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www.innerself.com.au
RadiantMIND
what isEnlightenment? with Linda Clair
with Peter Fenner, PHD
The Spiritual Teacher
The Gateway to Freedom
If you expect your life to be up and down, your mind will be much more peaceful. - Lama Thubten Yeshe We live most of our lives in constant reaction to the ever-changing realities of our conditioned existence. We speak about our problems as though they shouldn’t be happening. “What’s wrong?” we wonder. “Why is this happening to me?” How often do we think, “I’m not meant to be doing this,” about our work and family obligations. I know an Indian doctor who works day and night, seven days a week, at a tiny clinic treating impoverished villagers for routine complaints and more serious conditions such as malnutrition. Yet he’s always joyful, passionate, and appreciative. Why? One of the reasons is that he isn’t thinking that it isn’t fair, or that he should be doing something else. He fully accepts and owns his circumstances. He doesn’t indulge thoughts or conversations such as, “This isn’t the right line of work for me. I’m meant to be doing something easier and less demanding. I should move on to a different calling.” We habitually resist the reality of our experience. It can be difficult to take a trip across town, or spend a day in our office, or an evening at home, without someone or something disturbing our peace and serenity. We reject the volume of music in a restaurant, the actions of our politicians, our own and other’s appearance, the quality of the produce in our supermarket, the way people speak to us, the time we have to wait in line. This constant denial saps our energy and demoralizes us because we’re engaged in a losing battle with a reality that simply isn’t interested in our existence. Nearly everyone participates in this denial. In the affluent West it’s easy to take pleasure and satisfaction to be our birthright and live with a profound denial and rejection of pain and discomfort. Often we seem to share the insane belief that we shouldn’t suffer at all! Yet, we all suffer and will probably continue to do so until we die. Problems and dif-
ficulties are a natural part of life. Only a fully enlightened person—a buddha—ceases to create problems. Even though unpleasant experiences continue to manifest, year after year, we continue to operate as though our rejection would deenergize a negative experience. If this was how things worked surely we would be able to remove unpleasant experiences expeditiously and with ease. The energy in denial or resistance is always wasted. Not one ounce of our energy makes a productive contribution to changing our experience. The source of our suffering lies not in the circumstances of our lives, but in our resistance. When we resist reality, we tighten up. Our bodies become tense, we feel paralyzed or agitated. You might like to flash through some of the times you’ve powerfully resisted what’s happening to you, in order to connect with how resistance shows up in your body. Don’t try to interpret the experiences. Just scan your body for how denial manifests in your chest, belly, groin, shoulders, arms, hands, neck, throat, face, mouth, brow, and scalp. Where are the feelings located in your body? Is the energy stable or moving? Is it solid, like a constriction, or vacuous, like an absence or a gaping hole? The solution to our predicament is to cultivate of a more expanded, inclusive and realistic relationship to life. I call this “broadening the river of life.” We have ups and downs; great times when life flows smoothly, and difficult times when things get heavy and intense and don’t necessarily work out well. That’s life. If we act as though life shouldn’t be like this, we deny a fundamental aspect of our existence. By acknowledging that we do suffer we aren’t committing ourselves to suffering. We accept our circumstances without becoming resigned to our lot in life. Instead, we may think: “At this point in my evolution, I suffer from time to time because I’m still controlled
awakening one community at a time . . .
