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#2588 -
The Nondual Highlights
Non-duality Press
has reprinted two important titles by Dr. Jean
Klein, Who Am I?: The Sacred Quest, and Be Who
You Are. You may order them at http://www.non-dualitybooks.com/Jean%20Klein%20N-D%20Press.htm
Some readers who are
fairly new to the teaching of nonduality may not be familiar with
Jean Klein. He was teaching and publishing in
the 70s and 80s. Some who have been in the nonduality racket for
30 or more years forget that people are newly discovering the
teaching of nonduality and may need to informed of the spectrum
of writings available. Perhaps Non-Duality Press
will do more reprints in the future, though their expertise seems
to lie in discovering and publishing new writers and teachers.
The excerpt in this issue
of the Highlights is from Who Am I?: The Sacred Quest.
Q. When you are no longer
identified with the person, how is life affected?
A. The first thing you
notice is how much richer and deeper your perceptions are.
Communication becomes so much more varied. Generally, we are
fixed in patterns of communication but when we live in openness a
great sensitivity arises, a sensitivity we never dreamed of.
When we approach our
surroundings from wholeness our whole structure comes alive. We
do not hear music with the ears only. When the ears cease to
grasp sound for themselves we feel music with our whole body, the
colour, the form, the vibration. It no longer belongs to a
specific organ. It belongs to our whole being. This creates a
deep humility, an innocence. Only in humility is true
communication possible.
Then one lives in a
completely new dimension. To live as a personality is to live in
restriction. Don't live in restriction! Let the personality live
in you. In living in the environment without separation there is
great, great beauty.
Q. Would you talk more
about humility in human relations?
A. Humility is not
something you wear like a garment. It has nothing to do with
bowed heads and averted eyes! It comes from the reabsorption of
individuality in being, in stillness. It comes from the ending of
all agitation. In attention, alertness, there is humility. It is
receptivity, openness, to all that life brings. Where there is no
psychological memory, no accumulation of knowledge, there is
innocence. Innocence is humility.
In intimate or
problematic situations, each must speak in humility of how they
feel. It is simply a statement of facts with no justification, no
interpretation. We must not look for a conclusion. If we allow
the situation complete freedom from evaluation and judgement and
pressure to find a conclusion, many things appear which do not
belong to our memory.
Humility arises when
there is no reference to an 'I'. This emptiness is the healing
factor in any situation. Heidegger says, 'Be open to openness.'
Be open to non-concluding. In this openness the situation offers
its own solution, and in openness we receive it. Often when the
solution appears the mind comes in and quarrels with it, doubts
it.
~ ~ ~
Q. I'm afraid of the
nothingness I'll be faced with if the personality dies.
A. You are accustomed to
living in fraction. When the self-image dies you live in
completeness. This fullness can never be objectified because
there's no agent left to think it. It can only be lived. You must
familiarise yourself with dying. It's a new feeling. A feeling
without feeling.
You imagine that the
death of the I-image is an absence. But this is only the ego
speaking on behalf of its own survival. Come out of the vicious
circle of living in the narrow world of the ego. True death of
the insecure ego leaves you in complete security. So what is
insecurity from the point of view of the relative 'I' is absolute
security in terms of your whole being. There are people living in
tragic situations but they prefer to live this way rather than in
no situation at all because where there is no situation there is
no more hold for the 'me'.
Q. Is all fear then based
on a fractional view?
A. Yes. Because a
fraction is isolated. It is separation from totality. This
separation brings up fear and anxiety. Fear and who is afraid are
one, not two.
~ ~ ~
Q. What is a teacher?
A. when you become
established in truth you may or may not be a teacher. To be a
teacher takes a certain pedagogical gift, the capacity to pierce
the mind directly so that the answer comes with the perfume
of silence and unveils silence in the questioner. It is the
capacity to see into the disciple and know instinctively in which
way to present the teaching. There is no fixed teaching as there
is no fixed disciple. In fact there is no teacher, for the
teacher is identical with what is taught. He is established
knowingly in his teaching and it is at the core of his being that
he knows there is nothing to teach.
One who lives in his real
being takes himself for nothing. He brings the disciple to
understand that there is nothing to teach. This creates a new
perspective: that there is no disciple and no teacher.
The disciple takes
himself for an ignorant person with something to acquire. When he
meets the nothingness of the teacher and the teaching, he is
brought to a letting go of his desire to be somebody who is
enlightened, spiritual, religious, and so on. He is brought back
to himself.
Behave as if you do not
need any teaching, as if you are free, secure and contented. When
you think there is something to acquire, you live in lack. The
only thing to learn is how to approach.
~ ~ ~
Find out more about these
books at http://www.non-dualitybooks.com/Jean%20Klein%20N-D%20Press.htm