Interview with Enza Vita

Enza Vita lives in Adelaide, South Australia, where she and her husband Leo Drioli own and operate Inner Self Magazine:

Play or Download link:
http://nonduality.com/enzavita27april2013.mp3

Here is a listing of the tracks:

In the first hour (1:16:38, to be exact) there are blasts of static throughout the interview. If you find the static makes the interview hard to listen to, you may read a transcript of the first 1:16:38 here: http://nonduality.com/enzavita.htm

You may skip to 1:16:39, where the last hour is static-free.

0:00 – 4:43 Enza’s first interview. Husband Leo Drioli. Australia. Meeting Enza at SAND. Chatting, talking about Enza’s name.

4:43 – 17:52 Born in Italy. Going to Australia at age 17. Alice Springs. Coming from Solarino, Sicily. Growing up in Solarino. Feeling different growing up and having various boundary dissolving experiences that were outside the normal thus making her feel isolated. Several experiences described growing up and talking to different people in order to understand them. Trying to be normal. Discovery in Alice Springs resonating with childhood activity and being a sign she should stay in Australia. Family dinners in Sicily.

17:52 – 24:09 Family dinners in Solarino remembered and described. Enza being up on the roof to get away. Stories. How much of nonduality is stories? Awareness introduced.

24:09 – 30:36 Continuation of the discussion on going to Australia at age 17. Not speaking English. Dealing with her dad who didn’t want to let her go. Living in Alice Springs for two years. Reading at the library. Seeking. Trying to understand her experiences.

30:36 – 35:54 Nature of Enza’s seeking. Moving to Adelaide. Meeting her husband Leo Drioli. Making herbal potions. Studying naturopathy. Seeing teachers. Discovering Nisargadatta’s I Am That. Also Ramana Maharshi, Dzogchen books.

35:54 – 46:15 All the teachings having flown through Enza, being part of Enza as guiding energy. Current connection with Chogyal Namkhai Norbu. Remarkable story he tells that connects directly with Enza’s childhood experience. Experience with Zen breathing/meditation teacher that led to an opening up. More about resonance with Chogyal Namkhai Norbu stemming from her childhood. Mystery of it.

46:15 – 57:29 Being meditated, significance of. Paradox of getting from here to here. Enza learned to describe her knowing out of questions from her husband Leo. Not having anything to teach. Waiting for the next step as a teacher to become clear. If there were no questions she would have nothing to say.

57:29 – 1:01:58 Waiting for space to open to start teaching. Needing a reason to give teaching. The breast feeding story/analogy to giving a teaching.

1:01:58 – 1:13:11 Terms consciousness and awareness discussed. Coming from consciousness compared to standing as awareness. “I am” as consciousness. Nature of awareness itself. “Dark radiance of pure awareness.” Nature of “I am” and how to realize. Why isn’t the “I am” awareness promoted in today’s nonduality circles?

1:13:11 – 1:16:38 Suffering at the level of relative truth and as inseparable from absolute truth. Embracing both. Practice of presence. In teaching, starting with where a person is at.

ON THE TRACKS BELOW THERE IS NO STATIC:

1:16:39 – 1:21:08 Enza changes phone. Chatting about coffee and karaoke. Casual chat. Enza talks about her memory not being too good so she doesn’t remember what we were talking about before she switched phones.

1:21:08 – 1:27:34 The event of dropping away, non-separation, or shift in perception, or looking and seeing that she was everything. Everyone is already looking in this way. As a searcher or seeker you are looking for something other than this non-separation. Spiritual people resisting that Enza had this realization. This was seven years ago.

1:27:34 – 1:34:16 Is this realization a big deal? How the initial realization played out for Enza. Not talking about it openly for a few years. Role of meditation in facilitating realization. Not necessary to meditate as a practice. Enza having an inner knowing that this lifetime was for self-realization.

1:34:16 – 1:42:55 Enza feeling that a rope from within was pulling her toward “something” and that it was inevitable. Having trust. Nature of honoring that tug toward the inevitable. Relaxing into the spacious knowingness or “I am.”

1:42:55 – 1:48:15 Talking about awareness alone could be boring as it is not the complete picture. Nature of the separate person. We don’t need thoughts to know the sharp lucidity. Yet the mind is used to carry out the business of discussing awareness.

1:48:15 – 1:55:15 A space between the words. I ask Enza if she reads any current books. She says her memory is no longer photographic as when she was young. Things don’t stick around, even in the middle of speaking. Silence as the default stand. Her husband Leo keeps her exteriorized. How Enza is engaged in the world. Living in the body.

1:55:16 – 2:07:00 We talk about the Science and Nonduality Conference (SAND) U.S.A. 2012, where we met. Enza suggests a SAND for Australia. I talk about the group in Nova Scotia I’m involved with. Mind grasps perspectives. The activity in satsang where the teacher tries to get people to shift perspective toward non-separation. Enza’s experience addressing her husband’s questions. Headlessness.

2:07:00 – 2:16:50 A natural approach to self-realization compared to forcing it, yet can’t dismiss the more forced approach. The nature of being interviewed. Is anything happening? Awareness in movement and awareness still. Ramana Maharshi on deep sleep. Enza’s out of the body experiences as a kid and energetic experiences as an adult. Enza rehearsing as a backup singer for her husband Leo’s band which is opening for the Dalai Lama’s upcoming appearance.

Visit http://EnzaVita.com

Amazon.com link

Review of What Am I? A Study in Non-Volitional Living, by Galen Sharp

Review by Jerry Katz

Galen Sharp blends Zen, quantum theory, the teachings of Douglas Harding and Wei Wu Wei (Terence Gray), but never does any one of those teachings dominate his landscape. It’s always the exercises, the Reality Meditations, that are up front, making the reader the real subject of the book. The question, What am I?, is for the reader to investigate. It’s always that question that’s in the forefront of this book, not the author or his sources.

This book is a workout for your process of attention. It’s an attention gymnasium. There’s lots of exercise equipment in the form of the Reality Meditations. There are also ubiquitous reminders of why you are at this gym: to find out what you are.

A few quotations from the book give you a further sense of what to expect:

“Moving into reality has nothing to do with strict disciplines, or religion, or New Age pseudoscience. It is not learning something new and mystical, but looking openly at what is here-and-now and discovering it for yourself. It is something you can do as you go about your normal daily round. You don’t have to change anything about yourself or our life.”

“True liberation requires no effort and no willpower, no special principles you have to remember to apply. It causes no guilt and requires no faith. It requires nothing but watching — simply your attention. That is precisely why nothing else has really worked for you. Everything happens by itself.”

“It all boils down to where your thoughts come from and where your actions come from. Is any of it really from you or your ‘doing?’ How could it be? Can you see how the ‘loss’ of ownership of these things is actually liberation?”

“We will soon be forced to move from the dualistic Newtonian world model to the true nondual reality.”

“This New Reality must be personally witnessed, personally explored and observed deeply and thoroughly in your own experience to manifest in actuality.”

Galen Sharp is a teacher who stands his own ground, well-seasoned within a world of nonduality that barely knows him. But I’ve known about Galen Sharp through his writings since almost the day I went online in 1997 and began looking up stuff on nonduality. At the time there was one website which stood as a model for my own vision of an internet nonduality. It was Peter’s (I never knew his last name) now defunct sentient.org. (Use the Wayback Machine to enjoy past versions of the site.) Galen Sharp was one of a handful of featured authors/self-realized beings. In that way he was, and remains, legendary.

Galen Sharp offers a view of nonduality no other current teacher can offer. This is a seasoned view from someone who has seen it all and been a part of it all. Galen has been immersed in the teachings on nonduality for over thirty years. He studied personally with the legendary Wei Wu Wei, was friends with Peter, knew Douglas Harding, and even met Paul Reps. To use a generational analogy, if Galen Sharp were part of the Beat Generation he would have been best friends with Kerouac and Ginsburg. I highly recommend getting to know Galen Sharp, but mainly yourself, through this book that I know you’ll love.

Amazon.com link

Interview with Galen Sharp, author of What Am I? A Study in Non-Volitional Living

Galen Sharp is a sculptor and author. In the 1970′s he began a correspondence with the brilliant and enigmatic non-duality sage Terrence Stannus Gray, who wrote under the name Wei Wu Wei, that was to last several years. His teaching was to completely transform Galen’s worldview and life. Galen is the author of What Am I? A Study in Non-Volitional Living. His book and his other interests may be researched at the following sites:

http://www.tandavapress.com/
http://galensharp.com/

Contents of the Interview

0:00 – 2:52 Self-Introduction by Galen. Early life. Search for a philosophy of life.

2:52 – 9:38 Christian upbringing. Gospel of Thomas discussed including story about Wei Wu Wei’s involvement with the GoT.

9:38 – 17:38 Spiritual breakthrough that happened beginning at age 18. “Reality could be one’s ideal.” Life as an artist. Questioning who and what he was. “What’s it going to take to be happy?” Self-image realized to be a concept. Seeing nondual expression in the Christian Bible.

17:38 – 20:48 Discovery of books by Wei Wu Wei. Paul Reps mentioned.

20:48 – 24:03 Nature of Galen’s spiritual adventure back in the 60s compared to a nondual adventure in the internet age.

24:03 – 29:54 Galen’s book What Am I? briefly discussed, more on Wei Wu Wei. Paul Reps discussed and weird and fascinating things he did. Sixties spirit evoked. “LUCK!”

29:54 – 35:08 Story about Douglas Harding and Paul Reps relationship. Mountain Path magazine.

35:08 – 38:32 Douglas Harding discussed. “Kelloggs All Bran.”

38:32 – 43:31 Workshop associated with “What Am I?” Seeking venue in the Denver area for workshop. Connie Shaw from Sentient Publications mentioned.

43:31 – 56:17 Peter Reese from sentient.org discussed. Vicki Woodyard mentioned. Encouragement of Peter.

56:17 – 1:03:17 David and Natasha Rivers, and Tony Cartledge mentioned. Galen’s book further discussed. Nature of volition and non-volition. Doing and not-doing. Being quoted as an author.

1:03:17 – 1:17:25 Galen’s long marriage. Galen’s sculpture work and its Zen-like nature. Details of the process of sculpture including creating a mold and bronzing and the world of sculptors in the area of Loveland, Colorado.

1:17:25 – 1:25:42 Wei Wu Wei re-visited. Precision of his writing. Wei Wu Wei’s discovery of Nisargadatta. Ramana Maharshi discussed. Humor in nonduality. Lewis Carroll.

1:25:42 – 1:43:06 Killing the ego and Zeno’s paradox. Fear. Can you find a self? More about Wei Wu Wei. “Hot is not hot, therefore it is called hot,” explained. Obviousness of nondual nature of reality. Conclusion.

Our most recent Nonduality Network Talk Radio show may be heard at nonduality.net/6nov2013.mp3

Featured is a clip from a talk by Adyashanti: “We are in our essence unborn.” Meditation as a death, and opening the eyes to experience as “a display of the unseen.” Realizing our purpose.

Also a live interview with Adyashakti (Mark Canter), author of the newly published Awakening to the Obvious. “In short, nothing about me as a personality could be called extraordinary. Yet this does not detract from the matter at hand: I do understand my original nature, as described in Buddhist and other mystical teachings of the past twenty-five centuries. I have seen beyond the limits of conventional identity, into the open nature (free capacity) of consciousness itself. This book offers no special doctrine the reader can adhere to. ‘The Great Way has no back,’ said the Chinese sage Lao Tzu. ‘Thus, it cannot be followed.’ However, the essays herein may help you to reconcile with the inherent mystery of life as it is, and thus be one with (no longer at odds with) the Great Way.”

The next two issues that I edit (today’s and Tuesday’s) will primarily be devoted to one of the founders of Nonduality Salon, a pioneer in both online nonduality and real life communal living, David Hodges.

We begin with a recent article from David posted to his Reddit nonduality group at www.reddit.com/r/nonduality. This will be followed by Part One of an interview with David, along with photos. In Part Two we’ll conclude the interview and show you more photos.

photo: David Hodges

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What is a spiritual hacker?

by David Hodges

There is an image of hackers in the movies as bad characters or evil geniuses who can unlock even the most secure computer systems, and to defeat them you need a white-hat hacker on your team who can do the same.

However, within the computer community, the term “hacker” is generally a term of praise. Good hackers are heroes of resourcefulness. Computer hackers can cobble together programs to do just about anything out of parts of other programs. The whole open-source movement was created by hackers who were less interested in making money than in providing valuable programs to the hacker community. Linux is the hacker’s operating system. I speak as a computer programmer, for whom there is nothing more satisfying than a good, ingenious hack.

Do-it-yourself hackers can hack together a robot out of a Roomba vacuum cleaner, a Kinect game controller, a raspberry Pi, and some open source control programming.

