From the non-dual book pile…
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
I recently ‘inherited’ a trove of books on non-duality, and I thought it might be interesting to discuss some of the people and what they say.
I came across a book by this man, Darryl Bailey, who I found quite sympathetic. It was only when I listened to a talk of his that I heard about his extensive background as a Buddhist monk under Ajahn Sumedho. In any case, he talks about the impermanence of things, how this means that things have no permanent form and are really constantly changing. He talks about how impermanence affects thoughts, and the desire for pleasure.
He talks about how examining impermanence can bring you to the realisation that the universe is a mystery, made of constantly moving and evolving matter without permanent forms, and that the acceptance of a world without form can bring change to the thoughts that are trying to describe form, and so ultimately freedom and peace.
Here is the YouTube talk…
Comments
Just to add something that I see people miss sometimes when talking about emptiness, non self and impermanence. I think you're probably aware, but it wasn't specifically spelled out and I suppose its a bit of philosophical pedantry on my part.
"Things" aren't just impermanent and ever changing. Even if we were to take a snap shot in time of something, it still wouldn't be "thing" in its own right. At every point any thing is made up of other things, which are made up of other things, and so on.
So less this
And more this
The "thing" isn't changing, all the parts that make it up are shifting and changing.
A bit more from Darryl Bailey — apparently he is Canadian — in this interview he talks more about the formlessness of things. I really enjoyed this one.
I’ve been reading another book from my non-dual book pile, Nisargadatta Maharaj’s Consciousness and the Absolute, which was made from talks not long before his death, covering the period 1980-1981. In there Nisargadatta comes to the conclusion that he is not consciousness after all, that consciousness rather is just a concept and indistinguishable from the everything, which he calls the absolute.
In a way it is rather similar to Darryl Bailey above, in his vision of the everything as being one giant whole… I think what speaks to me particularly is the modern quantum physics perspective of everything as an unfolding process.
The other thing that he talks about quite a lot is that the body is food for consciousness, without the body there is no presence.
Today I have been reading Ajahn Chah, and in many ways, it has come as a breath of fresh air after all the digging into gaming stuff I had been doing (which fosters a lot of attachment).
So one quote I came across was “alternate systems of teaching are fine as long as they foster relinquishment.” And I thought it might be good to look at these writings in response to that.
First of all, a belief that the world is an ever-changing Mystery is good for letting go of physical possessions, the body, the mind… it challenges a lot of established thinking about what physical things actually are, and it’s a good opportunity to let go of them.
That is the good side of it. The downside is if you start identifying yourself with this Mystery, which would be rather a thinking mistake because you obviously can’t control very much of it, so how can you be it?
From the thread “There is no purpose, only love” in which I talked some about the Tony Parsons books that I found in the non-dual book pile…
I think this is true, when I went into computer games when I was 25 it was also because it was something I loved doing, and that determined much of my adult life, including my breakdown. Just a few years ago when I decided to buy a house with my mother and stepfather which was also a turning point in my life, that was also about love.
It’s interesting to look at the ways in which love moves us, throughout our lives. In a way it is all that really matters, whether you have acknowledged and followed love in your life. Love is not passion or lust, it is something gentler and more mysterious.
I wanted you to know that, because of this topic, I read Darryl Bailey's books. Reading it gave me profound insight, for which I am grateful. Thanks.
That makes my day, cheers. I’m just leafing through this big pile of non-dual books, some of it is unexpectedly good like Darryl Bailey and Tony Parsons, but some of it is proving dense and not very accessible. I thought I’d put some comments on the highlights of it all in this thread mostly for the sake of having a record of it, I’m pleased someone has gotten something from it.
The thing is, classic non-duality has some links to Hinduism, when you read through Balsekar or Nisargadatta, and that tackles subjects like sadhana, puja’s, reciting the names of God, and so on. The more modern neo non-duality is much cleaner and simpler, but there are still some good insights to be found in it.
