The Nondual Diary: A Nature Mystic’s Path, Part III

I REMEMBER LISTENING TO A KEN WILBER SERIES several years ago, I think it was The One Two Three of God, which helpfully classified the three types of mystics: Nature, Theistic, and Nondual.  Reality can be discovered through any of those three channels: nature, a personal God, or Nondual awareness.  However, because both the “software” and the "hardware" being employed to discover Reality is different in each case, Reality will be seen somewhat differently in each case.  Each methodology, over which we have absolutely zero choice or control, employs a different set of filters. 

EVERY BODY-MIND IS USING FILTERS all the time.  They MUST: there’s way too much going on for a mind to be able to comprehend, classify, and deliver a story from.  It has to narrow things down.  And you can’t narrow any field without distorting it.  Closer to the truth, however, would be to say that every body-mind is in itself a different filter.  So, even within the same class of mystics, there will always be slight, or even large variations on the theme, so to speak.  There is only One Truth, but our seemingly individual filters will deliver a different view, a different translation, a slight different story of the One Truth, and thus will describe it differently.

I HAVE GONE THE LONG WAY AROUND to talk about Betsy, but here we are at last.  I have said elsewhere that Betsy was either born awake, or woke up early as a child; I can't know which, though I suspect the former.  As with so many things in spirituality, this statement is both true and not true.  Everyone on the planet is awake.  This is clearly seen from a state of conscious wakefulness.  The vast masses simply do not know they are awake.  The Sage does.  That’s the only difference, and even that difference is not entirely true.  Nonetheless, that seemingly small difference is absolutely enormous.  The shores of New York and Mumbai are less divided that the apparent division between someone who is consciously awake to Reality and someone who is apparently not.  (There is actually NO division anywhere.  Again and again, there is just One.)

BETSY AND I TALKED ABOUT THIS OVER DINNER these last two nights, because I didn’t want to just formulate a notion and then push it out onto her or my readers.  I had educated ideas, a certain intuition, and when presented with both, Betsy agreed with me.  Thus, what I say here is at least relatively true, at least in one case, and this article is actually about one case.  I can’t know whether it can be extrapolated to cover most or all nature mystics.  So far as I am aware, I know only the one, though I suspect a couple of others.  My guess is that it takes in a great range of people spread across the globe, especially in the so-called “less developed” countries.

I THINK IT’S FAIR TO SAY that a nature mystic’s path is clearly unchosen, while the theistic and Nondual mystics appear to have made a choice.  There is a big difference here, perhaps especially in Betsy’s case, but I think it very likely, that it would apply in most nature mystic’s cases.  Interesting enough, strangely enough, boldly enough, I’m going to have to introduce something that is not at all widely known, and rarely discussed.  But last night, entirely out of the blue, I heard none other than Francis Lucille, the French Advaitist extraordinaire, and heir, if you will, to Advaita Master Jean Klein's crown, confirm it.  

I HEREBY PRESENT A NEW CLASS of human awareness, someone who is neither asleep, nor consciously awake, which are the usual bookends of the game.  There is no actual term that I am familiar with; I don’t know that one exists.  So allow me to quickly invent one.  Let us say that a mystic such as Betsy is actively inhabited by Spirit without their knowledge. They don’t have conscious knowledge of what’s going on, primarily because they lack a dualistic reference point. 

THE VAST MAJORITY of both theistic and Nondual mystics have first been seekers, generally for years, as I was.  There are exceptions, but not many.  Active spiritual seekers read widely in the field, and listen to teachers, write teachers, and in some cases go to retreat or ashram, and virtually all climb a theoretical ladder toward a completely misunderstood enlightenment.  Everyone assumes it’s going to be personal and everyone is shocked when they find it is not.  Being told ahead of time that it is not will not make an iota of difference. Adyashanti says he has seen hundreds of people wake up, many of them who have been seekers for 30 or 40 years, and he has never yet had anyone tell him, "Well, okay, that was pretty much like I thought it would be."  It is nothing like anyone thinks it will be, trust me on that.

BUT SEEKERS DO HAVE A REFERENCE POINT.  They know what it’s like to NOT be enlightened. And they know what it’s like in the constrasting post-awakening environment. Thus they have a reference point, a point of comparison.  And they come to Truth with what I referred to earlier as simply “baggage”, but which I will now call “beneficial baggage”: they packed for the trip and arrive with both a spiritual background and spiritual vocabulary. Thus, the so-called newly awakened individual has, in accordance with the length and level of their mystical  "education", a broader topical context, which enriches their understanding and experience of what is now happening through them.

IN DIRECT CONTRAST TO THAT, for better than fifty years of her life, Betsy thought “This is simply the way things are and I am the only one in the world who feels like this, who experiences life in just this way.” She could sense that she was radically different, hence the longing for privacy, where she was not different, but rather where she could simply be as she was.  When she was by herself, she was both accepted and safe.  She had no notion that there was actually a global community of mystics of different types and apparent levels.  They might have differences, but their commonalities are greater than the sum of their differences.  I can read the writings of a thirteenth century Sufi poet, a Taoist from 2,500 years ago, or a Christian Desert Father from the first century, C.E., and perfectly understand and agree with the heart of what they're saying.  By the same token, the majority of the current global spiritual community, if they were authentic mystics, would be able to see and share and help Betsy expand what she was going through. Reach out or withdraw: mystics of all classes understand either path.

