How to Stand as Awareness: Guest Teaching by Dr. Greg Goode

This is the second in a series of guest teachings that I’ll be presenting.  I have several other people lined up for coming weeks, so if you want to get to know the Nondual teaching community, this will be a good spot to do so.  I hope this will prove fruitful for both teachers and readers; I expect that it will.  We’ll continue to reprint short sections from previously published works, to let readers see how well they resonate, and just to get a feel for what different authors are saying, and how they’re saying it.  At the end of each post there will be helpful links.

Today’s teaching is from Greg Goode’s 2009 book, Standing As Awareness.  If you are looking for a practical, yet brilliant introduction to Advaita’s Direct Path teachings, this is it.  The book is relatively brief—109 pages, plus an index.  Don’t let the length fool you; it’s far from being a quick read, but it is a wholly wonderful book; full of the wisdom and insight culled from a lifetime of intense study, meditation and inquiry.  Beyond the initial introductory pages shared here, which provide a complete teaching within themselves, the book’s format is question and answer.  Dr. Goode has heard it all, and answers with both authority and compassion.  He is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the teaching of Atmananda Krishna Menon and the Direct Path.  Let me go on record as saying that this post contains everything one needs to discover their True Nature.

Greg grew up an atheist among atheists.  He studied Western philosophy at California State University, went on to study in Germany, and holds both a Masters and a PhD from the University of Rochester.  In a seemingly chance event, he found his "heart opened" by a gospel song at a Christian auditorium event in 1986.  Afterward he joined a Pentecostal church and was a member for several years.  Meanwhile, he began to study Advaita, and then several paths of Mahayana Buddhism under established masters.  Decades later he’s equally comfortable with the language and teaching of either Advaita or Buddhism.  He teaches when his schedule allows, leads occasional retreats, and has recorded a DVD on the Direct Path, Illuminations, with Chris Hebard. Dennis Waite, editor of Advaita.uk.org, and author of Back to the Truth: 5,000 years of Advaita, calls Greg a master of both disciplines.  I call him friend and mentor.

Greg Goode is truly one of the pillars of Western Nonduality.  After more than twenty years of being at the forefront of the gathering Nondual wave, he’s been in many hundreds, if not thousands of satsangs as both participant and teacher.  He knows scores of spiritual teachers, and is a sought after speaker and teacher himself. He is both a working philosopher and an IT professional. Greg is married and lives in the New York area.  He has a new book coming out this spring that will be the experiential companion to Standing As Awareness, entitled The Direct Path: A User Guide.  He also has a new website coming out on emptiness teachings.  

Dr. Goode is patient, compassionate, and generous to a fault. Sadly for him, wonderful for me, he spends much of his free time answering my emails.

And now… 

How to Stand as Awareness

 by 

Greg Goode 

What is awareness anyway? 

Before talking about standing as awareness, let’s talk about awareness itself.  Awareness sees what arises.  Awareness sees what arises.  Whatever appears, appears to awareness.  In order for form, thought, feeling, sensation, time, space, unity and multiplicity to appear to awareness, awareness itself cannot be limited or defined by these factors.  Awareness is the single subject of all objects.  It is the formless that sees all form.  It is the unseen seer. 

Sometimes awareness is called consciousness.  The two terms are synonymous in this teaching. Sometimes awareness is called being.  This is to underscore that awareness is not nonexistence or voidness.  Sometimes it is called knowledge.  This is to convey that it is the antidote to ignorance.  And sometimes awareness is called love.  This is to emphasize its open, inviting, generous, intimate nature that is free from limitation and suffering. 

You can experience your being as awareness easily.  Whereas the teachings say that awareness is the seer of all that is seen, you experience seeing directly as happening in you.  You never directly experience seeing to happen anywhere else.  You don’t even “see” seeing.  It is much closer than that.  It always feels as though it is happening here.  It always feels like “I” am what is seeing. 

Awareness sees, and I see.  They are the same thing.  Awareness is the “I”, or as Sri Atmananda calls it, the “I-principle”. 

Awareness is not an object 

This leads to a realization that seems trivial now but will have transformational consequences later: since awareness or the I-principle is that which sees (since it is the subject of seeing), awareness itself cannot be seen.  Awareness is not an object, but the subject.  It is not the thing seen, but rather that which sees. 

The reason that this will prove to be transformational is that it will dissolve the seeking tendency that tries to objectify or behold awareness.  If you hear that awareness is your nature, it then becomes quite natural for you to want to bring awareness up close and personal.  You wish to zoom in on it before your mind’s eye, or behold it in front of you as though it were sitting on a plate. 

But awareness does not occur as an object.  Sure, you can think of concepts of awareness, utter terms supposedly representative of awareness, or see artistic renderings of awareness.  But notice that in each case, what is directly experienced is a concept, a word or a picture.  Awareness itself hasn’t been captured.  After all, even if you think about this in an everyday logical way outside the scope of nondual teachings, it makes sense: for there to be all these objects, there must be some subject for them to appear to.  Why should the subject itself be able to be an object as well? 

And then, if you think about this more deeply, it will make more sense—to examine something mentally or visually is what is done with objects; it can’t be done to that which sees objects.  You can’t catch this seeing in the act.  You can experience this inability at any time.  Just try to see awareness itself, or perhaps do the Douglas Harding experiments.  Each time, you will fail spectacularly! 

The more this difference between objects and awareness sinks in, the less one tries to prove awareness through looking at something special.  One no longer tries to keep awareness close, or grasp onto certain objects that are believed to be definitive of awareness.  There is great liberation in this! 

