THE MESSAGE OF NON-DUALITY, From India and Asia to the “Americas,” Part Six

[These discussions of the Asia-India-“Native American” use of Advaita pointers are in response to an e-mail regarding the May 27th HBO presentation of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” You may visit http://www.hbo.com/films/burymyheart/ if interested in details.]

CASE STUDY: A First-Hand Account of the Advaita Message as Transmitted by One of the Indigenous Peoples in the U.S. (Continued from yesterday)

A LESSON IN TOLERANCE AND NON-DUAL LOVE FROM AN AH-NI-YV-WI-YA GRANDMOTHER
F.: If the healing effect of the quiet was not being modeled by Grandmother, then wisdom was being shared. She spoke so infrequently that, when she did, her words seemed to merit more attention than usual. If wisdom was not being shared, then unconditional love was being demonstrated. In fact, most of her teaching was by example. It was she who offered my first lessons in tolerance and unconditional love. Grandmother married a white man and they had a dozen children together, all delivered in their small house. Over half of the children survived, and the marriage was reportedly idyllic until Grandfather succumbed to appendicitis. The non-dual-type love they shared was described when a character called “Kirk” recounts what she taught during the summers of childhood days:

His lesson in Applied Tolerance came during time spent with Grandmother and his grandfather. They modeled such tolerance perfectly. Grandfather went to church every Sunday, serving as the choir director; Grandmother went into the woods, exercising some kind of communion of her own. They never questioned the other’s practice; they never challenged the other’s beliefs; they never tried to change the other. They did what they did separately and felt just fine; and they did what they did together and felt just fine. Applied Tolerance. No judging. Total acceptance. Unconditional Love. (See Meditation Guide Volume Two for that passage and further discussion.)

[Please note: There has been past confusion among some site visitors regarding pointers about “acceptance.” As used here, it denotes a sense of merely “witnessing” without efforts to control and without arrogance or ego. It certainly does not suggest “accept everything, including abuse and ignorance and lies as well as the unreasonable, the illogical and the nonsensical.”]

Grandmother’s alignment with nature and Grandfather’s preference for his ultra-conservative, Southern Baptist dogma never created the slightest problem in their marriage. Why? Unlike persons who are trapped in their false selves, their egoism and their narcissism, neither grandmother nor grandfather was searching for an “opposite-sex clone of self.” I seek strength, not to be greater but to fight my greatest enemy—myself. There was no “church vs. forest” differentiation, so they saw no differences that needed to be debated nor any problems that needed to be resolved. Grandmother was fully Realized and therefore knew exactly where Grandfather was on "the path," but she made no judgment about that. No false self, no ego, no narcissism = no separation.

With no differentiation, then no one could be called on to conform to the ways of the other. In their egoless existence, neither tried to change the other, neither tried to control the other, and neither tried to make the other over into one’s own image. How could she have tried to make anyone over into her image when Grandmother was imageless? In the absence of a belief in the duality of “good vs. bad,” Grandmother had no means by which she could conclude that anyone was not “good enough for her.” That non-duality absence of “good vs. bad” never allowed her to classify anything. It never even allowed her to complain about the extremes in weather: when it’s hot it is hot and when it is cold it is cold.

In fact, the absence of duality prevented her from complaining about anything. Never did anyone in her presence ever feel inspired to say, “Why don’t you please shut up, at least for just a few minutes!” Never did anyone in her presence say, “What’s the deal with you—you’re never satisfied?” Never did anyone ever observe, “You’re still miserable although you’ve accumulated so many nice things and have everything that anyone should ever want…and more.” Never did anyone ever ask, “Why are you so judgmental?” Never did anyone ever charge, “You are so self-absorbed…such a total egomaniac.” Never did anyone say, “Could you stop nagging for a little while and just appreciate what you do have?”

TRYING TO FIND ONCE MORE THAT TASTE OF NIRVANA
In an earlier post, it was mentioned that “floyd” would go on a “multi-decade search” to try to find again the level of peace that was experienced during those summer retreats. Is it possible for you to relate to how truly tiring that search can be? Here’s the way it is explained, and discussed in more detail, in Meditation Guide Volume One:

In his energy-consuming search for salvation, he’d been dipped, dunked, sprayed, spayed, sprinkled and neutered; in the quest for truth, he’d been blessed, cursed, cussed, lectured, scolded and praised; in his pursuit of Life’s Meaning, he’d been communion’d, Om’d, grape-juiced, wined, ashram’d, accepted, rejected, Mu’d, and yoga’d; in his chase for service-work opportunities, he’d been pulverized, martinized, and frappéd; and in the endeavor to attain Life Eternal, he’d been baptized, Buddha’d, New Aged, powwow’d, Far Eastern Indianized, incensed, sage’d, Tao’d, Peru’d, Tibet’d, washed in the blood, dunked in the waters, and purportedly purified.

