Bindi

Jeff Foster, nondual teacher who realised his nonduality was not authentic, and writes (above) about accepting duality as much as nonduality, the physical, emotional, and mental levels, is not able to accept these levels now that he is physically and cognitively disabled. It is at least authentic for him to acknowledge publicly “I am failing right now to accept my condition. I feel broken. I am not in love with where I am. I cannot “rest” with this shattering new reality.” “I WRITE BOOKS ABOUT ACCEPTANCE... BUT I JUST CANNOT ACCEPT THIS”. A Confession. 1st May 2021 http://r.lifewithoutacentre.com/mk/mr/nKauvvrCJ8OLrBhtl3_WWyJhPiPX3Omt8ZvYdn2aMIsAbIIeMNT6HxbCcWBe46RBt9Zc3B5snE0RnjhXoAMtjt83H5vcXnYPM_qAtAX1eCIJOeeC

Awakening from the Dream of Nonduality by Jeff Foster

There are Zen stories where someone claims to have achieved enlightenment or whatever, and they are put in a situation in which they become angry, thus proving they have not actually arrived. If you never fall back into the identification with the body or the emotions or thoughts but remain in nondual contentment permanently then you have achieved something, but you are still identifying with nondual contentment. If you didn’t identify with nondual contentment then you wouldn’t see nondual contentment as any more desirable than emotions or thoughts or the body, all things would be equal. Apech posted very early on if nonduality is seen as the ultimate then it is dual because it is set against duality. Nonduality shouldn’t differentiate between duality and nonduality, all are equally valuable, and ultimately all are limiting identification with a way of perceiving. The Atman, God, Buddha nature is inconceivable, beyond all perception, beyond all description, I suspect the closest we might ever get is hearing the echo, and this will be a great achievement.

Buddha nature is opened to, but once realised why doesn’t a Buddha just sit around in Nirvana? I gather Buddha nature desires to bring everyone else to the same realisation within themselves. What compels Buddha nature to do this? Why engage with anyone else? To the Christian it is God’s will that causes Jesus to act for the benefit of others, if we manage to become like Jesus we would also be compelled to carry out God’s will. The small voice in the stillness is not identified as my voice, it is other, it surprises me, in the external yellow court scripture “When the Green Immortal Spirit passes over and communicates with me, there is a distant echo.” I endeavour to hear the small voice, perhaps because it is a voice beyond all the perception layers, I need a guide from beyond the ‘koshas’ to guide me beyond the koshas. Some thoughts in response to your thoughts.

I think agency is negated because full blown authentic agency is so hard to establish in the appropriate place in the chain of command between mundane self and higher self. I’m thinking only one or two people ever have actually established agency to carry out the higher self’s will, unlike nondual realisation it’s incredibly rare, but to attempt to realise agency is the authentic path. Nondual realisation without agency is less than half the story.

This reminds me of the Daoist reference to turning the light around, I like the explanation given in the video below in the first three minutes (despite the rather disconcerting reference to Osho in the beginning). I didn’t watch any further than this because I’m not interested in practicing such things, I don’t see things like turning the light around as a method but rather as an outcome of following the Way.

No, it’s just me, what can I say, my spidey senses are just tingling. You could start with looking at the numbers of people who are claiming to be ‘awakened’ so quickly and easily and wonder why millions of people are now suddenly able to achieve what countless dedicated aspirants have failed to achieve for Millenia, and this despite the nondually awakened’s glaring lack of Siddhis. Sometimes things that are too easy to accomplish aren’t actually worth accomplishing, because they’re also Neti Neti.

But who is there to get thrilled, and what is there to get thrilled about, if no one exists and nothing exists, and since it doesn't matter what anyone thinks or doesn't think or knows or doesn't know anyway, because thinking and knowing are so transitory and not it, and in reality its just the imaginary us having an imaginary conversation anyway.

Maybe I should stick to the notion of ‘The Father’ who wills, as in ‘Thy [the father’s] will be done’. The ‘God’ of Jesus did have will, and it was Jesus's role to establish that will on earth, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is not the ultimately impersonal Brahman but the interested God who heals and loves.

Thinking on it a bit further, to me, the ‘Doer’ of Atman’s will is a causal force enabled when consciousness enters the central channel. This makes sense of why subtle channel work is necessary, without it there is no enabled doer, even if by some chance one can hear the will of the ‘Atman’. The Doer force remains trapped within the central channel until it is activated, at which point it can deliberately travel outside the physical body under the direction of the Atman and do all those siddhi things that the rare spiritual giants can do.

