An Advaita forum focusing on Realisation, enlightenment, non-duality, Real Love, peace, freedom, Your original nature, abiding naturally, the Oneness, the Nothingness, and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
As for Maharaj, you will find here some of his early pointers for beginners but some of his later pointers that are for seekers father along the "path." During his last years, he said of I AM THAT: "That book and whatever was expounded at that time was only relevant for that period. I am speaking differently today" and am "emphasizing different aspects." What he offered later differed considerably from his earlier talks, making clear that the pointers in I AM THAT will take you to the midpoint of "the race" but that his final talks point the way to "the finish line."
F.: During the first week of June, this four-book anthology,
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
which is available for pre-ordering now, will ship. (You may click the picture for more details.) In anticipation, certain excerpts from the four books in the paperback collection will be offered.
The following is from the book FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE (A Seven-Step Journey to Reality), which is included in the anthology, and is an excerpt from a transcribed satsang session:
Floyd: “I’ll mention before we begin that you might want to buckle your seatbelts. If this session is typical, we may be in for some turbulence. Ha. [Light laughter] Our ‘journey’ has reached the third stage. It is here that the broad highway narrows to a tapered path.”
Questioner: “And why is that?”
F: “Because a narrow, tapered path will handle the low volume of traffic from this point forward. Most will not move beyond the obstacles discussed in this session. The majority who quit abandon this seven-step journey at level three. Early on, my teacher guessed that one in one-hundred thousand might make it to the ‘end’; later, he predicted one in a million, then one in ten million. He was only guessing, but he might have been close.”
Q: “Not very good odds.”
F: “Indeed.”
Q: “Maybe we need better teachers.” [Laughter]
F: “Indeed.”
Q: “No fight? Ha.”
F: “None. The variable is not as much the teacher. The readiness is all. Are you ready?”
Q: “Yes.”
F: “We’ll see.” [Laughs] Let’s move to the Third Degree of Separation from Reality: assuming religious roles or spiritual roles as actual identities. Note, please, that I speak of religious or spiritual roles as obstacles. Why are they obstacles? Two reasons: first, they are personas. They are just new personalities adopted to replace other roles or to ‘co-exist’ in a conditioned mind with other states-of-being this or states-of-being that. Secondly, religion and spirituality—by their very nature and by virtue of the manner in which they are practiced by most—foster duality. They are steeped in duality.”
Q: “I disagree completely. The ultimate message of both religion and spirituality deals with atonement and oneness and that can’t do anything but help all mankind. How can a message of oneness be ‘steeped in duality’?”
F: “You speak in suppositions; I speak of actualities. You dream of a bountiful yield; I see the fruit already in store.”
Q: “None of that supports your claim that religion and spirituality foster duality.”
F: “In the earlier sessions, did you not see how the phenomenal existence of everyone in this room has been made miserable as a result of being trapped in your debilitating preoccupation with trying to earn the ‘good’ label and avoid the ‘bad’ label and earn a reward and avoid a punishment?”
Q: “Yes. That was clear. I got it.”
F: “I disagree. If you truly ‘got it,’ why would you defend roles that supports the ‘good-bad’ duality now? Why would you assume personalities that are preoccupied with the ‘good-bad’ duality’s companions—‘reward and punishment’—and strive for some earthly ‘reward’ now and some ‘ultimate reward’ that you want to experience eternally? Only because of your faulty conditioning and wrong programming. How has living in that duality worked for you so far? And ‘who’ would experience the benefits now and the reward forever? Your body-mind- personality. The sources of so much mental anguish in this temporary existence—that body-mind-personality triad and that ‘good-bad-reward-punishment’ quartet—you have been invited to discard in order to see truth and to be at peace, now. Instead, you want to assume and defend two false identities that will perpetuate the effects of those dualities in this existence and then seek to extend them for eternity. And that’s only a fraction of the duality that dominates these two false personalities.”
Q: [Pause. Begins to speak. Doesn’t.]
F: “Would being occupied with the material while claiming an occupation with the spiritual constitute dualism?”
Q: [Pause] “Go ahead.”