by judgments and preferences. Even so, I don’t feel resigned. I’m definitely not committed to the inevitability of this situation. I’m working with my reactive emotions so that, over time, the situation will definitely change. I can even accept the fact that I get resigned from time to time.” By broadening the river of life, we increase our capacity to be present to the whole range of human experience. We welcome what is, and this welcoming becomes a gateway into the nondual state. When we welcome what is, our suffering dissipates. We let what is happening happen, and don’t object to it. There may still be pain, but it no longer causes suffering. Ultimately, the only way to break our obsession with resistance, denial and suffering is by getting real and accepting the nature of our conditioned lives. We acknowledge and accept that suffering still happens for us at this point on our path. We cut through the fantasy that something is wrong when we suffer, and we stop making a problem out of having problems! We accept the basic structure and patterning of our experience, our life circumstances, not in a defeatist way, but with dignity and grace, because we know that “welcoming what is” is the gateway to freedom and liberation. Peter is a leader in the adaption and transmission of Asian nondual wisdom worldwide. He is a pioneer in the development of nondual therapy and creator of the 9-month Radiant Mind Course® (www.radiantmind.net) and the 10-month Natural Awakening: Advanced Nondual Training (www.nondualtraining.com). He was a celibate monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition for 9 years and has a Ph.D. in the philosophical psychology of Mahayana Buddhism. He teaches in North America, Europe, Israel and Australia. His books include Radiant Mind: Awakening Unconditional Awareness (2007); The Edge of Certainty: Dilemmas on the Buddhist Path (2002); and The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy (ed. with John Prendergast and Sheila Krystal, 2003).
Dr. Peter Fenner will be offering the 10 month Natural Awakening Training in Australia for the 1st time in 2014 www.nondualtraining.com Awaken to the bliss of awareness in one-to-one contemplative sessions with Peter.
Q: Could you describe what you felt being around your teacher during your practice, and what do you see as the value of having a teacher? Linda: The more time I spent being around my teacher; the more I craved to be near him. I was never completely comfortable being around him, but I didn’t want to feel comfortable – I wanted to feel alive. Sometimes I would feel incredibly self-conscious. Other times it was – I can’t describe it, I wouldn’t say ecstatic but part of it was that – I would feel this deep bliss. I couldn’t work out why I felt this way. On the surface he just seemed like a reasonably ordinary human being, but there was something incredibly attractive about being close to him. It was almost like there was a magnetic pull towards him. I realised that it wasn’t him in the personal sense that I was attracted to, but what he represented, which was reality – the unknown. You could say that an enlightened being is a representative of reality – the embodiment of reality. Being in contact with someone in this state is incredibly powerful. I could feel my consciousness speeding up when I was around him - it was the catalyst for the whole enlightenment process. But I didn’t want to depend on just being around him all the time. I wanted something that I could practice independently. So, that’s when I really started my formal meditation practice. Question: Could you say more about meditation? Linda: Most people underestimate meditation. It’s actually a really difficult thing to do, and can take one into incredibly deep states of stillness. Many people think it’s sitting and visualising being somewhere else, feeling nice, feeling bliss, feeling relaxed. It’s not that at all. You start to feel more at ease but that’s very different to feeling relaxed. At times your body can feel so tired and so much pressure that it feels like it’s going to explode. At other times you can feel so incredibly at peace with just being here that
you forget that you have a body. But that’s what meditation is; watching, coming into your body, grounding yourself in your body so you’re able to see how much control the mind has over you and how much fear is associated with that. The fear is that if I let go of my mind my body will die. We believe that the mind has total control of the body and that the mind needs to exist for the body to function. But in meditation you start to realise that this is not true. The body is actually far more intelligent than the mind. But you have to prove it to yourself in your own body. Nobody else can do it for you. That’s why you’ve got a body – so that you can realise this in your own body. Q: Isn’t there the danger of becoming too attached to a teacher? Linda: For a long time I was very attached to my teacher and being around him. Some people would see that as a bad thing, but for me it was the attachment that broke, eventually, all my attachments. I needed that to hang on to. While everything else was falling away, he was the only thing that I could call home, reality, because everything falls away beneath your feet. You don’t know what’s happening. And there’s just this beacon sitting in front of you saying, ‘It’s OK.’ Linda Clair is a non-sectarian teacher and author of the book, ‘What Do You Want?’ She takes meditation sessions and retreats in Melbourne , Adelaide, Canada and the USA . Currently she is also working on her second book. For more information, please visit www. simplemeditation.net or phone Christian on 0451 595 092
Meditation The joy is not in getting anything, but in knowing there is nothing to lose. . . Non-sectarian meditation sessions and retreats in Melbourne with Linda Clair www.simplemeditation.net
Don’t hesitate as sessions will fill up quickly For information about Peter see www.nondualtraining.com phone 03 9016 3988 • email peter@fenner.org
simplemeditation.net@gmail.com or phone Christian on 0451595092