He has also written a text at http://www.living-realization.blogspot.com. He also has many videos on both youtube and on his
site, as well as audio dialogues with other teachers and writers
interested in non-duality. See the KiloLogues page of the
kiloby.com site for those audios.
Greg Goode and Tomas
Sander will be teaching a class in New York, Saturday,
January 16, 2010, entitled:
Western Emptiness Teachings and Joyful Freedom
The Mahayana emptiness teachings are considered key for attaining
liberation from cyclic existence. Yet their difficulty has made
them less intuitive than they might be. This class will offer
insights from the Western tradition that can come to the
assistance of the Western student. We will learn several Western
emptiness meditations and experience how they can foster joy,
lightness, compassion, and freedom.
This class was presented in condensed form at the 2009 Science
and Nonduality Conference in San Rafael, California.
This class is open to Buddhists, non-Buddhists, and anyone
interested in the variety of non-dual approaches.
Location:
Nalandabodhi New York
324 West 23rd Street #2A
New York, NY 10011
Phone: 212-399-2193
Schedule:
Saturday, January 16
9:30am - 5pm
(bring your lunch or lunch money to order in)
Detailed Description: The Mahayana emptiness
teachings are considered key for attaining liberation from cyclic
existence. Yet these teachings have been notoriously hard to
understand, and in practice not as deeply transformative as they
could be.
This class will present insights and reasonings from the Western
philosophical tradition that can make the emptiness teachings
much more intuitive to the Western student. These Western
resources will be put to use in fresh new analytic meditations,
and applied with the soteriological know-how of the East. The
goal is the traditional one, to dismantle the false sense that
the self and other phenomena exist inherently, i.e., in a
non-empty way. The meditations are inspired by the work of
writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, Jacques
Derrida, and Kenneth Gergen.
We will also cover the beautiful side to the emptiness teachings,
which is an aspect very different from the analytical rigor they
are usually known for. We will discover how studying emptiness
leads to a joyful sense of freedom. As you meditate, the heavy,
essentialist, absolutizing feelings basic to suffering melt away.
Life becomes light, free, other-directed, and compassionate. You
gain joy because you have lost the heaviness of absolutist
demands and expectations about things. This joy frees you up for
self-creation, openness towards others - and if you are so
motivated - the creation of a better world.
This one-day class will teach the skills needed for Western
emptiness meditations, so that you will be able to practice
effectively after the class.
As we end the year 2009 to snuggle cozily into the welcoming arms
of 2010, thoughts on the Past, Present and Future do hover in our
minds. We accumulate our experiences as memory. Our brains
decipher certain inviolable patterns in those experiences. The
patterns and their recurrence go to reinforce and solidify our
belief in the reality of our experience.
Ancient Indian scriptures talk of three levels of
‘reality’ – (i) Absolute; (ii) Transactional and
(iii) Dream. The Absolute Reality is the ultimate, unchanging
Truth. Transactional reality is what we live with in our daily
life. The ephemeral reality is the one we experience in a dream
world.
Vedanta shouts from roof-tops: The dream and transactional
experiences are equally FALSE and UNREAL. There is nothing like a
past and future of things happening. Everything just happens in
the NOW. There is NO thing other than Nowness, the Aliveness, the
very Beingness. It is Alone. No second one is there. And that is
Advaita.
That is the view from the Absolute Reality that Gaudapada gives
us.
Venerable Gaudapada was a Great Sage of the 8th Century. He
expounded the above philosophy of Ajativada (nothing is
ever born), the true gist of Vedanta, in his classic Karika
(commentary in verses) on Mandukya Upanishad. The Second Chapter
of the Karika discusses the illusory nature of the world that we
experience and the non-difference of dream and awake states of
man. The Mandukya Upanishad and Karika hold these two states to
be mere 'arisings' in the deep sleep state.
Quoting Gaudapada Karika:
A question arises then: who cognizes the illusory objects of
dream and wakeful states, if the objects cognized in both the
states are unreal? (Karika II – 11).