Awareness is always already there.  It is infinitely closer than any concept, term or image.  It is that open clarity within which these objects arise.  It is that in which they subsist, and that into which they subside.  It is present even when they are not.  It is the open, loving spaciousness of YOU. 

Quick tour of standing as awareness 

What if you took a stand, right now, as awareness?  Sure, it can seem that “everything is awareness” is almost a cliché these days, but what if you really treated this pronouncement, this recent cliché, as true?  Simply, you will discover that experience confirms your stand. 

At the beginning of one’s search, it certainly doesn’t seem this way.  It seems that experience is a very dualistic affair.  Experience, we are taught early in life, has a personal inner observer who gets in touch with outer objects through the means of the senses, and communicates through language to other inner observers.  There is an impassible barrier, we are taught, between in and out. 

Many years of this cultural conditioning makes this inner-observer model feel so convincing that it is rarely questioned.  This way of experiencing corresponds to a stand taken as the gross body.  You feel as if you’re the observer beholding a world outside.  As intimately related to a physical object (i.e., the gross body), you naturally experience the world as a large collection of physical objects. 

If you stand as awareness, however the world will be experienced as awareness itself.  Experience will no longer be felt as a dualistic affair.  It won’t seem as though experience is of anything or centralized anywhere.  “Experience,” as a word used by teachers of the direct path, is a synonym for awareness itself. 

How you stand determines your experience 

Experience usually seems dualistic, divided into an experience (subject) and that which is experienced (the object).  This subject/object duality is perhaps the most fundamental duality of all.  The two sides are related to each other.  How you see yourself affects how you see the object of your experience.  “What you be” determines what you see.  And vice versa. 

And yet not all of your experience seems split up into this dualism.  There are many times such as being “in the zone”, caught up in a beautiful sunset or exciting movie, or being in deep sleep, when there is no subject/object gap felt whatsoever.  At these times you stand as the zone, or the flow or the sunset or movie itself, which is another way of saying that you were standing as awareness. 

Throughout the day, throughout life, you stand as different things.  This “standing” isn’t necessarily something you do or necessarily the outcome of a decision or commitment.  “Standing” characterizes the relationship between you and what you experience.

       *  * * *  *

Copyright 2009, Greg Goode, Non-Duality Press

LINKS:

Greg's website: http://www.heartofnow.com/

To view or buy any of Greg's material at Non-Duality Press: http://tinyurl.com/73qhwgf

To view or buy Standing As Awareness on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/73ztdzs

To view or buy Illuminations on Amazon:  http://tinyurl.com/7reg4jt

To watch an excellent interview with Greg on Buddha at the Gas Pump:  http://batgap.com/greg-goode/

To watch an interview for Conscious TV by Chris Hebard: http://tinyurl.com/77cghm3

To watch a series of You Tube videos of Greg, by Roger Ingraham: http://tinyurl.com/7mwlgsm 

Housekeeping Notes: 

Let me welcome Colombia and Sri Lanka to the ever-expanding list of countries visiting Awakening Clarity.   There are now 59 countries joining us in consciously living in Clarity, and we’re seeing more international traffic than ever. We’ve also picked up some more subscribers this week, so let me thank you for that.  

Let me remind you that The Nondual Diary, where I’ll be holding forth, is back; once again it is holding down its own page.  If you’re inclined to keep tabs on it and you’re a mobile viewer, or a subscriber, you’ll want to visit the main site once in a while.  Posts stay until there is no more room, and then they disappear into the ether.  That in itself is a lesson for all of us.  The button to access NDD is right above the Buddha.

The Light of Knowing: Guest Teaching by Rupert Spira

This is the first of a series of guest teachings I'll be presenting in an effort to showcase current teachers and their work, and to bring the very best of Nonduality to readers of Awakening Clarity.  I will be reprinting short sections from the guests' previously published work, which will give you the opportunity to see how well you resonate with them, as well as allowing you a broader glimpse into what's happening in our community. 

Rupert was kind enough to agree to let me reprint this short chapter from Presence: The Art of Teaching and Happiness, which is Volume 1 of the groundbreaking, two-book Presence set that Nonduality Press brought out in the fall.  In my opinion it covers the most essential teachings of Nonduality in about 700 words.  With the succinctness of an ancient Zen sermon, and stunning Advaitic clarity, it's as fresh and powerful as anything I've ever read.  I recommend you read it more than once; there is deep wisdom here worth diving for.  As Greg Goode told me earlier this week,  "We read in a spiral.  Each time we circle back and re-read something, we see it from a more inclusive view." 

Rupert Spira is a major voice in Nonduality with a burgeoning following.  He was and is a lifetime student of Eastern spirituality.  Rupert studied varying teachers and traditions for two decades, especially classical Advaita Vedanta, and later began exploring the nature of reality with the guidance and friendship of Francis Lucille, who in turn studied with Jean Klein, the best known Western proponent of Sri Atmananda Krishna Menon's teaching in the Twentieth Century.  Rupert first brought his teaching public in 2008, with The Transparency of Being.  That book--a critical success as well as being enthusiastically embraced by spiritual adherents--shot the author to the upper tier of Nondual authors and retreat teachers.  The Presence books solidify his place as a major voice for our age.

Rupert has been quite kind to me personally, as well as generous in his support for Awakening Clarity.  I am blessed to count him as both friend and mentor.  Just as an aside, in a remarkable display of cosmic unity, Jerry Katz featured Rupert in today's issue of Nonduality Highlights, of which my review of the Presence books was a significant part.  Neither one of us had any (consciously known) clue what the other was doing anything today.  Go figure.   

And now... 

