Category Archives: Chats

Sam Quotes

From Gnostic.org by Walter H. Bowart, EditorTucson, Arizona, 1972 Forward for This is the New Age in Person Lectures Inspired by St. Paul’s ‘First Epistle to the Corinthians The first thing that struck me about Samuel L. Lewis (called Murshid, or teacher, by his disciples) was his deep humanness. He had a gruff manner behind …

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Aliens and Nonduality

So, we’ve been watching this TV series, made for TV, on Netflix. It’s about aliens. It’s called Roswell. It’s set in Roswell, New Mexico, and it’s about aliens landing in ’47.

In this story there are aliens left in the town who grew up in glowing pods. It’s so funny to watch because, as the show goes along, you can tell the writers are literally making it up each episode. I don’t think they had a full plot to start with; new characters will come in whenever they need something weird to happen. Everyone in the show is super beautiful and handsome. People die and then aren’t dead. And it’s full of existential angst.

As we watch this show we’re always shaking our heads at the leaps from reality that are required to follow the plot, and commenting that if you’re writing a show about aliens, you can do any crazy thing. Add some aliens to a plot and boom! You can do anything. You can go in any direction; you don’t have to be moored to any reality at all.

This is just like living in the dual state… which is the opposite of nonduality. When you’re living in the dual state, you’re living in a projection of yourself rather than knowing who you are and living your life as your actual self.

The actual self is very simple. You know who you are—you’re just a “boring” you. It goes very deep, however. If you take a minute to stop and feel the essence of yourself it is also the essence of everything. It’s your connection to earth and reality. In the nondual state everything is real and connected.

The dual state is just the opposite. It’s always projected onto other things—the things we see, the things people have said about us, what we’ve been taught about Heaven and Hell. We’re always trying to find spirituality rather than just being a human being whose nature is to do spiritual things. In the dual state you’re always projecting out of yourself. People literally invent the stories of their lives as if it’s very bad fiction.

So many of our spiritual teachings, like “create your own reality,” or A Course in Miracles, are literally about how to invent your best projection. It’s like “How to Become an Alien 101.” In A Course in Miracles—the basis of it is that we come from somewhere else, and we’re here to learn a lesson. We’re not even from here; we’re not even from Earth.

We are aliens living on the earth. Stuck entirely in our heads.

The Nondual state, on the other hand, is solid and real. You can’t invent your own reality—you live inside a shared reality with not only every person but also everything: all our relations, all the animals, the stars, the molecules, and the energy. We live inside an actual reality that we are a part of. One of the basic prayers of monks studying nonduality is: “Bring us from the false to the real.”

Our alien story and living constantly in projections is very persuasive. We do the opposite. We put a lot of work into bringing ourselves from the real to the false, trying to make the false a powerful alien shell of illusion.

So, nonduality and aliens: watch the show Roswell and you’ll see what I mean. Have a good laugh at how it’s so obviously made up. It’s a total metaphor for living in the dual state—you can make up anything about your life that you want. Like the self-help gurus? Their job is to teach you how to make up the very best thing you can possibly make up about your life… and hopefully end up with lots of money.

Nonduality teachers are the opposite. We say, “No, real reality is just fine. Come out of the projection and into who you actually are.”

Little sidebar: I actually have a friend who totally believes in aliens. She’s written some books and stuff, and she was just telling me last week that the aliens are coming, and their job is to teach us to live in the nondual state.

I’m like, “Oh yeah, sweet, nice.”

But I’m thinking, “We can do that ourselves; we don’t need aliens to come teach us how to be human beings.” This is our birthright. This is what we do.

Anyway, come out of your alien state and be a human being on Earth. Amen.

Flat Earth and Nonduality

Flat Earth and nonduality—you might be thinking, what do those have to do with each other?

Well… lately, I have been talking about nonduality and Native wisdom. I’ve been saying that nonduality didn’t start with Buddha. It didn’t start with Nisargadatta. It didn’t start with Rupert Spira or Adyashanti, or anybody. These people are all describing a state that was already there. Just like Newton didn’t ‘discover’ gravity—he didn’t create gravity; he just found a way to describe it.

The nondual state has always been there. All of these people—Buddha in particular—who have described the state have been misinterpreted. So many stories have grown up around it that the idea of nonduality has turned into a total fiction.

Anything you hear about Nonduality is crazy. What we’ve actually interpreted the nondual state to be is nuts.

As I try to talk to people about it I see their misunderstandings. The belief that it’s a philosophy, a system of thought, rather than a natural state is deeply intrenched. It’s very hard to break through the conceptions to show just how real and ancient the nondual state is.

I’ve realized lately that it’s just like talking to a Christian fundamentalist about evolution. I’m calling it Flat Earth, but it’s the same thing, right? People who believe the world is flat because the Bible doesn’t say it’s round, or people who believe the world was created 6,000 years ago, and refuse to listen to anything different.

This is the same fundamental belief that people studying Eastern mysticism have, almost as if enlightenment was invented when Buddha lived 2,600 years ago. No! Buddha simply discovered a natural state that’s always been there.

We need to get past this “Flat Earth Society” mindset that everyone is stuck in and start looking at reality as if it’s real.

Big concept, right? [Laughter]

We need to realize that the nondual state is the natural human state. There are plenty of people around the world still living in indigenous communities who exist in this natural state. The second we truly realize the truth in that all seeking changes completely. You’re not seeking something in the future, something outside yourself—you’re seeking yourself. And how can you seek yourself? You’re right there!

You’re trying to become fully aware of your humanity, which is always there. The stories implanted in our heads cause us to miss this truth. Once you realize this, everything makes sense.

This is why spiritual teachers instruct students to calm down, relax, sit still, and be silent. When you calm down, relax, sit still, and just be silent, you are your natural self. Even when you’re running around, angry, and your mind’s going crazy, you’re still your natural self—it’s just that you don’t like that version of you.

Coming down into your actual being, you see that you’re only this simple, alive presence. You have a name, that’s you; you have a being, that’s you. When you’re solid in knowing who you are, in a way that you can’t be convinced otherwise, then you can live your life from that state of being. You become a positive contributor to the world rather than the consumer we’ve been trained to be. It becomes much harder to fool you. You begin interacting with people in new ways and bringing new modes of being into the society we live in.

The indigenous truths we still have today are the old way of being human, but we need to modernize it so that it works within today’s society. We don’t have to throw everything away, but we do need to clean up a lot of garbage—just look at the mess we’ve created! That’s a big job, but we’re humans, and we like doing things, figuring things out.

In order to take on this job we have to shed our consumer mentality and the conviction that we don’t know who we are.

The moment you know who you are, you become responsible for everything. And from that place of responsibility, we can act like fully adult human beings, capable of living sustainably with all our relations—with each other, the atmosphere, the water, the four-legged beings, and all the living creatures in the ocean.

Then we can see our connection and start acting as if we’re not on a flat Earth that was created 6,000 years ago. We are on an ancient, beautiful, living Earth, and we are the living Earth, awake, with responsibilities as human beings. This is the new way we’ll start living, rooted in the old understandings of reality.