I had a visceral, adverse reaction to most of the gurus after my own waking up experience (????) 3 years ago. I slowly found people like you Robert. And Shiv. Thank goodness.
I love Robert and Joan. Once Joan pointed out to Dartyl, I found some so simple and extraordinary. His voice and description of what is, is extraordinary. I loved recent writtings of Shiv too. All in all, i must say Robert is my go to person everyday. He responds to my email and I am very glad I have some one I can trust and askanythingincluding practical challenges. Love you Robert❤️
Robert glad to finally be on your substack. Been a fan of yours and Joan for years. Also most recently Darrel Bailey. You and Joan keep my 75 year old head clear. Thanks a bunch.
I'm definitely not in your 'bracket', though I like many of the things you say. I appreciate your criticism of the more dogmatic and manipulative elements in the "spiritual" field, but I still find too much unsupported assumption in what I'm reading from the three of you, for me - with respect, and of course supporting your right to believe whatever you believe and recognising you simply share your views, you don't demand anyone else agrees.
I too found that when I let go of my over-active control, the sky didn't fall in. As Darryl said, "...making no effort, life expresses itself clearly; it simply happens on its own..."
But then I disagree with the continuation, "There’s nothing else to get. The great truth is obvious." It is perhaps a psychologically important discovery we can make, in a culture that believes we have free will and are thus responsible for everything we do, but there's a lot more to "get," and it's easy to get carried away with experience and its meaning.
Joan says, "This one bottomless moment includes the whole universe, and yet it’s always just this. This cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through. Each moment is absolutely unique and unrepeatable, and yet the whole is fully present at every point. The ocean contains all the waves, and every wave contains the whole ocean. Nothing is really separate from everything else. It all belongs. It can’t be pulled apart."
Well, yes, it can be pulled apart, and this attitude seems to me to be fanciful. Our moments of experience *don't* include the whole universe, and things *are* separate from other things. We know with some confidence that everything was at one time a singularity that inflated into our universe, but that doesn't give me any meaningful connection with Alpha Centauri. I am relatively separate from my environment, despite interacting with it, and there are parts of the universe that are - if Einstein is right - impossible for me to have any interaction with, given the limit of the speed of light in a vacuum. It's a hell of a big universe Joan is invoking as identical with her knee pain, and there are several billion years of it.
If the oneness described here indicates something supposedly grokked in meditation - one of those famous peak experiences, I'm afraid I'm simply sceptical about their reality, and you must admit, presumably, that you can't know them to be accurate representations of reality.
One of the things I'm convinced of more and more is how fallible we are in our judgements, the power of our biases - I include myself in that, of course - but I do have much more confidence in the scientific method and its results. One reason is the enormity of the knowledge it bestows, and how integrated it is, how it just makes so much sense, across disparate disciplines from geology and astrophysics to biology, anthropology and psychology - everything mostly fits together in the most intricate details, and where it doesn't, we repeatedly discover why when we investigate further. It's got a fuzziness about it, but the weird bits from the last century or so haven't really removed the machine-like determinsm of it taken in the round. It is, in a broad sense, in the most colloquial sense, Really Solid, Out There, and Mostly Comprehensible.
And of particular note is how neuroscience is teaching us that our experience isn't what it seems, neither a continuous flow, nor a holistic composite. Our brains are continually parallel processing the most pragmatic elements of data from our senses, and much of that never talks to other bits of it, while some part of it persuades us of a unified flow of consciousness. We are biological machines, telling *them*selves a bunch of fibs all the time.
I see criticism of dualism in your writing, Robert, but I think it's harder - almost impossible - for us to give up our belief in it at an intuitive level. This is my meditation practice now: the old addage of losing the self, for me, is to be this body, sans free will, biological robot, just churning away crunching its causal numbers. It's not as glamorous a thought as living "the great truth" or being One-That-Is-Everything. But it has evidence behind it, and it is curiously liberating. There is also the consolation that our species discovers amazing "facts" and they're available for me to learn. Compared to those, the "controlled hallucination" going on in my mind is mere babble. It's like a politician. I don't believe a word of it.
Right, John. Joan has her point of view, Donald Hoffman has his, and Darryl has his. My Weltanschauung and theirs share some points of agreement, but there are also obvious differences.