The Light of Knowing  

by 

Rupert Spira 

Q: You repeatedly say that awareness knows the objects of the body, mind and world.  You also say that awareness does not know objects, selves, entities, others or the world.  How do we reconcile these seemingly contradictory statements? 


The suggestion that awareness knows objects is a halfway understanding that relieves us of the belief that the body/mind is an independent entity in its own right, with its own capacity to think, feel and perceive.  Once this formulation has done its job of uprooting the previous belief in the separate existence of a subject and object, it can be abandoned in favour of the deeper understanding that objects, as such, are never truly known.


In time, of course, this new understanding also has to be abandoned and we find ourselves shining at the heart of experience simply unable to move away from it into the abstract symbols of thought that conceive of selves, entities, objects, others and the world.


So these two statements are not contradictory; the latter is simply an extension and a refinement of the former.


Imagine that the sun's light could see as well as illumine.


On a dark night the sun cannot see the objects of the world.  All there is for the sun is its own light shining in emptiness.  Only the moon can see or know the objects of the world at night.  However, the light with which the moon sees or knows belongs to the sun.


In other words, although objects are illumined, seen or known only by the moon--they are not seen or known by the sun--it is, at the same time, the sun's light with which they are seen.


Likewise, awareness does not know objects.  It simply shines in its own emptiness, knowing only itself.  At the same time, the light or the "knowing" with which the mind seems to know objects belongs to awareness alone.


And just as objects at night require the presence of the moon to be seen or known, so the apparent objects of the waking state require the presence of the mind in order to be visible.


Even though it is the moon alone that sees or knows objects at night--the sun never comes into contact with the objects themselves--nevertheless it is only the sun's light that is truly seen and only the sun that sees.


So from the point of view of the moon, there are objects; from the point of view of the sun, there are none.


However, the moon's point of view is an illusory one.  The light with which the moon views or sees the world is not its own.  Even when the moon seems to be seeing, knowing or illuminating objects, it never is.  It is always only the sun's light.


In order for objects to appear, the sun's light needs to be reflected off the moon.  Likewise, in order for objects to seem to be real in their own right, the knowingness that properly belongs to awareness alone, needs to be reflected off or refracted through the mind.


When the knowingness of awareness is refracted through the mind it appears as objects, just as when the sun's light is reflected off the moon, objects are seen.


What seem to be objects for the moon are, for the sun, for the sun, only its own light.  What seem to be objects for the mind are for awareness, only its own light of knowing.


However, we can go further.  What is that sees the moon?  The sun?  No!  The sun only knows or sees its own light.  What is it that knows the mind?  Awareness?  No, awareness only knows itself.


The moon is only a moon from the point of view of the moon.  The mind is only a mind from the point of view of the mind.


Thoughts, sensations and perceptions are only thoughts, sensations and perceptions from the point of view of a thought.


Awareness knows no such thing.  It only knows itself.  That is pure peace.

* * * * * 

Copyright 2011, Rupert Spira, Nonduality Press

LINKS:

Rupert's website:
http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/home

To view or buy Rupert's material, including exclusive DVD interviews, at Nonduality Press:
http://tinyurl.com/7e2sb2k

To view or buy Presence, The Art of Peace and Happiness (Volume I), on Amazon
http://tinyurl.com/7rka4sk

To view or buy Presence, The Intimacy of All Experience (Volume II) on Amazon
http://tinyurl.com/865a6op

To watch a great interview with Rupert on Buddha at the Gas Pump

http://batgap.com/rupert-spira/ 

To watch a series of fine interviews with Rupert on Conscious TV (search the Programme Directory)
http://www.conscious.tv/consciousness.html


[If you have published a book and would like to be considered for a Guest Teacher spot, please get in touch.  Fred]

Please note the return of The Nondual Diary, which you can access just atop the Buddha.  I'm updating that section regularly, so if you normally catch AC either by mobile or subscriber email, it might warrant your checking in to the main site from time to time.

Sri Atmananda Krishna Menon and the Direct Path

IN THE LAST COLUMN I SPOKE about how I came to find my feet on Atmananda’s Direct Path.  I took a large leap, however, in assuming that my readers know of him.   A year ago I’d never paid any attention to him myself.  I remember seeing his photo from time to time, and I'd heard the name, but I'd never looked into him.  Now, in one of the strange twists that Nonduality often takes, I find that he, or at least his teaching, is the star around which I orbit.  Let’s take a look at him now.

SRI ATMANANDA IS THE BEST KEPT open secret in spirituality.  He was born in southern India in 1883, just four years after the birth of Sri Ramana Maharshi.  The two of them, along with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, would become the holy trinity of Twentieth Century Advaita Vedanta.  Their impact is not only carrying over to this century, it is growing almost exponentially.  Much of today’s interest in Advaita and Nonduality as a whole is the result of what these three men left us.  "Men" seems too small of a word.  Regardless, given that I had been studying different streams of the Nondual river for a long, long time, and was well versed in the other two legs of the stool, why had I never looked into Atmananda?

THE ANSWER IS BOOKS, or the lack thereof.  In contrast to Ramana and Nisargadatta, whose teachings are a cottage industry in publishing, Shri Atmananda’s books are either all out of print, or very difficult to acquire, and thus effectively out of print.  This is not from a lack of interest.  His books fetch high prices in the used and antiquarian book trade. I’m a bookseller; I know.  I’m a consumer, however, not a seller of these titles, and all I can say is ouch!  What I’m told, by an expert, is that essentially the folks with the copyrights don’t feel that the books can be truly understood without the physical presence of either Atmananda or his eldest son, Shri Adwayananda.  Since both of them are dead (1959, 2001), it’s rather difficult to sign up with them.  And thus we are denied direct access to the Direct Path.  Ironic, is it not?

