Centerless Center: A Seeker's Journey & Commentaries on Non-Dual Awareness

By Will Wright

Centerless Center explores the author's decades-long search for enlightenment, what finally brought it to an end, and reflections on what he discovered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: APA
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781963789553

Will Wright

Dr. Will Wright is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Colorado State University. Before joining the faculty at CSU-P in 1986, he taught at several universities including the University of California, Northwestern University, Wesleyan University, and the University of Arizona. Dr. Wright, who was formerly the chair of the sociology department, has written four major books The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory, Sage Publications, 2001, Wild Knowledge: Science, Language, and Social Life in a Fragile Environment, University of Minnesota Press, 1992, The Social Logic of Health, (with new Introduction) Wesleyan University Press, 1994, (First edition: Rutgers University Press, 1982), Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, University of California Press, 1975. Dr. Wright’s Sixguns and Society is widely considered a classic in its field and despite its publication over 30 years ago remains in print and in the library of every serious student of the Western movie. His work on Westerns is widely cited internationally and his theoretical analysis of the genre is summarized in detail in a number of prominent texts on film and society. Dr. Wright’s scholarly articles on theory, popular culture, and film have appeared in a variety of academic journals including Journal of Popular Film and Television, War, Literature and the Arts, Contemporary Sociology, The Social Text, and New Society. He has also contributed a number of chapters to edited books.

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Centerless Center

A Seeker's Journey

&

Commentaries on Non-Dual Awareness

Will Wright

Copyright © Will Wright 2024

All rights reserved. It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or

transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or

printed format.  Recording of this publication is strictly

prohibited.

The narratives in book one reflect the author's recollection of events.

Some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been

changed to protect the privacy of those depicted.

Dialogue has been re-created from memory.

Disclaimer

The commentaries and quotes in book two are meant for

spiritual inquiry only and are not intended as a substitute for

psychotherapy, addiction therapy, or medical care. Please consult

a licensed professional in all of these matters.

Cover Art by Eric Wright

Interior Art by Julia Wright

Table of Contents

Preface

BOOK I

THE SEEKER’S JOURNEY                                    

Milwaukee

Denver

California

Vermont

BOOK II

COMMMENTARIES ON NON-DUAL AWARENESS                                          

Ever-Present Awareness

A Case of Mistaken Identity

Am I A Limited Separate Self?                                                  

Not a Matter of Life and Death

Set Aside the Story

There is a Field

Simplicity of Being

Overwhelmed By Feelings

No You

Do Unto Others

Everywhere We Look

Life is But a Dream

Wherever You Go

Show Me your Face!

Pointers Point

Something Else is Happening

Why Does Happiness Come and Go?

Source of Our Being

No Effort Required

Homage to a Mantra

Simply Notice

There Are No Pieces

House on a Bridge

And Then We Smile

Where Are You?

The Stillness and The Peace

Perfect Peace

Ice on the Pond

Brainwashed

The Background of All Experience

Rules to Live By

‘Closer Than Close’

Blasphemy VS. Free Speech

Everything

Dead to the Present

Let the Real Fun Begin

Seeking Truth through Experience

AHA!

The Mother of All Containers

To Feed a Hungry Ghost

Consciousness Stands Alone

You Are the Silence

For Beginners Only

As I Move Through the Day

Self-Help

Mind is Moving

Already Dead?                                                              

No Selfie

Who, What, Where?                                                      

‘You Are Me’                                                                

Tsunami of Dark Thoughts & Feelings

The Root of All Things

Killing In the Name Of _____

The Screen

Love Your Neighbor

Let It Be

I, Awareness, and the Shopping Cart

That Which Remains Untouched

Nothing New

Consciousness by Any Other Name

Invest in Silk

Fugetaboutit

Warning: Total Waste of Time

Now Showing: The Paradox

Same Old Same Old

Pride & Prejudice

Closer Than Close Encounter

Be Open

One Sweet Soul

This Too Shall Pass

So, What is The Plan?

One Plus One

Meet Presence with Presence

The Most Relaxing Ride of All

It’s Only the Separate Self

I Fall to Pieces

One Step Back

This: For the Seeker

We All Appear To Die

Just as the Snake

Don’t Take it Personally

It is what it isn’t

For Advanced Seekers!

Before

Rules To Live By Ii

Be the Change?

Scrambled or Fried?