Musicians increasingly are hackers of sound, cobbling together remixes and mashups using GarageBand and ProTools.

So what is a spiritual hacker?

If a person wants to put together a coherent, meaningful spiritual life, and if they don’t want to go down the line with a mainline church, or if they are a refugee from organized religion, then they can now go the hacker route.

Spiritual hackers can cobble together a spiritual framework for themselves out of the plethora of ideas, discussions, articles, posts, tweets, facebook groups, and so on that are available now.

Just because you are a smart person, steeped in technology, doesn’t mean that you can’t have a deep spiritual connection. Just because your rational brain rejects what you see as the mythologies on the trashheap of spiritual history, doesn’t mean that you can’t construct a viable alternative.

There are many paths to God.

The hacker’s path is now, at this time in history, the one to watch. And NonDuality is the spiritual hacker’s Open Source operating system.

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photo: David Hodges in hat. Vermont during the building of communal home.

Interview with David Hodges

The following questions come from each of the Highlights editors, Gloria, Mark, Dustin, and Jerry:

Q: How/when did you experience nondual awakening/insight? What was your spiritual background or reading/research on the topic?

It was in the spring, around 1999 or 2000. I had driven about 45 miles from my home to visit my mother, who was ill. I was in my car, on my way home, Madonna’s “Ray of Light” on the CD player, when something gave way. It was like a balloon popping and suddenly the skin of my small self wasn’t there. Instead everything was just happening on its own – the landscape on the side of the highway rushing by, the music flowing from the car’s speakers, my hands, looking strangely foreign, on the steering wheel.

I stayed in an expanded state for several days. When I slept I had lucid dreams. Everything had flipped. The world was full of self, while inside me was just emptiness. It was glorious to just take a walk and feel that the trees had awareness and that everything was made from consciousness.

This was a big deal in my life and a lot of things changed for me after that.

In answer to the second part of the question, I was raised a Christian but had become interested in the NonDual approach when I read R.H. Blyth’s “Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics” in high school (except I didn’t know the term NonDuality then). I considered myself a spiritual seeker for years. I started meditating in my 40’s and found the Witness state pretty quickly, and felt energy moving in me when I meditated. When the Internet came along I discovered some kindred spirits in the Kundalini mailing list, among them Jerry Katz, Harsha Luthar, Berit Ellingsen, and many others, and was one of the first to jump with Jerry to his NonDuality Salon group. I learned a lot about self-inquiry then. Jerry helped me during that crucial period when I walked around asking myself “Is this I AM?” I would come to awareness with this question in mind a hundred times a day. And it was then that the experience in the car happened that pretty much ended my spiritual seeking, but led to other things opening up for me.

Q: How has your investigation evolved?

It’s a paradox. I just don’t believe my personal self is that important anymore, yet the Self that is the Absolute (Atman in Brahman) insists that I keep working on the personal self. It’s a continual deconstruction. The impermanence and downright inadequacy of the personal self keeps getting shoved in my face. I suffer when I don’t get it or resist it.

I keep getting nudged to move in the direction of devotion. NonDuality and Devotion is a tough one for Americans but very familiar to those who were acolytes of a guru. How can a Western NonDualist practice the yoga of devotion (bhakti yoga) without a belief in a personal creator god? That’s my paradox right now. Because in my heart of hearts I feel a lot of praise and thankfulness.

Q: What does surrender mean to you?

Surrender means “No Resistance”. When faced with oppositional energy from someone or some situation I try non-resistance, the way a martial artist might. Then the oppositional energy often is deflated or transformed into
something good.

Surrender also means I stopped having anything to prove. I stopped trying to perfect myself. I prefer to be whole, with a lot of flaws, than to aspire to perfection, which is a recipe for making oneself crazy. Surrendering the personal will means opening up to the incredible manifestation power of the universe. So many things have manifested for me at the right time, that trying to exert will to make them happen seems pointless.

Q: How do you feel that nondual insights have affected the machinations of your daily life, particularly with respect to how you handle conflicts in your work life and interpersonal relationships? Is there a way that you bring your nondual insight to bear in your interpersonal relationships?

Since I came to know that there is nothing to defend, I stopped being defensive in conflict.

Since I came to know that there is nothing to be made perfect, I stopped trying to be right in an argument.

But, I muck about in relationships like everyone else I guess. I am learning to be more open, more honest, to communicate my needs better, but I am still an amateur at that.

I think that since my NonDual realization I have become more conscious of love. Not romantic love, but love as a basic flow between me and just about everyone I come in contact with. I mentioned devotion previously. I think in the NonDual sense, Devotion means following the love energy. But that doesn’t mean all relationships are hunky dory. Living in community, you don’t always get the best side of people. And you accept the fact that they are going to see you at your worst from time to time. Projections, shadow stuff, baggage, button-pushing – yeah, all that happens to me and to my community-mates. But also good communication, sharing, connecting, working together, laughter, trust, caring.

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David’s Facebook page will draw you further into his life, his writing, his photography, and his spirit:

https://www.facebook.com/DavidDHodges?fref=ts

In the second part of the interview, David talks about Yoga, his journey to community, Reddit and gaming, nonduality itself, and the global picture.

photo: Community

This is Part Two of an interview with David Hodges.

Part One may be read at http://nonduality.org/2013/11/23/5093-saturday-november-23-2013-editor-jerry-katz/

First, here is a recent writing by David:

Postulates of Hacker Spirituality

Postulates:
That the self is an illusion
That most of us believe in the reality of the self, to our detriment
That belief in the reality of the self causes suffering
That awareness is all there is
That awareness gets projected and forgets itself
That meditation drives awareness back into itself
That the self is actually feelings, emotions, thoughts, perceptions.
That much of the determinants of our behavior (our choices, our life patterns, our “fate” are not known to us
That there is a finer more subtle order that can be perceived in awareness though most do not take heed of it
That this subtle order contains the gross order
That this subtle order is computational, not caused
That this subtle order’s algorithm is “god”
That this subtle order is sourced from an even more subtle order that contains it
That there are many pathways between the orders
That we as humans combine levels in an evolving way
“All the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind.” -Eckhart Tolle
That awareness is beyond the mind
That the subtle order in awareness is beauty, love, creativity, joy, peace
That by recontextualizing these postulates become self-evident
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Interview with David Hodges. Part Two.

Q: Talk about your interest and practice of Yoga. What kind of yoga? Do you still practice? What are its benefits for you?

Well, I am about a month away from being certified as a Yoga teacher. The longest series of classes I ever had was in Iyengar Yoga. The teacher was gifted and I learned a lot. I have also been exposed to Ashtanga, Anasara, and Yin Yoga. But mostly I have been trained in what I would call Kripalu yoga, as many teachers here in the Northeast U.S. are Kripalu trained.

To me, spirituality arises from the body and the emotions. Yoga frees energy (prana, or chi, or kundalini) and gets it moving. Often when I am doing yoga I revisit that state where ego disappears and then the yoga is just doing itself. (I call this state “up-time”). I often have had what you might call mystical experiences during yoga, or visions, but I don’t have to make a big deal about those. They come and they go. I like the physical benefits of being more flexible and more balanced also.

Q: Your move to Vermont, the construction of a home, the creation of a communal way of life, is fascinating. What inspired Outermost Village Green? What does it take to manifest such a vision? How does the vision of the community compare to the reality so far?

This is a huge topic. I’ll limit my answers to a NonDual perspective since I have written about this stuff in other venues. I was aware of communes in the 60’s and 70’s and even visited a few but had no desire to live in one. This changed years later during the period of my awakening. My heart opened to others the more I realized that my own self was nothing special. And then, after Realization sank into me, I began longing for a deeper connection to people, and the result of the longing was the manifestation of community.

You ask, “What does it take to manifest such a vision”? There’s no magic formula but it didn’t happen for me until I found one other person with the same desire and commitment as me. She is one of my best friends, and during the whole process of founding the community neither one of us wavered in our commitment. That made it possible. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t her. It was manifested via our partnership

Q: I like the collection of books that inspired and guided you in your “journey into community.” What are a few nuggets from them you could pass along?

– The importance of weekly community meetings
– The importance of consensus decision making. Majority votes turn some members into losers and we don’t want that. So consensus has to be found for every major decision.
– Everyone contributes. Everyone is recognized with attention.No one is a loser. each finds his or her own mission.
– If someone shows initiative, that has to be rewarded. Community supports the individual, as much as the individual supports community.
– The importance of not taking in people out of pity. People in community need to have strong lives and they have to be centered, they can’t be in need of rescuing or they can pull the whole community down. Caveat: there are some communities whose mission is to help people in need. That’s different. So you have to be hard-headed. I had to ask one guy to leave because he was kind of a well-meaning deadbeat. It was a good decision and I don’t regret it.
– There are phases that people go through in starting to live in community: First is inspiration and excitement and idealism. Then comes the phase where you start to see people as they are and the community as it is and disillusionment sinks in. There might also be times when you feel everyone is in on something that excludes you, and you feel on the outs. Finally you get past it and somehow become part of the flow, and that’s when you find true community.

Q: What is surprising you most about this journey to community?

I guess I could say that what is surprising me the most is how difficult (but worthwhile) some of the adjustments have been that I have had to make. I didn’t expect to be turned inside out but I was. There has been huge spiritual benefit in that. It was like a death and rebirth. What has made it easier is that I have not had to defend some false nothing of my self.

Other surprises:
– How much of community life centers around food: growing or raising food, preparing food, sharing food, cleaning up after, hanging out in the kitchen.
– How rewarding it is to work together on projects. Whether it is splitting and stacking firewood, or weeding the garden, or getting the house and grounds ready for a summer party, we work well as a team and I enjoy the camaraderie a lot.

Q: How did your experience in chaotic and unmoderated Nonduality Salon email forum prepare you for your current communal life, if at all?

Online community is quite different from real-life community so I would say it didn’t prepare me. But what NonDuality Salon did teach me was how a so-called spiritual movement could have such a wide umbrella and encompass so many shades of expression. And how most realized people are far more colorful and cranky and ornery and loving than their un-realized counterparts.

Q: Talk about Reddit, Gaming, the online world, and their relationship to NonDuality.

I’ve been an active online participant for 20 years, even before the web came along. I started out in the world of email discussion groups and Usenet. I think the online world teaches us how fluid identity can be. We can adopt many online personae, and we find that our persona can change depending on whether we are on an email list, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. We also find online how easy it is to construct reality. There’s been an explosion of cultural formation since the internet really took off. In gaming, this goes even farther, as we construct an avatar and then that avatar proceeds to have adventures in different kinds of worlds. Gaming has a lot of common culture that is seeping into real-world culture more and more. (Visit http://reddit.com/r/outside for a taste of how gamers talk about “regular” i.e. “outside”, reality).

This brings me to Reddit. This is a place that combines the chaotic, free-wheeling nature of the early NonDuality Salon years with gamification. (In case you haven’t encountered this term, “gamification” is where elements of game culture like earning points, badges, and rewards, are used to make an activity more engaging.) So, on Reddit, you earn karma points by posting links, and you get karma points by commenting. You can also up-vote or down-vote other people’s submissions and comments, which affects their karma score as well. This motivates you to participate more, as there is something magical in watching your karma score rise. A great thing about Reddit is that each sub-Reddit is moderated by volunteer moderators and so the commenting usually avoids flame-wars and such (I myself am the moderator of reddit’s non duality sub-reedit).

I think NonDuality is the perfect spiritual model for the Internet age. The NonDual model of relative vs absolute reality, and the shifting impermanent nature of the self, fits well with people’s modes of being online. Standing in NonDual awareness is a much better stance for the online world, than the dogmatism, rigid belief, I’m OK-You’re Not Ok, and Exceptionalism that characterize a lot of conventional religious life today. The online world’s spiritual practice is that of the hacker. (In this post I talk about spiritual hackers: http://bit.ly/18RgLPG)

Q: What is your vision of the future of humanity?

I love science fiction, so my vision is informed by many sci-fi books. I believe that humanity as a whole is evolving spiritually, and that the overall evolutionary thrust is propelling many to NonDual realizations such as I had. A term that I like for this process is recontextualizing.

Humankind as a whole had to recontextualize their place in the universe after it became accepted knowledge that the earth was not the center of the universe. Similarly, as the knowledge and experience of Nondual oneness spreads, people will recontextualize their identity and their sense of self to a much wider context.

Meanwhile science and technology keep evolving as well. I think that we will reach a stage on Earth where we are ready to leave earth and take to the stars. This will mark our transition from a Type 0 to a Type I civilization (see the Kardashev scale, http://youtu.be/67fPHOYqD3w and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale ). By the time this happens, the overall level of consciousness of humanity, as a result of recontextualizing, will be quite a bit higher (See David R. Hawkins work, esp. “Power vs Force”) With this perspective, I believe that our job (you and me and our tribes communities) is to help this evolution along by undertaking whatever tasks are presented to us that have meaning. In my life path, that task has taken the shape of learning to live in community and harmony with others by dropping family, clan, tribe, or national allegiance in favor of a global, if not galactic, allegiance. In some way, in my visionary moments, I like to think there is a direct line from my little community in Vermont to the lift-off, on some glorious future day, of the first colony destined for the stars.