The 12th verse of the Chapter II goes to answer (Swami
Nikhilananda’s translation, Advaita Ashrama, 1995):
“Atman, the self-luminous, through the power of his
own Maya, imagines in himself by himself (all the objects that
the subject experiences within or without). He alone is the
cognizer of the objects (so created). That is the decision of the
Vedanta.”
Gaudapada further explains that internally conceived things like
thoughts, ideas etc. are no different from objects seen ‘out
there’. He says in the 14th verse:
"Those that are cognized within only as long as the
thought of them lasts, as well as those that are perceived by the
senses and that conform to two points of time, are all mere
imaginations. There is no other ground for differentiating the
one from the other."
Swami Nikhilananda amplifying on the word
“imaginations” writes as follows:
“That a thing exists independently of the perceiving mind
is also an idea. …. Past, present and future are nothing but
ideas present in the mind at the moment.”
Peter Dziuban provides us, like Gaudapada, the
worldview from the stance of and as Absolute Reality. His
teachings echo Gaudapada’s Ajativada.
We are fortunate that he explains with great clarity, irrefutable
logic and inimitable expression our questions at his Blog: Reality
Check.
I posed him the following question:
Though we seem to understand intellectually the non-dualism,
how is it that a sense of ‘lack’ continues to haunt us?
I want to get to the root of this 'lack' - a lack not for any
objective 'thing' but that gut feeling of "not
satisficing".
One way is to see the 'lack' to be "ALL", the very
Being. However, this looks to be a mere explanation.
What Peter said, in brief (as I understood in my words) was:
1. Notice that "something" has cognised that sense of
'lack'.
2. Be that very "Cogniser" rather than claiming
ownership for that sense of 'lack'.
3. The sense or gut feeling of 'lack' is time dependent (hence
transitory) and therefore, sure to 'dissolve'.
4. The sense of 'lack' has its origin because of an 'assumed
add-on s' i.e. some unspelt 'expectations' of a person in 'me'
looking for 'object-oriented experience'.
I do not find anywhere, either in the ancient Indian lore or
in the modern non-dualism teachings, any body explaining the
emergence of the wakeful state with all the phenomenal 'world'
and its goings on.
Words like 'Maya', 'Leela' (play), 'Freedom', [Karma, cyclicity]
etc. are used to explain how from that Immutable Oneness the
first 'I-thought' is engendered to manifest later as the
variegated manifold. But these are admittedly just explanatory
fictions. Such explanations take all the mathematical precision
and scientific regularity in the phenomenal 'world' as 'given'.
They accept the inevitability of inexorable natural laws and
never provide any clue as to why a law is the way it is.
[.....,] we see a 'signature' of dream state in a dreaming brain
(REM sleep). How do you think the brain state would be when one
is "abiding" as ALL, One, Consciousness, Brahman.
I would like to draw the attention of the readers of this Blog to
the excellent Posts of Peter in reply to my query, a befitting
way to end the year 2009.
[The possible state of the brain of a “realized” man
(Jivanmukta) is obviously something he cannot comment. It would
fall under Neuroscience. However, his surmise is that there would
be no thinking activity, and little or no experience of
sensations — so he speculates that those apparent related
areas of brain activity would be greatly reduced or inactive.
Meanwhile, in such states the body usually still appears to
breathe, pump blood, etc. so it would seem that whatever brain
activity is involved in these apparent functions would continue.
This topic can be a good study for Barrow Neurological Institute,
Arizona, U.S.A. One of their Directors attended the Oct 2009
'Science and Non-dualism Conference' in San Rafael, California.
As no thinking can happen without stored information, it will
also be interesting to see how memory will behave in a
Jivanmukta. Our ancient scriptures say that vasana-s (past
stored impressions) will become ineffective like burnt out seeds.
Memory is still an active on going research topic in
Neuroscience.
Information we have from Neuroscince on retention, loss or
erasure of memory, abnormal memory of a savant brain and related
issues will form the subject of a future Blog Post.]
WITH BEST WISHES FOR A HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR
