Adyashanti and Dorothy Hunt
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#1899 - Monday, August 23, 2004 - Editor: Jerry
Featured is Part 7 of the review/summary of The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, edited by John J. Prendergast, Peter Fenner, and Sheila Krystal. Information about this book is available at http://www.paragonhouse.com/catalog/product_info.php?authors_id=218&products_id=315
Following that is a piece on Bob Dylan with photos.
Also included is another installment of In Nonduality Salon, featuring the posts from the Nonduality Salon list before the Highlights was born.
The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy
Chapter 7
Being Intimate with What is: Healing the Pain of Separation
by Dorothy Hunt
Adyashanti and Dorothy Hunt
Dorothy Hunt is founder of the San Francisco Center for Meditation and Psychotherapy. She has practiced psychotherapy since 1967, led workshops, presented at conferences, and edited and published various works. Her significant teachers include Mother Theresa, Ramana Maharshi, Ramesh Balsekar, and Adyashanti.
~ ~ ~
Unlike previous chapters, client experiences are interwoven thoughout the entire chapter rather than given their own section. There are several points to highlight:
-- "When what is awake directly touches its own experience of anything, there is deep intimacy with what is. ... In this intimacy we find ourselves undivided."
--"(This realization of our undivided being) is unfailingly healing because it experiences itself as a whole."
-- This intimacy is not conceptual, not another idea or identification to be harboured. It is not separate from this or what is. It is direct experience. Any conceptualization is movement away from the experience of this. "Healing happens when we are not separating ourselves from the authentic truth of the moment."
-- We no longer suffer when we are intimate with what is; not separate from our essential being; not avoiding experiencing the reality of the moment. "We are not trying to transcend the moment, or change our thoughts about the moment; we are simply being intimate with the moment exactly as it is. ... Such living experience of the truth of our being and the authentic truth of the moment is always healing. Conversely, it is our separation from the moment and our separation from the truth of our being that create suffering."
-- Only the undivided therapist can invite the client to taste the undivided. "If we have not experienced the truth of our own being, or known what it is to experience the touch of this intimate awakeness of our own experience, we will not be able to invite our clients to do the same."
-- Nondual psychotherapy cannot be taught. There is not "nondual psychotherapy" any more than there is "nondual dreaming" or "nondual war." "There is no something else," including a separate 'I' to learn "nondual psychotherapy." "This is Totality functioning exactly in this way." The mind rests in unknowing.
-- Healing manifests by being together, "without an agenda, without a place to arrive, without needing to refuse, get rid of, or change anything." Silence is the quality of being and silence invites silence to silence. Being together or sitting in silence together is not a technique used by the author. It happens fairly frequently in her work and always spontaneously, without explicit invitation. The author gives a series of brief comments from clients showing their responses to such silent meeting. They are of the nature of healing and opening.
-- Healing manifests by "continual invitation to the direct experience of the moment as it is." The direct and full of experiencing of anything, from joy to fear, beauty to horror, or the mundane, is an opening to the taste of nonseparate being. Client dialogue is given as an example of this invitation to direct experience
-- Truth returns for itself. Awakening occurs out of form, eventually becoming embodied so that not only the mind awakens, but the heart, the emotional body, the overall pattern of our life energy, and our physical body down to the cellular level. It is truth returning for itself. The embodiment of truth may take years, is ever-deepening, and is a fully felt intimacy with what is. It is surrender to God, if one wishes, or wisdom-love, clarity, and non-referential compassion.
-- Psychotherapeutic technique could occur in the unfolding of the moment, and is applied without intent to effect change. The invitation to inquiry could be extremely helpful, with questions on the order of, "Is the story true?" "Can you know it's true?", and other questions that arise spontaneously and intuitively and bear on the ultimate inquiry of "Who am I?"
A concluding paragraph:
"To experience this very moment directly, authentically, intimately, is to experience our being, our awakeness, our love, our truth. To do so heals the pain of separation. To allow things, moments, people, feelings, to be is felt as deeply loving. Grief, anger, boredom, fear, deeply appreciate being able to just be what they are. Sadness is very happy when it can just be sad. We do not have to create stories to sustain, or stories to deny our experience. Neither do we or our clients have to 'try' to be compassionate, or 'learn' to be loving. Compassion arises naturally in the presence of direct, authentic experience and the silence of our true being."