Q: Big thanks to you David for your clarity and scope of practice and vision.

Outermost Village Green (many more photos):
https://www.facebook.com/OutermostVillageGreen

Nonduality Reddit page:
www.reddit.com/r/nonduality

David on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/DavidDHodges?fref=ts

photo: Dustin, left, and James, at CKDU 88.1 FM in Halifax

Nonduality Network Talk Radio is on the air today from 12:30 to 1:30pm EST. Listen at ckdu.ca

My guests will be Dustin LindenSmith and James Traverse. Dustin will update us on what’s new in his busy life as a stay at home dad to three young kids, and as an observer of certain aspects of modern culture.

James will talk about his recent participation and attendance at the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Shanti Fest. We’ll play clips relevant to the Fest and conversation will be lively with us three guys.

A recording of the show will be available around 6pm EST Wednesday, at nonduality.net/27november2013.mp3

Here are relevant links for today’s show:

James Traverse’s Power of Here
soundbeings.com
suryachandra.net
nonduality.net

We’ll resume taking/making on air phone calls next week. Meanwhile, if you have an audio clip up to 3 minutes of anything related to nonduality, send it to me and we’ll play it on an upcoming show. It can be music, talk, a poetry reading, a meditation, a teaching, a reading from you book, a comment about the show, a question, whatever you think is relevant.

Nonduality Network Talk Radio: Your show.

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http://awakeningclaritynow.com/a-spiritual-teacher-named-willy/

A Spiritual Teacher Named Willy

by Fred Davis

These days our spiritual teacher is an eighteen-pound Tibetan Lama named Willy. He is a two year old Lhasa Apso, and he exploded into our lives fourteen months ago to show us close up what a life lived in abiding enlightenment really looked like. He has done precisely that, and taken our hearts in the process. I would say “stolen,” but the truth is that we have given our hearts over to him freely, spontaneously, without his ever asking us to do so. We could not fail to love such a radiant spirit.

Traditionally, Lhasa Apsos were the guardians of Tibetan monasteries. Their job was to alert the monks and huge Mastiffs to the presence of outside intruders. I hear they did a really good job, and delivery men to my house would hasten to agree. From what I have seen, however, in between attempted attacks and burglaries, one would have to assume the fierce guardians spent a lot of time in lama laps and holy kitchens begging scraps from the cook. Everyone needs some time off.

Legend has it that when a resident monk died, his soul went to live in one of the monastery’s Lhasa Apsos. Something like that is clearly the case with Willy, and it would appear, that he has got himself a real lulu of a house-guest, not just a Lama, but a former Dalai Lama or something. You don’t get much clearer than Willy.

Naturally comfortable in the present moment, Willy needs zero adjustment time between changing events, locales, or laps. Whoever is around is a prize, and whatever is happening is absolutely wonderful. He never met anyone he didn’t love, although he does seem adverse to my sister-in-law’s cowboy boots. Maybe they’re someone he knew in his previous life.

What Is works for Willy, no matter what form it’s taking, provided that form is not a possum. Even the clearest of us have our personal challenges, and possums are Willy’s. Nonetheless, his experience of a possum is lived out vertically rather than horizontally. The beast is seen and challenged, there is a flash of teeth and the sound of a bark, but the beast is not actually attacked.

Once either the possum or Willy has been removed from the field of near-battle, Willy is content to let bygones be bygones, and quickly forgets all about it. I confess, however, that I have upon occasion found him sniffing at the trail of a formerly adversarial marsupial as though he was planning to hunt him down. I get it. I’ve been known to exhibit that sort of behavior myself. I’m all for making a big show of bravery once the coast is actually clear.

Willy has got meditation down pat. That dog can sit for hours and never complain about either his knees or his obsessions. He puts me to shame in both departments, but I can still soundly beat him out in the spiritual inquiry department, because Willy has no questions! Everything just is as it is; he wastes no time longing for, or fretting about imaginary alternatives. He knows that in the end there is just This.  THIS This!

In that same way, Willy never asks if he’s enlightened, or if he should be, or if he used to be, or if he will be again. He simply lives fully as whatever it is that he iswithout looking for either imperfection or lack in himself or the world.  Willy knows thatWhat Is represents the culmination of all that has ever been. There’s no understanding it, so he doesn’t try.

Willy has never once asked, “Why me?” in regard to his having been locked away as a child in a kill shelter, through no fault of his own, and given just seventy-two hours to either raise bail or die. I wasn’t there, but I’m willing to bet that he was living every second to its fullest while he was in the slammer. He wasn’t waiting for anything. And of course someone came to his aid before the clock wore down, finding great joy by bringing great joy.

Willy has never wanted to know why such a cute, sweet, innocent little dog such as he is had such a hard lot early in life. The vet said that he’d been treated kindly, but had come from a disadvantaged home, meaning they had more love than money. I think that’s a fair trade. When he first took over our house he had worms, a bald spot on his back, no hair on his belly due to malnutrition, and was more than a mite skinny. Yet he was as happy and grateful as he could be, because he was not comparing his lot or his life to anyone else’s.

If I had to use just one word to describe Willy, that word could only be Love. That Love’s expression are the Joy and Gratitude that erupt spontaneously and volcanically all day and all night. Even in its sleep that little body stretches and rolls, clearly intoxicated with the luxury of simply being alive, of simply having a body when nothing at all was due him.

Scratch his haunches, and Willy will strain upward to lick you in thanks. Kiss him and he will kiss you back—mind the tongue. Throw a stick and he will chase it joyfully. He’s not very good at bringing it back, but he is a marvelous chaser. Willy plays to his strengths.

So, can animals help to clear us up spiritually? Can they show us how to live in loving clarity on an ongoing basis? Oh yes, you bet they can!  And do. In fact, they willautomatically do so if we don’t resist them. Kind of like enlightenment, we have to want truth more than we do our victim story. If we do, then we will surely find it. Wecan’t not.

Over the past ten years, my two cats Henry and Dickens, have changed my whole outlook on and experience of the world. My guardian angel, Miss Betsy, mother and best friend to all of us, has given us a model of Goodness to admire and emulate. She has shown us Love in action.

And Willy? Oh my. His is one of the Hundred Thousand Names of God.

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Colin Drake

Dear Fellow Explorers, Firstly I would like to welcome the recent buyers of my books from www.nonduality.com Here is a piece I wrote in response to a blissful day of sitting with Isaac Shapiro where we were exploring the (potential) bliss of embodiment.

Enjoyment or Renunciation?

 by Colin Drake

Many religions and spiritual paths have urged their followers to go beyond bodily pleasures, by renunciation, to achieve spiritual growth. Others have denigrated the mind as being only useful for worldly pursuits and of no use in discovering the Absolute Truth, instead lauding the state of ‘no mind’ where the thought process is suspended, or the various samadhis which are trance like states involving transcending the normal thinking process. However, I will argue that physical embodiment as an instrument of Consciousness is a wonderful process entailing the possibility of thoroughly enjoying its manifestation, the world, with all of the senses and nervous system bestowed on the human body. Moreover, the human mind is an amazing device, our onboard computer, which is quite capable of delving deeply into the nature of the Absolute Reality.

Much of the urge to renunciation is historical, stemming from eras when physical life was a lot harder than it is today and thus the possibility of physical enjoyment was greatly reduced. So much so that The Buddha declares that life is suffering and therefore:

Buddhism maintains that the main purpose of life is to overcome suffering. The Buddha stated that, ‘One thing I teach is suffering and the end of suffering. It is just ill and the ceasing of that ill that I proclaim’.[1]His primary teaching to achieve this was the Four Noble Truths (suffering, its cause, that it can be overcome and how to do this), described as ‘the most fundamental and basic teaching of Buddhism’.[2]The cause of suffering is craving and clinging, which has many aspects one of which is the sense of self-attachment, that is, attaching to ‘phenomena or sense objects as self or as belonging to self’.[3]To overcome this, Buddha suggested the Eightfold Path which centres on the concepts of anatta, no-self and anicca, the impermanence of all things. Once one has realized that there is no essential self and that all things are ephemeral and impermanent then there is truly no one to crave and nothing which is permanent to which to cling.[4]

However, he also realised that too much austerity is counterproductive and that the achievement of trance-like states did not result in awakening:

On discovering that aging, illness and death are integral in all human life he was deeply shocked and on seeing a sadhu who had renounced the world, in an attempt to transcend this suffering, the Buddha was inspired to do likewise. He studied under many teachers rejecting all of their techniques as capable of achieving trance states but incapable of giving liberation. It is said that, after six years of ascetic practices the Buddha realised the futility of these and, after taking a meal, sat under the Bodhi tree where he vowed to stay until achieving enlightenment.[5]

This resulted in him preaching ‘the middle way’ between renunciation and over indulgence, and the use of the noble eightfold path to overcome craving and clinging.

The teachers that he studied under would have been from the various Hindu (and possibly Jain) sects, many of which still champion the path of renunciation. This has also been promoted by Christianity and Islam which can be demonstrated by studying the lives of many of their saints. Even now the Catholic clergy is meant to remain celibate and there are many monasteries around the world whose inmates live in austere (and sometimes even spartan) conditions. The opposition of Christianity (and up to a point Islam) to bodily enjoyment is starkly shown in the following from Romans Chapter Eight:

Judaism, on the other hand, has always taken a very different approach extolling its followers to enjoy life in the body:

This concept is supported in the Talmud, the Jewish book of law, which states that ‘every person will have to give an accounting for all the good things created on earth that he, or she, denied himself, or herself, from enjoying’.[6]Men and women, who are made in ‘God’s image’ (Genesis 1 v.27), are enjoined to participate and take pleasure in God’s creation. As Rabbi Benjamin Blech says: ‘God decorated His house so magnificently that Judaism believes He takes it personally if you don’t share His excitement and joy in everything He has put on this earth’.[7]

I suspect that the difference is that Christianity and Islam have always stressed the afterlife and that this life is purely a stepping stone to heaven (or hell), whereas:

In the Torah there are no explicit references to a “world to come” nor are there any statements referring to an individual judging of souls… Intriguingly by the time you get to the Talmud, approximately 1800 years ago, you find that most of the words used to describe the afterlife come from the Greek … Most Jews in the US – almost 85 per cent – belong to branches of Judaism which do not accept any sort of afterlife.[8]

Judaism also regards man as an ephemeral manifestation (from dust to dust), animated by the breath of God which is created as the servant (or instrument) of the Divine to enjoy and continue with His creation whilst caring for others who are also his servants.[9]

This ties in very well with the discovery that we are all instruments of Consciousness through which That can sense, experience and enjoy its manifestation as the physical world (Consciousness in motion, or motion in Consciousness). This realization can take place by directly investigating the nature of our moment-to-moment experience, which reveals that at the core we are Pure Awareness, Consciousness at rest. This investigation entails using the mind in a logical way to analyse experience and its components and many further discoveries can be made with such an approach when combined with insight and intuition. For evidence of this see the many articles which comprise my four books on awakening.

Once one has realized one’s essential identity then the world is seen with a clear mind uncluttered with existential angst and self-concern. Thus it can be perceived in its full glory with heightened senses which are unimpeded by judgements and evaluations. This leads to the true joy of embodiment where sensations, sounds, sights, aromas, tastes, emotions and feelings are deeply (and often ecstatically) experienced.

Compare this with the life of renunciation in which the world, and its experiences, are avoided leading to a stunted life, through which Consciousness does not avail itself of the full human experience. In fact I would suggest that rather than: ‘So that those who are in the flesh are not able to give pleasure to God’ preferable is its complete opposite: ‘So that those who are in the flesh are able to give pleasure to God’ or: ‘So that those who are not in the flesh are not able to give pleasure to God’. In fact one needs to give mind/body and ‘spirit’ equal importance and nurture them both. This is backed up by the Isa Upanishad which says:

To darkness are they doomed who worship only the body, and to greater darkness they who worship only the spirit. Worship of the body leads to one result and worship of the spirit leads to another. They who worship both the body and the spirit overcome death and achieve immortality.[10]

For as I say in Beyond The Separate Self:

A study of the world’s religions reveals two major themes concerning the purpose of creation and the function of humanity. It is suggested that the Absolute, consciousness at rest (pure awareness), created (or manifested as) the universe for Its enjoyment and so that It could know Itself. For when consciousness is totally at rest It has no objects to be aware of, and thus no form of experience is possible; so the only way for any enjoyment to occur is for the ‘potential energy’, latent in the Absolute, to manifest into cosmic energy and thus the universe. Then instruments are needed to ‘sense’ this manifestation, so that these sensations appear in awareness, which is the function of all conscious organisms.