THE REALLY INTERESTING THING is that as my own awakening has deepened over the last five years, and now, finally, as it has more or less stabilized, Betsy has been sucked into the Nondual vortex encompassing this body, her husband.  By proxy, almost, she has found tools.  I am not attempting to take credit for anything here, I am attempting unbiased reportage.  But simply by living with someone going through an active seeking and then finding process, with me discussing (or in her mind--perhaps correctly-- lecturing on) the messages of different teachings and teachers throughout 6,000 years of spiritual history; through seeing and hearing my own teaching begin to develop; through the verbal and nonverbal transmission that is always occurring through all of us, she has found knowledge and vocabulary, and a community of at least two.   

THAT'S TWICE WHAT SHE HAD, and to Betsy it’s a lot.  For her, for now, and perhaps for forever, it is enough.  She can now see and understand what’s been happening to her all of her life, and these same tools have—this is vitally important—allowed her to share that experience; to talk and to listen.  Most importantly, at least from my viewpoint, they have greatly accelerated her enlightenment.  I know that can be sticky terminology.  Nonetheless, it is foolish to continue to try and avoid the word, for Enlightenment with a capital “E”—Reality as  Buddha saw it, as Jesus saw it, as Rumi, Dogen, Lao Tzu, and countless others, known and unknown throughout history, saw it—is precisely what we are talking about.

HER RAPID ACCELERATION IS WHY I finally was able to make the quantum mental leap from “Betsy is a wonderful and generous human,” to “Oh, now I see, Betsy is AWAKE!”  After all, she didn’t know.  And it was at about this same time, just a year or two ago, that Betsy began to know and say so as well, in our now-common language.  Just as the Buddha answered 2,550 years before her, when asked by followers what manner of man or god he was, Betsy, said simply, “I am awake.”  It is within this last year, for both of us, that the greatest changes have come about extraordinarily quickly.

WE ARE ON CONSCIOUS EQUAL FOOTING NOW.  We were always on equal footing of course, given that there is only One.  But experientially it felt differently than it does now.  These days, I bring something up, and she’s already seen it, or understands it with minimal clarification.  I often see that she’s gone before me.  And then, the next day, she’ll bring something up that I have already seen, or that I can expand upon; we notice that I have gone before her this time.  She catches up in an instant.  This is what I call the Beach Ball Effect.  We now pass the spiritual beach ball very often, given that this subject is talked about every day.  It is a constant source of wonder and a mighty tool of deeper seeing for both of us.  It is both the center and the circumference of our lives.

AH.  BETSY JUST BROUGHT ME A FLOWER, a white, fragrant, little bunch from our tea olives, which have suddenly burst into full bloom just this week.  She silently entered the study, appeared beside me, and laid them on my desk as I was writing, without comment.  With that image, I think this is a good place to break for the day.

To be continued…

The Nondual Diary: A Nature Mystic’s Path, Part II

AUTHENTIC SPIRITUAL AWAKENING is both a lot more and a lot less than most people think.  I insert the word “authentic”, because 99% of the people I hear talking about spiritual awakening are talking about a spiritual experience.  Spiritual experiences can be very beautiful, and can even be life changing, but it’s just not the same thing.  I say that in candor, without even a hint of dismissiveness, after having experienced both. 

LET ME QUICKLY STEP IN and say that there is a slight paradox here when I say that “I” have had spiritual awakening.  This is because the actual beholding in a spiritual awakening is that there is no separate “I” to have or not have an awakening.  It’s all illusion.  The personal ego, the body-we-think-we-are, does not wake up.  God does.  She beholds Herself.  She sees the cosmic joke She has played on Herself by pretending to be an individual so that she can experience Herself as form.  Elsewhere on this blog, there is a whole essay about what enlightenment is and is not, entitled, “What is enlightenment, anyway?” that explores this in greater detail.  There's an easy link to it in the box in the right-hand column titled, "Digging in the Archives".  For now let’s move on.

I INITIALLY WOKE UP in September of 2006.  And, unbelievably, I was unaware that Betsy was awake with me and before me until at least 2008.  I suspect it was even later than that.  My ignorance is now nothing short of embarrassing.  But it’s because she really had no words to describe her experience.  Everyone in the world could see she carried a light within her, but that can be quite different from being consciously awake. I think now, after many long talks in the night, that she has been in apparently fluctuating awakeness since she was a small child, possibly since birth.  I’ve heard one of my teachers, Adyashanti, discuss such things; I can’t really know.  Plainly said, Betsy had never been a spiritual seeker.  Why be a Seeker when you're already a Finder?

THE INSIDE JOKE HERE is that I have always been the one considered to be the family mystic.  Betsy didn’t read spiritual books.  I’ve read hundreds, on Buddhism, Taoism, different branches of Hinduism, a little on or by the Western, Christian mystics, even a bit of Sufism. When I was in jail I read the Christian Bible. Betsy, however, always reads popular history, biographies, and tons and tons of books on animals: cats, dogs, horses, birds or other beasts, it doesn't matter, so long as an animal was the star.  I’ve seen her cry over those books.  She glows like a light bulb when she finds an especially good one.

