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LIVING THE FIELDENLIGHTENMENT

LIVING THE FIELD

LIVING THE FIELD

Lesson 21 What is enlightenment? 5Lesson 22 Achieving total illumination 11Lesson 23 Through pain to immortality 13Lesson 24 Headless in the Himalayas 15Lesson 25 Man is a sleepwalker 17Lesson 26 The ‘isness’ of oneness 19Lesson 27 A Zen way past the mind 21Lesson 28 The riddle of life 23Lesson 29 The guru next door 25Lesson 30 The hippie Hindu 27Lesson 31 I am the road and shovel 29Lesson 32 Who am I? 31Lesson 33 The non-guru guru 33Lesson 34 The banker who became a guru 35Lesson 35 Born to be wild 37Lesson 36 The Irish Chinaman 39

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Contents

LIVING THE FIELDEnlightenment


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LIVING THE FIELD

T h roughout history, mankind hasclaimed that a higher state of con -sciousness is possible. This phenome -non has been called ‘enlightenment’,‘ realization’, s’atori’, ‘nirvana’, ‘bliss’,‘ l i b e r a t i o n ’ and ‘buddhahood’—and wewho are Living The Field would per -haps say that it is ‘realization of theZ e ro Point Field’. This is the first of aseries of articles exploring this extra-o rd i n a ry occurre n c e .

Enlightenment, or realization, isdescribed as a shift in conscious-ness when we realize the true

nature of the universe and of ourselves.Some realizations have been so power-ful—or perhaps they’ve been so well surrounded by self-serving myth—thatthey have started major world religionssuch as Buddhism, based on the experi-ences of Prince Gautama, who becamethe Buddha, or Islam, founded by theprophet Mohammed. As the Son of God,Jesus presumably did not need to becomeenlightened as he had a genetic advantageover the rest of us.

But most realizations are not preludesto cataclysmic events. Instead, ordinarymen and women who claim to be realizedmay carry on with their everyday lives in private, while others may gather ‘disciples’ around them.

Enlightenment is an entirely subjec-tive phenomenon and, ultimately, is amatter of faith for those around the ‘real-ized’ person—either they believe the per-son truly is realized or they don’t, basedusually on the things the ‘realized’ personsays or does.

Dr Fred Travis, director of the EEG[electroencephalography] Laboratory atthe Maharishi University of Management,has come the closest to providing objec-tive scientific data on the realized state.He has captured the brainwave patterns of people who practice Maharishi MaheshYogi’s Transcendental Meditation duringstates of ‘transcendental consciousness’,which the Maharishi says is a ‘ground

state’ and a prelude to enlightenment.Their EEG tracings reveal greater frontallobe coherence, higher global alpha-wavepower and more efficient performancewhen doing complex cognitive activi-ties—in other words, their brains aremore efficient.1

These changes appear to continue during sleep. Dr Lynne Mason has foundthat those who have attained the ‘globalalpha’ state, as defined by the Maharishi,continue to demonstrate greater EEGcoherence while they sleep.2

The history of enlightenmentThe idea that our day-to-day experience is not an absolute reality is almost as old as the time when man was first able to think conceptually. These strangethoughts would have been part of an oraltradition for many hundreds of yearsbefore they were written down.

The Upanishads, mystical tracts of theHindu faith, are some of the earliestexamples of a written version of this phi-losophy, dating from nearly 1000 yearsbefore the Christian era.

But why would early man, consumedwith the problems of daily survival, havethese thoughts in the first place, especial-ly when they are so contrary to reality ashe saw it?

The Upanishads, for example, tell ofthere being only one thing in the universe,which is perfect. Everything we seearound us is merely a phantom express-ion of this one thing. These would bestrange thoughts indeed for a hunter–gatherer or a simple farmer.

Religions that sprang out of theMiddle East, such as Judaism, Christi-anity and Islam, were more dualistic,positing a God who was separate fromman, thus involving man in some struggleor discipline to join with his God. Onlythe mystical or esoteric aspects of thesereligions—such as the Jewish Kabbalahor the Sufis of Islam—offered a system-atic path to enlightenment, but only forthe select few or cognoscenti.

EnlightenmentLesson 21

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What is enlightenment?