I was reading some more Tony Parsons today, and the core of his message seems to be that there is no-one there, that a body just creates an illusion of separateness but from an awakened perspective he sees that pretty much everyone is already at some level awakened. It’s cool that he keeps on repeating the message that there is no-one, there is only oneness.
A lot of his discussions with people who come to his talks are about working out the details of this. A lot of people are still talking from the old paradigm.
This channel usually sticks closer to verified science, there is some research offered though regarding a universal consciousness. The speaker is the Columbia psychologist and spirituality researcher Lisa Miller.
Really interesting, @person. The talk about the Schumann resonance and alpha waves in the brain is very “on point” as far as the whole idea of oneness is concerned. It seems that the spiritual universe is vast, with many different resonances.
This mornings perusing is through a volume of Mooji teachings, called Breath of the Absolute:
To me this makes a lot of sense. Ultimately the desire for freedom leads to the breakdown of structure, structures of thought and structures of society in which human beings are caught. The mind is not in favour of that.
I’ve heard this from a few different sources, that non-duality imposes no criteria and makes no demands. There is only the Truth. Of course as written there are a few areas where it differs from commonly held Buddhist belief — for example Self with a capital letter as shorthand for what Nisargadatta in his final book called the Absolute. It is a holdover from the Hindu roots of the original Advaita Vedanta, which Mooji retains through his lineage from Papaji and Ramana Maharshi.
In the phrase “There is no Path” you may also hear echoes of Jiddu Krishnamurti and U.G. Krishnamurti, they would say kind of similar things. Osho too, in his insistence that man was unique and that no path could ever lead one to meditation, that it was just a knack one had to discover. A lot of these teachings of modern spirituality are related. But just to read the words is enough to put me in a very particular space…
There is a Christian tradition, Lectio Divinorum which is the meditative reading of holy words, which this reminds me of.
I’m continuing reading through Mooji’s book, he talks a lot about the ‘I Am’ feeling, and also just Being. In that he is somewhat similar to Ramana Maharshi, I personally connect more to those who say there is no self. But I can’t deny that even in dreams there seems to be one being who sees and hears. So perhaps on some level there is some kind of ‘I’.
There was a section on control and the relationship between mind and control which I found interesting. The whole idea of giving up strategies seems like a good plan, because strategies and control are ultimately a kind of limiting death-grip of planned outcomes that the mind tries to impose on Being. Or at least, that is what Mooji’s dual chapters on control and strategies evoke in me.
The Mooji book has a lot of short chapters, you have to digest it a piece at a time. There is a lot of modern neo-Advaita in there, in the form of advice to seekers, and sometimes short speeches which are standalone. The introduction suggests reading the book in loose, unconnected chapters more or less randomly selected.
There is a chapter about how to experience pain and peace, even when they come at the same time. It is illustrative of the sort of question that comes from certain seekers on the path who are struggling with an issue that’s physical or part of the body-mind, and seek a spiritual solution to that.
In the books of the Indian sages like what remains of Ramana Maharshi’s speech, there are many more religious queries, such as whether it is good to do spiritual practices. It is more an older mode of thinking that many people still had in those times. The questions that Mooji seems to field are more practical, down to earth.
There is also a piece on the ease of the search, that in a way many seekers seem to want realisation but they want it in pill-form, so that it will be easy and without pain and discomfort. He talks about how some people feel threatened by the process of inquiring within, who exactly experiences.
I thought this was an interesting passage, because I have often wondered whether a calling was trying to move me, mostly in the last decade when I was moving deeper into spirituality. I’ve often felt that my past history in games has held me fast to the mind, rather than allowing me to move with the heart and the wider Beyond, which I have at times experienced.
Combining a life in a developed country including the need to earn a living wage with a spiritual calling has quite a few practical difficulties.
Apparently Mooji arranges a trip every so often to the mountain Arunachala in southern India, where the teacher of his teacher Ramana Maharshi stayed all his life. The mountain has a special energy, and Ramana used to say that the mountain was his teacher. So during one of Mooji’s trips there were some discussions with travellers, and these are included in the book.