BETSY NEVER TOURED the boundaries of the Internet in search of Truth.  I did, for years.  I still do study there, and teach there as well, via this blog, and also live with my teacher, Scott Kiloby, in online video meetings with groups of ten to twenty people.  Betsy, however, is more likely to be found perusing The Huffington Post for what the stars wore to the Oscars.  Most spiritual teaching, including most of my own, gives her a headache.  She just doesn’t care for it.  Until she does.  At those uncommon times she’ll press me for answers and explanations, but once satisfied, she drops the subject like a bag of dirt.  She's done with it until once again, when a Blue Moon is shining, and she's not.

WE HAVE A BOOKCASE in our living room that also serves as sort of a pseudo-altar.  There’s a nice Buddha statue on top, a lot of books, an incense bowl, flowers, all the standard mystical fare.  All of that stuff is “mine”.  Betsy long talked about putting animal pictures or something on it, which drove me nuts.  Then someone gave us a pretty little plaque of a bird, probably a raven.  I hammered a small nail into the back of the bookcase and hung the plaque above the top row of books, giving it a place of significance.  And that was enough.  She loved it.  I never heard another word about adding pictures of animals to my “Eastern” altar.  Yesterday, in honor of this article, I went and placed a little round, black, Asian coin box, I guess you could call it, on the second shelf.  Inside I put a dime-sized fossil of some primitive sea being and a shark’s tooth, in honor of my wife.  It’s very much a Boo Radley type of thing, as in To Kill a Mockingbird.  Betsy loves that story, and especially that character.  I think she identifies with the shuttered Boo.

BETSY HAS BEEN A LONER all of her life.  Ours is the only long-term love affair she’s ever had.  She had a lot of boyfriends, but they came and went with the seasons.  She has a lifetime friend or two, but they tell stories of Betsy staying in her room as a child and as a teen, alone and reading.  Betsy sometimes tells the story of when she was a small child, and her dad built her a sandbox.  A number of neighborhood children came to play in it, so it got a bit crowded.  Betsy ended up outside of the sandbox playing in the dirt by herself.  I know of no story that nails Betsy’s love of privacy and seclusion any better than that one.

WHILE WE ARE ON HISTORY let me say that once Betsy and I found each other, we knew early on that this was it.  I originally passed her a note in a recovery meeting, written on the back of someone's business card,  that said, "Are you in some kind of a 'relationship thing'?  She wrote back, "Mostly with my job and my dogs..."  It was classic Betsy: all worker bee, and all animal lover.

I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I WROTE, because that note, written over ten years ago, is three feet from me right now in a black frame.  I collected memorabilia about places we went, photos of our animal friends, and other little treasures and put them in a frame. It started with the note, and it ends with a picture of us cutting our wedding cake in 2008. I can clearly remember telling Betsy back in 2001, when we got together, "Actually I'm kind of a magician, and I'm creating history in advance.  The only reason for me to save that first note, and all the other little things here, and put them in a frame, would be if we were going to stay together for a long, long time, and would then have this to look back on in loving nostalgia."  Such was my foolish and circuitous logic. But you'd have a hard time convincing me that it didn't work.

JUST BECAUSE A PERSON WAKES UP to Reality doesn’t mean they necessarily lose their self-centeredness right away.  A few do, but for most it takes much longer.  For me it’s a work in progress.  It was this lingering self-absorption, and Betsy’s lack of the standard seeker baggage—what we think of as “spiritual” knowledge and “spiritual” vocabulary—that kept me from seeing the obvious: That in some unknown measure, my wife came to be “enlightened” long before her husband did.  By the way, don’t misunderstand Betsy’s innocence for some lack of intelligence.  As an adult student, Betsy was Phi Beta Kappa at the University of South Carolina—while being drunk the whole time.  It’s a little unusual.  She’s been sober fourteen years now.  I’ve been tagging along for the last eleven.  This is a lot more fun.

MY OWN AWAKENESS FLUCTUATED for about four years, with the time spent consciously awake growing as the years passed.  Somewhere along the way I began to suspect that Betsy was genuinely, consciously awake.  I say “consciously”, because from the awakened state it is seen absolutely clearly that everyone and everything is “awake”.  Everything and everyone is seen to be One.  Simultaneously, it is seen that almost everyone is pretending to be asleep.  It’s a complex and wonderful game that God plays with Herself.  There is no such thing as “why”, when one is seeing from a state of Truth.  It just is.  But if any individual, including you or me or Betsy, thinks they are awake, they aren't.  Paradoxes abound in Truth.

AT ANY RATE, somewhere along the way, as my own awakeness stabilized, I began be puzzled by things Betsy said.  She was talking about things as they are seen from the awakened state.  She just dropped them in conversation, casually, not meaning to impress me, but just to illustrate her point of view. This business of a point of view is critical, because that’s really the theoretical dividing line between being awake and being asleep.  It’s not what is seen, but how it is seen.

