Questions and answers

Q: I heard about an experiment of ill people in a hospital who all had cancer and didn’t have long to live. The experiment was to do with a mindfulness course I was on some years back.

They divided the ill people into two groups. The mindfulness people sent positive prayers, thoughts and wishes for healing to the ill people in the first group. The second group received no prayers, thoughts or wishes – nothing. The result was that the ones who received the positive prayers, loving wishes, healed more and were feeling happier than the group who received nothing.

I also recall this experiment done on seeds growing in pots. They did the same experiment sending love and thoughts to one lot of seeds in a room and not the ones in the other room. The ones with the loving thoughts grew ten times more than the ones who received nothing.

So does this mean we can influence consciousness or get its help?

A: I trained as a statistician, and my first comment is that from a scientific point of view the conclusions drawn from the experiments you mention would be invalid. There are several reasons for this which I won’t go into as it’s a bit technical, and there are more interesting and relevant considerations. But that’s the scientific view.

Now look at it from a non-dual point of view. Who or what is the ‘you’ that might influence consciousness? Just by suggesting that possibility you are back in duality – me and consciousness – two things. Same with ‘can we get help from consciousness?’. You are consciousness. Can you help yourself? Yes of course. Consciousness is helping itself – or more accurately enjoying itself – all the time. It’s automatic. Can’t be any other way.

Regarding being with friends and loved ones who are ill, illness is a condition of the body. The body is subject to all sorts of influences – physical and mental ones. There’s a close connection between mind and body. For example, many illnesses are made worse or in some cases actually caused by stress. Just as our bodies are not separate from the physical universe, so our minds are not separate from the universal mental realm.

The sense of being a separate entity produces stress in the body-mind. If you are with someone who is ill (or for that matter someone who is well) and you yourself know and feel yourself to be one with everything, that knowing and feeling will pervade your body-mind – it feels like a lovely sense of relaxation – and it may also influence those who you are with. Just touching someone can have a calming effect when that touch comes directly through a body-mind that is not subject to the stress of feeling itself to be a separate entity. And that reduction of stress in the other person can help towards health.

But sending positive prayers comes from a belief in duality. So it seems unlikely to help unless perhaps the ill person is told that people are saying prayers for them. In that case the positive feeling generated by knowing someone cares about you might also reduce stress. But that has nothing to do with non-duality and I don’t think is likely to be as powerful as being with the person or communicating with them from an understanding and feeling of non-separation.

Q: Some of my very good friends have moved away from the teaching of Francis Lucille and other non-dual teachers who teach the Direct Path, claiming that awareness or consciousness is a trap that is used by the ego to claim enlightenment thereby avoiding the shadow work on repressed emotions that is necessary for genuine enlightenment. 

A: This is a misunderstanding of the real non-duality. The real non-duality says ‘there is only one’. There are not separate entities some of which are enlightened and some of which aren’t. Body-minds don't become enlightened. It is a radical teaching. Few teachers who claim to teach non-duality really understand this. But in any case, the Direct Path teaching does not ignore the desire and natural process for the body-mind to become realigned with the non-dual understanding. It’s just that this happens following a liberating glimpse of our true nature, rather than being needed beforehand to enable such a glimpse to arise.

To understand this, let’s look at what a body-mind actually is. See that it’s just a flow of experience – what Jean Klein calls mentations. These are thoughts, sense perceptions, bodily sensations. That’s all. Just a flow of ever-changing mental phenomena.

Phenomena in the physical realm or what is usually called ‘the outside world’ (which we can only deduce via sense perceptions) correspond to patterns – laws of nature, scientific models, whatever we like to call them. Similarly, phenomena in the realm of mind correspond to patterns. These are less well modelled, understood or validated, but still we recognise that there are patterns. What we call ‘ego’ is simply a pattern, just as gravity is a pattern.

One other point that is commonly misunderstood, is that at the relative level, body-minds are really just machines by means of which experience manifests. You could describe them as being like AI robots. We think that as a body-mind, we choose our thoughts and therefore our actions. It’s not hard to realise that is ludicrous. If we could choose our thoughts, we would choose only happy thoughts. There is only one thinker, chooser, decider, doer. Only universal consciousness has freedom. We are that one, universal consciousness.

So what does so-called ‘shadow-work’ achieve? Well certainly it may lead to changes in behaviour, just as practising scales and other well-chosen exercises on the piano can enable a pianist’s body-mind to deliver an enjoyable performance instead of a somewhat dreadful one. But this kind of change resulting from practice has nothing to do with non-duality. And for those who think it does have something to do with non-duality and is required for enlightenment, it is actually taking them away from the real non-dual understanding.

