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408p. ISBN 0-9547792-8-2
An intimate account of spontaneous spiritual enlightenment and its implications in a life lived beyond the individual self. “It is so rare to see any work that holds that essential and fundamental perception without compromise. Your book is a beacon which can shine through all of the fog and nonsense that is broadcast under the name of ‘advaita’ or ‘non-duality’. Especially as that expression comes out of no-one!” Tony Parsons author of The Open Secret, As It Is and All There Is.
“This book is a Gonzo Gita – a Gone-so Song of God; a soaring, rampaging loving outpouring of Unmanifest Source displayed in manifest consciousness, playing a complex spiritual melody through the hollow bamboo flute of a Vermont farmer/carpenter/building contractor who was all but ignorant of the non-dual tradition before a disorienting full enlightenment struck and he realized ‘there’s nobody home.’ The melody is at once intimate, vulnerable, informal, passionate and rigorously rational in savaging the smug mind that uses language to seek security in concepts. Each time the self tries to survive by seizing upon some truth and running to safety, the Understanding always stands there blocking the way, producing a perpetual Zen koan throughout the book that just might stop the mind for long enough to… In the meantime, while you are still in the apparent realm of experience, if you want to read about the complete Understanding of What Is, and its aftershocks – the gaga phase of trying to communicate how it is that there is no choice or free will, no acting or doing, that there is not even any you – and if you want to know how life looks when no longer seen upside down and backwards, how the empty Void fills with mysterious Love, then this book’s for you. Beyond St.Augustine, who invented the literary genre of the autobiography and wrote a spiritual autobiography of the peak experiences of a separate self, comes this account of the No-Self, continuing and updating the tradition of the great mystics and sages” Robert Gussner PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of Vermont Dept. of Religion
Excerpts
This is based on appearances: there appear to be separate bodies, so the assumption is that there are separate consciousness-es. The belief in this assumption blinds you to seeing What Is, and is also the cause of your experience of this life as disquieting, confusing, unhappy, and generally full of fear and suffering. But it is not the case. There is in no way an individual sitting here talking to you. This body is nothing, an appearance in the dream. All there is is Consciousness, and it is Consciousness which is streaming through this appearance. There is nothing here that exists in and of itself. What we call the human being is not an independent being, not an originating mechanism, not a transmitter. It is a relay station, a pass-through mechanism for Consciousness, the One Consciousness, All That Is. That is what I am, talking to you. And it is the same One Consciousness listening to this, looking back at me out of those eyes you call your own. What I am when I say 'I Am' is exactly the same as what you are when you say 'I Am.' Once seen, the irony of the situation is staggering. Look: what you think of as your 'self,' what you perceive as an individual person, this idea of being a separate entity, a body-mind-personality-soul-intellect: this is a subsequent by-product, an artefact, an almost accidental side effect of this streaming, this flowing of Consciousness. It is the streaming of Consciousness in this organism which the organism inaccurately perceives as a 'mind' which it thinks is its own: it is the very Consciousness streaming in this organism which allows this perception at all, which makes it possible for this organism to think it is other than that same Consciousness. A simple, innocent misperception. And a silly one, because the very One who appears to be thinking this, who appears not to see, not to understand that it is not as a separate individual and is only as All That Is, is Itself the very I-ness that is the only Is-ness of all seeing, of all understanding. Look into what is behind this perception.