  

I HAVE HAD A COUPLE of completely non-Eastern-exposed, blue-collar, good ole South Carolinian men wake up while talking to me.  I was as surprised as they were.  This just goes to prove that none of what typical spiritual seekers (like I was) do to wake up is actually required to wake up unless they think it is.  Then it’s absolutely required until it isn’t.  Once a person drops their beliefs, opinions and positions (which I call BOPs) for What Is, all is seen very clearly and can be expressed reasonably clearly without benefit of any previous spiritual context or vocabulary.  Mind you, all of that is mightily helpful, especially if you’re going to teach, but it’s not necessary.  Awakeness can function through any body anytime it wants to, it just generally doesn't choose to, because too much of that would spoil the game, and kill the delightful spice of the "spiritual journey".

THIS INNOCENT WAY, what might be said to be the most natural Way, was the Way that chose Betsy.

To be continued…

Housekeeping Notes:

Let me welcome Hong Kong and Thailand to the Awakening Clarity family.  They join 32 other countries that are already helping to awaken Clarity.

The Nondual Diary: A Nature Mystic's Path, Part I, in it's first 24 hours on the Internet has proved to be far and away the most popular piece I've ever posted.  Once again, I am witnessing Betsy's magnetism in action.  Who knew?

The Nondual Diary: A Nature Mystic’s Path, Part I

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY WIFE, Betsy.  She is a wholly remarkable human being and Awakeness is consciously alive in her.  You can see it.  You can feel it.  You can hear it when she speaks; people are mesmerized by her voice.  Animals recognize it.  Even plants recognize it.  God is here, moving from room to room in our home, in Hut World.  Wherever She goes things are made beautiful and are restored to Wholeness.  I love her more than I ever knew I could love.  Sometimes I feel that I’m going to burst; that it just can’t get dialed up any more, or I’ll explode.  And yet, come the next day, it is dialed up; it is more intense, more incredible.  Somehow I don't explode.  She says it is the same for her and I know that it is so. 

TRULY, WE ARE NOT-TWO.  She is my sweet yin, and I am her devoted yang.  She is all the colors of my experience, all the fragrance, all the softness.  She represents all the goodness in my life.

WE WENT TO SEE a new tax accountant today, a CPA.  We found out that we will shortly be facing some large accounting fees and some rather larger IRS payments.  The meeting lasted an hour and a half.  Both of our bodies went into overwhelm.  It was like getting a full body blow from a college linebacker while having your finger stuck in an electric socket.  All plans for the future were dramatically altered in those ninety minutes.  Things would go unbought for a long time to come; budgets would change, plans would crash; there would be lots and lots of paperwork ahead of us.  It was pretty awful.  

UNTIL IT WASN'T.

IN ANOTHER NINETY MINUTES we were sitting in a Mexican restaurant laughing about the whole thing.  My wife gets it.  She understands loving What Is, and that it is always about right now.  This, too; this too.  She sees the play in action.  She embraces it, all of it, but does not cling to it.  She knows that what looks like her body is but part of that play, and mine as well.  She and I both knew there’s nothing personal going on here.  It’s all happening spontaneously to the benefit of all concerned.  We don't have to know the why of things.  We both know the Who.  God is taking us down to the bone again.  Great.  We get to consciously wake up a little more amid the fury and whimsy of What Is.  We get to work out some more kinks.  It'll make us more useful; it always does. We are not in denial; we are fully engaged while being fully surrendered.

ALL IS WELL.  It always is.  Today is no exception.  There is no exception.

I MET BETSY IN A RECOVERY MEETING about eleven years ago.  Something about her drew me to her.  One night I heard her talk about her little life with her books and her dogs and her cat; about a bagel and a sofa and a Saturday afternoon nap.  I was toast from then on.  That was the life I wanted; that was the woman for me.  She had a special energy, a special aura, if you will.  She had something really deep and wonderful, and magnetically attractive.  And being ever the selfish agent, I wanted it, too. They'd told me to find someone who had something I wanted and then to latch onto them.  I did exactly that.

SHE HAD NO WORDS for what she had; none.  She had no idea how she got it.  She knew she had it, whatever the hell it was, but she couldn't define it and didn't care.  I didn’t know what it was either, not for a long time, but I could see it.  I knew it was there.  And slowly, story by story, touch by touch, and day by day, that Presence transformed me.  You cannot live that close to that sort of primal power and not get some transmission from it.  She rolled me in the rock tumbler month after month until she wore off my rougher edges and made me begin to shine, too.  She set me up for awakening.  From that awakening would come context and words.  All of my life I was always the man with the words.

SHE HAD BEEN A FINE WOODWORKER for much of her life, a real artist in natural pine, maple and cherry.  She was and is totally oriented to the natural world.  The first time I went to her home, her dogs were barking like crazy behind her when she came to the door.  I already knew I had to pass inspection.  If I was going to win Betsy, I first had to win those dogs.  I flung myself to the floor the moment she opened the door, completely open to fur and fang.  I won’t tell you I wasn’t scared.  They sounded like a pair of monsters.  As it turns out, they were Golden Retrievers, which are about the sweetest, gentlest dogs on the planet, but all I could hear was aggressive barking and all I could see were swirling masses of red, and the white of long canines.

