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RICHARD SYLVESTER
Interview with non-duality magazine
http://www.nondualitymagazine.org/nonduality_magazine.2.richardslyvestor.interview.1.htm
NDM: Can you please tell me about your childhood religious belief
systems. What did you learn about 'God' from your parents,
school and society in general. What was the impact of this
religious indoctrination had on you?

Richard Sylvester:  When talking about nonduality, questions about our

personal history can be misleading. Liberation is impersonal, and as such
has nothing to do with the story of the individual who is reporting on it.
As soon as we start to tell this story, we may be thought to be implying
that there is a causal path that led to liberation, where no such causal
path can in fact exist. Why any individual's head is caught in the tiger's
mouth is always a mystery.

Nevertheless I'll answer your question in the spirit in which it is are

asked. My parents were agnostic humanists who brought me up with no
creed. The concept of 'God' had little meaning in our house other than as
a philosophical concept or a superstitious idea. At school the dullness of
assembly greeted me every weekday morning – the dreary hymns, the
mumbled prayers requesting God's favour to fall particularly on our ruling
class, the empty words of the address given by an unenthusiastic teacher
in a black gown.

In spite of the tedium of school assemblies and Christian Sundays in

England before the loosening of the Sunday trading laws, I did have a
brief flirtation with Christianity when I was about sixteen. This was partly
because my school was very strict, and the local church youth club was
one of the few places we were allowed to go where we could meet girls. A
pushy young curate at St Nick's got hold of my soul and I was actually
confirmed – I guess to the horror of my mother. But the God vaccination
failed to take properly, and by the time I left school there were other
opportunities for meeting girls. Christianity fell away from me shortly
afterwards.

NDM: Can you tell me about your pre-awakening period and your
early spiritual seeking? How did this begin? What kind of methods
did you try, what gurus did you follow, and what books did you
read? What results, if any, did all this bring?

Richard Sylvester:  I'm sorry to be so picky about language, but I would

not call it 'my pre-awakening period'. Liberation is the dropping away of
the person, the seeing that there is no one who has ownership of
anything. Neither the story before awakening nor the story after
awakening is owned by anyone.

But again, I'll enter into the spirit of your question, and write a little
about my spiritual roller-coaster ride, which was like many other people's
at the time. First, a major acid trip in my early twenties revealed that
there is, as it were, an intimate connection between consciousness and
reality. This everyday reality, and the nature of time and space within
which it unfolds, is only one possible version of reality. Tinker with the
chemistry of the brain with a small quantity of L.S.D., or some other
drug, and a quite different reality emerges.

In some ways this powerful acid trip was like being kicked in the head by
a mule, and I do not recommend it. Nevertheless the trip, combined with
a certain amount of existential despair and some reading of Alan Watts,
led me into some amateurish and failed efforts at the practice of Buddhist
meditation and an interest in Yoga. Then, at the age of thirty, after a
broken relationship had added a little more despair to my life, I stood one
sunny May afternoon on the doorstep of the Transcendental Meditation
Centre in Pimlico holding a bag of fruit and feeling pretty foolish.

Transcendental Meditation, like acid, was a revelation. In that first

meditation, having handed over my bag of fruit, I felt as though I was
bathed in warm honey and experienced a freedom and free-floating
happiness that I had never experienced before.

I became a fanatical meditator, sometimes turning up at dinner parties

and demanding a spare room to meditate in before I would join the other
guests for soup. I talked frequently to my friends about Transcendental
Meditation, and a few of them paid large sums of money to learn it but
got little or nothing from it. I went on TM retreats and determined to 'de-
stress' as much as possible. I considered giving up my reasonably paid
job as a lecturer in order to train as a TM teacher. Then, after two years,
I heard the words 'Guru Raj Ananda Yogi' and fell in love with My Guru.

'The Teacher Who Is The Yogi King Of Love' was a short round
charismatic man with dark limpid eyes. I have given a brief account of his
career as a guru in my book 'I Hope You Die Soon'. He taught very
powerful meditation techniques, involving mantras and candles and
mandalas and chants and a huge Tibetan gong, and I became one of his
teachers. Then, after about three years, the scandal hit the fan and his
organisation imploded.

Cast adrift, I looked around for another guru to fall in love with. I hung
around Muktananda's ashrams for a while but never felt any pull towards
him, nor towards either of his pair of young replacements after he died.
And soon scandal engulfed them too. Scandalous revelations were
becoming an occupational hazard of being a guru, and several guru cults
self-destructed at about this time. Although I'd accumulated three
spiritual names (two Yogic and one Shamanic), the Guru Raj years
proved a complete inoculation against any further involvement with
gurus. I continued meditating for many years, and even now practise tai
chi which might be considered a replacement, but I never spent quality
time with a guru again.

After a few years of following gurus and doing spiritual practices, it

became clear that yogic meditation techniques were very effective at
stirring things up, but not so effective at dealing with the psychological
and emotional after-effects. So like many other people I became involved
with psychotherapy, firstly through 'POPS', or 'Psychologically Orientated
Groups', such as EST and Self Transformations, then through personal
one-to-one therapy, and finally through training as a Humanistic
psychologist and therapist.

I was always drawn in therapy to a mixture of Transpersonal and

Humanistic approaches, and I respect those therapies that combine the
two, such as 'Spiritual Encounter'. Without the transpersonal, humanistic
approaches can eventually hit a wall, and without the humanistic,
transpersonal approaches can suck you into an endless round of
visualisations and forgiveness processes. The temptation for some of us
to float away into spiritual realms without doing the work of bucketing out
the mud and silt from the bottom of our well, to use Robert Bly's
wonderful image, can lead to what Eva Chapman calls “Sugar on shit.”
This is why, under the aura of love and peace, some spiritual people often
seem so irritable. By the way, I strongly recommend Robert Bly's book
'Iron John' to anyone who either is a man or who knows a man.

NDM: In your book 'I Hope You Die

Soon' you refer to seeing that there
is no separation. How is this "seen"
exactly and what does seeing it
mean?

Richard Sylvester:  From the time that

self-consciousness first arises when we
are very young children, most of us feel
that we have a separate identity and
exist as a subject in a world of objects.
The thoughts, feelings and perceptions
that arise seem to be my thoughts,
feelings and perceptions, and
consciousness seems to be coagulated
here in my individual being, although by
extension we assume that other people
have their individual consciousness as
well. In other words we live in a world of
separation and differentiation.

At any moment it is possible that this

sense of separation into an individual
identity may simply drop away. If it
does, it is seen that there is in fact no
separation and no differentiation, that
there is only emptiness out of which all
apparent phenomena arise. The
Buddhists describe this very well when
they speak about “Empty phenomena
rolling by.” I will quickly add, in case this
sounds existentially depressing, that
when liberation is fully seen, the
emptiness from which everything
apparently arises is also seen to be full
of love. In other words, every
phenomena is the outpouring of love.

NDM: When you write "the sense of

vulnerability and fear that attaches
to the individual falls away" does
this mean that vasanas, samskaras
and karma, also fall away at this
time?

Richard Sylvester:  My charismatic guru

gave some exciting and colourful talks
about vasanas, samskaras and karma.
These talks were very sweet and
inspiring, because at the time they were
listened to by a mind that wanted to
believe in them and the evolutionary
path to enlightenment that they implied.
'Vasanas', 'samskaras' and 'karma' are stories that seek to make sense of
the mystery of being. Many other stories seek to do the same, such as
the stories of the Kabbalah, of Buddhism, and of salvation through the
love of Jesus. If you want one of these stories, have it. But while you are
following it, the wonder of presence is being missed.

Particular personalities will be attracted to particular stories, but in

general all minds seek for meaning, and many minds are attracted to
stories that seem to explain injustice and to promise justice, if not in this
lifetime, then in the next or in the one after that. This is why the story of
karma is so delightful. The mind hates the idea that it can get no
purchase on liberation, that where liberation is concerned it is in reality
helpless and none of its stories count for anything.

By the way, the stories of vasanas, samskaras and karma are excellent
ones for explaining certain psychological tendencies and processes that
go in on people, just as Freud's stories or Jung's stories provide excellent
modern alternatives which require fewer metaphysical beliefs.

NDM:  You write “Liberation cannot be described in words. It

cannot be understood by the mind. It cannot be seen until it
reveals itself. Then no words or ideas are able to express it and
no mind is able to grasp it.” However Vedanta says the exact
opposite. The Vedas - the secret forest teachings, and the
Upanishads - the Chandogya, Kena, Aitareya, Kaushitaki, Katha,
Mundaka, Taittriyaka, Brihadaranyaka, Svetasvatara, Isa, Prasna,
Mandukya and the Maitri Upanishads, all say the opposite. The
writings of Adi Shankara, Ramana Mahârshi, Jñâneshvar,
Vasishtha, Ashtâvakra, Nisargadatta, his Guru Siddharâmeshvar
Mahârâj, Yajñavalkya, Nâgârjuna and many others all describe
exactly what liberation is and even how to attain it step by step.
They lay out a clear-cut method, through self-enquiry, Atma
vichara, and Karma, Bhakti and Jnana yoga, of how to do this and
they say exactly what liberation is with words and concepts, so
that the mind clearly understands it. In fact they say that if the
mind does not understand it, liberation is not possible.

What are your thoughts on this?

Richard Sylvester: Perhaps some of us have too much respect for the
words of dead Indians. Others of us may have too much respect for the
words of dead Hebrew prophets or dead Italian Cardinals. Therefore we
do not recognise how over the centuries the mind builds complexity on
complexity on top of an original insight into ultimate reality, like the
monstrous temple built on top of Nasruddin's dead donkey.* The original
seeing of liberation could never in any case have been put into words, as
the Buddha recognised.

The idea that oneness would need to follow a particular path with
prescribed procedures in order to reveal itself is utterly absurd, an
invention of the mind and the egos that attach to it. And you cannot put
enlightenment in a box and sell it. Oneness is neither a petty bureaucrat
nor a door-to-door salesman. Oneness is the lover who is constantly
whispering in our ear “I am here. I am closer to you than you are to
yourself. Notice me.”

There have been many hints of the real nature of liberation in many
cultures and at many times. Some of the clearest are from the
Upanishads, for example:-

“The Scriptures even proclaim aloud: there is in truth no creation and no

destruction. No one is bound and no one is seeking liberation. No one is
on the way to deliverance. There are none who are liberated. This is the
absolute truth, my dear disciple. This, the sum and substance of all the
Upanishads, the secret of secrets, is my instruction to you.”

Usually these hints have been misunderstood or ignored, because they

offered no purchase for power or wealth to be built on them. They were
instead the purest expression of anarchy. Some who hinted at this were
murdered by the sects and creeds that held power at the time. I'll quote
from just one of these, Marguerite Porete. Before being executed by the
church in the early fourteenth century, she wrote “Now this soul has
fallen from love into nothingness, and without such nothingness she
cannot be all”, and “If you do not understand, I cannot help you. This is a
miraculous work, of which one can tell you nothing, unless it is a lie.”
Perhaps you recognise an echo of the Kena Upanishad here - “Advaita is
not an idea. It is! The lightning flashes, the eye blinks... Then? You have
either understood or you have not understood… If you have not
understood, too bad!” Nor was Marguerite Porete impressed by those who
sought sanctity through morality, writing “the annihilated soul is freed
from the virtues”.
*One day, Nasruddin's father, who was a famous spiritual teacher with a
huge temple and many thousands of followers, became so fed up with his
wastrel son that he sent him packing with just the clothes he stood up in
and his decrepit and aged donkey for company.

Nasruddin roamed aimlessly till he was far from home in a strange

country. He was miserable and tired and to make matters worse, his
donkey suddenly keeled over and died. Nasruddin was so downhearted
that he just sat down in the dirt beside the dead donkey and sank his
head into his hands.

After a while, a group of travellers came by. They saw Nasruddin sitting
wretchedly by his donkey's corpse and they said to each other “This poor
man has been so saddened by the death of his donkey that he does not
even have the heart to bury it. Let us out of charity bury the beast for
him.” So they set about burying the donkey and then proceeded on their
way, leaving Nasruddin sitting silently by the burial mound.

After a while some more travellers came by and seeing Nasruddin and the
mound, they thought that perhaps Nasruddin was grieving the loss of a
friend. They too took pity on him, saying “See. This poor unhappy man is
so saddened by the loss of his friend and travelling companion, that
though he has buried him he has no strength to erect a little memorial for
him. Let us build a small pile of rocks on the burial mound to comfort the
wretched fellow.” So they built a little cairn of rocks and went on their
way, leaving Nasruddin sitting silently by the cairn.

Some time later another group of travellers came by. Seeing Nasruddin,
the mound and the cairn of rocks they thought that perhaps a rather
important man, perhaps a teacher, had died and that Nasruddin might be
his devoted follower who would not leave his grave. So they determined
to build a little mausoleum over the grave to show respect. Nasruddin
watched them without saying a word and continued to sit there after
they'd left.

After a while, another group of travellers came by. Seeing Nasruddin and
the rather impressive little building, they thought perhaps that Nasruddin
might be a teacher and the mausoleum his temple, built maybe by some
followers of his. Out of respect, they added a wing at both ends of the
temple, and then sat down by Nasruddin to imbibe his wisdom.

Gradually, more and more travellers came by. Each added a little more to
the temple, then sat to drink in the spirit of this master, until there was
an enormous temple and there were hundreds of followers. Still
Nasruddin hadn't said a word. As Nasruddin's fame spread, the hundreds
of followers became thousands, until word even reached his father, far
away in his own temple, about this great holy man who had so many
devotees.

Nasruddin's father determined to travel to this teacher to see for himself

his great spiritual aura. Eventually he reached the huge temple, and after
pushing his way through the great throngs of people he was astonished
to see his son, the wastrel Nasruddin, sitting on a great velvet cushion on
an ornate golden throne, still not saying a word.

As soon as he was able to, his father approached Nasruddin in private

and said “My son. I'm amazed. Tell me, how did you become such a great
teacher with so many followers?” So Nasruddin told him everything,
starting with the dead donkey and finishing with the mighty temple and
the crowds of devotees.

When he had finished his father looked at him in silence for a moment
and then said “That's incredible. Exactly the same thing happened to
me.”

NDM: You write “Language by its nature describes duality. There

is no language to describe nonduality.” What about vedic
sanskrit? What about the poetry of the Sufi mystics such as Rumi,
or the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, or Zen Haiku? What about dance
and theatre and art? What about the following:-

“Crossing long fields,

frozen in its saddle,

my shadow creeps by.”

Richard Sylvester:  There is Emptiness, No Thing, the Absolute, out of

which Fullness, Everything, the Relative, pours forth in unconditional love.
Of course the Relative is not different to the Absolute – it is No Thing
appearing as Everything.

Words can only describe phenomena, the stuff that happens. There are
no words to describe No Thing. Even words like 'emptiness' and 'silence'
can only be pointers to the seeing of liberation. Nevertheless, as you
suggest, poetry and prose, theatre, dance and the visual arts as well as
humour can all sometimes point towards liberation in a beautiful way.
One of my favourite pointers is this:-

“How can we ever lose interest in life?

Spring has come again

And cherry trees bloom on the mountains.”

(Ryokan)

 Another favourite of mine, perhaps because I am quite lazy myself, is

the following:-

“Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams,

Here lives an idle man,
In the day time wandering over green mountains,
At night coming home to sleep by the cliff......
How pleasant to know I need nothing to lean on,
To be still as the waters of the autumn river.”

(Han-Shan)

NDM: When you write 'the sense of self suddenly disappears. I do

not live, I am lived. I do not act, but actions happen through me,
the divine puppet', are you referring to not being the doer or the
actor?

Richard Sylvester: Yes. It is seen in liberation that there is no person who

does anything. “Actions there are, but no doer thereof” is a traditional
way of putting this. But we should also beware of this phrase 'the divine
puppet'. It is only a metaphor and of course there is no puppeteer. If we
do not recognise this, we are likely to gallop off after another story of
meaning and significance.

NDM: Then you say: 'However during the next year the self-
frantically tries to reassert itself, sometimes apparently very
successfully as issues manage to re-emerge, as boredom,
emotional pain somehow still have to be experienced.' Do you still
experience emotional pain, boredom, irritation, anger, anxiety,
frustration and so on?

Richard Sylvester: These words refer to a period which is sometimes

known as 'the desert', which can be experienced between awakening (a
sudden glimpse of the emptiness of the self) and liberation (the seeing
that there is both emptiness and fullness and that the nature of oneness
is love). In this desert, all the stories about personal seeking have been
seen through, but the separated seeking self still seems to remain a
reality. This often results in a sense of hopelessness and despair.

The seeing of liberation has no necessary implications. Anything that

occurred before the seeing of liberation could occur after it. It could not
be liberation otherwise, for liberation is all-embracing. Nevertheless,
liberation is a profound energy shift, and there is a tendency for certain
feelings to lessen or to drop away entirely. For example many feelings
have a distinctly neurotic element to them, such as irritation and anxiety.
These might disappear. Other feelings, which could be described as more
natural feelings, might actually get stronger, so instead of a long period
of neurotic irritation there might be a short period of natural anger.
Liberation has been described as living with the blinkers removed –
everything is more raw and immediate when the person is no longer in
the way filtering and toning down experience.

The topic of what experiences happen here is not very interesting. But
since you've asked, I'll report that boredom and depression are now
unknown. Boredom is unknown because this, presence, is seen not only
to be all that there is, but also to be enough, so the ordinary and the
everyday becomes fascinating. Depression is unknown because there is
no longer a person here suppressing natural feelings and draining the
colour out of life.

NDM: And what about contentedness, joy, or happiness? Do you

feel any of these?

Richard Sylvester: These feelings, like any feelings, can come and go.
Liberation is the seeing that they do not come and go for anyone.

Dudjom Rinpoche said “Even in the greatest yogi, joy and sorrow still
arise.”

NDM: What about problems - external problems like paying the

bills or internal problems like fear?

Richard Sylvester: Before liberation, paying the electricity bill. After

liberation, paying the electricity bill.

Fear is a natural feeling. Without it we would long ago have been wiped
out by sabre-toothed tigers.

NDM: You write 'Liberation does not bring unending bliss. For that
try heroin, prozac or a lobotomy.'  What do you mean by bliss?

Richard Sylvester: For many people, bliss is the ultimate pot of gold at
the end of the spiritual rainbow. We might notice that the end of any
rainbow retreats from us at exactly the same speed that we try to
approach it.

As long as we are searching for bliss, we are missing the wonder of this.
Bliss is another experience, another feeling. Liberation is neither an
experience nor a feeling. In liberation it is seen that bliss has no more
meaning or significance than any other experience. Liberation is so far
beyond bliss that they are not even within the same paradigm.

But as long as we feel a sense of separation, as long as we feel

incomplete, it may seem natural to search for bliss.

NDM:   Lao Tzu wrote 'Those who know, do not speak. Those who
speak, do not know.' If this is the case then why write books
about this at all? What is the point of trying to articulate the
ineffable. Is it, as Alan Watts said, to try to take some of the
effing out of it?

Richard Sylvester: Your quotation from Lao Tzu is pithy and pointed. Of
course if we take it literally, we wipe away the Upanishads, the Buddhist
sutras, and everything else ever written about this. Maybe that would not
be a bad thing. The Buddha said “Believe nothing, no matter who has
said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason
and your own common sense.” I know that this saying is authentic
because I found it printed on a bar mat in a pub in Wales.

Liberation does not need scriptures or gurus or priests to make itself

known. One moment there's somebody crossing a field, the next moment
there's nobody crossing a field yet it's seen that crossing a field is still
happening. The non-existence of the person is seen in that. Nothing
written or spoken, nothing studied and no technique, can have any
purchase here.

Let's be clear, there is no reason to write books about this and there is no
point in trying to articulate it. Nevertheless, oneness obviously sometimes
enjoys attempting to write or talk about itself in as clear a way as
possible.

Please excuse the personification of oneness in that last sentence. It's not
intended, it's just a consequence of the nature of language.

It is part of the madness of the mind that it always looks for a point to
everything and for reasons why. The mind rarely regards anything as
sufficient in itself. The mind takes an instrumental view and treats most
things as a means to an end.

I love Alan Watts' remark. I hadn't come across it before. If anything I've
effing written has taken some of the effing out of the ineffable, I shall be
very pleased.

NDM:  What is the difference between doing psychotherapy to

purify the subconscious mind and deal with the shadow, and
doing self enquiry or jnana yoga?
Richard Sylvester: Quite probably there is no difference, except that the
techniques used are sometimes different. Eastern philosophy, unlike
modern Western philosophy, has always been very practical. It is
probably best to regard advaita vedanta and Buddhism as psycho-
philosophies, as combinations of psychological and philosophical insight.
The effectiveness of certain ancient Eastern practices in dealing with
psychological and emotional problems is now being acknowledged within
our mental health services, where, for example, techniques derived from
Buddhism are being used with patients to very good effect. Many mental
health workers have now been trained in mindfulness.

NDM:   Do you believe in cause and effect? Or is everything a-

causal?

Richard Sylvester: In your dream last night you may have waved your
hand at a taxi in the street, causing that taxi to stop and pick you up. But
when you woke up you could see that actually nothing had happened –
there was no taxi, no street, no waving of your hand.

Or a week ago you may have gone to see a film in which Humphrey
Bogart's steady gaze and proferred cigarette lighter caused Ingrid
Bergman to fall in love with him. But you know that this was an illusion,
just flickering light falling on a screen.

Perhaps these metaphors are useful, perhaps not. But in this waking
dream it is much the same. In this dream of time and space there seems
to be cause and effect. In liberation this is seen through and it is known
that there is only this, presence, in which the dream of cause and effect
arises.

NDM. What about Dharma? What about Morality?

Richard Sylvester: The idea that we have a special dharma is a story

which is very appealing to the ego of the person. But when it's seen that
there is no person, there can be no dharma because there is only this.

Morality also belongs to the person. If you want to concern yourself with
morality, I'd suggest that all that is needed is the golden rule. This is so
simple that a child of seven can understand it. Perhaps that is why there
is a version of it in many different cultures. It simply says “Do not do to
other people anything that you would not want them to do to you.” That's
pretty comprehensive.

NDM. What do you mean when you write about liberation being
'seen'? What about 'knowing'? What about 'understanding'?

Richard Sylvester: There are no good words for describing this. I could
have written 'sensed' or 'known', but 'seen' seems to me to be the
nearest that words can get.

The trouble with 'understanding' is that it implies that concepts about

liberation are relevant here. But they have no relevance at all. It is
possible to see liberation with no understanding of it, or to have an
exquisite understanding of liberation but without seeing it. The first is like
enjoying a cake without knowing what the ingredients are. The second is
like knowing what the ingredients are without ever tasting the cake.

NDM. Do you have an aversion to Indian gurus and wisdom

traditions because of the negative experiences with your own
'guru of the single malt' which you write about in 'I Hope You Die
Soon'.

Richard Sylvester: My experiences with my 'guru of the single malt' were

overwhelmingly positive. That was the most enjoyable ride that I went on
in the Spiritual Fun Fair.

But when the person drops away, all stories of becoming, all stories of
evolutionary paths to enlightenment or other forms of salvation, are seen
for what they are, as simply stories. So they lose their fascination, and it
becomes difficult to hang around them any more except for the sake of
old friendships or for the sheer colour and entertainment offered by some
of them. I prefer to walk round the park and drink coffee by the lake now.

NDM: You write about words being pointers. But in traditional

Vedanta words are more than pointers, they deliver knowledge
and remove ignorance. For example, the word 'awareness' is not
a pointer, it is awareness.

Richard Sylvester: We will just have to agree to disagree about this one.
The word 'awareness' is just a word. Awareness itself can never be put
into words. We're back to Alan Watts and the effing ineffable.

NDM: Some of what you write sounds very close to existentialism.

Are you an existentialist? If not, what are you?

Richard Sylvester: An existentialist is someone who has seen through all

the stories about meaning and purpose but still feels themself to be a
separated person. This often leads to depression.

In liberation, all the stories about meaning and purpose fall away because
the person has been seen through. This does not tend to lead to
depression. Instead, for the first time, the glory of presence is seen.

I am, perhaps like you, a very ordinary bloke. I am, as you are, also the
light in which everything arises, and so is Lizzy and Tommy and Jimmy
and Anne. It would be more accurate to say “There is only the light in
which everything arises.”

NDM: When you speak of liberation, what are you liberated from?

Richard Sylvester: I am not liberated. No one is liberated. There is no

such thing as a liberated person. Anyone who claims to be a liberated
person, or to be an enlightened person, is by that very claim disqualifying
themself from having anything authentic to say on the matter.

Liberation is seen, impersonally, when the person drops away. It makes

as much sense, by the way, to say that there is in any case only
liberation, that being awake and being asleep are the same thing.
However, in being awake they are known to be the same thing, but in
being asleep it is believed that there is a difference, and therefore it is
thought that there is a pot of gold to search for.

NDM: What are your thoughts on neo-advaita?

Richard Sylvester: I've come across the suggestion that there are three
kinds of advaita. According to this description, in traditional advaita there
is both liberation and a path to liberation, in neo-advaita there is
liberation but no path to liberation, and in pseudo-advaita there is neither
liberation nor a path to liberation.

The idea that there are three kinds of oneness, or three kinds of not-
twoness, is very entertaining. It generates a great deal of heat on the
internet, which even spills over into 'web-rage', the internet equivalent of
road-rage, at times. But it has no importance.

Interview with Richard Sylvester - Feb 2007

Richard met Tony Parsons five years ago and attended regular discussion
groups in Hampstead.  Richard is the author of 'I Hope You Die Soon -
Words on Non-duality and Liberation'. He now holds his own discussion
groups in London, Tunbridge Wells and other locations.  

Halina: In your book you say that irritability doesn’t arise in liberation.

Richard: (Laughs). No, I didn’t say that irritability doesn’t arise. What I
said was that irritability is a neurotic manifestation of anger.  It is possible
that when liberation is seen neurosis will decrease and so the character
may be more likely to feel angry rather than irritable. To suggest that
irritability, for example, can no longer arise would be to suggest that
there is some sort of gift in liberation, some sort of gain. And that is such
a hook for the mind to grab hold of.
There is no reward.  Liberation has nothing to offer to a person.  

The mind is desperate to find any hook that it can use to haul itself up the
craggy cliff face of liberation. When this message is communicated clearly
then the cliff face crumbles and all the hooks fall out, denying the mind
any possibility of getting higher up the cliff.

I was giving a talk recently and I was just about to answer a question
when someone interrupted me and called us for tea.  After tea, of course
I couldn’t remember what I was going to say so I told the group “That’s a
pity because the secret of liberation was in that answer but we had a cup
of tea instead.” But really you are better off with a cup of tea because you
can do something with it. You can drink a cup of tea but you can’t do
anything with liberation. So it’s best just to forget the idea that you may
become less irritable or envious or depressed, because what happens
when liberation is seen may be exactly the same as what happens when it
isn’t seen.  Whatever happens simply happens and that could contain
irritability.

From the aspect of no-self- what is the mind?

One of the things that is seen when the sense of a person drops away is
that there is no such thing as a mind.  There are thoughts, feelings and
perceptions.  These are simply phenomena arising in awareness one at a
time.  But when there is a person, thoughts come so thick and fast and
seem to have so much energy attached to them that an impression is
created that there is an entity called the mind which is thinking these
thoughts. It seems undeniable to a person that “I have a mind”, that
there must be something thinking these thoughts and producing this
energy. There is a sense that this something must be “me”.  We could say
that the words “mind” and “person” are almost synonymous.  The sense
that there is a mind produces the sensation that there is a person and
vice versa.  

What can happen in liberation is that this is simply seen through. In

liberation there is a release of energy, an energetic shift. This is not a gift
or a goal. It’s just something that happens.  It is as if a lot of the energy
bound up with thought dissipates.  

Thinking doesn’t stop in liberation.  There is nothing wrong with thinking.

It is simply seen that thoughts arise from nothing. They arise and then
they fall back into nothing.  The mind is something like an idea or a
sensation which seems to be interpolated between nothing and a
thought.  We cannot see that thoughts arise from nothing and so we
imagine an intermediary called the mind. But this just falls away in
liberation.  

You mention Suzanne Segal’s book ‘Collision with the Infinite’ She
describes the frightening experience of suddenly there being no-self.
Tony talked about self developing as a protection for the organism. Can
you say why there is such a development of self? Are there any positives?

For a person there are lots of rewards but there are also difficulties.
Rather than seeing it in terms of positives and negatives I would say that
selfhood just happens. When self-consciousness arises it brings both the
promise of personal fulfilment and the threat of personal suffering. It is
how the game of life is played.  It is continually reinforced by everything
in society.  For example advertisements continually offer the promise of
personal happiness if we take this holiday or use that baldness cure.
Everything shouts at us “You are a person and you can experience
personal fulfilment.”

The sense of self inevitably arises. But it can fall away.

When we talk about underlying unity it is difficult not to give the

impression that we are saying there is something wrong with being a
person although that is not what is being suggested here.

There is nothing wrong with being a person for there is nobody who could
be doing anything wrong. The self is just awareness arising as the
individual self.  How could there be anything wrong with that?
Nevertheless, at the centre of the individual there may be the feeling that
there is something wrong.  There may be the idea that there is something
wrong with “me” or with “you” or that there may be something wrong
with life.  And this is clearly what fuels a lot of activity.  

I especially like one quote from your book: “Awakening is seeing the
emptiness of the void.  Liberation is seeing the fullness of the void.” Can
you talk about that?

Again I am aware that the phrase “seeing the fullness of the void” can
sound attractive and so it can become another hook for the mind.  But it
isn’t attractive. It is simply seeing the fullness of the void.  That’s no
more attractive than a cup of tea.  

What I was trying to describe were two apparent events.  The first event I
would call awakening.  What is seen in awakening is the complete non-
existence of the self and the emptiness of the void.  This is referred to in
some traditions as seeing the emptiness of all phenomena.  It’s
paradoxical that in other traditions they talk about “self-realisation”.
Actually what is realised is that there is no self. There is no lower self and
there is no higher self. There is simply emptiness.  

Later on there was another event and it was realised that it is a very full
emptiness.  These words are paradoxical and don’t get the mind
anywhere but that is the best I can do.  The mind might ask “If it is a full
emptiness, what is it full of?”  It’s full of love. All that can be said about
this is that everything is emptiness and everything is also love. However
when we look at certain aspects of the apparent manifestation, this can
sound very baffling to the mind.  The mind might say “Look at what is
going on in the world! How can that be love?” The only answer I can
give is that is just how it is.  Saying that everything is love is not a
teaching. It is just a description of what is seen in liberation and it may
make no sense to the mind.

People get obsessed by the idea of the transition from being a person to
‘being’.  It reminds me of the cartoon showing twins in the uterus and one
asks the other: “Do you believe in life after birth?”  “No” replies the other
one: “It is just a myth.”  My NCT group focused on the birth rather than
the idea of having a baby afterwards.  So when we talk about liberation
there are a lot of personal hooks around transition.

The mind is always trying to make something of this but it is impossible

for the mind to grasp it.  We might say that there is a shift and that this
shift is both tiny and cosmic. What can the mind make of that?  Yet that is
what is being said here. The shift is both tiny and cosmic.  But “cosmic”
does not contain rewards.

                                      Everything simply arises from Presence

Another quote from your book is that “being awake and being asleep are
the same”. Can you explain what this means?

It is paradoxical and an attempt to prevent another hook from being

hammered into the cliff face of personal enlightenment.  Whether or not
presence is seen, phenomena continue to arise.  Thoughts, sensations
and feelings continue to arise.  In that sense there is no difference
between being awake and being asleep but this cannot be seen whilst we
are asleep.  Whilst we are asleep we feel as if there is something to be
gained and this fuels the life of the person as we may rush about trying to
get something.  The person feels that we can get somewhere or gain
something that will at last make us feel fulfilled.  We will try to do all sorts
of things to cure our dissatisfaction.  That might be making a lot of money
or praying to God for a change in our circumstances or seeking
enlightenment for example.   

When awakening happens this may all be seen through.  And when
liberation is seen there is no longer anyone there who feels that they
need to make things better.  

Tony talked about the qualities that arise when there is no person.  Being
a friend arises instead of someone who is a friend.  Somehow the qualities
without ownership are richer.  

Yes, I relate to that.  Of course “relationship” is a concept, isn’t it?  It can
sound quite frightening to a person to hear that there is no such thing as
relationship.  But when the person isn’t there anymore relating simply
happens.  It is possible that relating might be more intimate or more
loving if the concept of relationship has dropped away.

In the story there seems to be “me” and “you” but really there is just
Oneness manifesting as two apparent people.  There may be more
immediacy when there is awareness of presence in which ideas and
concepts no longer play an important part.  

From a non-dualistic perspective what would you say is compassion?

It is difficult to talk about because compassion is bound up with moral,

religious and spiritual ideas.  For example, some people see compassion
as an attribute of the heart, which is confusing.  However I would say that
when there is a personal identity then there may be more neurosis and
neurosis is a great crusher of compassion. Neurosis grabs the attention of
the person and can produce an inward looking self-obsession.  It is
difficult for a person to feel compassion when they are obsessively
wrapped up in their own story.  When the person vacates the premises
they may take a few suitcases of neurosis away with them. This may
leave more space for compassion to arise and more awareness of how
difficult it is for others to be a person. But ultimately compassion, like
everything else, simply arises out of nothing.

