The Nondual Diary: Unsubscribe Nation (Part I)

Housekeeping Notes:

I began this blog at the end of July with the same number of readers every new blog starts out with: none.  It now appears that there is the better part of 200 of you dropping by regularly, and Awakening Clarity has reached into 44 countries.  That seems like something of a miracle and a milestone at the end-of-the-first-quarter mark.  I humbly thank you all for your participation in the ongoing process of truly awakening Clarity, and for your many encouraging emails. 

I particularly want to offer thanks and blessings to my wife, Betsy Hackett-Davis, for her undying love, loyalty, and support; to my dear teacher and now mentor, Scott Kiloby, without whom this blog wouldn’t be happening; to Vince Reese, who’s been steering toward truth for over a decade with me; and to Larry Coble, who’s been incredibly generous and supportive since the day he discovered Awakening Clarity, which, wouldn’t you know it, was the very first day.  Finally, special thanks to my friend and mentor Peter Francis Dziuban, who has made this journey so much easier and more pleasant.  Namaste, my friends, to one and all.


It is my plan to update this blog twice a week, instead of the three or more times that have heretofore been the custom.  I expect to post an essay late on Sunday night (EDT), so you may look for it on Monday morning.  The second piece will go out late Wednesday, thus you may expect it Thursday morning.

The Nondual Diary: Unsubscribe Nation

UNSUBSCRIBE NATION IS A SMALL PRINCIPALITY thus far.  It only has one formal inhabitant: me.  Perhaps this article will generate a few more citizens.  If you do decide to join, you can proudly identify yourself as an official delegate to the new U.N.  At the new U.N. you will find absolutely no structure, so with our low, low overhead we can offer you the great dues price of zero.  You get all the glamor and none of the crap.  And here, in our U.N. individual members only police themselves.  We allow everyone else to do what they do, because if we look closely we can see that they’re doing it anyway, without either our permission or direction.  Amazing.  World peace, along with the end of hunger, deprivation and abuse, all start at home.  As Byron Katie says, “The most attractive thing about the Buddha is that he saved himself first.”

FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS ESSAY, I’m going to differentiate between awareness and attention.  I am often not going to  bother with capitalization-for-the-sake-of-divinity, because more often than not I find it tedious, even when I’m the one using it.  So, attention, when I speak of it here, is in essence the tool of awareness.  On a spiritual level, pretending for the moment that there are such things as spiritual and non-spiritual levels, attention is the device by which awareness is able to investigate itself in great detail, to essentially any depth it chooses, whether that’s with an electron microscope, the Hubble, or our eyeballs.  It is also the foundation of all real art, genuine craft, and of all inspired achievement, be it in athletics, business, or some other form of apparently personal or group achievement.  Attention is at the core of all loving relationships, be they romantic, parental, or any other sort.  If you love your garden, or your home, or your pet, you’ll have a great garden, home, or pet, but it will probably be the result of attention, not wishes, luck, or dreams.

WHEREVER THERE IS AUTHENTIC SPIRITUALITY, you will find focused attention.  It’s a wonderful tool God invented for her own purposes, because awareness can’t know itself without it.  Yet not too long ago, I found myself squandering this precious, limited gift.  Even within constant consciousness of the inhabiting awakeness, I nonetheless was still hooked on what we might call Bright World trivia.  I don't think I need to define that any further.  Of course awareness wasn’t going to stand for that forever, so it brought my attention to attention a couple of months ago, and I’ve been deliberately unhooking ever since.  Please don’t think this is a rant on what anyone else should do.  I have absolutely no idea of what anyone else should do beyond what they’re already doing. This is my diary, my report to you of the ongoing noticings and results of a guy who is attempting to live ever more diligently in the direction of truth. 

AS MANY OF YOU ALREADY KNOW, thirteen years ago I was living in the bushes of Mount Tabor City Park in Portland, Oregon, slowly dying of alcoholism and physical neglect.  There was no movement toward truth, or contemplative attention being paid there; you have my word on it.  Thus this unit’s path, however winding and slow and dull it may seem to those starting out from higher planes of existence, it nonetheless exhibits a sharp enough, positive enough curve to these eyes.  If I was to anthropomorphize awareness, I could say that it is surely rolling on the floors of heaven in tears, coughing out peals of laughter over how this teleplay has gone.  The graphing of Fredness: The Movie would make a chart of the Dow Jones Industrials look tame: tons of melodrama; a great deal of danger and romance; a sharp spike up of success, followed by an even sharper spike of failure; addiction, illness, a long and struggling recovery; imprisonment and humiliation; finally culminating in an awakening five years ago. And now, our dubious star of this dubious movie is doing yoga, eating his bran and vegetables, and living Nonduality.  What in the hell is going on here?  

BACK TO OUR CENTRAL TOPIC, which may have been about attention.  Before anything new can happen in the life of a human being, the old pattern has to be thoroughly seen through.  Mere observation won’t turn the trick: its false basis and ineffective payoff must be completely penetrated.  That’s what happened which led me toward recovery.  That’s what happened that stemmed my quitting smoking eight years ago.  No, enlightenment is not about purification of the body; I’m just using those things as clear examples of penetration.  That same form of seeing is at least seemingly how awakening happened here, and is by far the most common circumstance in which awakening occurs.  I saw the absolute futility of trying to run this life.  I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t not do it. I had apparently made such a hash of it that I didn’t even want to live it any longer.  My head was screaming LET ME OUT!  In spiritual circles they call that surrender.  At the time I just called it hell.  Hell is extremely focused attention.  Like everything else in duality, it has its flip side.  The flip side for me was not relief while on the hamster wheel; it was relief by being removed from the wheel.

ATTENTION TO THE HERE AND NOW is the very thing that is overlooked in the seeking process.  One could say that it defines the seeking process.  So we want to take a close look at it, utilizing—what else?—the most complete attention we can muster.  There is almost always an experienced process of awakening whether the last, quantum leap is later seen as sudden or not.  My job here, as I find it, not as I’m designing it, is to consistently uncover the false and present the true.  The former is difficult; the latter is impossible.  Nonetheless, we persevere.  While it is true that you are actually already fully enlightened and I have nothing whatsoever to teach you, until absolute unity is experienced right now, and now, and now, and now, then division is our experience, and personal suffering is our consequence.  In a powerful statement near the beginning of The Power of Now, I remember Eckhart Tolle asking something to the effect that, “It’s all well and good that we may all already be enlightened, but the question is, ‘Is it true for you?’”  I ask the same.

