Archive for the 'Nondual confessions' Category

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The Story of a Holy Trinity

October 24, 2008

The story of being awake is as insubstantial as the story of not being awake. I don’t like to breathe life into that dynamic of being awake and not being awake, but here is a story:

When I was 7 years old I valued the sense of I Am. The spontaneous utterance was, “I am I am and I am I am.” At age 30 it became a permanent knowing and the spontaneous utterance was, “There is only one day.” At age 45 I was sitting on a rock and the I Am dissolved and the utterance was, “I have arrived … lighter … unscarred.” Those utterances still play on like a holy trinity. The utterance now is existence itself.

An aspirant needs only the sense of existence, or God. Value it and live from the valuing of it, instead of going to a place where someone talks about valuing it and lives from valuing it.

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Is Writing about Nonduality Prattle or Is It Singing from the Heart?

October 5, 2008

An Avadhuta is a liberated soul, one who lives in the realization of the Self. The Avadhuta Gita is a text of extreme advaita or nonduality: “There is no you, no me, nor is there the universe. All is verily the Self alone.” Authorship is ascribed to Dattatreya, a legendary figure who is seen as an incarnation of God.

Out of the eight chapters, 4, 5, 6, and 7 end with the same verse (there are slight differences). Here are two translations from the final verse of Chapter 4:

“In Self, there is no spell, no talisman, nothing to learn, no prosody to study. Swimming in the sea of oneness, Avadhoota Dattatreya sings in his delight of a pure heart, the grandeur of truth.” (Avadhoota Gita, with English translation by Shree Purohit Swami. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi, 1988.)

“There is verily no versification where one knows nothing. The supreme and free One, absorbed in the consciousness of the homogenous Being and pure of thought, prattles about the Truth.” (Avadhuta Gita, Song of the Free, translated and annotated by Swami Ashokananda. Sri Ramakrisha Math, Mylapore, Madras, 1988.)

Negation: Nothing to know, no knower

Each verse begins with a statement of negation: “In Self, there is no spell, no talisman, nothing to learn, no prosody to study,” says one translation. “There is verily no versification where one knows nothing,” says the other.

Fusing these two verses and the earlier verse — “There is no you, no me, nor is there the universe. All is verily the Self alone” — this portion of the verse could be paraphrased to say that there is nothing to learn and nothing to be known, as there is no knower.

Confessions of Nonduality

The second portion of each verse is a confession of nonduality: “Swimming in the sea of oneness…,” declares one translation. The other says, “The supreme and free One, absorbed in the consciousness of the homogenous Being and pure of thought….”

Initially, knowledge and the knower were negated. Now the condition of nonduality is confessed. The first translation prefers the term “oneness.”

Using the terms “absorbed,” “homogeneous,” “pure,” the second translation seeks a description that, in comparison, is more exact and intimate, closer to a description of non-separation or “not-two-ness.”

Singing in delight, or just prattling?

The third portion of each verse describes the nature of talking about nonduality: The one translation reads, “Avadhoota Dattatreya sings in his delight of a pure heart, the grandeur of truth.” The other is, “[Dattatreya] prattles about the Truth.”

One translator speaks of singing in delight of a pure heart and the other speaks of prattling. The translator who uses “prattles,” says in a note, “The transcendental Reality cannot be adequately spoken of. Whatever Dattatreya has been saying about It can only be prattle.”

What does it mean, to prattle?

The Oxford English Dictionary says

[< PRATE v. + -LE suffix 3. Compare Middle Dutch, early modern Dutch protelen to mutter, to grumble, Middle Low German pr telen, pr telen to chatter, to babble, to cackle.]

2. intr.
a. To talk in a foolish, childish, or inconsequential way; to chatter at length, esp. about unimportant matters. Now freq. with on.

