Having been disillusioned with the
Buddhist paths I tried in Japan when I was young, I joined the Quaker
meeting in the town I lived in in the late 1980s. Although I still
believed, theoretically, that those paths led to enlightenment –
and had in fact had a couple of spiritual awakenings on one of those
paths – in the end, they just seemed too hard – and too foreign.
I wanted a way to the Infinite that relied on my own Western
spiritual tradition, but at the same time didn't discount the
realizations of deeper truth I had had through the Eastern way. I was
also looking for something less hierarchical and sexist – and the
fact that there are no paid clergy in Quakerism – that everyone is,
in fact, a teacher to everyone else – appealed to me. All around,
Quakerism seemed a good “Middle Way.”
I was active in the Meeting until I
moved away in 2000. Shortly after I re-located, I found Adyashanti –
and he undid my world. Undid and remade and everything else that
there are no words for. So Adyashanti's teachings became my new
“Middle Way.” I call it this because Adya never studied Zen in
Japan – and neither did his teacher – but he did come from a Zen
lineage. As a third generation teacher, though, he felt free to
innovate – and he did. In the beginning, he called the talks he
gave “Zen-Satsang” because the content was often Zen-like, but
the format was in the Nondual tradition of India – and specifically
of Advaita Vedanta: a talk and then questions from students. This
worked for me: no arduous practices – no need to do anything
but just sit and let the energy wash over me.
Through all of
those years, I wondered if I could still call myself a Quaker – or
whether I should resign from the Meeting which I was, in any case, no
longer close enough to geographically to attend except very
occasionally. When I did get there, it had been so long that many
people didn't recognize me anymore. Still, I have kept my membership,
and so I get the monthly newsletter.
In the
November 2014 newsletter I just received, there is a quotation from
John Woolman, a well-known 19th
century Quaker: “To turn all the treasures we possess into the
channel of Universal Love becomes the business of our lives.” When
I read this, I thought, “This is why I'm still a Quaker – this is
a tradition that really does still speak to me.”
After years of
Adyashanti, I no longer feel the need of him in the way I once did –
which is fortunate because he rarely comes around to my town anymore.
But there's one area where I've still felt like something was
missing. It is said that there is a Universal Love that one comes to
manifest when spiritually awake. I kept waiting: where was it? Last
year, I was at a five-day retreat of another teacher, Pamela Wilson,
and when I emerged, the love was so palpable – I went to the
grocery store and loved everyone I saw there! (I probably wrote about
that here if anyone wants to go back and look at the summer 2013
posts.) But it quickly faded.
Now, recently, I've
become part of a leaderless nondual spiritual group which I
initiated. It's the fulfillment of my dream of a non-hierarchical
spiritual path. After a bumpy start finding our way, the group has
turned into a fount of love. But it doesn't feel like I always
expected love to look, and I think that's why I've been missing it
all along. So, I've been asking myself how it is different and the
answer I'm coming up with is that it isn't self-conscious. We usually
think, “I love him (or her, or everyone)” But what if that
secondary thought is absent? What if thought is absent from the
experience entirely? Then love is something else. Certainly not
sentimental, certainly not self-absorbed.