F: “Then look to the practice rather than the words. If we are speaking of ‘abandoning the material to deal with that beyond the material,’ are you going to suggest that the pious have abandoned the material? Or do they require a constant influx of the material to operate? Can creeds be practiced without material churches, temples, mosques, material accoutrements, money, etc.? All of those material elements are required to sustain dogma and spread doctrine.
That is material-spiritual duality, but only the beginning of the duality we’ll see.”
Q: “I don’t do all that any more. I focus only on the words of Christ.”
F: “As you will. Then look to his history and see that it reinforces my point. He began in the temples, talking about the content of holy texts; later, he left organized religion and its temples, spoke on hillsides and in homes, and offered talks that were beyond the texts. He had been exposed to the Advaita Vedanta Teachings during his ‘lost years’ and tried to shift his audience away from traditional religion with its dualistic nature by offering the message of non-duality that I’m speaking of now.”
Q: “Christ had a non-dual message?”
F: “He said, ‘Before Abraham was, I AM’ and ‘When you speak of me, speak of me as I AM’ and ‘Heaven and earth shall fade away’ and ‘No one shall ever see heaven—it is within’ and ‘A dual-minded person is unstable in all ways.” That manifestation called ‘Christ’ tried to offer the Advaita Vedanta Teachings. But how many who assume the persona of his followers have a clue of the Advaita content?”
Q: [Pause] “Huh. No one ever pointed it out to me. [Another pause] Alright, granted that organized faiths have to mix the material with the spiritual, but spiritualists have no churches or budgets. Why group the two together? You’re spiritual, aren’t you?”
F: “I am neither spiritual nor material.”
Q: “Are you a sage?”
F: “Ha! Do I sound like any of the authentic sages you’ve heard or read?”
Q: “Not really.”
F.: “So, there you have it; however, my teacher was a sage. I’m but a voyager who listened to the words of a sage who knew of what he spoke. He spoke of That Which He Truly Is, and I read his words and first came to know all that I am not. That facilitated my coming to know exactly That Which I Am. Like the early explorers of the earth, I embarked on a journey following a sage’s directions, I have seen that which is at ‘the end,’ and I have returned to tell you of its wonders. Now I can guide you ‘there’ as well, should you be ready to follow the same path. There is no difference in you and me. The appearance of any difference is merely a result of the fact that What I Am … I know. What You Are, your questions and comments show me you do not know. So let’s continue with the journey. You used the word ‘spiritual.’ What do you take ‘spiritual’ to mean?”
Q: “Spiritual to me simply means abandoning the material to deal with that beyond the material.”
F: “Good enough. We’ll use your definition for our discussion, but let me ask first, ‘What might be the detriment of shifting one’s focus to the spiritual and abandoning the material before having thoroughly examined all of the ‘material’?”
Q: “I don’t think there can be any detriment.”
F: “On my ‘journey,’ when I turned too soon from the material and began focusing only on what I called ‘the spiritual,’ I merely developed a new persona: the role of a ‘Spiritual Giant.’ I did not move farther along ‘the path’ until my teacher’s words returned my focus to the material long enough to see every falsehood. Many want to see the truth before they have seen all of the false. It cannot happen. So far on this ‘journey,’ we’ve focused on nothing but the material—the false material body, the false mind concerned with the material, and the personality concerned with the material. As for the ‘spiritualists’ you mention, they are as dual-minded as the pious if occupied with material trappings and posturing. My teacher gave short shrift to those playing spiritual roles, showing up in his loft with saffron robes, wooden crosses, beads, gold crosses, special beards, restricted dietary plans to please gods supposedly concerned with gastronomic issues, drums, bells, crystals, rituals, whatever. They were often ‘asked out,’ so to speak.”
Q: “I don’t see what any of that hurts.”
F: “It’s diversionary, misdirecting the focus from the I Am and The Absolute, accumulating more material ‘stuff ’ on what is supposed to be a journey toward de-accumulation, and thus halting the journey. It supports the false beliefs that ‘I have arrived’ and ‘the path ends here’ and ‘this material stuff helps me be more spiritual’ when, in fact, the journey is not yet even half complete. Some want to flaunt material evidence of their assumed spirituality. So be it. My words are for those who know they have not reached the destination. My teacher knew that nothing external could abet the process of knowing that which is within. Even the guru is within, he said.”