It’s odd, a lot of this book is more down to earth than a lot of spiritual searching, the real life concerns of money and how to treat it during one’s spiritual evolution come to the fore as well, including Mooji’s own experiences in London back when he was evolving.
In the end I didn’t get a really clear spiritual vibe from this book - it seemed somewhat bitty and repetitive.
I’ve taken up another book from the non-dual trove, titled Sailor Bob Adamson: Life and Teachings by Kalyani Lawry. It is part biography and part recorded teachings, I’ve just quickly skimmed the biography and gone to the start of the teachings, which seem promising.
Bob Adamson seemed to have had a pretty extensive spiritual background, spending time with Swami Muktananda, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and others. He was in the Australian navy in 1946, not long after the Second World War, so he was of the pre-war generation. He was Australian.
I am going to take a break from this material for a while. It seems to me that a lot of these teachers like Tony Parsons insist there is “nobody” within and to me this seems in a certain way disrespectful to the body and to a natural way of living. What comes to me is that whether there is “someone” or whether there is “no-one” is immaterial, one shouldn’t try to figure it out, and it is more important to just be, and not to attempt to force a knowledge inside that does not already exist within.
The Buddha also declined to answer certain topics. In a way, it is an acknowledgement for me that some of these ideas are not necessary for a deeper evolution. That Being in a natural way, once you strip away the conditioned layers, is more healthy than trying to apprehend the truth of the universe through a kind of neti-neti approach. It’s a certain sensitivity that seems to live with me.
A bit of Mooji in the morning… I like these videos more than the book…
So I read something from this group of books today, which was a short book called Integral Zen by Maurice Knegtel. It is a book on a type of everyday zen, about how zen can be lived in normal life. Maurice was a Zen monk for a while, and he also tells in short segments throughout the book about his attempt to start an organisation called Izen, which was set up to teach people to live with a kind of integral zen.
It seems to all come down to the attitude that you bring to your workplace and to your home. If you treat these places as holy, hallowed ground, then you are bringing the attitude of zen into your daily life, so relates Maurice. He calls Izen and it’s teachings a post-religious movement. In the books final chapter he relates how he received Dharma transmission from his Roshi.
This book raised some interesting questions for me, about the everyday, the spiritual, about humbleness and pride, about Buddha nature and being the Buddha in yourself.
I’ve started a new volume from the pile today, called The Mystery Experience by Tim Freke. It seems promising, in that it focuses on the experience of awakening in quite a different way. The author claims to have awakened at the age of 12, and that he has been fortunate enough to see many people awaken in the 20 years after that. He talks about the Wow experience, about wonder, and… well I’ll come back to it. Not strictly non-duality. Good stuff.
Seems he is quite a well-known author about topics like Jesus and the Goddess, the gnostics, the pharaohs and so on. He is more a spiritual philosopher, with 35 books to his credit. So it’s perhaps not so surprising that he might write and talk about awakening.
A little Mooji in the evening… this talk conveys well his gentleness, I thought
In this talk, I went to bed after taking a shower, clean and fresh, and just listened to the spaces between his words. He definitely has a certain something, an energy.
I’m in two minds about Freke and his book. I got a little further into it. On the one hand he talks about the ‘wow’ moment, which appeals to me because it seems like he has something, and then he goes and talks about deep this and deep that and starts conjuring with words which is just so much flim-flam and not the real thing.
I’m going to give it another go, maybe skim-read a few chapters to see if he comes to the point a little further in, he is a pretty decent writer which is generally a good sign. But the way he swings concepts around looks like he wants to build a picture in your mind rather than come to talking about the core of mystical experience.
I like Mooji's talks...always food for thought to chew over...
I’ve gone a little further, now reached 75 pages in, and he has taken a bunch of examples from science and showed how they fit mystical experience. I find this interesting because rather than talking directly about mysticism he is preparing the mind to accept certain things. It’s the reverse of the way a real mystic writes. I’ll persist with the book a little further.
