On the Road to Enlightened Duality: Reflections on Impermanence, Beauty, and the Path of Transformation

By M. Young

While traveling the road on pilgrimage, or following American Baul Master, Khepa Lee Lozowick (1943-2010), in his daunting travel schedule, author Mary Angelon Young crafted a collection of essays that explore and evoke the many moods of “Enlightened Duality,” one of Lozowick’s core teachings in the path of Western Bauls. This dynamic spiritual principle suggests that the spiritual seeker can combine an integrated awareness of the nondual (“all is One”) with a lively, conscious relationship to the duality or play of opposites that is the constant fare of everyday life. Unlike those strictly nondual perspectives that relegate the human experience to an illusion of the mind, Lozowick asserted that, while nondual unity is the foundation of what is, simultaneously, life is real. These original essays cover such universal themes as Impermanence, Beauty and Transformation, and comprise one wayfarer’s reflections, reveries and research. Some are flavored with academic spice, but most are predominantly experiential, presenting a kaleidoscopic journey that unfolds much like a large, multifaceted jewel looked at from many different directions. Each essay has its own integrity and stands on its own authority. Yet, taken as a whole, they form a useful map of the tantric path, charting its depths through daily events, travel, relationships, creativity and work?all continuous, integrated aspects of the transformational path. The teaching of enlightened duality can be found in many guises within the world’s great traditions, including Sufi, Vajrayana Buddhist, and both bhakti and tantric Hindu paths. It is a universal theme, and yet the treatment here runs true to the theistic underpinnings of the lineage from which it comes: Khepa Lee Lozowick, Sri Yogi Ramsuratkumar and Swami Ramdas. From this view, the highest aim of spiritual practice is to integrate mystical experience and insights of nonduality into ordinary life. This book provides a genuine feast of practical wisdom for the hungry seeker who yearns for a path through life that is both transformational and yet honoring of the innate dignity and potential of the human incarnation. The author has travelled extensively in India and Europe; has studied the Sanskrit, Hindu and Buddhist traditions; and has written published an extensive treatise on the Baul Path, The Baul Tradition. (Hohm Press, 2014)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hohm Press
• Release date: Jun 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781942493150

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moment.

INTRODUCTION

This book began in the fall of 2007 when my teacherLee Lozowick asked me to write a book about his teachings on enlightened duality as an essential dimension of tantric practice. He asked me to come up with an idea for how these teachings would be presented and write the book as the sole author. Although I was a seasoned author who had written several books and many articles and essays at Lee’s request over the years, I strongly resisted this idea, saying, It’s too big a subjectfor me alone—your teachings should be part of it.

His response was staunch. "You write it, he insisted, it should be in your words, not mine." It was only with a great deal of insistence and, in fact, truculence on my part and disgruntledchagrin on his part that he finally agreed to my design—to present his words juxtaposed as essays with mine.

That being established, how would I proceed? Enlightened duality is a field of contemplation and experience as vast as the night sky! In this teaching, Lee asserts that the distinctions we experience as the world—Great Nature, Shakti, or Prakriti—are Real and must be honored and even worshipped. The paradox (if there is one) is that the world is real when we perceive it as a manifestation of the underlying substratum of unity or nonduality. From this nondual view of enlightened duality, the highest aim of spiritual practice may be to discover the continuity of the Path in every aspect of ordinary daily life—and that is where I began to write.

Since the early 1990s I had traveled extensively with my teacher each year. By 2007 I had already published many of these experiences in books like As It Is—A Year on the Road with a Tantric Teacher and Caught in the Beloved’s Petticoats. Looking at the year ahead, I knew we would be making journeys to India and to various places in the States as well as traveling throughout the summer in Europe, and so I decided that the best way to write about enlightened duality was in the midst of it. I spent the next year writing my reflections on the road with Lee; it was a creative, juicy project and I must say that I loved every minute of it.

