Dear David, this here is just my humble reply to your “no practice is needed” aspect.
This here is an interesting and clear instruction:
“Until now you have not asked for anything in My name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete. 25I have spoken these things to you in figures of speech. An hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you this way, but will tell you plainly about the Father.…”
“ask and you will receive” points me to inquiry; the inquiry into the nature of reality and mind.
Father as a different word for Consciousness.
“In My name” is I am… the simple effortless unadulterated sense of “being myself”. The absence of the separate-self, the presence of the ‘LORD’.
Practice is an effort, an activity for the separate-self; the assumed doer wants to do, doesn’t know anything else but doing.
“I don’t know” for the separate-self seems to be more like death, defeat, loss, shame, guilt… as a concession it gets a toy to calm down a little bit.
David, it seems you have a different audience, a different clientele, a different aim, with your TM.
Yes, you can use ‘practice’ but it needs some loving disclaimers for people to see the trap of it, and to really understand what they are looking for. It needs to be clear that it is a temporary stepping stone, otherwise your practice becomes a golden cage.
“And just as it is not necessary to undress in order to feel our naked body, it is not necessary to change the content of experience in any way in order to be in touch with our innate peace and happiness.”
I see ‘teaching nonduality’ (the removal of self-entertained obstacles) more like an art than a craft.
Peace
I, too, have been thinking about this and related issues, particularly when I hear certain teachers say that no practice is needed, just an instantaneous recognition of Awareness, pointed to by suffering and all other conditioned experiences. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KXidr0z1RY may be hard for some people to watch, but it provides an insight that challenges the notion that nonduality needs to be preached until people “get it”. Is the teacher who preaches nonduality as a dogma helping others or giving in to their own ego? I don’t know the answer yet, but hope that this group will help me find it.
Reply to Kevin: “A faulty nervous system is no more the source of wrong thinking than a tap is the source of water.”
I cannot agree. Many of my clients suffer from anxiety, fear, and other forms of “wrong thinking”, yet these symptoms disappear when transcending (deep rest) fixes the nervous system by eliminating some of its accumulated stresses (dysfunctions due to overloads of experience). If a faulty nervous system were NOT the source of wrong thinking, these symptoms would not disappear. Remember, my clients are not engaging in introspection or any other kind of observation of their thoughts, just in practicing transcending twice a day.
I’m not commenting on this posting, just a general comment: it would be useful to receive an email notification when someone posts a comment. I don’t see a way to enable such a feature. I think I am missing many comments on previous postings.
I’ve been thinking about another metaphor from Jesus: It’s as hard for a wealthy person to get to heaven as for a camel to go through a needle’s eye.
But it can be a metaphor for getting to the true self. You must let go of everything: Your concepts, opinions, stories, and your body. Otherwise, you can’t squeeze through.
I don’t understand this quotation. I checked it online and it seems to be correct, but makes no sense in English. Can anyone here explain exactly what it means?
“What seems to be” is what our senses report and our conditioned mind renders as “reality”.
If we drop for a moment our old (erroneous) perspective of “I am body-mind”, and relax into “Consciousness is what is hearing these words” we might see the me-chanism. We might see that we believe the world of suffering into existence.
David, maybe you can set aside some time with this famous quote, in an atmosphere of love and openness…
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