I’ve started another volume, called Making Love - Sexual Love the Divine Way by Barry Long. It’s a book about love and sex, and how Barry sees the original way of loving that humans have left behind in favour of a male-dominated view of sexual interest and sexuality. He talks about the golden energy that was present in ancient humans, that the way of the past was for the male to adore the female, and for the male it was the path to arouse divine sexual energies in the female.
It’s a very interesting book. There are some unusual historical concepts, and I’ve just put my critical faculties aside in order to give it the attention it deserves. It rings certain bells in me, in that Barry does well to diagnose the problems that a lot of couples face. I think it deserves to be more widely read.
There are some obvious parallels with Tantra, which is also a path of divine sexuality. I’m not a great expert on it though and so will refrain from commenting further.
It’s quite a short book, I should be able to finish it in a couple of days. Barry talks a lot about loving without emotion, just letting the bodies have sex without getting emotionally involved or letting the imagination take over. He says this about emotion:
So it is kind of about breaking long-held patterns of self connected to sexuality for both men and women which trap you in an emotional and mental cycle while making love. Barry’s prescription is making love with a kind of pure awareness to get back to the body’s natural response.
Interesting book, I’ve finished it. It gets very explicit from the middle onwards, so perhaps not for the faint of heart. It’s basically a manual for conscious sex, staying away from fantasy and emotion.
After yesterday’s successful storming through one title, I thought I’d try another Barry Long book. This one is entitled Only fear dies, and it’s about ridding yourself of unhappiness, coping with death, our place in the world. And such.
This afternoon I returned to reading Only fear dies. In it Long talks about a range of subjects such as the rational Supermind which propagates a lack of peace, the kind of possession by negative emotivity that many children go through and how this is learnt, the way in which the felt content of words is eroded by society, the lack of truth in many professions and other things.
I find a good deal of truth in Long’s writings, and also a few things where he leaves things as a bit supernatural. It is not a very positive book, but it does a good job pointing out many places where joy is leaving people’s lives. It is quite a contrast with Osho, whose work is peppered with jokes and stories.
A quote about the rational mind and it’s controlling aspect…
It is certainly so that the rational mind controls a lot of what we do, and that a lot of the rest is the emotional responses we’ve accumulated in our personal past. It makes me wonder how few people are really looking for truth and trying to embody it.
I kind of skimmed through the bulk of the book, there was a lot there which didn’t feel relevant to my journey, but perhaps your mileage may vary. I’m not sure if I would recommend it, it didn’t feel pure to me in the way that the best spiritual books do. It didn’t really effect me on a deep level.
I came across this video on YouTube, which I thought would make an interesting addition to this topic:
In it Jeff Foster, a now-former nonduality teacher, talks about his disappointment with many nonduality teachers for not recognising their own basic humanity. The ocean is both the water and the waves, in the famous analogy, and it is not ‘better’ to go around declaring that “there is only water!” all the time.
I had heard that a common criticism of many nonduality teachers was that they stuck to a certain spiehl, a playbook of what to say and how to cope with difficult questions. This indicated it was learned behaviour, and not truly spoken from the beyond, as some would claim.
My non-dual book pile contains a book by Jeff Foster, called An Extraordinary Absence, so I thought I’d try reading that this morning. It made a good start, talking about how the author was not a teacher and how the book contained pointings only. It also spoke about how understanding by the mind was the wrong way to approach the book’s contents, that the mind tends to divide to understand and contain, while the book spoke of unity.
A good start indeed…
The observer becomes the observed.
All things manifest in consciousness but does consciousness manifest in consciousness?
From Jeff Foster’s book An Extraordinary Absence…
He talks a lot about his experience, of not being a personality, of only playing that he is ‘Jeff’. He gives some background, of depression, of not mattering to the world, until one day in Oxford he realised there was no person. He talks about the just being of a chair, how wonderful it is that it just is and that it bears your weight without asking anything in return.
He talks about how the words just come, out of the nobody-ness. He talks about how he sees an Ethiopian girl on tv, all stick arms and ribs, and she appears in him and is him. How the next thing he sees is the postman delivering letters, how he appears in him and is him. About how nobody is everyone at the same time.