So my view is that there’s nothing wrong with shadow-work as long as you don’t think it is going to lead to something called enlightenment. It could be helpful in a practical sense if behaviours coming from your shadow are interfering with your relationships. But see it as entirely separate from anything spiritual, or real self-enquiry; one way of helping to maintain mental and psychological fitness, rather like physical exercise or eating a balanced diet to help keep the body fit. Otherwise it will become a way of improving an illusory separate entity that you believe might one day become enlightened. And as such it would be entirely egoic.

The non-dual understanding gained from a liberating glimpse of our true nature is what starts the process of realignment of the body-mind. That process is driven by a love of truth. Ignorance will still surface from time to time, but our non-dual understanding coupled with our love of truth becomes an ‘ignorance-detector’, and each time it is seen for what it is, ignorance vanishes. Its appearances gradually become less and less frequent. Life becomes happier, worries diminish, and there is a natural ease of being.

Q: A common criticism of non-duality, especially as taught by male teachers, is that feelings are put in the garbage bin at the back of the garden and every negative emotion is related to the sense of separation. This can lead to a tendency to escape into the absolute, neglecting and disapproving of any psychological stuff. It’s often referred to as ‘spiritual bypassing’. What is your view on this? Does realignment of the body-mind with our non-dual understanding happen automatically, after a liberating glimpse? Or is shadow-work necessary? There have been a number of examples of non-dual teachers behaving in unethical ways and not practicing what they preach. Is this because of  spiritual bypassing?

A: Maybe for some people shadow-work could be helpful. But my observation is that the people who are into shadow-work are generally the ones who don’t need it. Instead, what they need is a clearer, more global, more universal understanding of non-duality and all its implications. For example, for me the deeply felt understanding that as an apparently separate body-mind I don’t choose my thoughts or actions and neither does anyone else was transformative. On the other hand, the teachers who we might think would benefit from shadow-work in order to have more appropriate and effective relationships with their students, are usually the ones who preach against it. They may have a clear mental understanding of non-duality but it is not fully embodied.

There is a transcendent aspect to the teaching. But then there is living the teaching in and through all the realms of experience. And I think all are important. That’s why I often talk about patterns. There is a beautiful parallel between patterns in the physical universe – the ‘laws of the universe’ – and patterns in the mental universe, which includes psychological patterns. Nothing is personal. It takes a while after a glimpse of our true nature for our body-mind patterns to become realigned with our new understanding. It depends on how strongly established the patterns are and whether life circumstances are tending to reinforce them or diminish them. When you see and feel things this way then you cannot regard spiritual teachers as being anything special, any more than science teachers or philosophy teachers are anything special. You don’t expect them to behave in a particular way or to necessarily practise what they preach. Some do and some don’t. It’s a spectrum.

What I feel is important in a teacher is honesty and integrity. Of course it’s not black and white – there could always be occasions when ignorance temporarily takes the stage, and honesty and integrity go out of the window. It’s a matter of frequency and predominance. If your teacher shares your deep love and devotion to truth, that’s enough. There’s something very powerful about allowing the question ‘is that true?’ to examine our thoughts, decisions and actions whenever we feel a sense of unease.

I think all the fashionable stuff about shadow-work has become a distraction from really understanding and exploring non-duality. That’s not to say we should stay in the transcendent – not at all. Every moment of every day is an opportunity for living the teaching, applying the teaching to every circumstance we encounter in both a thinking and a feeling sense, but mostly feeling – whether we are alone at home, or with other people, or working. Seeing everyone and everything as myself, and responding from love. It’s about living in truth. Then where is the shadow? Immediately if anything from past conditioning is brought into the current situation, and is seen for what it is, there is light. Delving into problems that arose in childhood in order to somehow purify the body-mind seems to me to support the sense of being a separate entity that needs to be improved. It keeps you in ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’.

Q: I hear/read about Love a lot. Statements like “you have to love it” or such like. I read these statements in Jean Klein and Ramana Maharshi as well as Francis Lucille (Truth, Love, Beauty). So, what I don’t see is a description of what “Love” actually means (in the context of the direct path at least). Mostly, it seems that it is something that we simply “do”. I do, of course, have my own view, but there is some confusion. Do you have any pointers please?

Love is not something that can be defined, just as consciousness can't be defined. It is an inherent attribute of our true reality, just as consciousness is an inherent attribute of our reality. So it can't be acquired - it is what we always already are.

To recognise what we are requires first of all interest in discovering what we are. We can't manufacture that interest - it just happens. Like for some people interest in football or music or art just happens. Interest leads to exploration and investigation, and increased interest. That increased interest in understanding what we are leads eventually to a liberating glimpse of what we are, and in that glimpse, interest is transformed to love. Love of truth. And that never leaves us.

Here are links to material which explores this topic in more detail:

Group paper: Love and Devotion

Francis Lucille’s essay on love: Love in the Other