Awakening Clarity

A Spiritual Sampler

by

Fred Davis

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 © 2013 Fred Davis

Awakening Clarity Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any

means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, taping, or by an information storage retrieval system
without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in
critical articles, reviews, or promotional media.

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 Also by Fred Davis

The Book of Undoing: Direct Pointing to Nondual Awareness

Beyond Recovery: Non-Duality and the Twelve Steps

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 This little book is dedicated to the readers of my website,
Awakening Clarity, all of whom are actively engaged in
recognizing and living as their True Nature.
This activity is the single most important thing we can do
for ourselves, for all beings, and for our planet.
I admire you, each and every one.

I also extend my profound gratitude to my family,

who sacrifice their time with me so that it can be spent with you.
Thank you, dear Betsy, Willy, Henry & Dickens. I love you all.

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5
Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
CLARITY IS A TWO-WAY STREET
A FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON
HEY, AM I AWAKE YET, OR WHAT?
SOLVING THE AWAKENING PUZZLE
BEING BEING
NONDUAL FAQ

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 INTRODUCTION

About Awakening Clarity

The articles in this little booklet first appeared, in a slightly different form, as posts for
my website, Awakening Clarity, which I typically refer to as simply AC. They are not
organized here in any special order. All of them relate, in one way or another, to
spiritual awakening. So do most of my waking hours. We could say that awakening is
sort of what I do.

Most hours of most of my days are spent either reading, writing, or talking either on
Skype or in my living room to clients about spiritual awakening, a.k.a. that most
charged of words, enlightenment. I may be the least likely spiritual teacher since St.
Augustine. I was a practicing alcoholic for most of thirty-five years, which didn't leave
a lot of time left over for me to be a thoughtful, sensitive guy. So as often as not I was
a jerk instead.

The short-short story is that I got sober in 2000 and had my own largish spiritual
awakening in 2006. I spent several years trying to orient to this new way of seeing
and being, and began to teach a bit locally in 2010. There wasn't much interest here
in South Carolina, so my experience was quite limited. Nonetheless, much to my
delight and surprise, most of the few people who would take me seriously and listen to
me in an open way came to recognize their true nature.

In 2010 I was still of the mindset that awakening was rare and difficult. Percentage-
wise to the population, it may still be fairly rare, but it sure doesn't have to be. I now
help clients wake up every month, lots of them. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I
quickly ran out of potential victims, and teaching everything from scratch one-on-one
was clearly terribly inefficient. All I noticed was the problem; I had no solution. Until I
did.

On July 30 of 2011 I sat down at my desk to do some work, I thought, for my little
book company. I have a secondary career, which until recently was my primary
career, as an online bookseller. I remember very well that I sat down at 9:00 p.m. on
that Sunday night. I don't remember much about the next seven hours other than
there was a great flurry of activity. I stood up seven hours later, at 4:00 a.m. on July
31, as the proud creator of a new blog.

Let me share a little more detail. When I sat down that night I knew absolutely
nothing about a blog. Nothing. I had always thought running a website was some sort

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of High Magic. If that were true, Awakening Clarity wouldn't exist. Fortunately,
Google's Blogger software is fairly idiot-friendly.

Now, I say that I stood up as the creator of a blog. That may be a bit of an
overstatement. I stood up as the maker of a complete mess, but it was a mess with
borders, some photos and an initial blog post, "Welcome to Awakening Clarity". I was
then and still am a long way from being a skilled computer technician, but the one
thing I had always had both a talent and passion for was writing. For the next few
months it became almost impossible to remember to eat and sleep. It was like being
the parent of an infant who refused to sleep. I ate whatever was quick, easy, and
hopefully portable, and I slept when exhaustion overcame willfulness. I ran my book
business the best I could, but my focus was now turned to the blog that didn't earn a
dime, rather than the business that supported my fragile lifestyle. I just couldn't
think about much else.

Now, I love my wife with depth and passion. I am absolutely crazy about her, and
always have been. Nonetheless, she didn't see much of me for the next six or eight
months—other than the back of my head as I sat at my desk writing, editing and
tweaking. We still had Date Night every Wednesday, but she often brought me home
early so that I could work on the Great Passion. Betsy also helped me a great deal
with the look of the site. I confess that it did take a while for my compulsive,
everything-including-the-kitchen-sink design mode to slowly unwind. Eventually I
became willing to accept her higher, far finer, and not colorblind (as I am) taste as
being what it was: priceless input.

I started out writing for a handful of people whom I mostly recruited via email. A few
discovered me on their own, for which I bow to Google's magical algorithms. These
days we're quite easy to locate. No matter the size of the readership, I was a man with
a mission. I had found the greatest way to give away thousands of hours of
productivity that has ever been invented. Yet my efforts did not go unnoticed. Over
the course of the next year I went from running a little website that attracted a few
hundred people a month to a whole lot larger website that attracted a few thousand.
In the second year of its life, that audience of a few thousand has turned into many
thousands in 126 countries. It grows and grows and grows.

As it grew, funny things started to happen. For one thing, I met a whole bunch of well
known spiritual teachers. I was writing reviews of their books, and publishing their
work on AC, and I became friends with several teachers, and had pleasant contact
with dozens. I didn't know it then, but in hindsight I can see that I was networking,
though I would never have called it that. In just under a year I signed a contract to
write a book for Non-Duality Press in England. I called it Beyond Recovery: Non-
Duality and the Twelve Steps, and I wrote it over the course of the summer of 2012.
Writing that book allowed me to see that I had—again unknowingly—developed
something of a coherent, cohesive teaching. I was quite surprised to discover that.
But I could plainly see I wasn't just writing and talking at random about spirituality

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any longer. I was writing and talking in distinct patterns, and many of those patterns
were linked. I was becoming more of a formal teacher, something I had long ago given
up on.

It occurred to me that now that I actually had what could be dubbed as a "teaching,"
then it might be something I could speak about in a structured sort of way. I then
started talking to people on the phone. It had taken me a while, but I had finally
found a way to give away yet more of my productivity! My business was already
suffering from neglect, and at the rate I was going I would soon be the best known
broke and unemployed guy on the Internet. I paid little heed to any of that, and
plowed right on doing what I was doing. I knew the teaching was what counted most:
sharing the message of sanity and freedom.

People began to wake up on the phone while they were talking to me. Not everybody,
but a good percentage of them did. It was a higher percentage than I had ever so
much as dreamed possible. I still haven't gotten over the sheer wonder of it all. Some
people came to see me as a result of the website, and they woke up, too! This really
got my attention. It was totally preposterous, but it's what was happening anyway.

I started talking on Skype, which I quickly grew to love. I didn't have to leave my
house, and I could cheaply, visually, and effectively connect with people around the
world. The miracle of technology was now in the service to the miracle of spiritual
awakening. It began to dawn on me that my true calling appeared to be, first and
foremost, that of a spiritual teacher. I really did feel pulled to share, to shout, to help.
I still do.

My Skype talks became question-driven. I wasn't talking about the awakened state, I
was guiding people through investigations and inquiry so that they could experience it
themselves on the first call. I got more and more skillful with it, and then saw there
were very distinct patterns to it. In the spring of 2013, I wrote a second book, The
Book of Unknowing, which was short, but which took what I now called Direct Pointing
Sessions, and put them on paper. I knew it wouldn't be as effective for most people as
a one-on-one, but it was a way to reach people who didn't have the money or the
confidence to talk to me live. Reports began to come in, and reviews began to show up
on Amazon stating that at least some people were waking up through the book alone. I
was overjoyed.

Which brings us right here. This little book is about introducing you to my work. I
hope you'll find it useful. If you do, come see me at Awakening Clarity, where there
are hundreds of thousands of useful words. Drop me a line if you feel like it. I can't
teach via email, but I love to hear from people, and at this point I still make it a point
to at least briefly respond to everyone who writes in. I wish you success on your own
journey. I promise you that it's available.

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Cheer & blessings,

Fred Davis
June 1, 2013
Columbia, SC

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 CLARITY IS A TWO-WAY STREET

Spiritual teachings are typically layered. For example, sacred literature, whether it
was written a thousand years ago, or the day before yesterday, can only reveal to us
what we’re already prepared to see. There is a wealth of terrific information, and a ton
of fabulous pointers in plain sight every day. We can’t see them until we can. We don’t
understand them until we do. Yet once awakening occurs, things that were once
overwhelmingly vague and arcane become as clear and solid as glass. Of course,
opening never ends; that’s both the nature and the joy of the game. We see more and
more and more. We know less and less and less.

Something similar occurs with our teachers and mentors. They may be telling us the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but we’re only going to get what we
get until we’re ready to receive more. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “He who
hath ears, let him hear.” It’s not all up to our teachers. Most of it is not up to them.
Most of it is up to us. It’s also rather like the Mark Twain story about a boy and his
father: the older the son got, the smarter his father seemed to get! The longer we
pursue the spiritual quest with a teacher, the smarter they will seem to get–all
because we grew a new set of eyes and ears. So, whether we get our information and
pointers from life itself, or from books, practices, or teachers, or as happens most
often, from a combination of all of those, the same rule applies. I’ll stick with teachers
in this column in order to maintain reasonable brevity.

While this article is being written for a worldwide audience, my overall life experience
is mostly with Americans, so I’ll hold with what I know. In the United States, we are a
people in a hurry. We are like a nation of cats: we want to be wherever we aren’t. We
want to start a practice, or work with a teacher, just so we can graduate. We are
doing this so that we can do that. We are enduring here so that we can get there.

This is a no-win position in spirituality. If we’re not established in Nondual awareness

and our teacher is, we shouldn’t minimize the theoretical gulf between us and them.
We don't know what we don't know. Patience and earnestness are critical if we want to
walk through the Gateless Gate and join them. The good news here is that this
apparent wide gulf simply means the teacher has a lot to offer us. As one of my
mentors says, we don’t want to be in the position of following someone who’s twenty
minutes ahead of us. Yes, they may be able to help, but the deeper the well the longer
you can draw from it.