As far as ‘knowing Itself’, It needs some form of mechanism, such as the human mind, which is capable of self-recognition; and this is what occurs when we realize our deeper level of being which is this pure awareness itself. For this realization appears in the mind and thus in awareness itself. Thus the human mind/body has the function of attaining self-realization and enjoying existence in order that the purpose of creation is fulfilled. This enjoyment of existence is greatly enhanced by seeing and experiencing the world ‘as it is’, that is by encountering it totally and directly rather than through the filter of the mind. This occurs only when we identify at the deeper level than body/mind so that the mind’s opinions, judgements, interpretations, etc. are seen for what they are, ephemeral thoughts coming and going in awareness itself. As one deepens one’s identification with pure awareness the mind stills and then the world is encountered directly, with ‘no mind’, and is experienced as it truly ‘is’. A Hindu term for the Absolute is Satchitananda, which can be translated as: Sat-‘what is’ (the manifestation), chit- the awareness of ‘what is’, ananda- the bliss of the awareness of ‘what is’.

In fact once one relaxes into pure awareness one can actually feel the bliss of embodiment through the sensations in the body, a subtle throbbing of the life force, and through that which is detected by the other senses. This bliss is present in every moment and can be detected by bringing one’s whole attention to the sensation in question, without any ‘second thought’ about the sensation and what it could mean or without relating it to any ‘story’ of oneself. This culminates into being totally in love with the whole of existence, a love where the beloved is always present as there is no separation between the lover and the beloved. The lover being the deeper level of pure awareness, consciousness at rest, and the beloved being the surface level of manifestation, consciousness in motion. In this contextSatchitananda becomes: Sat –the beloved, chit- the lover beholding the beloved, ananda - the bliss of the lover beholding the beloved.

The corollary to this is that when one achieves self-realization, recognizing that at a deeper level one is pure awareness, then this is the beloved beholding the lover. The beloved being the surface level of mind/body, the manifestation, realizing the deeper level of consciousness at rest, the lover. This completes the cycle of the Absolute using the mind/body to sense, experience, interact with and enjoy its manifestation, and also to recognize (or ‘know’) Itself.[11]

So to do justice to manifestation in the body we need to cultivate both body and spirit and this cultivation leads to experiencing the full joy of embodiment and of self-realization.

~ ~ ~

Colin Drake’s ebooks are available here.

The Nonduality Highlights

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New from Nonduality Magazine:

Interview with Diane Musho Hamilton

Excerpt:

…when you met your teacher Genpo Roshi, what happened with your development? Did anything transpire?

Diane Musho Hamilton: Yes I would say there were two things maybe more, but just in terms of my own path, what happened was that Trungpa had died and a kind of scandal involving the Regent Osel Tendzin ensued. Because of that scandal at the time, I simply differentiated from that lineage and for a period of seven years I had a child, who was born with Down’s syndrome. I was practicing in a much more, I guess nurturing way, and raising a child and dealing with my own grief. This was my practice at that time. I was integrating everything I had studied to that point and I would stay with my child 10 or so years into that and like many teachers and students in the West, I would say it was a bit of a smorgasbord of practice where I was exposed to some nature practices – to earth based Native American practices. I did yoga and kundalini and the whole spiritual market place, but my fundamental practice was really raising my child at that point.

Then this appetite for formal practice just arose spontaneously. I felt that meditation drawing me again, that deep stillness; that deepest enquiry into that dimension of who we are. It was kind of pulling at me and I knew that I wanted to study with a master and I wasn’t so concerned with which lineage, but what I wanted was a genuine lineage master. It could have been a sufi or a zen or Koeren zen master but it was at that point that I met Genpo Roshi. So I would really really credit Genpo with first of all creating a space in which my own reality deepened because his zazen was so stable and so committed just being in his presence and his sangha. I was also introduced to the soto zen lineage, the rituals and the ancestors. The way in which you have probably heard that Tibetan Buddhism is referred to as the complete Buddhism, and that zen is referred to as the essential Buddhism, and the way to use an integral phrase – the lower rite of practice the forms. I was introduced to the beauty of those forms as the formalism of Japan as you know is unparalleled; the way that they work with the robes and the way that they attend to the lineage master. So I was introduced to the forms and the beauty of Japanese zen and Genpo Roshi held the practice for the sangha. He had a monastic practice here at the time but it had a permeable boundary. The monks were very inviting of the lay people who wanted to practice; people who were questioning and people who were confused. There was a bit of a swinging door of how welcome people were to participate in those forms. So I learned a lot from Roshi how to hold the practice for others. So I would say that transmission was extremely important in my own development as a teacher.

And then finally I also participated in koan study. Koan study is one of the main ways that I interact with my students, which comes more from the Rinzai line, but Maezumi Roshi was more recognized in both the Rinzai and Zen schools. So finally I began to work with this process called big mind. He started to use what we might call a contemporary form of teaching in which the perspective of the student is already presumed to already have innate wisdom.

So it’s a facilitative style of teaching as opposed to traditional, but tradition happens in both conventional teachings and also in big mind. The facilitative aspects, you might call it positing out of helping the student actually identity in their own awareness, something like the infinite nature of mind or the relationship of form to emptiness. To actually use the process to bring those teachings home really lays out in a way like Buddha dharma, so people can really grasp it.

So I was the first person he gave transmission of studying with people in that particular method. I still use that method quite a lot in my own teaching. So it’s more than what I said in the beginning. I’m a teacher now due to his influence because I remember a meeting that I had with him one day. I just have so much appreciation for him as I’m talking. I had an audience with him and I had gone for a particular reason. I was going as a meditator at the time. I was really interested in something like meditation because by its nature it is dualistic. It is always something that’s transpiring between you and me. There’s always a subject object spilt and I was interested in what would happen in negotiation if the parties were capable of accessing the same mind and quality of mind. So I had that really deep question, and that’s part of why I went back to studying Zen. After a period of time he called me to have an audience with him and he basically asked me what my intention in practice was. I told him that I felt like I had received what I had really come for – the depth of the sitting and his pointing out and my realization through the big mind process. He looked at me and said what about others? And it was the first time that it had ever even occurred to me to support other people in their practice or teaching was even something I would be thinking about, even though I had been practicing dharma for many many years. It was only at that moment that it had actually occurred to me that I might have a karmic obligation – this is a way to say it. I actually mean that in a non dualistic way that it was simply a ripening of my own practice and to extend it to other people.

~ ~ ~

Read the full interview here:

http://www.nondualitymagazine.org/nonduality_magazine.7.dianemushohamilton.interview.htm

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New book by Jeff Foster from Non-Duality Press:

Falling in Love With Where You Are

Jeff Foster
A Year of Prose and Poetry on Radically Opening Up
To the Pain and Joy of Life

As we open up to life and love and each other, as we awaken from our dream of separation, we encounter not just the bliss of existence, but its pain too; not only life’s ecstasy, but also its agony. Healing doesn’t always feel good or comfortable or even ‘spiritual’, for we are inevitably forced to confront our shadows, fears and deepest longings – those secret parts of ourselves that we have denied, repressed, or deemed ‘negative’ and unworthy of our love. How can we find the calm in the midst of the storm? How can we rest, even as the ground falls?

Falling In Love With Where You Are invites you to discover a deep YES to your life, no matter what you are going through; to see crisis as an opportunity to heal, pain as an intelligent messenger, and your imperfections as perfectly placed. Through his prose and poetry, Jeff Foster will guide, provoke, encourage and inspire you on your lonely, joyful, and sometimes exhausting pathless journey to the Home you never, ever left: the present moment.

“Even in your glorious imperfection,” Jeff reminds us, “you were always a perfect expression of life, a beloved child of the universe, a complete work of art, unique in all the world…”

Go to this page to download an extract and to purchase a copy:

http://non-dualitypress.org/products/falling-in-love-with-where-you-are

218 pages. Paperback. A5 format

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Jean Metzinger, Le goûter, Tea Time, 1911, 75.9 x 70.2 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Ken Sanes on Facebook writes…

“When this painting was first shown at the 1911 Salon d’Automne in Paris, the prominent art critic André Salmon dubbed it ‘The Mona Lisa of Cubism.’ While Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were moving even further toward the dematerialization of the figure in their canvases of 1911, Metzinger remained resolutely committed to legibility in Tea Time, where a seated woman, holding a teaspoon suspended between cup and mouth, is clearly discernible within a geometric environment. The artist does, however, show the teacup in profile and from above to demonstrate the new art’s mobile perspectives.” — philamuseum.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Metzinger,_Le_go%C3%BBter,_Tea_Time,_1911,_75.9_x_70.2_cm,_Philadelphia_Museum_of_Art.jpg

http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51056.html

The Nonduality Highlights

This marks the 100th issue since our last milestone issue of #5000. Happy Thanksgiving and Chanukah greetings to our US and Jewish readers. I hope that none of you were affected by the various shootings, stabbings and assaults that occurred throughout the US at Black Friday retail events.

https://www.google.ca/search?q=black+friday+violence+2013

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This 1985 performance by Whoopi Goldberg might have been one of the first “one-woman shows” to have been performed on one of Broadway’s main stages. In this production, she portrays several different characters: a drug dealer named Fontaine who has her world view rocked by a visit to the Anne Frank Museum; an apparently vapid Valley Girl whose waters run deeper than they first appear; a woman with a severe physical disability who finds love and a sexual partner; and a young black girl with a painful yearning to look like a Caucasian girl with long, straight blonde hair.

By inviting us into the souls and minds of these disparate characters, we learn of a commonality to our human experience that we might not have previously acknowledged. It’s fun to imagine experiencing this show nearly 30 years ago, too.

I’ve also always been totally tickled by Goldberg’s stage name. Born Caryn Johnson, she apparently she chose the name “Whoopi Goldberg” because she was told that “Johnson” wasn’t a Jewish-enough name for show business.

Fair warning: this video does contain a fair bit of swearing and other explicit language. It’s what the kids would call NSFW (Not Safe For Work):

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On a slightly related note, a Florida school made the news this week when it threatened a 12-year-old African-American girl with expulsion if she didn’t tame her natural Afro. An initial read of the story reveals that the school is citing concerns about the transmission of lice, although sadly, I strongly suspect the decision has some sort of racist underpinning.

http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/change-natural-hairstyle-or-get-expelled–school-tells-12-year-old-girl-213351760.html

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Several of my artistic friends and I enjoyed this comic strip from Doodle Alley about self-judgment, discernment, taste, and mastery in the context of practicing visual arts:

http://doodlealley.com/2012/10/10/be-friends-with-failure/

This was one of the biggest take-home messages for me:

some artists are so averse to failure they would rather repeat one method they know works again and again than try something new

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I’m often moved emotionally by pieces that recognize how hard we often are on ourselves and which try to get us to recognize all that is good in ourselves instead of only what’s bad. I felt something click when I read the following section from a recent book by Jeff Foster that Jerry excerpted earlier this week:

as we awaken from our dream of separation, we encounter not just the bliss of existence, but its pain too

I find myself choosing, over and over each day, to look at the events in my life from a positive perspective. It’s purely arbitrary, and I have the enormous luxury of living a comfortable life without any major suffering to speak of. But I do like acknowledging that everything is perfect, just as it is. I’ve been told that this might be just a form of denial about all that is wrong with the world, but it seems to be working for me okay.

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Another video on enlightenment topics with Russell Brand has emerged. It’s a fast-cutting series of carefully-curated clips of his speaking in a huge variety of contexts:

The video has an almost assaultive editing style, spraying deep wisdom at us with the force of a firehose. I haven’t been able to handle watching more than 1 minute of it at one time, but I wonder if its ripping fast pace is more in line with the attention span of younger viewers these days.

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Parenting coach and author Susan Stiffelman wrote a guest post on Eckhart Tolle’s website this week:

http://communicate.eckharttolle.com/news/2013/11/13/the-captain-of-the-ship/

From that piece, I’d like to highlight the following passage:

As Eckhart Tolle says in A New Earth,

“while the child is having a painbody attack, there isn’t much you can do except to stay present so that you are not drawn into an emotional reaction. The child’s painbody would only feed on it. Painbodies can be extremely dramatic. Don’t buy into the drama. Don’t take it too seriously. If the painbody was triggered by thwarted wanting, don’t give in now to its demands. Otherwise, the child will learn: ‘The more unhappy I become, the more likely I am to get what I want’” (page 106).

This idea is what is powerful. When we argue or negotiate with a child while he or she is caught up in an emotional hurricane, we only make the winds blow more fiercely. Instead, parents can stay quiet and still, listening with a loving and open heart, without having an agenda for making things different than they are.