I used to have lots of ideas about personal growth and spiritual

development.  Paradoxically it was more difficult then to notice suffering
in another person as my thinking was bound up with assessing my own
progress along an imagined spiritual path.  

There is more space in an empty house for compassion to arise.

                                              The Expectation of Happiness

Tony also said how there was no expectation on people attending

meetings and after spiritual striving this can be a relief.

Yes, I loved that part of his interview when I read it on your website.
Expectations can be so subtle.  There are always expectations if you are a
student.  I was listening to an interview with Mathieu Ricard on the radio
last week. He is a French Buddhist monk who has written a book
about happiness. American scientists have tested his brain wave patterns
and found him to be the happiest person that they have ever come
across.  He sounded like an absolutely delightful man. I would love to
spend an afternoon with him.  But can you imagine the expectation of
going to a Buddhist retreat where happiness is being taught! You’d
probably be trying to gauge your happiness and comparing yourself to the
other students in the room! In a way it is another form of oppression, the
expectation that I must not be miserable or that I am failing my Buddhist
teachers by not being happy enough. It’s something else to fail at.  

That expectation of being happy seems the major foundation on which the
self continues.

It is very seductive and lies at the heart of much of our activity.  It may
lie at the heart of a person seeking happiness on a Buddhist retreat or of
a terrorist setting off a bomb.  A person has the idea that if I do this or
that I may become happier. We all want to be happy.  

I have just been contacted by someone who is a Christian who said it was
a revelation to realise that he didn’t need anything else from God.  People
spend so much time praying to God for so many things.  

Yes, I know somebody who was brought up in a strict Christian family. He

said that after one visit to Tony there was such incredible relief.  He could
let go of all that need to please God.  

                                     The Communication of Non-duality

In writing about non-duality for your book do you feel anything has fallen
into place?

The only thing I would say is that in writing about this the communication
may have become clearer.  So it may appear that things are being
realised that were not realised before but that is only an appearance. It
doesn’t really matter, but there are probably ways of thinking about this
that will only emerge if an attempt is made to communicate about it.  

Instead of writing a book about non-duality do you think you could have
written a more lucrative one about becoming a more successful person?

(Laughing)  Yes, except that every part of that field has been covered.  If
you go into any bookshop the shelves are groaning under the weight of
self-help manuals. But the fact that there are so many of them should
make us suspect that they don’t really work.  

I talked to Tony about the way this message of non-duality comes out
almost as a surprise to the character of Halina.  Do you have a similar
sense when this is being communicated?

Very much so.  I have taught adults all my professional life and I am used
to teaching workshops on Psychology or Counselling where everything is
carefully prepared.  One of the things that surprises me is the absolute
impossibility of preparing anything to say about this in advance, whether I
am coming here to be interviewed today or giving a talk.  It is impossible
to prepare, apart from maybe scribbling down one thought on a piece of
paper and stuffing it into my shirt pocket before a meeting in case I find I
am absolutely paralysed and there is nothing to say when the time
comes. But so far that hasn’t happened!  Words always seem to come
from the immediacy of presence.  My intended two minute preambles
sometimes stretch to half an hour while the character Richard sits
watching, agog at what is being said.  

It is difficult to talk about this.

Nevertheless, lots of words seem to arise. In trying to point to this we are

attempting the impossible.  We must remember that in talking about this
we are still telling a story, the story of non-duality.  But some stories
point clearly towards what is and some stories point confusingly away
from what is.  The story of non-duality, when expressed clearly, points as
directly as possible towards what is.

SCOTT KILOBY
Interview with non-duality magazine
 
Scott Kiloby is the author of "Love's Quiet Revolution:  The End of the
Spiritual Search" and "Reflections of the One Life: Daily Pointers to
Enlightenment."  He is also the creator of an addiction/recovery method
called Natural Rest.  His book, "Natural Rest: Finding Recovery Through
Presence," is scheduled for release in early 2011. 

Scott's main website is www.kiloby.com.  His other website is

www.living-realization.blogspot.com.  This second site contains a
free PDF text called "Living Realization" pointing directly to nondual
awareness.

Scott travels across the U.S. and overseas giving talks in which those
attending experience nondual presence.  In these meetings, every
position and belief gets challenged, including every belief about the self,
others, and the world, and also all of our ideas about spirituality.  This
leaves those attending completely open to allow the present moment to
unfold in a new way, free of identification with thought.  The point of the
meetings is allow each person attending to go home and discover for
themselves the freedom Scott's message is pointing to. 
INTERVIEW. July 2010
 
NDM: Can you please tell me how you came to this realization?
Was it sudden, or gradual? Did you use a method or practice of
any kind? 
Scott Kiloby: Both gradual and sudden.  My first teachers were Eckhart
Tolle, J. Krishnamurti.  I didn't meet them. I only read their books. 
Through these teachers, I began to relax without thought for periods
throughout the day.  I did this very often, simply looking without
thought.  As thoughts would appear, I would notice them in the way one
notices a fly buzzing by.  I wouldn't engage the content (i.e., I wouldn't
reach for the fly).  I would simply notice that thought was appearing and
disappearing.

This became very natural and effortless over time.  This is the gradual
part of it.  I noticed that I was experiencing more and more peace,
freedom, and joy.
 
There were two big experiences.  This is where the sudden part comes
in.  Without going into detail, the first experience was a seeing of the
total impermanence of everything, leaving me with a very quiet mind. 
The second was a Oneness experience where I could find no distinction
between myself and the wall, the carpet, the streetlight, etc.  I saw that
time is an illusion and that death is not what we think it is.  The sense of
being a separate self just vanished.
 
There has been another kind of gradual deepening after these big
experiences, where all thoughts, emotions, states, sensations, and
experiences that make up the "world" are seen to be inseparable from
awareness.  This stage is less like a "Big Bang" experience and more like
a settling into or stabilizing in a sense of permanent well-being, peace,
and freedom.  There have certainly been challenging situations and this
or that self-centered thought or negative emotion or defense arising
during this deepening process, but it all ends up looking like love or the
"one essence" at this point. 

DM:  When you say that  you began to relax "without thoughts",
do you mean with some kind of deliberate meditation or just
whenever?    For how long do you mean exactly? 

Scott Kiloby: Yes, a deliberate meditation but not meditation as it is

traditionally known. I'm speaking of resting in thought-free presence in
all situations in my life, whenever possible, using the mind only for
practical purposes.  Letting all "story thoughts" arise and fall without
engaging them.  And when I found myself engaging them, I would take
another moment and let that thought come to rest and then relax again
into thought-free presence. 

I did not want to limit meditation to a method I did only in the morning or
only under certain circumstances.  I looked around at the Buddhist
Sanghas, and nondual satsangs and saw a lot of people doing that and
seeking for years.  So I would call what I did more like "living meditation"
where, throughout the day, whenever I remembered to do so, I would
take a moment and drop all conceptual labels about the moment and just
rest there, letting the body relax into the stillness of the present
moment.  As thoughts would arise, I would let them be as they are, little
temporary movements that don't last unless you engage the content of
them.  In not emphasizing the thoughts, they became less important to
my existence.  The space of the present moment became more
apparent.  In making this a repeated practice that happened many times
throughout the day, it became automatic and natural, not like a practice
at all.  More like home!  

NDM:  Have you ever practiced meditation, yoga, tai chi  or

anything at all like this where you have to concentrate and  focus
your mind on a single point of some kind.  Such as when you go
into the flow with jogging, martial arts, archery, exercise, or work
of  some kind?
 
Scott Kiloby: These are all wonderful practices, all of them.  I dabbled
very lightly in some of that stuff.  I mostly focused on the "method" I've
already explained. 
 
When I worked out, however, like on a treadmill or lifting weights, I
would focus on a single point sometimes.  That seemed to help calm a lot
of the stories that arose while working out like, "Can't wait for this to be
over." 
 
Also, in the middle of a busy day, while working as an attorney, that kind
of one-pointed focus was helpful.  But the focus was more on resting
without thought instead of focusing in on one particular object.  What I
mean is, during the day, walking to the courthouse or working on some
case, I would simply look around the room at colors and shapes, without
conceptualizing them into objects.  I would use the conceptualizing aspect
of mind only when needed for work.  
 
NDM:  When did this begin to happen by the way?    How long
ago?
 
Scott Kiloby: I assume you mean when did I start this method?  Around
2005.  The gradual aspect happening from that point until early 2007. 
The big experience happened July 2007. 
 
NDM:  When you say that  you began to relax "without
thoughts"...For how long do you mean exactly?  Seconds, minutes
or longer?
 
Scott Kiloby: The first time, it was probably milliseconds or a second. 
Then, as I did it more often, the moments got longer, until eventually
over a several month period, there was an automatic return there.  The
moments got longer and longer and there was a tipping point where the
mind got permanently quiet. 

NDM: Would you say after a several month period it went from
milliseconds to  where the mind got  permanently quiet?  Do you
mean perfectly still, more or less? For example how many
minutes can you go without a thought appearing on the screen so
to speak?

Scott Kiloby:  It never occurs to me to count how long the periods are
without thought.  The point of my message is not to end thought but to
see thought as none other than awareness.  Just as silence and sound are
inseparably one, awareness and all movements of thoughts are
inseparably one.  I have found that any other formulation is dualistic,
including trying to privilege silence over sound or not thinking over
thinking. 
 
NDM: Before this shift, how would you have described the activity
in  your mind. Was it mostly  calm, clear, active, energetic or dull? 
Or would it fluctuate between all three?  Does it still fluctuate in
terms of its energy or speed of thoughts and so on?
 
Before the shift, very active.  Lots of thought.  But through the gradual
period, it became more and more quiet, fluctuating between periods of
activity and some quietness.  The first experience where the mind quieted
was a big change.  Very quiet at that point.

Once the Oneness experience happened, and the stabilization after that, I
began to see the line between thought and no thought as still dualistic.  I
saw that the one who would choose one over the other was the separate
self sense, which doesn't exist.  So thought happens a lot today, but it is
like a movement of the quietness itself.  Not two things happening or
fluctuating or oscillating back and forth, like before.  In my message,
realization is not measured by how quiet one's mind is.  Quieting the
mind is only a tool.  The realization is in seeing through the need to
measure how quiet it is v. how noisy it is.  ALL is.  One definition of the
separate self sense is the controller or measurer who is measuring
experience, trying to get somewhere else in the future, to a quieter state,
etc.  That was seen through. 

NDM: What do you mean in the "seeing" How is this "seen”  How
can you see awareness?  Do you mean known? 

Scott Kiloby: It's not seen in the way one says, "I see a bird" or other
object.  To say that it's seen that there is no self is to go looking and to
not find this self.  The one who is looking is not a self and the one who is
looking finds no self.  There are thoughts.  Both are thoughts, the subject
and the object.  Thoughts SEEM to be found.  These thoughts create the
appearance of "two" as if one can find or know or see the other. 
 
But only another thought would call them "thoughts."  If you sat in a
room and did not have the thought, "furniture" or any other thought, you
would not see furniture differentiated and separate from "floor" or
"ceiling."  In the same way, in the so-called subtle realm of thoughts and
emotions, it is only labeling that creates the appearance that thoughts
are separate from emotions or awareness, etc.  It's all labeling.  Mind is
dualism.  So one doesn't even find thoughts "in the end."  So-called
"thoughts" have no independent existence as something apart from
something else called "awareness."  Similarly, self doesn't find no self. 
Subject doesn't find object.  One doesn't know or see anything.  This is all
a mind game, teaching tools at best.   
 
So it is in the not finding of any separate thing that this seeing happens. 
You could call it knowing.  But the same question would arise:  "How is
this known?"  "How can you know awareness?"  Then we are back in a
maze of dualism that doesn't exist except in mind, creating non-existent
problems and questions.  The questions come from the assumption that
there are two here.  So to answer them from the knowing that there
aren't two here is a funny game, isn't it?  Yet, dualistic thought is what it
is (or appears to be).  ;)  The best statement I've heard about all this is,
ALL is.  It captures the simplicity of being.  The mind complicates it, but
that is part of the fun, isn't it? 
NDM: When you teach this how do you do this?    Do you have
some kind of method that you use? 

Scott Kiloby: The point of my message is to put people in a position

where they are awake to what is happening within them at the time it is
happening, rather than lazily thinking about themselves and what they
think about awakening or about traditions or methods they've studied
before and rather than engaging their stories of past and future
endlessly.  To notice a thought is different than to engage the content of
a thought.  In my message, I encourage people to simply notice thought
coming and going, without emphasizing the content of it i.e., what it
means, what its conclusions are, where it is leading.   

NDM: For example what would you say to someone that had bad
habits like drinking, gambling and so on?
 
Scott Kiloby: If someone came to me, I would then invite him to take
very brief moments at first, throughout the day, on a repeated basis,
where he simply relaxes his body and mind completely, letting all
thoughts come to rest.  At first, the moments might be very short.  But in
repeatedly doing this, the moments would get longer, and at some point
there would be a natural and automatic return to this thought-free
awareness.  In addition, I would help him notice all the appearances
coming and going through this thought-free awareness.  I would have
him notice what is happening in his body throughout the day, each
sensation as it arises.  I would have him notice emotions as soon as they
appear, without placing conceptual labels or stories on those emotions. 
This kind of noticing, coupled with resting in thought-free presence, gives
him a taste of the fact that there is no doer.  Things are merely
happening on their own.  This gives him a direct taste that he is that
which is aware of all these things, not a "person" who brings about or
controls these things. 
 
I would invite him to let all appearances be as they are, without trying to
change, overcome, neutralize, or get rid of them.  Appearances include
thoughts, emotions, sensations, states, and experiences as well as
"people and events and seeming objects" happening out there, outside
the body.  But as the message continues and one looks more deeply, one
begins to see that the objects outside the body are actually thoughts and
sensations.  In letting all appearances be as they are, this person gets a
taste of everything arising spontaneously and involuntarily.  It takes the
sense of personal will away. 

If he continued asserting certain beliefs, positions, or points of view that

made it difficult for him to rest in thought-free presence, I would present
any number of methods to help unravel and relax those points of view
(not emphasize them for a sense of self, to say it another way).  What
those methods are is beyond the scope of this article.  I can't even share
some of them because they are in the Natural Rest: Finding Recovery
Through Presence book.  The publisher is asking me not to reveal those
methods until the book is released.  I do reveal them on a private basis
to anyone I meet with.   

My text, Living Realization, is a book that contains a method of

recognizing awareness in all situations.  It can be found at www.living-
realization.blogspot.com.  It's already been released.  

NDM: Ok, understood, from your description, this sounds a little

like the "Forth Way". Self remembering by Gurdjieff. 

This also sounds like vipassana.

Parts of it like shamAdi ShaTka sampatta from advaita tradition.

Also step 7 and 8, Buddhist mindful-ness and concentration from

the eightfold path.

What is it about "Scott's way" that is any more clearer or is going

to give someone any other benefits than these traditional
methods?

Scott Kiloby: My “method” is really simple and in plain English.  Some of

the traditions are difficult for people to understand because of language
differences.  English-speaking people might resonate more with what I’m
doing. 

Would it give you other benefits than the methods you listed?  My
message is different than those traditions in a lot of ways.  It may
provide exactly what you need.  It may not.  One has to try and see.  I
didn't get involved with heavy reading of traditions.  I just took up these
practices and it wasn't a "hard road" at all.  No guarantees for you.  If
one is interested, they find their way to my message.  If not, they don't. 
Either way, all is well. 

NDM: When you say that the big sudden experience left you with
a very quiet mind. Seeing of the total impermanence of
everything.

What do you think triggered this. Was there anything unusual

going on at the time?    Health issue, death of a loved one,
accident, shock, let down, dark night of the soul, depression of
some kind, or anything else?   
 
Scott Kiloby: No, just this practice.  Oh, let me add that I got clean off
drugs in 2004, which triggered a spiritual search, but by the time these
big events happening, there was no trauma, health issue, etc.

NDM: What kind of drugs exactly. Was it recreational,  medicinal

or for something else?   

Scott Kiloby: I used for 20 years, mainly painkillers but also meth,
cocaine, alcohol, and pot.

NDM: Did you go cold turkey or get off gradually?

Scott Kiloby: Off the drugs...?

NDM: Yes.  What kind of physical and psychological withdrawals

did you have?    Can you please tell me how you felt exactly while
going through this?

Scott Kiloby: Painful, flu-like symptoms.  Stopping drugs was very scary. 
I didn't know how I was going to live without medicating feelings. 
Without drugs, the mind began looking for something else.  This is when
seeking enlightenment came in. It was the next "drug chase." 
Emotionally, I felt a lot of fear and experienced anger and resentment
that I had been medicating for a long time. 

NDM:  When you say there  were some challenging situations

and  the self-centered thought or negative emotion or defense
arising during this deepening process.  How intense was this and
last for and do these thoughts, feelings, emotions  still arise at
all?     

Scott Kiloby: After the big experiences, these things would not last long
at all.  They haven't been that intense at all.  They would be more like
sudden bursts of energy, emotional energy in the body (like a heat swell),
accompanied sometimes by thought, but many times with no thought at
all. 
 
These days, I don't normally experience negative feelings or a slew of
self-centered story-of-me type thoughts.  Every now and then, something
will very briefly arise, but it causes no suffering because it isn't carried
over into the next moment.  It feels like everything that arises, good or
bad, is already on its way out when it arises. 
 
But as an attorney, for example, I might get really involved with a case,
making my argument to a judge or responding to other attorneys in
litigation (meeting energy with energy in a heated talk about something
that is really important to my client, for example) but whatever energies
arise, they fall away very soon, leaving no trace.  No matter what
happens, it leaves no trace.  It's like it falls back into quiet space.  Even
when thought and emotion are happening, the quiet space underneath it
all is still there.  And the thoughts and emotions feel like movements of
the space itself, not like things that arise IN or WITHIN it (not something
separate from the quietness). 

NDM: When you say they would be more like sudden bursts of
energy, emotional energy in the body (like a heat swell),  Did you
notice this in any particular region of your body. Where would it
begin and where would it end. Was it uncomfortable, pleasant?
How would you describe it? 

Scott Kiloby: As far as the region in the body, the chest or stomach area,
sometimes the throat.  It can be uncomfortable if there is resistance to it,
which there isn't 98% percent of the time, so it passes right through
immediately. It's like there is a gate within me, always open, always
allowing everything to be.

NDM: Do these thoughts and emotions still have a charge?  Do

they pack any punch so to speak?

Also do you have any triggers someone can push? Something that
still sets you off?  For example can a judge or another attorney in
heated battle unsettle you in any way? 
 
It is difficult to upset me.  There have been a few times, here and there,
where something gives me a charge.  For example, recently my life was
threatened in litigation by a father on the other side who lost custody. 
My client was awarded custody.  He made death threats and when I
heard that, a rush of fear went through my body but there was very little
story about that.  When thoughts just pass by very quickly, the emotion
has nothing to "sink its teeth into" so to speak. 
 
Even when self-centered thoughts or emotions arise, there is no sense
that I brought them about.  They arise involuntarily and spontaneously,
so there is no ownership of them. 
 
NDM: When you had these experiences, had you read any
traditional scripture on non duality at any point prior to this? 
Western or Eastern? 
 
Scott Kiloby: Very little traditional scripture.  If you mean any of the
traditional Buddhist schools or Traditional Advaita or even Direct Path
Advaita, no--not in the beginning.  But, as you know, most of the modern
teachings carry some of those elements in them. 
 
My teachers after the big experiences were people like John Astin, Greg
Goode, and the Great Freedom Teaching.  I became interested in
Dzogchen at some point, which really helped me see that nothing that
arises has an independent nature from space.  Since the experiences, I
have studied with Greg Goode, on an informal basis, in Direct Path
Advaita and Tibetan Middle Way emptiness teachings. 
 
NDM: Ok, how has Greg Goode been helpful?
 
Scott Kiloby: Greg has really been clear on showing me how language
determines how we talk about non-duality.  One teaching might render
this whole discussion one way, by using terms like "no self."  Another
teaching might never use the term no self and instead might talk about
awareness and points of view of awareness (without ever mentioning
whether there is a self). 
 
NDM: When you say nothingness, do you mean this in a Buddhist
sense, like shunyata or Brahman in advaita?    What do you see is
the difference?
 
Scott Kiloby: Good point, because the traditions render it differently.  I
mean the absence of what I TOOK myself to be, which is a central,
separate self who has control and is acting autonomously within a self-
centered story of time.  If I were to pick one or the other, I like the
Buddhist description better.  The Advaita awareness lends itself to some
weird interpretations and even fundamentalism in some cases.  But it's a
good teaching that helps many.  For me, this is more like an absence of
that assumption that there is a separate self behind it all and then a
sense of seamlessness or inseparability of life that became apparent
when that absence was realized (ha ha) by no one.  
 
NDM: Can you give me an example of these weird interpretations
and  fundamentalism?
 
Scott Kiloby: Anyone can be fundamentalist or absolutistic about
anything.  For example, let's say I'm a raw food eater.  I only eat raw
foods because I've come to see the health benefits of that.  If I identify
heavily with that mental label and believe "I have found the truth above
and beyond all other truths about food" I'm not going to be a person
others want to be around.  I'm a self-righteous know-it-all.  The same
thing can happen in spirituality.  A little bit of intellectual knowing or even
experiential knowing about nondual awareness easily becomes self-
righteousness.  In those instances, other teachings, methods, traditions,
and paths are seen as lower forms.  It's no different than a Christian
Fundamentalist standing at the front of the church condemning to hell
everyone who does not follow his religion.  The mind will attach to any
content to strengthen a sense of self, so that it can feel better than, more
knowledgeable, more enlightened, more--anything than others. 
 
With Advaita awareness, which gives one a sense of having "transcended
the world," it is especially ripe for self-righteousness.  The "world" gets
made into a lesser form, as if the people in it who have not realized their
true nature are something below or lower than those who have realized
their true nature.  Although the world is illusion, there is a way to realize
that and maintain complete humility without arrogance and self-
righteousness about it.  I'm not condemning everyone in Advaita.  Not at
all.  Only a select few that use it to bolster a sense of self.   
 
There is nothing inherently wrong with absolutism or fundamentalism,
except that it closes off the mind.  The mind gets lazy, reverting back to
"what I already know" instead of relying on awareness and being open to
what arises.
 
NDM: Also what do you mean by "person" underneath?  Do you
mean character, personality, vasanas?  Inclinations?
 
Scott Kiloby: Who is driving me to type comes from the assumption that
there must be a who or a what.  The mind thinks in terms of objects. 
Thoughts are believed and we think they are pointing to objects.  But
they don't point outside themselves.  The self behind the typing only
seems there when we emphasize the thought that there must be a
separate object behind the typing.  When that thought is not operating,
there is just typing.
 
By person, I mean the sense of a separate self behind the doing, the
sense that we are separate objects, somehow cut off from each other and
from life, acting on personal will. 
 
Remain silent.  Talk.  Both equally 'this.'  Words cannot destroy 'this.'
 
NDM: Also on your website  it says  "NEW-Non-Duality in a
Nutshell'  What do you mean by 'new" exactly?  How does
it  differ from Advaita  Vedanta for example? 
 
Scott Kiloby: "NEW" means that writing is new on the site. 
 
NDM: Ok, sorry misunderstood.  Thought it meant some new non
dual movement.
 
What do you mean by this "The appearances are inseparable from
awareness. You  don't even privilege  awareness over appearances
or vice versa." 
 
Who is the 'you" that is not making this privilege or this choice?   
Are you saying there is still a Scott floating about in there
somewhere and Awareness?  What or who is doing this?
 
Scott Kiloby: I speak in conventional language.  Without conventional
language, our communications would be very awkward.  It would look like
this, "Hey Oneness, please pass the salt to Oneness," during dinner.  In a
conventional sense, there is a Scott and a John.  Otherwise, we could not
have this email discussion.  And we would be deathly boring at parties,
wouldn't you say?  :)
 
The "you" in the pointing is our true nature as nothingness.  To say that
there is no privileging of form v. formlessness or appearances v.
awareness is to say that there is no person underneath all that who could
manage or control or privilege these things. 
 
NDM:  So do you still have a sense of  a separate self behind the
doing. Is this what you are saying?  Are you still the doer,
experiencer, thinker? 
 
Scott Kiloby: No, no sense of doership or personal entity behind the
doing, thinking or experiencing. 
 
NDM: By vasana, what  I meant was an ingrained habit that gets
illuminated by awareness and energy that manifests  as typing,
talking and so on.    I was asking you, do you see yourself as the
action taking place. The typer?
 
Scott Kiloby: I don't see myself.  The mind wants to place identity
somewhere, like a grounding point.  It normally puts it in the sense of self
that is somehow "behind" it all.  When that falls away, the question falls
away.  One could say, there is only typing.  I don't look for or see any
identity or object behind the typing.   
 
NDM: Also on the subject of habits, inclinations, dispositions, like
and dislikes aversions and so on.   Do you still have these? 
 
Scott Kiloby: I still like the same foods I've always liked.  I still love the
Beatles.  I still like to play and write music.  I still love dogs.  You could
say these are likes and dislikes.  Some part of the conditioning continues
on.  It's the sense of a separate self behind it all that has been seen
through.  So these preferences are not a problem.  They are just
happenings, like the way a lion might prefer sleeping by a certain tree. 
There is no suffering in any of it.
 
NDM: What about worldly ambitions of any kind, hopes dreams,
aspirations for fame, attention and  so on?
 
Scott Kiloby: As for hopes, dreams, and aspirations, no.  I don't see a
future.  Even if a thought were to arise about it, it has no pull, as if
something is missing that must be found in the future.  It's just a
thought, with no energetic or emotional pull. I no longer live with any
sense of lack.  When that is gone, life is just lived in the here and now,
like I say, loving dogs or eating prime rib or whatever--not to reach a
later goal. 
 
NDM: Do you experience bliss, nirvana, are you a Jivanmukta? 
 
Scott Kiloby: These are terms relevant only to certain traditions.  I never
use them.  I would say it this way.  There is never a moment when the
sense of peace and well-being is missing.  I don't fear death.  I don't see
a past or a future that has any objective reality.  Therefore, life feels
totally free in this moment.  Certain conditioning, like appearing to
choose to listen to the Beatles over something else, arises but contains to
suffering. 
 
NDM: What are your thoughts on karma? 
 
Scott Kiloby: When we place identity in time, as if we are thought-based,
time-bound selves who live from past to future, we believe we are
making choices to bring about other things.  We believe we are in control,
and we believe we must be very careful to avoid certain consequences or
bring about other, positive results.  When that is seen through, the
question of karma disappears.  Life is simply lived presently, without a
notion that actions are leading somewhere that can be known or
ascertained or controlled on a personal level.  The mystery lives itself
through us, unfolding as it will. 
 
NDM: So, are you saying that just by "seeing through this", the
question of karma disappears. That there are no more binding
vasanas. Advaita sees this differently so does Buddhism. They
both say that if certain steps are not taken, the karma, (Action)
which creates samskaras which in turn create and form vasanas.
They say you can change your name  and call your self Mr.
Awareness all day long and it will make no difference because its
superficial.
 
Scott Kiloby: I don't call myself enlightened or Mr. Awareness or any of
that stuff.  There has been a seeing here beyond the personal self.  I
consider a lifetime, even after awakening to the Absolute, an ever
deepening adventure where one should remain open to see any ignorance
that arises.  This keeps humility in place and any egoing that wants to
arise in check.  To say one is enlightened would be to act as if that word
has one meaning.  It depends on context.  What tradition, language,
culture, teaching is talking about enlightenment.  That determines what
enlightenment is.  And to claim one is enlightened then would be to say
that he is enlightened within a particular conceptual framework, like
Advaita.  In that case, in my opinion, he would not be enlightened at all. 
It would be necessary to wake up out of that framework, or perhaps
transcend and include it as one of many frameworks that create objects
including objects called "enlightenment" which have no fixed definition
without reference to culture, language, lineages, tradition, history, etc. 
The word "enlightenment" spoken by itself, without reference to these
things, is completely meaningless.  It conveys nothing. 
 
NDM: When you say "The appearances are inseparable from
awareness. You  don't even privilege  awareness over appearances
or vice versa."
 
Does this fluctuate at all.  Do you shift from going from one to the
other. From being the witness to getting engrossed or sucked into
a thought?
 
Scott Kiloby: No fluctuation.  Thought is none other than awareness. 
They aren't states in time, one appearing after the other.  Awareness is
like air and thought is like a breeze moving through the air.  The breeze
does not and cannot destroy the air because it is air itself.  The notion of
recognizing awareness, not recognizing awareness, being lost in thought,
being "clear," or "getting sucked in" are all thoughts--movements of
awareness itself, not something separate that interrupts awareness. 
 
NDM: Which one would you say you  are?    The subject being
awareness or the objects, what  are arising in awareness?  Or
both?
 
Scott Kiloby There aren't two.  For pointing purposes, we talk of two, as
you know.  We say there is a subject and an object.  Then we might try
to say there is both.  But where is the line?  When you really look for it, it
is not there. 
 
NDM: Also would you say that the objects that are arising are also
"in" awareness at all times.  Or on its surface?  In other words
what's the difference with an object that arises and the subject
being awareness?
 
Scott Kiloby: These are subtle questions and good ones.  I know that
people first have the experience of thoughts, emotions, and other
"objects" arising in awareness, as if they are witnessing them.  In that
sense, the pointer "everything arises in awareness" can be helpful. 
 
But there can be a collapse, if one doesn't leave this in the dualism of the
witness, such that the question cannot be answered because there is no
visible or knowable line between the cognizing space and that which
appears within the space.  To speak of them as two is to make a division
where there isn't one.  So to talk about inside, outside, as if something
contains something else doesn't match the experience.  The mind thinks
of things in or out or within or without.  But, ultimately, all that is seen
through.  To divide them would only be for teaching purposes, to help
someone stabilize as the witness. But that is not the final seeing. The
witness is seen as not separate from what is witnessed.
 
NDM: Yes, however according to traditional advaita Vedanta, the
question is answered because the teaching says that "Brahman"
is without attributes. 
 
Scott Kiloby: Yes, this is another way of saying what I'm saying. 
 
NDM: Do you see non duality on two or more levels? 
 
Scott Kiloby: I would agree about the levels, but one has to be very
careful when they are "evaluating phenomena" if one thinks they are
doing that from an objective "view from nowhere."  Our conditioning,
beliefs, influences, language, culture, and history determines the actual
objects we see, as that link stated that you sent me.  So evaluating
phenomena would have to take into account what conceptual framework
one is looking from.  In other words, what is right in Idado, USA is not
necessarily right in Munich, Germany.  It's a careful rope one walks
across when using terms like "evaluating phenomena." 
 
NDM: When you talked about awareness earlier, when this shift
took place, what happened after that.  Did it become permanent? 
Are you always awareness, no matter what is going on? 
 
Scott Kiloby: Yes, but it isn't thought about.  There is no reminding
myself of this mentally.  It's just being that, effortlessly.  Yes, totally
permanent.
 
NDM: I ask this because in traditional advaita,  there is what is
known as Sahaja Samadhi, or turiya.  In this "state" they say that
one is permanently the non dual witness.  One "is" Awareness
itself. There is no wavering, going back and forth anymore.  In
this "state"  they say there is also a underlying bliss, silence,
equanimity, unconditional love, a mental, emotional and physical
calmness, composure, evenness of temper, no matter what is
going on?
 
Is this how you would describe it? 
 
Scott Kiloby: Exactly.  Very nice description.  No wavering.  I use the
word "oscillation" where one experiences periods of the clarity of
awareness followed by periods of being "lost in egoic thought" or "in
ignorance."  There is no oscillation.  Thought is experienced as an
inseparable movement of the awareness, but there remains an openness
to see any ignorance or self-centeredness when it arises. And in that
seeing, one is freed from it immediately.  It doesn't carry over into a
story, in time.  It has nothing to "sink into."  There is only clear, spacious,
empty awareness. 
 
NDM:    "Shadow" in a Jungian sense (sub conscious) is a modern
word for vasanas.  I think Eckhart Tolle uses "pain body" for this. 
Can you please tell me if any shadows popped up after your
awakening shift. If so what you did about them?
 
Scott Kiloby: You'll have to excuse me because I'm not very familiar with
the word "vasanas."  But in my message, I do talk about shadows, but
there is a specific definition for it.  Shadow work is ego work.  It really
isn't nondual inquiry.  Shadows, in the way I define it, taken from
Western Psychology, are very strong negative or positive traits that we
see in others.  These traits are really aspects of our own personalities
that have become repressed and then projected onto others.
 
After the recognition of nondual awareness, I found myself really fixated
with people who were "controlling" for example.  I would see it in friends
and family members and would have a very strong negative reaction to
the trait.  No amount of witnessing my thoughts and emotions would see
through it, because I thought it was the OTHER PERSON's problem.  I was
falsely believing that I had seen through ego in myself, while still stuck in
this aspect of it.  I couldn't find any eastern teachings that really dealt
with this.  I finally stumbled upon Ken Wilber's 3-2-1 shadow process and
that hit the spot exactly.  Since that time, I have endorsed this process
and gotten his permission to use it in my new recovery book, "Natural
Rest."
 
The process works like this.  First you spot the shadow.  For me, it was
this controlling trait in others.  Next you dialogue with it, finding out what
it is about this trait that really bugs you.  For me, controlling people were
overbearing and presumptuous, making me feel as if they were intruding
on the personal will of others. Once you dialogue with it, you re-own it. 
You say, "I'm controlling." Then you spot the ways in which you are
controlling, really re-owning this aspect of yourself, even looking back
into your story for it.  Remember, this is ego work, not nondual inquiry.
 