Now that I've made that flat statement, let me swoop in and take it away as well. Many
of us begin as followers of the really well known teachers. I’ll wager that Eckhart Tolle
has reached more people on the planet than just about all the rest of them put
together. Followers of the famous Watkins Books spiritual book store in London
recently voted him the most influential spiritual personality on the planet. It’s a no-
brainer. And if you’re Jim Carrey or Oprah Winfrey, I’m sure Eckhart is a very cool

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person to hang out with. But how about us? Most of us are neither rich nor famous,
and won’t come anywhere near to even meeting Eckhart, much less getting any direct
teaching from him. I’m using Eckhart as the example here, simply because he’s so well
known, but a similar situation exists with Adyashanti, Gangaji, Byron Katie, and a few
other big names.

You may get to talk to Adya at an intensive or a retreat, and you might get to sit on the
dais with Gangaji or Katie for twenty minutes in one of their meetings, but none of
them are going to be able to do much for you directly and at length in the way that a
hands-on teacher can. Frankly, a lot of that is show-biz. It’s fine, I get it, I’m on board
with it, and I personally love all of those people I mention, but we need to recognize
their limitations, too. Even if our teachers and mentors are all long-distance, as is
often the case, the difference between walking this path with a one-on-one teacher,
however distant, and a big name you’ll never, ever chat privately with for an hour, or
two, or ten, is beyond large: it’s unfathomable.

I never had a one-on-one teacher until after I woke up, and the cloudy awakeness of
those early years cannot compare to the clarity and stability that good teachers have
helped me find. If we have a teacher, our journey is also less likely to remain one that
revolves around ego. Nearly all of us start with egoic spiritual desires. That’s fine, it’s a
stage. What matters is where we end up. Teachers can help us stay out of that stew by
calling us on unconscious thinking and behavior. Once we establish a friendly
relationship with them—and I can't imagine having a one-on-one teacher we were not
in a friendly relationship-of-equals with—then having them yank us back from the
dream and into reality is, at least in this teaching, the bulk of their function.

It's nice to get outside confirmation of what we’re experiencing, and where we are
along the path. It’s important to realize that without a teacher we’re trying to guide
ourselves to a place we’ve never been. No wonder it’s so difficult! Is confirmation
necessary? No. Is it generally beneficial? Oh yes. For one thing, it gives us confidence
that, as I shared with a friend recently, “We aren’t just sitting in our living rooms
smoking spirituality.” That’s really easy to do. Ego is more than happy to grant
confirmation of all our grandiose notions of where we are on the path, and what’s
going to happen when we’re discovered and transformed into spiritual royalty. From
the very beginning of our journey, ego has been looking forward to being enlightened,
and is happy as all get out when it decides it’s gotten there! Oh, the specialness of it!
This is always a false reading; no exception granted. That doesn't mean our seeing
wasn't authentic. It means that what's currently grasping that seeing isn't authentic.

There's no problem in being either a seed, or a sapling. All great trees were once the
same. Trouble only starts if a seed or a sapling begins to believe it’s already a tree. I
see it all the time. We can do a lot of damage to ourselves and others if we end up in
that position. And it’s all too easy to stay there, because the only way we can get out of
it is to admit we’re wrong. Who wants to do that? The willingness to jettison
“rightness” and “righteousness” are not common, and neither is the humility required

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to remain in an open, not-knowing space of being. The thing that knows is the thing
that has to be jettisoned.

Contrary to many popular reports, there are no firm laws in any of this. Awakeness
can and does work any way it wants to, any time it wants to, with anyone it wants to.
Having said that, it’s fair to say that the general sorts of directions handed out by well
known spiritual teachers with large followings, however good that advice or those
pointers may be for that specific questioner, may not work well for us, and almost
certainly will not work for us indefinitely. The further we go, the more specific
guidance we’re going to need, well on into awakening. Second-hand media simply is
not the best place to get it–unless, of course, it’s the only place we can get it.

In this teaching, I live and die by the Law of Large Numbers. What works most often
for most people? That's what grabs my interest. I am not one for spending a lot of
time on exceptions, on people who declare there's "nothing to do and no one to do it,"
or the skeptical. I'm busy as it is, and I do not have the slightest desire to get involved
in a debate. I'm not going to enter someone's dream in order to attempt to pull them
out of it. Let them have it—what's the harm?

What I can tell you is that most of us, if we really want to awaken, and especially if we
want to move into abidance and embodiment of that awakening, will need far sharper,
pointing than generalities can provide. And most of us are going to need follow-up too,
although few of us will see that and then reach out for it. Most of us will best respond
to someone who knows something about where we are on the path in general, and
most importantly where we are in that moment. The best teaching arises
spontaneously, something which media is simply incapable of providing.

There are plenty of good teachers available if we’re simply willing to avail ourselves of
them. Ego, of course, if it’s not going to be groomed by the famous, often wants us to
do it all ourselves, because at least that way there’s no close scrutiny of our thinking
and seeing, and we get to magically advance to any level we wish, just as fast as we
want to! Sadly, most of us will also get to pay the ultimate price for that, which is
magnified delusion and continued suffering.

It's certainly not a famous teacher's fault that they may ultimately become limited in
their value to us. No matter how awake they may be, no matter their long experience,
expertise, and brilliant clarity, they are still human beings. Human beings come with
limitations, and time is one of them. How can you be on a personal level with
thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of followers? You can't.
It’s patently impossible. A teacher can influence that many people, or perhaps sort of
obliquely steer a crowd of that size in a generally wise and useful direction, but on
most of our paths, a much more personal touch is going to be needed if we’re really
going to get where we say we want to go.

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The secondary line of teachers is where the gold lies. There are a lot of brightly awake,
talented and devoted Nondual teachers. For the most part, these folks are at least
pretty good, and some of them are very good at what they do. With only the rare
exception, you will get more out of an afternoon with a pretty good one-on-one teacher
than at an excellent general meeting. Don’t assume lesser-known teachers are "not as
awake" as their better known counterparts. Many of them are not. Some of them may
be sharper than their better-known contemporaries. And any currently awake teacher
can help the great majority of as-yet-unawakened seekers who have the luck to spend
time with them; there’s no question whatsoever about that. And remember, effective
Nondual teaching is easily measured. We’re awake, or we’re not. Others are waking up
around us, thus proving the effectiveness of our teacher, or they’re not. Clarity is the
measure to use, not charisma. Do we really want freedom, or a charming, attractive
star to shine up our self image? Are we really serious, or really not?

As we travel all the myriad paths on which we find ourselves during the course of our
spiritual career, we want to use our common sense to guide us. We don’t ever “give
ourselves up” to a teacher. In my opinion, we don’t want to follow any teacher who
suggests we do so. Awakeness would never care about that sort of concession, but ego
would be crazy about it. We are lost before we begin if we do so. It’s good to remember
that we are always surrendering to what is coming through a good teacher, not the all-
too-human being who's been made an opening. We want to use a teaching to help us
cross the ocean, not fall in love with an anchor that holds us forever underwater. We
can love and respect our teachers and their teachings without getting stupid. After all,
it’s our path; let’s take some responsibility for it.

*****

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 A FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON

Spiritual Experience as Hazard

The Spiritual Stumbling Block

I want to tell you about something I've noticed in working with clients. There is a
strong commonality between the people who seem to have the most trouble coming to
an initial experience of the Understanding, and those who appear to come and go at
"having it," meaning those on the pendulum swinging between clarity and cloudiness.
The problem often lies in our expectations. Let me explain.

Defining a Spiritual Experience

First, let's talk about what a spiritual experience is. We can say that it's a non-
ordinary event that comes dressed in what we might call spiritual clothing: energy,
light, visions, auditory messages, something like that. There is probably an aha!
moment that occurs where we suddenly see or understand something we did not
previously understand, or we understand it in a different way. It is generally
pleasurable, and can be the most pleasurable event that a human can have. If we're
one of a lucky few, it comes roaring in: loud, wide open, absolutely clear, and employs
about the same subtle tactics as a pair of gunmen in a home invasion. We are forced
to see/be the truth. It arrives without seeking our direction, or asking our permission.
It leaves of its own accord in just the same way.

These are the bones of a large and profound spiritual experience. We can report when
it began, we can report when it ended, and it's clear that we had zero control over it. I
sometimes call it the S&M spiritual experience: "Tie me up and make me see!" No
need for us to take any responsibility or initiative. That sweet, easy road to clarity is
just the one we want to be driven down--all day every day. Ah! Pass the pipe and give
me another hit.

We could graph a spiritual experience if we were so inclined, and it would graph out
much like an LSD trip, or similar hallucinogen. Sharply inclined entrance rising to a
peak, followed by a sharply declining departure. We can also report who it happened
to: us. Spiritual experiences, even the best of them, still happen to an "I." If they
didn't, we couldn't report them. In the absence of a sense of "I-ness," events cannot be
recorded, or reported. They can happen without any "I-ness," but only "I-ness" can
record or report. The witness may be impersonal, and it may be way back in the
background, but it's there. Few if any experiences will incorporate all of these facets,
but they will include one or more. We can have just a little "pop," a sudden
understanding of something without any accompaniment at all, and that, too, is
actually a spiritual experience, but we tend to downplay such things and relegate
them to the shelf labeled "insights." Insights do not approach the coolness status
reserved for spiritual experiences precisely because they lack the coolness element of
glamour.

So, that's the experience, that's the vehicle. Spiritual experiences are such big fun
that what we as seekers tend to do is concentrate on the entertainment value of the
vehicle, and thereby dismiss the priceless value of the payload.

