Sonya Amrita Bibilos was Adyashanti’s former longtime program director. We talk about her experience with Adyashanti and compare it to corporate experience. Mainly we talk about the nature and experience of healing and even random acts of healing. As with most of these interviews, we wander into all kinds of areas of discussion. We also talk about Sonya’s upcoming free audio book, I AM NOT A MONK: Living, Working, and Making Money While Waking Up.
Sonya is an intuitive healer who offers sessions for awakening/evolving individuals, partners and teams that illuminate wisdom to liberate and transform all areas of life. Sonya’s unique and powerful perspective combines her intuitive gifts and life experience and enables her clients to resolve core issues and access clarity of purpose and vision—often in a single session. www.illuminatedwisdom.com
I interviewed Robert Rabbin on Nonduality Street. Robert is a speaker, author, teacher. He has taught public speaking and is currently teaching 5 principles of authentic living, which is what this interview is mostly about. You may listen here:
Has someone ever come up to you, thinking they know you, and started chatting away about people and events you have no knowledge of. You wonder who they’re speaking to. Suddenly, they wake up and realize that they don’t know you, that you only looked like someone they know or knew.
This is happening to me now. People are writing and speaking to me as if they know me. They don’t. I wonder who they think I am. I wonder who they’re speaking to. I wonder why they aren’t more present with themselves, and me.
It is quite common, isn’t it, to assume that we know people, because their name and face and voice are familiar. But we have to be careful, because something may have happened in their hypocenter, the place where earthquakes start. Without our noticing, their entire identity, history, and being may have shifted so suddenly and totally as to make them a new person. Not the old person with new ideas, experiences, and beliefs, but a new person, one we’ve never met. This can happen to anyone, to all of us. It’s often why we undertake personal and spiritual growth work — to become something utterly new.
If we are to serve and support each other in our growth, change and transformation, then we must approach each other with care, especially those closest to us, those we think we know. If we are not careful, our knowing will create a prison for them and us.
Can we approach each other with this level of care, being willing to both know and not know, suspending easy and habitual projections, in order that we may all truly have the opportunity to grow, change, and transform?
Whatever the answer to this question may be, we each ought to be true to who we are, who we’ve become, who we’re becoming. You know as well as I do what it feels like to pretend to be someone you’re not, to accept and cooperate with the projections of others. It makes you feel sick, doesn’t it? Self-betrayal leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth.
I love Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Sometimes a Man”:
Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.
A few months ago, I stood up during supper and walked out the door. The children of my past do not know me.
On August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist, walked across a wire he had strung between the two World Trade Center towers. He was on that wire, a quarter mile above ground, for 45 minutes. It was such a catastrophic enterprise, so beyond imagining, a feat of such daring that he walked from one life to another. When he was finished, he left his past. No one could follow him. He had become someone else on that wire.
I wonder what might happen if we were to truly let go of the self we were, and let go of the images we hold of others? I wonder what might happen if we stood up at supper, or breakfast, and walked out the door. I wonder what might happen in 45 minutes, a quarter mile above ground, with nothing but self-surrender to steady us and keep us safe, if never the same.
A Light Unto Your Self:
Self Discovery Through Investigation of Experience
Colin Drake
‘By observing mental states you also become aware of the seven factors of enlightenment. These are: awareness of awareness, investigation of the Way, vigour, joy, serenity, concentration and equanimity.’ (The Buddha, Maha Sattipatthana Sutta 14-16)
The first two are paramount and the last five are outcomes of these. This is what this book is all about, becoming ‘aware of awareness’ through direct investigation and then continuing with further ‘investigation of the Way’ (the Tao, the nature of reality). Once one is aware of awareness then one can become ‘A Light Unto Yourself’ by undertaking further investigations not needing to relying on any ‘teachings’, although these may be useful for confirming what one has discovered.
Comments from Peter Signell on the Author:
‘I know Colin Drake through his magnificent writing.’
‘Your words seem to always ring so true to me.’
‘You can only imagine how much I have wished for this clarity.’
Last week I had the honour of attending and speaking at the 2011 Paradoxica Nondual Psychology Conference held at the University of Lethbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, which is a 3 hour drive south of Calgary. Lethbridge is a city of about 86,000 people.
Lethbridge, Alberta, is a hotbed of nondual teaching, study, and training conceived and run by Dr. Gary Nixon, a firey, passionate, self-realized visionary. Gary is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences and head of the Addictions Counseling program.
I spoke to several of his students and former students who are now counselors and they speak with gratitude about having discovered and studied with Gary. He’s the kind of guy you’re either going to love or not want to deal with. He doesn’t mess around. He promotes the work of Jed McKenna, among others, and if there is a flesh and blood Jed it may as well be Gary.
The Conference was well organized, stayed on schedule, and no glitches were noted. All the speakers showed up and each one delivered something different and truly powerful. Gary himself is a dynamic speaker. Why he hasn’t appeared at the Science and Nonduality Conferences, I don’t know. Certainly that will change. For one thing, I guess, he’s very busy as an academic, teaching, doing research, publishing a journal, planning a yearly conference, counseling, and training graduate students.
The day after the conference I was privileged to sit in on a group counseling session with Gary and about 15 of his students, former students, and couple of outsiders who were speakers at the conference. There was a lot of vulnerability which allowed for deepened connections between people.
What’s happening in Lethbridge is the training of nondual psychologists. They, in turn, are spreading the knowledge of nonduality. I was very pleased to be part of this conference. I hope to return. Thanks to Gary Nixon for inviting me and to his students, former students, and other conference attendees for their gracious attention and interest.