Q: “Maybe those elements bring a touch of the material to the spiritual, but that doesn’t make the spiritual dualistic.”
F: “Of course it does, along with many other aspects. All roles are dualistic as soon as a person assumes an identity and then assigns attributes to that false personality. By assuming a role-with-attributes as a new and improved identity, one takes that which claims to have transcended the material but then assigns material attributes—an act which immediately gives the role a phenomenal character. Duality is an inherent component of any role, but it especially marks these two limiting personalities that are the repository of all ‘good-bad’ concepts and all ‘reward-deserver’ and ‘punishment-avoider’ personas. While body identifications and mind identifications prevent taking the first two steps of this journey to Realization, these two dual-natured roles will bring any journey already begun to a halt if not transcended. Before anyone here who is assuming a religious or spiritual personality wants to rush to the defense of a false persona, let me make this point: an interesting shift can occur at this juncture. The remaining obstacles I’ll discuss can still separate travelers from reality, but they also have the potential to facilitate the journey to Realization. The key lies in transcendence.”
Q: “Transcendence meaning what, exactly?”
F: “Meaning, if one transcends level three and the levels that follow, the stages can become stepping stones used to continue along the path. The challenge is that along the way two hindrances usually appear. First, some encounter what they take to be a cool oasis of religion or spirituality, tempting places to stop, to abandon the journey, and to spend the remainder of one’s life; in fact, anything prior to reality is a mirage and ultimately offers no stability. Second, along other parts of the path, many obstacles appear and some become frustrated and abandon the journey. To continue, all roles must dissolve, including the limiting religious and spiritual personalities.”
Q: “I see the problem with some of the roles you discussed earlier, like the way the ‘husband’ role or ‘employee’ role or ‘wife’ role traps people. But it just seems that the positive role of ‘spiritualist’ would have some benefit. It seems different from the others.”
F: “So let’s say that you’re a patient in a study group among those dying of cancer. Your group is receiving the placebo and the other group is getting the real thing. You’re telling me that you’d be willing to stay in the placebo group of cancer patients and not get the real thing if the researchers will just give you another placebo that is ‘different from the other’ placebos that you’ve been taking ... but a placebo nevertheless? [Q. frowns] All personas are false. Nothing false can help differentiate the true from the false.”
The following is from the book FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE (A Seven-Step Journey to Reality), which is included in the anthology, and is an excerpt from a transcribed satsang session:
Floyd: “I’ll mention before we begin that you might want to buckle your seatbelts. If this session is typical, we may be in for some turbulence. Ha. [Light laughter] Our ‘journey’ has reached the third stage. It is here that the broad highway narrows to a tapered path.”
Questioner: “And why is that?”
F: “Because a narrow, tapered path will handle the low volume of traffic from this point forward. Most will not move beyond the obstacles discussed in this session. The majority who quit abandon this seven-step journey at level three. Early on, my teacher guessed that one in one-hundred thousand might make it to the ‘end’; later, he predicted one in a million, then one in ten million. He was only guessing, but he might have been close.”
Q: “Not very good odds.”
F: “Indeed.”
Q: “Maybe we need better teachers.” [Laughter]
F: “Indeed.”
Q: “No fight? Ha.”
F: “None. The variable is not as much the teacher. The readiness is all. Are you ready?”
Q: “Yes.”
F: “We’ll see.” [Laughs] Let’s move to the Third Degree of Separation from Reality: assuming religious roles or spiritual roles as actual identities. Note, please, that I speak of religious or spiritual roles as obstacles. Why are they obstacles? Two reasons: first, they are personas. They are just new personalities adopted to replace other roles or to ‘co-exist’ in a conditioned mind with other states-of-being this or states-of-being that. Secondly, religion and spirituality—by their very nature and by virtue of the manner in which they are practiced by most—foster duality. They are steeped in duality.”
Q: “I disagree completely. The ultimate message of both religion and spirituality deals with atonement and oneness and that can’t do anything but help all mankind. How can a message of oneness be ‘steeped in duality’?”