A THREE-VOLUME SERIES, Notes of Spiritual Discourses of Shri Atmananda, Taken by Nitya Tripta, are now made available by the combined efforts of Nonduality Press and the Stillness Speaks website (which is temporarily down).  It’s a wonderful resource and it’s inexpensive.  Here’s a link to a free PDF of it, on Dennis Waite’s website, http://tinyurl.com/8ybgwvy. Another link of interest is the Amazon page where the first of these books can be bought.  My review is also there if you’d like to read it. http://tinyurl.com/7ql8ert.  One more link is to a page that'll allow you to save a PDF of a selection from his most famous books.  They not the complete books, but they're nonetheless helpful. You want to right click on the link and then "Save link as".  http://tinyurl.com/88unyug

THE PRIME FOCUS OF ATMANANDA’S TEACHING, the reason it’s called the Direct Path, is that we start from the I-principle, from the position of our already being Awareness.  One doesn’t need to set out to discover yourself if you’re always already here.  To bring this home, Atmananda has us rigorously investigate everything.  From numii.net:

According to Sri Atmananda, it is absolutely necessary to know what you are and what your standpoint is, if you want to arrive at the right knowing, or to put it another way, to see the right perspective. It is not enough to only investigate the waking state for that purpose, because your experience extends also into the dream and into deep (dreamless) sleep states. Let us then initiate an investigation into these three states. You will discover that the I-principle (the true unchanging Self) is continuously present in each of the three states. The body, the senses and the mind are present in one state, but they are not there in the others. From that it follows that the I-principle is unjustly coupled with the body, the senses and the mind and that in reality it is independent of these three. That can be seen in the deep (dreamless) sleep, where it shines in all its bliss. You can see there that the pure Consciousness is a deep Peace. When you awaken out of the deep sleep you then say that you were happy (that you slept deeply and peacefully).

ONE OF THE REALLY SALIENT POINTS about Atmananda is that he spoke English, which is now very nearly a global language.  It is impossible to downplay the significance of this direct connection.  Neither Ramana nor Nisargadatta spoke English.  How important is this?  If you have read different translations of, say, the Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada, or the Bhagavad Gita, you understand the inherent imperfections within the art of translation.   We get the gist of what was said and meant, and it may be "enough", but by the same token, in spiritual teachings, a miss can be a mile. You don’t need to be a Sanskrit scholar to get the full benefit of Krishna Menon, nor dependent on the understanding and translation talents of another; you can simply read his own words, straight from his mouth to your mind.  Beyond this invaluable difference, the method of the Direct Path, because it begins at the end and works backward, so to speak, can be effective where nothing else has been. 

SOME OF THE CURRENT TEACHERS who are true authorities on the Direct Path teachings are Greg Goode, Francis Lucille, and Rupert Spira. There are others whom I'm not familiar with.  All of them are excellent writers and convey the message extremely well.  The Direct Path might be worth your looking into. Namaste.

Housekeeping Notes:  We welcome Slovenia as the 57^th country to visit Awakening Clarity. This is truly a global community now.

Some of you will notice that I did not, in fact, continue here from the last column with my own experience of the Direct Path, and that I dropped “Part I” from that post’s title. After some reflection, it did not seem prudent to go into any detail about my understanding or perspective of that just now. 

A note on language: Whether written as “shri” or “sri”, the word is an Indian honorific denoting a great guru. Because I always use “sri” for Ramana and Nisargadatta, I’ve chosen that form here for Atmananda as well.  Either would be correct. “Krishna Menon” can also be written “Krishnamenon”.  Again, either is correct; I’ve used the more common form.

A Short Report on a Meandering Journey to the Direct Path Teachings

I WANT TO MAKE IT VERY CLEAR that I am not even close to being an authority on Shri Atmananda Krishna Menon, the Direct Path that he left as a legacy, or, for that matter, much of anything else.  Surprisingly enough, I am loathe to report that I am even an authority on my own experience, because “my own experience” has become quite suspect.  I think I can, however, with full candor and confidence, report that I am becoming an authority on my own experience of experiencing.  That sounds like a clever little play on words, and in one sense it may be.  In another, it’s simply as close as I can come to getting whatever truth I have about this topic transposed into print.  Both your eyes and mine have inexplicably found their way to this page, so I guess we might as well move forward.

SCOTT KILOBY MOVED ME INTO this different method of experiential Nonduality.  He has his own vocabulary for it, and his way is very gentle and light-hearted.  He calls it Living Realization, and I totally recommend that e-book, that method, and that guy.  For the sake of full disclosure, let me say that I love the guy, so if you want an unbiased source you’ll have to shop elsewhere for it.  I should also mention that I may soon be helping others with this form of inquiry, through Scott, for a fee.  Think what you will; this is not a plug; it's a story.   

SCOTT'S USE OF THIS TYPE of inquiry was unlike anything I had encountered in almost thirty years of exposure to different paths, all of them falling under the large umbrella that we call “Nonduality”.  I was not new to inquiry; not at all.  Twenty years ago I had some good fortune with the Zen koan, “What is your Original Face”, which I read somewhere could be interpreted as “Who am I?”  That's all I had to go on, but with a train load of passionate application, it proved to be enough to at least allow me to briefly see over the wall.  What a lucky stumble to have found that interpretation at that time.  It’s hard to believe, but everything you see on the Internet and via Amazon, and even with a well stocked Barnes & Noble store was generally unavailable not too long ago.  I was living in Portland, Oregon, which is as open a city as they get in America, and yet I missed anything outside of Zen.  I got an email from Chris Hebard yesterday where he talked about how things were as recently as 2007, when he started the website Stillness Speaks, compared to now, in early 2012.  It’s an unrecognizable landscape.  I got a quick peek at Myself, as they say, which was enough to permanently change some of  my core views and beliefs, and keep me fueled for a long, long time. 