Investigate what you think of as your 'self.' This is the purpose, the
meaning of all spirituality, of all seeking, of your very being: to
understand this amazing intricate play of Consciousness by seeing what is
this illusion, this mistaken perception, and what is its source which
makes it possible. What you are, you always already are. It is by seeing
what you are not that there is a stepping away from it, stepping out of
the misconceived role of a separate fearful individual. Effortlessness is not something that can be attained by effort. No-mind is not a state that can be achieved by the mind. Peace cannot be achieved by striving. Trying to be aware of 'just being in the present moment' is a contradiction in terms; being 'self-consciously' aware of it takes you out of it. Trying to be aware of "I Am' is a similar contradiction, and for the same reason. You can't try to be happy any more than you can try to go to sleep or try to act naturally. You only act naturally when you're not trying, not thinking, but simply going about life. People would come from all over India and the whole world to see Ramana Maharshi and ask him for advice on the spiritual path. His advice? "Just be yourself." This is what Nisargadatta Maharaj said of your natural state, of what you are naturally, spontaneously, without effort:
There is one tradition within Advaita which says that maya, the manifestation of the physical universe, is over-laid or superimposed on Sat Chit Ananda. I'm no scholar of these things, and can only attempt to describe what is seen here; and the Understanding here is that there is no question of one thing superimposed on another. Maya, the manifestation, the physical universe, is precisely Sat Chit Ananda, is not other than it, does not exist on its own as something separate to be overlaid on top of something else. This is the whole point! There is no maya! The only reason it appears to have its own reality and is commonly taken to be real in itself is because of a misperceiving, a mistaken perception which sees the appearance and not What Is. This is the meaning of Huang Po's comment that "no distinction should be made between the Absolute and the sentient world." No distinction! There is only One. There is not ever in any sense two. All perception of distinction and separation, all perception of duality, and all perception of what is known as physical reality, is mind-created illu-sion. When a teacher points at the physical world and says, "All this is maya," what is being said is that what you are seeing is illusion; what all this is is All That Is, pure Being Consciousness Bliss Outpouring; it is your perception of it as a physical world that is maya, illusion. Of course in truth there is no gate that opens into All That Is, and no path leads there. There can only be the shift in perception to see maya, the unreal, as unreal. Still, for this dream character the Understanding occurred in the context of indigenous spirituality, and so what is known in the dream as 'shamanism' in this case turns out to have been the pathless path to the gateless gate that swung open to reveal what was never hidden, never on the other side. Like any other form of religion or spiritual practice on the planet, shamanism is mostly nonsense, something for the dream characters to do to try to make sense out of it all and comfort themselves while the dream lasts. All that trying and all the trappings of shamanic practice exploded, dissolved in the light of Presence, of All That Is. Yet there are a very few even in shamanism who also know and have seen: that it is only a dream, and that nothing matters, and that all there is is Awareness, and that they are not. And they go through the motions for others, or perhaps with the passage of time in the dream they do so less and less until no more, and are seen as crazy fools. Who cares? For, while it is known beyond doubt that as a person, an individual, an entity, as 'david,' even as 'spirit,' I am not, do not exist, nor does any other: nevertheless it is equally obvious that as All That Is, I Am. The seeing that occurred in the jungle was and is self-validating in the sense that it is absolute and needs no confirmation. Everything is seen in its light; it relativizes everything and is itself relativized by nothing. Nevertheless, in the dream, the dream character continues to func-tion as such. And that dream character, that body/mind instrument, will be impacted by the occurrence of the Understanding. It seems that in most cases the Understanding comes after some period of seeking and of coming to an intellectual understanding of the teachings of the perennial wisdom, and in such cases there would likely be at least something of a recognition when it happened. In this case however there was very little if any preparation in terms of being exposed to the basic concepts. In one way this was a deep and beautiful grace and blessing; I have seen the intel-lectual comprehension of the concepts involved become itself a tremendous block to many spiritual seekers, and in this case I was spared that, the Understanding happening naturally, spontaneously and innocently. But in another sense it made the impact greater, and without preparation the body/mind was thrown into a kind of chaos. For this reason I find Suzanne Segal's account quite poignant; there is a deep appreciation of what she went through. Although in a sense she had more prepara-tion than in my case, having trained in Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, still