And so the essays found in this book were originally published in the early winter of 2009 as Enlightened Duality—Essays on Art, Beauty, Life, and Reality As It Is, which presented the teachings of Lee, as an American Baul, in a way that was uniquely different from other books written by him or by others about his teachings. In its pages the reader had the opportunity to glean from the sagesse of the teacher and experience of the student—myself. Spoken discourses of my teacher from various periods of time over the years were transcribed, excerpted, and edited by his co-author into essays that made his unique style of provocation, sassy rejoinders and enigmatic rambling or storytelling easily accessible by the reader.

When the book was published, it was enthusiastically welcomedin the hands of readers who responded with praise, which washed in like the tide to capture my teacher’s attention. Finally, one day in the summer of 2009, when Lee was holding a copy of the book in his hand (to sign it for a student who was eager to have his dedication inside the cover), he looked at me and said brightly, as if amazed by such an ironic and wonderful turn of events, "You know, this book is going to end up being everybody’s favorite book of yours! People love this book!"

Relief! Finally I felt rather vindicated, freed from those twinges of conscience. Putting aside theconcerns of ego, I knew in the moment that he was givinghis blessing—he and I were at peace about the project.Just as he used to quote Verlaine in moments when things had gone awry then settled themselves nicely in the end, I thought, All’s well that ends well…. (In this, the best of all possible worlds.)

Changing Times—Some Reflections on Technology

Since my teacher’s death in 2010, many people have enjoyed and benefitted from reading or hearing Lee’s teachings in those pages because they offer a glimpse into the awesome potential that exists within our lives: to live from our true nature, and from that foundation, rooted in an awareness of the unity, the oneness, the interwoven fabric of life, to court a conscious relationship with the Immanent Divine as He/She/It manifests in the play of opposites—that is, the dualistic phenomenal world in which we find ourselves.

At the same time, many people were moved and found help in the essays written from the student’s perspective. After Lee’s death, people began to ask for access to this book and other books I have written about Lee and his teaching, particularly in ebook format. This controversial idea reverberated with some charged debate, because Lee frequently expressed avehement dislike of the Internet, which he considered to be literally stealing the soul from this world. He did not put his books on the Internet, and he never used the Internet himself. (His views in this regard are well represented in the pages of this book.)

I wrestled with a decision on this issue for years. How to carry on my teacher’s legacy? And specifically how to make his teachings more accessible to people without compromising, selling out, or watering it down? Finally a solution dawned when a close friend suggested thatI could make my own words (not Lee’s) available as an ebook by extracting and publishing them, with some revisions and several new essays added in. Pondering this idea, the ironies around this book took on another dimension—finally I would be publishinga book on enlightened duality that was written solely by me from the student’s perspective.

The decision being made, I must add a caveat. While this is my first (but not last) ebook. I approach any use of the Internet with caution and a good deal of discipline precisely because I know the truth of my teacher’s perspective on postmodern technology and the way it is consuming our world, our minds, and our lives. An insidious, dangerous complexity has taken over our world. If humanity is going to survive on this planet, sooner or later we must turn toward the simplicity and wisdom of a more natural way of life. The only lasting solution is to rediscover and return to our true nature, a process that is aided greatly by immersion in the dharma—the wisdom of the ages found in all the great spiritual traditions.

And yet, these same traditions have also suffered under the yoke of scientific materialism and globalization, falling prey to the marketing mentality that profits from passing fads in ways that are fantasmagoric. Sacred mantras, yoga and meditation techniques are sold like cheap wine and fast food on the Internet, while false teachers and teachings proliferate along with the fear of cults, which taints the public mind against spirituality and spiritual authorities in general.Because of these many factors, many teachers and practitioners are concerned with the purity and preservation of pristine teachings; some, like Lee Lozowick, are speaking out in an attempt to educate seekers in the importance of making distinctions as to what is true and what is hype on the spiritual path.

As a field of human endeavor, spirituality is not separate from secular life and can be easily degraded by aggression, ignorance, and narcissism, sometimes obviously and sometimes in ways that are subtle but devastating to an authentic life. Have I betrayed the ancient way of truth by publishing an ebook? This is a question with no answer. I am moved by the integrity of those teachers who, representing their traditions, carefully discriminate to interact with the Internet in order to make teachings available out of compassion and accepting what is, not yearning idealistically after what should be.

