I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid I was fascinated by mirrors. My mother had a bedroom dresser with wing mirrors, and it was endlessly interesting to tilt the mirrors so that they reflected each other – creating an infinite cool-blue recursion of reflections that flipped my mind. Interspersing my head into that zone of recursion and seeing myself, a pale kid, somehow involved in, but not understanding, this mystery, was one thing; removing my head but wanting, at the same time, to know what was happening while I was absent (the recursion now presumably spotless) was quite other ache.

Mark West, at his regular Thursday night meeting in the Cross, was on fire last night. I felt for a couple of new arrivals, who (my concern only) might have been struggling with the breadth of material on offer.

Back to mirrors again, and Mark was last night demonstratiing (without mirror) Douglas Harding’s Mirror Experiment (Looking for Yourself):

I find no face here confronting the face in the mirror. I am space here for my appearance there. I am capacity for my face in the mirror.

Over there behind the glass is my human appearance; here this side of the glass is my divine reality. I am both. I have that face and I am this reality. My face there is an appearance of the One I really am – here. (One of my many appearances.)

Mark made a statement, in passing but with absolute certainty, about that head in the mirror, a statement which has stayed with me. Paraphrasing:

We’ve let that head [the one in the mirror] crawl up our arm and sit where we are, and that’s suicide!

This, to me, is a disturbing and true statement about our collective misidentification with who we are, about our construction and virtually constant maintenance of a false “I”, a sad act of continual substitution of the lie for the actually of who we are, of Awareness, of Presence.

What to do about this? As Mark said last night (in response to a great question from one of the new-comers), referring to the simple fact of awareness, to the undeniable fact of our own existence: just “Be warm towards This”. There’s something in the “warmth” that’s for me immediately curative – it’s in our myth of individuality that the warmth is lost, that we live our lives way too cool.

Some beautiful pieces from around about.

Not Findable but Undeniable – Randall Friend:

The subject of any and all experiences is empty – it is not locatable – it has no attributes… That subject is not a thing from which you are knowing – it is the knowing – it is like an open space or capacity. It is a mysterious, unexplainable, indescribable presence by which the world, body and mind are known… there is no light which can illuminate the subject – it cannot become objectified.

Finding Our True Home – Tracy Cochran:

…the word [nostalgia] is a learned formation of Greek compounds, consisting of “nostos,” meaning “returning home,” a Homeric word, and “algos,” “pain” or “ache.” Anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Homer’s tales knows that the desire to return home is the most powerful and galvanizing of all longings. According to this great teacher [Jeanne de Salzmann], we humans wish for Being the way Odysseus yearned to see his wife and house and homeland again.

Questions and ‘Answers’ about Nonduality – Nicholas Powiull:

Thoughts cannot be identified with, they are a conditioning taught to us from a small age. Nothing really ever identifies with thought other than thought. So nobody is really thinking those thoughts. They are completely connected to what unfolds in the environment. As a way of saying it, you could say they are the environment thoughts, for without the environment no thoughts would be stimulated.

Introduction to Emptiness: As Taught in Tsong-kha-pa’s Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path – Guy Newland:

We suffer unnecessarily because we do not know ourselves. Like addicts fiercely clinging to a drug, we cannot let go of the sense that we are substantial, solid, independent, and autonomous. We lay schemes large and small to acquire and to harm—all grounded in this false apprehension of how we exist, who we are as living beings. On behalf of this exaggerated self, with fear, anger, and pride, we harm others. To nurture and to satisfy each passing whim of this exaggerated self, we build up our greed. Yet the path of greed and harm does not at all lead us toward happiness; it is samsara, the cyclic path of dissatisfaction and misery. Over and over again, moment after moment, we fall into this trap we have unwittingly built for ourselves. Like an addict’s drug, the false notion of an independently existing self is the source of great misery for ourselves and others.

Saw a nice photo sequence recently at The Guardian on The demolition of the Market Estate which had me wondering: What is the space in the room, the space we’ve inhabited, become fully habituated to (possibly for a very long time), once the demolition crews arrive? And afterwards, how has that space changed?

Said an ex-resident:

It’s just overwhelming. Everything we’ve seen and done here comes to this end. It’s very moving.