The point is to re-own parts of your ego that have been split off because
they are too ugly to own or see.  It is easier to disown them and pretend
only that others possess them. But whatever we disown or deny comes
screaming back at one point or another.  The 3-2-1 shadow work is
great.  I highly recommend it.  It allowed a seeing through of my
arguments with other teachings that I thought were unclear or other
views out there that I had disowned, for purely personal reasons. That
was a nice by-product.  It allowed a more open attitude about all
personalities, religions, teachings, and worldviews.  It really cleared stuff
away to be and live in non-discriminating awareness, while still
appreciating the capacity for reason and discrimination on the relative
side.
 
An amazing peace came about, deepening what had already been
discovered through nondual awareness.  In re-owning shadows, we come
to see that all these ego stories, good and bad, controlling and not
controlling, are not who we ultimately are.  These are stories that arise
and fall within awareness, our real identity. 
 
On my site, on the KiloLogues page where I interview many teachers, I
re-enacted this shadow process on the controlling trait with Diane Musho
Hamilton, a zen master: 
www.kiloby.com/uploads/DianeHamiltonFeb20100.mp3
 
If vasanas is not referring to this kind of shadow, but more to general
habits of mind and emotion that can survive beyond awakening, I had a
few of those too.  But confirming and re-confirming my identity as
awareness, and letting all thoughts and emotions be as they are, without
trying to manipulate them in any way, worked to see through those.  In
addition, I saw through the idea of objects out there, lying around
somehow independent of thought.  Once  this is seen through, the habits
of judging, blaming, obsessing on, and otherwise objectifying "things" fall
away.  Middle Way teachings were helpful in this regard. 
 
It's the more deeply rooted, repressed aspects of ourselves that are the
real killers.  For that I needed shadow work.  I see shadow boxing
happening a lot in many teachers who cannot see it.  They keep going
back to their traditions looking for the answers, not being able to find it. 
A little investigation would reveal that Western Psychology has already
spotted it. 
 

NDM: Can you please tell me, what is your definition of

enlightenment?

 
Scott Kiloby: It would include a recognition of non-dual awareness as
one's true identity and the seeing that the world, as you see it, is
illusion. 
 
But it would also include waking up out of the idea that Advaita Vedanta
or one's path, whatever that is or was, is the right and only path.  It
would be to wake up out of one's conceptual framework into a larger
frame of reference that is open to all views, paths, traditions, teachings,
worldviews, etc.  Something more akin to Integral than anything else. 
 
What is so beautiful about Advaita is how well it works and how
accessible it is for people, when taught clearly.  It's limitation is that it is
just another object like all other objects.  It's often thought of as more
than an object, like some ultimate truth by the ones selling it to seekers
(and I don't just mean "charging" money...I mean selling it as truth). 
 
But when one wakes up from the teaching itself and looks around, one
sees that there were Buddhists over here talking about emptiness and
dependent arisings, Sufis over there talking about something else, and
Christians over there talking about Christ.   
 
At that point, the tendency might be to try and reduce all other paths,
traditions, and worldviews INTO the Advaita framework.  This is a
massive act of reductionism, a kind of violence we do towards other each
other, other teachings, views, etc.  I found myself fighting with other
teachings because of this ethnocentric tendency within me to absolutize
my own concepts about awakening.  Not very fun at a dinner party and
really arrogant actually! 
 
When that tendency to be right, to really, really believe "My path is the
right and only path," is seen through, there is a new kind of openness
that is available.  It's like waking up out of waking up, being free from
your own liberation, seeing your own teaching that helped you wake up
as one of many objects that can be transcended and included.  Not
dismissed, denied, argued against, etc, but totally included along with
everything else no matter what perspective or frame of reference it
comes from. 
 
I say, if you take non-duality all the way, you are free of it.  This means
you don't even absolutize your conceptual viewpoints about your path or
about Advaita or any of that.  There becomes this sweet, very
exploratory, compassionate, inclusive, non-marginalizing energy or
knowing that arises that wants to take other perspectives, appreciate all
forms as they appear, in whatever frame of reference they appear. 
 
And yes, a discriminating mind is important and included.  But, from this
view, any discrimination that happens would only make sense by
understanding what the frame of reference is.  You would see at this
point that what an object is, what it means, and whether it is right or
wrong, or clear or unclear, depends on the culture, teaching,
conditioning, and conceptual framework that "creates" or frames the
object.  The photographer is not independent from the photograph. 
Whatever you see depends on what conceptual framework (i.e., "lens")
you are looking from.  In my definition, waking up would include knowing
and seeing this.  It would include knowing what your conceptual
framework is when you are speaking.  This avoids the embarrassment of
opening your mouth believing that somehow you are speaking truth that
is somehow true across all cultural, regional, national, religious lines. 
 
For example, the framework from which this answer is written is what I
call Integral or the Open View. So there is a seeing that it is the lens
through which I'm speaking, not any kind of ultimate bedrock, final
seeing.  A Taoist might read this and be put off or not understand what
I'm saying or may think it's nonsense.  And so my definition of
enlightenment would not be a landing point or arrival.  It would not be an
attitude of "I already know."  It is an ongoing, fluid, openness to what
arises, open to see ignorance arise even after one believes he or she has
recognized nonduality or whatever. 
 
Any other definition, for me, locks one into an awkward place.  For
example, if I sit back claiming to be Mr. Advaita, or Mr. Non-Dual ever
present abiding in the Absolute, I am not seeing that THAT is a
conceptual framework.  I will find myself in a funny place when I meet
someone from a Tibetan Middle Way teaching, just for example, who says
that awareness is just a dependent arising and that one should not
essentialize awareness or even emptiness itself.  There are those
in certain Middle Way schools who would not say that emptiness is the
same as non-dual awareness.  That can rub someone in Advaita the
wrong way if there is Advaita-ethno-centric thinking going on.  Or Advaita
talk can rub someone from the Tibetan teaching the wrong way if there is
a "closing off" or absolutizing of a viewpoint in the one who holds the
Tibetan view.   
  
Here is another example:  If I am stuck in my view about formless
awareness being the ultimate and final seeing, I might find that an
Integralist has a different view altogether, which does not include ONLY
timeless and formless awareness but also the world of form, time,
phenomena.  An integralist or even a pluralist does not follow or
appreciate only formlessness.  In Integral, one is not enlightened if they
see themselves only as pure awareness "free from objects, experience,
time and form," they must also be at one with form, time, objects, etc. 
This too can rub someone the wrong way if they are entrenched in the
view that it's all about being "free of..." 
Can you see where the conflict arises? 
 
It is tempting to want to stand back and try to decide which view is the
right and correct view.  But the one who stands back is just another
perspective.  We can definitely have a talk about whether these paths
and teachings include a similar realization or whether one might be better
for some people and the other better for other people.  But until we get
over this hump of defending one's own view, making absolute claims as if
there is a "view from nowhere," no real conversation takes place. It's all
about being right, which, for me, is just ego 101.  The recent "discussion"
between Neo and Traditional Advaita is a good example of this nonsense. 
 
We find division and separation by the way in which we frame objects,
from plants, animals, humans, to science, teachings, religions, countries. 
And we frame objects based on our conditioning, language, culture,
teaching, religions, philosophies, etc.  We hunker down within conceptual
views that are only real when we emphasize them.  So I say, find a view
that is really open.  Be free of this separation.  If not, we take our
thoughts to be pointing to real objects in the world, as if Advaita or
Tibetan Middle Way is a real object, totally divorced from conditioning. 
Hmmmmm.
 
Can you see how ethnocentric thinking could lead someone to be so
entrenched in their view that they cannot see beyond it?  They only keep
seeing objects that take to be real, something called Traditional v Neo
Advaita, Advaita v. Buddism, the Tao v. God, Atoms v. Brahman.  These
are cultural objects.  If one cannot see beyond a cultural object, would
that be enlightenment?  Some say yes.   I say, "Don't be so sure."

 
So the point of my message is to wake up beyond ego, and then to wake
up out of the teaching or any other ethnocentric thinking, into an open
view, held very ironically and lightly (not essentialized or absolutized) so
that all views, all form, time, all teachings, all disciplines are welcomed. 
Obviously, in my message, the path to that is first and foremost the
recognition of one's true nature as non-dual awareness.
 
Once one has recognized non-dual awareness, I encourage an openness
to continue seeing where one's framework is limited, where shadows are
arising, where ignorance and separation is still coming up.  I found in
myself, a few years back, that there was a tendency to say that one has
seen through separation, but then ACTING AS IF separation is real.  This,
I think, is why some teachers have fallen from grace.  They say there are
no others, but then molest, hurt, ridicule, obsess on the others that
apparently don't exist.  If one takes non-duality all the way, a very deep
love and compassion for all arises.  You aren't a perfect human being. 
The perfection of life is realized, which allows all imperfections to be seen,
illuminated.

And you are free to "play" a character in the relative world, knowing that
there is no one, but still obeying the basic ethics and laws and common
decency within the cultural framework you find yourself (e.g., Midwest
America, or Beirut). 

NDM: Do you see we are living in a time of the end of the

traditional guru. That we are  now in the age of the "cyber guru',
giving email satsangs, or the universal guru that speaks one
language only. English.
 
Greg Goode  says: No longer can people believe that liberation
speaks only Tibetan, or that the world was created from holy
Sanskrit syllables. People are saying, "If it can't be said in my
language, then it isn't so universal after all." Even as recently as
thirty years ago, seekers of self-awareness had to trek to India or
the Himalayas to see someone who could impart a message of
liberation. These days there are many routes:   Barnes & Noble,
Borders, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, mobile phones and
BlackBerries"
 
NDM: What is your take on this? 
www.heartofnow.com/files/other.writings.html 
 
Scott Kiloby: I feel as Greg does.  Centuries ago, it was possible to have
a teaching very regionalized in one place where certain concepts were
passed around as truth, as the only truth.  Nothing else was getting in to
challenge or influence that from the other end of the earth.  As the
internet age is sweeping us into mass communication, we are waking up
to what we've been doing, mistaking regional, cultural frameworks for
absolute truths.  These paths and traditions like Advaita Vedanta and
Buddhism are true treasures.  But they are being reinvented today.  The
point Greg seems to be making is that awakening is not found
 

NDM: What about this money issue. Charging for teachings or for
guru-ship? 

Scott Kiloby: Most of the content, except books, on my site is free.  But
that is not coming from some high moral ground or from some belief that
gurus shouldn't charge money.  It comes from wanting to make the
message accessible.  But it has limitations because, up until now, I've
done no marketing.  Therefore, many who might benefit from my
message just don't hear it. There are a lot of good teachers out there who
are not getting their message out because of some idea that they
shouldn't charge or market or sell books or whatever.  Well then...no one
will hear it . . . or only a few will.  Whatever we think tends to to become
our reality.

If I remain closed to getting my message out, that's probably what is

going to happen--nothing.  If I remain open, perhaps more people would
hear it.  And the marketplace takes care of itself.  An unclear message
will, eventually, fail in the marketplace of teachings

NDM: Is it right or wrong to charge? 

Scott Kiloby: The question, like most, cannot be answered in an

absolutistic way.  In the East, perhaps it was wrong to do this in some
areas or in some teachings.  In the West, the free market system is
thriving.  It's a cultural difference.  Personally, I don't mind charging at
the door if people ask me to come and give a talk.  It pays for travel
expenses. 
 
I'm thankful that people paid my teachers to talk or else I would never
have seen their books or benefited from their messages.  I am certainly
glad I didn't have to go to India...
 
If there is a good teacher out there anywhere who can help the
realization of freedom, I certainly wouldn't want him working in a
factory.  If I were suffering, I would pay for him not to work so he could
give me guidance. 
 

To me, this is a non-issue.  It really only becomes an issue when the

hunger for money overrides the heart of the message--the intention to
help others.  When that happens, the ego of the guru has crept back in. 
But you can't always tell if that is the case from the "outside."  Many
people have made the claim that so and so teacher is money hungry
because he charges.  But then I've gotten to know that teacher and see
that it is just false.  The intention of the teacher is authentic. 

 
What is dying, more and more, is the idea of the guru itself, the notion
that there is someone who has something special that others don't.  As
this thing blossoms more and more, there will be more and more books
and websites, and so many teachers that the idea of enlightenment being
a special thing reserved for special gurus will die out.  I don't know this
for sure.  I just suspect this, given what has happened in the last ten
years.
 
There is plenty of room for abuse in the guru/student relationship.  That's
when gurus start feeling like Gods.  And it keeps people trapped in
projecting all sorts of personal stuff onto the guru, as if he is
superhuman.  That, I think, is on its way out.
Perhaps as this idea of the exalted guru goes away more and more, this
issue of charging money will clear itself up.  The guru just sells water by
the river until people see that they can take a drink themselves and
become the river.  At that point, they aren't going to pay for it anymore,
so the issue is dead.  The best nondual teachings are the ones where no
one returns. 
 
Whatever way that message gets to people, I'm all for it, whether
someone charges or not...ultimately.
 
For more info visit
www.kiloby.com
JERRY KATZ
Interview with non-duality magazine
NDM: Can you please tell me about your awakening, how and
when this happened?
 
Jerry Katz: In anyone's spiritual biography you can identify turning
points, moments when truth is stumbled into. Those moments could take
the form of a sudden awakening, or a question, or a realization of some
kind. You stumble into those moments. You can't plan for them to happen
and, you know, stop off for a sandwich on the way to experiencing the
stumbling. There's nothing linear about stumbling into truth. If it was
linear you would see the stumbling block and walk around or over it and
never stumble. It is said in the Kaballah that the stumbling block is in
your hand. It's not separate from you. You stumble upon yourself.
 
For most people there is more than one stumbling. I call them
initiations. I had several initiations into my true nature as "I Am." They
occurred between the ages of 7 and 10. I knew they were important and
meaningful but I never knew how to live life with them. So I forgot about
them until around age 25, when I revisited them. What got me to revisit
them was dissatisfaction with life and the sense that there was something
more meaningful I needed to find out about. It was clear that I needed to
investigate my early initiations into "I Am."
 
I spent a couple of years writing about my early experiences, feeling
them, investigating them from different angles, and wanting to be
stabilized as this "I Am." After about two years, in 1977, that stabilization
happened and was marked with the spontaneous utterance, "There is
only one day." Everything was seen as one day, or perhaps you could say
one moment; in today's language you could say I was living in the now.
However, in my words it was as though there was only one day.
 
The one day feeling lasted for about ten years and then it gave way to an
immediacy of awareness as the "I Am" itself apparently dissolved.
 
Another way of talking about this progression is to say that I started out
aware of awareness, then there was the sense that I was awareness,
which was aware of me, and finally there is only awareness.
 
So that's a story of awakening. There is still everyday life, problems,
limitations in expression and ability; or is there?
 
NDM: When you came to this Self realization, that you are "I Am",
were you studying the Kaballah, or anything else like Vedanta,
atma vichara, or Buddhism and so on? 
 
Jerry Katz: As a boy between ages 7-10 the initiations into "I Am" were
spontaneous and beyond and outside the influence of any practice,
reading, or exposure to ultimate spiritual teachings. Around the age of 25
when I started to investigate "I Am," I read a number of books. The
works of Osho (Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh), and Da Free John (Adi Da) were
especially helpful. I studied Science of Mind and the correspondence
course offered by the Self-Realization Fellowship of Paramahansa
Yogananda. The latter two helped me to discipline day to day living,
which was important for being able to focus on "I Am."
 
NDM: Then when you finally realized that you are "only
awareness".  At this point what kind of a vasana load did you
have?
 
Jerry Katz: There's no realizing that you are only awareness, even though
to talk about it one might say, "I am only awareness," or "There is only
awareness." It is enough -- it is too much -- to say there is only
awareness. To say anything beyond a variation of, "There is only
awareness," "There is only this," further diminishes the statement or
confession of what is.
 
Having said that, there was and still are habits and negative psychological
states. They are not so extreme. Most importantly it is realized that are
not me. Still, one must live responsibly in the world. To exercise a bad
habit and to dismiss it by declaring, "Well, yeah, it's bad but it's not me,"
is an abuse and neglect of discipline. 
 
I am sure that having experienced the "I Am" conditioned me early on
toward a life of simplicity. Even though it was not until the age of 25 that
I began to investigate my sense of "I Am," prior to that the initiation into
"I Am" exerted an influence upon my life. That's what initiation is all
about: it is a deep penetration of truth at a cellular level. Compare
initiation to a so-called aha experience. The latter is more superficial and
activates an energy which tends to burn itself out quickly or which gets
channeled toward seeking and self-improvement rather than resting in
knowing. However, aha moments are useful in living effectively; it's
important to have realizations about the nuts and bolts of day to day
living.
NDM: Can you please explain the difference between sense of
being awareness  and  finally only awareness?
 
Jerry Katz: The difference is that in the former there is a fascination with
awareness which is sparked by a seeming distance from it, a distance
which from time to time disappears, much as the clouds move away
from the sun and it is said that the sun comes out. The sense of being
awareness is like the sense that the sun is going to come out. "Only
awareness" is recognition that you are the sun, a recognition that burns
away any forgetting that you are anything else.

NDM: On page 16 of your book entitled, One. Essential Writings

on Nonduality, Sri Ramana talks about the importance of vasana-
kshya. The destruction of vasanas.  Do you believe it is possible
to be Self Realized, to be liberated, (moksha)  without destroying
these vasanas?

 
Jerry Katz: The questioner, not Ramana, was seeing the importance of
vasana-kshya. Ramana responded by saying, "You are in that state [of
realization] now." Ramana said to "remain as you are." Liberation is
complete liberation including the liberation of the vasanas. Nothing is not
liberated.
 
NDM: What would you say to someone who was saying they were
liberated but were still acting out on their vasanas for violence,
and saying they are not the doer/perpetrator.  That it is God that
is the doer/perpetrator of this violence?
 
Jerry Katz: It's too hypothetical a question, but if someone came to me
with that attitude I would want to know why they have come to me. Are
they boasting, are they testing me, are they questioning themself, are
they experiencing hallucinations or hearing voices? Are they looking for
me to justify their excuses to be irresponsible? Are they shifting
responsibility to God? I want to know where they are coming from then I
would respond. 
NDM: Ok, let me put it another way. Sri Ramana said:
 
‘For those who are very attached to their filthy bodies, all the
study of Vedanta will be as useless as the swinging of the goat’s
fleshy beard unless, with the aid of Divine Grace, their studies
lead them to subdue their egos.’ 
 
Sri Adi Shankaracharya says:  The first step to Liberation is the
extreme aversion to all perishable things, then follow calmness,
self-control, forbearance, and the utter relinquishment of all work
enjoined in the Scriptures.

 
Do you see it this way or is anyone fit for this, no matter how they
behave or are acting out?
 
Jerry Katz: Divine Grace doesn't discriminate, so anyone is fit for
Liberation. Students and seekers are best not told that, otherwise they
might go home and wait for Grace to strike while they're sitting on the
couch watching TV. However, being fit for Liberation and realizing
Liberation are two different things. Being fit for liberation is nothing more
than being fit to live life effectively, and that fitness is useful whether you
are a spiritual seeker, a professional athlete, a doctor, or a businessman.
Such fitness doesn't attract Grace but it allows Grace to operate
optimally; fitness allows you to handle Grace, the touch of God, which
can be quite a life-changing blow.
 
NDM: Yes divine grace but how about being fit to practice atma
vichara?
 
Sri Adi Shankaracharya says: 69. The first step to Liberation is the
extreme aversion to all perishable things, then follow calmness,
self-control, forbearance, and the utter relinquishment of all work
enjoined in the Scriptures.

78. He who is free from the terrible snare of the hankering after
sense-objects, so very difficult to get rid of, is alone fit for
Liberation, and none else – even though he be versed in all the six
Shastras. (Vivekachudamani)

Sri Ramana Maharshi also says:  ‘Only to such a mind which has
gained the inner strength of one-pointedness, Self-enquiry will be
successful. But a weak mind will be like wet wood put into the fire
of jnana-vichara ‘If the aspirants have not one-pointed mind,
which is possible for him who has pure mind full of sattva,
dispassion, discrimination, etc., Self-enquiry is impossible.’

‘It is easy, the concentration on the Self, for him who has
qualities like dispassion, discrimination, one-pointed mind,
renunciation, etc. For the rest, it is either less or more, depending
on how much one has these qualities. For those who are not
prepared, it is very difficult, if not impossible.'

Jerry Katz: You primarily have to have the hunger to want to know who
you are. That hunger alone will "clean up" your life and make you fit to
further practice. It will steer you to others who will help you see the blind
spots in the way you conduct your life. That hunger to want to know who
you are is Grace and the Guru, at once. However, it does not mean you
live a solitary life in the force field of that inner hunger and avoid other
teachers, guides, gurus, and helpers. Trust yourself while being open to
other teachers, guides, books, and while being open to nature itself.

 
NDM: What are your thoughts on neo advaita. Saying that there is
No morality. No right or wrong. No meaning?  Please See
interview with Suzanne Foxton.
www.nondualitymagazine.org/nonduality_magazine.1.suzannefo
xton.htm  

Jerry Katz: I like the neo-advaita movement. It doesn't replace traditional

advaita or anything else. It is another offering, that's all. Neo-advaita is
nothing new. It simply focuses on the portion of advaita that confesses
the reality of what is. Neo-advaita is a partial teaching, but for a given
individual it could be a whole teaching, depending on what one is ready to
receive.

 
Suzanne said, "There is no right or wrong." That's true. That's the pure
confession of neo-advaita. The Avadhuta Gita makes such statements
over and over again: "How can I speak of good and evil? I am free from
disease -- my form has been extinguished."
 
The Avadhuta Gita and a few other texts are more "neo" than neo-
advaita. Neo-advaita writings or discussions probably always have
contained within them some instruction, some suggestion of what to do in
order to realize what the neo-advaitin confesses. The Avadhuta Gita has
no such instruction. The Avadhuta Gita doesn't tell you to investigate
anything. It doesn't tell you to follow the I Am, as Nisargadatta has
urged. It doesn't tell you to Full Stop, as 'Sailor' Bob Adamson advises. It
doesn't suggest you inquire into who you are, what you're doing, why
you're here, what the truth is, or anything at all. It just confesses.
Period. 
 
Neo-advaita is not as extreme as some very old writings. Neo-advaita is
an evolution, a morphing of those writings and at the same time a
morphing of traditional advaita. The morphing, the evolution continues,
and watching that evolution is the delight of being involved in the world
of nonduality.
 
NDM: Yes, but Avadhuta Gita is  also reading material meant for
the use of  advanced students. 
 
Jerry Katz:  It is appropriate for today's mainstream nondual spirituality
audience, I feel. Even James Swartz, a current and strong proponent of
the stepwise teaching of traditional Advaita Vedanta, includes Avadhuta
Gita style of confessions in his book How to Attain Enlightenment. For
example, he says, "I am neither a person nor a non-person ... I am not
male, female, or neuter ... I have never lived or died ... I am pure
knowing, even though there is nothing to know." The entire book explains
details about life, practice, experience, and those confessions occur at the
end of the book in a section called Beyond Enlightenment. With the
proper preparation, such as delivered by Swartz in his book, or with a
strong intuition of truth, these confessions and the Avadhuta Gita itself
become understandable. I wrote a series of verses based on the
Avadhuta Gita, called The Wild Song of Standing Free, which is available
online here:
http://members.upnaway.com/~bindu/windsong/stafreeindex.h
tm. I wrote that in 1997, before I went on the Internet, and it served to
prepare me for the adventure of introducing nonduality to a mainstream
audience and to deal with all the people I would be encountering.
 
NDM: The Ashtavakra Gita is also from the absolute  level.
 
Jerry Katz: Yes, The Ashtavakra Gita is more popular than the Avadhuta
Gita, too.
 
NDM: Yes on this absolute level there is no right or wrong. But
what about on the relative level.  See here.
 
www.enlightened-spirituality.org/neo-advaita.html    
 
Jerry Katz: People may teach with reference to such levels, but teachers
don't go around thinking about what level they're in. One might question
whether there is a relative level or an absolute level. Such a questioning
is an inquiry. If you inquire from time to time, "Is this the relative
level?" "Is this the absolute level?" at what level do you find yourself
upon making these inquiries? Questions about right or wrong, absolute
and relative levels, have doors within them that take you out of the
questions. Turning a question into an inquiry exposes the door and opens
it. And then where do you find yourself? For example, the question, "Is
there right or wrong?" can be turned into the inquiry, posed randomly
throughout the day, "Is this right or wrong?" It may be seen that there is
no right or wrong in that moment of inquiry and also that there is no
relative or absolute level.
 
NDM: Dattatreya is considered by some to be the predecessor of
the Aghori tradition. The tantric left hand path.    Are you saying
that neo-advaita is a new western  left hand path of the Aghori?
That Tony Parsons and Suzanne Foxton, Jeff Foster  are some kind
of neo advaitic tantric Aghori? Breaking all taboos and violating
traditions?
 

Jerry Katz: I'm not saying that. Dattatreya's tradition doesn't have a
bearing on his confession of truth. Jay Michaelson has recently introduced
nondual Judaism to the world. Jay has written that as a Jew he keeps
kosher and follows other Jewish practices. Jeff Foster, for example, may
state things similar to Jay, however it doesn't mean Jeff keeps kosher.
Although it wouldn't hurt if he did, haha! Truth is truth and it is expressed
in multitudes of ways by people with all kinds of backgrounds. Many of
the expressions sound alike. There is a sharing in the similarity of
expression but not necessarily in other details of a person's life.
 
NDM:  Yes, ok. When you said earlier. "Such a questioning is an
inquiry. If you inquire from time to time, "Is this the relative
level?"  "Is this the absolute level?" at what level do you  find
yourself upon making these inquiries?
 
Would not that depend on the level you are at. For example, how
could a non realized person even know the difference without
"knowing" the absolute level?  If you are not the absolute, all you
know is the relative? You can understand it to a degree, but
cannot "know" it. The knowing only comes with realization.
 
Jerry Katz: The inquiry is sufficient if a person has had only an intuition of
the absolute. However, I don't recommend doing inquiry just for the heck
of it. Behind all efforts there must be the hunger to know who you are.
Inquiry is a powerful tool. One must find an inquiry that truly draws their
attention.
 
NDM: Did you experience at any point, close to your realization,
intense  temptation by your ego to co-opt this in any way. Such as
your shadow self at the time trying to make a power grab and use
it for its own motivations? 
 
  Bernadette Roberts talks about this here. 
 
"The major temptation to be overcome in this period is the
temptation to fall for one of the subtle but powerful archetypes of
the collective consciousness. As I see it, in the transforming
process we only come to terms with the archetypes of the
personal unconscious; the archetypes of the collective
consciousness are reserved for individuals in the state of
oneness, because those archetypes are powers or energies of that
state. Jung felt that these archetypes were unlimited; but in fact,
there is only one true archetype, and that archtype is self. What is
unlimited are the various masks or roles self is tempted to play in
the state of oneness - saviour, prophet, healer, martyr, Mother
Earth, you name it. They are all temptations to seize power for
ourselves, to think ourselves to be whatever the mask or role may
be. In the state of oneness, both Christ and Buddha were tempted
in this manner, but they held to the "ground" that they knew to
be devoid of all such energies. This ground is a "stillpoint", not a
moving energy-point. "
www.spiritualteachers.org/b_roberts_interview.htm     
 
Jerry Katz: I never had such dramatic experiences. I'm sure a lot of the
shocks encountered in the adventure to nonduality were, in my case,
ameliorated by the substantial initiation into "I Am" that occurred in my
childhood. We're each put together differently and we each unravel
differently, and in that unraveling the sparks of all kinds of experiences
and psychological encounters could take off.
 
NDM: What are your thoughts on Sri Aurobindos intermediate
zone? Do you think this could be an explanation for Adi Da and
Osho?  Please see here.
www.kheper.net/topics/gurus/IMZ_guru.html  
 
Jerry Katz:  You'll see in my work on nonduality that I have never been
into rating gurus. I like some and don't like some, but I don't rate. One of
the qualities of my work has been to create a list of
gurus/teachers/realizers/confessors which included just about anyone
who spoke with some real knowing of the realized state. I don't see that
some people are more enlightened than others. It doesn't interest me too
much -- except in a gossipy way.
 
Seekers and students need to connect with their own inner knowing, their
own inner hunger for truth, and to allow the inner force to be one's
teacher and guide. That, in fact, is the Guru. One may then be led to this
or that teacher. If so, from a practical point of view one should learn as
much as possible about a prospective teacher.
 
NDM: When you say" There's no realizing that you are only
awareness, even though to talk about it  one  might say, "I am
only awareness," or "There is only awareness." It is enough -- it
is too much -- to say there is only awareness. To say anything
beyond a variation of, "There is only awareness," "There is only
this,", further diminishes the statement or confession of what is."
 
So  what is it that "knows" that it is awareness?  What is this
knower that knows this and how does this knower get to know
this?
 
Jerry Katz:   There is no knower and no knowing of it. There is only it. As
far as getting to know this, it is said that Direct Path teachings can
facilitate that. These days Greg Goode might have the best handle on the
"There is only awareness" realization.
 
NDM: It obviously isn't "seen" as neo advaita  people say because
a seer cannot see itself no more than an eye can see its own
pupil?
 
Jerry Katz: Yes, it isn't seen. It is. To say "It is," is, again, too much,
which is why silence is a teaching.
 
NDM: What do you  think that  happened in the cases of Da Free
John (Adi Da) and Osho? 
 
Jerry Katz: Probably nothing new to add to this. They were human beings
with human limitations and blindspots. They were not different from you
or me in that way. What's amazing to me about those guys is not that
they were enlightened but that they were in possession of awesome
intellects and charismatic qualities. Their intellect and charisma allowed
their teachings to become valued and widespread and to benefit many
people, however they were screwed up in some ways and hurt people
too. When incidents of controversy as exhibited by Adi Da and Osho are
seen, then one must investigate what is about them that is bothersome
and puzzling. Take these incidents and make them your own inquiry.
 
NDM: Have you seen this silent teaching by Adi Da.    What are
your thoughts on this?
 
www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_bokk0KR7I 
 
Jerry Katz: I watched it. The music isn't necessary. It's a nice video of an
interesting guy. I don't make much of it. It is possible to get caught in
the charismatic and psychological grip of certain people, especially if they
are extremely attractive in the way of intellect, celebrity, power, and
psychic magnetism. I look for a teacher that turns me toward what I am
on a fundamental level, not toward what he or she is on a psychic or
some other energetic level. This video turns me toward the psychic
energy of Adi Da, not toward the fundamental nature of what I am.
 
NDM:  What are your thoughts on Christ consciousness as
Paramahansa Yogananda describes it?  Was he seeing this as an
object? Consciousness as a thing, or a reflection of the Self?
 
Jerry Katz: It's been too many years since I've studied Yogananda. I had
to read the article on Wikipedia to refresh myself on him. Apparently he
was talking about nonduality in the way the audience of his time (1920-
1950) could understand. A quote from the Wikipedia article shows that he
was saying nothing different from Ramana Maharshi:
 
"Self-realization is the knowing in all parts of body, mind, and soul that
you are now in possession of the kingdom of God; that you do not have
to pray that it come to you; that God’s omnipresence is your
omnipresence; and that all that you need to do is improve your knowing."
 
My sense is that he would not have seen Christ Consciousness as an
object but as who he was, as a sublime expression of reality beyond
which is what could perhaps be called the Father or emptiness or
awareness. At some point the terms we use need to be defined. I would
call the "I Am" the Christ Consciousness. Although the experience of
Christ Consciousness or Mystical Oneness may be full of literal light, soul
travel, meetings with heavenly beings, and so on, when all that
excitement settles down it resolves itself as the "I Am": a simple
presence and knowing residing in the atmosphere of awareness itself.

NDM : On page one of your book you say "However , being by its
nature cannot be known, so words can only give us a direction in
which to look"

James Swartz for example says that Vedanta is Shabda, a word means. 
He says that it is crystal clear on where to look and what to look at. It is
more than using pointers. It is a statement of fact.  It is a statement that
delivers knowledge.  It does not point to anything.  It removes
ignorance.  He says the difference is a pointer leaves you
looking, searching, seeking.  Self knowledge removes the one who is
looking. For example. The word Awareness is Awareness.  It’s not a
pointer. It's saying the sun rises in the East, not the West.  How do you
see this?

 
Jerry Katz: Formal Advaita starts out as a pointing and develops into a
more refined pointing. At some point the words themselves are known
as not separate from what is being pointed to. Advaita means "not-two"
so how could there be separation between the finger and what is being
pointed to? They ever-arise perfectly. It becomes known that "There is
only this," as the neo-advaitins confess. This is this: this perfect arising of
individualistic things. Residing in or abiding in the perfect arising as the
perfect arising, what am I? What am I not? So yeah, there is talk of
pointing and the failure of words, and then there's talk of all things
arising as they are, individual and without division. If nonduality isn't
coming across as paradoxical then it's been cooked too long.
 
NDM: Yes, ok, but what is "There is only this,"?  How does that
deliver any clear knowing?
 
