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The latest Nonduality Network Talk Radio show may be enjoyed at http://nonduality.net/13november2013.mp3 

This show includes a recording of Chloe Goodchild chanting, followed by a conversation on mantras and chants. Understanding nonduality via duality. A beautiful confession from Gangaji. Then conversation on desire, longing, and prayer. Enthusiasm is the next topic. A clip from Swami Beyondananda. Also an audio of Coleman Barks reading Rumi. In between it all, other topics, considerations and humor.

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Han van den Boogaard is a Dutch psychologist,

writer and translator. He regularly publishes texts

on non-duality, and is chief editor of InZicht, the

only Dutch-language magazine on non-duality. He

has written several books, including a biography of

Ramana Maharshi, an anthology of Wei Wu Wei and

a collection of fifteen interviews with non-duality

teachers from the USA, the UK and the Netherlands.

Han is married and has two daughters. He is

currently working as a clinical psychologist at a centre

for deafblind people in the Netherlands.

We develop into hollow men very gradually. The

period between complete innocence and the identity

crisis of the adolescent still contains countless moments

of undifferentiated Being. In my case it was the moving

of my family from a big city to the countryside that

threw me back into a new, unknown world waiting to

be discovered, allowing me to experience that phase

of childlike innocence all over again. To compensate

for the abrupt interruption of my regular life and the

loss of all my friends, my parents gave me a bike. It

had neither gears nor brakes. I didn’t know what to

do with it, but in all innocence I just mounted it and

got on my way. I pedalled around all day, from home

to school and from the farm of one friend to that of

the next. My ignorance was no obstacle to me. On the

contrary, it gave me endless pleasure to see, hear and

smell things for the first time: the kale growing by the

side of the road in winter, the dogs guarding the yards of

the farmers around the village, the tractor with which

I was allowed to plough the fields, the dens we boys

dug as deep in the ground as possible. I wanted to see

everything, experience everything, to know everything.

It was a hunger for life that was almost insatiable.

But the more I got to know, the more my original

innocence got lost. I had to search for it later on in my

life in faraway places where everything was new again.

But all the knowledge I had gathered by that time had

started to veil the simple happiness I used to know.

When I travelled to some exotic place, I would move

on after a couple of days, once again looking for this

not-knowing that had become so dear to me, but which

seemed to escape me faster and faster. But sometimes

I suddenly saw things as new and unknown, just as I

had when I was a child. Those moments were rare at

first, but they started to be more spacious as time went

by, until I became that space myself.

~ ~ ~

If the game of life has any purpose, it must be that it

enables us to recover the clarity, simplicity and openmindedness

that seem to be lost, or at least forgotten.

Playing this game enables Consciousness to expand in all

directions and grow clearer, until the point of complete

clarity is reached—the point in which all ego-related

sensations and perceptions dissolve. What remains is

a state in which we’re aware that everything we seem

to do and experience happens without there being

something or someone that does it or experiences it.

In that moment we look straight into the eyes of God.

Consciousness is the theatre in which the game of

life is playing. It creates the possibility of coming to

know itself as the only Self in all that appears, without

panicking or falling into despair when the drama of

life unfolds. For who is experiencing this drama? Does

someone in the audience have any reason to be grieved

when the actor on stage acts as if something terrible has

happened to him? Life is a drama, a play, a dream of

which Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, says to Arjuna:

“In this dream you are allotted a certain role. You need

to play this role without being concerned about the

consequences. The only thing you can do is to play the

role to the best of your abilities.”

The real drama is our ignorance, which makes us

afraid of whatever is happening on stage. Voltaire, the

French writer and philosopher, knew this when he

wrote: “God is a comedian, playing for an audience that’s

too afraid to laugh.” God’s play is being performed in

a place that occupies no space, but contains all space

and all possibilities. From this ‘place’ we’re aware, with

great clarity, of the ways the drama plays itself out.

~ ~ ~

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