One of the most insidious effects of the takeover by technology is that machines separate human beings from the natural world. The reverberations resulting from our ubiquitous alienation from Mother Nature are profound: while we wait breathlessly for an ecological disaster that looms over us like an apocalyptic shadow, the assault on nature by science and technology—ruthlessly wielded worldwide by corporations and governments devoid of conscience—continues unabated. Masses of people are spellbound by glamorous appearances and cheap eroticism, which proliferates on the Internet in virulent forms. We relentlessly pursue anything that glitters to distract us from the deeper mysteries of the self, holding out the false hope that we might escape death and avoid a taste of the Unknown at any cost.

We have lost sight of the Sacred, largely through a repression of the feminine dimensions of life. We do not live by what we know to be true: that we are interdependent, interconnected creatures of Mother Nature, and that our essential nature is good, auspicious, and primordially pure. The vital necessity to return to simplicity and a natural, friendly relationship with life, and the necessity for contemporary spirituality to turn back toward Nature and the Divine Feminine—the Mother Goddess, in whatever way we might seek, experience, or worship Her—are recurring themes of this book.

With these concerns in mind, I have come to believe that, as individuals, we can interact with the internet—benefit from dharma teachings and literature found there—in a way that is healthy, balanced, and wise. If we maintain clarity and purpose, the judicious use of the internet can be an aspect of simplicity in our lives. Toward that possibility, this little book has come into existence in the cloud zone of virtual reality.

Practical Things to Know About This Book

From the beginning of this project it was clear that mere wordsmithing or academic wrangling would fall far short of my purpose—to communicate the teaching through anevocation that is true to the bone and resonates within the reader. The written word can only ring true if the writer’s life is true, and soI was compelled to turn to my direct experience in life to find doorways and portals into the living experience of enlightened duality—or my inability to relax into it, which is also of value to the practitioner when it is seen clearly. Traveling the road on pilgrimage or following my teacher in his daunting travel schedule—and indeed, I was on the road when most of the following essays were written, at least in first draft—I explored the terrain in a radically nonlinear fashion. The result is a (sometimes) cryptic map thatmeanders through daily events, travel, relationships, creativity and work in a natural way that, I hope, reveals the continuity of the transformational Pathwithin daily life.

These essays were written over a period of eight years (2007-2015), spanning the last years of my teacher’s life and the years immediately after hispassing. Most were published in the original book, Enlightened Duality; these have been edited and revised for this book. However, I have often left the present tense intact as a literary device, even though in many cases the present moment occurred years ago and things have changed. For example, writing in 2007 or 2008, I speak of Lee as a living person; for the most part I have left the essays in this mode to reflect the mood of a student’s interaction with a teacher who is present in the physical form. This book also includes four new essays that were written during the past two years, after Lee’s passing, and reflect some of my process of working with that transition as a student of the Path. For the sake of clarity, I have included the dates when essays were written.

The abundance of Sanskrit terms in this book reflects my love affair with this sacred language, which communicates spiritual principles in ways that English cannot. For ease in reading, and in the spirit of this endeavor, I have not used the appropriate diacritical marks, which can be found in more scholarly treatises. Sanskrit terms are in italics the first time they appear within each essay; after that they will not be italicized. Many Sanskrit words have found their way into common English language usage, such as guru, ashram, pranayama, yoga, karma and many others. Because these are in any standard English dictionary, these Sanskrit words will not appear in italics. A glossary of terms, both Sanskrit and English, is provided at the end of the book for ease in understanding and digestion.

In general, some terms—for example, the Path—are capitalized in certain instances for emphasis or to deepen my meaning in their usage, while in other circumstances the same term may not be capitalized. It is my intention for the context of the sentence and paragraph in which the word appears capitalized to make its meaning clear.