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Separating the Payload
The starting point for deeper spirituality is generally considered, bare minimum, to be
"the glimpse"—where we come face to face with our true nature for at least a short
while—a second, a day, a week. It's sort of like losing our spiritual virginity. I've had
people tell me, "I don't care about a big awakening, I would be happy with just a little
one!" This is actually a negotiating position they've adopted in lieu of getting what
they really want. It's like a gambler having made the mental move from making the
big score to just getting his money back, then half his money back. They don't know it
when they tell me this, but it's not the truth. They're certainly telling me the truth as
they know it, but it's not the truth. The proof is always in the pudding.

I will share my experience with you: it's all I've got, so I might as well. It's limited, but
it's not insignificant. In the last few years since I've been sharing this thing in a
broader, more public way, I've had the good fortune to be present when, in a manner
of speaking, a fair number of people got their first good, knowing look at their true
nature. I've seen them wake up in person and on Skype, and I've heard them wake up
over the phone. In other cases, I've had the good fortune to be "recently removed"
from the client, by maybe a day or a week or two, and receive an excited report via
email.

Now, when I first started teaching, I thought that having someone awaken, however
briefly, either while they were with me, or as the delayed, yet fairly obvious effect of
having encountered this teaching, would be rare. I was nearly sixty when I began my
practice, so I looked ahead and thought I could call my practice a success if helped
facilitate half a dozen awakenings. That seemed like a significant number, and a
significant contribution. I simply didn't know any better.

Instead, I find that having people wake up while they're sitting with me is common, or
at least it is in formal Direct Pointing. I don't mean ordinary, when I say common, as if
I'm taking it for granted; I simply mean non-rare. In fact, I find that it is the norm for
someone who has a Direct Pointing session with me. Not everyone wakes up, but a
high percentage sure do. No one could be more surprised about this than I am. For a
while it totally shocked me. Today it delights me, and it always surprises me, but it
doesn't shock. When I enter a session now I'm more wondering when than if.

In the beginning, I thought that perhaps these awakenings would prove to be

permanent, or that many of them would be. I was wrong about that. I quickly found
out that many spiritual seekers are like other addicts, such as overeaters and
smokers: the quitting ain't so hard, but the staying quit is a bitch. Seekers are
addicted to their thoughts, and they simply cannot stand not taking them seriously for
any length of time. I have watched a goodly number of people move forward, stagnate,
and move backward, back into the lazy comfort of sleep and rightness. I'm not talking
about the regular back and forth of oscillation, which is generally just a stage. I'm
talking about people through whom awakeness was consciously functioning, who
though caught in oscillation were nonetheless working and progressing along the
apparent path, who simply dropped the ball without bothering to quit playing.

Imagine a basketball player rushing downcourt, moving his hand up and down
without bothering to see if he's even got the ball. These people are still going through

16
the motions, and still maintain a spiritual lifestyle and/or mindset, but their true
attention is elsewhere; their real desire is still dream-bound. There's nothing wrong
with dream-bound desires, let's just call a spade a spade.

Holding Out for a Spiritual Experience

So, if I'm right, if "the glimpse", or even more of an awakening than that is not as rare
and difficult as it's been made out to be, and you haven't had one, your number one
question has got to be WHY? Or, if you've had what you knew to be an authentic
glimpse at some time in the past, but that's not your present experience, and you just
can't seem to conjure up another one, the question again has got to be WHY? Our
Nondual Shakespearean chorus will now chime in to tell us that "there's never an
answer to a 'why' question." As is typical, the chorus is right, but also as is typical,
the radical chorus is only right from the absolute perspective. Just for the moment
let's pretend there is an answer. It may not be the only answer; there may be others.
But the following, I promise, ranks high among The Apparent Causes of Apparent
Long-Term Separation.

I can report that the people with whom I have had the least success with are people
who think just like I used to think! I suspect that like attracts like in this case. I didn't
put this all together until quite recently, but these folks A) Have a preset notion of
what reality should look like for them, and B) Have a good idea of how that seeing
should arrive. This was my exact position, and my precise predicament for a long, long
time. Grace eventually engineered an override for me, so to speak, but I wouldn't
bank on that happening for you, and I wouldn't wait at striking out in a new way on
my own.

What reality "should look like" to these folks is inevitably something other than this.
And that reality-that-looks-other-than-this "should arrive" with a bang and holler that
just happens to look exactly like a classic, in-the-books, big-time spiritual experience,
even if in their middle-of-the-night negotiations with the universe they've mentally
pared it down so that a "smaller, quieter" version of that has been deemed acceptable.
This is sort of like a mental manifestor "training" on conjuring a Ford instead of the
Mercedes they really want, because that's as high as they can get their thinking. If by
chance they get a Ford, they immediately go into a lather working on the Mercedes. I
say that, because everybody who ever got a glimpse—including me—immediately wants
another one, and it "should be" both bigger and permanent. That's the mechanism.

The only problem with this approach is that it's generally fatal to acquiring the
Understanding. If we insist on holding out for a big time spiritual experience like
we've read about in books, then in the absence of big-time luck or grace, there may be
no more glimpses glimpsed, whether we're talking about the first-time or a next-time.
Awakening can happen any time it wants in any way it wants, but I really like dealing
with the Law of Large Numbers. How do the most people wake up most often? That's
what I find attractive. There's an exception to every rule, but the reason they call it an
exception is because it's not the usual experience. And the reason you read about
those LSD-like awakenings in books, is because they're so unusual we write about
them in books!

Taking Old, Sound Advice

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I have heard this phrase attributed to numerous sources; I don't know where it
originally came from, but I know that it's true, so I'll share it. "The ignorant reject what
they see and believe what they think. The wise believe what they see and reject what
they think." There it is, folks. If you're having one of the problems referred to in this
column, this is almost surely why. But here's what happens. We read a crystal clear
truth like this, which is totally open and aboveboard, and then we scratch our heads
and go looking for the hidden meaning.

Only there is no hidden meaning. Our eyes are telling us, "Here you are, look around.
This is it: this here, right here, right now." Simultaneously our minds are telling us,
"This can't be it." And therein lies the rub. There is a disconnect between what our
eyes are telling us, and what our minds are telling us, and there arises a choice about
which we are going to accept as truth. We typically opt for what our mind is saying,
and I'm simply suggesting that this is not the way to go. I'm not talking about
consciously developing a new belief system, I'm talking about developing the strategic
foundation from which we will conduct all of our further inquiry. Nondual teaching is
not about fabulous answers, it's about fabulous questions.

This strategic choice declares where we are operating from: as confused Awareness, or
sure ego. We tend to go with the sureness, and we tend to be WRONG. I am far, far
better off to accept this ancient observation as sound advice, and elect to throw my lot
in with the wise, however confused I may be. Now I am not searching for something
new to happen, I am simply washing the window through which I peer at the world.
Sometimes I tell my clients: "These sessions are simply to keep the glass clear; they're
not about making anything happen.

The Key Change

When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change, and the
easiest way to change how we're looking at things, is to change from where we're
looking at them.

If we've not had a glimpse, it might be more important to investigate our secret
expectations--or demands--before we go look at what fresh tidbit Amazon or YouTube
may have to offer us. Then it's fine to go to Amazon or YouTube, but go as Awareness
itself, open to discovering something forgotten, not a seeker in search of something
new. I've had more than one person turn directly away from awakening, because
reality didn't meet their expectations. Honest to goodness, I'm telling you the truth.
Sometimes reality doesn't knock us off our feet until we've spent a little time with it.
That doesn't seem like the way things "should be", but it's nonetheless the way things
are

In a similar vein, if we have had a previous spiritual experience and think we are not
now awake, then we have confused the delivery system with the payload. The bells
and whistles have pulled our attention away from the fact that what was shown to us
during the that seeing was that we'd always already been awake, could not, in fact,
NOT be awake, that there's just one thing going on, that the seeker is the sought, and
that anything in opposition to that is pure invention, utter fiction. We have once again
invented the problem of separation, and now we are holding out for the fiction of our
deliverance!

18
Standing as Awareness, however cloudy we may feel, cuts the legs out from
underneath our story of future, when I'll get to be free again. I have a YouTube video
on this that you can find at Awakening Clarity which is well worth your watching, and
I've written about it in The Book of Undoing. What reality is going to look like, and how
it's going to arrive—first time or "next" time—are both versions of a future story, which
is a sure block to our path. It's completely absurd. And it's completely human. It's
what we do. Until we don't.

*****

19
 HEY, AM I AWAKE YET, OR WHAT?

I get the title question fairly regularly by email. I notice I never get it in person, or on
Skype. We don't ask questions in person that we don't want to hear the answer to.
One response that arises is, "If you're concerned about whether you're awake or not,
then you're not—at least not right now."

Such a question simply would not occur to conscious awakeness. Since we've already
said that everyone is equally awake, then all we are ever talking about is if we are or
are not consciously awake, knowingly awake. If we can get clear on this we can see
that there's no room left for higher or lower, better or worse, more spiritual or less. All
of those things spring from relative positions, which conscious awareness simply
doesn't have. The apparently separate being conscious awakeness is working through
will certainly have positions—that's primarily what a separate being is—but not the
awakeness behind it.

Lest we now jump over to the other side and pull a quick and oh-so-typical Spiritual
180 (in other words we move to the other erroneous half of a 360 degree circle), let's
listen to a wise friend of mine. A couple of weeks ago, when I shared the fact that I
thought I was going to write this article, he immediately shot me the following terrific
advice:

[In referring to this article...] "It's a good idea but there is one important caveat that
needs to be included. One should watch out for that desire going underground and
manifesting as a certainty and confidence that I am awake. "Before, I was in doubt.
Fred said that this doubt is a sign that I am not awake. Therefore I have seen through
this, and no longer have the question."

