It’s Not What You Think
As long as you don’t know who you are you don’t understand non-duality — because “boom” right there there’s two things. There’s this mysterious “who you are” and there’s the “you” that is thinking about who you are. So what we tend to do is study. We’ll read all sorts of books telling us various different things.
Worse than that, we’ll constantly try to massage and beautify the false self. We think that if we can make the false self beautiful enough we’ll be this enlightened being. Or perhaps if you have enough self-awareness you’ll be aware… or at least you’ll get rid of pain and be out of suffering.
It doesn’t work that way.
Non-duality is such a beautiful teaching because it simply says, over and over, “Nope it’s not that. No. No. Not two. It’s not this. It’s not there.” It’s not even what I’m saying, because literally everything you’re hearing me say is coming through words on a screen and going into your mind. There’s so many avenues between us and the real thing. That’s why Nissargadata only says, “I am that.” Simple.
What I’m working on in this course is finding ways that we can move straight into intimate knowing by getting a broader perspective over what it is, what we’re doing as spiritual seekers, how new developments in science can help us. And most important, learning to identify our own spiritual greed, and the things that spark that spiritual greed.
Looking for the Something
You’ll always find spiritual teachers who tell you you can get away from suffering.
Well, who wants to suffer? So yeah. I’m in! Let’s get away from suffering!
It’s a transaction.
Enlightened teachers look so beautiful and wise. And we want to be beautiful and wise. So we are drawn to that.
Step back and you can see that so much of is is straight out spiritual greed. We even have the business of create your own reality. If you are spiritual enough you get what ever you want. If you aren’t getting what ever you want you aren’t spiritual enough.
So we gotta put a stop to the spiritual greed. We can use all the new understandings we have about who we are as human beings in order to find out “who I am” in a graceful way. We have to be able to look at what past masters have told us and interpret those things with this new lens.
It’s not that other thing.