HOW MANY AUTHENTIC STORIES have you really heard that recount spontaneous, crashing enlightenment through people who were not looking for it?  Let’s count.  Eckhart Tolle: check.  Byron Katie: check.  Suzanne Segal?  I think the jury may still be out on that one.  Ramana Maharshi: check.  Tony Parsons: check.  My wife?  Her story is much like Suzanne Segal’s: only there was never a sudden shift; but like Suzanne's it remained quite a nebulous entity until it found the vocabulary of Nonduality to express itself clearly.  It's not a clear check on our sheet; that's for sure.  There are others,of course.  How many?  From my view, there are damn few reports of it out of billions and billions of people over a timeline of 6,000 or so years.

 MY POINT IS THAT SINCE INSTANT ENLIGHTENMENT, with little or no preceding practice, however vague or unpractice-like it was, is about as rare as a lump of coal spontaneously turning into a cut diamond.  You can play those odds if you want to, but I didn’t.  Adyashanti didn’t.  Scott Kiloby didn’t.  Gangaji didn’t; she was already in India when she got her first glimpse through the eyes and voice of Papaji.  Wayne Liquorman had a spontaneous spiritual experience that ended his alcoholism, but he didn’t wake up until he’d met with Ramesh Balsekar a number of times.  Ramesh wasn’t an instant wonder: he spent years translating for Nisargadatta, which seeped into Higher Wisdom, which led the way to freedom.  Even Nisargadatta himself, the shining center of the most radical Nonduality, states in his own words, time and again that when he when met his guru, he was told to “stay with the I Am.”  Nisargadatta heard that, did it for three years, and then came to Self-realization.  Let us be clear: nobody in any of the Nondual traditions that I know of ever achieved “easy” enlightenment.  That’s why they were in their tradition to begin with.  So, if it happens to you, well and good; my hat is off.  I wouldn’t hold my breath.  In truth, it’s probably too late for you anyway, given that you’re reading this blog.

(FOR THE SAKE OF PROTECTING MY INBOX, let me say that yes, yes, I know no one ever comes to enlightenment, except the One. I am using a teaching tool, not a hard and fast reference.) 

SADLY ENOUGH, HOWEVER YOU DO THE MATH, it’s unlikely you’ll come up as a promising candidate for spontaneous, full-blown awakening.  (Please recall that even after spontaneous awakening, Eckhart took years to really find his feet; and Katie, fully awake, invented The Work while sitting out in the desert in order to deal with a mind that very much was not free.) So we are left with the traditional path of, well, path.  The good news is that if this way is your fate, you’ll have a lot of company, including me.  Awakening can and does happen; it’s not a story, or a myth; it’s quite real.  And if you have not had a glimpse of your true nature yet, then you almost surely will.  You’re more attentive than most.  How do I know?  It’s because, once again, you’re reading this blog.  It’s not directly connected to Facebook, Twitter, or what have you.  You had to either blindly stumble onto it, find a link on Scott's or someone else’s site, or someone told you about it.  Rationality says you shouldn’t even be here reading this.  So much for odds, huh?  What I’m saying is that you are looking with fierce attention.  Good for you; this fierce attention is indeed the most common way of finding the Way.  Let’s take a closer look at how awakeness most often arises, and then we’ll go all the way back to the new U.N.

To be continued…

The Nondual Diary: Everything Is Important, Part II (Conclusion)

THE POINT OF THE BACKWARD-LOOKING examples of struggle that I used in Part I is simply to strongly make note that truth is not always easy or pretty, it’s often not what we want to see, but it’s always available. We have to want the truth more than we want the lie.  And since the lie is often far more comfortable and attractive than truth—at least until it isn’t, we go for it over and over.  What’s stopping you from waking up?  You are.  What else?  Nothing else. I'm not saying that from some standpoint of blame.  I'm saying that the price of awakening is the giving up of being sure, of being right, of knowing what's going on, what should and shouldn't happen.  The price of awakening is only one: giving up the illusion of You, Separate Entity, Esq.

THE MYTH OF ENLIGHTENMENT is that it’s some kind of one-time deal and then life is easy and automatic and there’s no more struggle and no more suffering.  That’s not my experience.  Ask Jesus, and see what he has to say about it.  Ask all the mystics who’ve died by fire and drowning and stoning for trying to live the truth we’re openly, almost casually sharing here.  Ask the gurus and teachers who have fallen from grace through scandal.  Enlightenment is all about right now.  Am I willing to tell myself the truth right now?  Surely this thing must be an exception, right?  Surely that thing isn’t really important, is it?  In reference to Part I of this post: How properly a picture of Ramana hangs is relatively unimportant.  Yet I notice that Zen temples and gardens are not exactly examples of disarray, are they now?  And respect should be paid where respect is due, and no one is due more than Ramana.  Still, all that is the Little Lesson in this example.  The Large Lesson is the noticing, acknowledging, and rectifying the lie I told myself about whether they were properly hung or not.  They weren’t.  I didn’t want to re-hang them, so I put it off.  I “didn’t exactly lie to myself”, which is a nice way of covering that I blatantly lied to myself by saying “I wasn’t sure”.  And then one day I spontaneously rehung them in response to my current relationship with truth.

NO MORE LIES.  Everything is important.

TRUTH IS ALL THAT COUNTS.  It’s the only thing that’s important.  And you don’t have to go looking for it.  It’s right here, right now, wherever you are, even as you read this line.  Adyashanti has a wonderful question that I don’t think he’d mind my borrowing.  He asks, “What do you know that you don’t want to know?”  That question exposes lies immediately upon contact.  Turn that kind of focus onto the lie that’s now been exposed, and it’ll explode, or whimper out; but it can’t stand the light of truth.  If I’m standing in a dark room and I cut on the light, what do I need to do with the darkness?  Do I need to put it in buckets and carry it out?  Do I need to hold a service for its death?  Do I need to wash the furniture now, to get rid of what remains of the dark?  No, no, no.  All I have to do to rid the room of darkness is be willing to cut on the light.  The light does the rest; the light does all the heavy lifting.