Do you see how tricky all of this is? It's unbelievable. You can hardly dance for
stepping on your own feet! Unless you entered this teaching with an extraordinarily
light load of karma—which I most assuredly did not—there's almost no way to weave
through the apparent awakening process without making lots of foolish mistakes. I
have been an absolute unholy fool in all of this for 30 years running. The under-
appreciated Bonehead Way has clearly been my path, and often still is. It's ugly, but it
does seem to work. I'm willing to be wrong, and I'm willing to be seen to be wrong—
even here, publicly—and to be corrected by higher authorities (ouch!) if it means I get
to see errors of thought and action, and thereby be given the chance to see through
them. I will lead with my chin if it's the only thing I have to lead with. Sadly enough,
much of the time it is.

Part of what I'm saying here is that it pays to want this thing a lot. Casual seekers
beware. Or not. Anything can happen; I don't know anything about sureness. So I'm
not saying that passion is required, but I am saying that it sure seems to help. It also
means you're going to get ahead of yourself from time to time. I have the scars to
prove it, and so do those closest to me.

20
I made embarrassing proclamations; made ugly errors in deed and word; I too often
unwittingly tortured those around me. In short, I repeatedly made an ass out of
myself.

"Hi, Bill. have you noticed that I'm basically the new, improved Ramana Maharshi?
No? Well, it probably doesn't show up for someone like you just yet. Others see it, I
mean at least probably they do. They should. At the very least, I see it! Once you get
a little clearer—if you ever do, bless your heart—you'll easily be able to spot it, too! In
the meantime, hang on my every word, okay?"

I've made this example far-fetched even for me in order to make my point clearly and
humorously, but sadly enough, it's not as far-fetched as I'd like it to be.

Another response that arises to meet our question of, "Hey, am I awake yet, or what?"
doesn't attempt to answer the question at all, but rather raises another question, or
series of questions: "Who's this you who's claiming to be awake? Who is this you that
can't seem to stay awake? Who woke up to begin with?" Gotcha. Personalities never
wake up. Units never wake up. Life itself wakes up from the dream of division to the
truth of unity.

When we have a Nondual 'experience', which is a misnomer, or more accurately, when

true being shows itself openly, the one common factor, regardless of background, is
that the one who appears to be experiencing this dramatic unveiling is now known to
be utterly nonexistent, at least in terms of autonomy. From the standpoint of the
mind, it's a real head shaker. You just can't figure it out, and you can't keep from
trying. However, from the absolute view, there's nothing to figure out. It's just the
way things are. From the point of initial seeing on, the seeking game changes. We're
no longer trying to move ahead into clarity. We're done with all that nonsense, for
goodness sake. Now, by God, we're trying to move back into clarity! This seeking is
even more fruitless and deadlier than what we were doing before, because we usually
have more openness and humility before such an event than we do afterward! We
didn't know what we didn't know. Now we think we do. It's pretty stagnating. So how
does all of this happen?

More often than not, this freshly exposed, non-existent self quickly appropriates this
new information, adds it to its wealth of treasures that are designed to keep it special
and separate, and then plows right on, as deluded as ever, even though it knows
better. So far as I know, there's no chance of actually unseeing what's been seen.
There's no unringing that bell. Yet side-by-side with that knowing there can and
usually does exist denial of, and resistance to that very same knowing. To know That
is to lose me, which is a really tough call until it isn't. Thus we have the paradox from
hell that runs until it doesn't. As close to the truth as words will allow is to say that
the hoax itself perpetuates the hoax. Sometimes this hoaxness even goes on to teach
other people that they can be autonomous non-existent beings too! Who said
spirituality was pretty?

Let's talk about language for a moment. When I ask, "Who's this you?" and all that
sort of thing, I'm not advocating staying away from personal pronouns; that's tiresome
and ridiculous. We can and do still use language provisionally. I love language, hence

21
the writerness that shows up here. We can actually use words just the same as we did
prior to coming to Nonduality, prior to some experience of seeing-being, but with the
tacit understanding that these words are now inherently untrue. What I'm saying is
that due to the nature and context of the question that was given me ("Am I awake or
not?"), in that specific case I have sensed an underlying cloudiness in the questioner.
It just shows. It's as simple as noticing that it's raining. I don't have to check with
anybody to confirm that I'm right. The reason I can see it is not because I'm some sort
of mystic. I can see it because I've ignorantly bloodied my nose in exactly that same
way against exactly the same mirror—over and over again. For years. I am less a
mystic than I am a boxer with a lousy record, but who never took a dive, and who
somehow keeps advancing in the rounds.

Let me go on to suggest that if we find ourselves "tip-toeing through the language

fields," that is, afraid to say, "I need an aspirin," or "I need to go to the bathroom,"
then we might want to check ourselves and make sure that this careful tip-toeing is
not a cover-up for our own unsureness, or else a move to impress everyone with the
implied proclamation, which is, "Look at me! I am enlightened! There's NO ONE here,
I say!" I know all about this. I'm guilty of having performed entire ballets of such
figurative tip-toeing. So what? It's common and it's okay; it's all part of the charade
and there's no shame in it. Yet the death of spiritual progress lies in believing these
positions and remaining caught in them. It's easier than you want to think. Believing
our own positions, including the sweet lie that we no longer have beliefs, opinions, or
positions (BOPs), happens most often when we are going it alone, as I did for a long,
long time. I didn't want help from anyone who might tell me I wasn't already awake!
Which means I was caught in an endless, self-referencing loop. I was going to my own
ego for outside advice. And then taking it! Oops.

Any decent teacher will easily point out our error, and help us remedy it by showing
us the flaws in our thinking and then sending us back to the way of experiencing.
They help us climb down out of our heads and plant our feet back onto terra firma.
I'm confident we can even catch this thing on our own if we're both willing and capable
of being absolutely honest with ourselves. That's no easy trick. I couldn't do it for a
long time, but if you can, my hat is off and I wish you well.

Let's look at another common area of confusion. All of these areas are tangled, by the
way, because in the end there's just one real mistake left to be made: incorrect
identification. This core error comes in lots of gradations, from subtle to profound. We
don't know what we don't know, so who knows where I am with all of this now?
Identification is an all or nothing game. We are either identified with the body, for
instance, or the mind, for another, or we're not. There's never any 50/50 proposition,
but there can be rapid oscillation between the poles of on and off.

To give a clearer, more general pointing, let's stick with talking about profound
misidentification; there are sharper lines to be seen with that example. Say we have
what appears to be a real seeing "event". We know in our hearts it's authentic. If it's
real, there's never any doubt at the time. Suddenly we are grokking things that we've
never understood before. Books that were thick muck are now joyful reading, all that
sort of thing. Mysterious things our teachers have told are now understood. We have
genuinely seen (or rather been) the truth. We get it. Everything is swell. Until it's not.

22
The apparent seeing event may last a few seconds or a few days, but however long it
lasts, at some point we almost always begin to notice that it's wearing thin. Rather
than living via experiencing, we're back caught in thought. We're now referencing our
former experiencing through memory. We're back to living in interpretation instead of
reality.

Our blissful event, like any event, passes, leaving us stranded as ordinary people in an
ordinary world. What a drag! We liked the specialness better! If this has happened to
you—as it did me—and you are asking if you are awake, then I would say straightaway
to take another look at my first two responses (1-No, you are not awake right now, and
2- Who was it that woke up to begin with?) One of them might be enough to snap you
back out of the dream, and back into reality. If not, we're back to using the unit to
move beyond the unit. That means practices. My favorites are specific inquiries and
using the body as a camera, which I detail later in this book.

The inquiries are easy, and blunt. I take my attention and turn it around 180 degrees.
"I'm longing for a return to clarity." Who saying that? Can you find an owner to that
longing? Look within and see for yourself. In the absence of an owner to that
thought, what have I got? An empty thought occurring within the vastness that is me.
Simply seeing that I can't find an owner, and allowing myself to experience that
quandary is enough, but it's not enough to do it once. We have to maintain the
willingness do it over and over. Few of us will.

The other inquiry is another investigation. "I should be clearer than I am." Is that
true? Is it really true, or are you just making that up? Check that thought against
the reality that you are as clear as you are. Whenever my thinking collides with
reality, I suffer. Would I rather be right, or would I rather be free. The choice,
incredibly, is mine. But it's mine in every moment, not just once. We investigate over
and over again. Willingness is everything.

Conscious awareness is perfectly content with the extraordinary ordinary. Every story
is seen to be equally unique and equally empty. We get what we get because that's
what we get. Why fight that? Why argue with it? It doesn't change a thing, only now
I've added suffering to my perceived dilemma. As I see it, any belief, opinion, or
position (BOP) that runs contrary to What Is is not stemming from awakeness.

Know this truth, however, doesn't mean that we now try to make that absolute view
into some bit of philosophy with relativity! The absolute view doesn't work as a
philosophical view. Absolute views of reality works on the absolute plane; they do not
transfer over to the relative. In that same manner, relative views of reality work on the
relative plane, but they do not transfer over to the absolute. Let me share a couple of
examples.

If you try to migrate the absolute view that this is all a play, or dream, or movie, to the
relative plane, it will just make you as cold and stupid as a stone. We don't want to
tell a friend whose life-mate just died that it's all hunky-dory, because their loved one
was "never here to begin with". That's not wisdom, that's cruelty. By the same token,
taking the position that because we appear to manipulate things on the relative plane,
and thus we can surely do so from the absolute is insanity; it is a denial of all we have

23
seen. Yet it's a common mistake, because it's so attractive. "NOW I can REALLY do
some manifesting!" Without making a judgment about it, I will simply say that this
teaching is not about any of that stuff. There are plenty of books about it elsewhere.

