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#3551 -
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Another fine title from
Julian Noyce's Non-Duality Press -- http://www.non-dualitypress.com/ -- is brought to you. Julian finds
some great books. Who would've published this stuff if Julian
hadn't come along? Okay, enough sucking up to Julian. But in all
the years I've been introducing his books to this readership, I
never mentioned the man behind the books.
The Light That I
Am
Notes From the Ground of Being
J.C. Amberchele
is the pseudonym of a man who found freedom, real freedom, during
the long prison sentence, which he is still serving. This freedom
is the same liberation or enlightenment that so many of us are
seeking, but we seek within the framework of a life where we can
have access to all the paraphernalia of the spiritual search and
the apparent comfort that money can buy. If you are reading this,
you probably have an inkling that the real freedom which
Amberchele talks about is something different and has no relation
to the external freedom that most of us enjoy.
The 'experiments' he used
before his radical shift in perception seemed, in his own words
"... crazy and childish, but I gave them a try. And there it
was, as plain as day'. The Light That I Am is no mere
prescriptive rehashing of techniques, it combines fascinating
biographical material with uniquely accessible insights into the
nature of who we really are and how a person continues to
function after everything has changed and yet nothing has
changed.
Foreword by Richard Lang
Afterword by Douglas Harding
"This book is a
collection of articles based on the insights of the English
philosopher and spiritual teacher Douglas Edison Harding."
About the Author:
J.C. Amberchele was born in
Excerpt from the
preface, by the J.C. Amberchele
Whatever idea I've had
about how things work in this world hasn't gotten me far,
considering I've spent more than twenty years in prison. Most of
my beliefs I acquired from my father and from John Wayne, and
anything that wasn't ultra tough and ultra cool was to me ultra
embarrassing. In fact, I lived in a state of near continuous
embarrassment, never measuring up to the ridiculous standards I
had accepted without question, applied to a framework of
expectations I and no one else could meet: how I should act, how
others should treat me or otherwise comport themselves in my
presence, how the days and months and years should unfold in my
favor.
Needless to say, I became
the poster boy for control freaks worldwide. And like all control
freaks, I carried beneath a facade of polished strength a sense
of hollowness and doom , ever waging the war between who I
thought I should be and who I thought I was. In a haze, I
self-destructed over and over, taking others with me.
And then years ago,
already well into this prison sentence, I happened to watch a PBS
Bill Moyers interview with Joseph Campbell, and I decided to try
meditation. It was difficult at first, what with the crowds and
the noise and the routine in the cellblock, but I soon discovered
that during meditation I had few expectations, of myself or of
others, as if there were no others. It was a place of no
standards and no embarrassment, a refuge where I no longer had to
assert my misguided will. And except for the rare glimpse on
drugs or during moments of life-threatening stress in my long
criminal career, it was the first time I had truly noticed
myself, that bare attention of "I am" at the center of
awareness that, it was now obvious, had always been there.
The mystery from then on,
became a question of how this "I" had orginated and
from where it continued to spring. The old way of thinking, that
I could be a separate consciousness in a separate mind and body,
was far too painful to accept. This was the way I had been
taught, the way of my father and of everyone else by whom I had
measured myself; this was the way of contraction and
confrontation and endless self-torture. There had to be another
explanation.
This led to six years of
obsessive reading. I wanted to investigate the unspoken hunch I
had had since my LSD days in the Sixties, one that had previously
manifested as fear, and one that had been resurrected during the
Campbell interview: namely, that all the major religions carried
at their root an identical message, one so clear and so basic
that words were unnecessary for its realization. I suspected that
my perception of the world and my so-called place in it were
illusory, that reality wasn't what I and most everyone else had
thought. It was as if humankind were the recipient of a hoax the
universe had conspired to play on itself. And it was clear
that my life thus far had been a fight against the revelation of
this knowledge, holding on, as it were, to the lies I had been
handed, lashing out to avoid the truth.
I read Buddhist texts. I
read Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. I read all I could find on the
Christian mystics. I devoured Hafiz and Rumi, then launched
myself into the work of the great Indian sages. I found Wei Wu
Wei, then returned to Buddhism and dug in for the long haul. I
was determined to sort this out, this mystery at the heart of the
matter.
And then one day I read
an article by Douglas Harding about his so-called
"headlessness," and something snapped. Seeing Who we
are, Harding pointed out, was elementary, so easy we miss it, and
in failing to recognize it we erect philosophical and religious
structures of monumental proportions, thereby concealing it all
the more. And all the while it is right Here, closer than close.
... The message was clear: "We can't see It because we are
It," and the implications were mind-shattering.
The Light That I
Am
Notes From the Ground of Being
J.C. Amberchele
Order from Amazon.com
or
Order directly from the
publisher in the U.K:
http://www.non-dualitypress.com/product.aspx?p=91ea0157-29a6-4a09-9147-5c4bc8baa87d