THAT'S FINE IN A DARK ROOM, but I notice in my conventional life that I don’t like to fess up to less than pure motives.  I notice I don’t want to tell you the truth because I don’t want to hurt your feelings.  In truth I don’t want you to hurt my feelings after I’ve told you the truth instead of a comforting lie.  This doesn’t mean that I scream, “Your new car sucks, you idiot!  What a color!  What the hell were you thinking?”  No.  I can say, “Ohhhhhhhhh, I can see where you’d really like that.”  That’s the truth.  I already know he or she likes it, because they just agreed to pay thirty-five grand for it!  I don’t have to step on other people’s toes in order to stand on my own feet. I can’t even know it’s not the best looking car in the world in the best color ever invented in a lab.  I DON’T KNOW.  I don’t need to retrain that unit, I just have to let it do what it’s already doing, and give it the least resistance that I can, otherwise I’m suffering over YOUR new car!!  I just have to figure out the nicest way to tell the clearest truth while being open to the idea that I may be the one who’s the idiot here.  Or perhaps there’s no idiot here at all.  Perhaps there are just two people looking at a new car.  Why complicate it with my heavy opinions?

I NOTICE I DON'T LIKE TO REHANG  pictures that are already hung almost-okay.  I don't really want to live in truth, I want to live in a world of almosting.  I want to almost tell the truth about where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, how I feel, what I think, where I’m at spiritually, what’s right for you, or a bunch of you, otherwise called the world.  I want to live in an easy world of almost correctly hung pictures, of almost getting sober today by promising to get sober tomorrow, of being almost as deep as my spiritual teachers.  I want to almost do my conventional work well—at least well enough to credit for having done it well.  I want to tell you that “you can call me anytime”, but then, for God’s sake, recognize that it’s a canned lie designed to make me look good and us look and feel for the moment like close friends, but please, please, NEVER take me up on it.  I want to go through the world almosting, but I want credit for going through the world honestly.

I DON'T THINK IT WORKS THAT WAY.

I WANT THE BIG KAHUNA. I want enlightenment.  I deserve it and I’m willing to shuck the bucks to acquire it.  I’ll “namaste” you until I’m sick of it, and eat vegetables as long as people are watching, and walk little old ladies across the street that have no more damn sense than to be out and about, perilously endangering both themselves and more importantly, MY schedule in MY world, and thus putting ME to time and bother when I’m on the way to meditation class.  Goddammit.  

YET SHOULD GRACE, in a fit of the highest wicked amusement, actually slap me with a touch of Self-realization, it’ll hang here for about fourteen minutes, if that long.  It’s all about right now. First off, after clearly seeing that there is no Fred actually here, that it’s a pure figment, an almosting ego will immediately claim that Fred got enlightened and ain’t he special now!  The next thing ego will notice is that the living experience of awakeness has now disappeared.  No matter; no problem at all.  An almosting ego will next claim that IT had it, IT lost it, and now IT is going to get IT back!  We are back in the endless loop of ego feeding upon the lies I want to believe.  The clearest teachers I know--or me--can believe ONE thought and awakeness, what Scott Kiloby calls Living Realization, what Wayne Liquorman calls The Living Teaching, the tip-off being the "Living" word in both characterizations, is gone.  Poof!  And any thought will do.  Being awake doesn't mean being lazy. It means being alert.  All the time.  It means knowing and respecting and living a life that knows and shows that everything is important.

DOING MY LITTLE BOOK COMPANY'S shipping chores is important.  I want to do that promptly and properly.  THAT is the living truth.  I'm pressed for time today, but writing this post for Awakening Clarity is important.  I want to get it out on Wednesday night like I promised I would.  THAT is an expression of the living truth.  I have a student whom I’ve been emailing back and forth with today.  She’s just beginning to see that she’s completely IN a lie, which is the first step to getting OUT of the lie.  It's a crucial point.  So it's important for me to follow up, and up, and up again; to do it and to do it as well as I can. No almosting there.  THAT is living in the truth.  The animals need to be fed, I need to shave and shower, and get ready for yoga, and be on time, and every last bit of it is important.  Because every last bit of it can be done in the light of truth, or it can be done in shades of gray, which is just a nice way of saying I can lie about my performance in life with words or actions, and call it almost the truth.  And then I find myself back in the dream.

EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT.  So, let me get to my shipping.  Namaste.

Housekeeping Notes:

IN THE FORTY-EIGHT ESSAYS that I have written in the three months since the inception of Awakening Clarity, I’ve posted  well over sixty thousand words in the main posts alone.  That is more material that than is contained in the average book on Nonduality.  So we now have a base, a foundation, upon which we can build.  I encourage you, new reader or veteran, to go back through the archives and read or reread the posts you are drawn to.  A lot of issues have been addressed; a lot of questions have been answered as well as they could be at that point in my awakening, and my development as a teacher.  There is some pretty good stuff in there, I think, and surely there are some pieces are poor presentations.  I say this with little sense of either pride or shame; I remain merely the typist and the “translator”, so to speak.  If a piece is good, the credit is the Writer’s, not the typist’s, or the keyboard's.  If it is poor, I accept full responsibility.  There is no end-point to clarity, and mine is still clearing daily.  I failed as highly and as well as I could with each piece; I can promise you that.  That’s the best one can expect when writing about a topic that is completely beyond words to begin with.

GOING FORWARD, it is my plan to update this blog twice a week, instead of the three or more times that have heretofore been the custom.  It is my intention to post an essay late on Sunday night, so you may look for it on Monday morning.  The second piece will go out late Wednesday, thus you may expect it Thursday morning.   Two essays a week is a lot on a regular basis, but since it’s less than I’ve been doing, I’ll be able to free up a bit more time to spend with my wife, and maybe even enjoy someone else’s writing more often, without feeling like I'm cheating on my blog.  It will also allow me more freedom to respond to those of you who write in.

MANY OF YOU WILL NOTE that I have removed some sections of AC and heavily edited others.  I never expected to have a blog, and didn’t know what the hell to do with one once it was started; I’m learning as I go.  At one point I had it so jammed with material it wouldn’t even properly load.  Sometimes less is more, and I think this is one of those cases.  I originally created more of a real website, and now I'm paring that down to more of a blog.  It’ll ease navigation by readers and maintenance by the compulsive custodian--me.  I hope you find these changes agreeable, unless you don’t.  I don't want to set myself up to suffer over your opinions!  However, you might as well like them if you can, because just like everything else in What Is, they already are.

Thank you for your interest in Awakening Clarity and this budding teaching.