I am not familiar with Darryl's view except for the quote Joan gave me and a cursory look at his webpage, after which I lost interest. I am put of by people who claim access to "truth." Once that card is played, I don't need to hear more. For me, epistemological humility is the name of the game.
Those who speak about what the universe is like also go way too far for my taste. As I wrote in The Ten Thousand Things: "Whatever you feel, think, and see is 'you'. There is no choice in the matter - no escaping 'you'. That is what I mean by the word "awakening" - a sudden awareness, quite undeniable, that everything you see, feel, and think is 'you'."
Since most of the universe is inaccessible to me, "I and the universe are identical" is an idea I reject. That frequent claim by so-called nondualists makes no sense to me. As I see this, I am here now and that is my experience, so "I" am identical to present experience, not identical to "God" or "the Absolute," neither of which can be experienced in the way I use that word.
As I have said, I lean toward naturalism, which means the idea that only natural laws and forces operate in the universe and that no supernatural suppositions are needed. That really would be non-dualistic.
Thanks for that. It seems I might have been overestimating the conformity of the 'bracket', or maybe it was that people tended to put you into the same bracket, rather than a bracket you devised or accepted.
But I don't understand you saying, "everything you see, feel, and think is 'you'." This could be an expression of the epistemological gap - that we can't know objects in the world directly, just through our perception. Your supporting statements seem to suggest that, and I would agree. But the way you put it sounds ontological - we *are* whatever we look at.
Perhaps I'm just reading you too literally. But why not be clear? Surely you don't think we ARE what we see? I'd extend that to all other perception - we're not what we feel or think, because we're still here when we're unconscious - for a while, we'll be here even when we're dead. We are human primate animals, as you say, and we have phases when we look and think and feel, and times when we don't. We're still the same beast in either case, just with different electro-chemical exchanges going on in the brain.
It depends on what is meant by the word "you," John. We humans are all primate animals, to be sure. You and I can agree on that. So what distinguishes one "myself" from another? You can say that it is physical differences, but that misses most of it. Most of it is differences in what "I" perceive, feel, and think, right? If you get that, I'll take the next step.
"You can say that it is physical differences, but that misses most of it."
But if you're a non-dualist, what else is there?
This is what I'm trying to draw your attention to, that you have two different definitions of a person, one physical, and another that you keep putting in quotes, "myself" or "I", "you" or "me".
One of those definitions is consistent with physicalism. The other, unless carefully qualified, traditionally points to a self or soul, a mental centre considered the reality of the person (the "most of it" that you say is missing in a physical description).
Obviously different primates will have different experiences, and SOME (most humans) imagine that indicates that they ARE that private experience, indeed that they live inside their heads in non-physical form. The quotes are interesting - suggesting an unreality that you don't use for "human primate", but you're clearly still invoking something non-physical.
Apparently, John, you and I do not concur on what is meant by nondualism. Take a song lyric, for example. Is it physical? No. It is purely information that could be recorded in countless ways: groves and pits in vinyl, ink on paper, a string of zeros and ones in a computer chip, etc. Those substrates that could be used to record the lyrics are physical, to be sure, but the lyrics are not physical. A song is nothing physical. A song is an idea. It is information. If you disagree on this, we have nothing to discuss.
I find it useful to discuss things with people I disagree with! It seems to me you have two substrates in your non-dualism: physical stuff and information. Anyway, it's a good answer, although it seems to be a kind of dualism as far as I can make out. I'd like to understand how those are related, but maybe I'll have to do some homework. Information theory is something I haven't looked into enough, I readily admit, and your answer was a surprise.
Up to this point, I've considered information as an abstraction, i.e. not actually an independent kind of stuff, but a representation in physical stuff (since we can't have information without it being embodied). In this sense, it is exactly like mental contents - indeed, an idea, a song, etc. - when they are embodied in physical conditions in the brain. Songs or ideas don't exist if there is no record, brain, digital computer, etc., hence those informational "things" *reduce* to physics, in one view.
