heard of it?  Why should I have to unsubscribe to something I never requested.  Isn’t that what spam is?  Subaru wants me to make my automobile the center of my life.  Before them, Ford did.  Please.  It’s a car, a tool; not the center of a fairytale.

WHY DIDN’T I UNSUBSCRIBE from those annoying flyer-type emails years earlier?  Habit.  Laziness.  Thinking I might hurt someone’s feelings.  And chiefly because it takes too much time, I said.  It was a lie.  It takes time once, and then I’m free.  That vital attention is freed up and available again for as long as I live.  It’s true that I have to scroll down and find the tiny little notice that tells me I can unsubscribe by clicking here, and then go through that process, but it’s better than the alternative, which is having my attention pricked here and here and here, like a giant balloon with multiple leaks.  That’s the subtle insanity of it.  None of these things blast my attention; they just nettle it, and nettle it, and nettle it. For sites where I need to recall that user name and password from 2001, if it’s easy to get I’ll opt out in standard fashion.   If it’s not, I set up a spam filter.  Immediately.  I’ve initiated more spam filters in the last two months than I have in the last ten years.  I put my attention there once—right now—and then, that attention span I’ve been wasting, or allowing someone else to waste, is back to being available for this difficult path of awakening or embodiment.  This is not a rant.  It’s simply a free man’s declaration of independence from Bright World, approval, and bullshit.  I’m going to be busy doing this or that in my life—that’s what life is—and I’m choosing this, writing Awakening Clarity; talking to seekers and students; trying to see through yet another belief of my own.  I have been on guard for a couple of months now, and my email is slimming down nicely to stuff I really want to see; things I want to read; people I want to keep up with.  The things that are coming in are coming in by my active choice, not by my passive default.

ON ANOTHER FRONT, let me happily announce that I’m pretty much out of the people pleasing business.  Caring what you think simply demands too much time and attention.  As soon as I get it you change your views anyway.  So why bother?  This doesn’t mean I’m out to annoy anybody; it means I’m out to live my life as I feel it should be lived.  Betsy and I’ve recently discovered to our utter amazement that we’re grown-ups now, and don’t have to check in with anybody else about what we do, or how we live, or even how we think.  Talk about empowering!  We do what we want to do, or what we feel we need to do, and thus we want to do it.  That doesn’t mean we don’t do anything others want us to do; we do such things all the time.  What it means is that when we do these things, we do them for our reasons, not theirs.  If I don’t see a reason for me to do something, I’m not budging, and you’re not going to budge me. 

WE ARE NEARLY OUT OF the approval-seeking-and-needing loop.  It’s an easy loop to get out of, once you get the hang of it.  First you notice that you don’t need anyone’s approval about how you live your life.  You were born free.  If die in bondage, you did it.  Don’t blame God and don’t blame the world.  You allowed it.  It’s what you wanted, or things wouldn’t have ended up that way. This doesn’t mean you now justify being a kidnapper or cat burglar.  We don’t succumb to caprice.  It means you go where your own heart leads you, not where you think your dead mother’s heart leads you; not where you imagine your brother, or sister, or teacher, or preacher has in mind for you.  It means you stand on your own two feet, not just spiritually, but conventionally as well.  As an aside on this, from the very first days of our relationship, for some crazy reason Betsy and I have always allowed each other to be just as we are; quirks and all.  We’ve found that the quirks can be the most interesting parts.  We don’t try to fix each other; we oblige each other.  If I fix her, I’ll ruin her.  A true Voice told me that in the first two months we were together.  She is an exception to a rule I lived by, that’s for sure.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENS as soon as you find out that you don’t need anyone else’s approval.  Guess what?  You stop seeking it.  It’s automatic.  Once the lie, the loop, has been thoroughly seen through, thoroughly penetrated behavior changes to match it.  It seems like it can’t be that simple, but in my experience it is.   Granted, it may take a while to completely drop a long-held pattern.  Take all the support you can get.  There are long and strong ones that still arise within me, but they don’t last, and they don’t hook me for long.  They are seen through quickly and willingly, and so the experiencing plays out on more of a vertical plane than a horizontal one.  Something happens, there is a reaction, truth makes itself available and is allowed in, and the reaction falls away into clarity, usually in the space of seconds.  And the whole dropping process is absolutely lovely as we see truth, and are willing live truth faster and faster.  We drop our fear of consequence and just plow through.  If we’re not living truth, we’re losing it; it’s just that simple.