TEN YEARS LATER I READ ECKHART TOLLE, and then explored the many Awareness teachings that fundamental exposure led me to.  I did an enormous amount of reading and inquired once again--this time using better instructions--into“What am I?” I already knew, of course, but since I thought I knew, that right there was all the evidence needed to prove that I didn't know.  Present, conscious seeing/being is all that counts.  Memory will not serve us there.  While using inquiry via Ramana Maharshi’s instructions, I also fell under the giant spells of first Nisargadatta and then Ramesh Balsekar.   Once again grace shined out of nowhere and onto nobody, this coming back in the early autumn of 2006.  There was more than a peek this time.  There was quite a profound awakening.  

AFTERWARD, HOWEVER, I WAS LEFT rather flat-footed.  I didn’t have a teacher, I didn't know what to do next, and I’m not sure I really did do much over the next few years, other than chase my tail.  The rare exception to this tail chasing was my reading Consciousness is All, followed some time later by a dear friendship with the author, Peter Dziuban.  Peter gave me absolutely nothing to hang onto.  It was like he had dropped me into a glass bottle and told me to climb on out on my own.  I scrambled and fell, and scrambled and fell again.  Peter, though his book essentially suggested I check to make sure the bottle was really there.  I’d never thought of that.  If I had to point to a single thing that encouraged a second large awakening, about fifteen months after the first, it would be that book. (Yes indeed, I am citing "cause" in a causeless universe!  I don't mean it very seriously, but I do mean it!)  Peter has been a mentor to me for several years now.

HOWEVER, I MANAGED TO OVERCOME all of that wonderful stuff and go back to chasing my tail.  Incredible, is it not?  Has this happened to you?  If it hasn’t, it probably will.  If it has, you’ll understand my frustration and suffering as the pendulum swung first to me, and then back away.  Walking the truth trail makes us fess up the most embarrassing behaviors, does it not?  I would chase along, thinking I had it, then fall back into knowing I didn’t have it, for several years. It wore me down,

A BIG BREAKTHROUGH CAME in the way of another important book to me: Living Reality, by James Braha.  James and Sailor Bob Adamson, in tag-team combination, snatched me out of my head and popped me right back into that same bottle Peter Dziuban had put me in, but from which I had sadly escaped--only to find myself outside of the bottle trying to find a way back in.  Living Reality was that way.  James and Bob gave me absolutely nothing to cling to. Once you have had a large spiritual experience, even though it's a thing that comes and goes, it is very, very difficult not to cling to it.  The natural egoic movement is to want to own it.  I had it, I own it, and it was all for me, even though the signature knowledge that arrives with such an event is the absolutely-sure, no-doubt-anywhere, utterly-self-confirming knowledge that the I who is now doing all this claiming does not, in fact, exist.  It is a marvelously ingenious bit of delusional trickery.  Hats off to Maya.  You have to see it in hindsight for yourself to even believe it is possible.  

WHILE READING LIVING REALITY, there was yet another theoretical awakening “event”, by which I mean some imaginary clouds appeared to thin.  And then, writing back and forth to the kind and generous James Braha, I hit a point, I hope, of no return.  As before, I couldn’t unsee what I had seen, but now, I also couldn’t unknow what I knew.  What the difference is, I couldn’t tell you.  But it was a new spot, at least in a relative sense. However, oddly enough, I seemed to get stuck in it.  I can't tell you anymore than that, because I don't know anymore than that.  What I am telling you is that awakening is more of a beginning than it is an ending.  It is the end of compulsive seeking, but it is only the start of a journey Home.  I think it fair to state that this includes virtually all of the seemingly sudden and/or "unsought" awakenings we've all read about. I can tell you this as someone who may still be in the wastelands, but who's having a hell of a good time anyway.  Do I suffer?  Yes.  Often?  No? Very much?  No.  For very long?  No. Did it used to be different?  Oh my God, yes.

SOMEWHERE ALONG IN HERE I came to feel that there really was more of something available.  I don’t mean the elusive “seeker’s more”.  There was nothing compulsive about it; it was more just a sensing, and a feeling that I should follow up on it.  If my timetable is a little skewed; so be it.  I couldn’t swear to you when one thing arose and another subsided.  I’m telling it as memory feeds it to me, but I’m quite sure it’s not reliably accurate.  We all do the best we can.  What matters is that I needed a push or a pull, and I couldn't provide it by myself, to myself.

IT WAS AT ABOUT THIS TIME that I contacted Scott and my world would never be the same.  Scott gently showed me that I was still fast asleep in some key areas, even though I was functioning from a relatively high degree of overall awakeness.  I can’t explain that.  I doubt he could either. You have to allow me to use standard language, and just assume I’m aware of all the conflict and paradox in describing this.  I am.  But if I’ve got to bridge every word or phrase back to some point of Nondual purity, we’re not going to get anywhere.  So I won’t be the Language Police if you won’t.   