However, this is a leaning on my part (I know nothing) and from a position of great ignorance about information theory. I can get into the head space where the patterns, independent of their embodiment, could be thought of as fundamental types of thing. I read something recently saying that underlying physics, the base substrate is information, so you may be onto something. On the other hand, those writings appeared to suggest the author was a little too pleased with himself - having not only solved the hard problem, but developed a Universal Theory of Knowledge! You're in good company: Sir Roger Penrose believes that "mathematics" (information, I guess?) is a distinct substrate of reality. (I think Penrose is a fantasist, along with Hameroff.)
I wonder, does your view of physical stuff reduce to information, the other way around, or is there some other way I should understand these as parts of a monism? (I'll go away if you think we're done, and bless you for a very interesting ride!)
I'm not wanting to get into an extended discussion here. Unlike Robert, who enjoys these dialogs on Substack and Facebook, I find them draining. I prefer to have conversations of this kind in person (or on Zoom or by phone, but not in back and forth comments where I find it easily becomes very mental and heady and not experientially oriented). I appreciate your concern about fanciful metaphysical certainties, and I endeavor (perhaps not always successfully) to speak and write from direct experience and not from beliefs or second-hand ideas. But let me at least try to clarify what sounded absurd to you.
You mentioned my statement that, "This one bottomless moment includes the whole universe, and yet it’s always just this. This cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through. Each moment is absolutely unique and unrepeatable, and yet the whole is fully present at every point. The ocean contains all the waves, and every wave contains the whole ocean. Nothing is really separate from everything else. It all belongs. It can’t be pulled apart."
I can see how this could be misunderstood and seem to fly in the face of our everyday experience of being able to pull the leg off the chair and separate New York from California and so on. But I'm pointing to the indivisible and holographic nature of reality. I think Thich Nhat Hanh did one of the clearest jobs of elucidating this.
He said that if you look closely, you'll find that the whole universe is in a single sheet of paper. That might sound absurd. But he points out that the paper wouldn't exist without the trees from which it was made and the lumberjack who cut down the trees and the lumberjack's parents and grandparents, and the food they ate, and the grasses that the cows they ate fed on and the rain and the sunshine the grew the grasses and whatever explosion created the sun and so on back to the big bang. In shorter form, he also said, "No mud, no lotus." Or we might look to the ancient metaphor of Indra's Net, in which the universe is described as a net of jewels in which each is only a reflection of all the others.
In other words, you can't have the good without the bad, the light without the dark, up without down, and so on. You can't hurt someone else without hurting yourself. To really see this, is both freeing and life-changing in my experience.
And because there is no actual boundary between the ocean and its waves, each wave is inseparable from the whole ocean--it's one whole movement. This can become very obvious and undeniable.
But to me, what really matters is being awake here and now, i.e. "this cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through." And if the rest seems absurd, I'd say, let it go. Or , if it beckons, keep looking deeply.
Anyway, I don't want to discuss further, but I did want to offer a clarification that might help.
Thanks Joan, for that clarification, and I'm fine leaving it there, except to say that I felt bad criticising your substack, and not even on your substack!
No need to feel bad. I feel we are all in this together, and we grow by being questioned and challenged, which may not always feel good, but speaking for myself, if I notice I'm getting defensive over a criticism, it's a clue that a button is being pushed that might be worth checking out. 😎 Anyway, if you haven't seen it, you might enjoy my most recent Substack post, No Bullshit: https://joantollifson.substack.com/p/no-bullshit 🙏
My experience of being aware of this life, happened through spending a lot of time on my mat, practicing postures and being present with my body. Turns out the body holds wisdom that, for me, arrives as short sentences that pack a punch. If I truly listen to what arises in my psyche, I land up disentangling the confusion I take to the mat and am lighter, free. Also decades of reading exclusively non fiction books.
I’m so grateful for having found Joan Tollifson and yourself. No BS, clear, grounded…open. I share this quote for you…
“Like the lotus flower that is born out of mud, we must honour the darkest parts of ourselves and the most painful of our life’s experiences, because they are what allow us to birth our most beautiful self.”
Darryl Bailey is not on Substack, so he asked me to post this for him. For the record, I am not the friend who brought your post to his attention, someone else did that. Here's Darryl's comment:
Hello Robert,
Some of the people who value my work informed me that you were commenting on it.
After reading what you have written, I would like to clarify a couple of things.
First, you mention that I charge money for personal counseling, which is not true.
Many, many, years ago, I offered the possibility of paid one-to-one sessions, but they were never counseling sessions.