THE DOGS LOVED THAT I WENT STRAIGHT TO THEM, and not their mother.  Betsy loved it, too.   Those the dogs licked me from one end to the other, and rolled with me on the floor, and I was in.  If truth be told, I think I won both dogs and woman in a single submissive roll to the floor.  I was their kind of guy.  Soon we were all family, along with Robin, the boy wonder, as fine and sure a cat as ever walked this earth.  When I was sick one night and day Robin crawled underneath the covers with me and stayed with me the whole time, curled right against my chest, sharing his warmth and the loving peace of his purring.  He was the nature mystic’s familiar and with her power he nursed me back to health.  None of those lads are with us any longer, but all are still very much alive, and still very much with us.  There is nowhere else for them to go.

BETSY SHOWED ME HOW TO LOVE.  I was coming off a thirty-five year drunk; it was something I desperately needed to learn.  I remember that first year.  I was so poor, and Betsy’s energy was so vibrant.  I lived on it.  I remember standing in my front yard one afternoon as she drove away.  I thought, “This is the kindest, most generous person I’ve ever met in my life.”  It is still just that way.  Hard times came my way in a few years, as will happen when you inherit a drunk's life.  I was arrested for things that took place in my drinking years.  I lived in terror of prison for 2 1/2 years.  Finally I ended up going to jail for twenty-three weekends in a row.  And every Monday I’d call Betsy as soon as I cleared the concertina wire, and our excitement was palpable.  We would soon be together again, curled up in the soft, dark magic of our bedroom, with animals all around us.  

PEOPLE WOULD FIND IT REMARKABLE that we were bursting with happiness every Monday.  Didn't you just get out of jail?  What on earth is up with you two?  Well, as Byron Katie says, "The best part about the past is that it's over."  We didn't need memory.  We had the Now and the Now was and is good.  Always.

BETSY WAS STRUCK SOBER.  There’s no other way to put it.  She didn’t do recovery in any conventional way, but she had and has the highest quality of sobriety of anyone I’ve ever known.  Everybody loves Betsy.  Especially me.  And Betsy was struck awake, too.  It just happened for her, unasked for, and even unknown afterwards.  She knew something had happened, but she didn’t know what.  Enter the man with the words.

To be continued...

The Nondual Diary: Letting the most important thing be the most important thing.

AS MANY OF YOU KNOW, for the last few weeks I’ve been doing online video meetings with my teacher, Scott Kiloby.  I’m a student/mentor, meaning that it’s very much his show, but I'm allowed to contribute if I behave.  I’m the sidekick who listens closely and then offers observations and suggestions.  The students seem to like it a lot, and it’s been great for me to interact live with classes of 10-20 people.  I’ve had the opportunity to look at spirituality through a teacher’s eyes.  That alone has been transformative.

THE FIRST THING I NOTICED was that most people don’t enter the spiritual quest in search of enlightenment.  Most enter it in order to improve their dreaming.  Now let me hasten to step in and say that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.  We’re really doing it because we’re called to do it.  We don’t make that decision.  But improved dreaming is most often the bait, as it were.  Illusion is quite tricky!  This trait coincides with what I’ve seen in private sessions, although I’m not broadly experienced in that either. I am the new kid on the block when it comes to spiritual teachers, but I am delighted to be here.  I’m very happy, because I know this is right where I’m supposed to be.

THE WAY I CHECK UP ON where I’m supposed to be is to notice where I am.  That’s right where I’m supposed to be.  Always.  I’m always doing what I need to be doing; I can’t do it wrong, be early or late, too fast or too slow, etcetera.  That’s the truth and it’s a comfort as well.  It takes all the pressure off.  It doesn't relieve me of responsibility, but it does take the pressure off.  It’s just the same for you, whether you see it, or believe it, or not.  Whatever you think is just fine, too.

BACK TO SPIRITUAL TEACHING.  Most questions arise from the dream state and are centered on it.  How can I use spirituality to enhance my financial position?  How can I use it to enhance my self-esteem?  Or my social standing? How can spirituality get me through this terrible ordeal?  How can I get God to notice me and/or do what I want Her to do?  Within these questions is the always implied, but unasked Plan B: Or how can I get it to help me not care about lousy story I’m living?  If I get enlightened, I won’t care about anything conventional anymore, will I?

THE ONLY QUESTION OF IMPORTANCE generally goes begging.  That question is: Who is asking these questions?  Find the answer to that and quickly all of these questions become moot.  You will still care about any ordeal you are going through.  The body is hooked up to move toward and be drawn by pleasant conditions, states, and sensations.  The biology of your body is going to do what it’s going to do.  All bodies have their own direction and their own intelligence.  And they have their own ignorance, too, for that matter.  All of us have blind patterns until we don’t.  (I’m not claiming to be a “don’t”.)  There is no crime in any of that.  You’re not the body anyway, so what do you really care?

I PROMISE YOU that this question of Who is asking these questions is the most important thing you can do.  Period.  If you want a greener planet, find out the answer about Who.  If you want animals to be treated better, find out the answer to this question.  If you want to end war, find out the answer to this question, and then stop going to war.  We’re all waiting for you to show us the way.  You start and we’ll follow; that’s the way it works.  It always starts with you.  If you want to be more comfortable in your own skin and with your own mind during any sort of financial situation or relationship issue, any sort of illness, any apparent tragedy, then find out the answer to this question.  This is the most important thing.  You are being asked to do it.  Answer the call.  Or not.  It’s always about your deepest intention.  I’m fine either way, because I'm in a no-lose situation. I'm dead already.