Jerry Katz: The statement is a variation of "There is only awareness," or
"There is only God." "There is only truth." There is only this moment." It
could resonate with a person's intuition or intellectual understanding of
interconnectedness, or with their experience of oneness. As part of some
response or description, the statement could strike a chord of clarity for a
person. However, to deliver that statement as a first and last teaching
consisting only of words and bearing no knowing-substance on the part of
the teacher, could mean you have meaningless words. Therefore, clarity
arises when there is substance behind the words, substance consisting of
the teacher's realization and the student's or devotee's intuition and
experience of nonduality.
 
NDM: In the chapter on the Kaballah in your book you  hint at
Moses being given this secret non dual truth by God. The I Am-
ness.    Do you believe that Jesus Christ also made the exact same
Self discovery as Moses? 
 
Jerry Katz: Yes. There are two bottom line teachings, that of the "I Am"
or the Holy Spirit, and that at Ein Sof, or, in Christ's term, The Father.
Anyone can know these. You don't have to be a legendary religious
figure. Some people know these truths and sweep floors for a living.
Others have served as the seed for major world religions. One is not
more wonderful than the other.
 
NDM: Why did Jesus talk about this truth in public while Moses
kept  this truth  hidden?

Jerry Katz: I'm not a scholar on this topic so I can't confirm the
assumption, but let's say it was the case. The same could be said about
the guy sweeping floors. Why is he or she sweeping floors when he knows
the Absolute? Jesus and Moses each had his way, his people, his time, his
job to do; and each had different people around him, serving him,
representing him, trying to understand him. They were different men
operating in different spheres of engagement. Implicit in the question is
whether some evolutionary force was involved in the differences between
the two men. I would call the evolutionary force Grace and, yes, Grace is
always present and exerting a force. But don't ask me why Grace does
what it does. Certainly Grace wouldn't know.
 
NDM: The way that Ein sof is explained sounds almost identical to
the Vedas. Do you know if the people of Moses' time ever visited
India through the silk trade routes, across Iran, Persia, Arabia,
Pakistan and into India? 
 
The Shaktona (symbol of shiva/shakti union) is identical to the
Star of David.  Do you think this was a coincidence?
 
Jerry Katz: I'm not up on the history to be able to answer this. I would
have to research it. Great questions.
 
NDM: What do you teach by the way. Do you have a method of
teaching. Do you do satsangs or anything like that?
 
Jerry Katz:  I don't teach or give satsang. My work is to bring nonduality
to mass consciousness in a variety of ways: Through websites, email
forums, a blog, twitter, radio appearances, conference development,
public speaking, organizing local gatherings, interviews, publishing e-
books, individual correspondences, encouraging and supporting various
people in the field of nonduality, writing book reviews. Of course a lot of
teachers do those activities, and more, too. If I did teach there wouldn't
be any method. I would look at what each person requires and offer
direction and guidance that is right for that person.
 
NDM: How long have you been doing this work of bringing non
duality awareness to mass consciousness?
Can you please elaborate a little more on your work and the
impact this has had?
 
Jerry Katz: I first went onto the Internet in November, 1997.
My intent was to bring nonduality "to the streets," to the spirituality
mainstream. At the time, nonduality was a topic and a word largely
reserved for discussion within ashrams, the circles of certain
teachers, and university departments of philosophy and religious studies,
and as well as part of the lesser known teachings of the world's religions.
 
The best known nonduality teaching is Zen, which belongs to Buddhist
tradition. I wanted to introduce nonduality as a broader Zen. To do that, I
introduced the word "nonduality" itself and colored it according to a
vision. Just as the word "Zen" has a certain magic and power to it, it is
my opinion that the word "nonduality" has its own significant meaning or
"color." I have tried to keep nonduality wide open and all-embracing.
 
Many people are involved in bringing nonduality to the mainstream. I
have provided online spaces for people to gather and talk about
nonduality in whatever way they wished and have welcomed and
encouraged a number of people. Over the years the broad teaching of
nonduality and the word "nonduality" itself have entered the spirituality
mainstream and even the general mainstream.
 
Lives are impacted in different ways. There's a peaceful, holistic,
harmonious, Yogic side to nonduality which benefits a person's life. It is
more about coherence and oneness. Then there is the jarring and harsh
side of nonduality -- the bottom line nonduality -- in which our ego
strategies are seen through or split wide open. Knowing who you are
requires a cutting away of who you think you are. Practically no one is
exempt from that harshness since layers of ego strategy are constantly
re-constituting. For living life effectively, I highly recommend the holistic,
Yogic type of path. Seeing who your really are, which is the atmosphere
in which this effective life is lived (and which it actually is) requires that
one question the effective life even while living it. It's tricky business and
only those who have no other choice will engage in it.
 
For more visit
 
 www.nonduality.com   

DENNIS WAITE

Interview with non-duality magazine

July 2010

NDM: When and how did you first become aware of "neo advaita"
and can you please tell me what your immediate impression was?

Dennis Waite: I think my first exposure to those teachings (which I did

not come to know as ‘neo-advaita’ until much later) was through the
Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK around 1999 – 2000. They used to have
a regular newsletter, in which they advertized forthcoming satsangs
(without necessarily endorsing the teachers) and a quarterly journal of
essays, satsang and book extracts etc. Around that time the names of
Tony Parsons and Nathan Gill began to appear and, later, there were
some intriguing extracts. Initially, I found their material fresh and
exciting. It spoke of the ‘here and now’ and seemed immediately
relevant. I bought Tony’s book ‘The Open Secret’ and Nathan’s booklet
‘Clarity’ after reading the essays.

NDM:  What exactly happened when you read Tony Parson’s book,
"The Open Secret”?  How did it go from it being fresh and exciting
to something other than this?  Was there a particular  moment, a
sentence or a paragraph when you began seeing red flags?

Dennis Waite: I can’t remember much about what I read yesterday, so

there is no chance of remembering from 10 years ago! What I have done
for the past 5+ years, however, is to mark up (in 3B pencil) any passages
in books I read that trigger comment or seem particularly useful. And I
know that, for example, by the time I came to read books such as Nathan
Gill’s ‘Already Awake’, I was scribbling quite a few comments, not always
complimentary! I guess that it was simply the case that, as I read more
in general and came to understand Advaita more and more, I became
more critical. Probably because of my scientific education, I have always
insisted that any teaching that I encounter is totally amenable to reason.
There is a proviso here that I am prepared to take something new ‘on
trust’ temporarily if I am sufficiently familiar with previous books or
teaching of that author/teacher and therefore know that they are
‘trustworthy’. (This is effectively a practical definition for the Sanskrit
term ‘shraddhA’.)

NDM: Do you know who first coined the term "neo advaita”?

Dennis Waite:  I don’t know who first coined the term. I know that Greg
Goode has attributed it to me but I don’t think this is strictly accurate.
Probably someone else casually used it in an email and I then started
referring to it regularly through my website and then later took it for
granted in my books. Certainly it is an obvious term, when the
proponents claim to be speaking of non-duality but reject the traditional
teaching, so I don’t think any kudos should be attached to its inventor!

NDM:  Do you see that this would also apply to other traditions
such as Zen, Sufism, Kaballah, Taoism, Gnosticism and so on?
Does it apply to anything that deviates from traditions? Or does
this just apply to Vedanta?

Dennis Waite: I don’t know anything about other non-dual traditions but
since the final message is presumably the same, I guess there might be
people trying to teach those and bypass the related methodology. In fact,
I suppose that it is only because of a particular teacher’s background, or
the background of their attendees, that one can identify a ‘neo-teaching’
as related to Advaita rather than another tradition.

NDM:   What are the criteria for being labeled a neo advaita
teacher?  Is it simply someone who teaches Advaita, but without
the traditional methods of meditation, self-enquiry, study of the
scripture, use of the Sanskrit terminology and so on?

Or is it someone who has not been initiated by a Guru, but

deemed qualified by the sampradAya system, through a
succession of linage? As Wright and Wright put it, ‘If one cannot
prove natal legitimacy, one may be cast out as a bastard. The
same social standard applies to religious organizations. If a
religious group cannot prove its descent from one of the
recognized traditions, it risks being dismissed as illegitimate".

Dennis Waite:  A neo-advaita teacher typically claims that the world and
the person are unreal. Consequently, there is no one searching for the
truth and no one who can help them to find it (i.e. neither seeker nor
teacher). There is therefore no point in wasting time and effort looking for
the truth; the scriptures are of no value and so on. So no, you cannot say
that ‘they teach advaita but without the traditional methods’ because the
traditional methods are really what constitute advaita. Advaita is a proven
methodology for helping seekers to remove the ignorance that is
preventing them from realizing the already-existing truth, namely that
there is only Brahman (or whatever you want to call the non-dual reality).
Neo-advaita makes the same claim but offers nothing at all to help the
seeker remove the ignorance.

Given that there is only Brahman, we are obviously already That. But
clearly we do not know this to be true. Simply saying that it is true is of
little help, but this is effectively all that the neo-advaitins do.

NDM:  When Nisagadatta was asked about this  by a questioner

who wished to join the Navnath Sampradāya, he said, "The
Navnath SampradAya is only a tradition, a way of teaching and
practice. It does not denote a level of consciousness. If you
accept a Navnath SampradAya teacher as your Guru, you join his
SampradAya... Your belonging is a matter of your own feeling and
conviction. After all it is all verbal and formal. In reality there is
neither Guru nor disciple, neither theory nor practice, neither
ignorance nor realization. It all depends upon what you take
yourself to be. Know yourself correctly. There is no substitute for
self-knowledge".

Question: How does one become a Navnath; By initiation or

by succession?

Maharaj: Neither. The Nine Masters' tradition (Navnath

Parampara) is like a river – it flows into the ocean of reality and
whoever enters it is carried along.

            Question: Or is it simply acceptance by a living master

belonging to the same tradition?

Maharaj: Those who practice the sādhana of focusing their minds

on "I am" may feel related to others who have followed the same
sādhana and succeeded. They may decide to verbalize their sense
of kinship by calling themselves Navnaths, It gives them the
pleasure of belonging to an established lineage.

So if this is the case, could anyone who has realized the "I Am"
call himself or herself a Navnath (As  Nisargadatta stated here)? 

Or  would that still not  make them legitimate enough to teach
advaita? 

Dennis Waite:  The usage of the term ‘sampradAya’ is not in accord with
the tradition as it comes down through Shankara. The key point about
teachers in a sampradAya is that they are qualified to pass on the
teaching of that sampradAya. And the key point about such teaching is
that it has been proven time and again to work. Thus, in order genuinely
to ‘belong’ to a sampradAya, one has to have studied with a teacher of
that sampradAya for however long it takes fully to understand all of the
aspects (i.e. many years). (In the past, this would have meant learning
scriptures by heart, in the original Sanskrit, and knowing how to explain
their meaning to a seeker.) And in order to become a teacher oneself,
one should also have the appropriate skills of a good teacher. Ideally, one
should be enlightened, too, but Shankara himself pointed out somewhere
that this is actually of lesser importance.

NDM:  What about  the sampradAya roots of these often  followed

teachers: Sri Ramana and Papaji.   Which sampradAya system did
Sri Ramana belong to?    Which sampradAya system  did Papaji
belong to? 

Dennis Waite : Ramana did not belong to any sampradAya. He is

someone who is acknowledged to have attained enlightenment without
any of the usual prior teaching and is therefore held up as proof by many
modern teachers that prolonged studies with a qualified guru are not
necessary. Unfortunately a single example does not disprove the general
rule, and history shows that most do need prolonged formal teaching.
Papaji is generally regarded as having been a disciple of Ramana. He did
not belong to any recognized sampradAya either. As far as I am aware,
neither formally recognized anyone as their ‘successors’ either, although
numerous teachers now claim that they were ‘authorized’ to teach by
Papaji.

NDM:  There are a number of teachers in the United States who

advertise and claim lineage from both of these teachers.  Such as
this one see here:  www.gangaji.org/index.php?
modules=content&op=lineage 

Would this lineage claim be considered legitimate or rather an

illegitimate  lineage according to the sampradAya teaching
system?

Dennis Waite: The term sampradAya (for Advaita) implies a lineage

effectively stretching back to Shankara and Gaudapada in a continuous
guru-disciple chain. So, the answer to this question is that no one
claiming to be a follower of Ramana and/or Papaji belongs to a
sampradAya.

NDM: So in effect this chain (please see

here)    www.advaita.org.uk/teachers/ramana_parampara.htm is
an offshoot? There are about 75 well known teachers here from
all across the world who give satsang, write books, give
seminars, retreats and so on.

 Since none of these can prove natal legitimacy to the

sampradAya dating back to Shankara and Gaudapada,  should
they all be cast out as a "bastards" so to speak? Or to put it in
polite terms, considered neo Advaita?   

Dennis Waite: You will see the note at the top of the Ramana ‘lineage’:
“(Note that a solid line represents a direct teacher-disciple link ('in the
flesh') and a dotted line an 'influence' only. All entries are to the best of
my knowledge and may be mistaken.) N.B. Strictly speaking, Ramana
Maharshi never authorized anyone to teach in his name. This is therefore
not a formal lineage.”

I derived pretty much all of the information for these charts by looking at
the websites of the teachers mentioned. So, in many cases, a teacher has
been added simply because his or her website states that they were
influenced by Ramana – i.e. I trust what they say.

You seem to be making much of this sampradAya issue. Not formally

belonging to a sampradAya does not mean that a teacher is ipso facto not
worthy of reading/listening to. What it means is that they are much less
likely to have a complete grasp of all of the teaching methods and aids,
stories, metaphors and so on that would automatically be handed down,
learned and totally understood within a sampradAya. But they may still
be a good teacher by virtue of their own reading, understanding etc. and
because whoever taught them had a good grasp. The point is that the
probabilities are imponderable outside of the sampradAya. It is
unfortunately the case that there are many self-claimed teachers who are
simply in the business of making money (a sampradAya teacher would
never ask for money), and who are neither good teachers nor
enlightened.
NDM:    I don't see Mooji on the list by the way. Shouldn't he also
be on this list since his Guru  was Papaji?

Dennis Waite: The ‘home page’ of the lineage information has the
following statement:

 “In the charts, I have listed teachers as accurately as possible, given the
limited information I have available - i.e. primarily the Internet. I have
not contacted every living teacher to ask them where they consider they
should be placed. Also, there will no doubt be many teachers who do not
have an 'Internet presence' so that I will be unaware of them. Finally, my
judgment as to whether a given teacher is a teacher of Advaita is often
dependent upon a quick appraisal of the content of their website. Some
indicate other traditions as being specially influential (e.g. Zen or
Dzogchen) but nevertheless write articles that 'read' as if they were
Advaita - I have given these the 'benefit of the doubt' in some cases.
Others may have been excluded because there is simply no material on
their website by which to make an assessment. Some teachers may
appear on more than one chart. Accordingly, I am asking for help from all
visitors to correct errors, suggest additions (or deletions) etc.”

Despite this, I think only about 3 or 4 people have ever contacted me to

tell me about errors or omissions. So thank you! I have now added Mooji
to the Ramana chart – and my apologies to him if he reads this.

NDM: So what about Nisargadatta and his line?  How does this
differ since according to your chart, his line only seems to go back
to the 13th century and not to the 8th century and Shankara?
/www.advaita.org.uk/teachers/navnath_sampradaya.htm     
However, doesn't his line go all the way back to Dattatreya?

Dennis Waite: As before, I have only been able to take whatever

information I could find on the Internet. I am not setting myself up as
any sort of authority.

You also have to accept that, in the past, Indians had no real interest in
documenting any personal history. In advaita, after all, the person is not
a real entity. Even in the case of Shankara, academics still argue about
when he lived, with conclusions being anything from several centuries BC
to around the 8th century AD. (Most agree that it was probably the latter.)
The only probably valid historical records of lineage are in the Shankara
mathas.

NDM: Can you give me the names of any western teachers today
who belong to the lineages dating back as far as Shankara?

Dennis Waite: Westerners probably only began to learn about this

teaching with the advent of people like Ramana and Nisargadatta and we
have already spoken about these. Teachers such as Swamis
Chinmayananda and Dayananda are associated with Swami Sivananda
and the former now have Western disciples who are teaching. For
example James Swartz was a disciple of Chinmayananda and Michael
Comans of Swami Dayananda. But I don’t know if Sivananda and
Tapovanam can be traced back to Shankara. John Lehmann, of the
Advaita Meditation Center in Massachusetts receives guidance from Shri
Bharati Tirtha Swamigal, who is the present Shankaracharya of Sringeri
Sharada Peetham; so maybe he is the only Westerner I am aware of who
can trace back to Shankara. But then he has not been formally accepted
into the lineage as far as I am aware so that reduces the number to zero!

NDM: Why do you think that no westerner has  been accepted up

to this point?  What are they missing? Is it their skills or
something else?     Wouldn't  His Holiness Shri Bharati Tirtha
Swamigal make this decision, being the pontiff of Advaita
Vedanta?

Dennis Waite: The formality of the lineage is part of the Hindu tradition. I
understand that only saMnyAsI-s are given the title of ‘Swami’ and a new
name, and I don’t think that lifestyle appeals to most Westerners! Also,
as I said earlier, Advaita did not really come to the attention of
Westerners until very recently, relatively speaking. But I think this is
another red herring; it doesn’t say anything about ability or worthiness.
Certainly a number of Westerners have studied with Swami Dayananda
and become excellent teachers in their own right. Michael Comans is now
‘Sri Vasudevacharya’.

I think the other point about the tradition is that, as implied by the name,
procedures are long-established. I don’t think any individual,
Shankaracharya or not, could unilaterally decide to do things differently.

But all this discussion is really outside of my field of expertise. If you

want to ask Indian cultural-type questions, you need to ask someone
else.

NDM: Can you please take a look at this question and answer
below with Suzanne Foxton and tell me  how morality is
understood according to traditional Advaita Vedanta?

  Where does morality (right and wrong) play into this equation?

Suzanne Foxton:  There is no right or wrong. There is what is.

Including many differing ideas about what is right and what is
wrong. However, compassion often seems preferable; yet if every
apparent individual were consistently compassionate without
exception...gag, barf! How dull would THAT be? AND there'd
probably be a loved-up population explosion.

We live in Utopia. We are Utopia. We are the perfect, dualistic

playground with every possibility shining, weaving, tearing,
growing, destroying, creating NOW.

Dennis Waite: Hindu dharma is a vast subject with many entire books
written about it. And I am certainly no expert! Very simplistically
(according to my understanding), the key point is similar to Kant’s ‘moral
imperative’: behave towards others as you would wish them to behave to
yourself. You try not to hurt others, either physically or emotionally, just
as you would not want others to hurt you. You allow others to believe
what they like as long as, by doing so, it does not cause you any harm.

NDM: Do you believe that some neo advaita teachings are

violating Hindu Dharma by misleading others about the nature of
reality and truth?

Dennis Waite: As I said, I know very little about Hindu dharma but I think
that is a red herring here, anyway. In the context of spiritual seeking, the
function of a teacher is to help the disciple to realize the truth. The seeker
usually has a lifetime of misconceptions and erroneous convictions about
this and the process of resolving these is necessarily a gradual one,
requiring skill and patience on the part of the teacher. It is ludicrous to
expect that one or two satsang attendances, probably with different
teachers who know nothing about the seeker’s personal level of
understanding, can bring about enlightenment. A qualified teacher will
know this and acknowledge that any implication to the contrary is both
misleading and effectively immoral.
Having said this, most neo-advaitins deny that they are teaching anyway
so one might argue that they avoid this contradiction and escape any
possible charge of deception or dishonesty. But then they do advertize
their satsangs and residential courses and they do charge seekers to
attend them. So, at the very least, it is a somewhat ambiguous situation.

NDM:  Can you please tell me about  your awakening?  When was
it and how did it happen?

Dennis Waite: As I mentioned in a previous answer, it is impossible to

know whether or not someone else is enlightened so the answer to this
question is irrelevant to anyone else. What do you conclude if someone
tells you that they are enlightened? It smacks of egoism, hubris or
superiority, none of which are traits one would associate with
enlightenment. In addition, there is the very significant problem that
most do not have a proper understanding of what is meant by the term.
Accordingly, if you answer ‘yes’, they can only interpret this in connection
with that misunderstanding. So, suffice to say that I do not have any
specific ‘enlightenment experience’ to communicate. (Experiences, in any
case, have a beginning and an end in time so have nothing to do with the
ever-present freedom of mokSha.)

NDM: Can you tell me more about  this mokSha?   What is this
freedom like?  Is it like a state of constant bliss?  What does this
do to your vAsanA-s? Do you still have any dislikes or likes,
aversions or  desires?

Dennis Waite: You are still mistaking the terms, here. Enlightenment =
Self-knowledge, which means that you know that ‘brahman is the truth;
the world is mithyA; the individual is not other than brahman’. You no
longer have any doubts about this. What you appear to be talking about
here is jIvanmukti – the peace, detachment; lack of worries; indifference
to results and so on. This is the condition which results either a) on
attaining enlightenment, when sAdhana chatuShTaya sampatti had been
fully satisfied beforehand or b) following enlightenment, after further
nididhyAsana for as long as necessary.

Everyone is already ‘free’, irrespective of whether or not they are

enlightened. Also, the jIvanmukta will still have desires etc, albeit to a
lesser degree, but the point is that there is no elation if they are fulfilled
or disappointment if they are not. Everything is taken ‘as it comes’ with
equanimity. (Or so I understand!)

NDM:  Yes at an absolute level they are free, but what about on

this empirical level.  What if someone has self-knowledge, know

that they are Brahman, yet still have an uncontrollable

predilection for chasing after beautiful women or men, gambling,

drinking and drugs?    What kind of mokSha is that;  being a slave

to these unwholesome desires?    How is that going  to stop them

from being reincarnated as a jackrabbit in the next life?

Dennis Waite: One who is enlightened still has a body-mind and vAsanA-s
but also knows that ‘he’ does not act; and any action will not affect his
Self-knowledge. Action is only at the level of the body and it is the mind
that enjoys the result, albeit that both take place only by virtue of
Consciousness. As an analogy, the petrol provides the motive power for
the tank or the ambulance but is not affected by the motives of either. As
explained elsewhere, the extent to which one gains the ‘fruits of
enlightenment’ (jIvanmukti) is determined by how mentally prepared one
was prior to enlightenment’. One who was just sufficiently prepared to be
able to ‘take on board’ the Self-knowledge, will still retain the
maximum (commensurate with enlightenment) of negative mental
attributes. In order to be able to interact in the world at all, there has to
be an ego and some degree of ‘identification’. The jIvanmukta has very
little and consequently has virtually no desires/fears etc. The person who
only just made it will still have a lot and it is this person who may be
perceived to act in ways that we would deem to be inappropriate.

Another way of looking at it is that the j~nAnI (enlightened person) still

has to use up the prArabdha karma that brought this body into
manifestation in the first place. Thus he will (have to) experience certain
desires and attachments and so on. When the prArabdha has been burnt
up, the body falls and there is no rebirth for that ‘person’.

 It is understandable that there should be strong feelings on this issue

and these have no doubt been exacerbated by the behavior of some who
had been acclaimed as enlightened but who presumably were not. But it
is also unreliable for the unenlightened to make pronouncements on the
basis of what they may perceive as inappropriate actions. An obvious
example would be Nisargadatta’s apparent addiction to bidis, obviously
knowing that they were bad for the health of his body. Yet most Western
seekers today seem to accept that he was enlightened.

NDM: How do you know if someone has attained mokSha or is

faking it?  For example, some  of these gurus  have the mokSha
shtick down pat. Some even quote from the scriptures, have
Indian sounding names, smile all the time, have  dots on their
foreheads, wear beads, orange robes  and so on?    See here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1i3sMVOBg4

Dennis Waite: You cannot know the mind of another. Unfortunately, all
you can do is to listen to them teach (or if that is not possible) read their
written material or transcripts of their talks. For as long as you continue
to learn useful things from them (as determined by your intellectual
discrimination), they are good teachers and therefore useful. If you are in
their presence, and they say something with which you disagree, you can
question them and maybe they will clarify the issue. If you are reading a
book they can’t do this. If he or she is a very good teacher, then maybe
you will eventually become enlightened also.

Regarding behavior, this is not necessarily indicative of their status as

‘enlightened’. There is ample evidence of accepted enlightened individuals
displaying anger or pain or sadness etc. And someone who is not a
jIvanmukta may also exhibit behavior that is popularly deemed to be
inappropriate for someone who is enlightened. As long as you remember
that enlightenment relates only to Self-knowledge, you should be able to
answer any similar questions yourself.

NDM: Yes, Ken Wilber said something like “a schmuck before

enlightenment, a schmuck after enlightenment”  based on the old
Zen quote.  How does one know whom to trust with so many
scandals breaking out?   

 Dennis Waite: If you do not have direct experience yourself, you will
have to rely on the words of someone who does. And in order to be able
to believe them, they must have proven themselves to be trustworthy.
This is why you accept what you are told by a personal friend when you
would question it if told by a stranger. Failing that, you must fall back
upon what I said above regarding learning useful things.

NDM: So what about the sublation of Dennis, the moment in

apparent time when this "apparent Dennis" put his head in the
mouth of the tiger and this apparent Dennis was devoured by this
tiger.  He realized that he was not this physical form, mind, the
five sheaths and so on, which he had been identifying with all his
life. When this non-dual light of awareness entered into the
picture, he knew for the first time that he was not the snake, but
the stick. That he was Brahman.
 
Are you saying that "Dennis", not the Self, Brahman, always knew
this from his physical birth?    That Dennis was always never
ignorant about this, that he was enlightened on a relative level as
well as an absolute level? That you were born an avatar of some
kind like Krishna, Vishnu or Shiva?

Dennis Waite: You still seem to be hung up on the idea of a sudden

transforming experience. It does not have to be like this.

I guess the first hint must have been when I was about 6 – 8 years old.
My parents sent me to a Methodist Sunday School and I attended for
maybe 6 – 9 months. I eventually stopped going and I recall telling my
parents that it just did not make any sense – if there was a God, then he
couldn’t be in heaven; he had to be everywhere.

But I didn’t actively begin seeking until my early twenties, by which time
I was convinced that I was never going to gain any lasting satisfaction
from worldly pursuits and decided that I had to look to philosophy for
some explanations. I began attending the School of Economic Science in
response to the ‘Course of Philosophy’ lectures that they advertized on
the London Underground. And I stayed for a couple of years until they
wanted me to part with a week’s salary to be initiated into TM. But at that
time, they were still mainly influenced by Ouspensky and their teaching
was a bit weird to say the least.

After a break to get married, have a child, get divorced and re-marry, I
returned to SES in the mid eighties, by which time their teaching was
much more influenced by Advaita. And I stayed until around 1998, by
which time I had myself been tutoring for a number of years. I left
because I had realized as a result of outside reading that the school’s
advaita was corrupted by other philosophies such as Sankhya, Yoga and
Grammarians. I also followed Francis Lucille for a while at this stage.
After being made redundant in 2000, I tried to set up my own computer
consultancy for a couple of years and wrote a book on Earned Value
metrics. When this didn’t work out, I started the website and began to
write on Advaita full time. It was really this process – setting down all of
the aspects of Advaita, asking questions, reading lots of books until any
points that I did not understand were cleared up – that consolidated my
understanding. Basically, I have been doing this every day, evenings and
weekends included since 2002.  And, over the period of say 2004 – 2008
for the sake of argument, I came to the realization that I had no further
questions. I was totally convinced of the truth of the teaching and found,
through the question and answer section of the website, that there was
no question that I could not answer (to my own satisfaction!) (Note that
this does not mean I can answer all questions to other’s satisfaction. A lot
of this teaching is stepwise and you cannot leap to the top step without
traversing the intermediate ones. Also, some seekers may require lots of
quotations from scriptures to back up an answer, and I am not always
able to provide these, one reason being that there are still lots of
scriptures that I haven’t read!

And, of course, some seekers are so entrenched and committed to their

existing mistaken beliefs that they cannot open up to any new ones. The
parable of pouring more tea into a cup that is already full applies here.)

But, again, I am not sure that you appreciate the significance of all of this
at the transactional level. Dennis still quite definitely exists. It is a
mistaken belief that the person somehow disappears on enlightenment.
The person continues until death of the body, driven by prArabdha karma
(the arrow continuing to its target once the bow string has been
released). And I am certainly not a jIvanmukta. As I point out in a Q &A
just posted to the site, I am still prone to the usual human failings. One
does not gain the mental/emotional benefits (j~nAna phalam) unless one
is fully accomplished with respect to sAdhana chatuShTaya sampatti prior
to enlightenment. And, unfortunately, I never became fully accomplished!

NDM: Was Francis Lucille of any help at this point in time with his
pointers and satsangs?

Dennis Waite:  Francis was very helpful. I emailed him a number of

questions a year or two before meeting him and he answered them in
detail (they appear in his book ‘Eternity Now’). And I was very impressed
with the satsangs in general and the way that he answered questions.
(This is not to say that I always agreed with what he said.)

NDM: When you say, "Dennis still quite definitely exists. It is a

mistaken belief that the person somehow disappears on
enlightenment." 

What about the identification with this "persona", the mask of

Dennis?  Do you mean you still identify with this, or that you
know that it’s mithyA (false, transient, not constant, not
permanent) and so on like any other object?   

Dennis Waite: Dennis still moves around in the world, doing all of the
sorts of things he used to do and outwardly appearing as normal. I know
that this body-mind is mithyA but still sometime behave as though I
don’t. Note that this habit of not saying ‘I’, or referring to oneself in the
third person, is really not something I approve of. It is an affectation
really. Pedantically knowing that ‘I am not this person’ does not escape
the fact that it is this person who is speaking as far as most hearers are
concerned! So to use this method of speaking is tantamount to saying to
the other person “Just remember that you are not speaking to another
‘ordinary’ person but to someone special!” And ‘I’ am not special – ‘who I
really am’ is ‘who you really are’.

NDM:   As far as not being a jIvanmukta; what kind of meditation,

karma yoga, bhakti yoga, along with j~nAna yoga, had you done
previous to your realization? 

Dennis Waite: No bhakti; probably around 15 years of karma and

meditation twice per day for 30 minutes.

NDM: Did you ever experience nirvikalpa samAdhi prior to this

realization? 

 Dennis Waite: I’m going to cut short this line of questioning. Answers to
questions such as these are really of no help to any other seeker. Each
one’s path, glimpses of the truth, realization gradual or sudden etc will
differ. Examining the minutiae of any one person’s experience really is
pointless.

NDM: Yes, is that because it is also misleading and can send

others barking up the wrong tree so to speak? Like if someone
has a sudden enlightenment  holding a bucket of water over their
head while dancing the Macarena; will others think that by
holding buckets of water over their heads while dancing the
Macarena, that it will also bring them enlightenment?

Dennis Waite: That’s a good way of putting it, yes! The bottom line is that
only Self-knowledge can give enlightenment because Self-knowledge is
enlightenment. Whatever one might be doing, where one is or what is
happening at the moment that final, full Self-knowledge dawns, is totally
irrelevant.

NDM: What is evolutionary enlightenment?  Does this have

anything to do with Shankara’s interpretation of the Upanishads
or Advaita Vedanta?  Andrew Cohen, Papiji's disciple was in India
recently promoting his ideas about "evolutionary
enlightenment".  He says he doesn't believe the purpose of
enlightenment is to attain freedom from incarnation.  He says it’s
to come back again and again and again and again to enjoy this
physical world. He also states that he is challenging the ancient
traditions with his new teaching.  At 17minutes and 10 seconds
into the video he talks about this.

www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-huston/spiritual-
life_b_514189.html 

Dennis Waite: I don’t have any direct experience of Andrew Cohen’s

teaching. Comments that some trustworthy contacts have made about
him did not inspire me to find out more. What he says above would seem
fully to justify this decision.

NDM: In  sutra number 18 of

your book, Enlightenment,
Path Through The Jungle you
say that some Neo Advaita
teachers may be helpful;
particularly the ones who try
to embody some
methodology in their
teaching. What kind of
methodology were you
referring to?  Is there any
teacher you can think of who
is doing this?
Dennis Waite: I’m referring to
the traditional prakriyA-s or
systematic procedures that are
given in the scriptures and
‘unfolded’ by a skilled teacher.
These include such things as the
three states of consciousness
(avasthA traya), differentiation
between seer and seen (dRRik
dRRishya viveka), the five
‘sheaths’ (pa~ncha kosha); and
the classical metaphors such as
rope-snake, pot-space and pots,
gold and rings/bangles etc. There
are many of these and they are
all demonstrably valuable for
showing a seeker how to look at
things in a new way and thereby
overturn habitual patterns of
thinking.  

NDM: In sutra 22 you speak

of the terminology to be
used, such as Brahman and
atman; what would you say is
the difference with using the
word  awareness?

Dennis Waite: The problem with

using English words that are
used in everyday conversation is
that they can lead to confusion
or misunderstanding. Even
seekers who are familiar with
‘spiritual discussions’ may not
clearly understand what is
meant, or may use a word in a
way which is understood
differently by the other person.
The word ‘awareness’ is a
common example, particularly
because Nisargadatta uses the
words ‘Consciousness’ and
‘Awareness’ differently from most
other teachers. By using the
correct Sanskrit term (and it is
acknowledged that one has to
learn what these mean before
using them in conversation), this
difficulty is avoided.
NDM: Can you give me an example of bhAga tyAga lakShaNa?