They were simply the opportunity to clarify any aspect of the information in my books, and on my website.
I stopped doing that many years ago.
I will still respond, by email, to the occasional question that people send in, but I don't charge for anything.
Second, the quotation of mine that you used, to summarise my teaching, is not the clearest.
If I might be allowed to offer a summary, I would say the following:
"Everyone’s only experience of existence is the feeling (the sensation) of this moment happening … a mysterious liveliness … a movement ... an unexplainable functioning, with an inherent urge to be what it is, and do what it does, in any moment. In each moment, it is always the only thing it can be and is doing the only thing it can do.”
For well over twenty years, this has been my sense of existence.
I have presented it in many different ways, but this is always the essential presentation.
I don’t usually engage with the broader world these days, but you were very up front when you stated, “I am not familiar with Darryl's view except for the quote Joan gave me and a cursory look at his webpage.” I felt I could offer a slightly clearer sense of my work.
Thank you, Joan. I wrote to Darryl and received a lovely reply from him. Here is my message to him:
Hello, Darryl--
Thank you for your message, which Joan forwarded to me, and for clarifying my misapprehensions.
The part about paid counseling was conveyed to me by one of my readers, and I took it at face value without looking into it. My apologies.
You and I seem to be on the same page regarding this feeling of existing or being this aliveness. I find few people with whom I can agree on that, so it is a pleasure to be in touch.
I love Darryl’s talks on his website. Darryl, Robert, Shiv and Joan have helped to really lighten the burden of seeking for me and I am so grateful. Just this natural, spontaneous flow that I have no control over…it really is so simple. I do still wonder what Darryl meant when he said that brains don’t create thoughts..I’m wondering if he was referring to this life flow/energy as opposed to the thing we labeled “brain?” It’s been fun to ponder. I used to practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and it was so complicated and I always felt like an outsider trying to fit in and it just never worked for me. I’m so grateful for your sharings Robert.
Cherish those who seek the truth.
But be wary of those who find it.....
I had a visceral, adverse reaction to most of the gurus after my own waking up experience (????) 3 years ago. I slowly found people like you Robert. And Shiv. Thank goodness.
I shall check Darryyl out.
https://www.darrylbailey.net
thank you Joan.
Thanks Joan 💚
I love Robert and Joan. Once Joan pointed out to Dartyl, I found some so simple and extraordinary. His voice and description of what is, is extraordinary. I loved recent writtings of Shiv too. All in all, i must say Robert is my go to person everyday. He responds to my email and I am very glad I have some one I can trust and askanythingincluding practical challenges. Love you Robert❤️
Robert glad to finally be on your substack. Been a fan of yours and Joan for years. Also most recently Darrel Bailey. You and Joan keep my 75 year old head clear. Thanks a bunch.
I am happy to welcome you, John.
So you’re not a holy trinity, then 🤣👍🏻
'Fraid not. lol
I'm definitely not in your 'bracket', though I like many of the things you say. I appreciate your criticism of the more dogmatic and manipulative elements in the "spiritual" field, but I still find too much unsupported assumption in what I'm reading from the three of you, for me - with respect, and of course supporting your right to believe whatever you believe and recognising you simply share your views, you don't demand anyone else agrees.
I too found that when I let go of my over-active control, the sky didn't fall in. As Darryl said, "...making no effort, life expresses itself clearly; it simply happens on its own..."
But then I disagree with the continuation, "There’s nothing else to get. The great truth is obvious." It is perhaps a psychologically important discovery we can make, in a culture that believes we have free will and are thus responsible for everything we do, but there's a lot more to "get," and it's easy to get carried away with experience and its meaning.
Joan says, "This one bottomless moment includes the whole universe, and yet it’s always just this. This cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through. Each moment is absolutely unique and unrepeatable, and yet the whole is fully present at every point. The ocean contains all the waves, and every wave contains the whole ocean. Nothing is really separate from everything else. It all belongs. It can’t be pulled apart."
Well, yes, it can be pulled apart, and this attitude seems to me to be fanciful. Our moments of experience *don't* include the whole universe, and things *are* separate from other things. We know with some confidence that everything was at one time a singularity that inflated into our universe, but that doesn't give me any meaningful connection with Alpha Centauri. I am relatively separate from my environment, despite interacting with it, and there are parts of the universe that are - if Einstein is right - impossible for me to have any interaction with, given the limit of the speed of light in a vacuum. It's a hell of a big universe Joan is invoking as identical with her knee pain, and there are several billion years of it.
