Due to our habitual experience of sectioning and parsing the present reality, in order to manipulate it for effects in the daily world of relative needs, we tend to carry this inclination over into what would be our spiritual perspective.

To be specific, this can be noticed in the concern we express regarding the presumed relationship and complicated interworkings of such selective concepts as “mind,” “thought,” “witness” and so on.

To one who perceives in terms of being a (separate) “self,” that self’s mind, thoughts, awareness et al are elements of a fragmented reality which needs to be “harmonized” with effort.

For the one for whom the image of being an isolated, separate entity has dissolved, the problematic ideas of “mind,” “thoughts,” “witnessing,” “awareness” etcetera disappear with it.

The point of the nondual teachings has basically to do with freedom and peace. There will be neither, as long as there is a notion that the present actuality should not be what it is:

• “My mind should not be in this state”
• “It would be better if my thoughts were absent”
•  ”Sometimes I am the Witness, most times I’m not”
•  ”My awareness does not seem to be what my guru says it should be…”

Can you see that such “better/worse” attitudes are dualism personified? The sagacious teachings urge us to transcend such designations, and to recognize that a singular, unbroken actuality is the essence of all that is occurring—good, bad or otherwise.

When you can be present with whatever seems to be appearing as mind, thought, awareness, witness and so forth, without equivocation, that is the freedom and peace that the Rishis‘ are describing. When there are not preferences for some particular state or condition over another, where can consternation arise?

 

During Robert’s travels he has labored as an auto assembly line worker in Detroit, as a carnival worker, a journalist in New York City, on a farm of a Zen community in California, as a landscaper, a financial consultant, a janitor. After living in the Mendocino area for about twenty years he bought a camper van and moved to a property in a redwood forest where he studied the inner life intensely.

Something fell into place there after a number of years, and out of that period of solitude, Robert began writing and sharing his observations on the reality that surrounds and includes us. Shortly afterwards, Robert moved to Ojai, California where he continues to live and write.