There is a great deal of practical wisdom to be found in the teaching of enlightened duality for those who yearn for the Sacred—who seeka path through life that is transforming and yet honors the innate dignity and potential of the human incarnation. Toward that aim, the reflections in this book unfold in many directions and moods that reveal the intention of the message as a whole; at the same time, each essay has its own integrity and stands on its own authority. It is very much like taking a large, multifaceted jewel and looking at it from many different directions: each facet reflects its own specific hue, brilliance, clarity or opaque quality. And so, here is theoffering of one wayfarer’s reflections, reveries and research, some academe but mostly experiential, conducted in the field of an emerging enlightened duality that appears and then disappearsin the ongoing impermanence of all things. It is my sincere prayer that this book will bring its readers enjoyment, insight, useful inspiration, sanctuary in the storm, and maybe even some humorous moments, to enhance and nourish your practice and your path. May you take courage from knowing that others walk beside you.

Mary Angelon Young

Triveni Ashram

Arizona, April 10, 2016

1.

Glimpses of Enlightened Duality

Enlightened duality is a teaching that has guided me in profound ways. It provides the practical means and wisdom to navigate through daily life with gratitude and innate regard for the sacred nature of the world. Years ago I asked my teacher to explain enlightened duality. He answered, "Enlightened duality is the Reality of existence; we can rest in it as a perception. He went on to say, Enlightened duality is Reality as it is." It’s a way of seeing everything that arises as potently real and sacred even while one understands the nondual unity underlying all forms. It’s the perception of reality that is tacit to our true nature.

An active participation in life from the perspective of a conscious, intentional, and even awakened state of being—which is our true nature—is not the conventional view or purpose held by the majority of people in the world. In fact, this option does not exist in the indoctrination we receive from church, family, state, school. How do we cultivate such a state of being? All the great traditions tell us that the spiritual path, which in the Indian tradition is called sadhana, or spiritual life, is the way to reconnect with our true nature—the truth of an already present enlightenment that is the foundation of being.

Traveling the spiritual path is an ongoing gesture of gratitude for the gift of life, in which we are getting to know ourselves at the root of our experience in a way that is transforming, all-inclusive and non-rejecting. We discover that we are both good and bad, beautiful and ugly, strong and weak, clear and confused. We have moments of insight and clarity as well as moments of confusion, disillusionment, and bewilderment. In sadhana, we come to an intimate knowledge of it all through a process that makes both bright and dark conscious and refines our deepest wish to serve the universal process of divine evolution.

Sadhana is a way of life; to engage sadhana is continuous with every aspect of our lives; it is more all-pervasive than the specific spiritual practices or disciplines that we may choose to engage—meditation, pranayama, seva (service), bhakti (devotion), worship or prayer. Sadhana takes many forms and is ultimately formless because it is a matter of the context from which we live. The more awareness we have accumulated through sadhana, the more we come to live in the dignity and nobility that is actually who we are in essence, at the bottom of things. Because we have begun to fuse our disparate parts into a greater internal unity, we begin to establish a foundation from which acceptance, trust, compassion and service may arise. From this inner unity, we can trust our own basic goodness arising as wise instincts and impulses. This wisdom is the natural function of the innate self, atma, or, as the Bauls might say, sahaja; it is the formative stage of a wise sage who will come to flower in the ripening and fruition of our spiritual practice.

Again and again we must turn toward the teachings and the good company of the wise. When we encounter a living path and lineage, we may feel a resonance in the cells of the body. A living truth is revealing, healing, deeply satisfying, sometimes provoking or profoundly unsettling. It may shake the ground beneath our feet, in fact, and yet the nature of Reality is ultimately benign and graceful. The masters who have gone before us embody the spiritual path, the encounter with which catalyzes a process of healing and harmonizing, of bringing back together that which has been torn apart, rended by trauma, separated by ideology and the mind/body split of our culture. Spiritual healing through reconnection to sahaja, our true nature, and the reunion of body and mind with spirit or soul, is basically what the path is about.