All Good Things

Whatever

Such is Life

‘It Makes Me Feel Happy’

E Unum Pluribus

A Knotted Rope

By All Appearances

Don’t Get Ahead Of Yourself

Meet Divine Awareness

We Are As Gods?                                                                    

This Becomes That

The Real Story

You Can’t Get There From Here

Ocean of Love

A Glimpse

A Drop of Water

Neither Here Nor There

I, Awareness, Want for Nothing

Unshakable Inner Peace

Everywhere, Like Space

I Have No Purpose

Your Choice?

Don’t Believe a Word

I Think

Ignore the Ignorer

I Don’t Mind

Undead or Unborn?

No ‘Who’ or ‘What’ about it

What is this Something?

No Expectations

Dining Out

The Chosen One Walks Among Us

Dead Eyes

Any Idea

Already a Masterpiece

I, Awareness, Want For Nothing Ii

OM!

Skyless Cloud

Lucid Waking

Pay More Attention

Ram Dass, Going Home

A Bird’s Simple Song

Don’t Name It

Gap in The Clouds

Consciousness Only Knows Itself

No Mistaken Identity

Breathing In

Regardless Of What You Think

No Way In

Nothing to it

Be the Realization

This Too Shall Pass

For One Day Only ~ Free Consciousness!

I, Awareness, Am Here to Simplify

Are You Experienced?

Connecting the Dots

All You Need to Discover

Sweetness and Vulnerability

The Only Thing That is Constant

Stepping Stone to The Sun

Forever

I, Awareness, Cannot Be Followed

Pebbles on the Shore

Nothing to Know

One of Two Things

To Beat a Dead Horse

Die To Your Imagined Self

Whatever Happens

Human Doing or Human Being?

Skyless Cloud Ii

Throw Away the Mask

Ignorance

All I Know is Myself

Do Unto No Others

Path to Happiness

Seeing Eye to Eye

Be the Changeless

All Good Things Ii

Two Things in Common

We Are the Emptiness

No Questions Asked

‘Three Inch Scholar’

Pendulum of Change

When All is Said and Done

Nothing is Sacred

R.I.P.

Mind Control

Imagine

About the Author

For my children and their spouses, who continually inspire me with their joyful and loving presence—Miklos & Annie, Corrina & Anthony, Kevin, Eric & Sarah, and Julia.

For my grandchildren, the next generation of Light—Penny, A.J., Lily, and River.

For my brothers Morgan, Steve, and Charlie, who effortlessly picked up the torch.

For my sister Sally, who doesn’t get what all the fuss is about.

For Katheryn, Henry, and Seth, who pointed out the joy in ways less travelled.

For Annabelle & R.C., John & Ginny, for their wholehearted and unwavering quest for the truth.

For Jim, who unassumingly embodies the essence of this book.

For John Wheeler, whose direct answers to my convoluted questions brought me to a full and satisfied stop.

For my teacher and friend, Rupert Spira, who expresses his insights with exacting clarity and profound love.

And for Dana, loving partner on the pathless path.

6/19/2014

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

~ Blaise Pascal

Preface

I am a musician, retired music teacher, writer, carpenter, husband, and father of five. My lifelong spiritual journey has been influenced by, among others, Jiddu Krishnamurti, psychedelics, Ram Dass, Zen (esp. Bankei, Dogen, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Philip Kapleau, and Paul Reps), yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Vipassana, various mantra and meditation techniques, and the many inspiring family members and friends who are still leading the way.

Music has always been the main focus of my life, and it was through music that I first got a taste of the infinite nature of things. This was especially true during my five years of study of North Indian classical music with Ali Akbar Khan and Shankar Ghosh at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California, and the many inspiring students I met while attending. What can be better than to play with a group of talented musicians and dissolve into one harmonious vibration? But once the music session or gig was over, and I was back to interacting in the world with my family, friends, and work associates, by all outward appearances I might have seemed as though I was spiritually mature, but an inner voice kept saying, You still don’t get it. This apparent lack drove me to continue seeking answers through other seemingly divine channels even as I continued my music studies.

In spite of all my involvement in and dedication to the various spiritual paths, after many years I still found myself dissatisfied with the results. Although I kept it fairly well together on the physical/material plane, there was some key element lacking in my heart—call it an inner peace—and I found myself once more seeking answers. I was on a roller coaster of emotional ups and downs and it felt as though it would never end.

My search took a dramatic turn when I was introduced to the Hindu teachings of Advaita Vedanta, especially those of Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj. It ceased for good after first attending a retreat with Rupert Spira, who spent many years learning from his teacher and friend Francis Lucille, and then meeting with John Wheeler, who had immersed himself in the works of Nisargadatta via Sailor Bob Adamson.