The Nondual Diary: Everything Is Important, Part I

Housekeeping Notes:

IN THE FORTY-SEVEN ESSAYS that I have written in the three months since the inception of Awakening Clarity, I’ve posted something over sixty thousand words in the main posts alone.  That is more material than is contained in the average book on Nonduality.  So we now have a base, a foundation, upon which we can build.  I encourage you, new reader or veteran, to go back through the archives and read or reread the posts you are drawn to.  A lot of issues have been addressed; a lot of questions have been answered as well as they could be at that point in my awakening, and in my development as a teacher.  There is some pretty good stuff in there, I think, and surely there are some pieces that are poor presentations.  I say this with little sense of either pride or shame; I remain merely the typist and the “translator”, so to speak.  If a piece is good, the credit is the Writer’s, not the typist’s, or the keyboard's.  If it is poor, I accept full responsibility.  There is no end-point to clarity, and mine is still clearing daily.  I failed as highly and as well as I could with each piece; I can promise you that.  That’s the best one can expect when writing about a topic that is completely beyond words to begin with.

GOING FORWARD, it is my plan to update this blog twice a week, instead of the three or more times that have heretofore been the custom.  It is my intention to post an essay late on Sunday night, so you may look for it on Monday morning.  The second piece will go out late Wednesday, thus you may expect it Thursday morning.   Two essays a week is a lot on a regular basis, but since it’s less than I’ve been doing, I’ll be able to free up a bit more time to spend with my wife, and maybe even enjoy someone else’s writing more often, without feeling like I'm cheating on my blog.  It will also allow me more freedom to respond to those of you who write in.

MANY OF YOU WILL NOTE that I have removed some sections of AC and heavily edited others.  I never expected to have a blog, and didn’t know what the hell to do with one once it was started; I’m learning as I go.  At one point I had it so jammed with material it wouldn’t even properly load.  Sometimes less is more, and I think this is one of those cases.  I originally created more of a real website, and now I'm paring that down to more of a blog.  It’ll ease navigation by readers and maintenance by the compulsive custodian--me.  I hope you find these changes agreeable, unless you don’t.  I don't want to set myself up to suffer over your opinions!  However, you might as well like them if you can, because just like everything else in What Is, they already are.

Thank you for your interest in Awakening Clarity and this budding teaching.

THE NONDUAL DIARY: Everything Is Important

THE KNOWING THAT EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT is something that is playing out more and more in both mine and Betsy’s lives.  As I have indicated before, we live small, private, ordered lives.  We pay attention to detail.  The old saying that “God is in the details,” turns out to be a statement of truth.  I have just this very moment proven my point; let me share it.  Just as I finished the sentence, “We pay attention to detail,” I looked up and saw that pictures of Ramana Maharshi, and his sacred Mount Arunachala, which I have framed and hung one atop the other, to the right of the window I face when I’m writing, were too far apart.  I immediately stood up from the chair, pulled out a little hammer that I keep in this room, and raised Ramana so that he is now hanging at a proper, artful distance underneath Arunachala.

UNTIL RECENTLY, OTHER THINGS HELD THOSE SPOTS.  When I switched them out, it was a speedy change-out and I was simply glad of the change.  I didn’t see, at least on a conscious level, that the spacing needed changing.  Stop.  That’s not true.  We are here to investigate the truth, so we’d better start with me telling it.  I did see it. Immediately. Yet rather than take action, I questioned it, rationalizing that I ‘wasn’t sure enough' to take action.  That’s such bullshit.  I didn’t want to see it, because it would necessitate a bit of work.  Denial in such cases is 100% effective.  Until you allow yourself to really see the truth, large or small, nit-picking or life changing, no action will arise to correct whatever is at last showing up as false.

I WAS A DRUNK, sometimes reaching high points, more often careening to low ones, but a drunk either way, for almost thirty years--from somewhere in my late teens to the age of forty-seven.  As I approached fifty, I clearly saw the detritus of the life that lay in the scorched earth behind me, and I was finally willing to project that truer vision forward.  As soon as I did, denial dashed itself upon the rocks of my shattered situation.  Once I was finally willing to really and truly see the problem; I was automatically willing to be other than I was, and a solution immediately arose.  All that needed changing was the point of view.  Once I took my vision and blame away from glowering at the world and turned them onto myself, change happened.  It couldn’t have failed to do so.  There is just One.  Since that’s the truth, and I’m conscious of being conscious, that One has got to be Me. 

AS GOD, I GET WHAT I WANT, but only every time.  I may not get what I think I want, but I get what I really, really, really want.  So long as I wanted to be a drunk more than I wanted to become what my projection of what a sober person was, I stayed drunk.  I wanted to want to be a sober person, but I just didn't until I did.  And it was all your fault.  Neat, huh?  Once the point was reached where I didn’t give a damn WHAT a sober person’s life might be, because it HAD TO be better than what I had, I got willing and I got well.  Now my life is better than I ever dreamed it could be.  I don’t have everything I casually desire, but you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ve got everything I really want.  The denial in me bred false projection, and I fashioned my life around the fear of that illusion.  Perhaps that’s why the words “alcoholism” and “insanity” often end up in the same sentence.

I CAN SEE NOW THAT FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I wanted two things more than anything else.  First I wanted a home.  A home was a whole lot more than a roof over my head.  I actually gave up a roof over my head over and over (I was homeless nine times.  As I sometimes say in my public talks, that’s not luck, it’s skill.)  Google up sannyasi, and then put the word “unknowing" in front of it.  No, I’ll save you the trouble.  It means, according to Princeton-via-Google, “sannyasi: a Hindu religious mendicant”.  I was such an idiot.  I had been running all around the Western hemisphere for almost fifty years looking for a home that couldn't exist until I first discovered myself. At one time, when I was living in Portland, I even took on the pen name of Bodhi Sannyasi.  Bodhi means awake.  If ever a lie was put before truth, it was in that pen name.  A home was my synonym for Love.  I wanted Love.  I had no clue that I was love.  I thought it was something you had to give me, and I was pretty sure it had something to do with sex and drugs and money.

THE OTHER THING I WANTED, probably for as long as I wanted a home, but consciously for twenty-five years, was to wake up.  I wanted enlightenment, whatever the hell that was; the way a flower ‘wants’ the sun.  I needed it and I didn’t have a clue why.  At first.  But as my life declined faster and worse, I sought an obvious-to-you awakening as a replacement for my obvious-to-me total failure.  It went sort of like this, though it was unacknowledged, or at the very least not shared.  “Sure, you’ve got success and money, a home and family, love and respect; I conceded that.  But I have the best of the best, the most elusive of the most elusive goals: I have enlightenment, whatever the hell that is, which shows me clearly that your success and money, your home and family, your love and respect, mean nothing.  Zero!   So all you need to do to become as happy as I’m pretending to be is give me your success and money, your home and family, and of course your undying love and respect.”  Enlightenment, I imagined, was like a set of keys to the backdoor of the kingdom, a secret, devious route to the very-material, Promised Land.