That which permeates all, which nothing transcends and which, like the universal space around us, fills everything completely from within and without, that Supreme non-dual Brahman –that thou are. (Shankara)

The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot. (Nisargadatta Maharaj)

I live just down the hill from Mark West and for a while I’ve been attending weekly meetings at his apartment. (Mark had the good fortune to spend time with Nisargadatta in the 1970s.) Recently, Mark was quoting energetically from Psalm 23, about sitting in the presence of enemies. (How Mark quotes so much of the scriptures of various traditions from memory continues to baffle me!) Here’s the piece:

You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.

“Why would I sit in the presence of my enemies?” asked Mark. Because that is what we must do, he suggests. Enemies are symbolic of thoughts here, and the Psalm is not saying we shouldn’t have them – rather that we should be able to be in their presence, and hence separate from them. How so? In Nisargadatta’s language, the work is required because we have lost the Natural State, we have the wrong relationship to thought.

In actuality we are not thought, any more than we are the body. So we sit at a table, prepared by the Lord, the Witness, pure Awareness; knowing that thoughts are the respected potential enemies of this Natural State. And in so doing we dwell in the house of the Lord forever. This is a beautiful piece of writing, a statement of pure nonduality (although usurped by a religious tradition that has lost its true meaning), a good reminder for me and possibly also for others.

To dwell in the house of the Lord forever will only be “returning to your own natural condition” (see previous post, Attempted Escapes from Fear).

A beautiful quote from Nisargadatta appears today on Charlie Hayes’ blog, and I repeat the first part here, out of my sense of conviction as to its truth:

Contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active, until you realise yourself as one with it. It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning only to your own natural condition.

Once you realise that all comes from within, that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you, your fear comes to an end. Without this realisation you identify yourself with the externals, like the body, mind, society, nation, humanity, even God or the Absolute. But these are all escapes from fear. It is only when you fully accept your responsibility for the little world in which you live and watch the process of its creation, preservation and destruction, that you may be free from your imaginary bondage.

You can continue reading Charlie’s post here.

The old woman is completely yellow. She struggles along a city street with stern facades rising around her.

She’s growing tired, and begins to stoop, lower and lower until she’s like a lizard or something prehistoric, exhausted and bony. Yet still she’s all yellow, and struggles on.

Then she begins to dissolve. Gradually, she becomes a yellow vapour or liquid and rises gently from the pavement, up the face of a building, until she breaks free into the sky.

Rising further, she coagulates into a blinding centre, the sun, and we know this only because we’ve no choice but to avert our gaze from what she’s become, alone and triumphant in that clear empty sky, high above the city, and know that it’s only the sun that would make us avert our gaze like this.

The empty city basks in her yellow rays.

I was struck by this quote from Sailor Bob Adamson on Charlie Hayes’ blog (See New Book “Only That”) and in my struckness merely repeat it here:

Without any concepts, you are seeing and knowing. Can you say the seeing, the knowing, hearing or functioning has any beginning? Can you say it has any ending? Can you point to where you start seeing or where you end seeing, or hearing? So it’s ever-fresh, self-shining, self-knowing. You don’t need another self to try to find yourself. That would be an impossibility. We have created this false sense of self and then we go looking from that point of view to try to find out what we really are. Yet that self-knowing is constantly with us.

I think this is a hugely important statement and it thrills me in its potentiality for freedom. Take seeing alone: the visual field is seamless as we move through our lives, one scene panning into another; there’s no boundary to it (even when the eyes close and re-open). The beauty in meditating upon this, in following closely the never-ending explication of the visual…

“Explication”, above, comes from David Bohm. The explicate order (what we see in the case of the visual) unfolds from the implicate order, the holographic template, the matrix…

I’m also led back to Thomas Traherne and his illimited field:

I felt no dross nor matter in my soul,
No brims nor borders, such as in a bowl
We see, my essence was capacity.

(Traherne, from My Spirit, in The Dobell Poems.)

There seems, at present, to be a re-emerging interest in the nature and uses of psychedelics. (You know that feeling when you’re hit by the same subject from various quarters at the same time?) Well, I don’t have personal experience of this, but I was very taken by the report of a man who took part in a recent trial using psilocybin as a treatment for depression: Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again.

And here’s what that man (Clark Martin) said:

It was a whole personality shift for me. I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people.

Rather neat I thought, simple home-spun philosophy that’s hard to refute and aligns with the nondual experience. And here’s Clark Martin, showing up in a rather endearing image.

