Real-World Nonduality

by Greg Goode

  So, applying the Sedona Method, I would see in an instant that I was wanting the approval of the other person. I could let that go! Then I’d see that the encounter made me feel uneasy, uncomfortable, and I didn’t like feeling that way. So, the first reaction was resistance to that feeling, because I wanted to change or control it. Could I stop resisting? Sure! Now I could see the uncomfortable feeling for what it was.

  Learning to let go of such emotions felt, at that time, like the most power spiritual technique I could find. I mean, I was able to become free right on the spot from most of the limiting feelings or beliefs that arose, even if only momentarily. But hey, the moment-to-moment ability to be free of what I believed then to be negative, unwanted feelings—I’ll take it!

  But something was missing

  But there was something inherent in this path and how I was implementing it that was a problem. It was incomplete. The funny thing is Lester told me so from the beginning. He said I would even have to let go of the Method if I wanted to go “all the way.” The Method was intended to help the individual get what they wanted in life, so that they could eventually see that happiness isn’t out there in the world but in fact inside themselves.

  I didn’t actually confront the flaw in the Sedona Method until after I’d met Francis Lucille. But looking back, I remember I noticed it early on, as I was learning the Method from Lester’s first and main teacher, Virginia. She was explaining how we perceive: I, through my discriminator, sense what’s going on in my environment, and I make decisions on the basis of information I receive. I asked her right after the presentation, “What about the I-sense?” She replied, “That’s not important now,” and when I asked Lester, he said we could discuss it after I had learned the basic premise of the Method, how to let go. So I set the question aside. Little did I know then that that was the missing component that the direct path and Francis would fully address and clear up later.

  Presupposing the me

  The Method did work as initially promised—it had life-changing benefits for those who used it—but only up to a point. You most definitely can release feelings. But it failed to address the question of the releaser. Someone believing themselves to be a separate individual can learn the method and use it to remove most of the feelings that arise. Where it failed was that it was incomplete in understanding, and thereby perpetuated the very source of the problem: namely, the idea that we are separate entities who can do something to set ourselves free or otherwise facilitate our own enlightenment.

  Using the Method at all presupposed three things: one, that a me as a separate entity even exists; two, that this me as a separate entity can in fact be free by virtue of something I do or don’t do; and three, that life situations and emotions were the problem that needed to be fixed, and by making changes, this me would then be okay!

  I was able to see that the very use of the Method supported the idea of a separate individual. Let me give you a real example. I’m in line at an event, and some jerk tries to skip the queue and get ahead of me. My Irish gets triggered, and I want to go to war. But before I approach the guy, I look within at how I’m feeling, and the impulse arises to release the feeling, because it doesn’t feel good. This is the Sedona Method.

  What nonduality adds

  But here’s nonduality’s contribution: then I stop and ask myself: who doesn’t like feeling this way? During this introspection there’s the unstated understanding that consciousness is always welcoming, whatever is happening, because its very nature is open, empty, and free.

  So I choose not to release. Actually, no: I see the activity caused by the me-feeling wanting to get rid of the upset—and I stop there. I’m just witnessing, just being globally open to what’s present. And that openness gives room to what’s being presented. Not because of something being done, but as a result of the very nature of being this globally witnessing present. Consequently, the sense of me softens, recedes into presence, along with the uncomfortable feelings and the need to say or do anything. After all, this is New York, and people jumping queue is a fact of life here. And so is how other New Yorkers respond. In this case, others online ripped him a new one. Ultimately I didn’t have to say a word.

  Thus what became so evident was this movement, this movement of wanting to get rid of something, this desire to do something, to change what was. Consciousness doesn’t do that—a sense of a someone does. This someone, if engaged, only perpetuates the struggle, the wanting things to be different, to continue. The someone was keeping the struggle, and himself, alive.

  A lingering sense of separation and fear

  I taught the Sedona Method from 1977 to 1993. Lester died in 1994. He was gone now, but I was still troubled by a deep sense of separation and fear. Not suffering, mind you. I was not miserable (at least not yet), but definitely not satisfied. And definitely not at peace.

  Lester was the first one to expose me to Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta , and nonduality, which I was growing to love. And even though I stopped teaching, I continued to use the Releasing Method in the midst of feeling this lingering dissatisfaction. I continued to seek in a spiritual way, too. My encounter with Advaita through Lester led me to finding out about Robert Adams, Ramesh Balsekar,27 Papaji (H.W.L. Poonja)28 and other Advaita teachers, and the love continued to grow.

  Francis Lucille

  But it wasn’t until I first met Francis Lucille and experienced the perfume of nonduality for the first time that things changed. Francis and I became friends. There was a period, over a year and a half, maybe two, in the beginning that I didn’t have to work, and I just went to his retreats. I attended lots of satsangs in the NYC area as many new Advaita teachers began to appear on the scene, most notably Gangaji, Wayne Liquorman, and Catherine Ingram. But I just really resonated with Francis.

