*** Read Part 2 *** *** Go to Part 1 ***
13. You then talk about:“the collapse into not-knowing, the profound mystery…”I don’t know (!) what this means – sounds a bit too mystical for me.
– Well, I suppose those words do sound a bit mystical! I’m talking about the huge relief, the liberation, the sense of freedom when the mind’s endless search for something MORE than the present moment dies down, and there is only what is, and nothing more. It’s the “profound mystery” because nothing can be known about it.
OK, I’m happy with ‘relief’ and ‘liberation’ but I would use ‘fascination’ instead of ‘mystery’ – after all, ‘I amThat’. ‘Not-knowing’ is quite misleading.
14. “If anything, I’m saying the exact opposite, that the Mystery could NEVER be contained in ANY belief (especially simplistic neo-advaita beliefs!) ”Words never ‘contain’ the ‘mystery’, but they can be used to point to it. “Everything is here right now” does not provide any pointers that might overcome the essential ignorance.
– Yes, words as pointers….of course.
15. Talking about the traditional approach, you say:“God knows, it helped me back in the day.”If it helped you, what makes you think that anyone else can ‘get it’ without similar help?
– Well, this is the paradox. In the story of “Jeff”, there were many practices and rituals and self-enquiries that appeared to help. BUT all of that is just a story, a memory, happening now. My whole life is just a memory. Just a thought. And any idea of a solid person there who is “having” these thoughts is just another thought. “Thoughts without a thinker” as the Buddhists would say. But that’s not to deny the apparent thinker!
Sorry, Jeff, but this is where you start to lose me. And this is what I mean by neo-advaitin teaching – “all just a story”. The practices either helped or they didn’t. I don’t dispute that there isn’t actually a ‘thinker’ as such, i.e. we cannot choose to have a particular thought but there is no denying the empirical validity of a person to whom those thoughts occur. In practical terms ‘you’ are communicating ‘your’ thoughts and ‘I’ am communicating ‘mine’, regardless of the fact that this is all just the movement of name and form on the ‘surface of the absolute’. The absolute cannot have a conversation with itself; conversations take place in time between persons – why pretend otherwise when it only misleads and confuses? Basically, you cannot deny the first-person perspective while you are still operating through a body-mind.
16. You then go on to say:“the seeking always aimed at a future… a future that never came” .But presumably it has come, now. Again, why do you say that the traditional approach is unnecessary if it helped you to get to where you are now?
– I never said it was unnecessary. It’s wonderful, traditions are wonderful. And I’d encourage anyone who wanted to go off and follow any tradition, to read all the books they can find, to meditate and do a million things. But all of this implies a future, implies that we have time. We could die tomorrow. I work in a hospice, and many people there only have a few days to live, maybe only a few hours. What then comes of our plans for a future enlightenment? None of us are guaranteed a tomorrow. This moment is all we are guaranteed. And so how precious this is. Tradition is wonderful, but it assumes a tomorrow. And tomorrow is only a thought. And yes, looking back, it appears as though the past brought us to the present. But really, there is only the present and the past is always a memory.
You are playing with metaphysical ideas and confusing absolute and empirical again. You switch the kettle on in anticipation of making a cup of tea a few minutes later. You advertise forthcoming satsangs and so on. It would be hypocritical to deny the validity of the concept of time at the empirical level. Of course many people will embark on a spiritual path and die before they complete it. But the knowledge that might be imparted/gained over many years on a traditional path cannot be transmitted by a few words, however much we ‘live in the now’. And ‘living in the now’ does not in itself remove self-ignorance.
17. You say that:“this message has nothing to do with any sort of denial.”But you just denied that any striving is necessary because the ‘happiness is always freely available’.
– Dennis, from one perspective striving is necessary, of course. And from another it’s completely futile, because this moment is all we have, and striving is just another desire, another aim for the ego. Sometimes I express one viewpoint, sometimes another, it depends on the context. I would deny neither perspective.
I thought you said the message has nothing to do with denial! Don’t you see that you are confusing levels? Time is only meaningless at the absolute level. As soon as you have a mind, you have cause and effect and time and space and all these are as real as they can be from that perspective. As for the striving, we dealt with this in 9.
18. Finally, you say that:“if that’s neo-advaita, I want nothing to do with it!” I’m still not clear how, essentially, your message differs from this. It is all about denying the relative reality and trying to impose the absolute reality before the mind of the seeker is ready to accept it.
– I would never try to impose an absolute reality – that would completely go against the message.
But you are, as I have pointed out above.
I have never claimed anything about my “teachings”, and indeed I don’t really consider myself a teacher.