THAT SLOWLY—VERY SLOWLY—BEGAN TO UNRAVEL as first I got sober, and then became more serious about spirituality (though I was still trying to win the Spiritual Sweepstakes and become Eckhart Tolle’s richer-than-God neighbor).  Then came the Great Horror, which beautifully and magnificently crushed me, followed by an actual big-time awakening that I’d just about ceased to believe could happen—at least to a loser like me.  Still, the allure of the Promised Land beckoned for a long time, even as I stumbled and fell toward a fuller awakening.  (Some people ‘flower and unfold’; I stumbled and fell.) I can truthfully say the desire for the keys to the kingdom had died in hot flames fed by the remains of my shredded ego by the time I emailed Scott Kiloby for the second time.  In my first email I had more or less offered him (yes, this is humiliating, but at least it is true) my undying support and allegiance as a follower-to-the-Master if he would simply recognize my spiritual superiority to most other living beings, his Beatific Lotus-presence Self being the primary exception.  Scott wrote me back a very sweet email.  It was just as sweet as it could be.  But he didn’t take the bait.  

SCOTT GENTLY AND KINDLY let me know that he actually didn’t need my undying devotion, or my approval, and that if I was the way-far-developed Real McCoy that I was clearly implying I was, then I wouldn’t need his either.  Ouch!  Oh, the sting of it!  I was completely humiliated.  And that's just what I needed. I discovered that for sure and for real, I wanted truth more than I wanted comfort.  I discovered that if I wasn't yet the full-blown Real Deal personified, then at least I had found the full-blown Real Deal personified, and that he would write me back.  I think that second email to Scott is one of the four most important 'spiritual' moves I ever made, after first getting sober, and then hooking up with Betsy Hackett.  It was on a scale with the first reading of Eckhart's The Power of Now in 2002, hearing Adyashanti's The End of Your World in 2008, and my first phone call with Scott, in the spring of 2011 when he slew the bogey man in my life, the dragon that was keeping me out of the castle and out in the yard..

NINE MONTHS AFTER my first initial contact, after reading all his books, watching and reading interviews and You Tube videos, after many emails, phone calls, and video meetings on the Internet; I had dug a fast, deep well to Scott Kiloby, just as I had previously done to Eckhart and Adyashanti.  What I'd really done, of course, was dig a well to the most Truth that I could see or take in, all three times.  All of the teachers had what I wanted, but I couldn't accept it until I could.  I notice that the progression got more and more personal, more and more close to the personification of Truth, which I'm sure is not always important, but I'm equally clear that it is for me.  I do think it's better to dig a few deep holes than a whole lot of shallow ones. Unless you don't, of course.  For me, after a lot of shovel work, each time I hit cool, clean water.  Only this third time around I was not only drinking it; It was drinking me.  There was no more oscillation between the Truth and the dream. Consciousness was and is aware of Itself, right here, right now.

ON A SUNNY SUMMER AFTERNOON, almost five years after my initial awakening, when Scott actually did venture to give me his 'approval', so to speak, he was proven right once again: by the time I got it, I didn’t need it.  But I’ve promised to tell the truth here, so here goes; judge me as you will.  It did feel really good.  It was on a Saturday.  The rest of that weekend glowed, or at least I did.  And still do.

To be continued…

The Nondual Diary: Waking Down

I SPEND A LOT OF TIME WRITING AND TALKING to people about waking up; about the true nature of reality.  Other than some splendid down time with my wife, Betsy, and our three Beasts Without Value, whom we both adore, I am not good for much else.  I read spiritual literature every morning, at meal times when I’m alone, and most nights.  For two years, which began in a very difficult time in the awakening that took place here, I was sucked into the world of comic books, like a child trying to go back to the breast of its mother.  Go figure.  But they’re out the door now, along with nearly everything else in my life that is not directly related to This and how to better communicate it.  I spend many hours a week working on this blog.  Several times a week I cut on a related audio or video to play in the background while I'm working.  What I’m saying is that while I’ve always heard it’s good to be well rounded and broad minded, I know nothing about it.  What I know is single-minded passion.

I SPEND SO MUCH TIME TALKING ABOUT WAKING UP that I fail to talk enough about waking down.  It’s not what people want to hear about.  Scott Kiloby has a great video out that talks about the difference between “what sells” and “what frees”.  I hope this essay is going to be in the “what frees” category.  I didn’t invent the phrase “waking down”.  I first heard it from Loch Kelly, who’s a terrific experiential-type spiritual teacher.  He’s done a terrific video with Adyashanti, called The Journey after Awakening, which is about just that.  You can get it through either one of their websites; they’re both easy to Google.

AWAKENING TO THE DREAM—the dream of our individual selves, our baloney beliefs, and our skewed world—is really very similar to waking up in the morning after a long night’s sleep.  The analogy is hard to top; I won’t even try.  What we are talking about when we discuss it, however, is that we begin to see life simply through “non-conceptual awareness”.  If you are seeing anything around you as a distinct and separate object, you are in the dream.  I am sitting in front of a computer.  There is a pen and pencil holder to my left, a tea mug and stainless steel carafe to my right.  I see them just as you see them.  Sort of.  In all likelihood, while you may hold some intellectual notion of “it’s all One”, you will still see these objects as separate from you, the you who is the apparent subject that is seeing.

WHAT I SEE WHEN I AM LOOKING through an apparent object (Fredness’ body), which is like a pair of glasses for a person with serious far-sightedness.  Without Fredness, I could be called (rather humorously) legally blind.  I can’t see a damn thing.  I’m still aware that I Am, mind you, but that is all that I’m registering.  When I slip on my Fredness garment, a miracle occurs instantaneously.  I see, hear, taste, feel and smell a whole world instantaneously.  It’s great!  The detail that is conjured is dizzingly magnificent.  So, we could say, so far, so good.