TURN AROUND.  Another one of my teachers and a Big Buddha, Adyashanti, says that in the time of Jesus that’s what repent meant: turn around.  His information on these things is usually impeccable.  I did enough Googling around that I found material to back that up.  I’ll take it as truth.  This repenting is what we need to do.  We need to turn around and look back at the looker.  Who is that is looking through your eyes right now?  Who is it that is reading these words.  The eye doesn’t think, it simply sends signals to the brain where they’re interpreted in a way that matches that brain’s belief system.  But what is it that’s actually receiving this skewed view of reality?  The brain is the coach, the eye is the driver, but who is it that’s riding in the coach?  Finding the identity of this mysterious rider is the most important thing.

IN SOME NONDUAL CIRCLES you will hear, “Well there’s nothing you can do, and no one who can do it.”  That is a philosophical position, it is not truth.  Even if the person who says it is an awake being it is not the truth.  It’s an excellent teaching tool to help a person do a chin up and raise their vision, but it is not the truth.  Nor is it true that you can do practices so that you’ll wake up next year, or ten years from now, or in the next life.  That’s another philosophical position.  The most dangerous, meaning the most delusional philosophical positions are the ones with some truth to them.  There is some truth in both of these things, but the truth is not there by itself.  It is holding hands with delusion.

IF YOU LOOK CLOSELY you’ll notice that those two positions are in direct opposition with each other.  Do you remember what we call that?  Duality.  Truth embraces both those positions and everything in between.  It can’t not.  Those are concepts and all concepts exist within the One.  There is simply no position that is true, because by definition every position is relative.  It is only true or false in relation to something else.  Reality is the spaciousness in which both of those positions are being presented.  Reality is always both/and.  In encompasses all of duality, meaning left, right, and every point in between.  We have a word for that, too.  We call in Nonduality.  We call it Not-two.

TURN AROUND.  Quit worrying about your hair and your dress and your job and what people think of you.  It’s never what you want.  Even if you get to a good spot, it’s going to change, and you’ll suffer over that.  Look for Who is doing the looking.  It’s the only thing that really matters.  It’s the most important thing.  Do that.  Even if you’re reading this and you’re only twenty years old, I’m telling you, that body is going to die.  Whether it was rich or poor when it died won’t matter.  Whether it was highly thought of, or completely despised won’t matter.  One of my book-teachers says that, “We are preening idiots in a mirrored coffin.”  We are worried about our hair and our weight while the clock is steadily ticking. Take advantage of this blessed confluence and find out Who is blessed.

TURN AROUND.  The simple fact that you have stumbled onto an essay like this proves unequivocally that you are on a downhill path falling toward awakening.  Let yourself fall.  Let go.  REALLY let go.  Make the most important thing the most important thing.  Die today.  Die now. Die before you die, the mystics tell us.  Once you have died you will taste freedom.  I really like it.  There is nothing better than This.

The Nondual Diary: Reality Rules

IN THE LAST DIARY ENTRY I mentioned that I might have to return to field work, meaning traveling about to acquire inventory for my online bookstore.  I haven’t done much of that in the last 18 months, and while I wasn't excited about the prospect, I was certainly surrendered to its necessity if it came down to doing it.  Let me re-state that surrendered position through the words of J. Krishnamurti. The light here, coming through this typist, is a steady candle, providing decent illumination for me, while slowly becoming more of a beacon for others.  In contrast to that, J. Krishnamurti was a vast, living forest fire.  His beacon lit up entire continents.

I STOLE THIS STORY FROM ECKHART TOLLE.  Krishnamurti had been teaching for about 40 years at the time it happened.  Some of his regular followers had been coming to every available meeting for many of those years; some for 20 or 30.  So on this day, when Krishnamurti said, “I’m going to tell you my secret.  Everyone wants to know my secret.  Do you know what my secret is?”  Everyone in the crowd leaned forward.  All noise ceased.  Time stood still.  Birds hung in mid-air, waiting.  And then Krishnamurti said, “I don’t mind what happens.”

THAT’S PRECISELY WHERE I WAS about returning to the field.  And it's pretty much where I am about everything else.  I don't mind what happens.  I typically have a preference, yes.  The body is hooked up to move toward pleasure; it always will be.  But my preferences are lightly held; I don't pay them much attention.  You can’t both be surrendered and remain keenly attached; it’s a one or the other situation.  In this case, as in all cases, I didn’t even know that my preference was right, which made it really easy to hold it lightly.  “Right” can only be seen in hindsight.  Whatever happens is what needs to happen.  How do we know?  It happened.  That’s all the checking I need to do.  It’s the only reference point I need to have. Any other view is outright insanity.  That may sound strong, but that's Truth.

THERE ACTUALLY IS NO SUCH THING as right or wrong, good or bad, up or down.  All of those things exist only in relation to each other.  They are dualistic, cannot stand independently, and are simply personal judgments.  Reality rules.  That’s all we need to know to be happy.  But we can’t just know this conceptually.  We have to “grok” it; we have to internalize it.  We have to own it.  Another way to put that, just to be a bit mysterious, is to say, quite accurately, that it has to internalize us.  (IT has to internalize the make believe "us".)