  When I first met Francis he invited me to accompany him to his next scheduled meeting, which was in Boston. We drove, which was a wonderful opportunity to just be together in a relaxed way. It was during our ride that I did something that felt egoic, for which I apologized, and Francis immediately said, “Oh don’t worry about it, Jimmy. It’s not who you are.” Imagine knowing you didn’t have to kill the ego in order to be free of it!

  You see I had grown up believing that the ego, with its wants and desires, was the source of suffering. One could even argue, as the Buddha did, that on an individual level the ego was the problem and had to be gotten rid of. I mean, wasn’t it my ego that suffered from being self-conscious and insecure? Wasn’t it me who felt jealous when someone I liked showed interest in someone else? Or angry when I wasn’t being heard or paid attention to sometimes? After all, didn’t the problems somehow have to do with something being wrong with me that I had to fix or overcome? Certain spiritual teachers would even say that in order for there to be enlightenment, the me had to disappear or that thoughts had to stop and the mind had to be quiet. And with the same breath they’d say there was no mind outside of thinking and that the mind was the ego that stood in the way of our true self.

  When Francis said to me, “It’s not who you are,” I felt an immediate sense of relief. I felt off the hook, so to speak, because I saw something, a separation of sorts, inside. He then went on to explain that, if I could see the behavior and feeling, if I could stand apart from it, I necessarily wasn’t it, and that explained how I was feeling.

  Boston was such a wonderful continuation to our first meeting in New York that I wanted to take every opportunity I could to be with him in order to learn everything about the direct path. You see, I was tasting what I had only been reading about all those years concerning the direct path and, for what felt like the first time, I was beginning to know with Francis what those words really meant.

  Like when he’d point out that thoughts and feelings happened in the same place as did bodily sensations and sense perceptions, and that “it” was none other than this awareness I referred to as me. Seeing this was so freeing.
In his company what I’d read became real, became alive.

  That in-seeing got my attention, but it was short-lived, as the me-identification with the thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations was so strong. So I would sit and look at the content of my inner self. I would discriminate, asking myself, What do I know? What do I see when I look inside? And it became obvious that thoughts would appear and disappear there inside me. The same held true for feelings, emotions, and bodily sensations. I saw clearly that they were appearing inside me, this awareness. I could not see any difference between me, awareness, and these comings and goings. And then seeing that the perception of, let’s say, a chair, or a tree, happened in the same place as my thought or my feeling was mind-blowing. Intellectually it made perfect sense too, that if I as the looker or awaring witness, if you will, was that which these thoughts appeared to, lived in, and then disappeared into, they had to owe their existence to this very same awareness.

  But that the chair or the tree wasn’t outside of me. I don’t know...I was having trouble with that one, even though I was experiencing it as such, because it also included, heck, everything, the world. Just goes to show you how strong this idea of a separate me is that I doubted my own experience.

  It didn’t become really clear that there was no-thing outside until one day while I was reading Atmananda’s Atma Darshan and Atma Nirvriti.29 Francis Lucille considered Atmananda one of his teachers even though they never met. And I couldn’t get enough of reading him, especially this book. It was when I read the section “The Origin and the Dissolution of the World” for the umpteenth time that something started to percolate. I was struck by his claiming that the truth could be found by tracing the objective world back upstream to its source. I’d wondered what that really meant concerning the knowledge of things that appeared. So I thought, How do I know the outside world if not through my senses? I took the sense of touch. I held a pen in my hand and asked, What’s the first thing I know? And it was clearly that I had a pen in my hand. But I already knew that the word isn’t the thing. The word “table” doesn’t signify what a table is, does it?

  So dropping the words “pen” and “hand,” what then did I know? Well, there was the shape and texture I could feel as I moved it around in my hand, but I was thinking again. So what else was present that I knew? Well, I was feeling something, and I had previously done body-work meditations with Francis where he would instruct us to give the bodily sensations room to expand in our awareness. So I did that to what I was feeling in my hand, and pen and hand lost their distinctions. There was just this open awareness of sensations. But wasn’t that also something I was yet again naming? Nevertheless, I was seeing what he meant by going upstream, and it was exciting.

  So what was further upstream to feeling and sensing? What was present? I knew I was sensing and feeling and, according to Atmananda, it was knowledge that comes to know anything! So there was this knowing of sensations that was present. And as I contemplated this knowing, sensations per se had vanished, and knowledge was all that remained, until I thought, what’s upstream from this? Poof! There was nothing! Well, not nothing-nothing—I was just awareness. I repeated that process again and again with the other senses as well. Sight wasn’t as clear; I would often get stuck with that one as I would with other things along this path.

  Investigating the releaser and discovering awareness

  Once I was stuck at an impasse and Francis told me I had to let go of the releaser. “What the hell!” I thought. “What do I do with that? I mean, I’m the releaser. How the hell am I supposed to let go of me?” That actually became a seminal moment on my nondual path.

  So what to do? Go to the laboratory and begin to investigate. What are the components of what was present?

  ❖I see there’s the awareness of feeling stuck.

  ❖There’s the feeling of not liking being stuck.

