Clear Light of Knowing: Meditation Love Non-Duality

By Gus Rhodes

A unique book. Poetic and considered. It caresses you to taste the awareness it describes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9780993883002

Book preview

Me

Introduction

I’ve heard it said that there is a saying within the Sufi tradition that the spiritual path is for gamblers and lovers, because no one else is willing to stake everything upon a crazy intuition. To reach mastery we must burn with love for what we do. Each of us have a place in our heart that hope and fear is unable to reach. It is a place of pure instinctual knowing. This temple of the heart houses our innermost passion. When we listen into the depths of our deepest yearning, intuition whispers to us from this language of love.

Often it is the perimeter of our own thoughts that keep us imprisoned. There is an invisible fence that each mind creates. Meditation is essentially a tool that can enable us to break through such limitations.

I was twenty-two the first time the veil dropped. It happened as I strolled along a country lane, midway between Tralee and Dingle, on the West Coast of Ireland. I was about to head back to Dublin, but I wanted to see down across the valley floor again, to the far side, where the mountains cut straight up into the heavy cloud. High hedgerows were blocking the view, so I casually walked on down towards to a clearing. As I turned from the road to open a gate, it was as if I turned into an experience of another world. A wave seemed to pass right through me. It was like I was instantly flooded with infinite space. The boundaries that held everything I thought of as myself were completely washed away. In that moment Gus effortlessly vanished. Like an echo he just faded into a raging stillness. The silence roared like thunder. Love exploded. An inferno of love, creating everything, and consuming everything as well. The intensity of presence surged in oceanic swells of bliss. Erupting with light, love bubbled and bloomed, producing the fundamental elements of life. Consciousness hurtled infinitely in every direction, but simultaneously remained exact and categorically still. A complete and absolute knowing experienced everything. Sheer intelligence shimmered in the brilliant radiance of eternity. And although the details blazed in astounding vibrancy, the way in which it was all being experienced was by far the most majestic thing. There is no way to convey the experience. It is not possible to describe the absence of a personal self, which is a revealing of infinite subjectivity, that at the same time is like pure objectivity, but which has no separation between you as the experience, and you as the witnessing. It is more intimate than can possibly be imagined. It is like nothing you have ever known. And yet it is the quintessential home coming. It makes life make sense. It answers every question without uttering a single word.

I’m not sure how long I stood there, feet in County Kerry, mind broken wide open, existing everywhere. But what happened next ignited my passion for spiritual inquiry. In the midst of all the magnificence I heard a distant thought. It grew stronger and began to reverberate. I could see it was like a kick start to Gus reappearing. Immediately I could sense the dichotomy re-emerging. My sense of self began to identify itself as separate from the glory and the grandeur. Then like the volume being gradually turned up, my individuality smoothly fazed back into dominance. It smothered itself entirely over The Unity, until it was all that I could perceive. And there I was again, standing at the gate, looking across the landscape. What was immediately clear was that the majesty hadn’t simply stopped or gone away. I saw with certainty how my mind had created a veil. Beyond this curtain of relativity, I had been the wellspring of life, which was continually outpouring in wonder and beauty.

Over the years since this first revelation a variety of similar exposures have unfolded. Some have appeared spontaneously, seemingly without cause. Others have revealed themselves through the purpose and discipline of meditation. There have been themes that have always remained present. Relaxed clarity. Devotion to an inner knowing of inevitability. The slide from deliberate effort into natural effortlessness. The gut level conviction that I am that which I seek to be. In essence, this little book on meditation is a play on these subjects.

At its core, meditation strips us clean, and exposes the threshold