1532 T. MORE Confut. Tyndale in Wks. 533/2 So he dooeth but prattle & prate of feling fayth, without the feling of any fayth at all. 1557 Bible (Geneva) 3 John 10 If I come, I wyl declare his dedes whych he doeth, pratteling against vs with malicious wordes. 1594 T. BOWES tr. P. de la Primaudaye French Acad. II. 118 Those that cease not to prattle and babble about vaine and vnprofitable matters. 1644 MILTON Areopagitica 16 They must not be suffer’d to prattle as they doe, but must be licens’d what they may say. 1692 J. LOCKE Some Thoughts conc. Educ. §35 He had the Mastery of his Parents ever since he could Prattle. 1722 D. DEFOE Moll Flanders 237, I talk’d to [the pretty little child], and it prattl’d to me again. 1778 JOHNSON Let. 15 Oct. (1992) III. 128, I never said with Dr. Dodd that I love to prattle upon paper, but I have prattled now till the paper will not hold much more, than my good wishes. 1833 C. LAMB Pop. Fallacies xii, in Last Ess. of Elia 256 The children of the very poor do not prattle..there is no childishness in [their]..dwellings. 1866 W. D. HOWELLS Venetian Life xvii. 252 The barber here prattles on with a freedom..respected by the interlocutory conte under his razor. 1920 D. H. LAWRENCE Women in Love xxi. 316 They talked and prattled at random. 1990 Esquire May 162/3 He’ll merely prattle on about how unimportant money is.

The nature of prattle: the heart and authenticity

There’s no argument that whatever is said about Self, or It, is prattle. However, can prattle be sung in the delight of a pure heart? Yes, as poets have for thousands of years, or as a child does: “I talk’d to [the pretty little child], and it prattl’d to me again.”

Can prattle bear authenticity? Again, the Oxford English Dictionary provides an answer: “He had the Mastery of his Parents ever since he could Prattle.”

Here, then, is a suggested fusing of the third sections of the two verses: “Avadhoota Dattatreya prattles in his delight of a pure heart, about the Truth.”

A paraphrase of the entire verse

“In Self, there is nothing to learn, nothing to express or confess, nothing to know, and no knower. The free One, swimming in the sea of Self, absorbed in the consciousness of the homogenous Being, and pure of thought, prattles in his delight of a pure heart.”

What’s your paraphrasing? Leave a comment.

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Life…

June 24, 2008

Life is like a ride in an amusement park, except everyone gets killed.

Jerry Katz

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Shift in consciousness

June 12, 2008

A friend asked whether I had read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. She’s currently reading it herself. I said yes. She asked whether I had experienced a shift in consciousness.

The question surprised me. My first response was that I read so much stuff like Tolle’s, and material far more powerful, that there wouldn’t be a shift in consciousness from reading anything.

The question is whether there is ever a shift in consciousness. There is. There are. They include

1. The shift from confusion and disillusionment to the intuition that there is Truth.

2. The shift from the intuition of Truth to the realization that you exist and that the world exists.

3. The shift from the realization of existence to a valuing of existence such that you study your existence — your thought patterns — through spiritual practices.

4. The shift from erratic success in your practice to stability.

5. A shift from stability in practice to effortlessness with practice.

6. A shift from effortlessness to oneness, no attachment, still with practice.

7. A shift from oneness to non-separateness. All arises as mind. No one to practice. The final shift. Sciousness.

8. The world recognized as “this.”

9. Selfless service; the natural playing out of “this.” Steps 8 and 9 describe the disposition of neo-advaita.

The steps are a very abridged version of the Ten Oxherding Pictures. You could awaken directly and apparently spontaneously to any of these steps.

Some would say you experienced the previous steps in former lifetimes. That may be your understanding, but with step 7 the idea is another arising within a mind that is no one’s and gives rise to the apparent truth that there are separate minds. The perception of separate minds gives rise to confusion and disillusionment, which might lead to the first step above: the intuition of something beyond, which is known as Truth, God, Reality… .

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Nonduality: a show about nothing

June 2, 2008

I’m reading Dennis Waite’s book, Enlightenment: The Path Through the Jungle, which makes a strong case for traditional advaita studies. Traditional advaita is the long, slow, involved path to enlightenment. It’s one path.

In the world of nonduality, what is there to hang one’s hat on? What path or teacher should one follow?

Consider that you don’t have to do anything other that sit down and do whatever is in front of you waiting to be done. It could be the laundry. That’s a path. The dishes. That’s another path.

An exchange on Seinfeld comes to mind, the episode where Jerry and George are pitching their idea for a TV series to execs at NBC. George states that the shows would be about nothing. The exec at NBC asks George what kinds of stories they’d write for a show that is about “nothing.” George responds by asking the head exec of NBC, “What did you do today?” The exec says, “I got up and came to work.” George says, “That’s a show.” Of course the TV exec comes back with, “Not yet.”