There is a right thing to do, a right thing to say, a right place to be, etc etc, for one or all parties concerned, at certain moments in time. Atman consciousness is aware of these things, it being a much more expanded consciousness than I have (possibly limitless, I don’t know yet )and it informs my normal ‘lower’ consciousness of this. It is up to my lower consciousness to hear the echo and enact what atman consciousness urges. So atman consciousness has great knowledge and will but no agency to carry out that knowledge if my lower consciousness doesn’t hear and act. My lower consciousness has agency. This is like alignment with the Dao or with God, not my will but my Higher Will, and my enactment of same.

You say “You already are, and always have been free,” but are you already and always have been holy and pure as well? or is it just free? You ask me what would I prefer, “An agitated mind or a peaceful mind? A mind filled with anger and hatred or a mind filled with joy and love?”, as though I can make this choice, and now you ask me why crave for the personality’s likes and dislikes and tell me to be free of the personalities whims. Why? I responded earlier that I didn’t think making choices based on the preferences of the personality was a good idea anyway, that it was like letting a toddler decide what to put in the shopping trolley. Stirling did something similar, he said nonduality would ideally be taught with an eye toward generating compassion for other beings, to soften the cherishing of the "self". This is the best way to avoid becoming an enlightened asshole, as though this was a choice, though he was very clear earlier that the “whole idea that you are a person who is in charge of your destiny, or that which practice you choose is in your hands, is nonsense. Projecting yourself or objects into the future and thinking what you imagine might REALLY happen, or imagining that something that happened to you in the past has any absolute reality is nonsense.” Confusing.

Could you post some TTC verses that you think capture this?

The danger of following the preferences of personality is that very often the most important things we have to do to progress are not what we would prefer. Like shadow work, going through the deepest darkest places of anxiety and anger because there is light on the other side. Like sitting with emotional pain until it is healed. Like letting go of what feels most desirable. Allowing personality to make choices is like letting a toddler decide what to put in the shopping trolley.

“That which knows this state, like all others,” as just one more state, is indeed the Atman, but would the Atman raise the status of this one state above all other states by desiring to experience this one state above all others? I think to extricate oneself from the delusion of anandamaya kosha the Vijnanamaya Kosha (Wisdom or Awareness Body) needs to first be developed, otherwise one cannot see where ego and anandamaya kosha start and end. Without wisdom one will see only anandamaya kosha and will want only anandamaya kosha, with some wisdom one will notice the presence of ego and try to destroy ego leaving only anandamaya kosha. I think the real work is to overcome the seduction of anandamaya kosha experience and seek to separate consciousness from anandamaya kosha (along with all other koshas).

I have multiple reactions, none of which are definitive, which makes it effective as an art piece at least

https://savy-international.com/yoga/anandamaya-kosha/ author Dr Jitender K Sahdev https://savy-international.com/about/teachers/

The Anandamaya kosha or 'sheath made of bliss', or ananda is in Yoga and Vedantic philosophy the most subtle or spiritual of the five levels of embodied self. It is not possible to exactly translate the word ananda; its meaning is closer to equanimity than bliss. There is unified experience and that experience does not change. It is peace, joy, and love that is underneath, beyond the mind, independent of any reason or stimulus to cause a happy mental reaction. Taittiriya Upanishad says: Hidden inside it (Vigyanamaya Kosha) is yet a subtler body, composed of pure joy. It pervades the other bodies and shares the same shape. It is experienced as happiness, delight, equanimity and bliss. It further defines anandamaya kosha as having the shape or form of a person with love as its head, joy as its right wing and delight as its left wing, bliss as its trunk and Brahman as its support or foundation. Anandamaya kosha is the most interior of the koshas, the first of the koshas surrounding the Atman, the eternal center of consciousness. It is the subtlest of the five koshas… This is a state of mind which does not change, despite anything that happens in life. With that state of mind you can live with all the conditions of life. You are where you are, firmly rooted in your own self, but at the same time you can interact with everyone. You can do anything, but still not be affected. Death cannot change that experience; birth cannot change it; love and hatred cannot make your experiences swing. When your mind becomes steady in experience and does not fluctuate under any condition, that is ananda. So, anandamaya kosha means the kosha which comprises homogenous experience. Satyam Loka, the plane of ultimate bliss, corresponds to anandamaya kosha, which is none other than pure consciousness. The anandamaya kosha is extremely important in yoga because it’s the final and thinnest veil standing between our ordinary awareness and our higher Self. …Ananda is steady state of being, no matter what circumstance arises. The state of wholeness, of integration with the moment and with yourself, encompasses the inner sheath of anandamaya. This bliss state is usually experienced in fleeting moments, but can remain for longer periods. Anandamaya can be experienced in those moments when you are fully immersed in that which you are doing—when you no longer separate yourself from your experience. Importantly, anandamaya is still a sheath, a layer that can be peeled back. When anandamaya is peeled away, we reach atman—our very center. Atman is our direct connection with the divine, with the essence of all that is. It is our pure consciousness.