LIVING THE FIELDBut whether the thinking is dualistic

or not, we do not know why ancient civi-lizations had these thoughts at all, andsearching the original texts doesn’t seemto offer a ready answer. Princeton psy-chology professor Julian Jaynes put for-ward a novel theory that early man—upto the time of the Ancient Greeks—con-stantly heard the voices of God. The voic-es were his rational, or left, brain ‘talking’to the right brain, a phenomenon thatfaded over time and is today experiencedonly by schizophrenics.

This theory, put forward in Jaynes’book The Origin of Consciousness in theBreakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Pen-guin Books, 1982), is still not the samething as enlightenment. Few ‘realized’people claim to hear God’s voice even if,in some instances, it is part of the processtowards enlightenment.

Some argue that the desire for enlight-enment is merely a movement away from unhappiness. Others say it is a flightfrom death—or, at least, from the fear ofdeath—and yet others hold that it givesmeaning to a meaningless world.

While it is true that some people proj-ect an antidote to their unhappiness ontothe amorphous concept of enlightenment,

it is not an idea that counters every ex-ample of the phenomenon nor does itmeet the richness of religious and spiritu-al desire and experience.

The many reasons for spiritual experi-ence, and our thirst for it, were researchedand documented by American psycholo-gist William James in his classic workThe Varieties of Religious Experience(Penguin Books, 1983), first published in1902. James argued that organized reli-gion can stifle man’s natural religiousyearnings, and that personal experience isthe only valid form of spirituality.

This conclusion seems to mirrorman’s religious experiences throughoutthe ages, so it is here that we begin ourquest.

What is enlightenment?The simple answer to this question is thatenlightenment is the realization that weare divine—but there seem to be twopaths to such a realization. Logic suggeststhat it must be one and the same experi-ence, if it exists at all, but with differentinterpretations.

One school, which could be classifiedas ‘the Advaita experience’, states thatthere is only one thing—God, conscious-


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At one with walking: a sudden realization described

The following is Tony Parsons’ own description1 of his realization.

“One day, I was walking across a park in a suburb of London. I noticed as I walked

that my mind was totally occupied with expectations about future events that might

or might not happen. I apparently made the choice to let go of these projections and

simply be with my walking. I noticed that each footstep was totally unique in feel and

pressure, and that it was there one moment and gone the next, never to be repeated

in the same way ever again.

“As all of this was happening, there was a transition from me watching my walking

to simply the presence of walking. What happened then is simply beyond description.

I can only inadequately say in words that total stillness and presence seemed to

descend over everything. All and everything became timeless and I no longer existed.

I vanished and there was no longer an experience.

“Oneness with all and everything was what happened. I can’t say I was ‘at one’

because ‘I’ had disappeared. I can only say that oneness with all and everything is

what happened, and an overwhelming love filled everything.”

1 Parsons T. As It Is. Carlsbad, CA: InnerDirections Publishing, 2000

ness or The One—of which we are a part,and it is only our delusional thinking thatmakes us believe that we are separate. If I were a realized being in the Advaita tradition, I would say that I am one withGod, that I am God.

The other major school, which wecould call ‘the God experience’, suggeststhat our separation from God is due to far more than our conceptual thinking,but is something that is real, and requirese ffort—intellectual, spiritual or evenphysical—before we can be one withGod.

The latter school presumes the exis-tence of God, while the former allows fora far wider definition that could incorpo-rate the laws of nature or consciousnesswithout losing its meaning.

On this basis, the Advaita experiencewould require no effort whatsoeverbecause, if we are already God, any effort to become that which we alreadyare would seem absurd. It is somethingthat even the Old Testament advocates inits stricture: “Be still and know that I amGod”.

In reality, the common features sharedby the two schools far outweigh any differences—both encourage meditation,purification, mind control, chanting andother spiritual practices to help you real-ize your true nature, or take you to God.

The contemporary spiritual teacherAndrew Cohen believes that enlighten-ment is a non-personal process of evolu-tion. This suggests that enlightenment ishardwired into our brain, and the realiza-tion that we are all one might be an essen-tial discovery if our planet is to surviveassaults from pollution and warfare.Cohen calls it ‘non-personal’ because,following the Advaita tradition, there isno one who needs to be realized becausea separate self is an illusion.