It’s an interesting book, about the experience of being nondual. It also sheds some light on not-self, which the whole book reminds me of strongly.
Continuing to read Jeff Foster’s book…
He talks about how pointless it is to talk about nonduality, various little anecdotes like the one about how an Indian Advaita scholar told him he still sensed a certain person-hood about Jeff and how he himself of course had shed this, but how absurd it was for someone who was no longer a person but One with the universe to see ‘persons’ in others.
He talks about how universe means ‘one verse’. He talks about Brighton, his cups of tea and the seagulls, and his relationship with his girlfriend Amy. He talks about one-ness with the lady he helps across the street, how helping her just happens, like the time he suddenly said yes to a request for an interview and the words started coming.
I’m now in the last 50 pages, and it seems pretty clear to me something did happen to him, he seems very genuine talking through the text, not a very complex person but a clear channel. Worth reading just for the perspective on not-self, certainly.
I thought I’d try another Jeff Foster book, Living without a centre. He says in the introduction that people are always looking for more, and that this book would not provide it. We shall see.
It talks about how liberation is available in the here and now, how it has already happened, how it just needs to be realised. It talks about the things that happen during the process of realising that the individual is illusory. It shows how the illusory life story of the individual always contained the signs of liberation.
“Illusory life story…” it struck me that since there is only the here and now, the history of the individual becomes unreal the moment it has been lived. It leaves traces in the present but it no longer exists.
I wasn’t much taken with Jeff Foster’s second book, so I moved on to Gangaji’s Freedom and Resolve: The Living Edge of Surrender. I know a little about Gangaji, and have always found her interesting, partially because of her connection to Poonjaji who was her mentor for a while, and partially because she is one of just a few nonduality teachers.
It’s a short book, just a hundred pages, some of which is dialogue with seekers. She says at the end that she was rather neurotic when she met Poonjaji on the banks of the Ganges, and that all kinds of other teachers and society had left many traces in her mind. That Poonjaji erased all the traces, and then sent her out into the world to erase other people’s traces. Beautiful. There are a few other sayings and short anecdotes of Poonjaji in this book.
Gangaji is not given to verbal grandstanding, unlike say Tony Parsons or Tim Freke, but what she writes has a genuineness to it. You get the feeling she still really carries the mind of stillness that Poonjaji bestowed on her. The book is not like ‘wow, I got a lot out of that’ but still I am intrigued and drawn to her.
After reading Gangaji’s short book, I came across an unexpected treasure, The Essential Teachings of Ramana Maharshi: A Visual Journey. It’s a book full of photos of Ramana and where he lived, accompanied by short paragraphs of his teachings. Loved it!
I’ve moved on to a book by a Dutch author, Jan Van Den Oever, which is titled I don’t know who I am. In it he talks about the creation of the self by means of an illusory sense of self, which then gives rise to an experiencer of the experience, and a sense of possession of the whole. But he emphasises that as soon as you start seeing the sense of self as ‘I’ rather than as a useful tool for relating to the world, things start to go horribly awry. The sense of self is an illusion.
He talks about things like how unsatisfactoriness always returns, while society keeps urging us to move towards better and more satisfying conditions. It is an endless frustration which is in complete contrast to what spirituality truly is: recognising and being open to that which is, and living within it.
He tells about meeting people in his past who told him, “I live in Gods hands”, and if he then asked them “what do you understand by god?” They would answer, “that I do not know anymore”. And Jans view of that is that these people have come home, because they live in surrender… they no longer recall to what they surrendered, they don’t have an image of him or it.
I like this book, it has some nice passages and insights.
I started reading a little in another Dutch author’s book, it is called Many roads, one home by Jan Van Delden, and I got caught. He is an older man, who was taught by Wolter Keers who was a disciple of Ramana Maharshi, and among other things introduced Nisargadatta and Douglas Harding to the Netherlands.
Anyway, Jan Van Delden is dyslexic and left school at the age of 14 to take care of his mother and his siblings. He had many swings, roundabouts and travails in his life before slowly opening up to a nondual realisation. It then took him 15 years after the death of Wolter Keers in 1985 to fully resolve this, and reach a state where he could just let thoughts come and go.