Dennis Waite:  Suppose that you and a friend, A, both went to school
with a third person, X. Although you were not particularly friendly with X,
you knew him quite well but, since leaving school you lost touch and have
forgotten all about him. Today, you happen to be walking along with A
and see Y, who is a famous film star, walking by on the other side of the
street. You have seen films starring Y and admire him very much. A now
makes some comment such as “Y has come a long way in the world since
we knew him, hasn’t he?” You are mystified since you have never even
spoken to Y as far as you know and you ask A to explain himself. A then
makes the revelatory statement: “Y is that X whom we knew at school.”

All of the contradictory aspects, that X is an insignificant, scruffy, spotty

oik that you once knew at school, while Y is a rich, famous and talented
actor, are all cancelled out, leaving the bare equation that X and Y are
the same person. Furthermore, the knowledge is aparokSha – immediate.
We do not have to study the reasoning or meditate upon it for a long
time.

NDM: In sutra 50, you talk about avidyA. This is also at the core of

the Buddhist teachings. Do you see any difference in the way this

is taught?

Dennis Waite: As answered in an earlier question, I do not really know

anything about Buddhism. You will need to ask someone like Greg Goode.

NDM: In sutra 54, you say we do not have any organ for self
knowledge; sudden insight through an epiphany?

 Dennis Waite: That sutra is talking about pramANa-s – the ‘means for
acquiring knowledge’. We have the sense organs – sight etc – for
acquiring knowledge about external objects; but there is no organ for
acquiring knowledge about the Self. Similarly, we cannot infer and have
no reason to assume that the Self is the non-dual reality. Hence we need
a trusted, external source to tell us and explain it. This is the function of
the scriptures and guru. Although it cannot be stated categorically that
enlightenment does not ‘suddenly come to one for no apparent reason’,
this is not the normal route! Also, the traditional route is, throughout,
totally amenable to reason whilst the ‘epiphany’ route is totally
inaccessible to reason. Furthermore, if you sit around waiting for
something to ‘happen’, you are likely to be waiting a very long time! If
you commit to a traditional path for as long as it takes, the evidence is
that you will get there eventually.

NDM: The Kena Upanishads say, “The eye does not go there, nor
speech, nor mind, we do not know "That" (meaning Brahman).
We do not know how to instruct one about it. It is distinct from
the known and above the unknown".

  If this is the case, then how is this known and who or what
knows this? 

Dennis Waite: It is interesting that you should choose this verse because
it is effectively an explanation of the need for sampradAya teaching. But
you have omitted the last sentence, which says: “Thus we have heard
from those who have gone before us, who told us about it.”

The point is that Brahman cannot be seen, or directly spoken of, or

known (as an object) by the mind. And it is not saying that ‘we do not
know how to teach it, period’, it is saying that ‘we do not know how to
teach it other than by using such seemingly paradoxical statements as
‘the eye of the eye’, ‘the ear of the ear’ etc. It has to be taught in an
elliptical fashion, undermining erroneous views and coming at it from
behind, as it were, because Brahman is not an object of any sort but, on
the contrary, the ultimate subject – infinite. When it says that we do not
know how to teach it, it is referring to the usual means of knowledge –
perception, inference etc. I can’t point to it or say ‘what’ it is. It is
different from the known (i.e. cannot be known as an object) and yet it is
different from the unknown, meaning that we nevertheless know it. How
can this be? Simply because we already are it.

NDM: Do you think that the mental disposition, akhaNDAkAra

vRRitti can be attained through nirvikalpa samAdhi?

Dennis Waite: No.

NDM: Ok, but what about after waking from this nirvikalpa
samAdhi? After the fact, when nirvikalpa merges into and
becomes Sahaja samAdhi while being awake and alert?

In the Ribhu Gita by Sri Ramana writes,

30. Remaining alertly aware and thought-free, with a still mind devoid of
differentiation of Self and non-Self even while being engaged in the
activities of worldly life, is called the state of Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi
(the natural state of abidance in the Self when all differentiation has
ceased). This is called Akhandakara vritti, the ‘I’ of infinite perfection as
contrasted with the ‘I am the body’ notion of those who have not realized
the Self. (Ch.18, v.40)

What do you think he meant by this?

Dennis Waite: A temporarily thought-free mind is not a mind that has

effectively ‘taken on the form of Brahman’. We have a ‘thought-free’ mind
every night during deep sleep but nevertheless still wake up believing we
are the body-mind. The akhaNDAkAra vRRitti is an instantaneous
‘dawning of knowledge’ in which the mind suddenly gels (as it were);
when the full realization of non-difference from Brahman occurs as a
result of the crystallization (as it were) of knowledge gained in the past.
Nirvikalpa samAdhi is a state of mind that is temporarily object-free;
conscious, but only of Self. Since it is empty of anything (‘nir’ vikalpa
means ‘without’ difference or distinction), how could any sort of change
or vRRitti (mental disposition) occur in it? In any case, as I pointed out
earlier, samAdhi-s are experiences and only knowledge can remove
ignorance.

Furthermore, I would say that it is not possible to ‘engage in the activities

of worldly life’ with a thought-free mind.

So I am not sure what exactly is meant by this passage. I haven’t read

and don’t have a copy of the Ribhu Gita. Maybe the earlier verses throw
some light on this. As I said earlier (I think) Ramana was a brilliant
teacher and unquestionably enlightened but he did not have sampradAya
training and had not, I understand, even read much scripture prior to his
enlightenment; so some of his statements may be suspect, especially
when taken out of context. The Bhagavad Gita II.55 (to end of chapter 2)
talks about the man of ‘steady wisdom’ as one who is ‘without desire’ but
not ‘without thought’. sthitapraj~na means the ‘state’ of being in,
Brahman, and arises as a result of the akhaNDAkAra vRRitti; it is not the
same as it. But, unlike samAdhi, it is not really a state; it is rather that
the Atman is now (known to be) Brahman.

 NDM:  A few days ago someone told me about a western Neo

advaita teacher in India who pays impoverished young Indian
boys to have sexual relations with him.  In this case who is the
doer/enjoyer? Is it this Neo Advaita teacher’s vAsanA-s, or is it
Brahman doing this?  Oneness, as some neos would say.

Dennis Waite: This sort of confusion arises because of failing to

differentiate ‘levels’ of reality. All of this ‘doing’ – whether working,
playing, seeking, becoming enlightened, giving time and money to charity
or having sex with young boys – all takes place within vyavahAra, the
transactional or worldly level. At this level, there is duality, people and
objects; and all of the usual issues of society, morality and responsibility
apply. Traditional advaita says that the position into which a given person
is born is determined by their actions in past lives and they have to ‘work
through’ the related karma. The desires they have are determined by
their vAsanA-s, which again are determined by past actions and formation
of habits and so on. It is said that when a given situation is presented,
one may act, not act or act differently from the dictates of past habits.
And this brings us onto the topic of free-will, which I don’t want to enter
into or we will be here indefinitely!

From the standpoint of absolute reality, of course, there are no people or

objects; no time, space or causation. But you have to be very careful not
to mix up the levels. Most conceptual problems in advaita result from
doing precisely this.

NDM: Who is responsible for this karma "oneness”, or this

apparent man’s vAsanA-s?

Dennis Waite: Again, from the vantage point of the world, the individual
person is responsible for his actions, which accumulate karma and
eventually bring about the appropriate ‘fruit’ of puNya or pApa – good
things or bad! In reality, there is no such thing as karma or reincarnation
but then, there is no person either to worry about such things. You decide
which aspect you are talking about and stick to it.
NDM:  The neos say that there is no karma because there is no
apparent man or vAsanA-s or saMskAra-s.  They say there is just
"oneness".   What are your thoughts on this?

Dennis Waite: This is what the neos mostly do.  They try to make
absolute pronouncements, as if from a pAramArthika (absolute)
perspective. But at the same time they seem to expect these statements
to be meaningful and helpful to a seeker who is suffering, trying to
understand what is happening at the level of the world and looking for
guidance to help them remove this suffering. Mostly it just causes
frustration and often increases the suffering because such a view does
not accord with the seeker’s experience. The seeker is unable to
rationalize what the neo tells him without both prior mental preparation
and significant preliminary instruction.

NDM: In a dialogue that you had with Jeff Foster, 

www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/trad_neo/jeff_dialog.htm  Jeff
said, "This message is about the simple and obvious appearance
of life, now, now and now. That this moment - right now - is all
there is. And everything, our whole lives, our pasts and futures,
are just stories appearing now. And yes, of course, THAT is a
story too! And so this can never really be expressed in words. It's
the attempt to put into words what could never be put into
words."......This is about the possibility of absolute freedom,
absolute "happiness" as you put it, right here, right now. This is
about seeing that the miracle that we are searching for is always
fully present, that enlightenment is already the case, but the
"search" implied that it wasn't."

What he is saying here sounds like the teachings of Eckhart Tolle,

being in the now. 

Do you think that he is missing the obvious here?  That you can
be in the now all day long and still not be enlightened?

Is it possible that he still has not realized the Self? It’s like he has
only climbed half way up the mountain and mistaken this plateau
for the top?

  I say this because this brings to mind the Zen koan, does a dog
have Buddha nature?  A cat or a dog also does not have a sense
of self nor is it attached to a personal identity. It comes when its
name is called. It eats when it’s given food; it urinates, defecates,
fornicates and so on, but it does not know that it is non-dual
awareness.

Dennis Waite: It is impossible to know whether or not another person is

enlightened. The best that we can do to assess this is to compare what
the person says with what has been said in the scriptures (or perhaps, for
most of us, with how the scriptures have been interpreted by those whom
we believe to have been enlightened). But this has to be tempered with
the fact that it is possible for people to learn pat answers without really
understanding them.

 Living ‘in the now’ and recognizing that there is *only* the present
moment is part of the mental preparation for enlightenment. I suppose
that it is an aspect of nitya-anitya vastu viveka – discriminating between
the real and unreal, the transient and eternal. But, in itself, it is not
enlightenment. And, you are right – you could be ‘in the present’ all the
time and still not be enlightened. Enlightenment is Self-knowledge and
has nothing to do with experience. (I may say this more than once in
answers to these questions but repetition of this fact is very worthwhile
for most people!)

NDM:  If I came to you asking you to help me become

enlightened, the way I asked these neo teachers, would you tell
me I'm enlightened already, no need to do anything and so on?
That  I'm already perfect just the way I am?   

The problem is this hasn't changed a thing.  I'm still the same
miserable jerk as before.  Each time I go to one of their satsangs
it costs me 30 bucks. This enlightenment business is getting very
expensive. Especially if I buy their DVDs and books, photos of
them as well. This all adds up. Then they tell me there is no hope,
or meaning. I'm getting depressed and confused by all this neo
babble and feel like I'm at the end of my rope.

What would you say to me?  Would you be able to help me do this
without having to learn a new language and to study Vedanta like
you did for 25 years?  Is there a short cut? A direct path I could
take, so  I don't go broke or old waiting for this to happen?
Dennis Waite: This is a good example of the way that neo teachers
mistakenly present the message of advaita. It is true that who-you-
really-are is already free, perfect and complete. The problem is that you
think you are this body-mind, and the mind definitely does not think it is
perfect and free. The mistaken views have to be undermined and then
rejected or corrected. Only when this has been done, will you be
‘enlightened’. But there is simply no point in telling you this. You have to
go through the process of examining your experiences and beliefs and,
with the help of a qualified teacher, acknowledge that what he or she tells
you is true. In this, you will have to utilize the means of knowledge
available to you (mainly perception, inference and scriptures) and your
faculties of reason and discrimination, possibly with a little bit of faith to
begin with.

Ideally, then, you will find a suitable teacher and commit to studying with
them for as long as it takes. Unfortunately there are not many of these
around as we have already discussed. This need not be an
insurmountable problem. One of the main qualities for a seeker is
mumukShutva – the desire to achieve enlightenment, to the exclusion of
all other desires. Accordingly, if this is really what you want, you can
‘simply’ move to somewhere where there is a qualified teacher.  You will
overcome all the obstacles in order to do this.

Realistically, most seekers do not have this all-consuming passion. For

them, the best that they can do is to read as much and as widely as
possible (but perhaps taking guidance from someone who knows more
about all this). And join an internet discussion group such as Advaitin,
where you can ask all of the questions that will arise and have them
answered by a number of very experienced and knowledgeable people,
some of whom are acknowledged academic experts or established
traditional teachers. All of this will cost much less than attending
satsangs!

But the process will take as long as it takes. (There is a story in the
scriptures of someone being ecstatic when told it would only take as
many lifetimes as there were leaves on the tree under which he was
sitting!) You certainly don’t have to learn Sanskrit either. You do have to
learn a number of Sanskrit terms, simply because there are no equivalent
words in the English language. But this is really not a great hardship.

Regarding short-cuts, I would say not really. There is the Direct Path
teaching of Atmananda Krishna Menon, currently being taught by people
such as Greg Goode and Rupert Spira. It is certainly worth investigating
this but it does not appeal to, nor is it suitable for, everyone. It is really
for a particular sort of mind – very sharp, logical, perceptive and
intellectual; ever-ready to drop a prior conception if reason or experience
dictates that it was wrong. Traditional teaching, on the other hand, can
cater for all levels of mind, with slow or fast-track techniques according to
ability.

NDM: What would you say is the difference with Brahman and
Shunyata? 

Dennis Waite: I know very little about any spiritual path other than
Advaita. shunya means ‘empty’, or ‘void’ and I understand the belief of
some branches of Buddhism to be that there is literally ‘nothing’. This
would seem to be diametrically opposite to Brahman, which is all
(everything). On the face of it, It would seem to be nonsensical to claim
that there is nothing – who would there be to claim this? It is also our
experience that we and the world exist. How could this (something) world
have originated from nothing?

 NDM: What if someone recognizes himself or herself as

Shunyata;  is this considered being enlightened, realizing absolute
truth  according to the Shankara and the Vedanta school or is this
also a form of heresy or Neo Advaita?

Dennis Waite: In the Brahma Sutra and bhAShya, Vyasa and Shankara
refute all of the other philosophies that were prevalent at the time. This
includes Buddhism. Obviously people can believe and claim whatever they
want but they cannot legitimately claim to be Advaitins unless their
teaching corresponds with that of Advaita.

NDM: When the Buddha came across some Brahmins, they

were discussing about the nature of Brahman, and the
Buddha asked, "Have you seen Brahma?"

 "No," said the Brahmin";

 "Or your father, has he seen him?" asked the Buddha

   "No, neither has he,"

   "Or your grandfather, has he seen him?"

 "I don't think even he saw Him." Answered the Brahmin.

 Buddha replied.  "My friend how can you discuss about a

person whom your father and grandfather never saw?

According to Shankara you don’t have to be enlightened to

teach about it.

Using the logic of the Buddha,  how can a doctor perform brain
surgery if he doesn’t even know what a brain looks like?

Denis Waite: Brahman is not an object and cannot be objectified in any

way. If it could be objectified, there would have to be a subject treating it
as an object and that would be duality. But, in order to know Brahman,
you do not need to objectify it – you are Brahman.

NDM:   Can you please tell me the difference between Neo Vedanta
inspired by the Vivekananda and the Ramakrishna Mission and
Neo Advaita?

On book learning, Vivekananda said: This quickening impulse,

which comes from outside, cannot be received from books; the
soul can receive impulse from another soul, and nothing else. We
may study books all our lives, we may become very intellectual,
but in the end we find that we have not developed at all
spiritually... In studying books, we sometimes are deluded into
thinking that we are being spiritually helped; but if we analyze
ourselves we find that only our intellect is being helped, and not
the spirit. That is why almost every one of us can speak most
wonderfully on spiritual subjects, but when the time of action
comes, we find ourselves so woefully deficient. It is because
books cannot give us that impulse from outside. To quicken the
spirit, that impulse must come from  another soul. That soul from
which this impulse comes is called the Guru, the teacher.... From
"The Teacher of Spirituality." Selections, pp. 51-51.

Dennis Waite; Neo-advaita, as I think we have already discussed, is the

attempt to convey the truth through simple, absolute statements without
any supporting rationale or mental preparation, denying the existence of
seeker, teacher or of any path that might be followed.

Neo-vedAnta may initially seem to be identical to traditional advaita.

However, there are subtle differences which only become apparent when
your understanding of the teaching is quite advanced. I have not made a
study of these differences so cannot say a great deal about them.
Principally, I think that neo-vedAnta is ‘corrupted’ as it were by confusion
with aspects of Yoga philosophy. In particular, they claim that
Enlightenment is a spiritual experience rather than a vRRitti (disposition)
of the mind. They therefore place great emphasis on samAdhi, and
equate nirvikalpa samAdhi with realization. Advaita, on the other hand,
states that this is simply another (albeit very profound) experience, with
a beginning and an end in time.

But it should be noted that many of the books by swamis of the

Ramakrishna Missions etc are excellent. They translate and comment on
Upanishads etc, including Shankara’s commentaries and these are often
brilliant. It is likely that you will not even notice the minor discrepancies.
I only discovered the problems myself when I began write my own books
on Advaita and began to encounter statements in their writing which
contradicted my understanding.

NDM; What are your thoughts on this, "All these talks, and
reasonings, and philosophies, and dualisms, and monisms, and
even the Vedas themselves, are but preparations, secondary
things.... The Vedas, Grammar, Astronomy, etc., all these are
secondary. The supreme knowledge is that which makes us
realize the Unchangeable One. From "The Sages of India."?   
Selections, p. 237.

Dennis Waite; It is true that all scriptures, commentaries, teachings are

mithyA. It is never possible to ‘describe’ reality in any way. So, in a
sense, for the enlightened person, they all become redundant.

NDM: In your book, you talk a lot about knowing through the aid

of scripture, but seem to relegate intuition.  How do you think the

first sages who  spoke these scriptures, secret forest teachings,

Upanishads, Vedas, got to know this when there weren’t any

books or teachers at the time?  Was it not through direct

intuition?

  Do you feel that book knowledge and scripture  are superior to

intuition?    Isn’t intuition the internal Sat guru as well? 

    Vivekananda also said:

You must keep in mind that religion does not consist in

talk, or doctrines, or books, but in realisation; it is not
learning but being. No amount of doctrines or
philosophies or ethical books that you have stuffed into
your brain will matter much, only what you are, and
what you have realised. From "The Need of Symbols."
Selections, p. 64-65.

The whole world reads scriptures, Bibles, Vedas,

Korans, and others, but they are only words... the dry
bones of religion.... Those who deal too much in words,
and let the mind run always in the forest of words, lose
the spirit.... "The Teacher of Spirituality." Selections,
pp. 54-55.

The network of words is like a huge forest in which the

human mind loses itself and finds no way out.... To be
religious, you have to first throw all books overboard.
The less you read of books, the better for you.... It is a
tendency in Western countries to make a hotch-potch
of the brain.... In many cases it becomes a kind of
disease but it is not religion. From "The Need of
Symbols." Selections, pp. 64-65.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think these old

scriptures should be thrown overboard in order to
realize this truth intuitively; through gnosis?

  For example,  how did Buddha realize the truth? Did he

read books all day long,  listen to a guru  giving satsang
or did he sit out in the forest alone until this realization
came to him intuitively?  In a flash, like the first sages
 of the Vedas.

Dennis Waite: Intuition is fine – but where do you go to get this? What
can you do to increase the likelihood of getting it? In a sense, the final
realization might be called ‘intuition’. You have been hearing ‘You are
That’, ‘Everything is Brahman’ etc. time and again but nothing has
happened. And then, suddenly, there is the overwhelming certainty: ‘Ah!
Now I see – everything is Brahman! How could I not have appreciated
that before?’ But, for the vast majority, this only comes as the
culmination of prolonged study with a qualified teacher.

And, as I said in respect of the sampradAya, the process is one of guru

teaching disciple, who then becomes the next guru and so on. And this
process is said to stretch back to the beginning. Long before scriptures
were written down, they were learned by heart in the sampradAya-s. OK,
you may not want to accept that there never actually was a human
author, but we are talking about scriptures that are thousands of years
old.

So, if you want to sit around on the off-chance that some intuition will
suddenly come along – fine! But don’t hold your breath…

Regarding the quote from Vivekananda, all scriptures, gurus, seekers and
the world itself are mithyA. Only the Self is satyam. So, yes, once you are
enlightened, by all means throw all of the books away if you like. But I
would make two points: firstly (if I may repeat), for the vast majority, it
is gurus and scriptures that will have brought you to this point; secondly,
the scriptures and their unfoldment by a teacher such as Swami
Dayananda are beautiful – the most profound truths embodied in simple
verses and metaphor, explained with crystal-clear logic. The enlightened
person still lives on in the world for the remainder of that embodiment;
so why throw away such beautiful things? Read and enjoy!

I think you are still caught up in the idea that there are very, very few
enlightened people in the world; that maybe most of the ones who were
enlightened are now dead; and that most of these reached enlightenment
by chance or sudden ‘intuition’. This is a false picture. I suggest that
there are actually quite a lot of enlightened people, most of whom have
become so as a result of following a traditional path. You don’t get to
hear about them because they do not have ‘teacher vAsanA-s’. Ones like
Buddha and Ramana are the exception rather than the rule.

NDM: Yes what about this one?

The Ashtavakra Gita says: My son, you may recite or listen to

countless scriptures, but you will not be established within until
you can forget everything. 16.1

“If even Shiva, Vishnu or the lotus-born Brahma were your

instructor, until you have forgotten everything you cannot be
established within.”

How do you interpret this?   

When one goes to dinner, does one eat the paper menu or the
dinner?  What do words made out of ink and paper taste like?

Dennis Waite: The words alone will never bring about enlightenment, no
matter how many times they are repeated, even if learned by heart. As I
said earlier they, like the rest of the world, are mithyA, not satyam (the
menu, not the meal if you like that metaphor). The mind of the seeker
has to be suitably prepared and there must be the intense desire for
enlightenment above all worldly pursuits. And of course the words
themselves are not the reality – they point towards it and need to be
understood. Hence the need for a qualified teacher to explain their
meaning. Your quote about Shiva etc is really emphasizing the need for
nitya-anitya vastu viveka – the ability to differentiate satyam from
mithyA. You have to ‘forget’ the unreal world before you can realize the
real Self.

NDM:   You ask, “Intuition is fine, but where do you go to get this?
What can you do to increase the likelihood of getting it?

  Well according to the Buddhist tradition, you don't sit around

holding your breath, even though this is a PrANayAmna method,
(kevala kumbhaka)
www.holisticonline.com/yoga/hol_yoga_breathing_4stages.htm 
or waiting for it to fall out of the sky.  Some would say through
the discipline of meditation.

 Mindfulness (sati) i.e. to be aware and mindful in all

 activities and movements both physical and mental
 Investigation (dhamma vicaya) into the nature of dhamma
 Concentration (samAdhi) a calm, one-pointed state of
concentration of mind
 This leading to the ninth jhana www.jhanas.com

According to the Christian Gnostic traditions, some would say

through prayer, reciting and studying the scripture,
contemplation, meditation and  ascetic fasting and devoting ones
life to God, Heart, mind and soul, with all ones strength.

According to Patanjali, he prescribes adherence to eight "limbs"

The eight "limbs" or steps are: Yama, Niyama, Asana,
PrANayAma, PratyAhAra, DhAraNA, DhyAna and Samadhi. 
Leading to nirvikalpa samAdhi, which can result in sahaja
samAdhi. Or  turIya, the fourth state, even though it’s not a state.

Others some would say bhakti yoga, karma yoga and all the other
yogas would result in intuition.  Clear vision. There is also a so-
called fifth state, turIyatita, which happens when the witness
disappears. At this point you become pure awareness. No
identification with any objects at all. This is JIvanmukta in
Vedanta or nirvana in Buddhism.

The Taoists would say through the practice of  Wu-wei - usually
translated as non-action, inaction or non-doing - is one of the
most important Taoist concepts. When linked to the Tao - the
creator and sustainer of everything in the Universe – non-doing
means the actionless of Heaven,

Or through Tai Chi and Qi gung and doing so will open up all the
meridians including ones "third eye", the ajna (brow) chakra and
the sharastara chakra.  The third eye, being knowledge itself.

Others would say through grace, as well as studying the scripture

as in your case with advaita Vedanta. There are so many ways
and means to heighten ones intuition.

Dennis Waite: The reason why we do not already recognize that we are
free, unlimited, ever-present, non-dual Consciousness is that we are
ignorant of our true nature. The only thing that can remove ignorance is
knowledge. Action of any kind can never remove ignorance because
action is not opposed to ignorance. All of the things that you mention are
great for preparing the mind and this has to be done before
enlightenment can occur but, in themselves, they cannot bring
enlightenment. Samadhi may be a beautiful experience of the oneness of
all things but, in 99% of cases at least, it comes to an end and we are
back in duality. Maybe the remaining 1% lead to sahaja sthiti; I don’t
know. But I would think most would prefer to go the certain 99% route
rather than the maybe 1%.

 Incidentally, as I said, I have no knowledge of other traditions. You

clearly have a much wider understanding than I do. But I don’t agree with
your comments regarding  turIyatIta or jIvanmukti in respect of Vedanta.

NDM: Sorry, I wasn’t being clear. What I meant by turIyatIta is

not a state but it is non-dual awareness, or Brahman. Does not
one become a jIvanmukta if one is permanently turIyatIta? I
don’t mean as in some kind of samAdhi, or meditation, or an
experience of some kind one has to go into.

I read this on your site by the way. Am I misreading or

misunderstanding it. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/teachers/turiya_peter.htm   

turIya (Atman): non-apprehension of duality;

praj~nA (deep sleep): non-apprehension of Reality and of duality;

taijasa (dream state): non-apprehension of and misapprehension

of Reality;
vishva (waking state): non-apprehension of and misapprehension
of Reality.

Dennis Waite: The word turIyatIta is defined in the site dictionary as

follows (http://www.advaita.org.uk/sanskrit/terms_tu.htm):
literally the "fourth" [state of consciousness]. It refers to the non-dual
reality, the background against which the other states (waking, dream
and deep sleep) arise. It is our true nature. The other three states are
mithyA. (If defined merely as the highest "state" then Ramana Maharshi
calls our true nature 'turiyatita' but this word is not encountered in the
scriptures.)

 Unfortunately the link to this page is missing from the menu! (Thanks for
enabling me to discover this!)
turIya could be considered as a synonym for brahman. There is only ever
this so that we are always this, whether or not we are enlightened.
Enlightenment is, if you like, the realization in the mind that we are
turIya. jIvanmukti, as I said before, refers to the person whose prior or
post mental state means that he or she also has the ‘fruits of knowledge’,
i.e. mental equanimity etc.

Regarding the definitions that you quote from the article, I wouldn’t have
defined them likes this. I would prefer to say that:

. vishva is associated with ignorance and error

. taijasa is associated with ignorance and error

. prAj~na is associated with ignorance only

. turIya is associated with neither

 ‘Ignorance’ is ignorance of the fact that I am turIya. ‘Error’ is in thinking

that I am the limited individual.

 But I believe that the way this is put in the essay is actually saying the
same thing, just in a different way.

 NDM: You said, “I was totally convinced of the truth of the

teaching and found, through the question and answer section of
the website, that there was no question that I could not answer
(to my own satisfaction!)

So, do you see yourself as  a guru or a pundit? 

Dennis Waite: I discovered during my work on defense communication

systems that I had a particular skill for describing complex software
functions in ways that newcomers could easily understand, provided of
course that I had understood it myself to begin with! Accordingly, it
seems natural to write books on Advaita, maintain the website and
answer questions from seekers. It is a subject that is endlessly
fascinating and ultimately the only one worth pursuing. I don’t teach
formally, mainly because I don’t want to travel and there is insufficient
interest in my area to begin a formal group. So… call me what you like.

NDM: Sailor Bob said,  "Subject-object thinking seems to cover the

natural state (awareness). But without awareness, thinking could
not take place. Because thinking appears in awareness (like a
cloud appears in the sky), realise that thinking in essence is
awareness. Understanding this, thinking cannot obscure
awareness".

  Do you see anything wrong with this statement?

Dennis Waite: First of all, Bob is using the term ‘awareness’, where most
would use ‘Consciousness’. But this is OK because he is following
Nisargadatta. It is not that what he says is wrong, it is that it implies that
ignorance cannot obscure Self-knowledge, whereas it can and does. But
then maybe he didn’t intend this connotation. Without the complete
context in which the statement was made, it is not possible to say. If he
did mean to imply this, one might as well say that, since everything is
Brahman (or Consciousness), therefore there is nothing that can or
should be done to attain enlightenment. And, of course, this is what the
neo-advaitins say – but it is wrong.

NDM: What are your thoughts on James Swartz’ “Enlightenment

sickness’?

He refers to this on pages 261 and 262 of his book "How to attain
enlightenment".  He calls it pseudo enlightenment or
enlightenment sickness.

He says "after realization, usually a strong sense of goodwill

toward everyone arises at this time and you almost invariably feel
that you should share what you know  with others. But before you
set out to do so, you better check you are  not suffering from the
disease of  enlightenment. It is similar to enlightenment and is
difficult for the sufferer to diagnose, although it is a well-known
malady. It should be treated quirkily before it becomes a chronic
condition.

One benign symptom of enlightenment sickness is transcendental

boredom. It is an understandable and slightly negative feeling
born out of you have accomplished everything that had to be
accomplished in this life, the realization that what you do from
now on will not fundamentally make any difference – ignorance is
here to stay after all –  and the crystal clarity about the basic
emptiness of life.  It is caused by the residual sense of doer ship
and unpurified traces of rajas. You may long for a bit of
excitement  and confusion marked your life in ignorance but you
know you can’t go back.

If you interpret this nothingness of reality as a void and become

vaguely disillusioned, know that you have enlightenment
sickness, due to unpurified traces of tamas. Enlightenment is not
the experience of the void. There is no void, only the pureness of
awareness appearing as the void.

If you formulate your enlightenment as a grand happening and

make it into a big story, you have enlightenment disease.  If you
hear yourself telling others you are awakened, or enlightened or
"cooked" you have enlightenment sickness.

  If you believe that your words are gospel and your deeds
whether they correspond to common sense or not and with
reason, or whether they are in harmony with dharma and
tradition,  are a teaching stratagem , you need help".  End of
quote.

Dennis Waite: James Swartz is excellent! He may not be the best

Western teacher in the world but he is almost certainly the best Western
teacher for the typical satsang attendee. He doesn’t pull any punches,
correcting all of the mistaken views out there regarding spiritual
‘seeking’. I’m glad you asked this question because I’ve been reading this
book for the past 2 – 3 months but, because I always have so many
books on the go at any one time, it takes me ages to get through any
particular one. Having now read the last chapter, it prompts me to review
the book on Amazon and hopefully get others reading it too. (It goes
without saying that it merits 5* - more if they were available.) The one
thing I would add to what he says is that I don’t think that all of those
teachers exhibiting the symptoms actually have the disease. I fear that
there may be a few who are knowingly taking advantage, deliberately
adopting all of the expected traits and learning the key phrases off by
heart so that they can simply earn an enjoyable and easy living at others’
expense – cynical this may be but I do fear it is true.

For more info visit

www.advaita.org.uk/index.htm

SUZANNE FOXTON
NDM: Suzanne, can you please tell me about your awakening,
when this happened, how this happened exactly, why you believe
this happened. What was going on in your life at the time?

Suzanne Foxton: Let me start by saying that the overwhelming quality of

"my awakening" was the realisation that there is no such thing. That "I"
couldn't "awaken" because there was no me to awaken, and what I had
taken myself for was a whimsical fabrication, albeit a fascinating one.
Within that paradox lies enlightenment, or whatever we're calling it
today.
 
Apparently, I had been going through some very thorough, very effective
therapy. The thrust of the therapy was dealing with past trauma. The
memories of the trauma - three separate issues - hit me hard, arising as
vivid flashbacks; I could smell my attacker and was seemingly in the
room where the attack occurred; the regret and remorse over an incident
where I was the perpetrator overwhelmed me; the loneliness of my
childhood engulfed me. Bit by bit, I faced these traumas, unravelled the
story of my life, and saw my past for exactly what it was, not for the
stories I had told myself about it. In other words, I was going through in
a Western fashion the kind of deep self-inquiry that many Eastern paths
advocate. My ego and its conceits were stripped away, one by one.
 
In the midst of this, I was washing some dishes. I took a knife from the
sink. The knife became an amazing wonder; it was exactly right; it was
the most knifish knife that ever knifed; it was life, knifing. A kind of vision
engulfed me, or replaced me; my mind needed to supply visuals, so I
seemed to see a sort of cosmic winking in and out, creation on a grand
and colourful scale, swirling being sucked into some kind of black hole
and renewing, over and over again. I knelt on the kitchen floor. "Whoa!" I
said, like Bill and Ted on their excellent adventure. I then wandered
around the kitchen, saying to the ether, "It's so obvious. It's so obvious!"

NDM: What was obvious?

Suzanne Foxton: Well, that everything was everything, but it actually

didn't exist; that everything was illusory, existing in no time and no
space, and yet fruitily, fleshily, impossibly real and existent. That what I
had been looking for was this, all around me, all me. There was no
difference between me and everyone and everything. It was all, most
obviously, the same thing, and the only thing that actually existed was a
sort of absolute knowing. My persona, the game of life, everything I had
considered so important, just dropped away; certainly, the importance
dropped away, and I saw I was free, to an extent that cannot be
communicated. Everything, no matter how "bad", was the icing on the
cake of awareness; the gift of duality.