ANOTHER SIDE OF THIS SAME SUBJECT is that I’ve given up some friends in the last few months.  They are all nice people.  I like some of them and love all of them.  But enough is enough.  I have found myself explaining what I do, talking about I do, dodging talking about what I do, trying to help them see what I do; all this simply because they’ve been right in front of me, and that’s always my cue that very likely I’m supposed to help them on their own spiritual journey, even if they’re blind to it.  But I’ve been reading Shri Atmananda Krishna Menon, who is terrific, and he makes clear mention of the fact that spilling out this teaching over and over to deaf ears, or trying to explain ourselves, or dodge truth so it doesn’t confuse someone, is ultimately both demeaning and disempowering and I’ve found that he is right.  How do I now know if I’m supposed to help you on your spiritual journey?  Because you’re right in front of me and you experience a certain resonance.  If you don’t that’s fine, I’m out of here.  That frees up my attention for someone who’s more likely to get it this time.  I can’t free the world.  I’m not even supposed to.  If you want to stay in the dream, I absolutely get it.  I even recommend it until I don’t, and that’s only when you can’t stay in it, because you can’t stand it any longer.  You can’t wake up until you can, and if you’re not deeply drawn, it just ain’t gonna happen unless you’re one of Grace Lottery winners we talked about in Part I.  In that case you don’t need my help anyway.

I HAVE ALSO DEEPLY LESSENED my connection to any organization that was very helpful to me at one time, but which I can no longer identify with.  They’re not wrong.  They are where they are, and they do what they do.  They’re pretty good at it.  I’m not wrong either; I am where I am and I do what I do.  But if I can’t tell the truth as I see it today, I’m out.  My view is also confusing to people who don’t need to be confused.  I’ve sat in meetings for years telling the truth.  No one understands it, and very few even want to try.  Fine, good for them, but I’m out. My prime example I’m talking about here is a recovery organization that I was a mover and shaker in for over a decade.  And now, suddenly, to my surprise, I’m just not.  It wasn’t planned, it just happened.  However, my planetary spiritual influence—simply meaning how many people I have the opportunity to offer my view to, has increased somewhere in between 40 and 50 times what it was just over three months ago, and has now reached into 44 countries.  That, my friends, is efficiency in action.  That’s all relative evolution is: a movement toward greater efficiency.  I can no longer stand around and sing the company song when the words just don’t mean anything to me any longer.  It’s not good for me, and it’s not good for them.  I need my attention too badly to throw it away on people who neither need it, nor want it.  So I’ve almost completely parted, only habit takes me back a couple of times a month, and they get to think what they want to think.  If I look closely, I’ll see they’re doing that anyway.  If the price of freedom for my time and attention is that someone else’s feelings get hurt, I think that’s a fine exchange.  I can’t make them feel badly anyway; I don’t have that power.  If they choose to tell themselves a personally hurtful story, I can no more influence that than I can their potential negative opinion of me.  The price of my freedom is always allowing you the freedom to have yours.  I’m not controlling me, and you’re not controlling you.  It’s all just happening.

I could write on this subject forever, but it would just be replaying the same basic notions in new fields.  Do that for yourself.  More of this is a do-it-to-yourself program than you think.  Take responsibility for your own attention.  Take a close look at what you’re spending it on.  Do you want to belong to Bright World?  Fine, have it and God bless.  Don’t bother hanging around here, though, because we’ll only annoy each other.  Do you want to wake up?  Have at it.  Notice all the places, even the nooks and crannies, where you’re squandering your attention; reclaim it email by email, belief by belief, person by person, and organization by organization.  Come join me in Unsubscribe Nation.  Come be a delegate to the new U. N.  Come be free.  I’m leaving the door open behind me.  Welcome.  Namaste.

December 8, 2011 Update:

 Just a quick update on Unsubscribe Nation.  There's a post in the archives by that name.  If you haven't read it, I recommend it, even if I am the theoretical writer of it.

Wow, is that practice ever effective!!  Maybe I'm the exception, but once I started paying attention to it, I found that I was receiving a TON of email that was unwanted and went unread, but not before it nabbed a few seconds of attention.  It took a long time to unwind that.  A little junk (not spam, per se, but junk-to-me) still comes in and I have to either unsubscribe it, or filter it, but almost all the email I get now is stuff I want to read.  It's great to have my online life back.

I also bought new phones with Caller ID.  I put it at two rings before it goes to the machine, so any disturbance is very short.  I don't answer it unless I want to, which is not much.  I have the ringer set low so that it doesn't rattle me, and the voice mail announcement set low as well.  I'd go after the junk mail, but that's a life decision that my sister-in-law has taken on, and I hear that it consumes much of her attention, which is the antithesis of what I am trying to accomplish.  She's coming at it from a conservationist angle, which I admire; it's simply not my objective at this moment.