Chuck Hillig, author of 5 books, teacher, nonduality pioneer, and creator of the new Living in the Wow DVD. We talk about the “old days” of nonduality, the act of writing, pointers to truth, and psychotherapy.
Life moves
Like shadow and light,
Instantaneously appearing,
Though I cannot find time itself.
Cities mirrored in thought,
Nothing standing alone.
There is no seer without the seen,
No thought without thing.
Subject and object inter-rise.
Feelings, perceptions, none self-made.
Not even the heart
Lights its own flame.
The separate self departs.
There are sensations, conversations,
Aromatic contemplations,
But no I to claim
This emptiness cafe.
~ ~ ~
Since studying and meditating on emptiness teachings, I was able to give nonconceptual, nondual experiences a gestalt that integrated them into life. This teaching brings both the emptiness of phenomena and cause and effect together in a way so as to understand and live through the guidance of nondual wisdom and compassion.
My work as a licensed therapist, utilizing both cognitive and psychodynamic therapies, has also been influenced and woven together with nondual emptiness teachings. The aim of emptiness teachings is to alleviate suffering and do so in a way that identifies and addresses its root cause, without finding it desirable or even possible to withdraw from individual and worldly concerns. Susan Kahn’s website
“The current nonduality teaching seems to be the same old wine in different bottles, in some cases, baby bottles.”
“I was expected to get it and to make any and all efforts to accomplish that. Any laziness at all in the work of getting it was severely criticized and I might be told that if I really wasn’t interested then perhaps I should just leave and stop wasting his time. … He knew how to laugh with a wonderful freedom. … He knew how to suffer, too. He never tried to avoid it but just took it all in.” Saltzman speaking about his teacher.
“The most difficult misunderstanding about awakening is that awakening is some special state which is somehow attained through effort. That is totally wrong. The emptiness and silence of awareness already exists everywhere and nowhere. Awareness is beyond description and no person will ever attain it or own it.”
“I did not awaken so I am not awakened. Awakening happens suddenly, and since the imagined ‘myself’ no longer cares to stand in the way of that or to struggle against it, awakening continues to happen. … Awakening never ends.”
Photo: Dr. Robert Saltzman on the left, Buddhism teacher and psychiatrist Dr. Robert Hall on the right, teaching a couple weeks ago in Cabo San Lucas, La Paz, Baja California, Mexico.
Dr. Robert Saltzman re-addresses and expands upon questions asked in an earlier interview. I believe you will like his honesty and the detail with which he considers and addresses each question. This interview is recommended for students and teachers. These are the questions asked and addressed:
What is the role of a spiritual teacher?
What is spiritual awakening?
What is the heart of what you teach?
How do you communicate the heart of what you teach?
You’re a teacher in a world of nonduality which claims there is no student and no teacher. How do you respond to that?
Talk about practice, its value and its limitations.
Tell us about your active website and forum.
Tell us about your teacher, Walter Chappell.
How do the roles of psychotherapist and spiritual teacher play out in your life? How much have the roles merged and how much separation do you give them?
There are traditional psychotherapists and these days nondual psychotherapists. How does know which one to go to?
There is training available to psychotherapists in nondual sensitivity, how do you feel about that? If psychotherapists came to you for such training, how would you approach such a challenge?
What does it mean to awaken?
What are some of the myths about awakening?
Would you discern between the intense and true desire to awaken and the intense and fashionable desire to awaken?
You write, “My entire interest is focused upon whatever is arising now in this very moment.” How can it be otherwise or does it just appear otherwise?
Since you mention context, how important is it to put teaching and confession into context?
A student or seeker might sit with you perceiving you as enlightened and awakened while perceiving themself as ordinary, limited, or unenlightened. How do you perceive the coupling of yourself and the seeker or student?
Quite literally everything we know just happens. We can of course pretend for a while to be the doer of all of the happenings in our personal life, but if you look closely to each moment anew, with an open mind, a fresh perception, then you will see how everything that happens, literally does just that: It happens.
Even when we believe ourselves to be the doer of something, even when we are in the very act of doing something using our thought/intention and body, if we become aware of it in that moment, we will see how even that which we call ‘doing’ is simply happening as an effortlessly appearing phenomenal process. There is no effort in any appearance of Life. Life does not know effort. Life simply happens naturally and effortlessly. Effort is that which we mentally ‘feel’ when we believe ourselves to be the doer of our lives.
First Principle Church, also known as the Society of Abidance in Truth, is a Hindu-based religious organization grounded in the Advaita Vedanta tradition (the teaching of non-duality). Smith and his brother, Jeffrey Smith, founded the Church in the 1970′s in San Bruno, California. About that time, Jeffrey Smith changed his name to I. M. Nome.
Nome was the Church’s head minister. Smith was also a minister of the Church. It does not appear that there have been any other ministers in the over 30 years that the Church has been in existence. Church members referred to Nome as “Reverend Nome,” “Master Nome” (which indicated that he had achieved spiritual perfection), “Bhagavan” (which means “one who is God”), and “Guru” (which means supreme authority; a spiritual light or leader). They referred to both ministers as “sages.”
Summary statement
…there was substantial evidence that supported the trial court’s conclusion that Smith’s salary forgiveness, Parents’ loan, Smith’s purchase of the Rodeo Gulch property, and Parents’ donations did not supply consideration for the promise of a pension.