F: “You speak in suppositions; I speak of actualities. You dream of a bountiful yield; I see the fruit already in store.”
Q: “None of that supports your claim that religion and spirituality foster duality.”
F: “In the earlier sessions, did you not see how the phenomenal existence of everyone in this room has been made miserable as a result of being trapped in your debilitating preoccupation with trying to earn the ‘good’ label and avoid the ‘bad’ label and earn a reward and avoid a punishment?”
Q: “Yes. That was clear. I got it.”
F: “I disagree. If you truly ‘got it,’ why would you defend roles that supports the ‘good-bad’ duality now? Why would you assume personalities that are preoccupied with the ‘good-bad’ duality’s companions—‘reward and punishment’—and strive for some earthly ‘reward’ now and some ‘ultimate reward’ that you want to experience eternally? Only because of your faulty conditioning and wrong programming. How has living in that duality worked for you so far? And ‘who’ would experience the benefits now and the reward forever? Your body-mind- personality. The sources of so much mental anguish in this temporary existence—that body-mind-personality triad and that ‘good-bad-reward-punishment’ quartet—you have been invited to discard in order to see truth and to be at peace, now. Instead, you want to assume and defend two false identities that will perpetuate the effects of those dualities in this existence and then seek to extend them for eternity. And that’s only a fraction of the duality that dominates these two false personalities.”
Q: [Pause. Begins to speak. Doesn’t.]
F: “Would being occupied with the material while claiming an occupation with the spiritual constitute dualism?”
Q: [Pause] “Go ahead.”
F: “Then look to the practice rather than the words. If we are speaking of ‘abandoning the material to deal with that beyond the material,’ are you going to suggest that the pious have abandoned the material? Or do they require a constant influx of the material to operate? Can creeds be practiced without material churches, temples, mosques, material accoutrements, money, etc.? All of those material elements are required to sustain dogma and spread doctrine.
That is material-spiritual duality, but only the beginning of the duality we’ll see.”
Q: “I don’t do all that any more. I focus only on the words of Christ.”
F: “As you will. Then look to his history and see that it reinforces my point. He began in the temples, talking about the content of holy texts; later, he left organized religion and its temples, spoke on hillsides and in homes, and offered talks that were beyond the texts. He had been exposed to the Advaita Vedanta Teachings during his ‘lost years’ and tried to shift his audience away from traditional religion with its dualistic nature by offering the message of non-duality that I’m speaking of now.”
Q: “Christ had a non-dual message?”
F: “He said, ‘Before Abraham was, I AM’ and ‘When you speak of me, speak of me as I AM’ and ‘Heaven and earth shall fade away’ and ‘No one shall ever see heaven—it is within’ and ‘A dual-minded person is unstable in all ways.” That manifestation called ‘Christ’ tried to offer the Advaita Vedanta Teachings. But how many who assume the persona of his followers have a clue of the Advaita content?”
Q: [Pause] “Huh. No one ever pointed it out to me. [Another pause] Alright, granted that organized faiths have to mix the material with the spiritual, but spiritualists have no churches or budgets. Why group the two together? You’re spiritual, aren’t you?”
F: “I am neither spiritual nor material.”
Q: “Are you a sage?”
F: “Ha! Do I sound like any of the authentic sages you’ve heard or read?”
Q: “Not really.”
F.: “So, there you have it; however, my teacher was a sage. I’m but a voyager who listened to the words of a sage who knew of what he spoke. He spoke of That Which He Truly Is, and I read his words and first came to know all that I am not. That facilitated my coming to know exactly That Which I Am. Like the early explorers of the earth, I embarked on a journey following a sage’s directions, I have seen that which is at ‘the end,’ and I have returned to tell you of its wonders. Now I can guide you ‘there’ as well, should you be ready to follow the same path. There is no difference in you and me. The appearance of any difference is merely a result of the fact that What I Am … I know. What You Are, your questions and comments show me you do not know. So let’s continue with the journey. You used the word ‘spiritual.’ What do you take ‘spiritual’ to mean?”