~ ~ ~
The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, edited by John J. Prendergast, Peter Fenner, and Sheila Krystal. Information about this book is available at http://www.paragonhouse.com/catalog/product_info.php?authors_id=218&products_id=315
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3597410.stm
| Dylan's still blowin' in the wind |
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As he prepares to publish his memoirs, BBC News Online examines the timeless appeal of musical legend Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan's unique fusion of rock, country, folk and blues have had an immeasurable influence on contemporary popular music. His political lyrical content has influenced everyone from The Beatles to U2, to Bruce Springsteen and Badly Drawn Boy. Joe Strummer said Dylan "laid down the template" for lyric, tune, seriousness, spirituality and depth of rock music. And at the age of 63, the man born Robert Alan Zimmerman on 24 May 1941 in Hibbing, Minnesota, is still on the road, still with his own, enduring career. Globalisation To his younger fans, for whom records are a quaint reminder of another era, Dylan has as much to say about the environment and globalisation as he had to their parents about racial tolerance and war. Of the Holy Trinity of Rock, the Beatles self-destructed more than 30 years ago, Elvis turned up his blue suede shoes in 1977, but Dylan continues to surprise and challenge.
He is currently on tour with Willie Nelson, travelling to Minor League baseball parks across the country US. In the last few years, two live albums of him performing in 1964 and 1975 have been released. And in 2002, his album Love and Theft won him a Grammy Award in the contemporary folk album category. In the fickle and transient world of popular music, Dylan has spent 40 years at the top, constantly re-inventing himself along the way, allowing his fans the opportunity to grow up and grow old with their idol and his music. For the most part, his songs are easy to play - 100,000 buskers in 100,000 railway stations are testament to that.
He does not have a conventionally good singing voice. Yet, as a wordsmith, Dylan is unsurpassed. Transcending pop and poetry, his lyrics have provided a soundtrack to his age. "The answer is blowin' in the wind", "he not busy being born is busy dying" and "there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all" are almost as much a part of the currency of literature as Shakespeare and Keats. Earlier this year, Dylan admitted that one of his most famous songs - The Times They Are A-Changin' - was originally a Scottish folk tune. Songs Scotland did not seem to mind - he was awarded an honorary degree from St Andrews University in June where he was described as an "iconic figure for the 20th Century". Even though Dylan has often been dismissive about how much his work reveals about its writer, he admitted in 1990: "People can learn everything about me through my songs, if they know where to look." To the thousands of amateur Dylanologists, their hero's every concert and out-take is to be recorded, collected and pored over as if it were Holy Writ.
Superfans, like the celebrated Larry Lambchop, about whom Dylan once said "this man has seen me play more times than me", constantly follow him around the world. He once said that his 1966 album Blonde On Blonde came closest to capturing the "wild mercury sound" inside his head and the image of mercury, an element which is constantly in flux and difficult to contain, is an apt one for Bob Dylan. His chaotic private life includes a 1965 marriage to a former Playboy bunny girl Sara Lowndes, which produced four children before ending in divorce in 1977. Beside affairs with numerous other women, he had a second secret wife, his backing singer Carol Dennis, with whom he had a daughter. Alimony, as well as a continuing burning desire to perform, means that Dylan remains constantly on tour. Though his glory days at the leading edge of popular culture might be behind him, the timelessness of Bob Dylan's work means that his relevance will never be diminished. |
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In Nonduality Salon
Highlights of early posts to Nonduality Salon
Niren
Posted November, 1998
Wherever you go..
As you know I am wandering down some Buddhist paths. In the
spirit of
wherever you go, there you are.... the nondual keeps appearing
before my
eyes wherever I look. They may be read more easily on the website
site,
for those who may be interested. Also the article on "the
flow" is quite
interesting.
Regarding Alaya ("the basic or ground conciousness from
which all
experiance arises"), there is a very interesting point made
by H.H.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and you can find it in the webpages of
"shambhala sun" magazine, at: http://www.shambhalasun.com
The Alaya
THE ground of Samsara (1) [see
footnotes below] and Nirvana (2), the
beginning and end of both confusion
and realization, the nature of universal
Sunyata (3) and of all apparent
phenomena, more fundamental even
than the Trikaya (4 ) because it is free
from bias toward enlightenment, is the
alaya (5), sometimes called the pure or
original mind.
Although prajna (6) sees in it no basis
for such concepts as different aspects,
yet three fundamental aspects of complete openness,
natural perfection
and absolute spontaneity are distinguished by upaya (7)
as useful devices.
