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page Being:
the bottom line
The bottom line is Being. Being awake or being asleep are actually beside the point. Usually the idea is that dialogues such as these have the specific purpose of bringing about enlightenment, awakening, liberation - whatever the term used for that which is deemed to be escape from (or transcendence of) identification as a suffering individual. But our true nature is always Being and doesn’t require any enlightenment or awakening. It simply is already, whether there’s identification or not. In the play of life, whenever there is identification, the story tends to be about improving what is in some way. And when that takes the form of the search for awakening, the focus usually falls on getting rid of the sense of individuality, as though it were somehow wrong or unreal. But if there’s a sense of individuality and a story about seeking to be rid of it, then precisely that is reality.
Being has no requirements whatsoever. Nothing needs to be
changed or attained in order to be. This present appearance is
already the perfect expression of Being and cannot be avoided.
Excerpts
Chap. 30: Identification and liberation are both impersonal Nathan, whenever there’s some crisis or other, the focus on it is such that identification seems inevitable. So the big story here is that life’s not OK and needs to be resolved through pursuing liberation. Liberation is not the ‘answer’ to problems and certainly isn’t the end result of any kind of process. However, whenever there’s an identification with the story of ‘my’ life, then quite likely that story will include the compulsion to do something about any ‘problems’. Maybe then liberation is viewed as being the answer. But how can you avoid identifying with the story? There’s no ‘I’ outside of the thought story that can avoid identifying. The ‘I’ that would avoid identification is an integral part of the story that arises in the play of life. And in the spontaneous seeing of this, there’s no need to avoid identification: it’s obvious that everything is a play of appearances arising presently in awareness. It’s not an ‘I’ that sees this, though. The ‘I’ cannot see - or avoid identifying with - anything. The ‘I’ is thought and thought has no capacity for action of any kind. Thoughts are just images appearing and disappearing in awareness. So although it’s not being done by any entity, identification with the images that appear in awareness may be happening. Or maybe there’s clear seeing that there is no one. And this is why liberation is impersonal, because there’s no one left when it happens. Identification is also impersonal, because there’s actually no one who identifies, there’s no one there in the first place! Identification happens as part of the play of life - but not to a someone. Even being a person is impersonal, because actually there are no entities at all. But even if there’s no one who identifies, identification is totally different in quality to liberation. Whenever there’s identification, there’s seeming separation and an attendant sense of lack in some degree or other; a sense of something missing. What’s referred to as liberation, on the other hand, is the clear seeing that there’s no one - no separate entity - and therefore no such sense of lack. But there’s no one to whom either identification or liberation is happening, and no one who can bring either of them about. Identification and liberation are both impersonal. Both are possibilities in the play of life, and while the difference between them will appear significant, that significance is relevant only in the play. Being is the bottom line in all of this. It is the ground that allows the expression of all possibilities and that has no dependence on any happening in the play. It is this present expression just as it appears - whether that expression should be identification or liberation. This is all there is.
Chap. 16: So what? Questioner: Twenty-five years ago I was travelling in Asia and I became mildly interested in Buddhism. So when I got back to the UK and heard that a Buddhist centre was starting up a few miles away from where I lived, I thought I’d give it a try. And for the next twenty years, Buddhism and the search for enlightenment took over my life. The Buddhist teaching that all things are transient, unsatisfactory and devoid of a central essence or self seemed to make perfect logical sense, and the idea that an escape from the unsatisfactoriness of life was possible I found really exhilarating. In the early days of the centre the teacher would say things like ‘Everything is perfect as it is’, ‘You are all enlightened already’, ‘There are no “shoulds”, “oughts” or “musts” in reality’ - not a million miles away from the kind of things you or Tony Parsons might say. Over the years, however, the simplicity of the central message and the sense of inspiration seemed to become increasingly overshadowed by the emphasis on all the things that had to be done - or not done - if enlightenment was ever to occur. The sense of mystery and wonder got buried under a grim determination to confront and wrestle with the negativities that I came to believe were clouding my vision. Having been well and truly hooked in by then, though, I could only keep going. My teacher would tell us that so long as we applied ourselves to the path with dedication, so long as we worked at developing the clarity of mind that would cut through confusion and reveal things as they truly are, it might take more than a single lifetime but we’d definitely get there in the end. And for a long, long time I believed him. Why not? So far as I could tell, he was enlightened himself, so surely he must know more about what it took to ‘get there’ than I did. And if I didn’t seem to be making much progress - or any progress at all - then clearly the fault must lie in my own application. Eventually it began to dawn on me - and the realisation took a long time coming - that the problem didn’t necessarily lie in my own inadequacy or lack of commitment. