Everything is as it is and there is nowhere to go?

Hey Everyone!

I just wanted to share quick post about a book that found me at Chapters in Charlottetown, PEI. I was getting ready to leave the store when I stumbled across a book that was on sale (I got it for dirt cheap actually!). The title of the book is "THIS IS IT... The Nature of Oneness" by Jan Kersschot. The book caught my eye and it has been very interesting to read the past week or so. I always kinda considered myself a bit of a "spiritual" person. This book has me thinking about a lot of things (I won't go into too details here or it could be a very long post). This book really dives into non-duality and how some of us can struggle through our lives searching for "enlightenment" or that one big event to change our lives and bring us constant and eternal bliss. Nondualism is a very new concept to me and I still find it a little confusing, but from what I can see it is about peeling back the way we are conditioned and just start "Being" and all about "Beingness" (that's a lot of being's). It also states that we are all "One" and part of "Oneness"... a few metaphors used in the book are we are all sand castles made with the same sand or that we are all waves in the ocean. This may be a touchy subject for some, but I am just now opening up to these ideas and that maybe everything is appropriate and just as it should be? Maybe there are no higher powers that we are separate from and enlightenment is in our everyday, "ordinary" daily lives....?

Photo By: General Wesc

A great quote that really hit home with me is from authors interviewed in the book named Tony Parsons when he states - "Everything is as it is. There is nowhere to go".

I find it very difficult to speak or put these ideas into words around Non-Duality (hopefully this post helps me!), but I feel that is part of the mystery behind just "Being". Hopefully this may have shed some light on the topic and if anyone has any other thoughts on the topic, I would love to hear them below. Thank you!

-- Adrian

P.S - Of course I respect everyone's views on this and am not trying to say this is right or the proper way. As they say in the book, it's everyones choice on how they feel about this and that is exactly appropriate, as it should be :-)

Aug 09, 2010

Forrest Loder said...

Hi Adrian,

Yet another interesting post. Thanks!

The concept of non-duality is a relatively new one for me too. A very helpful teacher for me in this regard was (and is) Kitaro Nishida, a modern Japanese philosopher. He used the term Pure Experience. This experience is the direct experience of phenomena before we start to judge and categorize it. In Pure Experience subject and object are non-different. This sheds a little light on Non-duality for me.

If this sparks some interest, the following is a short post I wrote discussing Nishida's concept of Pure Experience:
http://forrestloder.posterous.com/looking-back-214

Hoping this meets you well,
forrest

Oct 22, 2011

Nathalie Serrien said...

Maybe Jan never found himself and therefore concluded that he is a No Body, because he only searched in his head. (Declaring that you are a phantom or nobody is declaring that your are something).
Also, Jan's beliefs (even though he denies having beliefs) refuse to accept personal responsbility for thoughts and actions.
His case is because consciousness is living through him, he has no choice over his actions or power over his immediate surroundings.
Jan is pretty black and white..............So, this book not worth YOUR MONEY !!!!!

Whilst the author seems to write as best he can from a non-duel perspective, the words he uses are confusing and often sound contradictory!

My advise, if the non-dual perspective appeals to you, save your money and buy either Loe Hartongs book, Awakening to the Dream, any of Tony Parsons works, or Nathan Gill's new book Already awake

All are strictly non-dual and are much clearer, in my opinion, than this text.

For a book about non-dualism, it has a strangely two-pronged flavor.

First, it is making the general and expected points: No need to do anything, you are already enlightened (except that you don't exist and enlightenment is meaningless to begin with), etc.

Second, it has a definite under-edge of Non-Dual community infighting. At times, it has a strangely catty, insider tone. I feel it is written not so much for the general person just trying to figure things out, but for a specific narrow sub-readership of people who are very experienced shoppers in the spiritual supermarket, even or especially people who've been around the non-dual track a few times. These are the people that the author wants to reach, and get them to 'stop seeking'.

Though of course, even 'stop seeking' is "doing" something, or having a kind of program, and therefore unacceptable.

Except that of course EVERYTHING is acceptable because it is all illusory anyway.

I say that this author (and his interviews ) are on the far edge of current non-dual thought in that other stars like Byron Katie still offer a kind of goal (cessation of mental suffering) and a sort of problem-solving method (4 questions) to advance that program.

But the authors of "This Is It" are uncompromising and will have none-of-the-above. EVERYTHING is equally FAKE (or real, but in any case meaningless) and there's absolutely NOTHING to be done about it... except the reader is still left with the feeling that s/he as a regular gal/guy hasn't quite 'got it' (but no, no, there's NOTHING to GET, dumbkoff!) and ... you still don't really understand (that there's NOTHING to UNDERSTAND, you DORK....) ... that's the flavor of it.

However, this tough-man macho version of neo-advaita makes constant use of analogies like "All the sand castles on a beach appear separate but since they are actually all made of sand there's no difference among them and they are all the same thing - namely, sand". Or similar images of water, characters in a movie on the screen all being made of the light projected from the booth, etc.

This reductionist argument is logically erroneous, in that identity of material is not absolute identity. Different individual sand castles represent different information vectors and have different entropic coding potential. They differ absolutely, at the level of information structure. Admittedly these differences in entropic coding potential are non-physical in some sense, and hard to quantify without a context, but they are real, though subtle. It is an odd and unexpectedly materialistic argument - the assertion that material identity equals absolute identity.
Anyway, the only actual identity these authors can accept is equal emptiness or equally distributed 'Light' or 'Unicity'.

So it is truly a completely empty and meaningless teaching, a "difference which makes no difference". For all I know, it may be the simple truth. But "I" (??) suspect otherwise, because this random theory of meaningless "arising" of phenomena and experience does not account for the consistency of physical and psychological effects experienced by human beings.

But the authors would say that my small mind (which doesn't exist) is just playing stupid small-mind games.

The Journey...