Footnotes:
1 The cycle of birth, death and rebirth
2 The state of liberation from cyclic existence
3 lit. "emptiness," "void"; the truth that
all
conditioned existence is impermanent and
empty of permanent identity
4 lit. "three bodies"; the bodies through which a
buddha is both one with the absolute
and manifests in the relative world
5 lit. "storehouse consciousness"; the basic or
ground
consciousness from which all
experience arises
6 Wisdom, founded in the realization of sunyata
7 Skillful means
Also, a Koan from another article there:
Ordinary Mind is the Way
A Zen discourse by Joshu Sasaki-roshi, given at Mount Baldy Zen Center, February, 1998 translated by Katsuki Sekida
Joshu asked Nansen, "What is the
Way?"
"Ordinary mind is the Way," Nansen
replied.
"Shall I try to seek after it?" Joshu
asked.
"If you try for it, you will become
separated from it," responded Nansen.
"How can I know the Way unless I try for it?"
persisted Joshu.
Nansen said, "The Way is not a matter of knowing or
not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is confusion. When
you have really reached the true Way beyond doubt, you will find
it vast and boundless as outer space. How can it be talked about
on the
level of right and wrong?"
With these words, Joshu came to a sudden realization.
This koan called "Ordinary Mind is the Way" is
a beginner's koan, a koan made for beginners to study. For the
old
students just reading it once, immediately you should know
exactly what's going on.
~ ~ ~
Carlos Dwa
Posted November, 1998
I'll tell you a secret -since I'm up late and
irradiated.
I don't think "God" has any characteristics.
-but if he did -I think he would be like a small
piece of protoplasm lost on a rogue asteroid
that is hurtling uncontrolably through the
void.
And it's clinging tenatiously to life -because
it is all it has.
And your lives are the claws that it grasps
with.
It is the Least powerful of things. Almost
nonexistant -totally ignored and overlooked
-worshipped by no one.
I think maybe he is a barefoot old aborigine
-an old man wandering through the desert
-and he really has no power over anything.
But when the universe comes to an end
and all has ceased to exist -somehow
-inexplicably -he is able to look off
into the missing sky and ...with an innocent
smile and a lilting voice he can say a word
and the whole creation thing starts up
again.
Actually quite a charming old bugger
-been known to sit around mumbling
semi coherently to himself for eons
at a time.
It's been rumored that those who
are particulialy critical of him are
at some point forced to take his place.
In fact some say (and I really shouldn't
tell you this), some say, that's how he
got the position in the first place.
So bone up bucky -'cause I hear
that at times omnisience is quite
claustrophobic.
Like living in
a very small cell with a very bright
bare lightbulb.
(c)1998 Carlos Dwa
~ ~ ~
David Hodges
Posted November, 1998
Doing Nothing
Let's see.
Got nothing to do tonight, got no one to be with.
So I went to the video store and didn't find any video I wanted
to see
tonight.
So I went to the cafe and wrote in my journal and drank a latte.
Then I figured I'd go to the LARGE video store. Then I thought,
nah.
Then I came home. Then I meditated.
Then I noticed that SHE had been trying to get my attention all
along. SHE
was physically located in my chest. In consciousness she was just
- inside.
When my attention would wander she would pull me back. My impulse
was to
praise her or worship her but she wanted me to be quiet. Then my
impulse
was to figure her out, relate her to theories and ideas and myths
but she
wanted me to be quiet.
SO - I just stayed there with HER for a while. I continued to do
nothing.
But I wasn't alone.
Now I'm writing this to you Salon folks.
Now I'm not.
David
~ ~ ~
Jerry Katz
Posted November, 1998
Cafe Confessions?
Well, it wasn't a bad idea, going to a cafe and sitting and
writing
something confessional regarding our personal realization. I had
every
intention of going to a particular cafe, ordering a chai, and
writing in
my notebook. But when the time came to do it, it all felt kind of
contrived, so I just stayed home.
But there was a time when I did almost all my writing in
coffee shops.
In those days I was experimenting with fiction in the fantasy
genre,
inspired by readings on the occult.
This would be the 70's in Los Angeles. So I wrote at Ships,
which is now
nothing more than a splashy neon photo in coffee table books. And
at
Muktananda's temporary ashram in Santa Monica, overlooking the
ocean,
everyday for a few weeks. I wrote at the littles dives on Santa
Monica
pier, or while sitting on benches on the pier, fishermen to the
right
and left of me. I wrote a lot while sitting on the benches atop
Griffith
park, alongside the observatory, the famous observatory in Rebel
Without
a Cause. Also the benches at Inspiration Point, right near the
totem
pole at the north end of the park that parallels Ocean Ave. and
overlooks the broad and wide Santa Monica beach, Venice pier to
the
south, Malibu to the north, and sunset a success every day in
Santa
Monica.