Powerful ideas, indeed. With extensive experience, I now realize that trying to win an argument with a 5-year-old boy is a fool’s errand. I’ve also learned that powerful things can happen when I learn how to meet my son on his own level in that moment, without imposing my own stringent set of expectations on how I think he should be behaving right now.

Teaching us how to relinquish our desire for things to be other than how they are is perhaps the greatest contribution to our spiritual practice that raising children can give us.

Since meeting her in person this past summer, I’ve worked up a healthy crush on a francophone jazz pianist and composer out of Quebec named Marianne Trudel. She has an unorthodox but delightful trio named Trifolia that I’d like to share with you. The video is shot and edited by a visionary Montreal producer named Randy Cole, who has made dozens of superlative-quality films of several of Canada’s top jazz artists in the recent past.

Trudel is one of those rare artists who can write music that directly evokes the experience of being outside in nature. Her music may or may not be to your personal taste, but I hope that her connection with nature and her commitment to her own authentic artistic vision is evident to you, a careful viewer and listener. Plus, it’s always fun to listen people speak such beautiful French.

I wrote a short review of a performance she gave here in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the 2013 jazz festival:

http://www.jazzeast.com/blog/dustins-festival-blog-marianne-trudel-trifolia

At the time, I remember feeling like what her group was playing was a form of direct nondual expression in action; she and her music had such profound, poetic qualities. I had trouble expressing that sentiment to a broader audience, however. This is how I described it:

This trio is indeed an integrated, whole group. They don’t just run through tunes, pass around solos, or trade with the drums. Each song Trifolia plays is a piece of truly collaborative musical expression. To my delight, it was also evident that each member was fully absorbed: they responded immediately and tastefully to whatever was unfolding at that very moment, at all times.

It’s perhaps that last bit that makes me feel that Trifolia represents the best of what jazz has to offer: totally spontaneous, improvised interplay between performers which yields a musical result that connects authentically with its audience. It’s music that makes you feel something when you hear it played live. And in Marianne Trudel’s case, it’s music that invites you to stop, look inward, and feel grateful that you are there at that moment to experience it.

I may be overstating it, but I’ve also long thought that what we’re trying to do here with the Nonduality Highlights is akin to playing jazz. Instead of exchanging musical riffs or phrases between band members, we play ideas off each other and off of what’s arising in the environment and culture around us. If done well, we find unique and rhythmic ways to express our own true reality to each other that hopefully incite interest, insight and realization.

Thank you for being a part of our band!

Dustin

The Nonduality Highlights

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From Ivan Granger:

“I am so pleased to announce that the Poetry Chaikhana is offering a beautiful new card set of sayings and short poems.
It is a collection of several of my “thought for the day” sayings and a few short poems, with artwork by Rashani Réa of Dharma Gaia Cards.”

http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Publications/index.html

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Believe in a love that is being stored up for you
like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love
there is a strength and a blessing so large that
you can travel as far as you wish
without having to step outside it.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

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Do you hear what the music is saying?
“Come follow me and you will find the way.
Your mistakes can also lead you to the truth.
When you ask, the answer will be given.”

– Rumi

via Along The Way on Yahoo

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The effulgent Self, who is beyond thought,
Shines in the greatest, shines in the smallest,
Shines in the farthest, shines in the nearest,
Shines in the secret chamber of the heart.

~ Mundaka Upanishad

via Kia Pierce on Facebook

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Behind all our words is a yearning for the same silence.
There are so many ways of saying, ‘Shhh… Let us merely gaze.’

~ Fred LaMotte

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Vivian Maier

Imagine this : perhaps the most important street photographer of the twentieth century was a nanny who kept everything to herself.

Nobody had ever seen her work and she was a complete unknown until the time of her death.

For decades Vivian’s work hid in the shadows until decades later (in 2007), historical hobbyist John Maloof bought a box full of never developed negatives at a local auction for $380.

see some photos and a video clip:
http://www.webburgr.com/vivian_maier/

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Encore: Wendell Berry, Poet & Prophet

In a rare television interview, environmental legend and writer Wendell Berry
leaves his Kentucky farm for an inspiring conversation.

The world and our life in it are conditional gifts. We have the world to live in and the use of it on the condition that we will take good care of it”
Berry tells Bill. “And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.”

I wish to heartily recommend watching this show.
Wendell Berry is a true voice of sanity.
The entire hour may be seen from the link here:

http://billmoyers.com/episode/encore-wendell-berry-poet-prophet/

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Peace, freedom, and fulfillment are available to you in each and every moment…

“Well done, a fresh voice among so many sound-a-likes” – Adyashanti

“Tools for Sanity” is an invitation to unfold into an effortless peace. An invitation, if you’re willing, to see yourself and your world in an entirely different light.

Tools for Sanity reveals:
Four tools we can all access at any moment that can lead us directly to personal liberation.

Tools for Sanity: Peace, Freedom and Fufillment in Every Moment
amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Tools…/dp/0615880967/ref=sr_1_1…

The Nonduality Highlights

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Photo: Tim Gerchmez www.facebook.com/fewtchure?fref=ts

Tim Gerchmez

Let ‘freedom from ego’ take you by surprise. Don’t check on yourself, and in particular — don’t compare. The tendency to compare oneself to others has to go, in order to be free of the separate self. The real is incomparable — one without a second. Think as if you were the only one in the world… allow the ‘out there’ to go away, dissolve. Only the here and now matters when it comes to awakening. All the words are yours, and all the world is yours if only you cease to compare and contrast.

~ ~ ~

Tim is an active contributor on the Nonduality Highlights group on Facebook, which all are welcome to join:

www.facebook.com/groups/NondualityHighlights/

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Photo: Lynn Fraser www.facebook.com/lynn.fraser.737?fref=ts

Radio Notes:

Nonduality Network Talk Radio will be broadcasting live Wednesday, December 4, between 12:30 and 1:30PM Eastern Time, and may be heard at ckdu.ca. My guest will be Lynn Fraser who writes, “We’ll be talking about nonduality, the mind, PTSD, meditation and how all of this integrates into daily life. We’ll experience a taste of Scott Kiloby’s Living Inquiries.”

~ ~ ~

If anyone wants to send me an audio clip of anything related to nonduality, up to about 3 minutes, I’ll play it next week, December 11. Send a song, a rant, a poem, a spoken word clip, your definition of nonduality, just about anything.

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Randall Friend is active on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/randallfriend1?fref=ts&ref=br_tf

Here is his most recent post:

Vedanta calls it “Moksha” – the dispelling of illusion or removing ignorance – that seems rather challenging but it really isn’t.

There is an illusion that the world is something apart from yourself – ignorance of yourself is really the idea that you are something independent – something which has independent existence.

If we really look at the idea that we are something which comes about anew – an existence which begins and later ends – we might see that this idea is really silly. How can existence begin and end? Isn’t it really just the pattern or form that comes and goes? What the pattern or form IS doesn’t actually come or go.

So through this inquiry or honest questioning of our assumptions about existence, we might discover that the transient pattern called “ME” comes and goes – and that is what we’ve identified with. Therefore we believe that WE have come and will go. Seeing this, we at once realize our mistake – WHAT we are didn’t change but our IDEA of WHAT we are changes. We no longer identify with that transient experience called “ME” although that “ME” can continue along just fine.

We discover that our identity was falsely placed with something that isn’t real – or better said – that expression is just a transient expression of something that IS real. So our identity is properly aligned with what is REAL and not with something that is transient.

Moksha isn’t a new, cool mental state. It’s liberation from the false identification. That liberation includes the knowledge that the transient continues along just fine – there is no longer an attachment to it. That is called freedom or liberation. You were actually ALWAYS free. You just didn’t know it. So freedom is finding that you were free all along.

Moksha is a word which refers to the eventual dispelling of identification with a transient existence – it isn’t a new state but a liberation from the false idea about WHAT you actually ARE.

~ ~ ~

Randall is the author of You Are No Thing:

Amazon.com link

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Colin Drake writes in his newsletter:

Dear Fellow Explorers, The other day I attended an inspiring satsang with Gangaji, who was instrumental in my first awakening in 1996. She always tries to avoid well used words such as :enlightenment, awareness, awakening, God etc. as she feels these words have too much ‘baggage’ associated with them. So although Awareness and Awakening are central to my writings I was inspired to do the same whilst musing on The Absolute early one morning:

Musing on The Absolute

Early I was driven out of my bed,

Musing on the wondrous Godhead,

Intimating that things must be said,

Before this body is ‘brown bread’*.

For too long words have been proscribed,

As the Absolute cannot be described,

But now That urged it’s time I tried,

So that Its peace and love may be imbibed.

For only That does not come and go,

Being the substratum in which all things flow,

The screen where thoughts and sensations show,

By viewing which our minds can know.

The constant, conscious, subjective presence,

Our vital, inner, unmoving essence,

By which all beings have sentience,

Eternal, never needing to commence.

Full of peace and quietness,

All things arise at That’s behest,

Ephemeral vibrations filled with its zest,

Displaying therein before returning to rest.

From This everything is derived,

In which all reside and are spied,

Back into which they must subside,

When out of steam … the end of the ride.

This is ever still and serene,

Radiant, pure and pristine,

By which manifestation is seen,

Unaffected by what is or has been.

The home from which we never depart,

Our fundamental, essential heart,

If from this you feel apart,

One day you’ll wake up with a start.

To That which you can never leave,

Thus there is no need to grieve,

Just do not let your mind deceive,

By the egoic thoughts it may weave.

Direct experience investigate,

To discover That by which you sensate,

Present in every phenomenal state,

Not acquired but totally innate.

For This there needs no preparation,

The source of all with no deviation,

The unmanifest in manifestation,

Just Love which is ‘ no separation’.

*Cockney rhyming slang for ‘dead’.

Colin Drake’s books are available for immediate download at nonduality.com/colindrake.htm

The Nonduality Highlights

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Happy dual birthdays to nondual girls Gloria Lee and Christiana!

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Lynn Fraser was my guest on Nonduality Network Talk Radio today. We talked about her earliest experiences of non-separation in nature, which stimulated an interest in spirituality. Lynn offered a great definition of nonduality. Then we covered a few other milestones in her life. Study within the Himalayan Tradition, a physical attack upon her which forced her to address PTSD. Her life has a meditation and Yoga teacher. Lynn’s encounter with Scott Kiloby and becoming a facilitator of Scott’s inquiries. During this conversation Lynn leads the listener in a couple of exercises to illustrate her teachings, including Scott’s work. The music of Calum Graham is featured and we play a funny and powerful clip of Adyashanti speaking to our addiction to thoughts. Lynn’s website is nondualinquiry.com

Listen to the radio show

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How Scott Kiloby’s Living Inquiries Work

The Unfindable Inquiry (the UI) is the main tool within all the Living Inquiries. The UI is the foundation for the relationship inquiries: the Boomerang and Panorama Inquiries. The UI is the inquiry we use to see that a particular person (e.g., self or other) is empty of separate nature. It focuses on one person at a time. In sessions the client tries to find the “invisible self” using the UI. They cannot find it and so they find a release from that core sense of self.

The Compulsion Inquiry can be used on any compulsion, addiction, or craving, including food, alcohol, sex/porn, gambling, internet use, obsessive compulsive behaviors, and seeking enlightenment.

The Anxiety Inquiry looks for the seemingly external threat, danger, or attack as well as the internal sense of self that is threatened, endangered, or attacked.

The Boomerang Inquiry is an additional tool to use when you can’t quite name or “get a feel for” the deficient self. Like a boomerang that returns back to the thrower, the deficient self is mirrored back to you in relationship. By using the Boomerang Inquiry, you’ll see that mirroring effect and you’ll be able to name and then see through the deficient self that is being reflected back to you in relationship. You can inquire into your relationship with anything using the Boomerang Inquiry—any person, place, event, goal, or other thing. When we really believe that we are deficient at the core, almost everything can appear to confirm our story.

The Panorama Inquiry is based on the panorama view of all your relationships with people and things. Like the Boomerang Inquiry, it is merely a tool to help you name the deficient self that is being mirrored back to you in all your relationships. Once you name it, you then try to find it using the UI.

*Perhaps the most important thing about these inquiries is that they are best experienced, at first, with a facilitator. The facilitator gently guides you through the questions, so that you can just look at words, pictures, emotions and sensations.

Why work with a facilitator?

The facilitators are trained to help you use the Boomerang and Panorama Inquiries if you have difficulty putting a name to how you feel about yourself when you find conflict or disharmony in relationships. The Compulsion Inquiry and Anxiety are woven throughout.

