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.

What IS universal love?

 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 19^th 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.