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.
Ron Dowd is a psychotherapist practising in Sydney's East. He works from a Gestalt, intersubjective and nondual perspective. He's a member of GANZ (Gestalt Australia and New Zealand) and is PACFA registered. Ron also makes art, some of which appears here. You can contact him by email, phone or web-form.
