Nonduality Salon Highlights, #3540

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#3540 - Friday, May 22, 2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz

The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights

Announcement of a new book release from Non-Duality Press, You Are No Thing: Recognizing Your True Nature, by Randall Friend.

An excerpt is included along with a link where you can read more excerpts and order the book.

You Are No Thing

Recognizing Your True Nature

Randall Friend

Book blurb:

Randall Friend has written a book that will resonate with so-called spiritual seekers, but those seekers should beware as this book may challenge their dearest beliefs. Randall looks at the typical spiritual search and our assumptions about ourselves, the universe and the very meaning of spirituality. He then invites us to disassemble our carefully constructed world view and takes us to the very cliff edge of liberation: only to find that there is no cliff…

In deceptively simple and direct language You are No Thing avoids spiritual jargon and the rigid, codified practices which so often prove to be distractions from the ever present reality; it points beyond the mistaken notion that we can find what we are seeking outside ourselves or with inner states and experiences.

About the Author:

Randall Friend was seeking spiritual answers for 30 years until he read Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s book, I Am That. He eventually encountered Sailor Bob Adamson and Gilbert Schultz. In this simple and uncompromising pointing, the search ended. Randall is the author of the blog You Are Dreaming. He resides in Louisville, Kentucky, USA.

Excerpt:

Our World

We have a shared view of the world. This view includes the

commonly-held and scientifically proven belief in the big

bang. And before that big bang there was apparently pure

nothingness, nothing in existence, pure formless void.

Then the big bang happened – boom! Nothingness

exploded into something; particles spread into this void,

creating space, creating form, slowly spinning, creating

gravitational pull, and gathering other particles together to

form larger masses, asteroids, planets, suns and galaxies.

In this story of the big bang, the universe and all its content

was created. And from those foundational substances

all the rest was formed; the elements, compounds and molecules

which led to the formation of cells. Eventually life

sprang up, some sort of separate existence, the capacity for

consciousness and the ability to know our existence.

With the coming of consciousness came the ability to

know ourselves, to experience our existence. This means

that we know that we are. Yet it seems that a false assumption

has been made so that the story of creation is somehow

backwards.

How can the universe, which wasn’t originally endowed

with the quality of knowing itself, suddenly create within

itself, out of all these parts, the ability to look, to see? How

can consciousness, a piece of the universe, suddenly be

gifted with the ability to look up and know its origin, when

that very universe has no ability to know?

That universe itself, which forms its parts from the

whole, the totality of itself, must have the ability inherently

to know its own creation, must contain this background of

knowing for it to impart that to its creation.

That knowing of our existence hasn’t sprung into being

billions of years after the creation; that knowing is an

inherent quality of the universe itself.

The universe is this very consciousness.

It seems that consciousness has a wonderful imagination.

From this story we have our common view. We agree to

believe it. We have no way of knowing for sure, outside of

science’s explanations and continual effort to prove that

theory, to prove the truth of the story.

And here we live, on this planet, formed from the remnants

of that booming beginning, springing up in different

life forms, wandering in a world of separate beings.

And as a separate being, we’re known as a person, a

someone who somehow exists in this body, a finite existence,

which itself was formed from the very elements of this

original boom.

If we happen to be born into Christianity we are told that

our essence is soul and that God caused this big bang or

created the world for us, as separate beings, apart from Him

yet created in His image. Our goal is to reach Him, to be like

Him, so that we may, after the death of the body, be with

Him, go to heaven, live in everlasting peace and paradise.

If we don’t live up to the morals and regulations set

down in this religion, we are doomed to hell, a place or

condition which is so hideous, so awful, that we are totally

scared into conforming, frightened into behavior of which

God approves.

Here is this person, doing its best to live the right way,

yet somehow not sure what exactly that means. We’re not

sure exactly what lies on the other side of death. We’re constantly

scared because we never really know if we’re doing

it right.

Yet this story holds a pointer to truth. It’s the story

of an original essence, a God, which has been seemingly

broken up for the world to appear. It is a nothingness, a nothing-

ness, a void or original emptiness, out of which an

explosion happened and then the appearance of the world

was formed from various parts and pieces.

We might say that God or oneness had to be the same

essence, had to be present, at that moment of universal

conception. Whatever God or oneness is, whatever truth

or reality is, it must have also been there for that event,

long ago.

The common belief is that God is sitting outside of this

creation, this universal space, this infinite playground; that

He is somehow apart from, yet controlling every aspect,

with power over all, seeing all, knowing all, omnipotent,

omniscient and omnipresent.

It seems we conveniently ignore the omnipresent part.

Advaita Vedanta, and most religions (if we boil out the

political and self-serving impurities added both in scripture

and culture), point out that God is not somewhere outside,

sitting on some golden throne, writing down each and

every deed to be judged in a later day of reckoning.

God is omnipresent, present everywhere, present in

everything. God can indeed be seen to be playing the world

from inside, as the world, the very suchness or is-ness of

the universe itself.

God is omnipotent, the very power or energy or activity

of this world, this appearance, this universal substance.

God or oneness or the Self is the very movement of the

atom, the electron, the spinning of the planets, the pull of

gravitation, the nuclear fields of the body, the DNA manifesting

like the tree in the acorn.

God is omniscient, all knowing. The universe itself

is suffused with the capacity to know itself, look at itself,

appear to itself, through a million billion points of reference.

Relativity is only an aspect of the absolute, only a

seeing of itself like light broken up in a prism.

Without the distractions of thought, without the distractions

of body, without the distractions of planets and stars

and pieces of this and that which came out of pure nothing,

formed from emptiness; without these distractions we

have an utter simplicity, an infinite potentiality of creation,

of forms, of bodies and thoughts. An emptiness so full of

potentiality that it burst in explosion with form, exploding

an entire universe into being.

Whatever truth or reality is, it must have been there,

before that big bang, the very essence of that boom, the very

container and content of that original conception of the world

we see and know and take to be made up of separate parts.

That very truth or reality must be here and now, must

be the essence of what appears to be. That essence, that

is-ness, that intelligence energy or formless void of infinite

fullness, that must be the very essence of that body-mind

that we’ve identified with.

Yet in identifying as a small, relative piece of this totality,

of this infinite void of fullness, by identifying as a separate

person, we’ve overlooked our infinite and eternal presence

as the totality itself, as spaceless space, as formless form.

We’ve created a little character and a world to play in.

We couldn’t have imagined a more believable story.

You Are No Thing: Recognizing Your True Nature, by Randall Friend

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