If the oneness described here indicates something supposedly grokked in meditation - one of those famous peak experiences, I'm afraid I'm simply sceptical about their reality, and you must admit, presumably, that you can't know them to be accurate representations of reality.
One of the things I'm convinced of more and more is how fallible we are in our judgements, the power of our biases - I include myself in that, of course - but I do have much more confidence in the scientific method and its results. One reason is the enormity of the knowledge it bestows, and how integrated it is, how it just makes so much sense, across disparate disciplines from geology and astrophysics to biology, anthropology and psychology - everything mostly fits together in the most intricate details, and where it doesn't, we repeatedly discover why when we investigate further. It's got a fuzziness about it, but the weird bits from the last century or so haven't really removed the machine-like determinsm of it taken in the round. It is, in a broad sense, in the most colloquial sense, Really Solid, Out There, and Mostly Comprehensible.
And of particular note is how neuroscience is teaching us that our experience isn't what it seems, neither a continuous flow, nor a holistic composite. Our brains are continually parallel processing the most pragmatic elements of data from our senses, and much of that never talks to other bits of it, while some part of it persuades us of a unified flow of consciousness. We are biological machines, telling *them*selves a bunch of fibs all the time.
I see criticism of dualism in your writing, Robert, but I think it's harder - almost impossible - for us to give up our belief in it at an intuitive level. This is my meditation practice now: the old addage of losing the self, for me, is to be this body, sans free will, biological robot, just churning away crunching its causal numbers. It's not as glamorous a thought as living "the great truth" or being One-That-Is-Everything. But it has evidence behind it, and it is curiously liberating. There is also the consolation that our species discovers amazing "facts" and they're available for me to learn. Compared to those, the "controlled hallucination" going on in my mind is mere babble. It's like a politician. I don't believe a word of it.
Right, John. Joan has her point of view, Donald Hoffman has his, and Darryl has his. My Weltanschauung and theirs share some points of agreement, but there are also obvious differences.
I am not familiar with Darryl's view except for the quote Joan gave me and a cursory look at his webpage, after which I lost interest. I am put of by people who claim access to "truth." Once that card is played, I don't need to hear more. For me, epistemological humility is the name of the game.
Those who speak about what the universe is like also go way too far for my taste. As I wrote in The Ten Thousand Things: "Whatever you feel, think, and see is 'you'. There is no choice in the matter - no escaping 'you'. That is what I mean by the word "awakening" - a sudden awareness, quite undeniable, that everything you see, feel, and think is 'you'."
Since most of the universe is inaccessible to me, "I and the universe are identical" is an idea I reject. That frequent claim by so-called nondualists makes no sense to me. As I see this, I am here now and that is my experience, so "I" am identical to present experience, not identical to "God" or "the Absolute," neither of which can be experienced in the way I use that word.
As I have said, I lean toward naturalism, which means the idea that only natural laws and forces operate in the universe and that no supernatural suppositions are needed. That really would be non-dualistic.
Thanks for that. It seems I might have been overestimating the conformity of the 'bracket', or maybe it was that people tended to put you into the same bracket, rather than a bracket you devised or accepted.
But I don't understand you saying, "everything you see, feel, and think is 'you'." This could be an expression of the epistemological gap - that we can't know objects in the world directly, just through our perception. Your supporting statements seem to suggest that, and I would agree. But the way you put it sounds ontological - we *are* whatever we look at.
Perhaps I'm just reading you too literally. But why not be clear? Surely you don't think we ARE what we see? I'd extend that to all other perception - we're not what we feel or think, because we're still here when we're unconscious - for a while, we'll be here even when we're dead. We are human primate animals, as you say, and we have phases when we look and think and feel, and times when we don't. We're still the same beast in either case, just with different electro-chemical exchanges going on in the brain.
It depends on what is meant by the word "you," John. We humans are all primate animals, to be sure. You and I can agree on that. So what distinguishes one "myself" from another? You can say that it is physical differences, but that misses most of it. Most of it is differences in what "I" perceive, feel, and think, right? If you get that, I'll take the next step.