Re-entering the drama of life on these new terms, for my ego, was to be
rebuffed by anyone I tried to explain it to. No one wants to hear about
how everything is utterly meaningless, except in its intrinsic worth by
virtue of mere existence. I began writing the blog to give vent to my urge
to describe what had happened...including trying to communicate that it
never happened at all. 

NDM: Why do you think that this knife looked different from all
the other times you had seen this knife?

Suzanne Foxton: It didn't. There was nothing different about the knife.
Perhaps there was something different about how I was apparently seeing
it. It seemed to be a knife with no filters, no projection, no interference.
Just, very simply, exactly what it was.

NDM: How long did this knife experience last for?

Suzanne Foxton: It wasn't strictly "an experience", there seems to be no

one "here" to receive "an experience". It lasts forever. It happens now.

NDM: When you saw that "It's so obvious, that everything was
everything, but it actually didn't exist; that everything was
illusory, existing in no time and no space, and yet fruitily, fleshily,
impossibly real and existent." What do you mean exactly by
"everything was everything" and that it did not exist.

Do you mean this on the relative level, or on the absolute level or

some other way?

Suzanne Foxton: It's difficult to describe, so poetic language seems to

come up to try to do it. I suppose I mean that I saw that everything is
appearance, and that nothing in "real life" exists other than in our
apparent ability to see energy arranged in a certain way. "Everything was
everything" I guess means that everything is just exactly as it is, without
having to think about it, make judgments about it, or figure it out. The
poetic expression of it conveys the quality of reality more accurately than
the mind's specific, analytical need for description. The less concepts, the
"better".

NDM: When you say "Re-entering the drama of life on these new
terms, for my ego, was to be rebuffed by anyone I tried to explain
it to.' What do you mean by ego exactly?

Suzanne Foxton: I suppose my poor ol' overworked, overvalued mind

would describe ego as the personality; the construct of the individual,
which seemingly negotiates and navigates its way through the story of
life. There is nothing whatsoever, by the way, "wrong" with the ego. And
it seems the ego is here, but not taken as the be-all and end-all
anymore; and the story of life, not taken so seriously.

NDM: When you say that "there is nothing whatsoever, by the

way, wrong with this ego", Do you mean your own ego in
particular, or was that a broad generalization, including everyone
else's egos as well. If so, what about the unhealthy ego of
someone who is injuring others, or itself. Contemplating suicide.
Or as in the extreme case of a murderer, a thief, a liar and so on?

Suzanne Foxton: There is nothing wrong with anyone's ego, or ego as a

useful labelling concept. There is nothing wrong with anything; everything
is. Unhealthy egos, or those labelled as such, certainly seem to exist.
Homicidal tendencies and acts exist, as well as suicidal ones; also more
irrational sociopathology, and, of course, people who are big fat meanies.
I suppose these are balanced by creative joy and loving nurturing
kindness, altruism, philanthropy, and other good stuff like that; the stuff
that doesn't make it into the news as much.

NDM:  Is someone with a (ego) "story" like this also not to be

taken seriously?

Suzanne Foxton: If a suicidal ego wasn't taking the life story so seriously,
perhaps suicide wouldn't even come into the question?

NDM: Do you mean this strictly from the absolute non dual level,
or the relative dualistic level? Do you see a difference, a
distinction of these levels or do you not recognize or acknowledge
these levels?

Suzanne Foxton:  I'm not sure what you mean. In the unfolding story,
remembered now, I was suicidal for years; 12 or so attempts, two of
them nearly successful. Relatively, if I hadn't been taking my story to be
all that I am, it is unlikely I would have been suicidal. Absolutely, there is
no one suffering, but suffering certainly happens, and is as much an
important part of life as anything else.

NDM:  Where does morality, (right and wrong) play into this
equation?

Suzanne Foxton:  There is no right or wrong. There is what is. Including

many differing ideas about what is right and what is wrong. However,
compassion often seems preferable; yet if every apparent individual were
consistently compassionate without exception...gag, barf! How dull would
THAT be? AND there'd probably be a loved-up population explosion.

We live in Utopia. We are Utopia. We are the perfect, dualistic playground

with every possibility shining, weaving, tearing, growing, destroying,
creating NOW.

NDM:  If someone was not aware of these neo advaita teachings

and were to read this, living in Iraq or Afghanistan for example,
who had just had their family and children murdered, home
destroyed and so on. Based on your experience with
communicating this message. How do you believe this would be
interpreted?

Suzanne Foxton: Wow, it wildly varies. I've had contact with people who
have had problems on the level of Job, much as you describe. Lots of
anger, often; outrage; but also acceptance. It's amazing, what is
bearable. It's incredible, what kind of apparent healing can occur. And
through anecdotal evidence, those who respond to devastation with
compassion are the ones who feel the most peace; if peace is, indeed, the
goal. All things unfold, the horrific and the beautific. It can be judged...or
not.

NDM: Can you please tell me what happened to this ego as a

result of this realisation/awakening?
Suzanne Foxton: Nothing happened to the ego. The ego still arises in
awareness, if that's the preferred way of putting it on a Thursday
morning. I suppose the ego is, paradoxically, looked upon with more
affection and tolerance (compassion, perhaps) by itself than before.

I guess the point is that there seems to be at least a lot less of some sort
of receiver of knowing, or doing, or being, or seeing feeling touching
hearing smelling. Knowing known by itself. A gift, from the gift to the gift.
Just the knowing. Just the gift. No knower. No giver.

NDM: So if nothing happened to the ego. If it is still there, then

which self are you? Are you saying there are two selves, or you
are still this ego, or something other than it?

Suzanne Foxton: I'm saying that there is only one thing. The mind will try
to split it, understand it, categorise it into this compartment and that
pigeon hole...what I am, what is, can be labelled "awareness", and ego,
toast in the morning, kids needing a ride to the cricket match, the wall,
the body, the mind, the feelings, all seemingly arise in this awareness.
It's all one thing, seamless, whole, perfect.

NDM; So if there is no knower or giver, just the knowing, the gift,

how is the knowing possible?  Who or what is this knowing
known to?

Suzanne Foxton: How the knowing is possible is something the mind is

preoccupied with. It wants to figure it out. Knowing is, unto itself. The
knowing is known by knowing; the giving is given to the gift. There is
only One.

NDM: Did you ever study meditation, or any traditional forms of

spirituality before your awakening or read any books about this
subject of non-duality or consciousness?

Suzanne Foxton: It's not my awakening...but I understand we have to

use limited concepts and language.

No, I didn't study and formal meditation. Just the kind of "notice your
breath" stuff that gets into mainstream Western mental health circles.
Jesus, I can't meditate to save my life. Sit down in an uncomfortable
position and try not to think. 'Oh no! I'm thinking about not thinking. Ah -
there's a gap. Oh shit, I thought about the gap! Now I'm thinking about
thinking about the gap. AND I have to pee. Oh, f*** it.' That's about how
a meditation session goes for me. I don't even attempt it. It's
unnecessary, and I'm not talking to any other apparent egos "out there".
If you want to meditate, meditate. If it's good and blissful and still and
calming and seems beneficial, go for it. But I suppose for "me" that all
apparent states seem meditative. There is stillness present in the loudest
cacophony. There is bliss within turmoil Every state is meditation; every
act, a prayer; something like that.

 Also, I read no books about nonduality "before"...my therapist, however,

follows a spiritual teacher and he introduced the concept to me. He called
it "metaphysical nonduality". At the time I thought, 'OK....that's weird,
but I'm definitely making progress here so I'll just let the weirdness
slide.' "After" whatever it is with the apparent knife "happened", I saw
Tony Parsons and thankfully got some words that seemed to fit the
seeming phenomenon of 'clear seeing'.

For a while, I thought I was going crazy - or, more accurately, even
crazier. I occasionally felt like I was seeing from just next to the right of
my head and a little higher than my eyes; that I was coming out of my
body through the top of my head; and that I had no edges. My mind
didn't know how to handle that stuff. My therapist would just say, 'Oh,
don't worry about it.' I thought, easy for you to say Mate, I'm coming out
of the top of my head here! However, although there's no process in
time, not really, all that seems to have settled down. The identification I
got with the description of "awakening" (or whatever) from Tony was just
enough to reassure my fevered brain.

NDM: What words did Tony Parsons use that seemed to fit the
phenomenon of 'clear seeing'?

Suzanne Foxton: It was simply the phrase "this is it".

NDM: Can you please tell me which one do you see as being you?
Which one is your identity? Oneness or these inclinations,
predispositions, habit formations, urges to write blogs and so on?
What is the exact relationship between these elements?

Suzanne Foxton: I see everything as being me. My identity is unleashed.

The habits, urges, inclinations etc. are just what seems to come up. The
exact relationship between these elements - oneness and the ego-bundle
- is that they are the same thing, in apparently different, fascinating,
guises.

NDM: After your awakening, how much time did you spend
contemplating, or investigating through self enquiry, these
inclinations, predispositions, habit formations, urges, your
shadow self, The subconscious mind up to this point in time?

Suzanne Foxton: None. I just let 'em rip. Taking note of them with
amusement seems to happen a lot.

NDM: Was this metaphysical non-duality therapist knowledgeable

in traditional Vedanta, was he Self realized or was this some form
of  "neo advaita" therapist?

Suzanne Foxton: Neither I think. He's friends with this French guru-dude
named Alain Forget, who has a kind of non-traditional formula called the
4-D's: distanciation, dis-identification, and I forget the other two.

NDM: When you said you were coming out of the top of your head.
When this occurred what did this metaphysical non duality
therapist say this was? What do you think this was?

Suzanne Foxton: My former therapist is an expert in trauma and

addiction; the non duality stuff is just his hobby, for want of a better way
to put it. I'm not sure what he thought it was; he just told me not to
worry about it. Probably that I was having a therapeutic psychotic break!
He likes my blog though.

NDM: When you describe your brain as being fevered. How would
you describe the energy of your brain today? Is it usually active
or dull, or very clear?

Suzanne Foxton: The "fevered brain" was just a pretty turn of phrase.
Brain not really fevered; it seems calm, clear, active but nicely paced,
don't sleep too much (not from any worries, but because I seem
enthusiastic to start the day). This is most of the time, except when my
husband leaves the cap off the toothpaste for the 4,235th time in a row!
NDM: What were your spiritual beliefs before this awakening took
place?

Suzanne Foxton: My spiritual beliefs were very vague, somewhat

agnostic, and more or less along the lines of the Wiccan philosophy of "Do
what you will and harm no one".

NDM: Has this changed at all since your awakening or do you still
practice this?

Suzanne Foxton: Pretty much. I've never been a Wiccan, by the way, but
I've always liked that phrase. Also, I was raised in the United Methodist
church, which is as laid-back as Christianity gets. UM minister: 'So you
sinned? Well...that's not good, but oh well, just try not to do it again.'
The UM philosophy is not so far off "and harm none, do what you will".

NDM: Have you heard of the Sanskrit terms samskaras and

vasanas that are created through karma? Past actions that leave
deep psychic imprints?

Suzanne Foxton:  I have read these things, yes. The story can be just as
interesting, complicated and involved as you like!

NDM: When you say "I'm still a procrastinator and a bit of a

perfectionist, but these don't seem to be character traits that are
judged to be "bad" anymore. When these tendencies arise, do you
still act out on them like before. If so, why do you think you are
doing this?

Suzanne Foxton: I suppose the actions are similar, but the feelings and
thoughts are quite different; more relaxed feelings, and more
magnanimous thoughts.

NDM: Do you have a choice, or is this something beyond your

control?

Suzanne Foxton: Apparently there is an unfolding story where I have a

choice to change certain behaviours, much as the characters in a film
often seem to make choices. Truly, it is choiceless.

NDM: When these emotions arise, do they have an impact on your

decision making or your actions, choice of words, behavior and so
on?

Suzanne Foxton: Perhaps, but not to the same extent...apparently. More

importantly, I don't poke it with a stick all the time. Whatever happens,
happens.

NDM: When you said that "I was free, to an extent that cannot be
communicated.' What were you free of exactly and why do you
say this cannot be communicated?

Suzanne Foxton: Well, I can't communicate it no matter how many times

and in how many different ways you ask; it can't be communicated
because it's not an idea, or a feeling or a concept, it's...well, everything
borne of nothing. And THAT just sounds silly! And what was I free from,
exactly? Free from all the boxed-in ideas I had about what my life was.
Free from having to make things "better". Free from the treadmill of goal,
action, goal achieved, contentment still elusive. Free from everything I
ever thought was important; free from the story of my life being the be-
all and end-all. Free from the tyranny of the body and the mind and the
emotions. Free from everything, because I was never anything that could
be enslaved. I was never anything at all. Limitless.

NDM: When you say "I began writing the blog to give vent to my
urge to describe what had happened' Where did this urge come
from. Who's urge was it and who was venting it?

Suzanne Foxton: Ida know where the urge comes from; it's just there. I
don't particularly care where it comes from, either. There it is. It's my
urge, and I'm venting it, in the drama of life that seems to unfold but is
taken with a wryly raised eyebrow "these days".

NDM: When you say "No one wants to hear about how everything
is utterly meaningless, except in its intrinsic worth by virtue of
mere existence". Is this your personal opinion, view, belief,
conclusion you arrived at and if so can you please tell me what is
the basis for this view?

Suzanne Foxton: Well...that was a broad and sweeping generalisation.

Perhaps there are a heck of a lot of people who want to hear that
everything is utterly meaningless, except in its intrinsic worth by virtue of
mere existence. How do I know? I could be totally wrong. However,
based on the anecdotal evidence of how friends and family react when I
present this concept, which is nearly 100% negatively, and buoyed by
further accounts from a disciple or two at a Tony Parsons meeting, one of
whom was deserted by her best friend of 20 years when presented with a
similar concept...it would seem that blanket meaninglessness is not a
popular idea.

NDM: You mentioned in your conscious TV interview that you

went to see Tony Parsons after your awakening. Was he helpful to
you in understanding this and if so, can you please explain how?

Suzanne Foxton: I believe I answered this in a previous question, more or

less. His words seemed to fit; I finally had some words to describe what
"had happened". It was, apparently, comforting to my mind, which still
thinks it needs to figure everything out...or at least have some vague
handle on what's going on.

NDM: Has your character, temperament, personality, habits,

proclivities, inclinations changed since your awakening?

Suzanne Foxton: It's not my awakening...you can have it! Free for all.
But I suppose I've apparently become less "lost"; there is very little
suffering, although there is pain; all those "negative" states and emotions
seem to be relished (if not enjoyed) rather than resisted. It's all life, after
all. I'm still a procrastinator and a bit of a perfectionist, but these don't
seem to be character traits that are judged to be "bad" anymore. The
procrastination leads to adrenaline-fired creativity, on a tight deadline;
the perfectionism seems to foster more carefully honed work, which, at
the moment, is writing and work in Photoshop, and the very interesting
job of tending to my family.

It all seems much the same, but without bouts of depression or running
away from what used to seem unbearable. And it is all fantastically,
phantasmagorically fascinating, right down to the pile of dog poo I tell the
kids to step around. However, it was much the same "before"...if my
head ever managed to shut up for a minute. Now, if my head is noisy, I
ignore it. It can do what it likes.

NDM: What would you say is the difference with an awakening

glimpse and liberation?
Suzanne Foxton: Ida know. It seemed to whack me over the head, over
the everything in fact, and if it was a glimpse I'm still glimpsing, and in
fact, it's all been one big glimpse...even "before".

NDM: What would you say is enlightenment?

Suzanne Foxton: I'd say there's no such thing. It implies something that
can be obtained by some non-existent person in some non-existent
future. Oneness isn't getting any "one-er". Being isn't going to be any
more existent than it is. This is enlightenment, with interesting and
perhaps misguided commentary laid on top. Life is enlightenment.
Everything is enlightenment, even the misguided commentary. What
people are perhaps looking for is their life, "reality", whatever, exactly as
it is...they just can't believe it. There doesn't need to be some knifish
knife or years meditating or the careful stripping away of the ego. This is
it.

NDM: According to the Buddhist tradition, there are Seven Factors

of Enlightenment/nirvana. There are also 5 hindrances to
enlightenment/nirvana /perfect wisdom.

The seven factors are:

1. Mindfulness (sati) This is being mindful of every word, thought

and action one takes.

2. Keen investigation of the dhamma (dhammavicaya) This is

similar to atma vichara, self enquiry practiced in Vedanta. It is
ongoing investigation of the Self , or awakened nature, Buddha
nature and other.

3. Rapture or happiness (piti)

4. Calmness (passaddhi)

5. Concentration (samadhi) One pointed concentration in what

ever you are doing.

6. Equanimity (upekkha)
What are your thoughts on this?

Suzanne Foxton: My thoughts are OMG, what a lot of work! Many of these
qualities and actions, interestingly, seem to be unravelling "backwards"
(after my thingy - call it awakening if you want!

NDM: These are the five hindrances to enlightenment according to

the Buddhist tradition.  

1. kamacchanda — sensual desires

2. vyapada — ill-will

3. thinamiddha — obduracy of mind and mental factors

4. uddhaccakukkucca — restlessness and worry

5. vicikiccha — doubt

What are your thoughts on these?

Suzanne Foxton: Again, unraveling backwards, these "blocks" may well

arise from "time" to "time"...but they are not taken seriously. Nor do they
arise with any force. Any "defects of character" that seem to come up for
the character, Suzanne, apparently making her way through Samsara,
are regarded (by who? Ida know) with affection, tolerance, amusement,
compassion. The same with the same traits arising in the behaviour of
apparent "others". It seems that rather than clinging to the world, the
world is loved by the world; the world is love, manifest, and because it is
expressed in duality, both sides of each coin are love, and loved.

NDM: When you say already "here", do you mean like to "be in
the now" as in the teachings of Eckhart Tolle. What do you mean
by "here" exactly ?

Suzanne Foxton: I mean that there is only now. You don't have to make
some effort to "be in the now". You are in the now, whether you want to
be or not. You are the now, whether you know it or not. This is it,
whatever thoughts are arising. It is always now o'clock. This is
wholeness, now. There is nothing that needs to be done, but most people
don't believe that and would rather play. So play! That's fine too. It's all
the same thing.
NDM: If I came to you and asked for your help, after having tried
everything else, psychotherapy, yoga, meditation and all the rest.
What would you say to me?

Suzanne Foxton: I'd say, give up! You're already here.

NDM:  What if I'm here like Angulimala, a vicious serial killer? A

serial killer in the now? Every time  I cut off someone's finger and
wear it around my neck my watch says "now o clock."  How
is  giving up, I'm already here going to get rid of my ignorance?
www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Angulimala

Suzanne Foxton: Well, I see what you're getting at. If a serial killer came
to me for help, I'd probably say "you're already here" as I surreptitiously
dialed emergency services. If the serial killer had tried psychotherapy,
yoga, meditation, etc., I'd say he'd be likely to confound the cast of
Criminal Minds. If it's illusory, it's illusory, all of it, including vicious serial
killers named Angulimala. Oneness is oneness, including murder. It's the
mind's confoundedness with these conundrums of morality that keep the
mind locked in a cycle, unopened; yet an unopened mind is Oneness, too.
All is one, and all is a perfect expression, even the horrible bits, and
compassion arises for it all; it is all compassion. Now if my head was
locked in a vice by Mr. Serial Killer, whether boundless compassion would
arise is up for debate. But it's possible, though in pain, there would be no
suffering. As I said, devastation can be met with compassion as well as
the more common negative judgement, resistance and revulsion.

NDM: This is what I meant earlier by the relative and absolute

levels of reality.  Here is an article by a direct student of
Nisargadatta Maharaj on this.

www.enlightened-spirituality.org/neo-advaita.html 

What are your thoughts on this?

Suzanne Foxton:  Absolute reality, Brahman, as opposed to illusory day-

to-day reality,Maya, seems as logical a way to conceptualise Oneness as
any. The mind loves the categorisation of it, the sense of it, the
comforting explanation of how illusory reality arises in awareness. If it's
Oneness, it's oneness, beyond judgement, beyond right and wrong,
beyond all concept. There is simply this, now, what arises, and the
stillness it arises in. Being tricked or fooled by Maya is the devil in
another guise; duality needs the bad to balance the good. What is, is.
Maya is loved; maya is love, manifest.

NDM.  What about dharma, the natural harmonious laws of the

universe  Anything that deviates form this law is considered
adharma, meaning immoral, unnatural, wrong, wicked or plain
evil.

Suzanne Foxton: Sure, there's dharma, and there's adharma. How else
would it be?

NDM: What are your thoughts on karma?

Suzanne Foxton: There's many many ways the mind goes about splitting
reality, retelling it, perpetuating the ego ad infinitum. It's what the
ego/mind does. It doesn't want to perish. So there's karma, and a
hundred thousand lifetimes to balance karma. What a great deal!

NDM: Do you consider yourself a teacher of non duality, do you do

satsangs or hold meetings on this subject to help others in some
way?

Suzanne Foxton: No, I definitely don't consider myself a teacher, I don't

hold satsangs, although I get lots of queries about this. I did a thing at
Never Not Here in Chicago last January, at Richard Miller's request, and it
was quite the merry ride keeping the thing going for THREE AND A HALF
HOURS. I also did an interview with Urban Guru Cafe and
www.conscious.tv/nonduality.html they contacted me after seeing
my blog, and I'm happy to do these things if asked. If it seems to help
some nonexistent soul, why not?

NDM: As far as teachers go. Have you read any of the classics by
Nisargadatta or Sri Ramana by the way?

Suzanne Foxton: I'm afraid I just read a few blogs on the subject here
and there.

NDM: Do you have any interest in learning about the ancient

wisdom traditions of non duality. Vedanta, Buddhism, Sufism,
Taoism, Judeo Christian mysticism, Gnosticism, indigenous or
Native American non duality traditions and so on or do you see
this more or less as dogma, religious indoctrination, meaningless,
nonsensical stories?
Suzanne Foxton:  I'm interested, but have little (nonexistent) time! I
know a fair amount about Hinduism and Sufism, as I studied them at
university. And all stories are meaningless and nonsensical...that's why I
love 'em.

NDM: Can you please tell me about your book "The Ultimate
Twist". What is this book about  exactly?

Suzanne Foxton: The Ultimate Twist is about a love triangle that isn't
really a triangle at all; a mental breakdown that turns out to be "a good
thing"; love in healing, and healing that turns out not to be necessary.
It's also about life-changing revelations on a trip to Pakistan, that turn
out to not change that character at all; and stony skepticism about
spirituality, and a refusal to change, in the character who ends up
changing a great deal..."a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing" 

NDM: When will this book be published?

Suzanne Foxton: The book is coming out early 2011. Published by Julian
Noyce of Nonduality Press.

Visit Suzanne Foxton's blog

Nothing Exists, Despite Appearances

JAMES SWARTZ

PART 1

NDM: Can you please also tell me what exactly is "moksha", the  
root meaning of this Sanskrit word, as well as how is this
manifested, according to Vedanta and the ancient teachings?
Who was the first person to use this symbol?

Ram: It is a Sanskrit word that comes from the word ‘muc’ which
means to release from bondage, to set free. It is impossible to tell who
used it first. It is many thousands of years old.

NDM:  What do you see as the distinction between

Bodhi/awakening and moska/liberation?

Ram: Awakening is an experience that happens to the mind, one that

gives the individual some kind of understanding that there is something
beyond the visible. It is not enlightenment although it is often thought
of as enlightenment. Most modern teachers are simply awakened. The
self is ‘the light.’ It never slept. It is not enlightened. Enlightenment is
moksa, freedom from experience, including awakening, and the notion
that the self is limited. It is the hard and fast knowledge “I am limitless
non-dual ordinary actionless awareness…assuming that it renders all
vasanas non-binding and cancels the sense of doership. Chapter 2 of
my book deals with this topic in depth. There is a sub-heading in the
chapter called Stages of Enlightenment. The second stage roughly
represents self realization/awakening, where there is still an individual
who has ‘realized’ i.e. experienced the self. There is still the sense of
duality, a ‘me’ and the ‘self’ which appears as an object. It differs from
the third stage, which is not a stage, called ‘enlightenment.’ The word
enlightenment is not actually technically suitable because of its
experiential connotations.
NDM:  In your book, 'How to Attain Enlightenment", you go
into the history of how Vedanta was brought to this country
and somehow became distorted. How this New Vedanta
introduced the idea of four paths or yogas: action, devotion,
knowledge and meditation. How the traditional Vedanta only
focused on action and knowledge.

Do you think the reason why the yogic path seemed to take
off more than the knowledge path because westerners are
hardwired differently and have been conditioned to be
fundamentally more corrupted and pleasure seekers,
sybarites, through hardcore advertising, television,
pornography, Hollywood, Rock and Roll and so on.
Essentially programmed from birth and were using yoga
   
experientially, like alcohol or LSD to get high, as opposed to
how it was used in India and in the Yoga scriptures of
Patanjali?

James: Yes and no. No, in the sense that the yogic view of
enlightenment is the dominant view in India as well and has been
the dominant view for thousands of years. People are experience
oriented and their suffering makes them unimaginative, so that
they cannot connect the suffering with self ignorance. They just
want quick relief and are susceptible to the idea that there is some
kind of permanent blissful experience that they can gain by Grace,
by yoga, by transmission, etc. This is why they are eager to call an
epiphany, an petty awakening experience, enlightenment. But yes,
 in the sense that materialistic cultures like ours place very little
value on self knowledge although they value relative knowledge
highly because it is instrumental in gaining worldly things. But it is
only a matter of degree. Indian’s crave experience like everyone
but the society is duty oriented and based on the Vedic model
which is knowledge centered. The word ‘veda’ means knowledge
and self knowledge is still respected in India today.
NDM: . What are your
thoughts on Deeksha
and Shakipat and the    
"Oneness school" An
Indian school that
teaches westerners to
give Deeksha? Or a
blessing in the form of a
mantra, or laying hands
on someone's head or
other parts of their
body?

James: Shakti sadhanas

are useful up to a certain
point in that they generate
epiphanies, awakenings.
Epiphanies can be helpful
spiritually or they can be a
serious hindrance if they
cause you to formulate
enlightenment as a kind of
permanent feel good
shakti experience. Shakti
is not liberation because
shakti is fickle. It comes
and goes and has many
forms. Shakti is just a
particular subtle kind of
experiential energy. I
debunk the shakti as
enlightenment myth
toward the end of Chapter
2. There is a subheading
called, “Energy as
Enlightenment” in the
Enlightenment Myths
section that will help with
this.
Deeksha, which is similar
to Reiki, is a big con game
cooked up by a greedy
ambitious fellow, Kalki
‘Avatar’ and his equally
greedy wife to sucker
gullible do-gooders out of
their money. Fortunately
the bloom is off the rose
and Deeksha is suffering
the bad karma that
inevitably flows when the
idea behind it is incorrect.
But you will be happy to
know that Kalki and his
wife are set for life. Kalki’s
son broke with him over
money and power and took
many of the dasas with
him. They have predictably
taken up with a big money
person, Tony Robbins, who
has mined and monetized
the lowest levels of
spirituality with great
success for years. It is a
fad that has lost most of
its appeal in America and
has had to move to other
countries to stay alive. It
will die because shakti is
fickle. You get high from it
and then, like any drug,
you come back to reality
only to discover that the
brain rewiring was faulty
and you are caught up in
your old world view once
more. Hopefully, even
though you are poorer,
you may be a bit wiser. It
is hardly worth discussing.
I satirize it at the very end
of the book in the Chapter
on Neo-Advaita.
 
 
NDM: Do you believe it’s
possible to transmit
    permanent enlightenment,
through shatki, qi, chi,
prana, orgone, kundallini or
any other kind of energy?

James: Definitely not. There is

only one self and it is already
free. If the self thinks it is an
individual and bound, no
energy i.e. experience will
remove this ignorance. Shakti
will not change the orientation
of one’s thinking patterns.
Only the application of self
knowledge will. The best
shaktipat can do is to give you
a glimpse of your true nature.
Non-dual experience, if
interpreted correctly, may give
rise to this knowledge but it
will only cancel the belief that
one is bound in a very subtle,
highly mature individual like
Ramana. And even then, once
the shakti, the experience, has
worn off ignorance almost
invariably reasserts itself and
the self goes back to thinking
that it is incomplete and
bound. The idea that
enlightenment is an
experiential something that it
can be transferred to another
person is a fantasy that
appeals to lazy people who do
not want to do sadhana.

NDM:. Can you please

describe the difference
between the self enquiry
that Sri Ramana taught and
the self enquiry that Papaji
and his followers/disciples
 teach in the west today?

James: Papaji’s very unrefined

notion was to simply ‘be quiet’
and wait for something to
happen. His idea suited the
level of seekers that came to
him. He himself cynically said
they were not qualified for
moksa and he gave them
shaktipat as an indulgent
parent gives children
‘lollipops’…to use his own
words. Ramana’s view was
that self inquiry was only for
highly qualified mature purified
individuals. It is an aggressive
moment to moment inquiry
into the nature of the self.
Vedanta’s conception of self
inquiry is akin to Ramana’s but
is much broader. It
presupposes self knowledge
and asks the inquirer to apply
the knowledge “I am the self”
when the inquiry has revealed
a limited dualistic orientation.
NDM:  What is the history and
Vedanta tradition of charging for
satsang or guru instruction? For
example do you know if Dattatreya,
Sri Ramana or Adi Shankara or any
of these sages ever charged for
instruction or satsang?

James: There is no history. Wealthy

donors who value spiritual culture
support the teachers. My guru took care
of my room and board for two years and
never asked a dime. I charged once in
Tiruvannamalai only to keep the
gawkers, window shoppers, and
lifestylers, away. It worked, but now I
use other methods to get rid of them
without denying access to the teachings
to sincere seekers. A true teacher does
not see what he does as a career, a
profession. It saddens me to see the
terrible exploitation that goes on in the
Western spiritual scene.

NDM: . I would like to ask you about

this new school of advaita. Often
referred to as neo-advaita. One
English teacher by the name of
Tony Parsons says "Any
communication that supports and
encourages the seeker’s belief or
idea that it can find something it
feels it has lost is only reinforcing
and perpetuating a dualistic
illusion........ There can arise a wish
to help or teach other people to
have a similar experience. That
communication can sometimes
seem to be “non-dual” when the
teacher describes the nature of
oneness, but it contradicts itself by
recommending a process which can
help the seeker attain that oneness
through self-enquiry, meditation or
purification, etc"

How do you believe that someone

like Adi Shankara the Indian
philosopher who consolidated the
doctrine of Advaita Vedanta, would
have responded to this, according
to his teachings?
James: I have a whole chapter on Neo-
Advaita in my book, How to Attain
Enlightenment, The Vison of Non-
Duality. I do not think highly of it.
Shankara would have had a good
condescending laugh. It is a superficial
ill-considered counterintuitive belief
system that seems to be reasonable on
the surface, but does not hold up when
you actually think about it. Tony
Parsons exemplifies the worst of the
Neo-Advaita teachers. He spouts a
plethora of vague advaitic ideas that
have gained a certain degree of traction
because Westerners are very spiritually
 unsophisticated and want a quick easy
enlightenment. It amounts to little more
than the denial that you exist as a
human being and offers no methodology
for preparing the mind for
enlightenment, much less serious
experience based teachings that
patiently and effectively remove self
ignorance. Traditional Vedanta
completely disagrees with Tony’s
statement. He is one of the most ill-
informed of the Neo-Avaita types. He
has virtually no knowledge of Yoga and
Vedanta apart from the recycled
conventional wisdom that has been
circulating since Papaji’s minions
infected the spiritual world with their
advaita-lite version of non-duality.

It is actually incorrect to see Shankara

as a philosopher. He was just a link in
the sampradaya, the Vedanta tradition
that stretches back to the Upanishads.
And Vedanta is a only a means of Self
Knowledge. It is not a school of thought
or a philosophy. Chapter 3 of my book
clearly explains Vedanta as a means of
knowledge…a pramana…and debunks
this myth.
NDM: What are your thoughts on "evolutionary enlightenment"?  

James: In so far as there is only one self and it never changes, there is
no evolution. Evolve to where? There is no evidence that life is not as
evolved or un-evolved as it always was. In the spiritual world it is a long
standing belief, made popular by Aurobindo in the last century. In terms
of the apparent reality, it is basically a religious belief that ambitious
spiritual types like Andrew Cohen tend to promote and exploit to gain
fame. Do-gooders and world ‘saviors’ are held in high esteem by gullible
well meaning people. Rare individuals committed to truth do tend to
grow spiritually, however, but it is not helpful to think of it in terms of
evolution as much as purification, getting rid of something unhelpful,
rather than getting better, which has the danger of feeding a self
righteous ego’s sense of vanity. The initial appeal of Deeksha was
largely based on the absurd notion that the planet is devolving and that
enlightenment could save it when 2012 comes! It is a notion that
appeals to worried people who would greatly benefit the world if they
quit thinking about the human race…which after all is just a concept…
and cleaned up their own problems. If this is a non-dual reality, then
everything here is the self and as such it serves the self. How does
suffering help? Suffering usually makes you dull at first but if you suffer
enough and hit bottom, it can wake you up. This happened to me. I am
very grateful for my suffering. Even if you could ‘make a difference’ and
change the world, it will still be a fool’s paradise because the absence of
suffering is only the negative half of moksa.

  NDM:. Do you believe that God is evolving?