Upon returning to our apartment after its recent renovation one of the first things we did was put valued books onto new bookshelves. One such book is I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. Slipping the book from the shelf a couple of days ago, I opened it to this short statement: “Life has no ambition”, a beautiful reminder that all our hopes, dreams and ambitions are mere constructions of an assumed I-centre, a thinker, a one who fears. Life itself is unfolding without the merest touch of such notions.

There is gestating, flowering, growing, withering, shining, decaying. Without an overlay that would name a future state. Such a relief, we are making up all else.

More quotes from Nisargadatta, from around the web:

The whole manifestation of this world is an expression of the same Consciousness that you are. You should not love anything other than your true nature, Consciousness. Deep desires, deep expectations: How can that be love? Your body identity is attracted to objects. It creates desires and you treat them as high priorities. Understanding yourself should be your only priority. Your body desires will lead you nowhere.

If you don’t understand the “I Am” how can you understand the rest?

To abide in consciousness is the true religion. The human brain creates religions.

How can words explain that from which words originate?

Without food there is death and the idea “I am” vanishes. Consciousness is beyond any idea.
You can only watch events happen. You can’t use Consciousness to do or undo anything.

Your body identity is like a very tight screw. Your idea of being an individual, is a screw. You must loosen it up. Let go of your personal identity and the screw will open as much as needed.

If you wish to use your intellect dwell on your nine months in the womb. What is in the womb is not different from what is happening now.

Anything that can show you what you are is actually pointing out what you are not.

Grasp the knowingness principle and move ahead in life. Like a swimmer caught in a vortex has to dive to the bottom of the river, then has to swim to the surface, outside of the vortex, and only then he is free.

We live like worms in hot sand, always needing help, but I am not a worm. I am the manifested and the unmanifested.

This set of images by Robert Kinmot has been in my queue for posting since about last September. Quite a bit’s happened since then – we’ve moved out of our apartment, had it renovated, and moved back in, a process much bigger and more disruptive than expected. There have been a total of six moves – including house sittings and two sub-lets in a difficult Sydney rental market fueled by the hot summer and high traveler numbers.

Back to the images – they’re more powerful now than when I first saw them on the SFMOMA site. I know there’s a whole conceptualist backdrop to Kinmont’s work, but looking at these images now, coming back home (literally), I’m drawn at a more emotional level to Kinmont’s own homecoming – his return to art making after a 30 year break. These are poignant images from 1969. They remind me also of dusty roads around Rotorua New Zealand (where I grew up) – riding the Raleigh Sports on unmade roads through dark bush.

Then there’s the real home, the nondual ground, the sublime emptiness; the way the photographer’s eye relaxes into the natural humility and accepting lack of these dependable dust-brushed ways. Very beautiful.

Robert Kinmot
My Favorite Dirt Roads, 1969

Check out also Kinmot’s unpublished notes on the SFMOMA site, which add another level of story, an autobiographical richness, to this work.

Greg Goode has a great body of material on nonduality at his Philosophical Consultation and Nondual Inquiry site. I’ve recently been reading his book, Standing as Awareness, which is for me is a wonderfully succinct summary of the direct path of Sri Atmananda. It contains some lively dialogues on the subject, too.

And here’s a piece of self-inquiry on You Tube that I especially like. “Non-dual teacher Greg Goode conducts an experiment to find the place where Roger’s “I” is located. Illustrated with drawings by Roger Ingraham.”

I am enjoying some of the gems on Francis Lucille’s blog, including his response to a question regarding the practice recommended by Nisargaddata of holding on to the sense of “I Am”. The questioner is concerned that the practice is in itself a duality, despite its nondual intention. Lucille answers as follows:

There is dual practice as long as there is the belief in an individual, separate, objective consciousness who seeks liberation through this practice. In this case the goal is an object, a state to be acquired by this personal seeker. At some point, a shift takes place with the understanding that that which we are is not an object, gross or subtle, and we find ourselves open to the possibility that consciousness is divine and unlimited. As soon as we are fully open to this possibility, consciousness reveals itself for what it truly is, infinite intelligence, boundless love, absolute splendor, and puts an end to our misery.

Lucille points to what seems to me to be a common error for spiritual seekers (I include myself), of attempting to acquire some state for the personal seeker. And what he says changes is the belief. This to me is powerful: that our beliefs can be held implicitly, to such a deep level that they block our true nature.

Here’s another lovely image from the 2010 Outsider Art calendar that was a present from my friend Ardsley. This one, Sanford Darling’s Lagoon, is for the month of February. (You can see January’s image here.)