BUT LET’S BE CLEAR ABOUT SOMETHING.  When I (I am, at this moment, speaking of the Writer here, not the typist), slip into my Fredness garment, I get a world that is totally colored by Fredness.  It is an utterly subjective view of an absolutely objective world.  When we say, in a throwaway sort of way, for perhaps the ten-thousandth time, “It is what it is,” then we have just uttered as profound a spiritual truth as can be possibly be spoken.  We say it, but we don’t hear it.  We are as happy to ignore truth the ten-thousandth time as we were the first.  What Is is where and what this body-we-think-we-are finds itself “in and as”.  What Isn’t is what this mind thinks about What Is.  It takes pure information and weaves a completely imaginary world around it; a world for us to resist and complain, moan and groan over.  In case you hadn’t noticed, we are right back to Beliefs, Opinions, and Positions: BOPs, which have been discussed here several times.  We are right back to being BOPped into suffering.

WHAT I MEAN BY “WAKING DOWN” is that our “quest” is simply to have the mind wake down into the space where our bodies already are.  Get out of your head and into your body.  Get out of fantasy and into reality.  These bodies I AM wearing, all 7,000,000,000 of them, are already living in What Is.  That would chiefly be because there isn’t anything OTHER THAN What Is!  The bodies-we-think-we-are simply sense what’s going on here, within this dimension of planet Earth.   They transmit that sensed information, BOP-free, to Mind.  I could say “minds” here, but there is really only One Mind, and you are living right smack dab in the middle of it, exactly where you are, at this very moment, even as you read this sentence.  I can look around and say hello to Myself, but I am not conditioning-free and never will be, so I am still seeing Myself as viewed by Fredness.  We are all familiar with the great spiritual question, Who am I?  Well, one answer few teachers would argue with me about is that “you”, which is a figment, a total invention, is simply a point of view.

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED THAT YOUR BODY DOESN’T COMPLAIN?  Oh, we surely say it complains.  We may go to the doctor only to be asked, “What are your complaints?”  But when that happens you’ll notice that a knee doesn’t suddenly pipe up and say, “I’m stiff and sore and old, and by God I want something more than this damn glucosamine and ibuprofen you’ve got me on.  This is Serious Stuff down here, you lousy quack!”  No, the body just sits quietly on the table.  It's not even awaiting instructions.  Even THAT is mind.  All waiting is Mind.  The knee just presents itself when it’s told too.  It moves or fails to move in a fashion that is 100% normal for it. It hurts or it doesn't.  Mind, however, always tends to think that the knee should be doing something other than what it is doing, and that the doctor should be doing something other than what he or she is doing, and that the receptionist has a bit of a smart mouth and should probably be fired or perhaps hung to teach ALL those smart-mouthed receptions a lesson.  Plus the curtains are awful, and the paint!  Yellow!  Who in the hell would paint a doctor’s office YELLOW?  Fools, every last one of them.  

THAT'S PROBABLY WHY YOU'RE PAYING THEM hundreds of dollars an hour, huh?  Because you really think they're fools?  Let's tell the truth.  Body, under outside direction, is going to the doctor because The Director knows they know what needs to be known, and do what needs to be done in that office.  Body is going, regardless of the complaints of Mind.  It doesn't even pay Mind any attention.  Only Mind pays itself any attention.  Only Mind believes itself.  And only Mind suffers.

BODY HAS NO COMPLAINTS. It’s living in What Is.  It’s part of What Is.  It’s doing its job perfectly, however poorly we might judge it.  It’s Mind that’s creating the entire ruckus.  Yet once we begin to see a little light—we don’t have to even be awake to begin spotting it—we see that the ruckus may be mandatory, but the suffering it causes is entirely optional.  A body feeling pain is not a problem.  It may not be pleasant, but it’s not a problem.  It just is what it is.  However, MY body experiencing MY pain is a problem.  MY knee misbehaving (as little, separate me sees it) is a problem.  We can extend that out to anything.  A tsunami is not a problem.  People being washed into the ocean is not a problem.  It is what it is.  ONLY.  There is not a what isn't.  What Is has to be, because it already is, and that's ALL there is!  

BUT A TSUNAMI THAT SHOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED—in MY precious opinion—is a Big Problem.  People being washed into the sea who shouldn’t have died, at least according to MY ‘sacred’, self-centered, completely skewed, groundless, baseless opinion, is a Big Problem.  They are such Big Problems that I can suffer as long as I want to over them.  That suffering keeps ego—which is just a thought on the move—alive.  It gives it purpose and life.  It gives it food.  Life goes on and on like this until it doesn't.   For me, my story got so bad that it crushed me.  I wanted out so badly that I didn’t give a damn about dying, and so I died.  Waking down is dying before we die.  Then we get to live until we die—freely.  And after that?  Stop right there.  There is no “after that”.  That's a story of future.  We're back in "what isn't".  There is just This.  There is just What Is.  Come, I invite you, wake down, my friend; wake down.

The Nondual Diary: Where are YOU? Part II (Conclusion)

 

Where we left off:

[So, on we go with the show, only now, for a while here, it'll be just as it really occurred,  I'm going to be playing both sides, just as I did while Vince sat in my living room drinking it all in.  From here to almost the end of Part II, I am going to be telling a teaching story.  And you, the reader, are invited to do just like Vince did that day last autumn, and listen v-e-r-y carefully, okay?  You never know what might happen...]

“YOU ARE ONE HARD-LUCK GUY, PAL.” I tell him.  “Shortly after you get out of the hospital, damn if SOMEONE ELSE doesn’t run into you and you lose both legs AND both arms!  By now I know where to find the best parking spot, all the hospital personnel, and the whole layout, so I come to see you right away; just as soon as the surgeries are over and you’re back awake and alert.  I don’t bother to use any lead-in at all.  I just stand at your bedside and ask loudly, ‘Okay, wise guy, where’s Vince NOW?’  You can no longer point, so you nod with your head as best as you can, gesturing toward what’s left of your body. ‘Good Lord, Vince! ‘I howl.  ‘Are you still sticking to that old story?  Not long ago you were a guy with two hands, two arms, and two legs.  Now you are just a head and a torso!  I want to know where the hell Vince is! Clearly he wasn’t hiding in your hands, your arms, or your legs, was he?  So WHERE is he?’”

MAKE-BELIEVE VINCE’S DEFENSES BREAK DOWN HERE.  The guy that he now finds himself is more interested in the truth than the strong, healthy guy was, so he agrees to exploratory surgery.  He’s got less and less to lose, so he’d better get this question answered before he runs out of places and spaces!  If the head loses its torso, or the torso loses its head, it’s all a moot point, at least for Vince.  In our imaginary surgery, they give Vince a spinal so that he can be awake to watch, right along with me and the doctor.  The surgeon cuts him right down the middle, from stem to stern, so to speak, and then uses some stainless steel rig to stretch him out wide.  The doc then starts moving the organs around, peering around and under them.  Damn if I can see any Vince in there. 