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was rather the case that the method itself was inherently flawed: it couldn’t actually deliver what it promised. At the end of 1999, I left the centre that had been my life for eleven years and struck out on my own. I found a job and a place to live and I gradually built myself a ‘normal’ life in the world. Thoughts about enlightenment, however, the idea that there must be something other than the daily grind, the inexorable decline into sickness and death, continued to nag away at me. The following autumn I was in Watkins Bookshop in London. Attracted simply by the bizarreness of the author’s name, I picked up a book by Wayne Liquorman. Even in my heavy Buddhist days, I’d always loved Nisargadatta’s I Am That, and I found Wayne’s take on non-dualism attractive. A few months later I went to one of his weekends in London. Although I was wary of his emphasis on the guru-disciple relationship, I would probably have carried on seeing him if he hadn’t lived over the other side of the world. Not long after, a friend happened to lend me a copy of The Open Secret. I can’t pretend that I understood it all, but something about the simplicity of Tony Parsons’ words intrigued me. I took a look at his website and found that he was giving a talk in Salisbury the following Saturday. Tony’s clarity and constant pulling the rug from under my feet have been an inspiration. He reawakened me to the mystery and the wonder of it all. He helped me to appreciate more and more that there is no one - therefore no choice and no responsibility. After all those years of continually trying to do the right thing and stop myself from doing the wrong thing, this came as such a relief. How did what Tony said differ from what you’d heard before? Tony was saying that everything is right as it is, and that there is in fact no one, no self. And that seemed to be exactly what my Buddhist teacher had been saying. For a while, I was quite confused about what the difference was, but gradually it became clearer that essentially it boiled down to a question of emphasis. I’ve read somewhere that there are two basic approaches to enlightenment or liberation or whatever you want to call it: transcendence and immanence. Transcendence says we have to make the effort to go beyond the world to find the answer - immanence says the answer is already always present. While the Buddhist teaching certainly includes the idea of immanence, what it really emphasises (in my experience of it, at least) is transcendence. So while anatta or non-self is one of the central tenets of the teaching, and while it’s said that enlightenment is totally beyond action and result, beyond time and space, beyond the conditioning process, you tend to hear more about the million and one things that can and must be done if you’re ever to get to the point where enlightenment occurs and it can be seen that there is no self. Buddhism does recognise this contradiction, and it seems to address it by saying that you need to use the self to go beyond the self and by explaining that there are different levels of reality which should not be mixed. (There’s ‘conventional’ reality where I am born, grow old and die and can choose the actions I take, ‘ultimate’ reality where there are just transient sensory phenomena, and beyond both of these, enlightenment itself. Complication upon complication ...) Of course, all the emphasis on effort and control inevitably brings in its wake all the problems of comparison and perceived inadequacy that arise when characters who emotionally believe they are real and solid strive to come to the realisation that they aren’t. So however often I managed to be mindful of self-doubt or conceit or even the concept of self arising, that did nothing to dent the emotional conviction that there actually was a ‘me’ who could make progress on the path. Tony cut away all that. He dissolved that division between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and revealed that everything is actually OK. The initial burst of euphoria lasted till I managed to dig myself into a pit of what amounted to fatalism. I’d heard Tony say time and time again when someone complained that his message seemed fatalistic, ‘It’s not that there is nothing that can be done - rather is it that there is no one’. On an intellectual level - and at times on an experiential level too - that made perfect sense. But increasingly I was getting bogged down in an emotional belief that there was nothing ‘I’ could do. Which of course led at times to intense feelings of futility and frustration, because I no longer had a direction in which to focus in order to resolve this dichotomy - Tony had taken it away from me! When I was involved in Buddhism, at least there had always been something I could do - be more mindful, meditate more, practise restraint. Now, despite everything Tony said about there being no one, despite my own intellectual understanding of that, my emotional reality was of a ‘me’ trapped in a situation that was hopeless. So you mean you started out, through Buddhism, with a positive, hopeful ‘I can do something’ approach, but then you found you’d gone to the opposite pole and were caught in the negative frustration of ‘I can do nothing’? Yes, exactly. And to make matters worse, where Buddhism gives you the impression that only one in a million ever gets enlightened, in the new non-dualist circles I was coming into contact with there seemed to be continual gossip and rumours about people waking up or ‘getting it’. The satsang circuit was littered with new names, and it looked as though there would soon be more teachers than students. Which, in my worst moments, threw me right back into the sense of inadequacy of being someone who hadn’t ‘got it’ and who doubtless never would get it. At first I tended to take the claims on trust but my sceptical streak gradually re-surfaced. A fellow sceptic summed it up when he reckoned that many of them were simply overreacting to what amounted to ‘having a good day’! So what’s been happening more recently then? Well, having been oscillating for some time between a frustrated, hopeless fatalism and an attitude of ‘bugger the whole thing and turn on the tele’, something you said at one of your talks recently really seemed to strike home. I know I’ve heard similar things from both you and Tony in the past, but this time the words got through. It went something like this: ‘At the talks we keep hearing “There’s no one there” and this becomes another focus for seeking, as though it mattered in some way, that there ought to be no one here. Sometimes it can be completely obvious: we take a look and we see that there isn’t actually anyone here. But if we take a look and there still seems to be someone, so what?’ That made me realise how much investment I’d been putting into the times when there seemed to be no one: ‘being no one’ is good and to be sought after, ‘being me’ is definitely not OK. And rather than the ‘so what?’ being a bolshie, frustrated kind of ‘so what?’ (along the lines of ‘If I can’t win this game, I’m not going to play it’), there was a feeling that whether there was no one, whether there was someone - it really didn’t matter. But then that vision or whatever you call it disappeared, and on the emotional level, being ‘me’ felt like a problem again. But what you had said had revealed that I was still subtly hoping that a point would come when there would simply be ‘Being’ without any ‘me-ing’, that there would always be that experience of ‘There is no one’. Much as I’d like that to be the case (!), you made it clearer to me that that just isn’t necessary. So I guess it’s a bit like Pandora’s box - hope’s the last thing out!
UK £8.40 US $13.95 Paperback 120 pages ISBN 978-0-9551762-2-7 Website: http://www.nathangill.com/
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