But breakthrough to recognition of the nondual came when I
wrote my
first Book of Umba, in my front yard on Pearl Street in Santa
Monica, in
1980-81...
Nothing is gained or lost
But infinity is re-arranged.
All things happen to all entities and souls
And keep on happening until infinity
Itself is lost
And the ease of nothingness reigns.
--- from The Book of Umba, November 8, 1980
I am a castle speaking.
There's a man inside me.
His name is Umba.
He wants wood,
And my table is wood.
He wants iron. So iron vats.
He wants missionaries in black robes
And the sadness of being alone.
So missionaries.
He wants fields in the beyond
And food growing in them.
And he wants levitation.
Stars, moons, red planets
And esthetic objects flying past my windows.
So flight.
He wants simple walks.
He wants paths with pebbles solid to touch.
So smooth.
And he wants an earthly body.
And earth and sky
And air and space and light and water and fire.
And he wants it all from me.
So he gets it all from me.
My castle is the center of my kingdom
And every part of my kingdom is part of my castle.
My castle has many rooms and secret passages.
My rooms have no corners, no walls, no floors, no ceilings.
Under my rooms are secret passages.
My castle has the anatomy of desire
And is cherished by monks;
The anatomy of responsibility
And is unavoidable.
The physiology of evolution
And is love in solution.
My castle has many rooms
And only the room I am in is important.
The room I am in, is indistiguishable from all the other rooms.
The room I am in is a room only because I call it a room.
There is only one room
And that room is everything.
It is the layer of light
Between Umba and the Core of Umba.
---from The Book of Umba, November 19 and 20, 1980.
~ ~ ~
Harsha
Posted November, 1998
Jerry you reminded me of a beautiful and a sad time. By 1980,
I had
completed several years of training under my teacher and was bent
on
becoming a Jain monk. But in 1980 Chitrabhanu Ji told me that I
should
respect the wishes of my parents who were completely against that
life
style. He advised me to go back to graduate school. I was
dejected and in
great sorrow as I had no other aim in life. I did not have any
skills in
making a living other than teaching yoga and meditation which I
was doing at
the time. So I went to California. I was in Santa Monica for
about a week or
so back in 1980. I had a chance to visit La Jolla as well and
meet that very
famous love psychologist who had an institute there. (Carl
somebody I
think). He was in his 70s at the time and had two girl friends.
Then I went
to the Hippocrates Institute and experimented with the raw
vegetarian diet
there. After three weeks, the owner of a resort asked me to come
see his
place. He wanted to set up a business arrangement where I would
be the Guru
at the resort and we would split 50-50. I stayed there for two
days and told
him I would think it over. I felt very sad there. I called my
teacher on the
phone one day. I said a few words but could not talk much as
tears
completely overwhelmed me. Chitrabhanu Ji asked, "What is
the matter
Harshadeva? You have to be strong." I tried to explain but
what could I
explain. My pain was too deep. After a few days I left California
and spent
some time with my parents. Then I spent a few months with my
teacher. As
fate would have it, I ended up going back to graduate school.
~ ~ ~
Bruce Morgen
Posted November, 1998
Confessional remembrance of childhood
I will tell you that my
first "spiritual"
experience occurred in 1953
when I was a six year old
attending Hebrew School in
the thriving New York suburb
of Levittown, Long Island.
The Bible stories I was
taught caused great
dissonance in my childish
consciousness, I somehow
"knew" that the jealous,
whimsical, downright
murderous "God" depicted in
the Old Testament was a
concoction of thought, used
by those in power to enforce
social conformity. My
teachers were, of course,
relentless with their tales
of the vengeance and wrath
of "God." Finally, one
summer evening, I stood in
my driveway, looked up at
the stars, and asked the
"God" I was taught to fear
and obey to strike me down,
as I could not coexist in
the same universe with such
a ruler/creator. The answer
was utter silence, there was
only the profound, deeply
quiet beauty of the night sky
-- and so the journey, my
"path" to the actual, living
"God" began with the stars in
a little boy's eyes.
Bob
Dylan has been massive influence on 20th Century
music
Dylan
has spent more than 40 years at the top of the
music scene
He
experimented with different sounds
The
young Dylan mesmerised a generation