I’M LOOKING FOR SOME LITTLE VINCE-LIKE FIGURE, sort of a finger puppet, or maybe a tiny, Vince-like “Ken” doll with time off for good behavior from “Barbie”. I am looking for something tangible and thus REAL; something that exists even when Vince isn’t thinking about it.  The doctor is looking carefully, but even his trained eyes can’t see anything of a personal nature in there.  Even Vince, who’s leaning over looking into himself, can’t find a “me” in there!  We all agree: there’s absolutely no little Vince character hiding in the torso, so the doc sews him back him and that’s that.  This guy is more and more like an onion!  We peel him and peel him, but there’s nothing at all at center except the absence of onion!

WE ALL AGREE TO EXPLORATORY SKULL SURGERY.  There’s no other course to take.  We’re desperate men taking desperate measures.  The suspense is killing Vince, and now even the surgeon is curious, so before too long we’re all back in still another operating room.  This is “the court of last resort”.  Again Vince is given a spinal, so that he can participate; so that he can be an active witness to the discovery of a Vince, provided such a discovery is ever made.  The skilled surgeon pops Vince’s head open like a fresh melon, with one whack of a chisel and hammer.  He is good.  Again he stretches the incision wide.  He begins using a probe.  He hits a particular spot in the brain, and Vince says, “Oh, wow, I remember when I was little boy and got my first bicycle.”  We’ve hit memory.  The doctor probes another spot, and Vince says, “Oh, it smells like chocolate in here.”  We’ve hit the senses.  The surgeon probes yet another spot, and Vince says, “Two plus two equals four.”  We’ve hit intellect.

“SO,” I SAY, “WE’VE DISCOVERED A DETAILED DATABASE, and some interesting tools for creating and recreating a world, but where the hell is Vince?”  The doc can’t see one, I can’t see one, we hold a mirror up for Vince, and he has to confess that he can’t see one either.  What the heck is going on?  There’s only one place left to look.  So we cut the brain open.  This is the end of the rainbow, only there’s no color anywhere.  There’s just a bunch of gooey gray junk.  Damn if I see any little Vince character.  In fact, I can’t see anything but goo and SPACE.  He really IS like an onion!!  The surgeon can’t see anything either, and via the mirror and a powerful curiosity, Vince somehow manages to look and he can’t find himself.  I rechristen him Vinceness.  All the mechanisms exist for maintaining a personality, but medical science has failed to produce a genuine entity. 

[This is the end of the teaching story within our larger story.}

WE ARE NOW BACK IN MY LIVING ROOM, out of the teaching story, and back into normal life. It is the autumn of 2010.  I look at Vince squarely in the eye.  The corners of my mouth are beginning to smile.  I know I’ve got him.  “Okay, pal,” I say.  “We tried everything possible and we couldn’t find a Vince.  There’s simply NOT a Vince in there, is there?”  He’s dizzy with all of this, but he agrees there is not.  There can’t be.  We have searched high and low via intellectual surgery, and could not come up with the first shred of evidence for any separate, distinct entity by any name.  He is lost.  That’s good.  But the implications haven’t hit him yet.  They are about to.

“SO, IF THERE’S NOT A VINCE anywhere in that body, and there’s not a Vince anywhere in that brain, what’s that tell us?”  No answer from Vince.  He is barely breathing.  Gus the Golden Retriever is still as a brick.  I lean forward.  You could hear a butterfly flap if it flew through the living room.  I whisper, with all the compassion I can muster, because I know he's scared, and he's got to let go of the fear.

"OKAY, PAL, THERE'S NO VINCE IN THERE; we agree on that.  So, given that, I have a completely new question to ask you.  Forget about "Where's Vince?"  I'm turning a whole new page.

“SO, IF THERE’S NOT A VINCE anywhere in that body, and there’s not a Vince anywhere in that brain, what’s that tell us?”  No answer from Vince.  He is barely breathing.  Gus, our Golden Retriever, is as still and quiet as a brick now.  I lean forward.  You could hear a butterfly flap if it flew through the room.  I say, with all the compassion I can muster:

“THEN WHAT IS VINCE?” I shout.  And then I shut up.  His head jerks back, and then he looks at me in wonderment. His eyes grow wide.  They start to tear up and then flow.  He begins to sputter and laugh through the tears.  And then he says, “My God, Fred.  You mean Vince is just a STORY???  Vince is just a THOUGHT???”

  

I SMILE ABOUT A MILE WIDE and say quietly, “That’s right, pal.  You’ve seen it yourself, by yourself, to your own satisfaction.   It's self-confirming, isn't it?  You don't need me to tell you what you saw.  Vince is just a story.  Vince is just one thought right after the other.  Click, click, click, but moving fast enough to create the illusion of permanency.  But there's no separate entity actually there.  It all a river.  How many rivers are there, Vince?"

HE HOLDS UP A SINGLE FINGER.  And then we both explode into laughter, deep, rich peels of laughter, with tears flying wildly; the gentle giant and the little badger, seeing and being Oneness.  Completely paradoxically, we are BOTH Oneness together. It doesn't even make sense.  It doesn't have to.  We are distinct, but we are not separate.  There is no separation anywhere.  None.

Namaste.

The Nondual Diary: Where are YOU? Part I

ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL METHODS OF INQUIRY I’ve used in helping a person begin to realize they’re not a person is with a slight turn of the traditional Advaita question of inquiry, “Who am I?”  Instead of asking you to use that inquiry on yourself, I facilitate, move into storytelling, and together we inquire together about, “Where are you?”  It’s a very logical progression that nonetheless seems to catch the mind by surprise, which I believe to be very helpful.  I think it’ll carry reasonably well into print, so I’m going to throw it out there to you, and see what kind of feedback I get.  If you find something like this helpful, please do let me know.  You can do that directly, publicly and anonymously (if you wish) by leaving a comment to the post, or you can do it privately by sending an email.  I’ll pop my email onto the end of this essay.  Don’t be afraid to use it.  My answers may be short or long, depending on what comes out.  Given that I’m really just the typist here, I have no control of it: my fingers do what they do until they don’t.  Then I go to bed.