* * *

for further details visit nondualinquiry.com

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Daniel Anhorn
Volkswagen (Red)
watercolour pencil on paper
26″ x 40”
2005
Senvest Collection of New Canadian Art

The Nonduality Highlights

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Falling In Love with Where You Are, by Jeff Foster

A Year of Prose and Poetry on Radically Opening Up To the Pain and Joy of Life. As we open up to life and love and each other, as we awaken from our dream of separation, we encounter not just the bliss of existence, but its pain too; not only life’s ecstasy, but also its agony. Healing doesn’t always feel good or comfortable or even ‘spiritual’, for we are inevitably forced to confront our shadows, fears and deepest longings – those secret parts of ourselves that we have denied, repressed, or deemed ‘negative’ and unworthy of our love. How can we find the calm in the midst of the storm?

Amazon.com link | Non-Duality Press link

View the catalogue of Non-Duality Press e-books

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Excerpt from Falling In Love With Where You Are, by Jeff Foster:

DIRTY LOVE

Waking up doesn’t mean ‘being okay’ with everything all the time, or ‘being fearless’ all the time, or ‘being relaxed’ all the time, or being anything ‘all the time’ for that matter, for why would you place such heavy demands on present experience? Why would you put conditions on the unconditional, and whose conditions would they be anyway? Why would you want to live up to a second-hand, time-bound image?

Thankfully, what you are never has to live up to any image of how awakening ‘should’ look. The myriad, ever-moving waves in the ocean of you can’t be anything ‘all the time’ since they are alive – they love to dance and play and arise and dissolve as spontaneously as they arose, leaving no trace – and this recognition is the beginning of such cosmic relief for the exhausted seeker of ‘the next experience’.

Life never has to match up to your idea of ‘life’ and that’s why life is so restful at its very core. There is simply no demand for present experience to be anything other than what it is. There is simply this – present, complete, empty and full. But, intelligent and discerning reader, this inherent perfection does not equate to detachment and apathy. Quite the opposite!

It’s not ‘just letting things be’ or doing ‘doing nothing’ or preaching ‘there is no me’ to anyone who will listen. It’s not a mental conclusion or second-hand belief, or a way to block out pain. It’s more of a living attitude, a way of being, a seeing that, no matter what arises in present experience – a thought, a sensation, a feeling – no matter how intense or unexpected, these visitors have a home in you, they are welcome as beloved and inseparable waves of yourself. Love is no longer a fancy notion but a living, breathing, real-time reality. The poets and sages were right. The end of violence is here within you. And from this creative and compassionate place we become more engaged with life than ever, more alive than ever, even as all stories and dreams of ‘my life’ and ‘how it should be’ fall away.

This love, this deep and ever-present silence that you are, is so vast it swallows everything. It pays no heed to images of how it should be. It does not try to impress, it is not looking for rewards, acceptance or validation. It is not pretending to be transcendent, or fearless, or beyond pain, it has no use for the word ‘spiritual’ or ‘enlightened’, it does not act as if it’s above everything. It knows no bypassing, no clever tricks, no ways to numb itself to itself. It gets its hands dirty.

Yes, this is a dirty love. The unloved and unwanted and unmet get stuck under its fingernails. It wants all of its children, not just the pretty ones. It is the mother, the father, the lover, the guru we have always longed for. It loves because that’s all it knows. It would work its knuckles to the bone just to be here.

We pretend to be fearless and beyond human concerns only because we are afraid. We act at being peaceful and undisturbed
only because there is a storm inside. We strain to show others how far beyond anger we have gone, only because anger still rages in us, longing to be met. We show off our perfect spiritual knowledge in public to mask our perfect private doubt. It’s a perfect balance.

Who will stop pretending? Who will meet the ‘shadow’, the misunderstood ‘dark side’ of life, those waves of ourselves that
are not inherently negative or sinful or dark, just neglected and abandoned and longing for home? Who will meet life’s orphaned children? Who will sacrifice the image for the delight of not knowing?

It is such a relief to no longer have to pretend to be anything – not ‘the awakened one’, nor ‘the one who knows’, nor ‘the
blissed-out experiencer’, nor ‘the spiritual expert’ – and instead to know ourselves on a deeper level as the home for those homeless parts of experience that we always thought ‘should’ disappear.

Our unwanted children cannot disappear until they are truly free to appear in us. And when they are truly free, who would
ever want them to disappear? When they are no longer unwanted, is there any problem? Even the unwanted are wanted here in the vastness that we are. There is plenty of space.

Beyond awakening, there is this grace, this inexplicable and heart-breaking timeless welcoming of everything as it arises. By dirtying itself until it cannot dirty itself any more, love purifies itself.

~ ~ ~

Falling In Love with Where You Are, by Jeff Foster

Amazon.com link | Non-Duality Press link

View the catalogue of Non-Duality Press e-books

#5107 – Monday, December 9, 2013 – Editor: Gloria Lee
Nonduality Highlights • http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights/

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

~ Dogen Zenji

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“I came to discover that grief is not sadness. Grief is
love. Grief is a felt experience of love for something
lost or that we are losing. That is an incredibly
powerful doorway. I think we all carry that abiding
ocean of love for the miracle of our world. And if, on a
collective level, we could grieve together and
rediscover that deeper part of our collective psyche,
then healing the symptoms of that disconnect could
happen much faster than we imagine.”

~ Chris Jordan

From an interview with Chris Jordan about the film
project MIDWAY. Article: An Abiding Ocean of Love:
A Conversation with Artist Chris Jordan. Center for
Ecoliteracy.

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What I know makes me proud and small.
The Unknown humbles me and makes me vast.
Through the practice of Unknowing, I am human.
I am a speck of dust, vibrating with the music
of stars. O Lord, hear my prayer.

~ Fred LaMotte

Click on photo and the image will fill your screen:

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Many people breathe in without knowing they are
breathing in. Many people live without knowing they
are alive. Life is a miracle. When you breathe in
mindfully, knowing that you are breathing in, you
touch the miracle of life.”

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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A pianist plays ‘Imagine’ on the anniversary of John
Lennon’s death in front of Ukranian riot police on
Sunday.
Photo: Nastya Stanko

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In a stunning turn of events today in Thailand, riot
police yielded to the peaceful protesters they were
ordered to harass and block. The police removed
barricades and their helmets as a sign of solidarity.

video: http://youtu.be/t3y3WPL7Oko
Some cry tears of joy as a truce is called between Thai
protestors and police. CNN’s Paula Hancocks reports.

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You should be out of both these traps… neither bondage
nor freedom… because this is a concept. Bondage was a
concept, now concept of freedom. Get rid of both these
concepts and now where are you? Here… here is neither
a trap of bondage nor of freedom. Here is here.

~ Papaji

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on “spiritual inquiry” – be warned

if you endlessly ponder

your seeming lack of enlightenment

(the proof of; the reasons for; the need to overcome)

your life appears to be unenlightened

and is experienced accordingly

-

if, for one instant, you stop your pondering

the Real is found to be already and always there

(luminous; changeless; already perfect)

and your life, in that instant, IS enlightenment

and is experienced accordingly

-

you don’t need to seek or strive or supplicate

you don’t even need to understand or accept or believe

you just need to slow down

get really quiet

and stop

-

how cool is that?

by miriam louisa

http://echoesfromemptiness.com/2013/12/06/on-spiritual-inquiry-be-warned/

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They have come to make love with you…

There is so much intelligence in your hopelessness if you
will turn toward it and mine the wisdom it offers. You
have been taught that hope is required and that it is a
true “spiritual” quality which is necessary to open your
heart to this world. But the wild reality of love will
never conform to your hopes and fears.

There is a line between sanity and confusion which is
not nearly as solid or continuous as it may appear. We
could say that love is the bridge between the two,
though it is not the love that the mind knows. This
bridge is translucent, and is crafted of your
self-kindness and luminous creativity, emerging out of
the unknown to reveal the wisdom within your neurosis.

Your hopelessness is path, and is a pure reflection of
untainted original awareness, revealing the most radical
truth that there is no ultimate reference point in which
you can rest any longer. Groundlessness is becoming
your home now, for it is within this raging crucible of
hopelessness that the conceptual world falls away. In
its place is wide empty space, but it is so warm there,
and so pregnant with the qualities of love. It is this
warmth which enables you to share yourself with others
and with this precious world. You are no longer
ashamed to be what you are.

Your sadness, your vulnerability, and your hopelessness
– these guests have not come into your experience so
that they can be healed, transformed, changed, or
transcended. They are not problems which need fixing
or more evidence of your failure. They have come to
make love with you, and to reveal their nature as path,
weaving and interpenetrating your tenderness with
everything around you.

~ Michael Chilcoat
A Healing Space blog – http://bit.ly/L7Yre4

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THE OPENING OF EYES

That day I saw beneath dark clouds,
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before,
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing,
speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

The Opening of Eyes
From River Flow
New and Selected Poems
©David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

The Nonduality Highlights

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Nonduality Network Talk Radio is on the air Wednesday at 12:30PM EST. Listen at ckdu.ca

My guest is James Traverse. We’ll be talking about Jean Klein, playing various clips, and seeing where the flow takes us! If you want to be part of the show send me your phone number. I can call one or two people. I’ll take the first who responds with preference for people who have not yet been on the show. You can talk about anything having to do with nonduality.

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Pope Francis sounds like Osho is this recent statement:

In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid. And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements. The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people. But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh? -Pope Francis

Here’s Osho:

I will not be talking about Christ, but about Jesus. Let Christ be imprisoned in the churches – that is the right place for Christ to exist. I would like Jesus to enter your hearts. Forget Christ, remember Jesus. But just the opposite has happened. People have forgotten Jesus and their minds have been hammered continuously for two thousand years, hammered to remember Christ. Christ cannot transform you, because there exists no bridge between you and Christ. Then there exists an unbridgeable abyss. But with Jesus you are close. You can call Jesus “brother, but you cannot call Christ “brother.” And until you feel a deep brotherhood, a bridge, how can Jesus be of any help to you? Jesus is tremendously beautiful. His beauty has a dimension of its own.

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What Are We Seeking?

by Randall Friend

What exactly is it, that we are seeking? In spirituality, are we seeking a new experience, like a new ride at the amusement park, some new state of experience, or do we really want to know WHAT we are?

What if knowing WHAT you are ultimately has nothing to do with experience?

Certainly the discovery of WHAT you are can lead to some interesting experiences, but isn’t the point of all this to really find out WHAT you are? Isn’t this really the point? So we must focus on the discovery of what exactly it is that you are, and not what you take yourself to be, not what you believe yourself to be, not what you have been told that you are.

The ocean and the wave are great examples. Can we admit that ultimately, wave is really just ocean? No matter how unique wave is, it really isn’t anything but ocean itself. Ocean has risen up in a particular, unique pattern. Ocean races to the shore, picks up a few brave surfers along the way, and then finally ends in a spectacular crash upon the shore. In all this, what happened to wave? It ended. But what happened to Ocean – to what wave really WAS? Nothing happened to ocean. Ocean’s expression in this case just ended.

Did wave have an independent existence? Was wave something independent of Ocean? No – wave IS Ocean. Our existence is exactly like this.

Let’s call it Life. Life IS. Life is FROM WHICH all expressions come – the tree – the cloud – the bird – the thoughts – the bodies – Life is that substratum of existence, and all expressions really are THAT IS-ness we can call “Life”. So the tree didn’t come into Being independently – it didn’t have its own existence but all along was just Life. Life patterned as Tree for a while then Tree ended – Life’s expression ended. Tree is dead but Life remains.

That body-mind you have taken yourself to be has come – you take yourself to be some new existence – something has independent existence. That means – you take that body-mind as WHAT you are. That is called Identity. Therefore whatever happens TO that body-mind seems to happen to you. But is that body-mind an independent EXISTENCE? Or is it simply just another expression of Life, another expression of what-IS?

Aren’t you really what-IS and not JUST the subsequent expressions of THAT? Just like the ocean, haven’t you mistakenly identified with the wave and missed your true essence and IS-ness as the Ocean? As Life itself?

Instead of trying to invoke some mystical experience, focus on the idea of existence itself. Can existence come and go? Does existence begin anew with each new experience? Or does THAT which IS remain as those expressions come and go? And isn’t that ME just another transient expression of Life?

Isn’t then Life just the infinite potential for ANY expression? Does the expression ever limit that substratum of existence?

Can you really be anything but THAT which IS? And is there more than ONE of THAT? This is ultimately what these various disciplines of spirituality are pointing to. This is the point of the spiritual traditions which point to One without a Second.

You are THAT which IS. Discern Experience from Existence. Find out if identity is correctly placed upon that transient, fleeting experience, or if it should be placed upon what actually IS, FROM WHAT any experience comes.

If you are truly seeking yourself, you cannot find it by seeking experiences but only by finding out WHAT those experiences ultimately ARE. You are seeking your true Self – that Self is the “self” of everything.

Start by questioning your own existence – was I really ever born? Did I really begin?