To say that my spiritual search ceased for good is not entirely accurate. The pointers of the great sages, past and present, finally illuminated by Spira and Wheeler, led to the recognition that there never was a me to go searching in the first place. We are already what we yearn for. The seeker is the sought.

The commentaries on non-dual awareness first appeared on my weblog, Centerless Center. Written over a period of eight years, they have nothing to do with concepts, beliefs, or opinions, and everything to do with the direct experiential discovery of our original Self—pure consciousness, or aware presence—whose inherent nature is one of peace, happiness, and love. And the wonderful fact that there are not two: Advaita—one without a second.

For those of you who do know who you are, who we are, this book is a call to action. By this, I mean to spread the word, the teaching, with your kind, peaceful, and helpful interactions with yourself, other beings, creatures, and all of nature. As Zen master Shunryu Suzuki says, There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.

For those of you who are still seeking, perhaps something in this book might bring you to, as John Wheeler likes to say, a Full Stop! And, in so doing, that your, our, true self may then be revealed.

Will Wright

North Pomfret, Vermont

April 2024

BOOK I

THE SEEKER’S JOURNEY

W

e all know that our body-minds are limited. We were born, we will live for a period of time, and then we will die. The sages, past and present, say that to live a life of true peace and happiness, we must discover that within us which was never born and will never die.

I’ve investigated consciousness/awareness and discovered that there can be no experience without it, but that it, itself, is not an experience. Consciousness exists before, during, and after all experiences, all appearances, have come, lingered for a time, and gone. At our core, we are this consciousness, so I no longer have any questions about the meaning of life—why are we here, what is our purpose, what is our relationship to others? It’s enough that I have discovered that my essential being is unlimited ever-present consciousness, and all appearances arise within it. And, this being the case, all things are made of consciousness—you, me, the world, the universe, and beyond. And because of its infinite and eternal nature, there can be only one—where is there room for two in the infinite? And its inherent qualities are peace, love, and happiness. It is this that we all have in common.

The commentaries in this book begin when my spiritual journey ends, at least the seeking part, so in order to give them some context, I will have to tell you some of my personal story, especially as it relates to my decades-long search for enlightenment or awakening.

For those of you on a spiritual quest, my wish is that you do not have to spend another day, or, in some cases, another second, looking for what you already are. If I had met the right person, or perhaps read or heard the right words, at the right time, I would have realized what I know now a lot sooner—that on the pathless path there is no distance between you, us, and our essential shared being.

Milwaukee

The last thing a child wants to do on a bright summer day is to take a nap, but that’s what my stepmother insisted on. She wasn’t wicked at all, just strict, and thought that a nap was good for a youngster’s overall well-being. It also gave her a break from having to keep track of me. But instead of sleeping, I often liked to ponder what seemed to be the infinite nature of the universe. As my six-year-old self understood it, the air I breathed turned into the sky that turned into space that turned into the universe that adults told me went on for ever and ever. I just couldn’t wrap my head around for ever and ever, so I imagined that the universe, with of all its planets and suns and stars, was contained in a gigantic box. From there, the best I could come up with was that the box was surrounded by, imbedded in, something solid, like lead or stone. But then . . . did this solid mass go on forever? Or if not, what contained this solid mass? More space? It seemed as though I had stumbled upon the limitless nature of things, but it was more than I could grasp. I gave up trying to figure this out, but the mystery of the infinite stayed with me, and, I suppose, added to my spiritual unrest and quest as I grew into young adulthood.

My upbringing was mixed. I was the child of divorced parents who never actually lived together. In 1943, just before my father, who had joined the Navy, was to ship out to patrol the Pacific during World War II, my mother joined him in Virginia Beach. They eloped, I was conceived, and I was born on March 5, 1944. As the story was told to me seventy years later by my mother’s sister, now deceased, my father returned from the war a year and nine months later, victorious and unharmed, only to be thrown out of the house before he even got a word out. My mother shouted something like, You had an affair with your housemaid when you were a teenager! I don’t want to ever see you again! My father, unable to deny it, walked away. They both remarried several times, each having two more children, my father a boy and a girl, my mother two boys. I split time between them until I reached college age and left home for good.