The point is that in your life of nonduality, everything’s a show, everything’s a path. Getting ready to go to work. A conversation. The current book you’re reading. Reading this. That’s your nondual path. There’s absolutely nothing else.

Eventually you will come to see that this intimacy with each event or moment is enriching. It keeps you appreciative, grateful, and focused. But that’s not the goal or the end of it.

At some point you come to sense that there’s an atmosphere in which all this stuff you’re doing plays out. It’s the atmosphere in which laundry is done, in which gratitude happens, in which the moment is experienced, in which you become a more real person, in which you perceive you are awakening, in which your spiritual life plays out.

You suddenly realize that you are that atmosphere. You go back to doing the laundry, the dishes, the nonduality book, but now it’s different. Those events could be said to be happening, but there is no one doing them. Atmosphere is doing them. The sensed atmosphere is awareness.

Back to Seinfeld for a moment. The “nothing” theme in which all of the Seinfeld episodes play out is like the atmosphere I’ve been talking about. It’s the overall awareness of the Seinfeld show. Seinfeld is about nothing, therefore the show can — and did — bring almost anything into play: the placement of a shirt button, the need for a spatula, the crunch of a candy bar. When “nothing” is the backdrop, like a blank movie screen, anything goes.

Understanding the atmosphere of “nothing” or awareness, suddenly everything has great meaning, and not one more than another. It is all awareness, all nothing. So go read a nonduality book. Or do the laundry. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you realize it plays out in an atmosphere. But you have to truly have that realization, otherwise it does matter.

As far as morality, law, ethics, manners, traditions, and customs, it does matter what we do. That’s because while everything is nothing, it still has a reality which must be respected.

Traditional advaita teaches about that reality in the process of leading you gradually toward enlightenment.

If you don’t want the gradual teaching, if you want more immediate knowledge about action and the atmosphere in which it plays out, read the books of neo-advaita.

For a fuller picture of nonduality as presented in books, read both traditional and neo advaita.

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The Big Duality

May 17, 2008

The big duality of nonduality is the two kinds of teachers or communicators.

One kind of teacher is the guide. He or she functions to guide you to toward a full understanding of the way things are.

The other kind of nonduality teacher is the confessor. He or she confesses or simply states the way things are.

Many nondual teachers function in both capacities.

The guide

Most people are comfortable with the guide. The guide makes a promise that you’ll gain a better psychological condition. The guide has a plan, a program, a practice. The guide is extremely useful and helpful. By all means, allow a guide to guide you!

The confessor

The confessor is different. Either you get what the confessor is saying or you don’t. The confessor says that this is … it, perfect knowledge.

What is this? You could say it is the moment. However, it is finer than the moment. Since this is so refined and small, it is incredibly vast, just as subatomic particles are associated with a vastness of knowing.

The moment vs this

The moment is not the same as this. You can be in the moment, perceive the moment, recall a time when you were in the moment, do a meditation to put you in the moment. You can Kodachrome the moment.

None of that is true for this. You can’t be one with this. You can’t perceive this. You can’t photograph this.

The moment is the Now. People are convinced about the value of living in the Now, in the moment. That’s not true for this. This is only confessed. The confession is the Kodachrome.

But let’s be honest

There’s nothing unusual about this duality. In any field, whether it’s spirituality, organized crime, or anything, experienced people within those fields will teach in one or both of the ways described.

Teaching as a guide, many people will be reached.

Teaching as a confessor of the truth that you personally know — through your actions, the way you live, through a few simple words — you’ll impart that personal knowledge to very few people. But you’ll become a mentor or guru to those people.

Presence

The confessor not only teaches through confession of his or her truth, but also silently. The silent teaching is called presence. Again, it’s not only the spiritual person who has presence. Anyone in any field of endeavor could have presence and teach through their presence. Presence is silent confession.

Two in One

As I said earlier, many teachers function both as guide and confessor. They express themselves through clear instructional guidance and through verbal and silent confession. Guiding and confessing are not necessarily separately occurring functions. While the teacher is guiding you in the steps for proper meditation, she or he is also being the confessor, silently, as presence.