Following an initial awakening, the attempted transference of absolute-level views to

the relative, or conversely, trying to transfer relative-level views to the absolute, is the
cause of most of our confusion. And pain. They just don't mix! I would like to put up
billboards to that effect. That's why they call all of this a paradox.

Whether we're "awake or asleep" is really not all that confusing. We always know one
way or the other. The truth is, when we're not functioning from awakeness we simply
don't want to see that we're not. We're more interested in being right than being
awake. We're more interested in our job that we are in remaining alert. We're more
interesting in pursuing the Hot New Thing than we were in being awake. That's fine,
that's all part of it, too. But of course we want to eat our cake and have it too. We
want to put the bulk of our interest into other affairs, and remain awake. Perhaps you
can do that. I can't. In my personal experience, I either have to live this thing, or lose
this thing. And thus it is the very center of my life. You cannot separate what I am
from what I do, or what I do from what I am. There's simply no line.

That certainly doesn't mean that everyone needs to be a spiritual teacher. Far from it.
How about awake school teachers? Can you see the value in that? I sure can. How
about awake policemen, or stock brokers? Can you see the value in that? I sure can.
How about awake cabbies and cashiers? If there's just one thing going on, are not
these position equally as vital as any other? The truth of unity is also the truth of
equality. We can continue to pursue any line of work that we are pulled to. In fact we
can't not pursue whatever line we're drawn to! We don't need to direct all of this; the
river flows unerringly by itself when I get out of the way. Let us shine from where life
places us, but by all means let us shine!

How much longer can our living planet survive the dream of separation and its
symptoms of fear and selfishness? We're tearing the life net apart. The rocks will
remain, but who will be there to enjoy the flower that pops up between the cracks?
We are just about out of generations who can take and take and not give back. We are
just about out of generations who can live off those who came before. We're going to
have to take responsibility for our own conscious awakeness—which seems to be the
only way out of this ratcheting dilemma—and then take responsibility for our
unconscious mess.

We can operate with clarity and kindness. Or we can operate in denial and resistance
which are just two more names for unconsciousness. Who we are is what we teach.
Who we are is what we carry, for good or ill, into the world in our ordinary lives. That
is what's important; skillful action, not academic philosophy. Only from a place that
at least smacks of honesty, humility and surrender is our true nature likely to come
out of hiding and consciously, knowingly, remain out of hiding, for one arising after
the other. It's a challenging journey. I invite you to join me in the only quest that
matters—awakening Clarity.

*****

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25
 SOLVING THE AWAKENING PUZZLE

As most of you know by now, I'm very big on saying things like, "The easiest way to wake up is
to notice that you're already awake." Strange as it may seem, that's a fundamental truth, it really
is, but it's not always helpful. I was on the enlightenment trail for a long, long time—decades—
before I recognized my own always already awake condition, and I can well remember when
such a comment was nothing short of maddening. So today we're going to take a closer look at
that statement, using some of my own story as an example. We'll look more closely at what it
points to, and see if we can find something that will be helpful, no matter where you feel like you
are in your journey.

Back in the day, my responses to hearing, "You're already awake," ranged from anger, as in,
"Why in the hell would they tell me something so absurd as that?" to getting my feelings hurt,
because I felt like people were somehow making fun of me and my dreadful "awakelessness", to
mentally accusing any author of that statement of being either a liar, or a fool. I felt stupid and
inadequate that I couldn't see something so many said was obvious. Any of these reactions is a
fair response for an ego to have, because it does indeed, on the surface of it, seem like such a
patently ridiculous statement. And let's do be honest: it ain't obvious until it is! Until we see it,
we can't see it. Once we see it, we can't not see it.

While I was registering anger and confusion, I was too caught up in that to ask, "Who are these
teachers talking to when they say this?" This is the key to solving the awakening puzzle.

We think self-realization is all about us, and that's just not the way things work. Since I believed
there was a "me" housed in my body, and that what I was thinking and doing was controlled by
this me, I naturally thought that thoughts and deeds played a direct role in getting me through the
Gateless Gate. Nope. Things don't work like that, either. By using my own example, it'll help
the reader see how awakening can occur not just through the well-intentioned, good, wise,
humble, and dedicated, but also through the poorly-intentioned, hollow, stupid, arrogant, and
erratic, such as myself. Awakeness does what it does for its own reasons, and it plays no
favorites. Thank goodness!

In 1982, when the thought first popped into my head that said, "You should study Zen," it was
clearly directed at the human unit that was spending it's afternoon drawing with crayons in the
day room of a locked ward in a mental institution. It was clearly directed toward me, meaning
Fred, if you'll pardon the expression. And it was a damn reasonable suggestion, given that the
very same Fred unit had been in the very same room almost exactly one year before, and had
apparently not learned enough between visits to keep itself out of that room.

So far so good.

26
The problem arose when I presumed that since the thought to study Zen had arisen in my head,
that it was being presented for my approval and benefit—the "my" in this case meaning my ego.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I saw it as a self-help type of suggestion by some higher
functioning part of me, or perhaps some unknown mystical entity, but either way it was being
made available for the physical survival, mental comfort, and spiritual advancement of Fred.
After all, although I considered myself to be both brilliant and astute—a real comer, so to
speak—in the harsh light of day anyone other than myself could see that I could neither feed nor
house myself, nor hang onto a job, relationship, or anything else of consequence or value. It
was about all I could do to stay out of jail—most of the time.

The total absence of any evidence to support my lofty self-evaluation did not keep me from
holding it. This is called denial. It went hand in hand with the fierce denial of the core cause of
my hospitalization: addiction. I was, in essence, addicted to everything that had ever felt good.
Chief among them were the substance of alcohol, and the state induced by compulsive
gambling. Mix those two with chain smoking, and maybe a helpful amphetamine or two, and
man oh man, you've really got something! I was a mess.

When I got out of the hospital, what I discovered was a Brand New Story. Now I could be Fred
the Mystic. I would be able to dress up my clamoring desires in spiritual clothing, and hail my
newly found superiority over the unwashed masses from an entirely new position!
Enlightenment—or almost as important—having you believe I was enlightened looked to be just
the vehicle for a guy with my checkered past to catch a ride on, and then rise meteorically from
the dead to compete again on the worldly stage, and this time wear the crown of the chosen
winner I thought myself to be. To heck with big money, I had Advanced Spirituality, and now
chose to look down on that which I still secretly craved. I also imagined that women would find
my hot Zen self devastatingly sexy as well, which was a second big plus. Maybe I could even
find a rich patron. Ah, the possibilities! I repeat, I was a mess.

Every motive I had was wrong. I was, in truth, a very sick guy. Yet from the absolute position,
none of this mattered one iota. Flow was positioning the Fred unit—that body, that Fredness
pattern that we call Fred—right where it wanted it to be: onto the spiritual path. Flow didn't give
a tinker's damn about what that unit's mind was thinking. Flow knows a harmless crank when it
hears one. It's listening to 7,000,000,000 of them bemoan their conditions every day, so ignoring
the unit I found special was all in a day's work.

After I did some reading, I confess that even I, the dedicated fraud and hedonist, caught a flavor
of something that sounded very, very alluring. Suddenly I really did want to wake up. A quite
sizable part of me still wanted to wake up for the aforementioned shallow and selfish reasons,
but a new spark got struck while I was investigating just what in the heck this realization thing
might really be. Of course I had no clue whatsoever, no one ever does, but that didn't stop the
arising of a longing for it. We always want what we don't have—until we wake up. Then we
want to keep that so badly that we chase it away by our grasping for it.

First and foremost, enlightenment sounded like a way out. Most people that I talk to in private
are looking for some variation of the same thing. They want out of suffering, out of the dream,
out of delusion, out of their present life situation, or perhaps just out of the insane seeking cycle

27
they find themselves so firmly caught up in. I hear there are people who are moving toward
something with their seeking, who are willfully and valiantly moving toward truth for the pure
sake of truth, and not away from anything, but I wasn't one of them, and they must be
exceedingly rare, because I've yet to meet one. Everybody I talk to wants out of suffering, just
like I did.

In the end, from the absolute view, personal motivations simply don't matter. They make no
difference whatsoever. All of that is simply story, just window dressing flow creates, probably
to lower the unit's resistance to doing what it's already fated to do anyway: take the spiritual
journey. Flow loves efficiency, but is equally happy to do things the hard way if it has to, even if
that way may prove rather devastating to an individual unit. We then become, in essence,
victims of grace. If our intention has been such that we are willing victims, then things will go
more quickly, smoothly and comfortably for the unit involved, but they are going to go the way
they go, and they will not long be turned, or ever be stopped.

Hopefully it is clear that I am not suggesting this is any kind of decision making process by some
sort of divine entity. No, no, no. I'm just reporting on the mechanism. My mind, any mind, is
completely incapable of grasping how this all happens. I'm just saying that it does happen. I
don't need to understand electricity to report on what a light switch does. Same thing here.

Witness that flow started out with a unit that had zero genuine interest in spirituality, and had
nothing even resembling humility, integrity, honesty, or tenacity. Yet flow began, with what we
might call infinite patience—it's not hard to attribute some measure of hilarity as well—to bring
the unit's rebellious mind into alliance with its already compliant body. It began the process of
waking me down, out of my head, and down into my body, which had always been fine, because
it is incapable of registering an opinion otherwise. Flow is what drives a petunia through a crack
in the sidewalk, a bat to grow larger ears, and is what waits out a red sun that is collapsing over
the period of a billion years. Dealing with something no more complicated than an idiot is no
real challenge.