There IS manas consciousness, anandamaya consciousness etc until the moment they are all thoroughly and permanently disidentified from. Then they don’t exist, only Atman does. I have heard the experience of Atman cannot be put into words, but I see nondualists have no problem putting their experience into words.

I have tried to explain my frustration with nondual-speak, but I’ll say it again to try and clarify. From my perspective the nondual awakened have experienced anandamaya kosha and as you say above have then dropped out of that experience, from then in though they have set their manas consciousness to want to be in anandamaya consciousness always, to be perfectly aligned with it, I could say they are in love with anandamaya kosha in the way that manas loves and clings to store consciousness. What nondualists don’t comprehend is that anandamaya/nondual consciousness is not the endpoint, but one more form of consciousness that they are identifying with, just as they once identified with physical, emotional and mental consciousness. They disregard these earlier levels of consciousness as false, and don’t realise that their nondual perspective is equally false. Conceptually then, Atman is beyond duality, but it is also beyond nonduality.

Immersion (Piss Christ).

Agreed, emotional dysfunction, abusiveness, temper, addiction, all have nothing to do with nondual understanding as it is presented by nondualists. If all stories collapse upon realisation of nonduality, what are the further ten years for? They all collapse, but it takes ten years to let go of all the collapsed stories? As a nondualist how can you choose anything let alone whether you’d like to become an enlightened asshole or an enlightened saint, when as you say above the “whole idea that you are a person who is in charge of your destiny, or that which practice you choose is in your hands, is nonsense. Projecting yourself or objects into the future and thinking what you imagine might REALLY happen, or imagining that something that happened to you in the past has any absolute reality is nonsense.“ You can choose or you can’t choose, you can’t have your cake and eat it. If your practice hasn’t led you to recognising which action is right between these two, then I don’t think it is a healthy practice for humanity as a whole. My practice has a maxim: “When I think I think of others”. The closer I am to living this maxim the closer I am to my end point. I have no interest in philosophical justification for abuse. It would be good to be a nondually awakened Ukrainian at the moment.

Complete disidentification? What about The Scam of Nonduality. Emotional dysfunction persists beyond nondual awakening. So you either have to categorise the emotionally dysfunctional nondual awakened as not really having had a nondual awakening, or acknowledge that nondual awakening in general is only part of an equation. Awakening to atman is an ultimate solution because all koshas including the emotional kosha level are transcended, the entire limited consciousness structure collapses. If emotional or mental dysfunction remain at all then I can say the whole kosha structure remains operational because it has to collapse in its entirety to be truly overcome. In my understanding of the kosha system emotional and mental health would have been dealt with at an earlier stage, equivalent to disentangling the tendrils and branches of the vine from the structure first. Equally, without disentangling the tendrils and the branches first, perception of what is vine and what is wood at the the trunk of the vine is impossible. If the above is the state of store consciousness and manas, how can they be easily separated? Or does the Arhat simply ignore it as illusion? Or is it the case that if no one is there to see it then it effectively doesn’t exist, even though emotional dysfunction patently still exists?

Well they have rather successfully staged a coup, and are now ensconced as the dominant ‘Eastern’ and New Age spiritual paradigm. Hordes of smug nondual awakened bastards coming to a store near you.

The issue for me is that this ‘natural state’ that nondualists describe sounds a lot like anandamaya kosha to me: The issue is that “anandamaya kosha is still a sheath, a layer that can be peeled back. When anandamaya is peeled away, we reach atman—our very center. Atman is our direct connection with the divine, with the essence of all that is. It is our pure consciousness.” So I’m basically saying there is something beyond the ‘natural experience of nonduality’. The problem with ‘self’ is not ‘self’ but self’s identification with consciousness states that are ‘not self’, up to and including anandamaya kosha. My ‘self’ would be equivalent to atman, permanently free from the restrictions of identification of myself as body, mind, emotions or anandamaya kosha. What that would be like is impossible and pointless for me to guess at, but as has been mentioned earlier it’s likely to be hard to describe. The idea of losing atman is on a whole different level, I don’t think it can even be contemplated until one has actually arrived at that point in the first place. Equally whether atman experiences itself in a dual or nondual way is impossible to guess at, and actually unnecessary to know anyway, the only thing that ever needs to be known is how to disentangle atman from identification with the koshas, everything beyond that will be as it is.