  ❖There’s the trying to let it go and a sense of making an effort and being frustrated in the process of failing.

  The very first thing I learned in the direct path is to start with the truth, namely that awareness is the subject to which all else, the objects, appear, and that I am that: awareness itself. And as such, awareness is ever present, open, and unmoving. So that’s my starting point, I am the very awareness that all I know appears to, and what appears is ever changing. I saw this clearly.

  What I saw next was the impulse or movement to try and let go, which also was manifesting as a wanting to get rid of feeling stuck, a desire to change being at an impasse—all of which was an arising in the unmoving awareness that I am. Seeing this was huge. Awareness never moved. As a result, I saw that they were all one and the same arising. There wasn’t this multiplicity of things. All of it was how Jimmy was manifesting as this movement.

  The releaser sneaks back in

  What tripped me up was that the releaser, the separate me-sense, kind of snuck in the back door as I was trying to do nonduality. The identification with the sense of a separate self can be very subtle at times and can kind of hijack consciousness, if you will. It was actually the same problem I’d had while I was involved with the Sedona Method. I was just seeing it more clearly and deeply.

  Awareness is the unchanging, open, unmoving, unfragmented whole that I am. What’s in the way is the idea that I, as an individual, am trying to let this other idea go, and I can’t. The movement was exposed as Jimmy-feeling-frustrated-and-stuck. That was the obstacle. The very movement of the releaser trying to release was exposed. So as the witnessing presence, I just didn’t move. Then I saw that there never was this separate Jimmy releaser. It was just an idea arising in me. The problem was seen through and solved, and I didn’t have to let it go.

  Seeing through the releaser

  The in-seeing was the undoing. That was pure Advaita. It also drove home another very important point I’d learned, namely that consciousness isn’t a function, a doing. It’s always just knowing!

  Seeing through the releaser happened many years ago, as I spent long periods of time with Francis. He helped me see that having thoughts and feelings isn’t a problem in and of itself; believing that they were real and were who I am is the only difficulty I’d ever had. God, what a relief!

  I was on fire back then at his retreats. I mean, imagine being brought face-to-face with the palpable understanding: “You are Zero Distance to all you know!” That little tidbit struck me like a thunder bolt. Years after investigating the ramifications of that insight and understanding, I wrote a (unpublished) book with that as the title: Zero Distance.

  The on-going path

  The need to be around Francis has all but gone. It’s been replaced by wanting to spend time with him and other like-minded friends who also like such company. But the looking continues. Actually, it’s intensified. Turning 72 carries with it all the wear and tear that happens to any machine over time, meaning things start to break down—only now it’s so much closer to home. It’s my body, not the car or the toaster. I’m smiling inside as I write this, because I suspect some of you who are reading this, if you’re from the nonduality camp, might be saying to yourself, “He’s still identifying with the body. He’s not there yet!” But I have to report that at this stage I can see everything as “me”! And it’s not like that’s stopped the world from doing what it’s doing.

  I still experience getting stuck, even... and as I sit with this statement I have to say it isn’t really true. The truth is phenomena still arise, and as provocative as they may feel and appear, at no time do I ever feel lost or stuck in or with them, as conscious awareness is ever present, which takes the sufferer out of the picture in the midst of whatever is present living itself out. This is especially so when intense fear arises from some failing body function. Or the announcement by the medical profession that I’ve got one of those dreaded age-related conditions that could prove fatal. Remember wanting to survive as a body? Well, that feeling is deep—like DNA-d
eep—and will be as long as I have the slightest identification left with this body.

  Reminds me of a story. A Zen master nearing death was asked by a disciple how he was doing. The master replied, “I’m fine, but my body is having trouble keeping up.”

  So, although I can’t imagine not having the wisdom that is available with a nondual-direct-path perspective, and although having this knowledge at the moment brings with it great feelings of gratitude, I can honestly say that the direct path is not a prescription that takes away or otherwise shields one from the vicissitudes of life. In fact, being knowingly the open, non-local field of the present awareness I call James allows everything to be experienced fully.

  Even thought. It is crystal-clear here that feelings, bodily sensations, and sense perceptions come and go in this awaring presence and have been recognized as having no power to change either way, positively or negatively, this awareness. I still am confronted with the aches and pains and discomforts of living in a 72-year-old body. And let me tell you it has been intense at times. Because it brings you face-to-face with the inevitable reality that nobody gets out alive. Seeing I am the unchanging reality that the sensations and feelings that comprise this arising body appears to, is the ultimate reward. And the reality remains that realizing this arising will, one moment in the time of this life stream, be no more—this sometimes still causes a shudder within. It still exposes yet another layer of a me-identification.

  But that’s okay! It’s part of the whole. Nothing is separate. The me-feeling, the ego-idea, bodily sensation, our assumed humanness—these are all part of the whole, as is feeling free of it all, as is getting stuck in identifying with it all sometimes. The only thing that matters is one’s point of view, and sometimes that just takes being willing to be with what is unflinchingly until the right perspective shows up, which is, I’m okay no matter what!