~ ~ ~

About/Contact

Randall was seeking from the age of twelve, disillusioned with traditional Christianity, discovering a world of differing Religions and taking a natural inclination towards Buddhism. Though years of study and practice went by, no contentment was to come. It was through the writings of Alan Watts that Vedanta was discovered and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj book “I AM THAT” was read. After reading this book, the flame was lit and Randall was determined to meet someone who was in the “lineage” of Nisargadatta.

Randall read about Sailor Bob Adamson and his book “What’s Wrong With Right Now – If You Don’t Think About It.” Gilbert Schultz edited this book and Randall began a conversation with Gilbert. Over a few months the so-called “prerequisites” were there but still no contentment. There was sleeplessness – a constant mental flood of questions.

Randall called on Sailor Bob a few times – Bob pointed in the most simple way – the mental flood was replaced with a clarity of inquiry. What was considered beyond question was put under critical scrutiny. The house of cards called separate reality crumbled – the bottom fell out of the paradigm of individuality – the message hit home and it was clear that reality is whole – it is glaringly obvious. Gilbert and Bob were the signposts – pointing away from ignorance and toward Self-Knowledge. Nothing changed – it was realized that reality is already whole and what-I-am is that wholeness.

Randall has a book with Non-Duality Press, offers Skype conversations, and can be contacted via email – see the Profile page for email address.

Avastu Maruti is the Second Life Avatar for Randall Friend.

Randall Friend wrote the book You Are No Thing, published by Non-Duality Press:

Non-Duality Press Link

Amazon.com link

The Nonduality Highlights

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Here’s the most recent Nonduality Network Talk Radio show, featuring James Traverse. We talk about his encounters with Dr. Jean Klein and the associated teachings. A poem by James Wright is read and discussed. A couple of audio clips by Vicki Woodyard are played but due to technical issues they will have to be re-played in a future show.

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In yesterday’s issue I quoted Osho, and internet nonduality pioneer Sarlo wrote to tell me yesterday was Osho’s birthday!

I suppose for the last several years Osho has become an industry. So for his birthday I’m going to type out something from a small pamphlet, The Eternal Message, first published in 1972, around the time he started to attract thousands of followers. I bought this small book of 39 pages at the Bodhi Tree used bookstore for 40 cents quite a while back. There’s one used copy on Amazon.com. Here’s something from it by Osho, then known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh:

The Eternal Message: [a collection of thirty immortal letters written by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to Ma Yoga Bhakti, New York, U.S.A., now Ma Ananda Pratima, World President of Neo-Sannyas International] Second Edition: November, 1973 — 3000 copies. Printed in India.

Truth Can not be Transferred

beloved bhakti,

Love. Truth is never second-hand.
It can not be transferred.
One has to know it and be it oneself.
That is why all tradition falsifies it.
And all scriptures.
And all words.
And in the end it is nothing but the soup of Mulla Nasrudin.
But first I must tell you a story.

A kinsman came to see Nasrudin from the country and brought a duck. Nasrudin was grateful, had the bird cooked and shared it with the guest.

Presently another visitor arrived. “I am a friend,” he said, “of the man who gave you the duck.” Nasrudin fed him as well.

This happened several times. Nasrudin’s house had become like a restaurant for out-of-town visitors. Everyone was a friend at some removes, of the original donor of the duck.

Finally Nasrudin was exasperated. One day there was a knock at the door and a stranger appeared. “I am the friend of the friend of the friend of the man who brought you the duck from the country,” he said.

“Come in,” said Nasrudin.

They seated themselves at the table, and Nasrudin asked his wife to bring the soup.

When the guest tasted it, it seemed to be nothing more than warm water. “What sort of soup is this?” he asked the Mulla.

“That,” said Nasrudin, “is the soup of the soup of the soup of the soup of the duck.”

21-5-1971

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Here’s one more from The Eternal Moment (the bold type and punctuation are contained in the original text)

Hey, I just found the entire book online here, so whereas I typed the above passage, I’m cheating and just copying and pasting (although I have to admit I enjoyed the typing as I sit here at 4 in the morning. You really don’t want to be copying and pasting stuff like this at 4 o’clock in the morning; it’s too much like Nasrudin’s soup):

Letter: 22/The Seeker Dissolves in Awareness

beloved bhakti,

Love. it is very easy to progress from one illusion to another.
Because, no foundational transformation is needed.
There is no shaking of the foundations.
Because, you remain the same.
So the real problem is not to change the objects of desire.
From the worldly to the other-worldly.
But to transform oneself.
Not to change the seeking.
But to change the seeker.
Otherwise the problem remains as it is–only it takes new
shapes.
But how to change the seeker?
First find it out–where it is and what it is.
And then you will come to know a hidden secret, that the
seeker exists only until it is not sought.
And when someone goes to search it out–it is never found.
It exists only in ignorance.
And in darkness.
In awareness it is not.
And this realization of NO-SELF is the jump.
Jump into the unknown.
Jump into the Truth.
20-5-1971.

___________________________________________

Alright, I’m hanging around Nasrudin’s table waiting for his wife to make me a chili dog and since I’m such a good copier and paster, here is another letter.  But first here is a photo of Rajneesh on the back cover of The Eternal Message:

Letter: 29/Childish Answers about the Ultimate Reality

beloved bhakti,

Love. Metaphysics is born out of childish curiosity.
So howsoever sublime, it remains juvenile.
And all the ultimate answers are foolish in a way
Because the ultimate is not only unknown, it is unknowable.
A mature mind is one who understands the impossibility of
knowing the ultimate.
And, with this understanding, there is a new dimension.
The dimension of BEING.
Knowing is not possible, but BEING is.
Or in other words, in relation to the Ultimate only, Being
is KNOWING.
This dimension is the religious dimension.
And unless one is religious in this sense, one goes on asking
absurd questions and accumulating even more absurd answers.

In a little backwoods school the teacher was at the black-
board explaining arithmetic problems. She was delighted to see
her dullest pupil giving slack-jawed attention, which was unusual
for him. Her happy thought was that, at last, the gangling lad
was beginning to understand.
When she finished, she said to him, “you, were so interested,
Cicero, that I am sure you want to ask some questions?”
“Yes’m.” drawled Cicero, “I got one to ask. Where do
these figures go when you rub them off?”

30-5-1971.

~ ~ ~

Read more from The Eternal Message here:

http://oshokala.bizhosting.com/contents.htm

a pdf version is here:

http://www.satrakshita.be/Books/Osho,%20The%20Eternal%20Message.pdf

John Veen is a poet and working stiff from Central California by way of Michigan. He facilitates an irregular non-duality dialog in Fresno, C.A., and edits the website: www.nopathnoself.net.

A Tether Tied to Space
Epigrams and Subversion

by John Venn

published by Non-Duality Press

Excerpt of the first few pages:

“Just simply say when doubt arises,
Not two.”
— Seng Ts’an

“We… in mad trance strike with our spirit’s
knife / Invulnerable nothings.”
— P. B. Shelley

“Since everything is without substance,
sustain the joke of the absurd.”
— Longchenpa

“Luminous mind is the actual
condition of everything.”
— Longchenpa

Foreword

Reality is timeless so the question “When?” can
never be answered.

If you can’t say when something arises you can’t
claim to know that it arises. You might speculate
that birth and death happen now, simultaneously—but
timelessness erases even that.

Now thoughts, whether “of” time or timelessness
or anything else, have no actual extension in space
or time, and therefore no content. We might reflect
or meta-reflect on thoughts as objects or containers
of objects but that near-process is an extinct,
dimensionless memory.

Memories, thoughts and other “karmic burdens”
are like flames and water streams: formless
forms apparent only to the timeless non-form in
question.

Reality is…?

The epigrams and subversions that follow are a
sequence of primitive objections to form, most of which
also object to their own forms vainly, solipsistically.

They step foolishly into the dream. And while they are
not light, they are bathed in it. They thank you for it.

~ ~

Look straight at the seeking itself.
There’s your devil. Your teacher.

~ ~

It requires nothing
no belief
no conversion
no breakthrough
no need to bore down
no need to dig deep…

~ ~

See the resistance to what is —
to what is right in front of your face.
See the inversion, the contraction,
the avoidance,
the rejection of the real
in favor of some phantom ideal.

~ ~

You become aware of your own tendencies
and resistances.
Seeking (seeking answers, seeking comfort…)
is seen or felt as uncomfortable,
even painful, contraction.
Compulsive, instinctive, automatic desires
and fears are exposed.
And the peace of not clinging, not grasping,
not cowering is somehow exposed.

~ ~

Chronic self-knotting, caught in the act,
is itself the key.
(The key to what? Who the fuck knows?)
See the contraction in action
without trying to fix it…
Now it’s as if there’s a microscopic (infinite)
distance between ‘you’ and ‘suffering’.

~ ~

That distance is healthy detachment.
Simple, accidental renunciation.
Breathable space.
(It’s all breathable space!)

~ ~

A ghost outside.
Tension inside.
When you look and see nothing’s there
tension subsides on its own.

~ ~

The ‘yes’ hidden in the ‘no’…
release masquerading as obstruction.

~ ~

Bodymind contracts, both predator and prey.
Salvation? Love?
The breath that comes and goes…

II
Ponder the inconceivable.
Stop!!

~ ~

The presumption of separation
the fear of separation
the desire for non-separation
are all non-separate forms of natural perfection.

~ ~

Separation into discrete problem-units
is barred by reality.

~ ~

Bodymind sense is life-cling-death-fear.
It is immune to facts like emptiness and its own
absence.

~ ~

When the apparent dilemma
(object, dream-tangent…) presents itself
it is spontaneously recognized as ‘light’.

~ ~

When light rediscovers omnipresent light
it drops the post-threat post-lust tendency
to linger in fear-desire-fight-flighthate-
love-anger-greed
or any other sticky form of light.

~ ~

If that thing that sits on your chest were real
there would be no in-breath.

~ ~

Moment to moment resistance
is ‘divine’ pressure,
a tactile hint,
a gift.

~ ~

The release button was pushed forever ago.
Nothing to do!

III
The simplicity of no-path-no-self
precedes trying—
trying to understand,
trying to do.

~ ~

Try to get to the point where
the trying stops
when you see the trying.

~ ~

Stop digging
your hands are insane.

~ ~

Why struggle with the struggle?
Look up. Face the world.

~ ~

Free seeing brings free breathing?
What is it that sees? What is it that breathes?

~ ~

Instantaneous: your passage to the next moment
(the next life).
Without you.

~ ~

If you’ve got time to waste
get into process.
If you’ve got no time
don’t.

~ ~

Timelessness is the briefest therapy.

~ ~

Click here to find out more about A Tether Tied to Space, from Non-Duality Press

Amazon.com link

It has certainly been a strange weather week, what with our province being covered with ice today and snow falling in Texas and the Middle East. Due to the strange and wonderful weather conditions in Nova Scotia this weekend, I’m delivering to you one of my “Highlights of the Highlights” issues today instead of my regular compendium-style one.

This selection comes from an issue of Gloria’s from last winter which features a lengthy but insightful piece by the eminently wise, wonderfully readable Joan Tollifson. I’ve been a big fan of Tollifson’s writing since Glo first introduced her to me; she comes from a similar sort of “real-world” position that Pema Chödrön does, and integrates beautifully the esoteric nature of deep spiritual science with regular, ordinary life.

It seems to me that spiritual teachers who are women have a particular gift in attaining that balance; I strongly suspect it has to do with their need as mothers and wives to keep the household running even in the face of deep spiritual practice. The buck always stops with the mother and wife, in the end; even if they’re serious spiritual practitioners, they still often end up needing to clean up the messes left behind by the other men and children in their lives, and that practice can yield unique insights into both the deep spiritual AND the human dimensions of life.

Dustin

#4856 – Thursday, February 28, 2013 – Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights

The peace that we are looking for is not peace that crumbles as soon as there is difficulty or chaos. Whether we’re seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth—it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened. ~ Pema Chodron

Alan Larus Photography

Photo: Joan Tollifson

Excerpt from Tollifson:

I just got word that someone I knew took his own life recently, someone who had a very clear nondual understanding. Many years ago, I remember hearing of a Zen teacher who committed suicide. His students found him hanging. What a teaching! Many people imagine that “enlightenment” (whatever that might be) means you wouldn’t do something like that – you wouldn’t kill yourself, you wouldn’t be depressed, you wouldn’t have financial problems or health problems or personal problems or problems of any kind—you wouldn’t need Zoloft— and if you were terminally ill, you wouldn’t want the morphine—you’d want to be clear and alert and “fully present” at the moment of your death (presumably so that you could get a good start on a successful new incarnation of your self – ho ho ho).

In the world of meditation or “the Power of Now,” what people tend to mean when they talk about clarity or awakeness (or “enlightenment”) is being fully present here and now, awake to the nonconceptual, sensory reality of this moment, not entranced in stories and ideologies.