I LEARNED FROM ALL OF THESE MENTORS that “awakening”--given  that I had apparently fallen out of it!--is about right here, right now.  I know I just referred back to some dates, and those are nostalgic reference points to some lovely spiritual experiences that came and went within time and space, and were indeed, in a conventional, provisional sense, markers of some breakthrough events.  But just like Peter and James before him, Scott didn’t let me continue to glom onto them.  Scott introduced me to something new to me, however, that certainly not everyone needs, but that I needed, and still need.  Something similar may have been available to me before, but you can't see it or hear it until you can. Scott gave me a way to stop—again and again—the compulsive urge to make present seeing into a victorious story of the completed spiritual journey.  It is the great killer, as James Braha might say, of genuinely living reality.  Those past spiritual experiences of mine—or yours—are as dead as last week’s flowers.  

TO COUNTER THAT GRASPING ATTACHMENT, Scott introduced me to the most powerful and immediate inquiry I’d ever encountered.  I deeply love and respect Byron Katie.  Her inquiry has also changed my life and brought me tremendous relief from suffering; her picture hangs on my office wall.  This inquiry, however, was different, at least for me.  If I had to describe the results of this method as opposed to The Work, I would say that “larger chunks” fell away from me faster.  It cut very deep very fast.  Again, I am at a loss to illuminate this any further; you’ll have to try it yourself and see if it works for you.  I'll cite some books at the end of the concluding post that can help anyone who might be interested.  Of course it goes without saying that this is all heavily colored with Fredness, which is all I can ever report. Your experience may be completely different; you can then write your story about it.  This is mine.

THE KEY TOOL FOR DIRECT PATH INQUIRY, at least in my limited experience, is the body.  All suffering is ultimately due to a sense of separation, of a belief in a "me in the container of the body", which may remain long after the belief in a separate me has passed.  I still have some; I'm a difficult case.  Don't make me let it sound like it's not been successful.  It has, in spades. Scott used my mind and body to pierce the illusion that these trapped feelings were actually me, or mine.  In my first phone conversation with him we might say that a giant iceberg calved.  Release flowed.  I was freed of the worst suffering I had ever known.  All in the space of forty-five minutes.  I was hooked,

 

Housekeeping Note: 
I've sort of fouled up some announcement via creative editing, so just to make sure I don't leave anyone out, let me say again that we welcomed Nepal, Croatia, and Serbia, as our 53rd, 54th, and 55th countries to join us in helping to awaken Clarity this week.  Thanks and hello to all of you everywhere!

Sunday Morning

 

Quiet. Still.  I am reading Krishna Menon, Rupert Spira, and Francis Lucille.  Central heat sings white noise.  Cat warms my thighs; a lap-robe floats over my knees.  It has been a noisy week internally.  For this moment, mind is open; willing to listen rather than talk; to rest rather than run. 

Presence.

Absence.  

Sun breaks through a front window and the glass book-weight shows off its diamond quality.  Light; always there is the light.  Eyes shut.  No light.  Only outpouring void, no-thing; the source of both its extreme children, and their offspring, the 10,000 things.

Stars shimmer in the morning.  Ocean crashes into the living room.  A flock of wild birds fly overhead, then land on the bookcase and begin preening each other.  The chair wraps its arms around me in a movement of total acceptance, absolute love.  Chair, cat, lap-robe, books.  A cup of tea steams.

  http://tinyurl.com/lnffg3

Housekeeping Notes:   
Let me welcome Serbia as the latest country to visit us.  It is the 55th country to join us in helping to awaken Clarity.  Please note the inclusion of a new link in the Black Holes, Red Giants post, which directs you to a video of the Known Universe.  The link came to my attention via the very fine website, Nonduality America, and is sponsored by the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.

On Winnie the Pooh and the Value of Mentoring

THIS IS A POST THAT’S LONG OVERDUE.  I simply want to share my experience; that doesn’t make it a prescription for anyone else.  I don’t have any idea what I am supposed to do until I’m in the middle of doing it, so I sure can’t know what’s right or wrong for anyone else.  Yet a lot of you have written me about the living of Nonduality on a day-to-day basis, and what you might be able do to awaken either initially or more deeply.  All I can do is share what I’ve done that’s apparently worked, and what I’m doing now.  I hope it helps.

I WAS HOT ON THE TRAIL of the Most Obvious Thing for twenty-five years before it showed itself.  I felt like Pooh and Piglet on the trail of a fabulous Woozle.  They’d found tracks underneath a tree, and between them they decided it must be a Woozle.  They followed the tracks for quite a long time.  First there were the tracks of one Woozle, then of two, and finally they seemed to be tracking a whole crowd of the beasts!  They kept spotting where the Woozles had been—the tracks in front of them grew more and more numerous.  Yet try as they might they could not even catch sight of the Woozle!  You could say that they were stuck in the second frame of the Zen ox-herding pictures.  They were (1) in the hunt, and they had (2) found the tracks, but they just couldn't seem to get to (3) which is catching a real glimpse of it.  Sound familiar?

WELL, ALONG COMES AN OUTSIDER, one Mr. Christopher Robin, who has a completely different view.  He doesn’t just have a different viewpoint, he has an entirely different view.  Christopher Robin is up in the high branches of a tree from which he can clearly see that Pooh and Piglet are circling!  They are following their own footprints, and the more they track, the more difficult the journey becomes.  Christopher can see that his friends are not following Woozle footprints at all, and they can search until the end of time, but if they don’t change what they’re doing they are simply never going to Glimpse the Woozle.  This is not a personal judgment about Piglet and Pooh; it’s an entirely impersonal fact.  Being a good and kind fellow, as well as being In-the-Knowing, Christopher alerts his friends to their fundamental error.  The whole thing rather frightens Piglet, who runs off to safety.  Pooh stays behind to talk to Christopher, who climbs down out of the tree so that he can help his old friend figure things out.