So what about you?” Can you relate? Are you tired of the search? It can end with a simple, seven-step process, but persons typically only turn to the simple Advaita process after having exhausted every other conceivable method and after exhausting themselves in the process. Are you ready to be done with self? Are you ready to recognize the Unseen and Eternal? Are you tired enough to try the simple way? Are you so tired that you can only walk seven more steps? Then you just might be ready. Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
THE QUOTES ABOVE ON “APPLIED TOLERANCE” AND “THE ENERGY-CONSUMING SEARCH” ARE DISCUSSED IN THE MEDITATION GUIDE SET. INTERESTED IN ORDERING BOTH AT A REDUCED RATE?

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THE MESSAGE OF NON-DUALITY, From India and Asia to the “Americas,” Part Five

[These discussions of the Advaita-Asia-India-“Native American” unicity are in response to an e-mail regarding the May 27th HBO presentation of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” You may visit http://www.hbo.com/films/burymyheart/ if interested in details. In an interview with actor-American Indian Adam Beach who plays Ohiyesa/Dr. Charles Eastman, Beach noted how the white man’s dualistic judgments affected him during childhood and into adulthood: “Imagine people trying to tell you being Indian is bad, is wrong and that your culture, your tradition is dealing with the devil. It affects my generation. After a hundred years of this manipulation of 'you're not a good person,' it really affects us.”]

CASE STUDY: A First-Hand Account of the Advaita Message as Transmitted by One of the Indigenous Peoples in the U.S. (Continued from yesterday)

THE FIRST TASTE OF THE CYCLES AND A SECOND TASTE OF NIRVANA
F.: (Are you seeing that the consciousness that was called "Grandmother" can still teach us all?)

With Grandmother, witnessing happened more than anything else. During walks in the woods, deer and owls and hawks and rabbits and coyotes and eagles and snakes and foxes and fish in the nearby stream and scores of species of birds would be witnessed. Once, while gathering herbs with her, I asked, “Can we get into trouble for trespassing if the owner catches us?” She said something that, at the time, made no sense at all: “Do not be concerned. No one owns the land.” I thought but did not say, Grandmother, all land is owned by somebody." Each morning, Grandmother would go into the woods alone after sending me to the garden where I picked the vegetables that we would prepare for lunch and dinner and placed them in a bushel basket: Let's see...for lunch we'll have okra and tomatoes, corn, and cream peas with cornbread, and tonight we'll eat blackeyed peas, potatoes, and the chunks of smoked ham that the woman gave Grandmother in gratitude for curing her migraines.

Many times at night, while sitting with her in the rockers on the porch, the plaintive cry of a bobcat could be heard in the distance as fireflies passed before our eyes. Grandmother could lift an upturned hand and the fireflies would land on her palm and walk about. On the few occasions when I could be still, they would do the same with me. (It seemed that I could not unwind during the first days of my visits with her, but the longer I was there, the more slowly I began to move.) The rustle of insects’ wings could be heard. Chirping crickets provided a musical background for a small child sitting next to his Ah-ni-yv-wi-ya Grandmother. But a happening one evening provided another taste of Nirvana. (Those early tastes would eventually drive me throughout a multi-decade-long quest as an adult to try to recapture the calm and soothing sense of at-one-ment that came in those early Nirvana moments to a child on retreat.)

It was late one evening when Grandmother and I were using paring knives to strip away willow bark in preparation for making a healing potion. Another woman would be visiting early the next morning, also for treatment for migraine headaches. After the bark was taken into the kitchen and put to soak with other herbs, we returned to the front porch and sat in rocking chairs. I was unaware of how vigorously my chair was moving on the dark porch, nor how still Grandmother’s chair was in contrast. Unconsciously, when my rapid rocking walked the chair to the edge of the porch, I stood, moved it back, and began the process all over again. Later, the full moon would clear the tops of some of the trees in the piney woods in front of the house, and a gap between the limbs of the taller trees allowed moonbeams to strike Grandmother.

I glanced to my right to see that she was looking straight ahead toward the trees and the moon. She was enlightened as the moon bathed her in a bluish luminosity that was still bright enough to reveal the brown spots that covered the top of her hands, hands which looked to be more bone than skin. I looked at my smooth right hand, then at the rough skin on her left hand, and then at the lines that crossed her face. Nature would not allow those lines to be ironed out into a smooth texture ever again. An obscure awareness of something about “patterns” or “cycles” or “phases” tried to surface from the brain-stem, but I had no tools to use to clear the way for it to come into consciousness: even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were.