My case was an extreme one. That, plus my own intimate familiarity with the tale are what
make it such a good example for illustration. The first time around, I was full-on into spirituality
for about eighteen months. Then I fell into a promising business opportunity, and dropped
sainthood like a hot rock. I moved in and out of spirituality for the next few years—mostly
out—for a human can completely abandon itself to only a single master at a time, and I had an
old one made new again: money. I made enough of that over the next few years to help me come
to believe that I was altogether bulletproof, so I started drinking and gambling again. In fairly
short order I cleverly drank and gambled my way right out of prosperity and back into my
default position of poverty. When I hit bottom from that dive, guess what suddenly looked
appealing again? That's right, Zen and the enlightenment card. Does this look like a pattern to
you? It does to me, too. Humans are all about patterns, whether they work, or they don't work.

I was not gently moved onto the spiritual path either initially, or that second time around. In
fact, in my entire history, I was never quietly or softly positioned, because without the presence
of a desperate, hair-on-fire crisis, it was impossible for me to be open to any idea beyond my
own. Subtlety didn't work with me. So in my case, "positioning" was more like being thrown

28
from a speeding airliner without a parachute. Each time I briefly struggled futilely, and I each
time I landed with a loud splat.

During that next foray into Zen I went the full course, at least for a solo adventurer. I meditated
a lot. I read constantly. I discovered self-inquiry and drove myself absolutely crazy with it.
Amazingly enough, half of the time I was actually sincere. And by golly, I got a glimpse of my
true nature; I surely did! Yet hot on the heels of that cosmic seeing, before the glow had even
passed, I returned to caretaking my addictions, and stayed at that task for another nine years. I
was permanently imprinted by that amazing glimpse, trust me on that, but I still had a lot of
seeking to do, which is what my addictions were: seeking mechanisms. It was still all about me.

Notice, however, that regardless of my addictions, or the unit's beliefs, opinions, and positions, it
had nonetheless been positioned to acquire a hell of a lot of context. Context is absolutely
invaluable once we awaken. I liken it to snow falling on a tree instead of bare ground. The snow
doesn't need the tree, but because of that context it can have a much richer experience of itself.

In early 2000, the fragile charade of my life began to crack again, and I once again found myself
attracted to—that's right, my old fallback, compulsive spirituality. I got sober, I moved back into
practicing Zen, I discovered Eckhart Tolle, which led to other authors—and then I started
another business. If I was still a betting man—which I most certainly am not—I would bet you
dimes to donuts that I would have dumped spirituality again within that very month, because I
suddenly had options. Whenever I had a promising option, spirituality always came in second,
meaning last.

But flow was running out of patience. In Twelve Step recovery they tell you that you have to
make your amends for all the things you've done wrong, but they don't say anything about them
having to be accepted. Some folks to whom I had delivered a real live, heart-felt apology
decided that that simply wasn't good enough. They arranged to have a couple of policemen drop
by my house early one sunny morning, and cart me off to jail.

Boy, did that spiritual thing ever look good again! Perhaps I could do both the new business—
which I would need to flog for legal fees—and simultaneously pursue spirituality? Did people
actually live like that? Two balls in the air at the same time? Who knew? Previously I couldn't
have found balance in a dictionary. Now I was being forced into some semblance of it, because
without money I couldn't support or defend myself, and without spirituality I would have gone
over-the-top, never-get-out, locked-ward crazy-crazy.

For two and a half years, from the day of my arrest until the day of my hearing, I ate, drank, and
slept spiritual teachings while I pumped up my fledgling business. I listened to Eckhart's
soothing baritone twelve to sixteen hours a day for months—upstairs, downstairs, and in my car.
I needed that calm overlay to keep the voice in my head from driving me nuts. After my hearing,
where I properly pled guilty, I went into total despair. Already living quite modestly, I had been
dealt a terrible financial blow. My physical freedom was greatly constrained. And of course
there was that nagging little element called humiliation. Six weeks after the trial, in a dark hole
of depression, wanting to die, but forced by loving promise to continue living, on one bright
morning while sitting in my living room, I came to recognize my true nature.

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Funny how that works.

Flow had done its job. Despite this unit's errant path and aberrant thinking, an ugly duckling had
been miraculously been turned into a swan; a lotus had risen from the mud. I confess that though
I had tried and tried to storm the Gateless Gate, I never really thought it would actually happen.
Prior to it happening through me, I wasn't even totally confident that there was such a thing as
awakening. I'd been a hopeful faker; maybe everybody else was, too. Our personal worlds have
precious little to do with facts. They are built entirely of our personalized beliefs, opinion, and
positions—those pernicious BOPs.

When someone says, "You are already awake," they aren't talking about "little you". They are
talking about "Big You". Little you is not only not awake, it is incapable of being awake. The
lights are on, but nobody's home. Anywhere. The one who wants to wake up will never wake
up. My ego never woke up, and neither will yours. That's why I say awakening happened
through me rather than to me. It is, in fact, Livingness itself that wakes up. It wakes up from the
dream that it is a single human unit exclusively, and sees that it contains all units of all kinds
universally. There is nothing that is not you. You are every grain of sand, every thought anyone
ever had about a grain of sand, and everything either man or nature ever built with a grain of
sand.

All arisings, including the one reading this sentence right now, rise and fall within you, Big
You. You, Big You, indeed, are awake. Always have been, always will be, can't not be.
There's no need to wake you up, and no way to wake you up, since you're already awake. All I
can hope to do, is help you point back at that which is doing the pointing, and help you come to
recognize your own, infinite, eternal, true nature. The puzzle is never solved, but rather it drops
away after you, Big You, sees that it was never there to begin with.

Awakening is not about these units you're wearing, as a tree wears snow. They can appear to
impede or advance spiritual progress. But whence the directions to cooperate or hinder? Those,
too, come from Livingness, can't not come from Livingness, because Livingness is all there is,
and you—Big You, wide awake you—are It.

*****

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 BEING BEING

Now, no single arrow I shoot is going to strike home with everyone I use it on, which is
why I come to meetings with a full quiver. But if I could only show up with a scant few,
this would surely be one of them. How to stand as awareness, how to actually
experience being Being, is both remarkably simple and incredibly effective, so it
warrants our attention. If you have not yet had an awakening, this is a great way to
get an experiential taste of it. One successful experiment is worth more than many
thousands of words. If you are in oscillation, this is the fastest way I know to come
back to living recognition. In either situation, it's one of the best practices I know.

I've explained it before, but let me do it again here. In this teaching we are pro-
practice, but not as a means to some later end. Practices here are to cause an
immediate shift, an immediate clearing. In this teaching, there ain't no later. We use
the body and the mind to move beyond both of them. Say what you will, think what
you will, but there are scores of people who've woken up in just the last few months
alone who will tell you that what I write about, what I talk about, what I help you do
really works. That's my single criteria: does it work? If so, it goes in the tool box. If it
doesn't, throw it into the sea and never mention it again.

First, let's define our terms. When I say "standing" as awareness, what I mean is
consciously being Being. Right now. We are already the one thing going on, because
we can't be anything else, hence the referencing of the term ONE. There is nothing else
beyond, below, or behind oneness. We all know this. Many of us are sick of hearing
about it, and dying to experience it. The trick, of course, is that it doesn't feel like
we're the one thing going on until it does. Until then, it feels like we're just plain old
ordinary us. Assuming we've matured beyond the God-is-my-lackey stage, then for
plain old ordinary us, the goal is usually one of connecting or unifying with oneness.

That would be a reasonable step, and a fine goal were it not impossible. We cannot
unify with what we already are. We cannot connect to what we already are. In Direct
Pointing Sessions, once I have people actively experiencing their true nature--even
though they don't yet know it--I will often ask, "Did you have to connect with it?" The
answer is inevitably no. I'll then ask, "Could you actually disconnect from it?" There's
a pause, and then, once again, the answer is always a negative. Just like unification,
connectivity requires a minimum of two things. Here we are talking about Nonduality,
not some sort of elevated dualism.

Being Being is not something we can do later. The only time we can ever be Being is
right now, just as the only place to be Being is right here. We cannot wait for the time
or space to be "right" in order for us to become what we already are. We simply have to
recognize it. Oddly enough, that can be quite a difficult thing to do. Many people
spend their entire lives trying to cause a shift that can't ever happen and never needs
to. When I say a "shift," what I really mean is the perception of a shift. Think for a

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moment. How could we ever manage to shift into reality? Does that make any sense? If
we look at it closely, it's a ridiculous idea. The better question is, "How could we ever
manage to shift out of reality?". The obvious answer is we can't. So we're not trying to
make anything new happen, we're just trying to recognize the oldest thing there is--
Isness itself!

Imagine that a guy dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, someone I know to be a veteran
firefighter, came up and asked me, "How do I become a fireman?" What advice do you
think I should offer him? I might start with pointing out the obvious and simply tell
him, "Hey, buddy, don't look now, but you're already a fireman." Yet what if that
didn't do the trick? Imagine he told me, "Yes, that's what I hear too, but I don't have
any sense of being a fireman. I don't feel like a fireman."

In that case, my second approach might be, "Really? You don't? Then why don't you go
put on your uniform?" They say 'clothes don't make the man,' but clothes certainly
give us a wonderful sense of who we are. Is Life so different? Maybe not. From my view
it appears that Life has got a whale of a closet! Just on this planet alone, in the
outback of a galaxy that's in the outback of the universe, she's got 7,000,000,000
outfits. We call them people. She puts them on and prances around in the mirror
admiring herself for a while, and has little drama classes with them, but eventually
they all wear out. No problem. Old outfits disappear, and new ones arise. Poof! Just
like that! What a show! And it's all on auto-pilot. No one's doing anything, but
everything's being done.

So, let's pretend that you've already heard that "everything is one," (with or without a
capital O), for the standard million or so times that we hear that phrase without it
causing so much as a ripple, much less a breakthrough. Let's go further and suggest
that you have read so much about it, talked so much about it, and pursued spiritual
practices so much trying to find it, that you've pretty much come to believe this bit of
hearsay. "Okey-dokey, I'm the One. Agreed. Hurray, whoopee. Now what?"