“I have been Foolish and Deluded,” Pooh said, “and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.”

“You’re the Best Bear in All the World,” said Christopher Robin soothingly.

“Am I?” asked Pooh.

THE ANALOGY SHOULD BE CLEAR; I won’t belabor the point.  What I can tell you from my own experience is that I Woozle-hunted on my own for quite a while.  Through pure grace I caught a good glimpse of the Woozle and more.  And then I spent more than three and a half more years circling the tree anyway!  I can’t think of a better way to put it.  In January of 2010, now two years ago, I finally realized that yes, I could do this thing by myself.  Absolutely I could.  But not very well.  I finally went out looking for help. 

I LUCKED INTO TALKING TO ADYASHANTI on the phone via his radio show a couple of times.  He gave me some really valuable help.  I then saw him in person in Asheville, where he may have mostly endured me, but he heard me, and a couple of weeks later he addressed via his radio show precisely what I needed to hear, but had so poorly approached.  One of the things about moving from spectator spirituality to active spirituality is that I put myself out in the open.  I was no longer safe, because I was no longer living in the make-believe world of my head, where everything I thought was right and pure and wise.  I quickly discovered that in the real world I was extremely vulnerable.  Frankly, I didn’t like that aspect of things, but as Adya always asked, “Are you more interested in truth or comfort?”  To my surprise I found out it was truth.

ADYA WAS A GREAT PLACE TO START, but it would’ve been a poor place for me to stay.  He can’t be my real hands-on teacher; he can’t be a real one-on-one mentor.  If he was local things might be different.  He's not, and he's already involved with many thousands of people. Thank God for the Internet.  Understand: I live in South Carolina, a state that is not known for progressive anything.  People here still spend time pondering the American Civil War (1861-1865) and reliving grievances; I swear to you that’s true.  I live in a little duplex in a rougher section of town.  I’m not well-to-do and I hate to travel.  I’m essentially a hermit who is fortunate enough to have found a female hermit to throw in with.  Nonetheless…

I WON’T PLAY NAME-DROP WITH YOU, but my email inbox would probably astound you on some days.  I say that because it astounds me on a regular basis.  Above and beyond all else, I am just a guy.  Not a special guy, not a wired guy, just a guy guy.  In the two years since I first reached out into the night to Adyashanti I have become friends with half a dozen of the sharpest teachers in Nonduality that Earth has to offer.  They kindly and generously mentor me.  Even accidentally they throw me bones I didn’t even know existed, and which I never would have found on my own.  I’m in consistent, sometimes quite regular, sometimes not, contact with all of them.  I’ve tried to help them where I could.  I’ve actually tried to be of service to them first.  That policy has served me well, so I pass it along with a gold star beside it.  What they have done for me is immeasurable.  I am still walking around the tree a bit, but I’m looking up at the sky, not down on the ground for imaginary Woozles.  Give an outsider with a removed view a chance.  They just might change your whole life.  They’ve certainly changed mine.

(This post is dedicated to Dr. Greg Goode, who is a being with deep wisdom, unbelievable patience, and an abiding love for this Way.) 

On Black Holes, Red Giants, and Incense Burners

LET ME SAY RIGHT AWAY that I’m mentally at work on a column on inquiry that I hope to have up in the next few days.  It’s been a really interesting week in that regard and I want to share it.  It needs a bit more gel-time, however, so I thought I’d pop this up, since it was also on my mind, and promises to be a shorter and easier way to give you an end-of-week hello.

I'M A BOOKSELLER BY TRADE, so it’s sort of like shooting yourself in the head to see how a breeze might feel up there, but I’ve acquired a Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet.  In my defense, I don’t plan to use it much. if at all, as an e-reader.  For me, it’s a bed-sized computer.  My wife, Betsy, wanted more company in bed, and at our age she wisely figured out the only way to get it was to put a computer in there.  Sure enough, I’ve risen to the bait.  I can net-surf, and I can watch Netflix and You Tube from something larger than my iPhone while being stretched out instead of hunched over my PC, which is the way I spend much of the rest of my day.  We don’t own a regular TV, thus we don’t have cable, or satellite, or even an antenna.  We do have a non-signal-receiving monitor and a DVD player, so we’re not totally out of the loop, but we’re playing on the edges of it, that’s for sure.

LIKE ANY GOOD PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL, I am watching my share of The Office and animation.  “Animation” is what grown-ups call cartoons.  I also read graphic novels.  “Graphic novels” is what grown-ups call comic books.  I find The Office smart as well as funny, and yes, I like cartoons and comic books, particularly of the super-hero variety.  Go X-Men!  I have a thing for mutants.  Who would have guessed it?  Not me, I promise you that, but then again, I’m not the one calling the shots here.  And heck, when I’m dead, what will it matter?  That’s another way of saying, “What does it matter now?”  If you care that I read such stuff it would probably be good to ask yourself why. 

I AM ALSO WATCHING SCIENCE PROGRAMS, and I’m particularly taken by a series called How the Universe Works.  It’s a Discovery Channel offering, and once you swallow the presumptuous title, it’s very good.  The scientific animation is excellent; the astronomers pretend to be on the same playing field that we are, and we get to see and hear about some great stuff.  The Big Bang episode is incredible.  They tell you all about how, “Something the size of a pin head, but with incredible density, held all of the energy that would make all of the matter in the entire universe.” You can no more get your head around that than you can the loftiest aspects of the teaching.  The mind stretches and stretches, and then it stops, dumbfounded.  And then, just like with the teaching, it says, “Okay, let’s play like I understand that.  What next?”  If there’s not an intuitive jump, there’s just a belief-making process.  Which is fine of course, it’s just odd to see its genesis arising from science instead of religion.