But in my experience, the most liberating realization of all is the recognition that there is no way NOT to be here now—that EVERYTHING is included in What Is, even the EXPERIENCE of confusion, or depression, or anxiety, or apparent encapsulation in a separate bodymind, or even the compulsion to take your own life or the life of someone else.

Unlike some radical nondualists, I do still talk at times about “being in the Now.” Maybe one day I’ll stop doing that entirely. I’ve mentioned in some of my writing that with my fingerbiting compulsion, whenever there is complete attention to the bare actuality of fingerbiting (i.e., the bare sensations without the storyline or the labels or the judgments), when there is total acceptance of it being just as it is, when there is no effort or desire or intention to change it, when there is complete awareness and total presence with the bare happening itself, the biting immediately stops. (It may start again a moment later, but in that moment of complete attention and total acceptance, it stops.) This experience is completely nonverbal and nonconceptual. It is concentrated but relaxed, alert but effortless, open and unbounded, free awareness. It is frequently called “being in the Now” because there is no story happening of past or future, no ideas about “me” and “my life” – just simple awake presence Here / Now. This kind of presence and attention to the present moment is what many schools of meditation aim to cultivate.

And this can indeed be helpful for dealing with addiction, depression, anxiety, stress, physical pain and other forms of suffering. And as I have often said, sitting quietly, doing nothing, tuning into the nonconceptual sensory reality that is so easily ignored in our busy world of information bombardment MAY help to directly reveal impermanence, interdependence, the absence of any real separation between inside and outside, the mirage-like nature of the self, and the ungraspable, inconceivable and unavoidable nature of reality. All of this CAN be very liberating — it certainly seemed so for me—and for a very long time, I associated this experience of presence with true awakening or real clarity, and I had the sense that enlightenment or final liberation would be the state of abiding permanently in that kind of presence—being “in the Now” all the time.

But of course, that kind of experiential “being in the Now” inevitably comes and goes. For some people, it is an easy state to access—for others, it is more elusive. Some bodyminds have more stormy weather than others. Some people naturally have more equanimity, greater calm, and a better ability to concentrate and relax and “be present” than other people. Some people are by nature more tightly wound, more hyperactive, buzzing with thoughts and impulses flying off in different directions, more easily “distracted” from what they are “supposed” to be concentrating on. Some people can happily sit quietly doing nothing for hours, while others can’t sit still and “do nothing” for more than a few seconds. And while training and practice may be able to alter our basic nature to some degree, it can never turn a turtle into a rabbit, a dandelion into a rose, or a shrub into a giant redwood tree.

Some of us are given the abilities, the aptitude, the inclinations, the interests, the drives, the urges, the concerns, and the circumstances that compel us to join or lead a movement for social justice or environmental protection. Others of us are given the abilities, the aptitude, the inclinations, the interests, the drives, the urges, the concerns, and the circumstances that compel us to take up a spiritual practice such as meditation—and some of us have the interest and the ability to persevere at this practice, while others quickly or eventually lose interest. Some of us are compelled toward radical nonduality, many of us are not. Each of us is an expression of nature, just as each tree, each animal, each flower, each rock, each cloud and each rainstorm is an expression of nature. Some trees are tall and straight, some are short and gnarled. Some buds open and blossom, others die before that ever happens. ALL of these varied forms and happenings are an expression of nature.

Nothing holds still. Every form is inseparable from everything around it, and each form is nothing but continuous change. Impermanence and flux are so thorough-going that no-thing actually forms as a solid, persisting, independent entity—except conceptually, as a mental idea. No-thing is actually separate, autonomous, or self-sufficient. Everything is one whole indivisible happening—seamless and boundless—ever-present and ever-changing.

At some point in my journey from Here to Here, it became clear that ALL states of consciousness (“being in the Now” AND being entranced by thoughts and stories) are equally included in What Is, and that ALL of them are passing experiences. All these different experiences are impersonal in the sense that they have no owner, no author, no subject—they are simply expressions of nature like the ever-changing movements of the outer weather. It was realized that biting my fingers is simply a compulsive happening of nature that is no more wrong or unenlightened or personally caused than a thunderstorm or a cloudy day or a gnarled up tree or any other expression of nature. It doesn’t MEAN anything “about me.”

That discovery or realization was a big relief. The NEED to get rid of this compulsion and all the ideas about what it meant about me fell away. The biting continues off and on when it does, but there is no judgment or evaluation of it, none of the previous conflict with it that used to be present. The interest and the inclination to pay total attention to it in any given moment (to “be in the Now” with it) may or may not arise, and it doesn’t matter either way. There is no longer any idea that “being here now” is the superior spiritual state and that “I” must make that happen.

It’s clear here that everything happens in the only way possible. Some people are compelled to do terrible things like child molesting and serial murder in the same way that I am still compelled to bite my fingers. Only by grace (aka luck) is my compulsion fingerbiting and not serial murder or molesting children. No one chooses to be a serial killer or a child molester, and although most of us find such behavior repugnant and disturbing, it is as much a part of nature as erupting volcanoes, earthquakes, tornados, plagues, and animals eating their young. That doesn’t mean we have to like it, or that we won’t put serial killers in prisons and do our best to keep child molesters away from children. But it does mean we may have compassion for these unfortunate people who are driven to do things that they themselves may find abhorrent, acts that make them social pariahs and outcasts. We don’t get to choose the part we play in the Cosmic Dance.

The most liberating realization is that ALL of it is What Is – the parts we like and the parts we don’t, the “being here now” and the “being lost in thoughts and stories,” the calm experiences and the turbulent ones, the moments of heaven and the moments of hell, the heroes and the villains and the ordinary folk in between.

And we really have no way of KNOWING what THIS (this presently appearing happening) is. We can only BE it. We ARE it. It is ALL there is. Our attempts to understand this happening, whether through physics or neuroscience or biology or philosophy or spirituality, are always limited. We can never stand outside this happening. Subject and object are not two. The observer is inseparable from the observed; they are one event. Any understanding we have is partial and always subject to doubt. But we cannot doubt BEING here. We cannot doubt this present happening, this aware beingness. We can doubt any explanations of it (that it is a dream, or a brain experience, or a bunch of atoms and molecules doing a subatomic dance), but we cannot
doubt the bare ACTUALITY of the happening itself, the beingness of Here / Now – THIS, just as it is.

And we can notice that it is no way in particular, for it is ever-changing. Anything we try to grasp will vanish and disappear. Anything we THINK is permanent (including any IDEA or any EXPERIENCE or any subtle IMAGE of the One Self or Consciousness or Primordial Awareness or Emptiness) will vanish and slip through our fingers like water, air or smoke. And yet….

THIS is undeniable. You cannot NOT be as you are – this ever-unfolding, ever-present event that is always Here / Now. This event may show up as the mirage-like thought-sense of bring a separate-self encapsulated in a bodymind looking out at the world. It may show up as an experience of undivided wholeness. It may show up as the experience of “being here now,” or it may show up as molesting children, committing serial murders, planning a genocide, drinking yourself to death, committing suicide or biting your fingers. It may show up as a giant meteor hitting the earth and wiping out an entire continent, or it may show up as a gentle spring day. However it shows up, it is all one undivided happening without beginning or end.

Of course, this begs the question, what do we mean by realization or enlightenment? We thought at first that realization meant “being in the Now” and that enlightenment meant “being in the Now” all the time. From that perspective, it seemed like we were going back and forth between “getting it” and “losing it.” It seemed that “realization” meant something experiential, something “deeper” than merely understanding all of this conceptually or believing it as a philosophy. But then we realized there was no way NOT to be here now, and no one apart from Here / Now to be in or out of it. There is no separate “somebody” to be lost or found, realized or not realized, enlightened or unenlightened.

The whole spiritual adventure melted away. We were left with life, just as it is.

That doesn’t mean being left in a state of perpetual bliss or having a continuous EXPERIENCE of “being in the Now” (except in the sense that EVERY experience is one of being in the Now). It doesn’t mean we are always calm, decisive, spontaneous, relaxed, fearless, happy and filled with love. Some people by nature have more or less stormy weather than others, just as some places are by nature sunnier and others more overcast and cloudy. Realization simply means it is ALL recognized as What Is, even the absence of that recognition. It’s not a perpetual EXPERIENCE – but rather, the understanding that EVERY experience is one whole happening without an experiencer, even the experience of apparently being a separate experiencer. Nothing is left out. Nothing is not it. And there is no “it” to be found!

Like the edge of the earth that our ancestors feared they might fall off, the problem we’ve been trying to solve is imaginary. We are no longer seeking heaven without hell, or up without down. We don’t mind being the short tree instead of the tall tree because we know it’s all a play, and we’re the Whole Show. And this isn’t an EXPERIENCE or a special STATE of consciousness. It is JUST THIS, Here / Now, EXACTLY as it is!

How is it? It just moved! And yet, Here it is!

Joan Tollifson’s website, with her books, is www.joantollifson.com/books-joan-tollifson.html

Welcome to today’s issue of the Highlights. Featured are an interview with Shi Guolin, haiku by Miriam Louisa, and an offering from David Hodges on the nonduality of Star Wars.

photo (l to r): James, Heather, Kim, Scott (Sorry that it’s blurry, I was using my old Polaroid, and that’s not a great pic of Heather who is vibrant and beautiful.)

First, a reminder that an extended version of Nonduality Network Talk Radio will be airing Wednesday, December 18, from 12:30 to 3:00PM EST. My guests will be Scott and Kim MacInnis. Scott is a facilitator and leader in our Nonduality Satsang meetup group in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and this will be his first exposure to a broader audience. You might want to hear how he speaks about things. His wife Kim is a sage in her own right, though seeming to prefer a lower profile. Mark your calendar and listen to our show at ckdu.ca.

SHI GUOLIN

Venerable Guolin, abbot of the U.S. Shaolin Temple and President of the Shaolin Temple Overseas Headquarters, was converted to Buddhism at the age of 15. Since then he has dedicated himself whole-heartedly to learning, practicing, spreading and developing the Shaolin tradition for more than 20 years and won the reputation of Iron Arhat. Shi Guolin is well versed in Taoism and Confuscianism as well as Buddhism. He was the head coach of martial arts at the Shaolin headquarters in China. He is the successor disciple of the present abbot Master Monk Yong Xin and wa s assigned to be the inheritor of the 34th generation of the Shaolin tradition.

Fascinated by the diversities of culture and religion in the United States, he decided to share the Shaolin heritage with people living in this country and came to New York in 1992. Since then the number of his disciples and students has increased and is still increasing with each passing day.

The website of the Shaolin Temple is www.shaolin-overseas.org/index.html

Excerpt from an interview with Nonduality Magazine

NDM: What is enlightenment in the Shaolin tradition?

Sifu Guolin: You see these prayer beads that I’m holding. What are these prayer beads used for?

NDM: For counting?

Sifu Guolin: This is used for stilling your mind. A clean mind. An enlightened mind. Ok. This enlightened mind is clear, together. Sometimes if it’s not clear. This will make it together in one line. It will make it very clear. This is enlightenment.

NDM: So you’re saying that enlightenment is when your mind is clear all the time?

Sifu Guolin: All the time. Maybe for you like this you have been meditating for a long time. Right. In your meditation, you are very clear. Out of meditation you go back, not clear. Sometimes clear, sometimes not clear. (Laughter) You go back to the meditation, enjoying. This feels good but it’s not very good. You go back. When you finish meditation and are outside in life, when you can keep your life like it is when you are in meditation, that is good. Then sometime for a long time you are dreaming. (Laughter) So you cannot pass this one. (Pointing to the knot in the beads)

NDM: And the goal is to?

Sifu Guolin: To keep clear. If you just keep going around the beads and you don’t know how many circles you have made, you are like a machine. Like a machine, it’s no good. That’s why when you make one circle, you have to know its one circle to keep enlightenment.

NDM: So do you use some kind of visualization like light to help it go through? Or like a yin and yang symbol in your mind?

Sifu Guolin: You don’t have to use yin and yang means. Relax and tighten is yin and yang, inhale exhale is yin and yang. When your mind don’t move or moves is yin and yang there are many yin and yangs.

NDM: Empty/full.

Sifu Guolin: Yes.

Nicole: So you don’t visualize anything going through, you just think relax?

Sifu Guolin: Just take care of your training and your mind.

The complete interview may be read here:

http://www.nondualitymagazine.org/nonduality_magazine.7.shiguolin.htm

from http://echoesfromemptiness.com/2013/12/12/three-haiku-for-the-road-ahead/
three haiku for the road ahead
by miriam louisa

David Hodges posted http://www.reddit.com/r/nonduality

Star Wars: is the Force a sci-fi representation of NonDuality? (self.nonduality)

The force is an energy field crated by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. –Obi-Wan Kenobi