Leaderless Meetings in Truth

 Lately, I've been flirting with the spiritual tradition I was involved with before I met Adyashanti: Quakerism. By "flirting," I mean attending Meeting through Zoom. 

It's been years since I've been drawn to Meeting. Compared to going to satsang, it seemed I couldn't go deep. 

 But last week that changed. I realized that it wasn't a matter of going to Meeting to get something from the group but to give myself the opportunity to sink into the truth of my being, as we say in nondual circles. 

And this week as well, I found it a deep experience -- a Meeting in which everyone was engaged in the question of what faith is, what being a Quaker is. 

The thing that drew me to Quakers, more than anything else, is that there is no paid clergy -- no one who is set up to know Truth while everyone else listens to what that wise person says. There may be leaders -- or elders, as Quakers sometimes call them -- those who are wiser than most of the other members of a Meeting, but they become that by common understanding that they do know more, not by any official designation. And they are the exception to the rule that everyone present is equally called upon to look inside and find God, or what is most true. 

And expectations matter. When people go to a gathering expecting to be told the truth, they often fail to realize that that truth is closer than their own nose. Going to satsang can be like that. You sit in front of the nondual teacher and listen to him/her and feel the awake energy penetrate you. Wonderful! I used to love that so much. 

But there came a time when I began to wonder if that wasn't disempowering. We need examples of embodied awakening; otherwise, how can we recognize it when we begin to experience it in ourselves? But once we do begin to experience it, is it not more helpful to our development and that of others we share the meeting space with if we recognize that each of us is a manifestation of the universal energy. If we have realized it but still look to a leader in order to experience it, we are giving away our own realization.

So, this is why I was so intent on establishing a leaderless nondual group. But my attempts haven't been very successful; maybe the hierarchical tradition in nonduality is too strong.  People don't seem to know how to be in a nondual group where there is neither teacher nor students, and maybe I myself don't know well enough how to model what I want to see. 

The result seems to be, at least for now, that I recognize how valuable the traditions of the Society of Friends (Quakers) are: there is a way to do this that is 350 years old, and it works.