I CAN’T JUST MAKE A DECISION to be non-attached.  Well, I guess I can, because I can remember often thinking, “Gee, I see the wisdom in that.  I need to become unattached to things now.”  In the next moment something would arise that didn’t suit me, and I would rise up to bat it down.  So much for living in non-attachment.  And so much for making decisions, too.  I can try to do both, but I notice that I can’t successfully hold to either one.  Unless, by happenstance, I do.  Then I claim that absolutely-beyond-my-control happening as my own, and point to my strong self-control and strength of character.  I highlight, both in memory and in sharing, to the single time my behavior predictions held true—predictions being what “decisions” really are—and I meanwhile overlook the forty times I made such predictions that quickly fell by the wayside, ostensibly unnoticed, and certainly unmentioned.  We live in denial of the actual character of our lives; hanging to the myths, and shunning the truths.

AH, YES, RETURNING TO THE FIELD.  I travel out of town tomorrow to a book acquisition sale.  That means early to bed tonight and early rising in the morning.  Betsy and Gus will be away on a medical venture that morning, so I’ll only have the cats, Dickens and The Right Annoying Sir Henry Hackett, for wake up backup. I think I’d better set my iPhone as backup instead.  Those cats could sleep through riots and tornadoes.  Unless, of course, it was chow time.  Then they will become a riot and a tornado until they are fed.  I will attend an estate sale on Saturday, so again it will be early up and early out.  Okay, I’m in.  Reality rules.  My surrender had no effect on the outcome of the situation, but everything to do with how I’m viewing it.

I TOLD BETSY LAST NIGHT, “I’m going out there and find out what the Universe is trying to do for me, not to me.”  That’s the way it works.  What needs to happen happens.  Every time.  If I plant a seed in a flower pot and then water and feed it, it will grow into a healthy plant, or it won’t.  I can’t know which is supposed to happen until it does.  What I’m absolutely sure of is that my leaning down to the pot and trying to “talk it through its trials and tribulations would do the seed absolutely no good at all, and it would drive me crazy, because I’ll be invested in the outcome.  No, no, no.  No investment in outcome.  I can only be invested in outcome when I’m living in I Know Land.  I still visit that lace, but I don’t live there anymore.  I live in Don’t Know Land.  It’s so much freer and happier.  Ego is that thing that's "talking us through it"; the thing that's narrating events, and it's crippling.

SO, I’M BACK OFF TO THE FIELD, and I’m more curious than anything else.  What’s out there that I’m supposed to see, or find, or do?  There's something, you can be sure of that.  Something new is supposed to happen.  And it will.  It always does.  Everything changes constantly; might as well go with it than go crazy.  Even the mighty, Great Sphinx is getting worn down.  We think it's been here forever and is really lasting a long, long time, but it's only been around for the blink of a geologic eye, no more than a gnat on the surface of make believe Time.  It gets smaller and smaller every day, just like my ego.  Reality rules for the Great Sphinx and Reality rules for me.  Always.  And I'm surrendered to that.

A Very Short Course in Surrender

A Very Short Course in Surrender

I TALK ABOUT SURRENDER at every opportunity that Life affords me.   And as it so happens, Life has afforded me an awful lot of opportunity.  This body-mind has taken a lot of knocks.  Most of them started right here; they were initiated by me.  I never saw that, and for 47 years I resisted whatever was going on.  It would not be inaccurate to say that for 47 years I was simply a bundle of resistance, a constant impedance in the current of Life.  Now, for almost a dozen years, I've become more and more skilled in the art of surrender.  I had to learn another Way, or be driven crazy by story-mind.  I had to become schooled in softness and femininity, in the power of openness and receptivity in navigating the ever-shifting currents of Tao.

  

I ATTENDED RECOVERY MEETINGS for more than a decade, and for most of that I spoke almost entirely on surrender.  When I have heart-talks with people in private, the subject, no matter what it looks or sounds like to them, is always surrender.  I give public talks from time to time, and that usually consists of my talking about what it’s like now—living in surrender—as opposed to living in the resistance that was the first 47 years of my life.  Just as I was formerly resistance, one could say that I now am surrender.  Until I'm not.  Surrender is always about right now. 

PRETTY MUCH NO ONE EVER KNOWS what I’m talking about, even the ones who say they do.  People smile.  Some nod their heads like they’ve heard something wise with which they identify.   A few will wince or smirk, because they’re sick of it already, damn it.  I am like a crazy old uncle who tells the same off color story every Thanksgiving.  You really wish he’d keep it to himself, but he won’t; tradition allows him to say his peace, and no one wants to disrupt the holiday in an attempt to retrain a relative. Pass the potatoes and let’s move on.

MY BUSINESS DRIED UP over the past week like the gods on Mount Olympus cut off a faucet in spite.  Business was okay one day and dead the next.  And the next and the next and the next.  I’ve been selling books on the Internet for eight years.  I’ve been selling at least some high-line books for the last five, and that’s nearly all that I sell now.  By high-line, I mean books that sell for $50 and up, either technical or antiquarian.  I have some cheaper stuff in the house, but it’s the spendy stuff that earns me my living.  In eight years I have never seen a sharper drop.  Not during the financial crisis of '08, not in the recession that followed, not in the middle of the dog days of summer when all the students are chasing each other instead of grades. 