His book is a series of short talks and lectures. He talks about how Jesus, the Odyssey, Atmananda and A Course in Miracles all bring you to the same home. So far I am enjoying it.
I came across a non-dual advocate who said, “I am God”, to which my reply was this song text:
…Jesus, I am overjoyed
To meet You face to face
You've been getting quite a name
All around the place
… Healing cripples
Raising from the dead
And now I understand You're God
At least that's what You've said
… So You are the Christ
You're the great Jesus Christ
Prove to me that You're divine
Change my water into wine
… That's all You need do
And I'll know it's all true
C'mon King of the Jews
… Jesus, You just won't believe
The hit You've made around here
You are all we talk about
The wonder of the year
… Oh, what a pity
If it's all a lie
Still I'm sure that You can rock
The cynics if You try
… So if You are the Christ
You're the great Jesus Christ
Prove to me that You're no fool
Walk across my swimming pool
… If You do that for me
Then I'll let You go free
C'mon, King of the Jews
… I only ask things I'd ask any superstar
What is it that You have got
That puts You where You are?
… I am waiting, yes, I'm a captive fan
I'm dying to be shown
That You are not just any man
… So if You are the Christ
Yes, the great Jesus Christ
Feed my household with this bread
… You can do it on Your head
Or has something gone wrong?
Why do You take so long?
Come on, King of the Jews
… Hey, aren't You scared of me, Christ?
Mr. Wonderful Christ
You're a joke, You're not the Lord
You are nothing but a fraud
… Take Him away
He's got nothing to say
Get out, You King of the, get out
Get out, You King of the Jews
Get out, You King of the Jews
Get out of my life!
(King Herods Song, from Jesus Christ Superstar)
So I’m this morning reading the book of Wolter Keers, called Being Free, which is a discussion of the Hindu text Ashtavakra Samhita by him and a few friends. The Ashtavakra Samhita contains a discussion in the distant past between the sage Ashtavakra and King Janaka. It is a key text in Hinduism, next to the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita.
It surprised me how well-pitched the density and the sequence of explanations was. It turned out to be a really good exposition of the ideas behind Advaita. I’m not sure if it has ever been translated into English but I’m really enjoying it so far. Definitely one of the better books from the non-dual book pile.
Keers talks about not being the body or the mind or the senses, but that these things appear in consciousness, which is formless, cannot be damaged and is like a ‘clear light’. It is not possible for the senses to apprehend consciousness or for the mind to imagine it, it is inconceivable. But Advaita holds that that is what we truly are.
If you start looking at what you can observe, anything that you can observe is a subject and distinct of the object, the observer. Hence the world, our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings are all not us. They are all “observable”. In a way you retreat ever deeper inside, away from the senses of the body, to the senses of awareness of energy, but these are senses too. Until you realise that all the things that appear before you appear in consciousness.
It is said that consciousness vanishes during sleep, but Keers explains that any state out of which you can be woken up still contains an element of consciousness which is watching the body. It is more that during deep sleep consciousness is freed of the mind.
Still reading in Wolter Keers’ book Being Free, which had this to say about being a seeker:
“As long as I am like a seeker or a thinker, I find what is available in the world of this seeker or this thinker. If I set myself up as a 'thinker', then I find concepts. If I set myself up as a 'seeker', then I find useful and useless things. Things I find are beneficial or not, a 'nice' weekend or a 'worthless' weekend. Then I 'find' something or nothing and it's all wicking, weighing, assessing and shifting. As long as I set myself up as whatever projection, I participate in the conservation with the illusion.”
So it’s a question of what mask you choose to wear, what you find in the world. But this is all judgements, seeing things as this or that. Earlier in the book he talks about what Advaita holds we truly are, a clarity, consciousness, clear light which illuminates that which appears in it.
I’m finding this book exceptionally clear, as a Westerners exposition of nonduality. Maybe it’s just that he is Dutch, and his use of the Dutch language matches my own level of understanding.