SO, IT OCCURS TO ME THAT THERE MAY NOT really be all that much difference between that kind of science and this kind of spirituality.  They are both stories.  They are both pointing toward a higher, weirder thing.  It’s more a matter of language than any fundamental disagreement.  The big tip off for me was when they said, in reference to the Big Bang which animation showed us, “And this is when space and time began.”  That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.  Mine is quite similar.  The last time I heard, they don’t burn incense in astronomical observatories.  I don’t do high math.  Call it a wash.  I like to think that perhaps Nonduality is where science can meet religion and both of them can give up some of the ground of their belief systems for the sake of truth.

THERE ARE A LOT OF SCIENTISTS who end up coming over to this teaching.  That’s serious inquiry.  That’s real honesty and humility, too; I admire that very much.  Quite a few of them end up becoming teachers; they are the driven ones.  They are not into spectator spirituality.  Neither am I.  I wonder if many people leave this teaching to go become scientists?  I doubt it. A lot of people hit the teaching later in life; you can't really reverse that trend. If you don't go all out for science early on in life, it's unlikely you'll ever get far with it.  I’d like to be an astronomer, or a physicist, something like that, but I left off at college algebra; I don’t think I could qualify to do more than sweep and dust around the telescopes and labs.  I could probably skip a small scientific calculator across the top of a still pond, but I don’t think I could do much else with one.  Oh well.  Maybe this DNA will blow in that direction the next time it shows itself around Planet Earth.  I’d like that.
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe/

Housekeeping Notes: Let me welcome Nepal, as the latest country to visit our blog.  It joins 53 other countries who are already helping to awaken Clarity via this project.  

A New Year in the Dream

WELCOME TO THE RECENTLY RENOVATED DREAMTIME, which is now designated 2012.  It is of course a wholly imaginary distinction, but this is the great thing about truth: it’s wholly inclusive.  We can have our reality cake and enjoy the dream as well.  The experience here is that sometimes I feel like I have one foot in the relative world, and the other in the absolute.  At other times it’s more like having both feet in one or the other.  Regardless, there is never any lengthy confusion about what is really going on, by which I mean the verbness of Oneness.  I confess to still experiencing a keen sense of Fredness on a regular basis, but even in that situation there is no enduring footprint.  Flash anger, fear, or anxiety can and do arise, but soon enough they are followed by a restabilization of reality, and the deadly seriousness of things is again dropped.  Peace returns to where it never left.

BETSY, MY DREAM WIFE, and I have had a fine first day of Dreamtime 2012.  We’ve been on staycation this weekend, which means we stay in town, sleep a little later than usual, eat a big, lazy breakfast somewhere, do a bit of pleasant, smallish shopping, take our Golden Retriever for a long ride in the Subaru, then come back to too many brownies, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and movies watched from bed.  This time around we did a few household chores together as well, which sort of transforms them from being chores into something more like organized, goal-oriented play.  All that really matters is that we are alone together for a long stretch of time.  That is heaven.  That word doesn’t actually even touch it.  What I am putting into print are common, ordinary events.  They are, however, seen from an extraordinary view that we magically share, as if we somehow inhabit the same skull, and she is the right eye, and I am the left.  Of course we do not inhabit a skull or a mind at all; both occur within the One that is somehow seen as “us”.  While on one hand we are indeed the apparently split halves of the Taijitu (yin yang), we are simultaneously and emphatically Not-two. 

WE HAVE BEEN TOGETHER BETTER THAN TEN YEARS NOW, and have a burgeoning love that has always been built around mutual acceptance and respect.  That recipe cannot fail to sprout adoration, which I assure you is plentiful around this home.  People on the outside see us as blissfully blossoming.  From our ringside seats here on the inside, it is experienced as wildly exploding. We are like twin quasars shooting from opposite points of the universe, meeting and joining in the amorphous, borderless, no-thing where eternity meets infinity. The teaching has had a tremendous effect on us as individuals, and us a couple.  Forty years ago we both did LSD.  That is all we know to compare this present happening to, though I want to make it clear by doing so we acknowledge we are using a rather profane image to illustrate something sacred.  We become so intimately bound, or merged, or however one could try and fail to describe it, that we know there cannot be any further movement; that surely this—this day, this conversation, this moment is it.  And it is.  And then somehow it grows anyway.  We sit having tea sometimes and look at each other in wonder: “Can you believe this?” one of us will ask? The other can only shake their head.

LET ME POP IN A COUPLE OF QUICK NOTES on the teaching as it continues to unfold here.  Next week I’ll be in video satsang with Francis Lucille.  He is a very bright light of Advaita, having been a long-time student of Jean Klein, who was the Western master of Advaita in the 20^th Century.  I’ve been aware of Francis for a long time, but had somehow managed to not study him.  Not too long ago I broke down and bought a set of DVD’s of a retreat he did in 2008.  It’s called Dialogue Excerpts; is really wise and wonderful, and is available from Stillness Speaks, Non-Duality Press, or Amazon, where I’ve reviewed it.  I am also reading his splendid book, Eternity Now, which I have yet to review, but I plan to rave about it in print soon.  Francis is Rupert Spira’s teacher, another bright light about whom I am equally enthusiastic.  Their message is essentially the same, but it comes through different filters, so it can strike the reader differently as well.  In my opinion, both are examples of awakeness operating at a very high and rare level.

BACK TO DREAMTIME 2012.  I’d wish that all your dreams come true for you this year, but I see that they are already doing so.  We always get what we want most.  As we are divine reflections, how could it be otherwise?