HUT WORLD, WHICH IS WHAT I CALL MY DAILY LIFE, exists only because of the peculiar way I am able to run my business.  I have the time to do what I do, because I don't need to sell a lot of books in a day to make a living, and I don't have to go out in pursuit of inventory.  I need only the Internet and my postman.  But Hut World, brought to you courtesy of my little book business--Henry Dickens & Co.--flies on the delicate wings of a butterfly.  Any stiff wind can blow it from existence into memory.  It is fragile and ephemeral, as are all such things of rarity and beauty. 

I WRITE LIKE IT'S MY HUT WORLD, but in truth it’s our Hut World.  It belongs to me, Betsy, Henry and Dickens (our spoiled cats), Gus (our equally spoiled Golden Retriever), and to a lesser extent the squirrels and birds that daily hustle me out of sunflowers seeds and fresh water.  Because I am home all day the quality of all of our lives is a good deal higher than it would be otherwise.  We know that for a fact, because I traveled three states for six years, and it’s only been the last two that’s seen me be able to wind that down.

I REALLY WILL tie this into surrender in a minute.

I DON'T MAKE A LOT OF MONEY.  I can't stand a no-income situation for very long.  I could make more money and have more financial security by working longer and harder.  I could go back to traveling three states.  I could give up the regular schedule, the gentle pattern that Betsy and I live by.  I could send the dog to Betsy’s folks when I went out of town, instead of tussling on the floor with his old body, and giving him a bit of biscuit every time he drags me outside and eliminates to my satisfaction, which just happens to be every time. 

I COULD PUT OUT A BOWL OF DRY FOOD for the cats instead of fussing over them with bits of canned treat and crunchy kibbles six times a day.  That's a pain sometimes, but I invented the game for us, and it’s a warm little pain.  Paying attention to the cats forces me out of my head and into the world in which my body lives.

THAT'S WHY I HAVE THE BIRD FEEDER, TOO. There’s a whole lot of difference between staring at a computer screen and gazing at the fabulous color and motion of a bird feeder, you know?  Only one of those things is real, and it's not this one.  Watching the days and seasons change via the feeder is a short, healthy break numerous times during the day.  I watch when I'm downstairs making tea and fixing lunch.  I watch when I'm tending the beasts who run me.  

IF I WENT ON THE ROAD, Hut World would suffer dramatically.  It’s not worth it, not by a long shot.  Unless it is.

WHEN BUSINESS DRIED UP, both Betsy and I were fine.  We actually stayed fine for the whole six days.  I mean, we could both see we weren’t selling any books, and we know that selling books is necessary to pay bills and everything, but there just wasn’t any sense of panic.  Ever.  We did discuss it, but more from a point of wonderment than anything else.  We said things like, “Weird, isn’t it?”  And, “I guess times are hard and we’re taking our lumps just like the rest of the world.  There’s certainly nothing special about us.”

WE DID NOT SUFFER. We did not tell ourselves stories about anything being wrong.  We certainly noticed that something was very different, but we never labeled it as wrong.  We didn’t think anything other than what was happening should be happening.  We were not in resistance to it.  There was not an internal movement within us that was contrary to the movement we found in the world our bodies were living in.  I am not going to say we were completely “loving What Is,” but I will go so far as to state that we were loving most of What Is most of the time, and were in acceptance of the rest.  I think that’s honest and accurate.

THAT'S WHAT SURRENDER IS.  It’s agreeing to go along with what’s already going on anyway.  It’s allowing everything to be as it is.  I notice that everything already is as it is anyway, so it would be insane to go to war with Reality.  I mean, who do you think is going to win that war?

SIMULTANEOUS TO THIS INTERNAL SURRENDER, after about three days of deadness, I did some serious repricing.  It didn't make a bit of difference.  So I began to make some mental shifts concerning travel.  I started looking for acquisition sales.  I began to mentally reorganize my old road gear and began going over what would need to be done.  If it did.  I began to make contingency plans.  I couldn’t see why anything fundamental had changed in the space of a few days, but I also knew that my banker really doesn’t care about any of that.  He just wants his money.  On time.  Fair enough. 

SO, INTERNALLY, I WAS SURRENDERED.  I was in alignment with the movement that was already happening.  But I hadn’t given up.  Do you see this absolutely key point?  Can you grab this?  I hadn’t thrown in the towel.  I hadn’t wrung my hands or thrown them in the air and said that apparently God’s will was for Henry Dickens to collapse, damn it, and there's nothing to be done and no one to do it and blah, blah, blah.  That’s not surrender, that’s bitter resignation.  That’s resisting while pretending to hold a white flag.  It's still that old same blame game. 

AUTHENTIC SURRENDER is Truth calmly holding a white flag up to Itself while the body does what it does.  Godness surrenders to God.  The appearance lays down to allow for the march of Reality.  That’s surrender.

THE DROUGHT BROKE TODAY. We sold some books and did a good day’s business.  If we have good business the next couple of days, I won’t travel.  If we don’t, I will.  I'll have to, unless I'm willing to face the consequences of not traveling, and I'm not prepared to do that.  But I’m surrendered either way.  Reality always knows best.