I MAY HAVE TAKEN A STAB AT IT BEFORE, but I first used this inquiry in depth, completely spontaneously, about a year ago.  I tried it with one of my oldest and dearest friends, Vince Reese, who also lives nearby (in Columbia, SC).  Vince was drawn to me spiritually a long time ago, and has been coming to see me off and on for tea and talk for over ten years.  Over the last five years I had been slowly unwinding his belief system: he’d been a Christian fundamentalist or evangelical--I confess I don't know the difference, if there is one--for all of his days.  That was something I had no interest in pushing against, and felt no need to fix.  Everyone who comes here is welcome to be just the way they are, especially since they already are that way anyway.  But given my somewhat radical spiritual direction, if Vince and I were going to remain close, we were going to have to find a common language, and I had no plans to get washed in the Blood, so to speak.

ACTUALLY I WASN’T DOING that unwinding as some sort of project or plan.  In fact, I wasn’t doing it at all; it was just happening.  But I could see his beliefs begin to unravel as we went along.  Vince didn’t see it until he did.  He knew he was changing, but he knew neither how nor why.  Like most of us, including me, he probably thought it had something to do with his specialness.  In fact, he was slowly becoming more and more ordinary.  In spirituality, ordinary is good. I had no idea he’d come so far in this direction, and never once planned on it.  I just wanted him to begin to see the holes in his thinking, which would loosen him up, broaden him, and allow the mechanics of his life go a bit smoother.  You never know what God’s up to, I promise you that.

ON ONE SUCH TEA-AND-TALK OCCASION, I began to sense—to my total amazement—that Vince was really close to the edge of discovering his altogether obvious True Nature.  I didn’t really think he would “go over the top”, so to speak, but I decided to just throw out some bread crumbs and see if he followed, and if he did, just what might unfold.  I began to gently ply him with question after question, along the lines of the same ones I’ll print here.  And then suddenly, after somewhere between fifteen minutes and half an hour, he saw it!  All on his own he passed through the Gateless Gate! 

BOTH OF US WERE STUNNED, sort of frozen in timelessness.  We looked at each other across the living room in utter wonder.  I imagine my eyes were as big as saucers; Vince’s sure were.  And then we exploded into laughter, both of us.  We laughed so hard that we scared the dog, and Gus began to bark with us!  Maybe Gus woke up, too--who knows?  We laughed until we cried and then we laughed some more.  Vince now knew and he knew I knew what he knew.  It ranks among the finest moments of my life.  Here’s what led up to it, or something rather close.  For the sake of brevity, I've had to make it a little more of a story and less of a conversation than it actually was, but it'll do.  And by the way, the rather grisly nature of the inquiry was really just sport between two old friends.

“VINCE, WHERE ARE YOU?” I asked.   “I mean where’s the real you?  Can you find it?  Can you point it out?  Can you show it to me?  I mean, here we’ve been talking about Vince this and Vince that, so there must be a defined, separate entity here.  So you declare, but I can’t see it.  Thus I’m simply asking, ‘Where’s Vince?’”  He looked at me sort of blankly.  It’s not a question the mind has ever considered. 

[And how about you, the one reading this right now?  Do you think you are that body?  Do you think you are that mind?  Fine.  I’m willing to go along with that if you can produce some evidence.  Can you? If you can, you win the game.  But if you can’t, and I’m betting that you can’t, I’m going to suggest that the you-I-know-you-are is something more than you think, and that the you-you-think-you-are is something far less.  Let’s find out.  You play along, taking Vince’s role.  I’ll play mine.  Let’s have at it!]

 

“HOW ABOUT YOUR HAND, VINCE?  Is that you?  I mean, it’s certainly a connected part of that body, is it not?  So would you then go so far as to say that’s you?  Oh, I see, it’s part of you.  Fine.  Tell you what; let’s agree that it’s part of you.  Now, how about if you were in a car wreck this afternoon and God forbid, you had your hand cut off.  [All of Vince’s misfortunes are painless in our story, and bloodless too, so everyone can stop grimacing.]  But we rush you to an emergency room and they fix you all up, and I come to see you in hospital.  I ask you the same question: ‘Where’s Vince?’  You would still point to your body, would you not?”  He agreed that he would.  Vince is a highly agreeable fellow.  This is really helpful, since Vince is well over six feet tall and weighs in around the 300 pound level.  I am 5’ 9” on my tiptoes and weigh 170 soaking wet.  Nonetheless, I am a bit of a badger.

“BUT WHAT ABOUT THAT MISSING HAND?  Is it somewhere in a freezer, or burned up in an incinerator?  This morning you told me that it was you, or at the very least a part of you.  Now part of you—poof!—is gone.  Do you now feel like you’re less Vince?”  He said he didn’t.  “But this morning you were a guy with two hands and now you’re a guy with just one, yet you report you feel the very same?  That body is not the same, but you still feel the same, is that right? Fine. The Vinceness is still intact.  Okay then, I won’t push it yet; let’s move on.

“WE GET YOU FIXED UP AND OUT OF THE HOSPITAL, and then on the way home, God forbid again, we have another wreck and damn if you don’t lose the other hand!  It’s just awful.  So it’s back into the hospital with you, and I, ever the loyal friend, come to see you as soon as you can take visitors.  I don’t bring flowers or a card; I bring only a question.  “Where’s Vince?”  You awkwardly point at your body.  ‘Well, Vince,’ I say, ‘that body can’t be YOU.  Just a couple of days ago you said it was you when you had two hands.  Then you told me it was you when it had one hand, and now you’re saying it’s you, and you’ve got no hands.  Which is it?”  He had no answer for that one.  He’s a bright guy, and he could see he was being set up, but he didn’t care.  He trusts me.  We love each other.  He knows that if I’m going to “trick” him, it’ll be for his own good, and never for spite. 

[So, on we go with the show, only now, for a while here, it'll be just as it really occurred,  I'm going to be playing both sides, just as I did while Vince sat in my living room drinking it all in.  From here to almost the end of Part II, I am going to be telling a teaching story.  And you, the reader, are invited to do just like Vince did that day last autumn, and listen v-e-r-y carefully, okay?  You never know what might happen...]

To be continued…

Housekeeping Notes:

First, let me welcome Chile and the Philippines to the growing list of countries visiting Awakening Clarity.  They joins 42 other countries that are already helping to awaken Clarity.

Thank you for your interest in Awakening Clarity and this budding teaching. You can reach me with comments or questions at fredsdavis@yahoo.com.