My guess this work is one of the many images he painted on his house in the 1960s. (You can read an enthusiastic 1971 Time magazine article on the man and his enterprise here.) It’s obviously a lagoon form, and also for me an ocular form.

That the space within the eye is largely empty is appealing to me – an open field within which the world can be envisioned. And that elements of the landscape are also shown within the eye has a tantalising connection to Advaita – the world arising within the perceiver.

Sanford Darling
Lagoon
Latex on composition board, 125 x 125 cm (approx)

Here’s a nice introduction to the cross-over between science and nonduality (“the no-state state”) and the scientific method as a “way in” to the subject, for Westerners. It’s from the Science and Duality Conference site, for their conference that’s happening in October this year.

Yesterday I brought Nonduality as a subject in its own right into the Art + Psyche fold. It’s a new category in the blog. Now, here together are the three major areas I’m interested in, both personally and in my psychotherapy practice.

What’s Nonduality? There’s a lot on the subject around the web, for example, at Jerry Katz’s original Nonduality site. And it goes by many other terms in the many traditions of which it is spoken, such as presence, awareness, advaita, sunyata, and one term that I’ve constructed myself (an amalgam from Kant and Gestalt), the noumenal field.

Here’s Gangaji on the subject of the play of our lives of thought and suffering, and the underlying nondual dimension:

All the while, there is this simple, present stillness that is aware of the whole play. It experiences the play, experiences the suffering of the play, yet is ultimately untouched by the play. [Diamond in your Pocket, p113]

Gangaji’s spiritual lineage is the East (Papaji and Ramana Maharshi), and she has managed to fuse the understandings of contemporary Western psychology to this ancient spiritual tradition (advaita vedanta). Her teaching has been a strong influence on me, enabling me to bring the nondual dimension into my psychotherapy practice. I look forward to blogging more on this subject in the future.

Yet more on emptiness: he’s a nice quote from an interview with Adyashanti, a contemporary spiritual teacher. The interview is in a collection of essays and interviews The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom & Psychotherapy, which I consider to be a pretty good survey of what the book title states it to be!

Q: Is the avoidance of emptiness the root of human suffering?
Adyashanti: I like to call it the dirty little secret of humanity. It’s the emptiness, the abyss, that’s right in the middle of every human being. It’s right there, the silence that is always there, just waiting for some recognition.

More on the subject of the void and emptiness, I re-read Bernadette Roberts’ impressive book What is Self? over Christmas and there was one paragraph that struck me as deep wisdom, being as it is so simple.

Instead of going down into their own emptiness, people try to fill it with the pleasures of this world. They run from darkness, nothing and emptiness and often become embroiled in various delusions regarding its true nature. Too few people come to the unitive state [union with the Divine] because they are outside the proper religious tradition or context for having a true understanding of their experiences. (p 62)

Roberts’ path happens to be Mystical Christianity, but the wisdom she speaks of, arising as it does from a living tradition, transcends that tradition.

And raises questions within that traditional as well: I’m particularly taken by Roberts’ revisioning of the metaphorical (archetypal) meaning of the crucifixion, as, rather than a transformation into the unitive state (or a shedding of the ego, as some commentators have it), a transformation out of such a state, to one of a wholly higher order – one in which all experience of Self (which in the unitive state she understands as an experience of oneness with the Divine) drops away, leaving a void at the centre of the Self, that void being the Divine.

And as she says later:

Psychological and spiritual freedom is the ability to live with not-knowing. (p 101)

A new exhibition at Cunningham Dax is due to open next week in Melbourne, and I regret not being able to get there for it. According to the flyer:

Avoiding the Void features works from the Cunningham Dax Collection which reflect and engage with existential ideas and concerns. The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the insightful ways in which the creators of these works have grappled with difficult questions that are ordinarily avoided.

Joan Rodriquez
Isolation
Charcoal and Conte on paper

There are also public talks on the topic of Existentialism, a topic around which psychotherapy has gravitated for some time, and through the writings of Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Ernesto Spinnelli and Victor Frankl (to name some of my personal favourites) has been greatly enriched.

(As an aside, I see that Spinelli will be visiting Sydney in November this year, an event not to be missed for those existentially inclined.)

It’s maybe a little presumptive to comment on the title of the exhibition, not having seen the exhibition itself, but I wonder about “avoiding”: is this what the artists are considered to be doing or not doing? In my experience, it’s the latter (the not avoiding), the via negativa of many spiritual traditions, that is the only way through, or in.