"You can say that it is physical differences, but that misses most of it."
But if you're a non-dualist, what else is there?
This is what I'm trying to draw your attention to, that you have two different definitions of a person, one physical, and another that you keep putting in quotes, "myself" or "I", "you" or "me".
One of those definitions is consistent with physicalism. The other, unless carefully qualified, traditionally points to a self or soul, a mental centre considered the reality of the person (the "most of it" that you say is missing in a physical description).
Obviously different primates will have different experiences, and SOME (most humans) imagine that indicates that they ARE that private experience, indeed that they live inside their heads in non-physical form. The quotes are interesting - suggesting an unreality that you don't use for "human primate", but you're clearly still invoking something non-physical.
Apparently, John, you and I do not concur on what is meant by nondualism. Take a song lyric, for example. Is it physical? No. It is purely information that could be recorded in countless ways: groves and pits in vinyl, ink on paper, a string of zeros and ones in a computer chip, etc. Those substrates that could be used to record the lyrics are physical, to be sure, but the lyrics are not physical. A song is nothing physical. A song is an idea. It is information. If you disagree on this, we have nothing to discuss.
I find it useful to discuss things with people I disagree with! It seems to me you have two substrates in your non-dualism: physical stuff and information. Anyway, it's a good answer, although it seems to be a kind of dualism as far as I can make out. I'd like to understand how those are related, but maybe I'll have to do some homework. Information theory is something I haven't looked into enough, I readily admit, and your answer was a surprise.
Up to this point, I've considered information as an abstraction, i.e. not actually an independent kind of stuff, but a representation in physical stuff (since we can't have information without it being embodied). In this sense, it is exactly like mental contents - indeed, an idea, a song, etc. - when they are embodied in physical conditions in the brain. Songs or ideas don't exist if there is no record, brain, digital computer, etc., hence those informational "things" *reduce* to physics, in one view.
However, this is a leaning on my part (I know nothing) and from a position of great ignorance about information theory. I can get into the head space where the patterns, independent of their embodiment, could be thought of as fundamental types of thing. I read something recently saying that underlying physics, the base substrate is information, so you may be onto something. On the other hand, those writings appeared to suggest the author was a little too pleased with himself - having not only solved the hard problem, but developed a Universal Theory of Knowledge! You're in good company: Sir Roger Penrose believes that "mathematics" (information, I guess?) is a distinct substrate of reality. (I think Penrose is a fantasist, along with Hameroff.)
I wonder, does your view of physical stuff reduce to information, the other way around, or is there some other way I should understand these as parts of a monism? (I'll go away if you think we're done, and bless you for a very interesting ride!)
Hi John,
I'm not wanting to get into an extended discussion here. Unlike Robert, who enjoys these dialogs on Substack and Facebook, I find them draining. I prefer to have conversations of this kind in person (or on Zoom or by phone, but not in back and forth comments where I find it easily becomes very mental and heady and not experientially oriented). I appreciate your concern about fanciful metaphysical certainties, and I endeavor (perhaps not always successfully) to speak and write from direct experience and not from beliefs or second-hand ideas. But let me at least try to clarify what sounded absurd to you.
You mentioned my statement that, "This one bottomless moment includes the whole universe, and yet it’s always just this. This cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through. Each moment is absolutely unique and unrepeatable, and yet the whole is fully present at every point. The ocean contains all the waves, and every wave contains the whole ocean. Nothing is really separate from everything else. It all belongs. It can’t be pulled apart."
I can see how this could be misunderstood and seem to fly in the face of our everyday experience of being able to pull the leg off the chair and separate New York from California and so on. But I'm pointing to the indivisible and holographic nature of reality. I think Thich Nhat Hanh did one of the clearest jobs of elucidating this.
He said that if you look closely, you'll find that the whole universe is in a single sheet of paper. That might sound absurd. But he points out that the paper wouldn't exist without the trees from which it was made and the lumberjack who cut down the trees and the lumberjack's parents and grandparents, and the food they ate, and the grasses that the cows they ate fed on and the rain and the sunshine the grew the grasses and whatever explosion created the sun and so on back to the big bang. In shorter form, he also said, "No mud, no lotus." Or we might look to the ancient metaphor of Indra's Net, in which the universe is described as a net of jewels in which each is only a reflection of all the others.