it did not seem to have provided her with the necessary parameters to comprehend the awakening when it happened. Perhaps even more significantly, she was not provided with any meaningful support after it occurred, and spent the next twelve years with psychotherapists engaged in "an all-out effort to pathologize the emptiness of personal self in an effort to get rid of it." In my case, the shamanic context could not itself provide an adequate system of ideas and experience in which to ground and comprehend and express what had happened. I knew that there was "nobody home," that there was not and never had been a 'david,' that what I had always thought of as 'myself' was a fiction. I also knew that Brilliant Presence was All, outpouring. This was beautiful and perfect, but at the same time it produced what at the time I called a severe 'disconnect;' a sense of discontinuity not only from any sense of personal past or history or beliefs or purpose, but also a total disconnect from what was apparently the experience of every other being on the planet, as far as I knew. Within our social and cultural context, the possibility that there had been some kind of psychotic dissociative break and that the david thing had gone quite insane seemed a very plausible explanation. And so what followed was once again
miraculous, unearned Grace. As a result of the unconventional way in which
the Understanding occurred in this case there was not the discovering of
the relationship with a guru in the traditional way. Yet there is
something, perhaps similar, as this unfolds: simply being, resting, in
this Brilliance, letting this tremendous Grace take hold: clearing,
opening into this Peace that passes understanding. Makes sense here. Jed McKenna calls it a "damn peculiar ten years" and I'd have to agree. It simply takes a while for the body/mind organism to adjust. Everything that people think is important and makes sense, is seen to be completely absurd, meaningless. And what people don't even see, is Perfect, beautiful, complete, needs no words. There is an inclination, even greater than previously, toward silence and solitude even though there is obviously no such thing. Hui-Neng says that while the Understanding is sudden, what he calls 'deliverance' is gradual indeed. Near as I can figure, the mind/body thing is impacted by the happening of the Understanding, and that can take some adjustment. How can it be otherwise? In some cases perhaps the transition can be smooth: if for example you live in a culture and a time in which you are saturated in the the basic elements of the Teaching all your life, the period of adjustment in the body/mind organism may be very mild. Clearly in my case it was different, almost the complete opposite. After a lifetime of experiencing life as almost unbearably confusing and painful, of fighting against life and everything it brought, very different patterns and habits and ways of thinking were laid down in the condi-tioning. There was no background of the Teaching to fall back on or refer to. And, there was no community or other resources for support immediately after the happening. There is a tradition in Buddhism of something called Pratyeka-bodhi, 'solitary realization.' It refers to Awakening when it occurs outside of the usual transmission of teaching from master to disciple, and without the usual background or preparation or support. In such a case, the road to deliv-erance might well be even more "damn peculiar" than otherwise. Perhaps Ramesh was thinking of something like this when he said to me, When I came across Jesus' comment at the beginning of The Gospel of Thomas, it was the first time I'd found a teacher saying that after the 'finding' of awakening, one can be greatly disturbed, greatly troubled. Depending on the conditioning of the body/mind in question, this may not always be the case, but it was the case here. This period of disturbance is itself 'deliverance,' the rearranging of the patterning and conditioning of the life of the body/ mind in the light of the new conditioning provided in the Understanding. And underlying it all is the constant, total amazement of awareness as the All, which never dies. But this all has to do with how the body/mind organism responds and adjusts to the varying ways in which the Understanding occurs. It has always been quite clear that the Understanding itself is ultimately complete and simple and total. Those who argue that there is gradual awakening, or awakening in stages or degrees, or a even some process of deepening into it, seem to me to be missing something very essential and integral to the Understanding itself. It is not something of time and space, and it cannot take up time or space. It is not an experience, is not a process. It is a piercing of time and space by the pivotal intuitive insight that all time and all space and all things and all entities including the one in whom the insight is occurring, all are not. How can this be other than instantaneous, immediate? It can't be partial; it's either/or. And all this is apparent only; it is seen that there is nothing here: words, ideas, thoughts, all meaningless; "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound a fury, signifying nothing." What Is, is great beauty, great love, great silence, and that really is all. Once again it doesn't translate, doesn't seem to be communicable, expressible.
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Perfect Brilliant Stillness