Nonduality & Duality

Perhaps most unsatisfying in the contemporary scene are the popular, fast-spreading teachings of nondualism—referred to in this book as neo-advaita, in order to make an important distinction between these teachings and the respected, time-honored teachings of classical Advaita Vedanta. Teachers who advocate nondual philosophy too often hold out false promises of a fast and easy enlightenment—and therefore a certain relief from suffering—but at the same time leave us adrift in the tumultuous ocean of the world without a life raft, without skillful means (to use a Buddhist term), without conscience, and without the unerring instinctual wisdom of the heart.

The failure of neo-advaita and other contemporary teachings not rooted in ancient wisdom is perhaps most poignant in the world of human relationship. For many people, intimate and familial relationships reflect the state of the world: highly unstable, with little or no foundation of a deeper context that engenders trust, commitment, or the nobility of sacrifice for the other. Postmodern relationships are riddled with the illusion of separation, the desire for power, manipulation and domination. To overlay a strict teaching of nonduality on the troubled lives of our contemporary times without offering practical help for navigating the dualistic world of daily life is a certain suicide of the soul.

I find the traditional teachings of nonduality and duality much more satisfying and ultimately useful; both ancient and timeless, they transcend culture and place. The context of nonduality and enlightened duality is found in the teachings of countless realizers and expounders of dharma such as Ramakrishna, Vallabhacharya, Chaitanya and the great bhakti and tantric traditions. Descriptions of enlightened duality can be discovered in ancient scriptures, in prose elucidations of dharma, and especially in poetry. Dimensions of enlightened duality are particularly well covered in tantric Hindu, Vajrayana Buddhist, and Sufi literature.

My khepa (as I will refer to my guru, Lee) often used the language and terms of Vajrayana Buddhist dharma teachings in his presentations, because of his great love of Buddhism, which has an elegance and straightforward simplicity. For example, there is a kinship between the Buddhist Heart Sutra—form is emptiness; emptiness is form—and Lee’s teaching of enlightened duality, which is nondual at its core. The difference is that enlightened duality goes beyond the Heart Sutra, into the unabashed theism that is true of my lineage gurus—Khepa Lee, Yogi Ramsuratkumar, and Swami Ramdas—and the Baul tradition, which is the path I have walked for almost thirty years.

It is this warm, dulcet tone of loving God that is the crucial difference between dzogchen or mahamudra, which is at the heart of Vajrayana tantric practice, and the Baul Path, with its twilight language of the unknown bird and man of the heart. Baul teachings as a whole transmit a particular tastiness—a certain sweet rasa that can be savored. It is this bhakti (devotional) flavor that is found among the Bauls of both East and West—a passionate certainty of relationship with the living Lord, the personal Beloved. Because of this, Grace finds a natural home throughout these pages, sounding a clear note that clearly reflects the living embodiment of my mahaguru, Yogi Ramsuratkumar.

Amongst many of the great nondual expounders of India, there is a continuity of realization from nondual to dual. In the Hindu classic, Tripura Rahasya: The Secret of the Supreme Goddess, the fierce, nondual, ascetic yogin Dattatreya speaks to his friend Parasurama, making the following declarationof Grace and the importance of worshipping the Supreme Goddess, Tripura Sundari:

Listen! Rama, I am now telling you the secret of accomplishment. Of all the requisites for wisdom, Divine Grace is the most important. He who has entirely surrendered himself to the Goddess is sure to gain wisdom readily. Rama! This is the best of all the methods.¹

Dattatreya goes on to tell Parasurama, Therefore bhakti yoga is the best of all and excels all else. He explains further that jnana practitioners—those who seek liberation through knowledge alone—find themselves in the state of perfection of sahaj samadhi only when they are calm or composed in their investigation into the nature of Reality. At other times, they are subject to interludes of imperfection, even though they also experience interludes of wholeness.²

We Are a Work in Progress

Anyone who practices honestly on the spiritual path knows very well what is meant by interludes of imperfection that can be particularly troubling, especially after an experience of enlightenment, a radical insight, or a profound inner resting in Reality as it is. When focused attention and conscience are brought to this friction of opposites within, it is called sadhana, or, as my khepa often said, the Work, borrowing a term from the Russian mystic, G.I. Gurdjieff. In sadhana, the tension between experiences of clarity and illusion, light and dark, sometimes becomes so extreme that the inner war must be directly addressed and confronted if we are to progress in any satisfactory way on the path.