So there sat a child that had not yet cycled one decade with a grandmother that had cycled many. There was smooth skin and rough, there was a day that had cycled into night, there was a moon cycling across the sky, and that full moon would soon complete another cycle as well. There was something there to be understood, but it was beyond my grasp, so the nervous rocking began again. And again to the edge of the porch. And again, a chair pushed back beside Grandmother’s. I looked to the right and saw Grandmother’s blue, expressionless face looking forward into the moonlight, then my rocking began again as I looked at her hand, at mine, and at the moon that had moved diagonally into a higher position in the sky.

With my chair moving front-to-back, front-to-back, front-to-back, I looked again at Grandmother, beautiful now in the subtle color that was fading into a darker blue. Something wanted to be realized, yet I was decades from that happening. Then suddenly, my rocking stopped...and did not start up again. And when it was obvious that something had stilled the chair and would keep it still for the rest of the night, I looked at Grandmother, still looking straight ahead, but I saw a smile form on her lips. Remember the peace that may be found in silence.

Then, I began to feel a calmness. Next, I felt her left hand move from the arm of her rocker and rest itself atop my right. In the stillness, I had finally become…available. The moon had moved so high into the sky that the roof of the porch was beginning to cast us into shadow. I looked down at those two hands and, for some reason, they did not look so different anymore when viewed in the fading light. I looked at her and she looked at me, and she smiled and I smiled, and then we both looked back toward the piney trees and the sky above, and I knew, by nothing more than the touch of a hand, exactly what it was like to love and to be loved, unconditionally. I felt in harmony with all things. Being Indian is an attitude…a way of being in harmony with all things and all beings. It is allowing the heart to be the distributor of energy on this planet. Yet that feeling would last but briefly. After reaching the “adult years,” it would take decades for it to manifest again.

Yet for a few moments that night, I sat back, in Nirvana, experiencing something that was indefinable to a small child, without a clue...but also without a single fear or a single desire. I felt, but did say out loud, “I feel whole; I feel complete; I feel safe; I feel happy; I feel like all is well; OK, Grandmother, I have learned another lesson and I am not concerned.” When I sneaked another glance at her, it seemed that Grandmother was even closer than by my side. I could not understand, but that did not interrupt the peace. The first peace, which is the most important, comes from within when people realize their oneness with the universe. I would barely remember being gently shaken some time later, coaxed to my feet from the rocker, guided to a bed from my rocking chair with her arm wrapped around my back and side as she half-carried, half-walked me out of the shadows and through the night and into the comfort of very, very deep sleep.

How about you? Have you had a taste of Nirvana that you might be recalling once again? Was the taste sweet enough to trigger a search to find it and keep it? If not, is the bitterness of not having that sweet taste enough to inspire you to begin to follow “the path” that will lead you there? Are you ready to walk out of the shadows and through the night and into the comfort of Realization? Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)

THE MESSAGE OF NON-DUALITY, From India and Asia to the “Americas,” Part Four

[These discussions of the Advaita-Asia-India-“Native American” unicity are in response to an e-mail regarding the May 27th HBO presentation of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” You may visit http://www.hbo.com/films/burymyheart/ if interested in details. Here is a summary as well: In the late 19th century, the U.S. government waged a systematic campaign to exterminate American Indians—and nobody seemed to care. HBO Films presents this epic adaptation of Dee Brown's nonfiction masterpiece that brought this dark chapter of U.S. history to light. Beginning just after the bloody Sioux victory over General Custer at Little Big Horn, the film intertwines the unique perspectives of three characters—Charles Eastman, Sitting Bull and Senator Henry Dawes—while detailing the sprawl into the American West that tragically affected American-Indian culture.]

CASE STUDY: A First-Hand Account of the Advaita Message as Transmitted by One of the Indigenous Peoples in the U.S.
F.: The ancestors of my Ah-ni-yv-wi-ya (or “Tsalagi” or “Cherokee”) grandmother were sent away from the land they had cleared for farming and lived on for generations when the land was confiscated by the U.S. Government and sold for $1 per acre to a family from Germany. Those Native American ancestors were “resettled” to areas in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Eventually, one "American Indian" family was “pardoned” and allowed to move back south to a small, remote, heavily-wooded tract of fairly-useless land in what came to be known as “Cherokee County.” That family would eventually procreate and it would be in that region where the consciousness happened to manifest in a space that I would someday call “Grandmother.”