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Lucid Dreaming: Entering Darkness

April 29, 2008

I’ve Noticed Shadows

I’m not familiar with the literature of lucid dreams, so I don’t know where this confession fits into it. I’m good at dreaming lucidly. But, like being awake, it is what it is and there is nothing I’m so interested in manifesting or changing.

However, I’ve noticed in dreams places of long and deep shadows. I’ve been meaning to walk into those dark places during a lucid dream. The other night I finally explored one of those deep, dark shadow places.

The Dream

I was in a garage — going somewhere, doing something — and I had just turned a corner. I looked behind me and saw not far away a long, deep, and very dark shadow area. Since I was lucid in the dream I thought what the heck and walked back into the shadow.

It was nothing more than a dark space in which I could not see! I walked back into the light in order to continue the dream.

The Nature of the Dark Place

However, the dark place was very peaceful too. It was the experience of awareness alone. Some people experience all their dreams from that place. It may be black as night, or have a cast of dark blue. It is the experience of awareness itself.

It seems that all dreams are edged by darkness. If you’ve never seen that darkness, I’m sure you sense it. That darkness marks the limit of the dream, the place where the play of inner light ends. So by all means, if you wish go beyond the world of the dream, look for the deep shadow area and enter it. This is not the Jungian shadow world. It has nothing to do with repression. It’s different, as explained below.

The End of the Dream Is Everywhere

What is the parallel in the waking world? What is the dark, deep, shadowy area of the world in which you are right now? How do you move beyond the everyday and into awareness itself?

That’s done by being aware that you are aware. That can also be done during a lucid dream, of course, at any point in any dream. That deep, dark shadow is everywhere. The end of the dream is everywhere, though it may be perceived as distant in some way.

The distance may be perceived as psychological, as something yet to be achieved. It may be felt as geographical, as being represented by a teacher who lives away from you. It may be physical in dream space, as the place of darkness I walked toward.

Clearly, distance isn’t real. If there is only awareness, there is no separation from it. There appears to be movement toward or away from awareness, but there isn’t any movement, just as in a dream nothing moves or fundamentally changes.

Do You Value the Dream or the Source of the Dream?

What’s important is what you value. If you value the dream and all the events occurring in them, then have fun. At least I am sure you will pay some attention to your pure existence or awareness. If you value awareness, then you will also be active in the dream world, but you will always know the dark, potent, wordless ground of reality.

This Darkness is Dark Because It Has Burned the Eyes That Would See The Light

Perhaps you are asking why darkness is used for the depiction of awareness and not light. This darkness is prior to the light. It is not the shadow side of Jungian psychology. It is not a shadow that hides repressed things.

The light of the dream comes out of this kind of darkness that I’m talking about. That’s how bright this darkness is. It is beyond seeing or knowing. There are no more eyes to be burned by this brightness. So it appears to be dark.

How To Discover That The Light Comes Out of The Darkness

If you doubt it, just enter that dark space in the lucid dream and then manifest a dream situation. You will see light form in the darkness and take whatever shape you want. Then you will get all caught up in the manufactured shapes. But if you remain lucid, you will see those shapes for what they are: absolutely nothing. But don’t let that keep you from enjoying that hot fudge sundae!

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Reincarnation and Nonduality

April 24, 2008

Are you wondering about reincarnation and its place in the teaching of nonduality?

The teaching of Advaita Vedanta — also known simply as Advaita — is part of Hindu tradition. Advaita addresses your questions of karma and reincarnation. Dvaita means duality, and the ‘A’ prefix confers the ‘non’ portion. Advaita = Nonduality.

Advaita means nonduality, and nonduality means ‘not two.’ While things, events, phenomena appear to be separate, in reality there are not two — not separate — things.

Advaita is a tradition which takes the student through steps of knowledge leading to the full recognition of reality as nondual. Neither Advaita nor Buddhism nor other teachings in their advanced forms talk about reincarnation or soul development. Those experiences are not more special than other experiences. However, if questions about reincarnation are important to you, they need to be addressed.

In Advaita, one of the steps on the way to nondual understanding is the teaching of karma, free will, and reincarnation. This step is not the ultimate teaching of Advaita. The ultimate teaching is that there is only reality, God, Christ, Truth, The Eternal Self, The Kingdom of God, Oneness, or whatever you wish to call it.