In fact, war is everywhere we look. Our whole planet is at war, from the U.S. and Iraq to Africa, Burma, Tibet and China, to the war against nature waged by the technocrats who rule. If we are honest, we know there is a war going on within ourselves. Our inner state is a mirror of the outer world: the yes versus the no of confusion, doubt, and gnawing insecurity; the growing dread in the world around us; the vacillation we experience daily over whether or not to sacrifice personal comforts and ideas of a private happiness for the good of another. We are at war within and we are also at war with those around us: we fight, argue, and compete for dominance and control. We are often irritated or at odds with those who directly oppose us or who have gotten under our skin, even when—in the face of global suffering—our petty struggles are glaringly revealed as paltry, selfish obsessions.

Life is so distracting and seductive that we forget who we are on a moment-to-moment basis. As Dattatreya explains, Pure Intelligence illumining has cast a veil of ignorance of Her own over all. Her true nature is evident only after removing this veil by discrimination.³ One moment we are alert, present, compassionate and in relationship with others and our environment, then—despite our most profound insights into the oneness of Life—the very next moment some random catalyst may cast us head long into greed, lust, anger, jealous rage or resentment. One moment there is harmony and a sense of rightness from the ground to the sky, a gentle relaxation of the primal knots within, and the next moment the basic psychological disease of our times has taken over and we are lost in the illusion of separation, armed to the teeth and defended against Reality as it is.

All this is the grit and ground of the path we walk. All of it is useful for the alchemy of transformation. The key is to embrace, accept, and bring awareness to everything we experience. Moments of real insight arrive when we least expect them, but they are easy to miss because psychological defense mechanisms buffer us from the experience of Reality. Those mechanisms have many different forms and manifestations; for example, just as we can have denial about inner darkness, we can also have denial about inner light—and both must be made conscious. When we begin to take responsibility for the totality of who we are, both bright and dark, then it becomes a lot less likely that we will make decisions based on childish reactions driven by our basic psychological strategy.

Just This: The Assertion of What Is

It is possible to taste, feel, know and directly experience the truth of enlightened duality. It is an experience that is known with the intelligence of the heart, which informs the entire body and is not limited to the physical heart itself. It is possible and even likely that we are often having experiences of this awakened state, but we are not noticing it. We are too distracted, seduced, and fascinated with arising phenomena to notice our underlying state of being. The primary aim of spiritual practice is to come to abide or inhere consciously in this state of Realness.

In sadhana, there are moments all along the way that offer a glimpse of this Realness. These moments are extraordinarily delicious to the soul; they are nurturance of a very profound kind. We can profit greatly on the Path if we become aware of these moments when egoic concerns of survival, control, power, and dominance are swept away—melted into the shadows as if they never existed at all. We are delivered of our ordinary burdens in a moment in which we are free from the usual constraints of our personalities and neuroses, in which we are resting in the disposition of enlightenment. In such a moment, we can genuinely say, This is Real, about whatever experience of life is occurring in the moment.

There is a naked experience of whatever is arising, which may be full of feeling, from joy to sorrow, or completely empty, void-like, and yet ecstatic—as the Buddhists say, emptiness and bliss. When these states arise, it is a moment of Just This—a term that describes reality as it is. My khepa instructed his students that one may enter into the perception of enlightened duality by means of spiritual practices that, when engaged over time, move one into an awareness of the world in which the constant play of opposites are objectified.

The term Just This, which Lee used as a catalyst for the state of being he called Assertion, is a fundamental declaration of Reality as it is. Similar to mahamudra and dzogchen in Vajrayana Buddhism, Assertion is the beginning, middle and end of the Path, and that which is returned to again and again. It is a spontaneous, radical insight into the nature of Reality.