My father joined his family business and became financially successful. My mother remarried a charming alcoholic, who couldn’t keep a job for long, and when he was working, she would try to intercept his pay check on Friday afternoons so that he wouldn’t spend it all at the local bar before he got home that night. Even as a functioning alcoholic, my father remained relatively stable, keeping a steady job and providing a nice home, even if he could turn violent at times. On the other hand, my mother often didn’t know how she was going to afford groceries for the week, let alone pay the rent. We often had to move, sometimes to a new state, with my two brothers and I having to switch schools and make new friends, always with the underlying threat of physical abuse from their father, my stepfather. Abuse wasn’t the norm, but because of the unpredictable behavior caused by alcohol, you never knew when it would occur. I won’t go into the specifics of the abuse from either man, except to say that this was the era of hairbrush spankings, and that they added fists and pool cues. 

You could say that I grew up as a rich boy and a poor boy. Being tossed back and forth between parents, I lived on both sides of the track, each one with a very specific story. The right side of the tracks revealed how material wealth did not necessarily bring happiness. The wrong side of the tracks showed how happiness could be spread by a poor but loving mother. Not to say that my father wasn’t loving, it’s just that my mother was more overt about her love of life and this rubbed off on me—happiness in spite of circumstances.

By the time I had reached my teenage years, you could say that I was a good boy and a bad boy. On the one hand, I was polite, charming, and showed some amount of intelligence. But when I thought no adult was paying attention, I could be mischievous, devious, and sometimes dangerous, to myself and others around me. Fortunately, I never caused any serious harm to anyone, at least to my knowledge, although drunken behavior that I’d picked up from my parents and minor car accidents were involved. I was about as confused as one could be about the meaning of life and my place in it and was ready for a major change. I did have a close childhood friend, Henry, who introduced me to Jack Kerouac and jazz, which opened up a whole new world. But it was music that altered my life’s direction forever.

I picked up the guitar when I was fifteen. It was 1959, my sophomore year in high school. I was inspired to play by a guy in my class who was the leader of a rockabilly band. With a greasy red ducktail and a sunburst electric guitar, all the girls flocked around the stage when he played for our school dances. This—flocking girls—was my initial motivation for learning how to play, but once I got into it, the music itself began to emerge as my lifeline towards happiness and freedom. My father said that he regretted the day I got a guitar, that playing music was for niggers and drug addicts.

Denver

I turned eighteen in March of 1962, left my dysfunctional families and Milwaukee, basically both forever, embraced the hippie counterculture, and never looked back. Following Timothy Leary’s lead, I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. But not all at once.

I lasted two quarters as a freshman at Denver University, mostly playing pool in the student union and gaining twenty pounds of beer fat at the local bar. One of my four roommates—we lived in a drab campus dormitory suite—claimed that we could get high and hallucinate if we ate morning glory seeds, which contained a chemical similar to LSD, whatever that was. This sounded great to me, so we went out and bought packages of the seeds aptly labelled Pearly Gates, supposedly the most potent for our purpose. After ingesting a couple of bags, it was also recommended that we stare at a candle for a long time to focus our attention. The results were mixed. The seeds were unpleasant to chew and swallow, and might have even been coated with a poisonous preservative with ammonia overtones. I didn’t throw up, but definitely felt nauseous. And there were no cool hallucinations. Just a general eye fatigue from staring at the candle, which was like staring at a mini-sun, partially blinding you for a period of time.

I had been corresponding with Henry, who was attending Columbia University in NYC, and we both decided that it was a good idea to drop out of college so that we could have our own on the road experience and infuse our lives with some real meaning. By this time, we had also read Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, so the spiritual aspect of Buddhism had been introduced into our psyches, and enlightenment was now part of our vocabulary and quest. So that spring, I dropped out and drove cross-country to pick up Henry, and with little financial forethought, except that we were going to Brownsville, Texas, to make a quick fortune working on an oil rig, we managed to get as far as New Orleans when our money ran out. In turn: I sold my car for fifty dollars to Diamond Joe (real name); we rented a hotel room on Bourbon Street: walking about taking in the sights, I was arrested for attempted bank robbery—I seemed to fit the description of a forty-year-old vagrant; was taken to the penitentiary for my mug shot, fingerprinting, and line-up—a hopeless, harrowing experience; was let out of the local precinct jail after three days—after witnessing brutal racial violence—with the admonition to Stay off the streets; found that Henry had spent all of our money on a hooker; got a job as an opening folk act at a strip joint across the street, which, as you might imagine, didn’t last long—the patrons were more interested in the girls than some young punk singing Blowing in the Wind; joined Henry selling hot tamales out of a cart on wheels from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m.—making a grand total of $3.20 if you sold out, enough for two fried eggs, toast, and coffee at the local diner; both of us suffered a nervous breakdown of sorts—what the hell did we think we were doing?; and with great disappointment and shame called a parent to wire us some money so that we