It’s important to have a sense of the ultimate teaching while investigating your urgent questions, such as reincarnation.

One way of keeping the ultimate teaching present, is to resort to a metaphor.

View burning questions and intense emotions as the rising of waves in the ocean. Any wave can be tremendously awesome, hugely violent, or small and calmly gentle. Yet no wave is separate from the great, vast ocean. The ocean is the nondual self, the eternal Self, the real you. While Advaita teaches about the qualities of waves, the ultimate teaching is about the ocean itself.

I suggest that Advaita is the best context in which to pursue questions about reincarnation for one who senses nondual reality. If you wish to look into Advaita, begin at this page on Dennis Waite’s site. Also, Dennis’s books are the best guides to Advaita. In Back To The Truth he speaks specifically about reincarnation.

Chuck Hillig’s classic, Enlightenment for Beginners, brings reincarnation into the view of nondual reality. Chuck is a devotee of Ramana Maharshi, who is mentioned below.

Finally, note that the very same teacher of Advaita (or nonduality) will one moment explain reincarnation in detail and at the next moment deny there is such a thing as reincarnation.

Do not let the apparent contradiction confuse you. Do not be offended or insulted by any response. The teacher is speaking to different needs of different people. He is giving the answer that would best serve the specific student. Simply hone in on the response that is right for you and don’t worry about the rest, for now.

For example, look at this teaching from one of the great sages of Advaita, Ramana Maharshi.

Advaita requires that one know the source of questions about reincarnation. Until one is ready to approach that knowledge, and in order to stimulate curiosity about that knowledge, careful answers about reincarnation are given. So are answers given to questions about karma, free will, desire, creation, purpose, happiness, and the world in general.

Advaita is a full path to full knowledge of the Self.

Neo-Advaita? Well, that’s another story. Neo-Advaita is the confession, claim, report, or description of existence and reality from the point of view of one who has attained full knowledge of the Self. Some people are in such a disposition that they can hear one of these confessions and awaken to the full knowledge of Self. But many cannot. For those who cannot, the path of Advaita is available.

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Attending to attention

April 23, 2008

When you’re writing, thinking, trying to state the way things are, try stopping for a second and turning to the fact that you are paying attention to what you are doing.

For a moment focus on the attention itself.

You may or may not find that an interesting step to take.

Leave a comment and let me know whether turning toward attention has done anything for you.

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Valuing Awareness

April 20, 2008

My attentional thrust as a kid was such that awareness was valued over all. In many ways I was lost in it. I used to be able to look at a very small thing, such as a pebble on the ground or that was part of an earthen wall, and the pebble seemed very important, like more of a friend than any friend, more of a parent than any parent.

I had rapport with small things. I would pick up bees and play with them. The big world of careers, human entanglements, and all the associated comings and goings, didn’t interest me too much.

As I entered my thirties or forties, I could no longer look at a pebble and recognize awareness. Everything had become that recognized awareness.

There’s a big difference between seeing awareness in a pebble and seeing nothing but awareness wherever you look. The limitation of this relationship is that … it’s a relationship. It is a higher form of duality, a lower form of nonduality.

There’s an even bigger difference between recognizing nothing but awareness and awareness itself. The death of the seer of awareness means what? Awareness. That and nothing else. Now there is no pebble and nowhere to look. You can’t pick up little bees anymore. Why? Even if a photograph is taken of you picking up a bee, now it is not done by you.

There is no difference between your fingers and a stone on the ground in the Himalayas, in the sense that they are contents made of the same stuff and exist only in what appears to be a container known as the universe. The contents and the container are very flimsy. The atmosphere in which they flicker momentarily and beautifully, like northern lights, is awareness.

How is this little telling about awareness made practical? It comes down to valuing awareness. Very simple. Value awareness, your being, you being-ness.

I confess this as a valuer of awareness and a witness to what that valuing sets in motion from an attentional point of view.

As far as how you value awareness, you have to be able to intuit that already. Just sit, be still, and realize you are aware, you exist. Respect and value it. Do that as often and as deeply as you can.

Books and teachers? They can serve as guides. However, trust yourself first and last, and somewhere in between let the books and teachers fall.

And if you try to pick up a bee, you may get stung, if it is not meant for you to do naturally.

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