James: In terms of the limited scientific view, it seems nature…which is

one aspect of God…is evolving but even this view presupposes that
there is some ultimate purpose to life. And there is no evidence that
there is such a purpose. If there is any purpose it is to get rid of
suffering because that is what people are attempting to do all the time.
But God, whatever that means, is not a person. Presumably, He or She
is already perfect. So if ‘God’ means consciousness, it is definitely not
evolving. Consciousness is non-dual. Where will evolve to?
NDM:  Or that the human ego is evolving in some way? Becoming
less violent, less narcissistic, pleasure seeking, greedy,
competitive, war mongering, less deceitful, manipulative and so
on?

James: No. The human ego is just a notion of incompleteness, separation

and inadequacy. Ideas do not evolve. However, certain rare individuals
do consciously change in line with certain ideals. But there is no evidence
that the human race is getting any better. There is no evidence that it is
getting any worse either. The light and the dark forces that make up the
apparent reality…duality…are always more or less in balance.

NDM:  In your book you say that "Ramana Maharshi gained

enlightenment without a teaching and a teacher. Aside from the
fact that it is, in very rare cases, possible to realize the self
without help, the odds are about the same as winning the lottery,
perhaps less."

What are the reasons that you believe that it is almost impossible
to become enlightened without a teacher? Or the reasons why
someone without a teacher is bound to become self deluded, or
stuck somewhere?

James: Because the self is beyond perception and inference and can only
be realized by the removal of ignorance. It is completely counterintuitive
that you are whole and complete. It does not feel that way at all. And we
are so conditioned to take our feelings to be knowledge that we need to
be shown how we are actually whole and complete. The one who has the
ignorance is almost never objective enough about his or her self to see
 where he or she is caught up in beliefs and opinions about the nature of
reality. We  unconsciously interpret what we experience in terms of their
ignorance, no matter how ‘conscious’ we think we are. Ignorance is hard-
wired and universal. It formulates itself in many subtle ways. Only
collective systematic proven knowledge that comes from an objective
source can help. If enlightenment was up to an individual’s will anyone
who wanted to become enlightened would become enlightened. So you
need help. In my case I exposed my mind to Vedanta for a long period
and was eventually freed of all the things that limited me. I did this with
the help of my teacher and scripture. I had had much experience of
Samadhi and every conceivable major epiphany and I am not a stupid
person but I could not crack the code without help. I am eternally
grateful to God for giving us this tradition.
 
NDM:  How does karma play into this enlightenment equation?
Do you believe that enlightenment is causal, or the result of
someone being ripe, due to past actions?

James: It depends on what you mean by karma. Enlightenment is not

causal. No action can give you something that you already have. In fact
you do actions to gain enlightenment because you are ignorant of the
simple fact that you are already free. However, action…karma…is
indispensable for gaining enlightenment if it is used to prepare the mind
for enlightenment. The mind needs to be qualified (See Chapter3) for
enlightenment. This is where Neo-Advaita is completely ignorant. It
dismisses action and the doer and sadhana as ‘duality.’ Being ‘ripe’ is an
indirect means of enlightenment. Self knowledge is the direct means.

NDM:  What is the importance of being aware of samskaras,

vassanas and vrittis and how do these hinder one from becoming
enlightened?

James: It is very important because they extrovert the mind and keep it
from meditating and inquiring into the nature of the self.

NDM:  Do you believe that it’s possible to be liberated and still

maintain a healthy ego with desires, aspirations, attachments
and aversions? In essence to maintain a personal and a separate
sense of self? To be Brahman, as well who you always were?

James: A healthy ego and enlightenment are nearly synonyms.

However, if someone is ‘maintaining’ an ego, whether it is healthy or
not, it is definitely incompatible with enlightenment. Enlightenment
cancels the notion that you are an ego, so you will not do anything to
make the ego healthy or unhealthy. You just see your ego for what it is.
You need not tamper with it. If it is sick it will become healthy if you
leave it alone and stay with the self. And you will leave it alone when
you know who you are. You will love it warts and all. And in the
presence of your love it will become healthy.

NDM:  Do you see Neo-Advaita as a form of a depersonalization,

de realization disorder, a 'dissociative disorder' a psychotic
break of some kind. Or a form of nihilism, or intellectual
solipsism. An extremely highly developed and sophisticated egos
way to escaping responsibly for ones actions, thoughts and
deeds.

James: No, people are just lazy and denial works well with them. It
allows them to continue being the fools they are and imagine that it is
somehow hip and cool to pretend that they do not exist. It is actually a
pretty harmless phenomena. Most of them are only there because
others are there and they don’t want to miss out on ‘the energy’. It is
more about the sanga, the company of like minded people, than a
serious spiritual path. It is true that the spiritual world attracts a lot of
psychologically wounded people who really belong on the psychiatrist’s
couch but this has always been the case.

NDM:  Many people believe that being enlightened is a license to

teach about enlightenment. In the tradition of Vedanta, for one
to become a teacher of this, were there certain guidelines,
criteria, tests that one had to overcome to prove without a
shadow of a doubt one was enlightened and qualified to be a
teacher? Such as a peer group of teachers, satgurus that would
make these determinations?

James: In a way, yes. The sampradaya, the tradition, works in very

subtle ways to maintain its purity. This is because you only get access to
the tradition if you are qualified. If you just break in off the street
loaded with desires and are not mindful of dharma and seeking for the
wrong reason, you will not last long enough to be accepted by a teacher.
It will not make sense to you. Ordinarily, the complaint is that Vedanta
is ‘only intellectual.’ You will want some kind of emotional connection,
some kind of ‘heart’ connection and you will not be subtle enough to get
what is actually going on. So you will wander off. And also you have to
be admitted by the teacher and in Vedanta. You cannot just decide that
a certain teacher is your guru. It is a two way street owing to the nature
of the means of knowledge. If you are not meant to be there you will be
out the door very quickly. It is very rare to find an ambitious Vedanta
teacher because most of them are really enlightened, meaning that they
do not care if they teach or not and are not interested in fame or
fortune. I do not want to talk about it in detail. It will give the idea that
Vedanta is elitist. It isn’t.
NDM:  Some of these neo advaita teachers say things like there
is no karma, because there is 'no doer", that everything is
acausal, so it really doesn't matter because things just happen. 
Such as murder happens, lying happens, cheating or stealing
happens and it’s not happening to a separate person.  They say
what causes suffering or guilt is the illusion a separate person is
lying, cheating, murdering and so on.  As if to say that oneness
or God is doing it and that once you know its God doing it, there
is no suffering nor guilt and therefore nothing wrong with it.

James: This kind of doctrine is ridiculous. First of all, from awareness’

point of view, nothing ever happened. So if you say these things happen
they only mean something to awareness under the spell of ignorance,
i.e. the doer. So it is the doer who believes that things happen. The
whole idea is silly because there is nothing wrong with the doer.
Doership may be a problem. As a human being you are definitely a doer
but you can do without a sense of doership. There is no choice about
action. Yes, you can see that you are the self, in which case, you are not
the doer. But the self is limitless and can apparently act. If it could not
apparently act it would not be limitless. And the apparent reality, in
which doing appears to happen is not non-existent, although it is not
real either. This whole topic needs careful analysis. I take it up in detail
in my book.

Things do just apparently happen, but conscious action apparently

happens too. Doing and non-doing are just concepts that are meant to
reveal the nature of That because of which doing and non-doing exist
i.e. awareness. Knowing God as the doer does not remove your
suffering unless you are God. But the doer, the one who believes these
ideas, is not God. God is the source of the ideas of doership and non-
doership, and the doer is awareness under the spell of ignorance. We
call ignorance avidya when it applies to the doer, the individual, and we
call it God or Maya or Iswara with reference to the whole creation.
Awareness is beyond God, the creator. In any case, this whole issue as I
just mentioned needs a lot more discussion that we can give it here.

NDM: What are your thoughts on Aurobindos "Intermediate

Zone" letter to his students about the pitfalls and dangers of
seeking enlightenment. Becoming delusional and so on.

James: Aurobindo and epiphanies. I suffered through the pretentious

Aurobindo torture on epiphanies and, when I got over my headache, I
concluded that his view about them is more or less correct. But he
certainly makes a big deal out of something that is relatively simple. As
I mentioned already, they can be helpful or harmful depending on your
understanding.
 Continued to part 2

For more info visit about James Swartz visit

www.shiningworld.com

JAMES SWARTZ

PART TWO
NDM:   When you met your guru
Swami Chinmayananda, how
much of a vasana load did you
have at that time and how
much were you able to shake
off and how long did this take
after your realization of the
self?

James:  My vasana  load was quite

light.  That is why I was able to
assimilate the teachings.  I worked
out my worldly desires…sex, money
and power…by my late Twenties. 
The tendencies were there but they
were non-binding. 

Once I realized that I was the Self…

it is not actually correct to say that
I realized the self…the purification
took place automatically as a result
of the knowledge, so it would not
be completely accurate to say that
“I” was shaking off anything.  If the
knowledge “I am awareness” is
firm it does the work.  The
Bhagavad Gita says, “There is no
purifier like (self) knowledge.”  In
so far as there was a functional ego
 there…a James…I directed him to
make certain choices that resulted
in the further attenuation of the
remaining non-binding vasanas…as
a kind of hobby.  There is nothing
to be gained by being vasana
free.     

NDM: When you say "there is

nothing to be gained by being
vasana  free", what do you think Sri
Ramana meant when he said "owing
to the fluctuation of the vasana s,
realization takes time to steady
itself. Spasmodic realization is not
enough to prevent rebirth, but it
cannot become permanent as long
as there are vasana s there."

James: This statement of Ramana’s

needs a little bit of analysis.  Not all
vasana s destabilize the mind.  In fact
there are many…self inquiry, devotion,
meditation, etc. that compose the mind
and enhance self inquiry and are
considered means of self realization.  The
vasana s that causes violent fluctuations
in the mind or that make it cloudy and
dull are the vasana s he is talking about,
I believe: greed, anger, lust, 
attachment,  hatred, etc.  On this score
he is definitely correct.  The reason you
want a composed mind is so that you can
assimilate the knowledge that is
equivalent to vasanas. 
You have to remember that Ramana was not a teacher.  He was an
enlightened person of the highest character but he spoke one on one to
people with specific questions.  He did not carefully unfold the complete
teachings of yoga or Vedanta in a systematic way in order to resolve
both apparent and real contradictions.  The idea that vasana  exhaustion
is equivalent to enlightenment, which I assume he means by ‘prevent
rebirth,’ is called the vasana  kshaya theory of enlightenment.  It is best
known through Pantanjali’s Yoga sutras in which he says ‘yoga chitta
vritti nirodha.’  ‘Yoga is the removal of the waves in the mind,’ not to put
too fine a point on it.  Patanjali and traditional Vedanta would both agree
that only the binding vasanas need to be elimintated for vasanas.  A
binding vasana  is one that you are compelled to act out.  Why do you
act it out?  Because you identify with it.  You identify with it because you
think it will complete you, make you feel happy.  Why do you identify
with it?  Because you are ignorant of your true nature, which happens to
be whole and complete and in need of nothing, but which unfortunately
which is unappreciated by you.  To make it simple, the idea is that you
have to get rid of some of your psychological baggage if you want to be
enlightened. 

The vasana s themselves have no power.  They are just ideas in

awareness.  But they become powerful tendencies because of a person’s
self ignorance.  Therefore it is the identification with the vasana  that
needs to be removed, not the vasana  itself.  The identification needs to
be removed because you should identify with the self if you want to be
free.  Confident identification of oneself as the self neutralizes the
vasanas.  So, speaking from the self’s point of view the vasanas are not
a problem.  They are only a problem from the point of view of an
individual who wants to realize the self and then only the binding ones
need to be dealt with.  In that statement I was speaking from the
platform of the self.  
 

NDM:   Do you believe it’s possible for someone to drop their

entire vasana load immediately and all their life times of
samskaras, karmic debt, conditioning and so on with
realizing the self.   Or is shaking off and unwinding these
vasanas, samskaras usually a gradual process that takes
time, work and additional self-enquiry after one has
realized the self?

James:  The complete dropping of the vasana  load at one time is a

Neo-Advaitic fantasy.  There is no reason for vasanas to be a
problem when you know that you are awareness.  You can easily
live with them.  The presence or absence of vasanas is not
enlightenment because the karmic mind/ego entity is not opposed
to awareness.  It is merely an appearance in awareness. Those
making this claim are fame seekers who equate enlightenment
with purity.  It is just big talk.  

Additionally, nothing like this happens in nature.  Everything in

nature is a gradual process, some call it evolution. 

NDM:  What was it that qualified you to receive Swami

Chinmayanandas Vedanta teachings?

James:  The hard and fast realization that there was not one thing
in samsara  that could make me happy.  I would have preferred to
die to living another day chasing the things I chased with such a
passion before.  There are so many seekers and so few finders
because most seekers still have hope that samsara will work for
them one day.  I was one hundred percent convinced that the
world was empty.  

NDM: What are the odds that a typical westerner would be

qualified, have the right disposition, temperament,
intelligence and the other factors to study Vedanta with a
satguru?

James:  About the same as winning the lottery.  It is particularly

difficult for Westerners because the culture presents no alternative
to samsara.  It is in love with samsara.  It tells everyone that they
are inadequate incomplete consumers and it offers enticing sexy
solutions.  It is unlikely in India too, but there is visible culture
there that will respond to the deeper needs of the soul.  

NDM: Do you believe it’s a result of one’s karma, action in

prior lives that someone would even begin seeking, or come
across a satguru?
 

James:  Yes,  Although everything prior to right now is a ‘past life.’ 

No one knows the answer to this.  It is best to think of it as the self
throwing off the shackles of ignorance. 

NDM: If someone would like to

study Vedanta with a guru. How
does one go about finding a
legitimate qualified traditional
Vedanta teacher outside of the
contaminated modern day
satsang market without
traveling to India like you did?

James:  It is not really advisable to

seek a guru.  If you are ready, it
does not matter where you are, the
guru will appear.  So the best thing
is to do your very best spiritually
according to your own
understanding, live as pure a life
and possible and ask God…however
you see it…for freedom.  It will
happen.  The reason the Neo-
Advaita scene is so dangerous is
because it has only a (half-baked)
understanding of the teachings of
non-duality and, more important,
no road map out of samsara.  It
denies samsara  altogether so it
does not deal with karma and
dharma and all the other essential
knowledge and practice that
prepares one for the dialogue with a
proper mahatma. Having said that,
there are Western people who are
realized and who are good teachers,
but they have the good sense to
keep their heads down and work
quietly out of the limelight. 
Seeking has become just another
lifestyle these days.  I know
several.  Please don’t ask me their
names. 

NDM: What is the difference

with going to a satsang and
getting Vedanta instruction
with a guru?

James:  The way the satsang  scene

has evolved here is a joke.  I was
recently given a copy of a book by
Mooji who as you probably know is
one of the big luminaries in the
Neo-Advaitic world. One of his
followers wanted me to debate
him.  I said “OK, if he wants to
debate it is fine with me but I have
no idea what he is saying” so the
person gave me a copy of his book
Breath of the Absolute.  On the very
first page he goes into the theory of
Advaita quite correctly.  Mind you I
am not saying that I think Mooji is
enlightened or not.  He gives five or
six sentences...all the usual no this
and no that…and then he says,
“Here you are not being told that
you must be fit for this journey.” 
He may be the Avatar of Avatars
but this is just nonsense.
Presumably Ramana’s famous
enlightened cow’s offspring could
wander into one of Mooji’s
Tiruvannamalai satangs… which
takes place in an area where cows
wander freely…and ‘get it.’  You
cannot make it to the feet of a
 proper Vedanta teacher unless you
are qualified.  The sampradaya
keeps those that are unqualified
out. 

    

I know that some will say that I

have an ax to grind and it is
probably churlish to say this but
one day I was channel surfing and
I came across Gangaji in satsang
on a public access channel.  I do
have an ax to grind with Neo-
Advaita but I have no problem
with any person doing what they
are inspired to do, enlightened or
not, as long as they follow
dharma.  Anyway, this woman
came up to sit in the ‘hot seat.’ 
She was an emotional wreck and
broke into tears within minutes. 
Her life was so difficult and
enlightenment was so hard and…
boo hoo...it was all so tawdry like
the ‘reality’ shows on TV.  And
Gangaji…of course….was so
‘supportive,’ so kind and
compassionate…like enlightened
people are supposed to be.  She
took her hand and lovingly stroked
her hair and said, ‘There, there
you poor dear’ or some sort of
equally sappy nonsense.  I
switched channels quickly before I
was overcome with nausea but I
suppose what happened next…as
it does in these Neo-Advaita
satsang s…the guru dishes up
some terribly clever vague
‘advaitic’ psychobabble and the
grateful recipient wanders off
‘fully’ enlightened. 

    

Secondly,  because the satsang

here is white bread, meaning it
has very little food value, people
wander from one guru to another. 
I never met any of these teachers
but sooner or later some of them
show up at my doorstep and I
hear the list of names…it is always
the same.  And what I discover is
that these people are completely
confused by what they have
heard.  So and so said this and so
and so said that etc.  But Vedanta
has not changed since the
beginning.  There is only one
teaching and it is very refined and
sophisticated.  All the apparent
contradictions have been handled,
not denied.  It works and it will
continue to work forever.  Just as
nobody is going to invent a new
wheel, nobody is going to invent a
new Vedanta.  It crystallized into
its perfect form in the Eighth
Century.    

Finally, Ignorance is hard wired,

persistent and very pervasive. You
need many tools to attack it. 
Vedanta is the complete tool kit. 
Neo-Advaita is more or less in the
same category as religion because
without a valid means of self
knowledge you can only believe
 that everything is non-separate
from you. 

NDM: So when these neo advatins show up at your doorstep

confused by these satsang teachers.    How you deal with
someone who is delusional and sincerely believes that they are
"fully enlightened" according to neo-advaita standards?

James:  Those who are attracted to Neo-Advaita only come to traditional

Vedanta because Neo-Advaita has not worked for them.  But ‘fully
enlightened’ delusional people generally do not show up.  I have only
had one in the last three or four years.  He bided his time and then
decided to show his enlightenment to the group.  Everyone was
completely turned off.   Then he wanted to argue with me.  I told him I
did not argue and when he got aggressive I asked him to please leave. 
He left. I later asked him why he left and he said, because I said ‘please.’

The thing about Vedanta is that the sampradaya, the tradition, works
very nicely to keep unqualified people out.  I almost never have to deal
with it.  The interesting thing about Vedanta is that it assumes that
everyone who is there is enlightened.  It speaks to them as the self.  It
assumes that you already know who you are but just lack a bit of clarity.
And it is such a skillful means of self knowledge that it takes away the
doubt quite nicely without giving you a complex in the process.  When
you approach people with the understanding that they are
unenlightened, you make matters worse.  You are forced to tell them
that there is something wrong with them and that they should do
something to get what they already have…like quit thinking and let go of
their suffering and surrender their ego and what not.  It is not helpful.    

NDM: As a teacher, do you feel it is your responsibly to speak out

against misleading neo advaita teachers?  Why not just keep
quiet, turn the other way and allow these people to take their
money and waste their time, to find out the hard way?

James: First of all I do not think of myself as a teacher. It is not my

identity. It is a hat I put on when I am asked a question.  As soon as the
answer is finished the hat comes off.  Teaching is more or less like a
hobby.  It is not a career.   
I do not feel it is my
responsibility.  I am not
motivated by responsibility.  I
am motivated by desire.   I
WANT to show the weakness
of the Neo-Advaita teachings…
but I think this is what you
mean.  I have the highest
regard for Vedanta and I hate
to see how uniformed, deluded
and ambitious people corrupt
the teachings.  Mind you,
these are not ‘my’ teachings. 
I have no teachings.  So I am
not upset on my behalf. I’m a
very happy person with a
great life quite apart from
Vedanta. 

And although it sometimes

may not seem so, I have
respect for everyone as the
self.  Unfortunately certain
names are associated in the
public’s mind with certain
teachings…Ramesh Balsekar
with the idea “You are not the
doer,” for example, so Ramesh
may have his feelings hurt…
well, he won’t now because he
is dead…when someone
criticizes his words…if he is
attached to them.  

Anyone squawking away in

public like myself should be
ready to take the heat.  I am
quite happy to be criticized. 
Let people say what they
think, good or bad. It does not
enhance or diminish me in the
slightest. I listen to what is
said and see if there is truth in
it.  If there is,  I accept it and
 if there isn’t, I don’t.  And as
far as Vedanta goes, you
cannot actually attack it unless
you are ill informed.  The Neos
don’t really attack it because
most of them have no idea
what it is, or if they do it is
only because they read a few
books, not because they
subjected themselves to the
tradition and heard it from the
inside…in which case they
would be qualified to attack it.
It has endured for thousands
of years.  In the fullness of
time Neo-Advaita will not even
rate a minor footnote in
spiritual history because it has
no proven methodology.  It is
an unruly Hodge podge of
ideas that gained a certain
currency in the last fifteen
years and is now losing steam
as a spiritual force because it
is basically a Western fad. 

 
 

The way I see it, everyone is enlightened. Everyone is the self.  You are
not special because you say you are enlightened.  You are not special
because you are a teacher.  Mind you, teaching is something you elect to
do.  You definitely have an agenda. One of my agendas is  to help sincere
people understand the limitations of teachings that are not in harmony
with tradition.

I do this in two ways. First, I teach Vedanta which is a very positive and
complete teaching.  When you have been taught Vedanta you can see
very clearly which teachings and teachers are unskillful and harmful. 
Secondly, I feel justified in having a go at Neo-Advaita, not for myself…I
could care less…but because I get many emails every day from people
around the world who have been through the Neo-Advaita scene and
want to know exactly why, in spite of its sometimes seemingly reasonable
ideas, it does not work. Since I have started criticizing Neo-Advaita the
interest in the way I present traditional Vedanta has increased ten-fold. 
Mind you I didn’t do it for fame. Fame is a big drag.  I did it because I
could see the harm that these half-baked teachings do.  

Second, I explain the limitations of Neo-Advaita.  I don’t do it because I

am an angry self righteous do-gooder out to defend the faith and get the
people to come to the church of Vedanta.   I give solid reasons based on
scripture and the seeker’s own experience why Neo-Advaita comes up
short as a means of enlightenment.  If you read my book you will see
that ninety five percent of it is traditional Vedanta with no mention of
Neo-Advaita.  There is one short chapter in which I take on Neo-Advaita,
not because there is anything sinister about it, but because it is an
unskillful uninspiring teaching.  Why is it uninspiring? Because it denies
the existence of the seeker, among other things.  You can tell me until
you are blue in the face that I do not exist but unless you can prove it to
me and give me a way to discover what that means by myself, you are
simply frustrating me.  I give all the reasons why Neo-Advaita does not
work,  but I do not leave you there; I reveal the many proven  teachings
like Karma Yoga, discrimination, the three gunas and many others that do
work.  It is not mindless criticism.  The idea is to stimulate people to
think and provide them with a road map out of samsara.  Saying that
samsara does not exist is not a road map.     

The last point I have to make is that my attacks, if that is what they are,
are not aimed at the person.  They are aimed at the teaching.  As I said,
it is unfortunate that certain names are associated with certain
teachings…the Buddha with emptiness, for example…and unsophisticated
people think that the attack is on the person.  The Vedantins and the
Buddhists have been going at it for two thousand years.  Everyone fights
with everyone else.  What’s wrong with it?  It can’t be helped.  Some
ideas work and some don’t.   For every complaint I get…and there are not
many…I get twenty ‘thank yous’ for saying that the Emperor has no
clothing.  It a nasty job but someone has to do it.

NDM: How would you answer the charge that you speaking out
about other teachers is shadow projection, or playing game of
one upmanship or a negative competitiveness vasana  playing
itself out? 

James:  This is certainly the age of pop psychology and it is very

fashionable to psychoanalyze people.  In the old days people were busy
surviving and did not have time for such frivolities.   And when you are a
public figure you are inviting projections.  As far as the general public is
concerned about a third think you are a saint and are happy to worship
you, a third don’t think anything and a third think you are a scoundrel
and are happy to vilify you.   I honestly do not care what people think.  I
am a good person. I live a righteous life. I help a lot of people and I
happen to know what I am talking about.  I have been a student of
Vedanta for forty years.  My teachers are the top Vedanta men in India,
Swami Chinmayananda and Swami Dayananda.  I am part of an ancient
lineage.   I invite any Neo-Advaita teacher to do dharma combat on the
topic of moksa and how to attain it…specifically the way to attain it…
assuming we can agree on a definition of moksa and have impartial rules
so that it does not end up being just opinions.   In the old days, the
society reveled in debate, controversy.  They had great debates that
lasted weeks with all the different spiritual teachers taking on each
other.  Controversy is healthy. 

Mind you there is nothing wrong

with peace and harmony.  I’m all
for hugs and kisses and the warm
fuzzy stuff.  But there is this
notion that spiritual life is about
living up to some kind of ideal,
living the life Christ or the Buddha
and the like.  The problem is that
nobody knows what Christ and the
Buddha were actually like.  
Everybody thought Mother
Theresa was a saint until her
letters were published
posthumously and people who
were out from under her thumb
started pointing out certain, shall
we say, 'flaws' in her personality. 
We are all damaged goods.  There
is a new book out on Ramana in
which it is suggested that he was
verbally abusive.  Maybe he was
and maybe he wasn’t. I personally
doubt it. But it has caused a big
fuss in some circles because it
contradicts the ideal, the myth we
have about enlightened beings. 
They are supposed to be saints. 
They are supposed to usher in the
Millennium when everyone will be
walking around with halos over
their enlightened heads hugging
and kissing everyone. Is life like
that?  Was it ever like that?  Will it
ever be like that? Human beings
are a mixed bag.  They have
wonderful qualities and not so
wonderful qualities.  Let them
express themselves as they
are.        

NDM: What about the belief

that enlightened people are
not judgmental or do not
criticize others?  That doing
this only proves that one has
"not arrived" yet?

James:   It is just a belief, but

there is some value to it,
particularly if you are attacking
just to attack and do not have any
logic to support your statements. 
But I do not think that enlightened
people are any more important
than rock stars or politicians.  We
are all playing some kind of roles
in this Divine Comedy and no role
is more important than any other. 
And people who speak out, like
Jesus, had better be able to take
the heat.  The world of human
beings is very beautiful and very
ugly.  It has always been this
way.  Trying to sweep the ugliness
under the carpet is not helpful.

As far as I am concerned, nobody

is getting anywhere.  Things are
 just as they are.  I actually believe
that to say you are enlightened…
that you have ‘arrived’ to use your
words…should be cause for
embarrassment and shame, not
celebration.  Why?  Because you
have always been awareness. 
When a morbidly obese person
looses four hundred pounds he or
she is heralded as an emblem of
courage and accomplishment.  But
is going back to normal an
accomplishment?  What about the
corruption that led the person so
far astray in the first place? 
Enlightenment is not the gain of a
special status, it is simply the
removal of ignorance.  Is this
cause for celebration?  It is not
correct to say that you are
enlightened or that you are
unenlightened.  Enlightenment has
nothing to do with you.  You are
that because of which
enlightenment is known.   

NDM: There seems to be a bit of a war

going on, regarding Vedanta and neo
advaita.  For example, Tony Parsons
said somewhere that Ramana Maharshi
was still living from duality or words to
that effect.  Even self enquiry is often
criticized and questioned  For example
this is from an interview with Jeff
Foster.

 Q:  So, it’s okay to continue to self

enquire?

Jeff Foster: "Yes, if you find yourself

engaged in that, then of course. If you find
yourself self-enquiring or playing pool, then
 that’s what’s happening. All I found
ultimately with self-enquiry was three words
and a question mark: WHO, AM, I, and a
question mark, that is all I found. All I found
was the question and what was seen was
that the question was already that, the
question was just arising in This. It didn’t
need an answer, no question needs an
answer. That is real Freedom."

NDM: What do you make of this

teaching? 

James:  Well, it is true from the self’s point

of view.  But so what?  This person does not
seem to understand that self inquiry is much
more that the question Who am I?  That the
Who am I question is just a clever sound
bite that is meant to encapsulate a vast
tradition of Vedic wisdom.  Self inquiry is
not a question, because the answer is well
known.  The answer is “I am limitless non-
dual ordinary actionless awareness.”  But
again, so what?  This is something to be
appreciated. The person who makes this
statement is probably just making it for his
own satisfaction, probably to make himself
look enlightened or profound, although it is
true from the self’s point of view.  Self
inquiry is a body of experienced based
knowledge that, when applied to a qualified
mind, gradually removes the doubts
standing in the way of the full assimilation
of the meaning of the statement, “I am
awareness.”  
NDM: What are your thoughts on neo advaitas position on free
will, dharma or karma?

1)  There is no free-will.

James: It is true if you look at the individual from the point of view of the
 total mind. It is apparently untrue from the point of view of the
individual. Apparently untrue means that as long as you take yourself to
be an apparent person, you are confronted with apparent choices in the
apparent reality. From the self’s point of view there is neither free will nor
the absence free will. It is illuminator of the idea of free will and no free
will. 

2)   There is no dharma or karma (no good or bad, no natural order,

and no consequences for one's actions)

James:  The same answer applies to these statements. This is a very

good example of one of the serious limitations of Neo-Advaita. It does not
take into account the apparent reality. It mindlessly denies the existence
of experience. It is actually karma to say that there is no free will. If
there is no karma, then how does this statement get made? And there is
definitely a consequence to this person’s statement; I am explaining what
is right and wrong about it. If there is no consequence, then why is this
person making the statement?  He is making it because he wants a
result. He wants us to think that what he says is the truth.   

Let me try to explain it.  I hope that some Neo-Advaita teacher with an
open mind reads this and thinks about it because it would be immensely
helpful, although it is only the first step to developing a serious means of
enlightenment. You cannot say that the world does not exist or that it is
unreal. Why? Because it is experienced. You have to exist to make that
statement and you cannot deny your own existence. At the same time
you cannot say that it is real either. Why? Because it does not last. The
definition of reality is ‘that which is unborn and eternal.” So what is the
world with its free will and karma etc? It is apparently real. The word is
mithya in Vedanta. It is one of the most important teachings and it is
completely lost on the Neos.

What does mithya mean?  It is real for you as long as you take yourself
to be something other than awareness. If it is real for me, then I am
going to need something more than the statement that it doesn’t exist to
make it apparently real for me.  Speaking like this without the means to
back it up is like asking people to believe in the tooth fairy. 

In this very rudimentary discussion of an important topic I did not attack

this person, although it may seem so. I have no idea who he is. He is just
a name associated with an idea. I attacked the idea. I did not willy nilly
slag it off and move on as if I was some kind of authority on the topic
whose word should be taken as gospel. I gave the reasons why it was OK
and why it was not OK. 

NDM: What about people that say things like karma, dharma and
free will is in the mind, made up by some characters named
Buddha, Christ,  Krishna and Shankara in a story.  That in essence
it’s all meaningless, futile, and hopeless and any meaning is
simply in the mind and so on?

James: This is an ignorant statement.   It actually makes me laugh.  But

let’s accept it.  It says some old fuddy duddies cooked up karma, dharma
etc and it is meaningless because it is only in the mind.  Isn’t the idea
that it is meaningless only in the mind too? If that is true, how can we
take it seriously?  

Turning the mind into a villain is another of Neo-Advaita’s extremely silly

teachings. The mind is a very useful instrument when it contains
knowledge that is in harmony with the nature of reality. When it is stuffed
with ignorance it is definitely a problem. But you do not get rid of the
problem by dismissing the mind. You cannot dismiss it. It is a fact. It is
consciousness functioning in the apparent reality. You handle the mind by
giving it discrimination so that it can separate what is real from what is
apparent. You have to educate it, cultivate it. The instant enlightenment
teaching of the Neos…transcend the mind, drop the mind, etc…is popular 
because it is meant to be ‘instant.’ I guess the idea is that you will just
wander into the satsang and ‘get it.’ Satsang is a great institution but the
way it has evolved in the West is a parody of a proper satsang. At best it
is a very skimpy and blunt tool that, because of its lack of methodology,
only adds to the mind’s confusion about the nature of enlightenment. It
does not remove the supposed villain in the piece. 

Vedanta is a complete science of enlightenment.  It has a cosmology, a

psychology and for want of a better term a theology.  It has a plethora of
methods for cultivating the mind…the yogas.  It deals with values and
ethics and love and every conceivable topic of interest to spiritually
inclined human beings.  All of human civilization, good and bad, was built
by the mind. You cannot just contemptuously dismiss it and hope to be
taken seriously. We owe a great debt of gratitude to the human mind.

Neo-Advaita picked up this teaching from traditional Vedanta.  It is called

neti neti, not this, not that. Bascially, all that Neo-Advaita has is neti neti,
but it is not actually properly understood by the teachers. Negating the
mind can take you quite a way, but it cannot close the deal because the
denial of the apparent reality is not tantamount to the hard and fast
realization “I am limitless non-dual ordinary actionless awareness.”  And
the removal of the apparent is not accomplished by believing in this
teaching, by mindless denial. It only comes about by intense self inquiry,
applying inquiry to everything that happens in you on a moment to
moment basis. 

This apparent reality teaching is quite sophisticated and I cannot do it

justice here. I deal with it carefully in my book. 

NDM: Here is another example on neo advaita and free will.

