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.

Discovering (Again) that My Thoughts Aren't Me

Everyone, even his worst enemy, is publicly wishing him well. I mean POTUS of course. But I wasn't. I wished he'd catch it (COVID). Does that make me a bad person, I wondered. I mean, I should be compassionate, right?

And then it started to morph. I remembered someone saying to me recently, in a post on FB, “The self has to go.” So was having a self the problem, then? No self, no wishing he'd get COVID, right? But I didn't want to get rid of the self, if I even knew how. And there was no reason to listen to others' voices. Why not trust my own instinct: the self wants to exist and even if I knew how to kill it, I wouldn't.

No, the self needs to be welcomed and embraced. It needs compassion. After all, if I can't feel compassion for my own self, how can I feel compassion for POTUS? And that compassion isn't coming from the self, right? It has to be coming from something larger.

But what about the thoughts that wish ill on POTUS? Maybe those thoughts also need need a little space, just to be. Surely trying to banish them isn't going to work.

And then it started to come clear – what people who meditate probably figured out a long time ago: thoughts are not me. The thoughts are not the problem: it's the attachment to thoughts. That is, it's the mistaken idea that thoughts are who I am. A bad thought arises, I just it, and decide it makes me bad.

There is no realistic way to banish thoughts. They come back in another form but with the same emotional content. But thoughts, whether positive or negative, are not a judgment on me because there's no one here. The space where the thoughts appear is what I am. And everything comes into this space, whether a fictitious “I” welcomes it or not.

Which account of awakening in the previous post is more authentic?

OK, so let me identify the passages first. The first is by Somerset Maugham, from this novel, THE RAZOR'S EDGE. The awakening is reported by Larry, the character in the novel who has been seeking all his life and finally finds what he had been looking for with the Advaita gurus in India. 

The second passage is by from an interview with Annette Knopp, from the book ORDINARY WOMEN, EXTRAORDINARY WISDOM, by Rita Marie Robinson (O Books, 2007). The teacher referenced in the passage is Isaac Shapiro.

My own take on it is that the second passage is the most authentic. Although there is a place in the first passage where the self seems to fall away, most of the passage is about what happens TO the self -- rather like what someone might imagine enlightenment to be. I did research just a bit and found out that Maugham went to India in the 1930s (RAZOR was published in 1943), but according to his journal, he evidently fell into a deep sleep precipitated by the energy of the guru and didn't remember what happened to him! So perhaps he just imagined what might have happened if he'd been awake. I want to explore this more,though, and what I say here shouldn't be taken as definitive.

TWO ACCOUNTS OF NONDUAL AWAKENING: WHICH IS MORE AUTHENTIC -- AND WHY?

 First Account:

    "I have no descriptive talent, I don't know the words to paint a picture; I can't tell you, so as to make you see it, how grand the sight was that was displayed before me as the day broke in its splendor. Those mountains with their deep jungle, the mist still entangled in the treetops, and the bottomless lake far below me. The sun caught the lake through a cleft in the heights and it shone like burnished steel. I was ravished with the beauty of the world. I'd never known such exaltation and such a transcendent joy. I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and traveled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as pure spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived. I had a sense that a knowledge more than human possessed me, so that everything that had been confused was clear and everything that had perplexed me was explained. I was so happy that it was pain and I struggled to release myself from it, for I felt that if it lasted a moment longer I should die; and yet it was such rapture that I was ready to die rather than forgo it. How can I tell you what I felt? No words can tell the ecstacy of my bliss. When I cam to myself I was exhausted and trembling."

Second Account:

    [The teacher concludes his statement, during satsang, "Just for a moment, allow yourself to directly experience, who are you?"]

    "When he said these last words, the whole world stopped. It was just complete stillness. Then suddenly, the first sound I heard was the ocean crashing against the beach, and I knew immediately, 'I am this ocean out there! I am the ocean.' I looked at the room which was me as well. 'I am the people. I am the chairs. I am the microphone. I am this body.' I wanted to say, 'I'm everything.' As soon as I wanted to utter this, it sort of popped and gave way to limitless transparency, a transparent nothingness that could not be located specifically. Yet everything was made out of that. I couldn't speak anymore."

See the following post for the answer!

"You're ALL of it"

 In the last few weeks or maybe months, the sense that something is changing here comes on. Now it's coming clearer: the resistance to being in form is melting. 

I don't think I would have put it that way before now. I don't think I would have said that that's what needs to happen. But there's been a struggle to accept all of life as it is -- to feel that it was all right to accept it -- to just be the whole thing in all its messiness.

As I was thinking about this this morning, the words of Alan, the spiritual teacher in my novel, ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE FLESH, came to me. He's giving advice to the main character, Jeannie, as she struggles with rejection in love:

"'But I don't understand,' [Jeannie persisted]. 'I mean, I already realized I am the love I was seeking. So why am I still seeking it?'

'You're all of it.'

'Huh?'

'You are the love and you are the seeking.'

'But I don't want to seek what I can't have,' she implored. Yet, just as she spoke, another thought nudged: That's a lie.

'Do you have a choice?'

'But I want to have a choice. I want freedom. Wasn't that the promise?'

'Whose promise? Not mine.'

'So I don't get freedom/'

'Not freedom from desire. And not freedom from need either. Not freedom from anything. You get freedom to be anything. And everything. Meaning, freedom to stop fighting with yourself. That's all you get.'"

Indeed. Freedom to stop fighting with myself. As though I could change the reality of what I am, of what is, by resisting it! 

And when I don't, that mysterious sense of Presence comes.

The Definition of Karma

 A nondual friend of mine doesn't believe in karma, and whenever I mention it, he looks at me like I am caught in a silly superstition.

I think he doesn't define karma the way I do. Probably he thinks of it the way most Westerners were taught: If we do good, we reap good karma in our next lives. If we do bad things, we likewise reap that. So a human being may be born to a higher status or perhaps as an angelic being if he does good, and as a dog or worse if he does bad. This definition requires belief in both reincarnation and moral behavior as the most important virtue. 

My definition is quite different. I'm not sure if it is the standard view among nondualists or if my view is just what makes sense to me. Karma is the result of thoughts believed in. As long as we believe our thoughts (including unconscious ones), our actions are governed by them and we (and others) reap the results. 

After awakening, thoughts are seen to be empty -- having no substance. We may go on believing some of the most persistent ones for a long time, so it's not like the slate is necessarily wiped clean, but the heaviness of karma is nonetheless lifted once we know our beliefs are only just that -- beliefs.

The transformative effect of our divinity being seen

I just finished listening to a recent talk by Adyashanti in which he says, "One of the most healing things that can happen for any of us is for someone to look right through our imperfections and see us and know us as completely whole -- spiritually, humanely whole and divine -- from the very beginning. When someone sees us like that . . . that is an incredibly healing presence."

And, he adds, "Ultimately, spirituality is about finding that in ourselves."

I don't know if I would have dared to voice it that way when I met my first teacher. I only know that all I needed to do was sit in front of him and healing tears would start to flow. He actually saw me that way though the words were never spoken. And so, of course I became attached -- because when you see yourself as broken and someone and not only treats you as though that isn't true but actually sees your perfection -- well, it's a miracle of sorts.

The trick is to realize the last part of what Adya said: ultimately finding that in oneself. And that means finding that unbroken, eternal spirit in oneself.  For me, that took meeting Adya and having that truth reflected to me again, but this time becoming conscious of it.