Q: “Spiritual to me simply means abandoning the material to deal with that beyond the material.”
F: “Good enough. We’ll use your definition for our discussion, but let me ask first, ‘What might be the detriment of shifting one’s focus to the spiritual and abandoning the material before having thoroughly examined all of the ‘material’?”
Q: “I don’t think there can be any detriment.”
F: “On my ‘journey,’ when I turned too soon from the material and began focusing only on what I called ‘the spiritual,’ I merely developed a new persona: the role of a ‘Spiritual Giant.’ I did not move farther along ‘the path’ until my teacher’s words returned my focus to the material long enough to see every falsehood. Many want to see the truth before they have seen all of the false. It cannot happen. So far on this ‘journey,’ we’ve focused on nothing but the material—the false material body, the false mind concerned with the material, and the personality concerned with the material. As for the ‘spiritualists’ you mention, they are as dual-minded as the pious if occupied with material trappings and posturing. My teacher gave short shrift to those playing spiritual roles, showing up in his loft with saffron robes, wooden crosses, beads, gold crosses, special beards, restricted dietary plans to please gods supposedly concerned with gastronomic issues, drums, bells, crystals, rituals, whatever. They were often ‘asked out,’ so to speak.”
Q: “I don’t see what any of that hurts.”
F: “It’s diversionary, misdirecting the focus from the I Am and The Absolute, accumulating more material ‘stuff ’ on what is supposed to be a journey toward de-accumulation, and thus halting the journey. It supports the false beliefs that ‘I have arrived’ and ‘the path ends here’ and ‘this material stuff helps me be more spiritual’ when, in fact, the journey is not yet even half complete. Some want to flaunt material evidence of their assumed spirituality. So be it. My words are for those who know they have not reached the destination. My teacher knew that nothing external could abet the process of knowing that which is within. Even the guru is within, he said.”
Q: “Maybe those elements bring a touch of the material to the spiritual, but that doesn’t make the spiritual dualistic.”
F: “Of course it does, along with many other aspects. All roles are dualistic as soon as a person assumes an identity and then assigns attributes to that false personality. By assuming a role-with-attributes as a new and improved identity, one takes that which claims to have transcended the material but then assigns material attributes—an act which immediately gives the role a phenomenal character. Duality is an inherent component of any role, but it especially marks these two limiting personalities that are the repository of all ‘good-bad’ concepts and all ‘reward-deserver’ and ‘punishment-avoider’ personas. While body identifications and mind identifications prevent taking the first two steps of this journey to Realization, these two dual-natured roles will bring any journey already begun to a halt if not transcended. Before anyone here who is assuming a religious or spiritual personality wants to rush to the defense of a false persona, let me make this point: an interesting shift can occur at this juncture. The remaining obstacles I’ll discuss can still separate travelers from reality, but they also have the potential to facilitate the journey to Realization. The key lies in transcendence.”
Q: “Transcendence meaning what, exactly?”
F: “Meaning, if one transcends level three and the levels that follow, the stages can become stepping stones used to continue along the path. The challenge is that along the way two hindrances usually appear. First, some encounter what they take to be a cool oasis of religion or spirituality, tempting places to stop, to abandon the journey, and to spend the remainder of one’s life; in fact, anything prior to reality is a mirage and ultimately offers no stability. Second, along other parts of the path, many obstacles appear and some become frustrated and abandon the journey. To continue, all roles must dissolve, including the limiting religious and spiritual personalities.”
Q: “I see the problem with some of the roles you discussed earlier, like the way the ‘husband’ role or ‘employee’ role or ‘wife’ role traps people. But it just seems that the positive role of ‘spiritualist’ would have some benefit. It seems different from the others.”
F: “So let’s say that you’re a patient in a study group among those dying of cancer. Your group is receiving the placebo and the other group is getting the real thing. You’re telling me that you’d be willing to stay in the placebo group of cancer patients and not get the real thing if the researchers will just give you another placebo that is ‘different from the other’ placebos that you’ve been taking ... but a placebo nevertheless? [Q. frowns] All personas are false. Nothing false can help differentiate the true from the false.”
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
