Experiencing Essence together, beyond the personal self, is the true purpose of a nondual group

For the last nearly two years, I've been a part of a wonderful nondual spiritual group. For most of the last year or so, we haven't had facilitation. This has worked, probably because, at the beginning, we did have two facilitators and were guided as to how to be in the group.

 In a group with a leader, it is implicitly conceded that the leader gets to decide what the group is: people who don't like it can leave. But in a leaderless group, everyone believes they have a right to their own view and are more likely to stick it out when they are dissatisfied, believing they can re-form the group in their own image. I've been in a several leaderless spiritual groups previously, including a couple I started myself. Having no one in charge is really tricky because what often happens is that everyone has different needs, and therefore different ideas of what a group should look like. One group I was in, for example, seemed to spend half of its time together discussing what it was really about. I began to wonder if it could ever work to have a leaderless group that actually functioned and that allowed people to go deep into Truth without someone's guidance.

I want to say that there is nothing wrong with guidance. I've had lots of it, some of it in a group format. But the idea that someone "knows" and therefore guides, and that the rest of the participants need guidance because they don't know is inherently false. It may or may not be helpful for seekers to initially project our True Nature onto another -- a guru or teacher -- but in the end, we are all equally Aware Essence. And it seems to me that a leaderless group more accurately replicates this truth than one that gives all the power to one member.

In this most recent group in which I participate, we all understand that the purpose of the group is for us to be together on the level of essence -- or whatever one wants to call that which we essentially are that is beyond the mind, beyond words, and that manifests as love and wisdom. Ego comes up, but it doesn't get very far because we all know why we are there: to meet each other in pure awareness, beyond form. So we do a lot of gazing into each other's eyes, where we meet as essence. We talk as well, but the words emerge from those depths.

I've thought a lot about what has made this group the only one I've ever been in that has given me what I was seeking. I think it is the INTENT. Most spiritual groups either are about teaching a doctrine, or they are about delving into each person's inner process: how that person is approaching Truth (however a given group defines that) and what the impediments are. In contrast, because the members of our group know that there really are no "individuals," we do something that looks quite different. The point of our meeting is to experience together "The I That Is We," as Richard Moss put it. It's a completely different approach from that taken by most spiritual people.

When the body-mind seems not to "get" the deepest Truth

I just listened to an interview with Rupert Spira on BATGAP (Buddha at the Gas Pump) from 2011. At the end, Rupert talks about the relationship between realization and the body-mind's adjusting (my word, not his) to the Truth that has become known. He says that this takes usually takes time, and that this adjustment can happen before or after the realization of the truth of nonduality -- or both before and after -- and in fact seems to continue indefinitely.

I think those of us who have realized Truth to the extent that it is clear that there is no self often reflect on the contradiction that in daily life, many of the old patterns of behavior persist. That is, I often behave, internally (in thought) or externally (in behavior) as though I really truly believe I am a separate self. There continues to be that deep knowing that there really isn't anything separate, but I must admit that one looking from the outside wouldn't be able to tell that!

I've become much more relaxed about this. My programming from childhood was to become "perfect" in order to be loved, and that has given way to a kind of compassion for the illusory separate self that seems to show me up as less than perfectly enlightened! (See how the "me" creeps in -- as though enlightenment were something "I" do?)

Fundamentally, just as enlightenment isn't something "I" do, neither do I create the separate self.  "I"  am not the author of it nor responsible for it. Life does everything.