In other words, you can't have the good without the bad, the light without the dark, up without down, and so on. You can't hurt someone else without hurting yourself. To really see this, is both freeing and life-changing in my experience.
And because there is no actual boundary between the ocean and its waves, each wave is inseparable from the whole ocean--it's one whole movement. This can become very obvious and undeniable.
But to me, what really matters is being awake here and now, i.e. "this cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through." And if the rest seems absurd, I'd say, let it go. Or , if it beckons, keep looking deeply.
Anyway, I don't want to discuss further, but I did want to offer a clarification that might help.
Thanks Joan, for that clarification, and I'm fine leaving it there, except to say that I felt bad criticising your substack, and not even on your substack!
No need to feel bad. I feel we are all in this together, and we grow by being questioned and challenged, which may not always feel good, but speaking for myself, if I notice I'm getting defensive over a criticism, it's a clue that a button is being pushed that might be worth checking out. 😎 Anyway, if you haven't seen it, you might enjoy my most recent Substack post, No Bullshit: https://joantollifson.substack.com/p/no-bullshit 🙏
Thanks Robert.
My experience of being aware of this life, happened through spending a lot of time on my mat, practicing postures and being present with my body. Turns out the body holds wisdom that, for me, arrives as short sentences that pack a punch. If I truly listen to what arises in my psyche, I land up disentangling the confusion I take to the mat and am lighter, free. Also decades of reading exclusively non fiction books.
I’m so grateful for having found Joan Tollifson and yourself. No BS, clear, grounded…open. I share this quote for you…
“Like the lotus flower that is born out of mud, we must honour the darkest parts of ourselves and the most painful of our life’s experiences, because they are what allow us to birth our most beautiful self.”
Debbie Ford
Darryl Bailey is not on Substack, so he asked me to post this for him. For the record, I am not the friend who brought your post to his attention, someone else did that. Here's Darryl's comment:
Hello Robert,
Some of the people who value my work informed me that you were commenting on it.
After reading what you have written, I would like to clarify a couple of things.
First, you mention that I charge money for personal counseling, which is not true.
Many, many, years ago, I offered the possibility of paid one-to-one sessions, but they were never counseling sessions.
They were simply the opportunity to clarify any aspect of the information in my books, and on my website.
I stopped doing that many years ago.
I will still respond, by email, to the occasional question that people send in, but I don't charge for anything.
Second, the quotation of mine that you used, to summarise my teaching, is not the clearest.
If I might be allowed to offer a summary, I would say the following:
"Everyone’s only experience of existence is the feeling (the sensation) of this moment happening … a mysterious liveliness … a movement ... an unexplainable functioning, with an inherent urge to be what it is, and do what it does, in any moment. In each moment, it is always the only thing it can be and is doing the only thing it can do.”
For well over twenty years, this has been my sense of existence.
I have presented it in many different ways, but this is always the essential presentation.
I don’t usually engage with the broader world these days, but you were very up front when you stated, “I am not familiar with Darryl's view except for the quote Joan gave me and a cursory look at his webpage.” I felt I could offer a slightly clearer sense of my work.
All the best, Darryl
Thank you, Joan. I wrote to Darryl and received a lovely reply from him. Here is my message to him:
Hello, Darryl--
Thank you for your message, which Joan forwarded to me, and for clarifying my misapprehensions.
The part about paid counseling was conveyed to me by one of my readers, and I took it at face value without looking into it. My apologies.
You and I seem to be on the same page regarding this feeling of existing or being this aliveness. I find few people with whom I can agree on that, so it is a pleasure to be in touch.
Be well,
Robert
I love Darryl’s talks on his website. Darryl, Robert, Shiv and Joan have helped to really lighten the burden of seeking for me and I am so grateful. Just this natural, spontaneous flow that I have no control over…it really is so simple. I do still wonder what Darryl meant when he said that brains don’t create thoughts..I’m wondering if he was referring to this life flow/energy as opposed to the thing we labeled “brain?” It’s been fun to ponder. I used to practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and it was so complicated and I always felt like an outsider trying to fit in and it just never worked for me. I’m so grateful for your sharings Robert.