The Space called ”Grandmother”

Her family would pass down to her not only their philosophical teachings but also their healing methods as well. She would become a medicine woman, visited regularly by the infirmed, but her curative abilities were not limited to the physical. Time with her would heal the troubled “mind” and emotions as well. With Grandmother, the ancient teachings that found their way from Asia and India were taught at times by word but were transferred more often in the silence of example. In her small house set on a knoll in a dense and isolated forest where I spent my childhood summers, it seemed to a young male from the city as if there was nothing…yet it was seen later as an adult that there was everything.

As for that nothingness, never did she complain about the lack of indoor plumbing or about a too small house or about the absence of electricity. Never did she complain about having to draw water from a well or about having to gather wood or about having to build a fire each morning under a large black kettle in order to heat her water. Never did she complain about the multi-mile walk to the nearest store or about having to use a mule to plow her one-acre garden. Never did she complain about the red dust blown into her eyes from the lane that paralleled her land or about being alone in a very dense forest.

To the contrary, she was free of fear and free of desire, functioning as a minimalist who was completely content, even as “less” marked each aspect of her existence. All efforts by her children to provide “the basic amenities” were refused. Though “nihilism” would not have been among the words in her vocabulary, in practice she lived in what dualists would have called “a moral fashion” without needing a defined, moral code or religion to guide her; though she provided healing for many, she never did so to attain a sense of “self”-value or to give “meaning” to “her life”; and what happened on any given day at any given time was never a result of “preferences.” Looking back later, it was seen that everything that happened with Grandmother happened spontaneously or not at all.

She knew no time; she honored no days with dualistic notions about some being “more important” or “different” or “holier” than others; she honored no person with dualistic notions about some being "more important" or "different" or "holier" than others; she was attuned to the cycles of the seasons but lived only in the moment; she was at-one with all. The manifestation spanned a century, so she obviously cared for her body without caring about her body. Looking back, it is obvious that she had none of the delusions that cause many to confuse three-dimensional things or three-dimensional beings with the real.

THAT FIRST TASTE OF NIRVANA
For a young child longing for peace and for respite from an existence that was plagued with far too much nonsense, with far too many judgments about being “good or bad,” and with the application of excessive punishment when labeled “bad,” the contrast of summers with a calm, serene Ah-ni-yv-wi-ya grandmother became a welcomed balm. To be in her presence in the quietness of the natural surroundings of a forest and in a home where serenity reigned was to be in Nirvana. At least it was for a young child who was already trying to escape an environment in the city that was far too chaotic, far too noisy, far too castigatory in character, and far too illogical and irrational. The concept in India of undergoing “the forest dweller stage” became my experience long before I heard the term.

AN EARLY LESSON ABOUT THE ILLUSION OF DEATH
When in the city with my parents, bedtime was always marred with a prayer which included the phrase “…and if I die before I wake.” That always struck me as a peculiar concept to introduce just prior to sleep, but my protests in that regard were ignored and the lines had to be spoken. That prayer was never a requirement at Grandmother’s; in fact, Grandmother never used any prayers that I saw or heard, but she did offer a hug and a kiss and a pat at bedtime, so sleep in her home was long and deep. Except for one night.

One night, when fears generated by strange noises outside the open window drove me from my bed to hers, she calmed me with a hug and shushing sounds. That night, the noises triggered a fear that “this might be the night that I die before I get to wake.” The thought drove me to seek something to assuage the fear in a way that would allow me to return to sleep, so it was asked, “Grandmother, am I too bad to get to go to heaven if I die?” After a moment of silence, in which she was processing a hurt that I only now realize she was feeling, Grandmother said, “Not only are you not bad, but there is no death, so do not be concerned. Just go to sleep and rest.”

“There is no death?” I repeated sleepily. I wanted to ask for more explanation, for more assurance, but I wanted even more to return to sleep, so nothing more was said after a few incoherent mumblings from a child transitioning from abject fear into the quiet-breath sounds of sleep. It would be forty-five years before it would be seen in retrospect that the transitioning from abject fear into the quiet-breath sounds of rest would be a metaphor for the Advaita “journey” of transitioning from my relative existence that had been marked by imagined fears and unmet desires and “mind”-generated suffering to enjoying the quiet-breath moments of rest, post-Realization.

Can you relate to a child running about in the darkness of abject fear over what was really nothing? Can you relate to an adult still doing the same? Are you ready for the quietness to replace the chaos? Are you ready for the sleep-state level of peace to manifest during the waking hours as well? Are you ready for peaceful surroundings? Are you truly ready to take all seven steps that are required to complete the journey that can take you to that? Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
FOR INFORMATION ON A BOOK TO GUIDE YOU THROUGH THE SEVEN STEPS:

Click FROM THE I TO THE ABSOLUTE (A Seven-Step Journey to Reality)