Just This is a practical way of articulating the moment of Assertion, while at the same time it is not Assertion per se nor is it a mantra or phrase to repeat as a form of practice, like Ramana Maharshi’s Who am I? Just This is an inner condition of awareness, an interior state of being. Just This is a statement that asserts the perfection, completeness, fullness and emptiness of what is in any particular moment when life is known through an awakened lens of perception.

When a moment arises in which we are aware of the fundamental truth of Reality, egoic fixation and rigidity relaxand we are naturally awake and aware. French teacher-filmmaker-philosopher Arnaud Desjardins describes this state with the similar declaration, What is, as it is, here and now.

Just This is elegant in its simplicity; it articulates everything as an all-embracing, open-ended statement. It affirms the oneness as well as the emptiness of all phenomena; it affirms the fullness and distinct realness of every aspect and element of life. Assertion is the declaration that this moment now is complete and true.

My teacher Lee sometimes spoke of a transformational shift of context that occurred for him in the early summer of 1975, in which he became a spiritual slave to the Will of God. He became an active, awake participant in the Great Process of Divine Evolution. At the foundation of his awakening was the realization of nonduality, and yet equally evident and obvious was an enlightened duality—the perception of all diverse strands of life as an interwoven, interdependent whole. How can we separate the sun from the stars? And yet we perceive the reality of their existence as apparently discrete objects. Nothing is separate; from the view of enlightened duality, the unified field of life—with its apparent aspects, qualities, and creative overflow—comes into focus as the adornment of God. The teachings of any authentic path lead the seeker through this wonderland. In pondering and living the path, one revelation leads to another, but we always return to the inherent oneness of all things: Just This.

Sahaja

The statement The body knows refers to Organic Innocence and is of great importance to the practice of Assertion and the perception of enlightened duality, for the fruition of practice is only possible through full embodiment. We are meant to be embodied beings—spirit in matter. Until we have passed beyond the veil of bodily death, we perceive Reality through the precious vehicle of the human body, with all of its potential for transformation of being. Enlightened duality is therefore also very closely related withKhepa Lee’s teachings of Organic Innocence and the Primacy of Natural Ecstasy, which describe the essential mood of incarnation or spirit in matter.

What does the body know? Everything. It is the body that recognizes the innate truth of enlightened duality—everything is real. The authenticity and ultimate efficacy of one’s practice depends upon bringing practice into the body, which is Organic Innocence. The body is capable of the most profound Assertion and the revelation of Reality; the body is the accurate arbiter of what is true or false in ordinary daily events. Tribal and indigenous people the world over know these fundamental truths; great sacred cultures have risen based on the truth that the body knows. This is a secret that is not so secret—in fact, it is so obvious that one wonders why we would even need to consider it at all.

But, we must urgently ponder these things, because the more we become star-struck by science, progress, technology and tools of the mind, the more we are separated from the instinctual wisdom of the body. We are so enthralled by technology that the human race is fast losing all relationship to the natural world and therefore to the solar system and cosmos. Spiritual practitioners are no different than anyone else in this regard: cell phones, computers, the unwise use of the Internet, and technological gadgets rule our lives while the technology of agribusiness and use of fossil fuels are destroying the ecology of Earth. Too often we are more interested in these deadly seductions and distractions than in the life of the body, which weeps for its exile from earth, air, fire and water—from sun, moon, sunset, sunrise, winter, fall, summer and spring.

To enter into the perception of enlightened duality, we must return to the truth that is native to bodily life. Living fully within our bodies will lead us, sooner or later, back into relationship with the Earth, with plants, minerals and animals, with human beings, with the vast array of Creation, and with the Divine. In the amazing gift of enlightened duality, we discover what it means to be real.