But the seekers who attend your talks and read your book do consider you to be a teacher and that is what counts!
The words come out, and they attempt to express what is going on over here. If they resonate with others, great, and if they don’t, great. I know you think that what I write is of no use to the seeker. But I receive emails and phone calls all the time saying how helpful the book has been, how people feel calm and clear after reading it, how frustration dies away and the search for something “more” is seen to be futile, and how this gives way to an ease of living and a peacefulness which underlies everything else, and the “enlightenment” sought for a lifetime is seen to be ever-present.
I don’t dispute this but I’m afraid they are deluding themselves. There may be ease and peace etc. for a while but this is not knowledge. The basic ignorance is still there because there has been no new knowledge to remove it and it will re-assert itself all too soon. Then the suffering will return. There is a danger too, then, of additional frustration or a sense of hopelessness. If they believe they have actually had all there is to get, but are still suffering, what hope is there?
I’m not saying this to boast or to make myself out as anything, just to point out that paradoxically this message CAN be helpful, as the seeking mind finally, after a lifetime of searching, of believing the present moment isn’t enough, dies down and the perfection of what is, is all there is.
Ah! You are citing a special case here. I agree that it is possible for a message such as yours to ‘tip the balance’ for a long-term seeker. But I suggest that the majority of seekers you encounter are not long-term (or even medium-term).
But of course, many people don’t like the message, and want to go out and seek, and that’s wonderful too, and I mean this genuinely. I’d never ever want to stop anyone from seeking, and I’d never deny that seeking happens or any such nonsense, and I’m sorry if you’ve read this into what I’ve written. I just wonder sometimes whether this whole seeking business is not just a nice distraction, to give the mind something to do. Because the last thing the mind wants to do is give up. It craves the known, it craves classifications and building up knowledge and following the latest teachings. And this is wonderful and I’m not denying it.
But the words you use do not convey this message – ‘any such nonsense’, ‘nice distraction’, etc. Seekers come to listen to you and read your book because they believe that you know something that they don’t and they listen to the things that you say and absorb them. They are bound to come away with the impression that seeking is a waste of time.
But all this knowledge, it pales in comparison to the awesome perfection of this moment – to this cup of tea, to this little bug crawling across the floor, to the flower that the Buddha is holding up in front of us. The mind desperately wants to KNOW about the flower, and could spend a thousand years building up that knowledge. But to SEE the flower, how long does that take? Do we really need years of seeking to see the flower? That flower is the end of it all. I fear that with all our classifications, our philosophical systems, our claims of being enlightened and being the Big Self, our practices and rituals and complex systems of thought, we lose sight of the flower. 😉
What flower? There is no such entity – read my essay on‘What is advaita?’
https://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/definitions/advaita.htm
Concluding Remarks
Thanks for your replies, I find it fascinating to hear your views, and I’ve learned a lot about your “traditional” approach and how it differs from the “neo-advaita” approach. I am not all that familiar with all the terminology so it’s been very useful. Both approaches have much in them, but from over here, both seem to miss the point entirely, and so I’m not sure it would be useful to carry on debating in this way. Krishnamurti once said that ‘truth is a pathless land’, and I don’t believe that truth could ever be captured by any process or practice or tradition or set of concepts, however wonderful they are (and they are wonderful – without our traditions the world would be a very dull place indeed). And the mind could go on and on, arguing over which tradition is correct, which concept is the clearest – and how the mind loves knowledge! – but again I fear that this completely misses the point.
But that’s just the experience over here, and I’d never want to stop anyone from doing anything they wanted to, to gain whatever they wanted to gain, whether that be “enlightenment” or a million pounds in the bank. And over here, it is seen that the search for something more only ever implied that the present moment wasn’t enough, and there was something to get in the future. Seeking implies a future goal. And how the mind loves to create and pursue goals. But then again, goals are fine, and I would never stop anyone from pursuing their goals, if that’s what they wanted. And indeed, in the life story of Jeff, there were once a million goals to pursue. But once again, I’m not saying this to make “Jeff” seem special in any way (he’s far from special!), just to say that the book “life without a centre” came out of these experiences, and it was in no way written to try and convince anyone of anything, or to win any arguments, or to convert anyone to a new way of thinking. God knows, there are enough books like that in the world, enough people trying to win arguments, enough disagreements, enough of the “I know!” mind….I’d love to carry on our conversation but I think it’s going to get way too long and confusing, even with the color coding, so I’d suggest that maybe you’d like to have a chat on the phone one day? Best wishes my friend, and I really have enjoyed this.
Jeff 😉