Well, for all you Nondual firefighters out there reading this, meaning the majority of
you who are taking in these very words in this very moment--yes, even including you--
my advice is that you put on your uniform. You will then be able to get a concrete
sense of your firefighterness. You might even see that you always already are a
firefighter. Funny hat, big boots, suspenders--hey, look at me! I'm the real deal! Who
knew?

Of course you already have your uniform on. You always do. In the absence of your
uniform, there may still be a you, but there's no you that you can experience, so forget
about casting off your uniform. What I want to do is simply draw your attention to one
tiny part of your uniform, and then have you put it on very slowly and deliberately. I
want you to wear it consciously instead of unconsciously, which is what you typically
do. Here's how.

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Do you have a cell phone with a camera in it? Cut the camera on, and then pan it
around the room. Do you see how it just records, just registers whatever it sees? What
does the camera think about what it's registering? What beliefs does the camera have
about what it's recording? How many opinions does the camera hold about what it's
registering? What positions is it taking up about what it's recording? What's that you
say? The camera is not thinking at all? It doesn't have any beliefs, opinions, or
positions (BOPs) about what it's seeing while panning around? Are you saying that the
camera, so to speak, is having a nonconceptual experience of the room? Neat. Why
don't you try it?

I want you to use that body--what you erroneously think of as being your exclusive
body--as a camera. Your camera. You can use the graphic at the beginning of this
post as a guide. Now pan around the room just as you did with your cell phone, only
let that unit be the body of a camera, and let the unit's eyes be the lens. Just like your
cell phone's lens, just look. Don't label, don't judge, don't tell any stories about what
you're looking at. Just look.

You know that you're alive, do you not? Of course you do. You know that you are. You
could say, "I am," and know that you're right, yes? Yes. Now just pretend that you are
the one thing going on that you've heard so much about. Look through the body, not
as the body. So you have to be looking at yourself now, correct? Do you get that? If
not, back up, and read this again until you do get it.

Let's take this slowly. Let's recap.

1) You are using that body as a camera.

2) You know that you are.

3) You are pretending that you are the one thing going on, and that you are thus
looking at yourself.

You know that you are, but when you use that body as a camera, when you look
through the body, but not as the body, do you know what you are? No. Me either.
What do you actually know other than that you are? Nothing, right? Same here. I
know that I don't know, but that's all I know. How about you?

Can you tell me if there's anything missing, or is what you're looking at always already
complete? We could sort of say it's completely complete, could we not? That's the way
it is when I do it. How about for you?

Now, drop the pretending, and go to your actual experience. For this experiment,
suspend your ability to label. When you look without labeling through the body as a
camera, how many things are going on in the world that you are filming? When I do it,
I count one. If you can't label, you can't judge, can you? In the absence of labeling and

33
thus judging, is there truly any division in whatever it is that you're looking at? Is
there any genuine separation? There sure isn't for me, I can tell you that with great
confidence.

When you use your body as a camera to view whatever it is that it's viewing--because
without labels there's not even a "world"--how are things going? How's that whatever-
it-is getting along? In the absence of labeling, we can't compare, can we? And in the
absence of comparing, can you find a problem? Me either.

If when you use that unit as a camera, and YOU are the ONE THING going on, then
you are, as they say, NONDUAL, wouldn't you agree? If that's the case, as it certainly
is, then what would you say is showing up in your camera? Everything, you say? Yes,
that's true. Everything. Is there another word for that, one that really says it with
style? How about What Is? That's what's showing up, correct? Of course it is. Well,
since that's the case, is there anything that really is, that's not showing up? Not for
me!

So how about comparisons? Not there, huh? That's because comparisons aren't in
What Is. Only real stuff is in What Is. So where do are all comparisons live? In your
head. I call that territory what isn't. It can't show up in your body-camera because it
doesn't exist. It isn't part of What Is, and there's nothing BUT What Is.

How about alternatives? Surely there must be alternatives to What Is? If so, where
would they be? Hmmm.. They'd have to be IN What Is, don't you think? If they aren't
where would they be? Ah, in what isn't again! Your head!

How about all those universes and dimensions where woulda-coulda-shoulda mean
something? Do they show up? Nope. Then where do they live? In your head. Does the
past show up in your lens. Nope. How about the future? Nope. How about that
Wonderful Land, the land where what you think about stuff actually matters. Does
that show up? Nope. You're stuck with What Is, and in What Is, your beliefs, opinions,
and positions mean squat.

How about 'someplace else'? Nope. You got your Here, you got your Now, and you got
nothing else. That's all that shows up, because that's all that is.

Want to argue with what you see? Okay. How's that working out for you? Are you
changing anything, or have you just got what you already had, only now you're
suffering over it. Funny how that works, is it not? It only works like that every time. I'd
spend my energy looking at how I could get along with What Is, or open an
investigation into how What Is might be in the next moment if I made some practical
tweaks.

I think I've made my point. If I haven't, it's unlikely any further illustration will work.

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YOU, my friend, are Being. You are a living verbness and not a static noun. You are
always being Being, but this camera exercise will help you to get the sense of being
Being, like the firefighter putting on his uniform. Being is where you're always looking
from, only sometimes you get confused. You get confused when you look as the body,
instead of through it. After all, it's not your exclusive body anymore than any other
body is. It's just another unit. It's just another tool for functioning in the dream. It's
really quite like my eyeglasses, which are a tool I use for looking through, only my
eyeglasses never make the mistake of thinking they're the looker! But when you look
through that unit, you make the silly mistake of thinking that you are your looking
tool! How funny is that?

Welcome to a taste of being Being. You can do this anytime. You can do this on the fly.
It will not transform you, it will dissolve you. Welcome Home.

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 NONDUAL FAQ

1- What is Nonduality?

Nonduality is the term we use to label the examination and exploration of oneness.
"Non" means "no" and "duality" means "more than one," so this is the philosophy of
not-more-than-one. There is "just one thing going on". Everybody and everything are
part of this one thing. Nonduality takes the Golden Rule one step further. It’s not
telling you to treat others as you would have them treat you, but rather that as you
treat others, so are you treating yourself.

There is no room for accidents in this kind of spontaneously arising environment. It’s
such an extraordinary concept that the mind cannot hold it; it can only behold it. It is
this very beholding that was experienced by Jesus, Buddha, Rumi, St. Francis, St.
John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and many,
many more of whom the average person has never heard. It's my educated guess that
more awakened people are living on the planet today than have lived on it in all the
previous years combined. For thousands of years, Nondual awakening was
nonetheless an extraordinary and isolated event. Percentage-wise, it's still unusual for
someone to come to a deep and ongoing spiritual awakening, but glimpses of reality,
clear seeings which can forever alter our lives, are simply no longer rare.

The effectiveness of Nondual teachings is measurable. Under the guidance of an

awakened teacher, no matter what the tradition, or lack of tradition, we will come to
self-realization, and/or we will see others do so—or we don’t. If this isn't happening,
it's simply not the real thing. You will know it by its fruits. I know of no other set of
spiritual teachings whose success or failure is so clear, evident, and public. You’re
surely going to be hearing more and more about oneness teachings in coming years as
they quietly spread like an ocean of dye while making their way both around the globe,
and around your block. Wherever it reaches there is marked change.

Once we enter the stream of this teaching we don’t need science to convince us of
anything, but it’s nonetheless interesting to note that many branches of science, from
quantum physics to advanced neurology, are pointing to many of the same
conclusions advanced by Nondual teachings. We find striking similarities—or
mirrors—in quantum physics, cutting edge neuroscience, computer science, biology,
and more.

Even if you have never heard of Nonduality, it doesn’t matter. That might even work
for you, simply because you won’t have to unlearn or overcome a bunch of intellectual
knowledge about it. Such knowledge can be very helpful, particularly at the beginning,
but if we don’t stand upon it and reach beyond it, then it can become a hindrance. I
have seen two men, neither of whom had even heard the word "Nonduality," come to
an awakening as we were going through some investigation together. They didn’t need
background. I have also seen people who've followed this path for years become so

36
steeped in their own ideas about truth that they have become resistant to truth itself.
We become too right and too smart to wake up—at least until we don't.

Nondual awakening is what has traditionally been referred to as "enlightenment." All

of this is explained in more depth below. Suffice it to say, awakening is real, and the
truth can be realized by ordinary people without any sort of deprivation or
renouncement. One way to do that, the quickest way that I know, is through the
Direct Pointing Method that I share and write about.

2 – What is awakening?

Awakening is actually something of a misnomer. What we’re speaking of is simply the

recognition of your true nature–seeing/being that which you already are. As explained
in FAQ 1, there is just "one thing going on," and awakening is the seeing of this truth
for ourselves. We no longer have to rely on hearsay or second-hand information. We
may not yet be clear, but we know a deep truth that we can never fully un-know.
When this occurs it tends to feel like an awakening from a dream. However, what is
‘experienced’ is that which is always already awake–which in fact never was asleep to
begin with. The easiest way to put this is that it's not the ego which awakens, but
rather Life itself which awakens from the dream of exclusive identification. In short,
we see that what we are includes the body (and everything else!), but our true nature
is not limited to the body.

This is not something we can figure out; it has to be seen for ourselves. This seeing
can come as a glimpse, or as a full seeing–with a whimper, a bang, or anything in
between. Awakening can seem to come quickly, or slowly. Most often it’s a
combination. It may appear to require special spiritual practices, or be shown to
completely transcend them. It can and does happen any way it wants to, any time it
wants to, through any body it wants to. Any attempt to explain what awakening really
is, including this one, will ultimately fail. That which is always already awake is also
that which is beyond words. Still, we try!