Life Is Real

Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’ is the title of a book written by G.I. Gurdjieff, the Russian mystic who developed what is called The Fourth Way of spiritual development.⁴ Every great system of spiritual evolution has a teaching—a dharma—and a method or series of techniques or yogas, practiced within the context of an intentional life, whose aim is the realization of the I am that exists prior to all conditioning, birth, death and appearances of change and impermanence. When we practice Just This, we are affirming the existence of the I am, the atman or primordial self, as well as its unity with all life. Life is real only then, when ‘I am’ is a succinct statement of enlightened duality, in which spiritual evolution moves into a mystery that brings the dance of opposites—which we call life—out of veiled illusion and into the strong radiance of Reality.

To realize this requires some work. Gurdjieff states that we only become an individual—a unique expression of the Divine—when we have become real through the process of inner unification. Eastern scripture and philosophy refer to the falling away of false identifications and kleshas (afflictions) which reveals the atman, the eternal self, shining at the center of awareness, beneath or beyond the ahamkara, or sense of a separate egoic I. Classic advaita teachings state that there is no distinction between one self, or atman, and any other self or aspect of existence.

In the Hindu tradition, the one who is living in the condition of liberation from the veils of illusion is called jivanmukta—a being (jivan) who is liberated (mukta). It is a word that hints at something real that exists prior to the ahamkara of egoic I-ness and points toward the potential for a unique individuality that may exist beyond the realization of the nondual atman. When false identifications fall away and the egoic I am or ahamkara is stripped bare of personality embellishments, conditioned responses, and psychological survival drives, then Reality informs perception of its immanent and impermanent truth.

From the perspective of enlightened duality, while it is undeniably true that there is only One—we are continuous in our interconnected sameness, and there is only God—we are also created beings gifted by the act of Creation. Each one of us is unique: not special, not better or worse than others, merely unique. The self that perceives at the moment of awareness is the same as every other self, and yet it can be experienced as a uniquely individual awareness.

It’s Simple but Not Easy

The truth is simple to realize, but it not so easy to live. A unique awareness ofthe innate blueprint of being is on a journey of becoming—whether that journey is called super efforts, yoga, sadhana, or spiritual practice. The Bauls take the way of sahaja and refer to the man of the heart as the pinnacle of human realization.

The mind cannot wrap itself around this work as an idea; only the body can embrace and embody this potential. Of course, this is rhetorical dharma until we are taken by an exquisite and raw experience in the world of form. This insight or epiphany of Realness touches upon eternity—a moment that is penetrating, so hot and bright, or piercingly sweet, rare or full of sorrow, in which clarity is the quality of seeing and feeling in a brilliant view of our deepest felt experience. There, in the apex of a mystery, our emptiness and fullness is revealed, and from that inexplicable potential, something real may arise within the world of form.

These are lofty considerations that we will return to in much greater depth in the essays that follow, bringing them down to earth and rooting them in the world of sadhana, where the ordinary may be revealed as the extraordinary. I have attempted to write about all this in contemporary terms for modern Western seekers and practitioners of dharma. So don’t despair if this particular essay is too philosophical for you. The essays in this book that elaborate on pure dharma are far outweighed by those in which the author plies a great passion for telling a story and describing the experiential moment of awareness—because all writing is a story, and in the case of the dharma, the story is about transformation, impermanence, beauty, Life as it is. It is the shared human story of the soul.

Endnotes, Chapter 1

1  Tripura Rahasya: The Secret of the Supreme Goddess, translated by Swami Sri Ramananda Saraswathi, pages 158–159.

2  Ibid, page 160.

3  Ibid, page 158.

4  Very simplistically, in Gurdjieff’s method of self-development, the I am is cultivated through an arduous process of self-observation and the integration of the many disparate I’s that make up the human personality into a single, unified I. When one begins to function as an integrated individual, an I am, the three centers of thinking, feeling and moving—what he called the three brains of a three-brained being—begin to work together as a harmonious whole. Furthermore, Gurdjieff says this individual self must be built through extreme super effort. When the unified I has been forged, life becomes Real.

2.

Organic Innocence

Every human being is born with the abiding gift of God—the shining original nature