  "There is no such thing as free will or choice, there is no doing or

destiny, motive or purpose. The belief that there is a seeker
(subject) who has the free will to choose to self-enquire in order
to discover clarity (object) simply maintains the dreamer in the
hypnotic dream of separation."

James:  This is another half truth masquerading as truth. It is true from

the self’s point of view. But if there is no seeker, there is also no one
making this statement that there is no seeker. This contradicts
experience.  The one who is making this statement has exactly the same
order of reality that the imaginary seeker that is being denied. 

NDM: In chapter one of your book, you talk about people chasing
objects. Other people, love and so on and how this cannot bring
lasting happiness. That human beings are essentially controlled,
or governed as a result of their samskaras, vasansas, karma,
habits, conditioning and so on.

If there are all these pre-existing conditions, how much true free
will does a person who is not liberated have if almost everything
they do or say is done on auto pilot or in a state of sleep walking?

James: You have apparent choices in samsara and since you believe that
samasara is real, they seem like real choices for you. In this case, if you
feel a spiritual inclination, you should chose to follow it instead of worldly
impulses. But you really don’t have the choice to choose to be out of
samsara altogether because you do not know there is another alternative.

At a certain time in the lives of certain people, however, you get a

glimpse of another possibility, usually as a result of some kind of
existential trauma. At this point you know there is another way to see
things and at this point free will becomes real for you. But you still have
to exercise it to work your way out of samsara. Because of lack of real
knowledge many of the Neo-Advaita teachers…I won’t name names…
present the idea of determinism in such a way that a seeker can draw the
conclusion that even the decision to do sadhana is predetermined and so
the seeker conveniently uses the no-free will teaching as an excuse not to
do anything for his or her enlightenment. If you do not exercise the free
will you have to get out of samsara, according to the knowledge you have
at any stage, ‘grace’ will not descend because the self, being non-
coercive, will assume that the choice you exercised not to use your free
will was your exercise of free will and it will leave you as you are suffering
under the tyranny of your vasanas.

NDM: How much free will does a person who is liberated have and
what is the difference between a liberated persons free will and a
non-liberated persons free will?

James: The problem with this question is the idea that there is a liberated
person. Liberation means liberation from the person. This means that you
know you are awareness. Awareness is always free of everything. So the
idea of free will is not an issue for you.

But if you want to assume that liberation is something that some people
have and other’s don’t, then a liberated person’s free will is exercised
without the belief that he or she will be changed as a consequence of the
results flowing from the choices he or she makes. In other words, he or
she will not be attached to the fruits of his or her actions, whereas an
unenlightened person will be happy when the results are favorable and
unhappy when they aren’t. An enlightened person is happy with the self
alone.

NDM: Have you ever experienced nirvikalpa samadhi or

other types of samadhi and can you explain how does
samadhi help one to realize the true self.

James: Yes.  I have experienced every conceivable samadhi.

Samadhi can be a great help, a ‘raincloud of dharma’ to quote
Panchadasi or it can be a complete hindrance.  It is useful for
purifying the mind and preparing it for self knowledge.  If you
equate nirvikalpa Samadhi with liberation, you are really shooting
yourself in the foot.  It is a technical discussion and there is not
 time to go into it here. I go into it in my book, How to Attain
Enlightenment.  Second to the last chapter, I believe. 

NDM. When did you

first experience nirvana
and what was this like
for you?

James: It depends on
what you mean by
nirvana. We experience
thousands of mini
nirvanas through the year
when our minds become
resolved. So probably the
day I popped out of the
womb and suckled on my
mother’s breast. There is
a very nice sub-heading in
the third section of Tripura
Rahasya “On the
uselessness of fleeting
samadhis and the way
to wisdom.”

If you mean the ‘big

spiritual nirvana” again I
can’t recall, although the
first time I had an orgasm
probably qualifies.

Sorry for being purposely

obtuse, but if you mean
nirvalkapa Samadhi, it
was in my thirtieth year.
But then it would not be
accurate to say that I
experienced it, if you think
I am a person, an
experiencing entity,
because in that nirvana
you are not there to
experience it as a person.

If you mean savilkalpa

 Samadhi I experienced it
unconsciously on and off
for about three years from
twenty six to about twenty
eight. By unconsciously I
mean I did not know what
it was then but now that I
do I can look back and see
that did experience it. For
the next two years I
experienced it about 95%
of the time. Since my guru
erased the veil I am in
savikalpa Samadhi all the
time. It means nothing
however, except
continuous peace, because
I am not actually ‘in’
Samadhi. Samadhi is ‘in’
me. In other words, it is
an experience that
appears in me, because
the mind that I formerly
thought was ‘mine’ is
locked permanently on
me.

NDM. Can you please tell me about an epiphany that helped you
to realize the self and do you believe it’s possible to realize the
self without some kind of an epiphany?

James: Here is the passage from my autobiography, Mystic by Default,

that describes it in detail.

“Since I am not an accomplished writer and cannot describe my feeling of

self-loathing well, you will have to take it on faith that I finally hit bottom,
my consciousness peppered with thoughts of suicide. Then, on a lovely
tropical morning, after a drunken and debauched night with a woman
whose husband was out of town, I` was sluggishly lumbering through the
International Market Place on my way to the Post Office, the pavement
glistening from a light morning shower, the sun playing hide and seek
with big billowy clouds as the plumerias sprayed their erotic fragrance
and gentle trade winds rattled the palm fronds. I noticed a jaunty old
man, a vacationer or pensioner come to Hawaii to idly pass the sunset
years, appropriately attired in Bermuda shorts, aloha shirt, tennies and a
straw hat, perusing his mail as he ambled my way. As he got closer I
realized we were on a collision course and sent a message to my feet to
move left, but nothing happened! Panic stricken, I tried to move out of
the way a second time but the body wouldn’t respond!

I had completely lost control.

A couple of seconds before impact the bodies stopped face to face and I
heard a sweet voice speaking through me.
"Excuse me, sir, may I ask you a question?" it said.

Someone else had taken over!

Since I had no idea what the voice was about to say, I tried to apologize
but the words wouldn’t come.
I wasn’t connected at the mouth either!

The old man looked up, unaware of my distress, a kind smile on his
wrinkled face. "Yeah, sure, sonny, shoot."
Then the voice, flowing like nectar from a deep place within, resumed,
"Out of curiosity, sir, how old do you think I am?"
Since I already knew the answer and didn’t have the slightest interest in
the opinion of the doddering old codger, I was completely flabbergasted.

Certain that I was going mad, I ran frantically around inside my mind
looking for the control panel but reality, which had a mind of its own, was
completely uninterested.

The old man stepped back, pulled on his pipe, gave me the once-over,
and judiciously replied, "Well, sonny, I'd say you're forty-three."

A long history of untruth meant I could spot a lie a mile away; he was
deliberately underestimating my age to spare my feelings.
"Well, yes, thank you very much," the voice said sweetly.

"Don't mention it, sonny," he said, proceeding on his way.

I seriously considered the possibility I was losing my mind, but the

experience was permeated with such a sense of clarity, I didn’t indulge
my fear. And then I regained control and proceeded toward my mailbox,
the mind settling on the concerns of the day.

But as I entered the foyer I lost it again! Instead of proceeding into the
Post Office proper as programmed, the body confidently turned left,
entered the men's room and parked itself in front of a big mirror over the
wash basins, eyes glued straight ahead, feet welded to the floor.

"Oh no, not again! Am I flipping out?" I thought anxiously.

But I wasn’t going mad. I was having a good look, courtesy of God, at
what I had become. I don’t know how long I stood there, unable to move
a muscle - perhaps a full five minutes - aware but unaware of the stares
of the men coming and going, the flushing toilets and the irritating flicker
of the neon light over the mirror. But it didn’t matter because a brand
new world had miraculously opened up, an inner world illumined by a
powerful light in whose presence I saw every last bit of the sin and
corruption that I was.

The moment of truth in the post office lifted a monstrous weight, like Saul
on the road to Damascus. Though I still looked a wreck, overweight and
run-down, my face etched with deep pain lines, I felt young again,
inspired by the conviction that I might find an exit from my dark
labyrinth. And for the first time in my twenty-six years I realized there
was a compassionate God.”

Is it possible to realize the self without an epiphany?  Oh yes, definitely.

Epiphanies can be very useful or they can be a complete impediment. In
my experience about half the people who get moksa through Vedanta
have not had an epiphany.

It is what kind of experiences you have had in life that matter. It is how
you assimilate them, what they mean to you.
 

NDM. Do you think there is a neurological aspect to

enlightenment? For example some neuroscientists believe that
there are changes in the right amygdala and the left
hippocampus and other regions of the brain, such as the anterior
commissure, a bundle of nerves connecting the two cerebral
hemispheres.

James: I don’t know what they are trying to prove, but I bet that they
are in the ‘chemistry is destiny’ camp. So the answer is no. However, the
state of your mind, which is the result of your knowledge or ignorance,
does have an impact on your cells.

Vedanta says that these people, who are materialists with a dualistic
mentality, have got the cart before the horse. Consciousness causes
matter, not the other way around, although as I suggested, there is a
connection. But they are not equal principles. Matter is a subset of
consciousness. Their view, which purposely ignores common sense, is
that consciousness is a subset of matter.
 
NDM: What was your experience like living in a cave with a
python and your guru. Did you sleep on some kind of make
 shift bed, where did you get your food and water from?

James: I slept on the sand wrapped in my dhoti. Sadhus and local

kids brought me food and I sometimes walked to Laxman Jhoola to
get it myself. I drank from the Ganges. My guru was downstream a
couple of miles in his very comfortable ashram.

NDM. Do you believe there is there such a thing as a third eye

and is this connected to the pineal gland?

James: I suppose you mean a physical third eye? You have to read
Lobsang Rampa to find about about that . There is a chakra in the
third eye location between and slightly above the eyebrows, but what
it is meant to do I am not sure. In Vedanta we say that the scripture
is the third eye. It is knowledge that cures the disease of ignorance
that is the result of looking at the world with two eyes.

NDM. What is your take on the chakra system and can one be
enlightened if there are blockages or ethereal knots of some kind
in the chakras? Such as Brahma Granthi, Vishnu Granthi and the
Rudra Granthi?

Here is an email and my reply that deals with this question.

I have a question. When I was reading the book "Play of Consciousness"

by Swami Muktananda…maybe you have read the book also…it caused a
question. Swami is talking much about the Kundalini and the process of
awakening that snake energy so it can get up through your chakra's. He
is supposing that it is necessary to awaken the kundalini for getting
enlightenment. I searched your Vedanta-CD and found little about it. Just
in one of your satsangs you pointed something out which gave me some
more insight. But while I already had the idea of laying the question at
your feet, I still want to do. It might still help give me more stable view
at the topic. On the CD you said, "The Self is everything and everything is
the Self, so why bother working on kundalini? It will happen when it
needs to happen, and when it doesn't happen it doesn't need to happen."
Is that your answer? What use is it anyway?

James: What does it mean to say that the kundalini is awakened? When
most people think of kundalini they think of the incredible psycho-spiritual
‘mystical’ experiences that happen when the kundalini awakens and
passes through the charkas on its way to union with Shiva. Additionally,
people often believe that if these experiences do not happen in the way
that they have read about them or heard about them from others that
they will not get enlightened. So they take up certain practices that they
believe should initiate the shakti and start this process in motion. As they
are described these experiences are almost always incredible, fantastic,
and exotic. Considering that most people feel sensation-starved the they
are attracted by this kind of shakti sadhana.

But trying to wake up the kundalini is a little like the tail wagging the dog.
If they happen…and it is not necessary that they do happen for
enlightenment contrary to what Swami Muktananda says…they should be
the result of the spontaneous awakening of the kundalini.

The kundalini does not awaken in the same way in every person. It often
produces dramatic experiences but in most cases it does not. You can
assume that your kundalini is awakened if you have an interest in
religion, mysticism, meditation, etc. If you find yourself attracted to
chanting, reading holy books, associating with spiritual people, going on
pilgrimages, etc. then your kundalini is awakened. If you have
experienced altered states of consciousness it means your kundalini is
active.

What actually is the kundalini? It is the Self creating experiences that

shake you up and cause you to seek answers to the basic existential
questions: what is this world and who am I? The kundalini of everyone in
the so-called ‘spiritual’ world is active to varying degrees; they all have
had ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystical’ experiences that have caused them see the
world and themselves in a different way. It is not giving you experiences
just for the fun of it.

An awakened kundalini is not enlightenment. It just means that the mind

has become somewhat subtle and can now experience ‘inner’ states, not
just sense objects, emotions and thoughts. These inner experiences are
of every imaginable type, positive and negative, gross and subtle. The
type of experience that an individual has depends on the nature of his or
her vasanas when the kundalini wakes up. What cause her to wake up?
Usually the person has had enough worldly experience. They are fed up
with the world, bored perhaps. They know there is nothing in it but they
don’t know where to go. The Self is awaiting for this to happen. When it
does it illumines the latent vasanas for spiritual experience and
something dramatic happens…one’s life starts to flow in a different
direction.

There is nothing mystical about the ‘chakras.’ They are just general
categories of experience. For example sexual energy means that the
kundalini is associated with the root charka and this causes creativity and
sexual desire, is a gross desire for union. An experience of great power
means that the kundalini is associated with the manipura charka. An
experience of universal love means that the kundalini is associated with
the heart chakra, the anahata. And so on. Spiritual literature is full of
these experiences. You may have read “Mystic by Default,’ my
autobiography. In it there are many ‘kundalini’ experiences. In fact every
experience that we have, inner or outer is kundalini, the Self in the form
of matter and energy. It is important for a spiritual person not to turn the
idea of kundalini into a big romantic fascination. Ninety nine percent of
people, Eastern and Western, who are practicing ‘kundalini’ yoga are not
qualified for kundalini sadhana and will not see it through to the end. In
fact most of the ‘kundalini’ sadhanas you find in the West are not proper
kundalini sadhana at all. The kundalini symbolism is very beautiful and
very dramatic and mysterious and so people are attracted to it. It has
become a fashion now and almost completely corrupted by the
Westerners.

Enlightenment is the knowledge “I am the Self, limitless awareness.” It is

the hard and fast knowledge that all my experiences are me but I am
something more than my experiences, subtle and gross. Kundalini Yoga
says the enlightenment is the union of shakti and shiva, the energy of
Consciousness, the Self, with Pure Consciousness. So the next question
is: what is this ‘union?’ Supposedly it is an experience in which the
subject and the object ‘become’ one. This tempts us to ask: what is this
‘becoming?’ A ‘becoming’ means that something that was in one form
before changes into another form. To use the yogic metaphor, the
individual soul that ‘merges’ into the universal soul. In short, something
limited inadequate and incomplete ‘becomes’ limitless adequate and
whole. This is all very fine as an idea but it presents a very real problem:
experience, ‘becoming’ is subject to change. It never stops changing. This
means that there is no such thing as a ‘permanent experience.’

So what happens is that the person who ‘became’ the Self, ‘unbecomes’
the Self after the experience of union has run its course. This is what one
might call ‘temporary’ Self realization. These temporary Self realizations
or ephiphanies are useful in so far as they give the experiencer an idea
that there is a Self (Shiva) and maybe some insight into its nature. But, if
the person believes that enlightenment is the ‘permanent experience of
the Self’ he or she will simply develop a vasana for Self experience by
practicing a sadhana designed to produce Self experience. There are
many sadhanas beside kundalini sadhana that give experience of the Self.
In fact sports, accidents, sex, and many fear related activities produce
Self experience. Any practice that you do with great faith, concentration,
and devotion will awaken the kundalini and produce a ‘spiritual’
experience. But you should know that if something wakes up it will
definitely go back to sleep. This is karmic law. This is why you have so
many frustrated people in the spiritual world. However, if you pursue the
sadhana that awakens kundalini with incredible intensity, day and night
without a break, forgoing every worldly attachment and desire, the mind,
which is what is waking up, will eventually become so energized with
shakti that it will only fall back to sleep for very short periods. This is
important because most of the time it is in direct contact with the Self
and this is desirable if you want Self knowledge. This is why the yoga
shastras encourage the pursuit of a sattvic mind. Remember, the Self is
not awake because it was never asleep. It is the awareness of waking and
sleep. It is the knower of the mind. It is the knower of the kundalini. So
as the Self you are already beyond the kundalini. It will not turn you into
the Self…I think this is what people believe. They think they will be
‘transformed’ into the Self, like a larva becomes a butterfly…but this is
just imagination.

Nonetheless, this sadhana is so severe that only one person in ten million
can practice it successfully. The desire for liberation has to be one
hundred percent. If you have even a small attachment to your body or to
worldly things it will not work.

Vedanta questions the whole idea underlying yoga. It says that the
problem with this ‘union’ idea is: anything that was caused by action,
karma, will only last for a finite time. When the energy that generated the
experience plays out the experience ends and one returns to a state of
separation, limitation and incompleteness. Kundalani is a karmic force. It
is the Self operating in time. It may lead you to the Self or it may lead
you far away. It may even cause madness in people who are weak
minded. Much of the mild insanity you see in spiritual people is caused by
their inability to integrate their spiritual experiences into everyday life. So
the kundalini, the energy of the Self, is a very mixed bag and not
something to be sought after. If it comes, it comes and you must learn
how to deal with it. But rather than cultivate it, it is better to cultivate
devotion for God. Yes, bhakti is a dualistic path, just like kundalini, but
cultivating love for the Self in some form is more natural than forcing the
body and mind to do a lot of very complicated and potentially dangerous
practices. Vedanta says that experiential sadhanas may purify the mind
but they will not produce enlightenment. This is so because
enlightenment is the removal of Self ignorance. Experience will not
remove ignorance. Only the knowledge that arises with experience can do
that. If you don’t know this you can have all sorts of amazing mystical
experience and be as Self ignorant as an animal.

Vedanta says that there are not two separate selves that must become
one. It says that there is only one Self that has been misunderstood to be
two or many. Now, who is it that misunderstands that he or she is
separate from the Self? Is it the kundalini? It is not the kundalini, the
shakti, because the kundalini is not conscious. Activated by the Self it
moves, it changes and causes all sorts of things to happen but it does not
know anything. It has (is) a strong feeling that it is missing something
and so it works its way through many experiences (the charkas) seeking
for freedom from this sense of limitation. This is not a conscious seeking.
It is trial and error. Sometimes it goes into a positive experience (Pingala
nadi) and sometimes it goes into a negative experience (ida nadi) (I may
have these names reversed). And it can get stuck in an experience which
is very pleasureable or very painful. That it gets stuck indicates that is it
ignorant, unconscious. It foolishly clings to pleasureable experiences
because it doesn’t realize that experience is changeable and that the
pleasure will eventually disappear. When it gets stuck in a painful
experience, this shows that it doesn’t have discrimination or it would have
avoided the experience in the first place. Discrimination is the most
important function of consciousness. Without it you cannot function in
this world nor can you separate the pure Self from the moving Self, the
kundalini shakti. Kundalini is just a force, a power, an energy. It is not
real. The Self alone is real. Yes, the kundalini is the Self but the Self is
not (only)the kundalini.

So who is it that takes his or herself to be limited? Who is it that wants to

erase this sense of limitation and is therefore open to the seductive
message of kundalini yoga? The common answer is that it is the ego. But
Vedanta says there are not two selves, a higher enlightened Self and a
lower ignorant ego Self. There is only one Self.

Now we come to the most difficult thing to understand. If there is only

one Self and this Self always knows who it is, i.e. that it is limitless and
whole and therefore does not need any particular experience to erase its
sense of limitation and make it whole, how can it forget who it is?

Vedanta says that it can’t forget but that it can forget. Or to put it
another way it says that there is only one Self, pure Awareness, and that
this Self is capable of both knowledge and ignorance. It would not be
limitless if it were unable to be ignorant. This capability of being two
opposite things at once is called Maya. The definition of Maya is: that
which is not. You can see the problem in the definition. How can
something that is not, be? Well, strangely, it can.

Now the question that arises with reference to the process of experience,
which we can call kundalini, is: does the experience of union with the Self
erase ignorance and produce knowledge? Knowledge means that you
understand that you are whole, complete, limitless and free. And the
answer is that it may produce knowledge and it may not produce
knowledge. Whether it produces knowledge or not depends on what you
think enlightenment is. If you think enlightenment is the permanent
experience of the Self then you will not ‘get enlightened.’ You will
experience oneness, wholeness, and limitlessness for a time and that
experience will wear off and you will then experience duality,
incompleteness and limitation once again. This is why kundalini yoga and
all the other yogas rarely bring about enlightenment.

But it is possible for yogis to get enlightened if they develop inquiring

minds as a result of their spiritual experiences. When the experience of
oneness happens one needs to remain alert and try to determine what
one is actually experiencing. This is what Vedanta calls inquiry. If you are
trained to observe and draw the correct conclusions from your
observations you will see that the ‘oneness’ that you are experiencing is
you, not some incredible state of consciousness, unless you understand
that incredible state of consciousness to be you, the seer, the
experiencer. If you understand that what you are experiencing is you,
you have freed yourself of experience. You never have to practice yoga
again. Why? Because when are you not you? How far are you from you?

What kind of knowledge is it? It is immediate ‘experiential’ knowledge.

This means that when ignorance tries to rise up and tell you that you are
missing something and you see your desires being activated, you have a
good laugh and can let the whole process of desire die before it produces
karma. It means you are the master of your mind, not the other way
around.

Is it possible to ‘attain’ enlightenment without an awakened kundalini as

it is presented in the kundalini shastras? Yes, absolutely. Is it common.
Enlightenment according to Vedanta is the removal of Self ignorance
brought about by the understanding that the Self is limitless actionless
awareness and that I am that Self. I have met perhaps twenty
enlightened people whose kundalini was not active in that it was not
producing mind altering inner experiences. I have also met at least one
hundred people who were having intense kundalini experiences…
sometimes for many years…and who were actively seeking ways to turn
the experience off…since it completely disrupts one’s life. You won’t be
able to accomplish anything solid or real in the world with this going on.
It is too disturbing and it often has a strong negative impact on the
people you come in contact with. You say and do things that make
normal people think you are nuts. And in a way you are. The spiritual
world is full of peole who have had it going on for varying periods and it
does not rise up and ‘mate’ with Shiva. It just bounces around in the
chakras. Shakti sadhanas can be very dangerous without the right
teacher and the right karmic situation.

It is also important to know that kundalini does not generate the same
experiences for everyone. It generates the experiences that are
necessary to stimulate inquiry. Certain people have developed very subtle
minds as a result of the way they have lived. So for these people the Self
as kundalini awakens inquiry, leads them to a jnani, and their ignorance
is removed by the non-dual teachings. Their enlightenment is in no way
inferior to the people who have realized who they are during or after an
intense kundalini sadhana. Enlightenment is enlightenment; it has
nothing to do with the way it came about. Ramana, for example, did not
practice kundalini sadhana although his kundalini was obviously active; it
produced his ‘death’ experience. He is an example of a yogi who had an
inquiring mind and practiced vichara, Self inquiry, not kundalini sadhana.
Muktananda does say that enlightenment can only come through
kundalini sadhana but he knew that this was not true. He was very smart
about psychology and he was trying to build a big religion…Siddha Yoga…
and it does not help to give people too eclectic a view of enlightenment…it
just confuses them…so you say it is the only way. It is very much like the
Christians who say Jesus is the only way. Well, Jesus may be ‘a’ way but
the only way? I don’t think so. The same with Kundalini. It may work…
there is no sense putting it down…but I would bet my bottom dollar that
of all the enlightenments that happened since the beginning of time not
more than one or two percent were the result of a classic kundalini
sadhana. Look at all the great enlightened people that have come out of
Buddhism and other paths…and they are not talking kundalini.

The truth is that everyone is basically in love with experience and this is
all we have to our credit when we awaken. But experience is only as good
as one’s ability to understand it. So when you begin consciously searching
you are naturally drawn to yoga because it promises a spectacular
experience that is supposed to solve all problems. In a way this is true
but in another way it is not true.

What should happen when you take up an experiential sadhana like

kundalini is that your mind should become subtle and inquiry should start
to happen. But what usually happens is that you get addicted to
experience. You want to meditate all day and go into traces and have
transcendental experiences. You want to hang out with powerful gurus
and get shaktipat, etc. And so you build up a vasana for experience and
you fantasize the big one…enlightenment…which you always imagine is
just around the corner. It’s like going to Las Vegas and pulling the long
arm of one of those big slot machines. You pay and pull and pay and pull
and in your mind every minute you are waiting for the big Ka-Ching! and
a flood of money to bury you. It never happens. All that happens is that
you get a big experience vasana.

Question: How do you see kundalini and trying to work with that in
relation to Vedanta and Self-knowledge. "The Self is everything and
everything is the Self, so why bother with working on kundalini? It will
happen when it needs to happen, and when it doesn't happen it doesn't
need to happen". Is that your answer? But what is
the use of it anyway?

Ram: I would not advise ‘working on kundalini.’ Vedanta says that

kundalini is just another name for the Self. So everything is already
kundalini. Every experience you have is kundalini, the shakti. Why limit it
to a particular set of experiences or a particular process? You can have all
sorts of amazing experiences and never learn anything about who you are
and you can also have very boring ordinary experiences and suddenly
understand who you are … because you were thinking clearly. If you had
a certain experience and you found yourself walking out of the house
without saying goodbye to your family and getting on a plane that was
going somewhere and when you got off you met a strange man in a café
who invited you home and you started to spontaneously perform kriyas
and have visions and felt amazing things taking place within yourself then
that would be kundalini and you would be into it and there would be no
question of ‘working on it.’ It is not something you work on. It is
something that happens. And it is not something that needs to happen.
So don’t long for it and imagine that you are spiritually incomplete unless
you have had it happen. I had it happen and it all stopped many years
ago and I am very happy that it all stopped.

You - the Self - are the source of the energy. Without you there is no
energy. You are not this little body/mind instrument that perks up with
the influx of energy and wilts when the energy leaves. Kundalini is a very
fickle bitch. She is completely unfaithful and inconstant. One minute she
is seducing you and driving you wild with passion and the next minute
she abandons you without so much as a by-your-leave and you end up
angry and depressed. Aim for shanti, it beats shakti every time.”

NDM:  Can someone be

enlightened/liberated if their
Sahasrāra (Crown Chakra) is not
opened?

James: Yes, of course. This presupposes

that enlightenment is some kind of special
experience that depends on certain
conditions. Enlightenment is the nature of
the self, meaning it is the nature of
everyone. The question of enlightenment
can be solved very simply when you
understand this. As I said above, it does
not depend on your experience. It
depends on how you assimilate or
interpret your experience. If you
understand the value of understanding
and how ignorance works and you expose
your mind to a valid means of knowledge
like Vedanta, that is all that is required for
moksa. Westerners have almost no idea
of the great Vedanta sampradaya and of
the many people that gain enlightenment
through it.

NDM: Buddhism has the eightfold

path that addresses moral issues.
such as right view, speech, thoughts,
conduct, occupation, concentration,
mindfulness and so on. What does
Vedanta have to say on moral and
ethical issues such as these?

James:  It agrees with Buddhism

completely on these issues as indirect and
secondary means of enlightenment.  

NDM: What are your thoughts on

other paths of enlightenment like
Buddhism, Sufism, and Christian
Gnosticism?  Do you believe that they
all lead to the same place?

James:  I don’t have any beliefs.  I do not

know.  I fell into Vedanta when I was very
young.  It finished my search and I have
had no interest in other paths.  They may
work. I have met many enlightened
people all over the world who did not
come through any of the traditional
means.  In the end, it is an individual
thing. If you are completely fed up with
samsara and you earnestly strive to be
free, the self will see to it that you realize
who you are irrespective of your karmic
situation.  Why? Because it is actually the
self waking up to itself and it its will
cannot be denied.    
NDM: What is the difference between sin and negative karma? 

James:  None, in practice.  The word ‘sin’ means to miss the mark.  It
means that when you take the self to be the body/mind entity, you have
missed the mark.  That is to say, you failed to see yourself as you are, as
awareness.  When this happens you make  many dumb choices that lead
to inappropriate and untimely actions which fructify as unpleasant
experiences.  
NDM: What is the difference between Khrisna, Christ and Buddha
consciousness?

James: It depends on what you mean by consciousness.  Krishna, Christ

and Buddha were supposedly people that realized they were
consciousness but we have no way of knowing whether they did or not
because they are not here to testify to their realization.  Vedanta says
that there is only consciousness appearing in many forms.  So in that
sense they are just forms of consciousness who supposedly realized that
they were consciousness. 

 
NDM:   What about attaining knowledge from the self
through gnosis, insight and not just from external sources
such as gurus or teachers.

James:  Yes, indeed. There is no one way.  It can happen in any

way.  It is not really up to the person because there really isn’t
someone other than the self.  So when, for whatever reason, the
self gets fed up living in an ignorant form, it will wake up and
realize who it is irrespective of the situation. Because I have been
more or less sheltered in the great Vedanta sampradaya and know
of many of the many successful inquiries in that world I have not…
until about six or seven years ago when I put up shiningworld…
had much knowledge of enlightenment outside of the tradition. 
But the website attracts maybe eight or ten enlightened people a
year.  I almost always manage to get their stories and it turns out
that it does happen quite frequently outside of any established
tradition…all over the world.  Some make perfect or near perfect
scores on my enlightenment quiz. 

NDM:  Doesn't the Self, the sat guru, also shine light on the
ignorance of the mind? 

James: I’m not sure what the import of the question is.  Perhaps you are
implying that nothing needs to be done, that the self will just do it
without any outside assistance?  Yes, it can.  But the problem with this
argument is that the self is not a person who is suffering under the spell
of ignorance.  It is the illuminator of ignorance.  And it is just as happy
with ignorance as it is with knowledge.  It views everything equally.    It
does not need to enlighten itself because it is already enlightened.  

If it suffers under the spell of apparent ignorance and thinks it is a

suffering person, it will have to invoke itself (see how silly this sounds…
but that’s Maya!) to generate an awakening.  Usually the best way for it
to do this is to ‘hit bottom.’  That gets its attention and starts the process
of evolution.  A proper teacher and a valid teaching is helpful because not
everyone has the purity and maturity to inquire and remove his or her
own ignorance.   Many people do 99% of the work on their own and then
show up at the feet of a teacher for the finale.  This type is well suited for
Vedanta and can finish the search in a very short time.

NDM: Isn't the self the source of infinite knowledge, and

intelligence?      

James:  The self in its capacity as Isvara, God, is infinite knowledge, and
intelligence.  It has all qualities.  But if reality is non-dual, then there is
no such thing as the creation and no knowledge, power, desire, etc. 
These things apparently exist as long as ignorance is operating, but the
self is free of them.  So it is “beyond’ God, beyond the limitless creation.
It is that because of which limitlessness and limitation are known.  You
cannot actually say what it is or that it is the source of anything.

For more info visit www.shiningworld.com

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do
not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored
by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found
written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely
on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in
traditions because they have been handed down for many
generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find
that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good
and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”  
Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha

welcoming the totality

“Separation can exist only between two perceived objects” - Francis Lucille
 
Welcome the totality of it [all], the sensations in your body, the sound of my voice and the birds, your
thoughts. All of that is at a zero distance from you. All of that is in you.

Even if you create the thought that there is someone who is separate from that as the observer or the
perceiver, this thought itself is one more appearance from which you are not separate.

Recognize the immediacy of all appearances as a fact. The separation comes after the fact, as an interpretation
of the fact. Separation can exist only between two perceived objects, between a chair and a table, for instance.
But how can we talk about separation between something that we perceive and something that we don't
perceive? Between something that is perceived and that which perceives? In order to see, to establish such a
separation, we should be able to perceive the perceiver, to see it as separate from the perceived. And that is
not possible.

Ask yourself, In my experience, do I stand separate from that which I perceive? Your experience is the only
point of reference in deciding this question. We are not talking about philosophy here but about perception,
how we perceive the body and the world, our life itself. It may sound theoretical but it isn't. It is only
practical. Practicality demands that we eliminate anything that has no purpose, no meaning and which is a
waste of energy. Any activity, thought or feeling based upon the illusion of separation is such an unnecessary
burden. And that is especially true of the way we perceive the body and of the way we perceive the world.

We can perceive the body and the world free from any psychological interference, free from the
superimposition of a 'me', from fear and desire, from like and dislike. See just the facts, the facts of the world,
of the body, of the mind as they arise.

See also the tendency of fixation of the attention either in some form of thought running in circles or some
form of bodily sensation, a localization of the body. The mind always wants to have something, some object
to chew on. The restlessness of the mind has to be completely seen.

That which triggers this activism is often a sense of lack, a compulsion. We have to welcome it completely at
the feeling level. The way to welcome it is to give it the space and the time it needs to unload its
psychological content. We can meet those fixations in the body with total indifference. The last thing we want
to do is to try to eliminate them, to work on them, to interfere with them.

The peace of our true being doesn't get revealed by the elimination of objects, but rather through our
overlooking of the objects, through this dispassionate welcoming. The object being contemplated with this
indifference liberates the awareness, makes it available to itself.

That which is perceived is part of the mind and we don't share it with others. That which we share is not
perceived. It is the perfume.
It is the perfume of the seer knowing itself, of seeing knowing seeing, of seeing seeing seeing. When we are
among truth lovers and when seeing seeing seeing----in other words, seeing that sees itself----takes place, we
all feel pulled inside by this seeing in which there is nothing to be seen.

It is very mysterious how this silence propagates. It comes from the inside.

~ Francis Lucille