The personality–the one looking to wake up, get enlightened, find liberation, whatever
you want to call it–will never actually awaken. The personality, the character of the so-
called individual, and hence that entire play, is precisely what is seen through. In the
absence of a personal me, reality is shown to be spontaneously arising. It’s right
here, right now: nowhere and nowhen else. This is it, but it’s so close, so obvious, so
incredible that we can’t see it. Until we do. Once we do, if it’s thoroughly seen, we
can see nothing else. Our story is like clouds in front of the sun. In the presence of
clouds, the sun is shining, but it isn't seen. In the absence of clouds, the sun is seen,
but the clouds never actually affected either the sun or its shining. In the absence of
story, only truth remains.

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3 – What can I do to help myself wake up?

If you mean, what can the non-existent character do to bring about a change in its
hypothetical sleep state–well, you see it right there in the words "non-existent" and
"hypothetical". In the end there's nothing we can do, not directly. However, don’t
despair. While it’s true that from the absolute view there is "nothing to do and no one
to do it," that’s just a view. It feels like the whole, but it’s really just half; it’s 180
degrees of seeing out of a possible 360 to be experienced. It could be said that taking
this fatalistic viewpoint is tantamount to the absolute denying the existence of the
relative. It happens a lot, especially with glimpses, or less than full awakenings,
which are by far the most common sort. After spending most of our lives identifying
as the relative, once we get a glimpse we completely shift our loyalties to the other side
of limitation!

For fifty years I thought I was Fred. Then, after my initial awakening, I thought I was
Not-Fred. Now, at long last, I know the truth: I'm both. If we embrace this "I am the
vastness and only the vastness" limitation after our own experience, or borrow it from
others, then our view remains incorrect, but in a wholly new way. Now we get to
suffer from a much higher level!

The true Nondual view, the 360, as I call it, denies nothing. Nonduality means that
there’s just one thing going on; how can we deny any part of it–absolute, relative, real,
unreal, permanent, temporary; all of those are just halves, which is the tip-off that
although our view may have significantly broadened or deepened, we’re still seeing
from duality. Neither yin nor yang is true or complete, but the pairing of the two is
both true and complete, so to speak. Let me add that there are fully awake teachers
who employ this "no-method method" as a teaching strategy. That’s their story and
they’re sticking to it. I get it. When this strategy works, it works well, but it only
seems to work with a fairly narrow band of seekers. My teaching is based on the Law
of Large Numbers: how do the most people wake up most of the time? Let's do that!

Regardless of what we may see, know, and experience from that absolute view, there is
nonetheless a body still here on a planet we call Earth, and it’s still going to want
lunch and a nap. We can, in essence, enlist the dream character to work within the
dream toward the apparent goal of awakening, or to carry out skillful living. From a
higher view it could be said to all be part of a spontaneously unfolding script, and
that’s fine. None of this makes any logical sense. If we insist on putting everything into
neat, logical boxes, then we are lost, because at that point even doing nothing is seen
as a practice!

Again, this is not something we can figure out. We have to experience it first-hand.
This is what Direct Pointing is all about.

4 – Do I have free will, or not?

Neither. Both. Actually, it’s a moot question.

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Once again, this has to be looked at from the larger picture. Once we enter
Nonduality, we have left the land of easy answers, and entered the land of difficult
questions. Who is it that is supposed to either have free will, or not have free will?

Ah, yes, we’re right back to our old friend, the imaginary character! Answer in the
negative, and we’re saying that no, I as a separate being do not have free will. Answer
in the positive, and we are stating that yes, I as a distinct object, do have free will.
The trap is successfully sprung either way we go.

This is precisely the kind of question that human minds love to get involved with,
because we can take a stand and battle over it forever. In fact we have already done
so: clerics and philosophers have had an ongoing argument over this for several
thousand years; we’re just the latest generation to address it.

Ego delights in all of this, because it gets to keep churning along no matter which side
has the temporary upper hand. All ego needs to survive is resistance in any form, and
war in its ten thousand costumes is the single most common phenomena on our
planet.

Nonduality is not declaring that you do not have free will. Nonduality is not declaring
that you do have free will. Nonduality is declaring that you, as a separate entity, do
not exist.

5 – How do I stay awake?

This question is a doozy. I say that, because it haunted me for so long. We get a
glimpse, or maybe even have a major seeing that lasts for days or weeks, but gradually
we begin to see it soften and slide, and the next thing we know, we’re right back in the
mud. We had it, but we lost it. We have lost our "connection"!

In order to answer this question, I have to ask the used-to-be-enlightened human a

couple of questions of my own. "What was the primary knowledge you received from
your "awakening experience?" If it was for real, there can only be one answer. (Of
course you can now fake this answer, but that’s a whole other bucket of misery.)

The only legitimate answer is, "I saw that there was no separate me. I saw that there
was just one thing going on, which left no place whatsoever for an individual. From
that view, bodies are true, but persons and personalities are stories, nothing more."

Very well, my used-to-be-enlightened friend. Then let me ask you a few more
questions that you don’t even need to answer. I really hate to do this, but I have no
choice. Who is it that’s lost their connection? Who is it that feels like it has "fallen
out," or become "disconnected" from the one thing going on? It couldn’t be that
imaginary character creeping back into the picture, could it?

Of course it is. Not every question that arises in Nondual teachings comes back to
this one question, but damn near every one of them does.

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One more quick note here. The chief reason we feel like we’ve lost "our connection" is
that we’ve lost our buzz. Humans are hooked up to love their buzzes. Sometimes the
apparent penetration of reality is accompanied by waves of energy, blissful highs,
hallucinations-which-we-call-visions, and any amount and variety of fireworks and
candy. We confuse that with the awakening. We confuse the bugle with the sunrise,
and we happen to like the bugle a lot. And who is it that likes the bugle? You tell me.

But does the bugle actually have anything to do with the sunrise? Is it causation, or
accompaniment? The answer is clear. Having said all of that, let me end this by
saying that there are things we can do to encourage stable awakeness. I talk about
them regularly on the Awakening Clarity website (Google it), and in The Book of
Undoing.

6 – Is there really a planetary shift taking place?

Apparently so, although there's no hard evidence of it. There certainly appears to be a
dramatic shift taking place in the number of awakenings that are taking place,
particularly in the number of initial penetrations, either glimpses, or more prolonged
seeings, that are occurring. For thousands of years we believed awakening was a
rarity. While we certainly can’t know how many men and women woke up historically,
the records we have received concerning saints, mystics, and those who seem to have
been "Nondual heretics" indicate that it was extremely rare.

Granted, in the West, few would have been very keen to "come out of the closet," what
with a stoning or stake burning awaiting them, so the records are less than infallible.
But in the East, where such things have long been more culturally acceptable, reports
of authentic awakenings have never been abundant. I offer here my own story of what
I think is happening in this era in my country (the story is similar elsewhere), how I
see it occurring, and why I think it’s taking place now, particularly in America.

While many Nondual principles have been studied and debated by Western
philosophers since the time of Socrates, it was in the East where the experiencing of
them was turned into an art. Yet for a long, long time the East was a relatively
isolated area—to Westerners, I mean! In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as
both local and world travel became more common, Nondual teachings could move
more easily, and they began to come out of hiding. America had its
Transcendentalists–Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, John Muir, et al.

The Indian saint, Sri Vivekananda came to the West at the close of the nineteenth
century. This was a game changer as he presented his views at the World Parliament
of Religions in 1893. Beginning in the 1920s D. T. Suzuki (with a little promotional
help from Carl Jung) brought Zen teachings from Japan, and a decade later Paul
Brunton introduced the world to Ramana Maharshi via his book, A Search in Secret
India. In the 1950s, after China swallowed up Tibet, those long-secret teachings
began to emerge. By the 1960s and 1970s there was a flood of information moving
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West, and a river of spiritual seekers moving East. All of this was the foundation for
the detonation to come.

In this century, with the rise of the Internet, the teaching found an easy way to
spread, a comfortable place to call home. It was a perfect marriage of information and
utility and Nonduality exploded. Long-hidden teachings were suddenly just a click
away. The most obscure volumes could now be easily discovered on Amazon.com.
And people began to wake up–lots of them by any historical standard. (Although it’s a
brief penetration for many, that’s often enough to change the life of the seer.)

Simultaneous to all of this, the health of our planet has grown more and more dire. Of
course the planet itself is in no danger, but the living species are, including humans.
While America is not the only culprit, we remain the shining example. We are the
poster nation for a world of self-centered culprits. Everyone in the world now wants
two cars and a McMansion. Everyone wants cheap, abundant electricity, so much
water that they can waste it, and all the fossil fuels they can burn. Everyone wants to
eat meat two or three times a day and throw their garbage in burgeoning landfills.

We have just a few generations to solve these enormous, fundamental planetary

problems, or the planet will solve them for us, and we won’t like the fix. Probably the
only acceptable way out of this is through a matching level of enormous, fundamental
change in human behavior. There is nothing so inspiring as self-interest, and once it
is seen widely enough that there is just one thing going on, then all interest is Self-
interest. There is only looking out for number one, and that’s only achieved by looking
out for everyone and everything.

Not everyone has to wake up in order to achieve this, but significant numbers will
need to. Assuming that’s what’s happening now, then at some point the weight of all
these enlightened people will tip the scales toward rational living and rational
governing. The rest will follow; they always do. From an absolute view, none of this
matters much. I find that view cold and pointless, and I don’t find it enlightened. It
does not inspire skillful thinking or skillful action.

There is a story about a Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki, when he was on his deathbed
in California. A friend brought him some tea. Suzuki swooned a bit and the friend
jerked to help him. When she did so, the tea cup she was carrying careened toward
the floor. "Watch out for the cup!" Suzuki hollered. "But Roshi (teacher), I was trying
to take care of you," said the friend. "Taking care of the cup is taking care of me,"
Suzuki replied.

This is enlightened living.

*****

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