Getting thereThe Hindu religion defined four paths ofyoga for man to reach the divine: Rajay o ga, Karma yoga, Bhakti yoga a n dJnana yoga. The adept who follows thepath of mysticism and spiritual practice

would be a Raja yogi. The one whodevotes his life to selfless work, possiblyinvolving acts of charity, as did MotherTheresa, would be a Karma yogi. He whoseeks union through love would be aBhakti yogi, and the one who seeks itthrough philosophy is a Jnana yogi.

‘Yoga’ simply means ‘union’, but thisconcept implies separation, and space andtime; it also shapes the quest. And there’sanother problem—if you are consciouslyseeking union with the divine, then thereis a good chance you will find your version of it.

Quite a few realizations ‘just happen’,without any obvious effort or practice.Krishnamurti, the famous teacher andeducator, said he realized the unity of all experience as he was watching a roadworker digging a hole. In that moment, herealized that he was the observer, theworker, the spade and the road, as well asthe tree he was leaning against.

Krishnamurti was not exactly an‘ordinary’ person, of course. He had beenchosen as a young boy to head theTheosophical movement, and he hadthousands of followers even before hehad his roadside experience.

Perhaps a better example is offered byEnglishman Tony Parsons, who waswalking in a London park when he real-ized that there was no ‘Tony Parsons’,only the act of walking, and the unity ofall things (see box, page 6). He had neverthought about enlightenment before theexperience, and he had never meditated.For 40 years, he related his experience toonly a few friends, and carried on with his everyday working life. It has onlybeen in the last couple of years that he haswritten down his experience and attracteda small following.

This idea that enlightenment ‘justh a p p e n s ’ lies at the heart of ZenBuddhism, although this most ‘natural’of events seems to require meditating atdawn, being struck hard with a stick andpondering imponderable koans such as:‘What was your original face before youwere born?’ or ‘What is the sound of onehand clapping?’ These practices are


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LIVING THE FIELDdesigned to trick, or stop, conceptualthinking, which Zen Buddhism believesis the problem.

The Hindu sage Patanjali, who waswriting at around the time of Christ, saidin his yoga aphorisms that liberationcould be obtained by either birth, drugs,the power of words, the practice of aus-terities or by concentration (see boxbelow).

It is certainly true that, for many, thestate of enlightenment was attained onlyafter great struggle. The Hindu sage Sri

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) was said tohave reached enlightenment only after hethreatened to kill himself with a swordunless God revealed himself. RamanaMaharishi, one of the acknowledgedmodern masters of the Advaita tradition,reached enlightenment after deep medi-tation in isolation in a cave.

Yet, one of his successors, Sri Nisar-gadatta, said he was instantly realized themoment someone approached him whilehe was working in his tobacconist shop in Bombay and told him he was God.


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How to know God

Patanjali, the Hindu sage who lived around the time of Christ, wrote a series of sutras,

or aphorisms, about yoga and its disciplines that has become a classic commentary

on enlightenment and how to achieve it.

In 1953, the English writer Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda

collaborated on a new translation and interpretation of the sutras, which they called

How To Know God (Hollywood, CA: Vedanta Press, 1981).

What follows is taken from this classic text, and includes the disciplines required

for reaching enlightenment, according to Pa t a n j a l i :

◆ Meditation on the OM word: For Patanjali, OM (pronounced AUM) is the expres-

sion of ‘Ishwara’, or ‘the supreme being’, and is a word that should be repeated

during meditation

◆ Cultivate a calmness of mind: This can be achieved by “cultivating friendliness

toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indif-

ference toward the wicked”

◆ Use the breath: Equanimity can also be helped by controlling the breath in a

series of disciplines known as ‘pranayama’

◆ Meditate on the Inner Light or an illumined soul, a dream experience or deep

sleep, or a divine symbol: In these instructions, Patanjali encourages the use

of concepts of higher things to quiet the mind

◆ S a m a d hi: The previous instruction is important because a clear, quiet mind is like

a crystal that takes on the color of the thing nearest to it, so the mind cleared

of ‘thought-waves’ achieves sameness with the object of its concentration, a state

known as ‘samadhi’

◆ C o n c e n t r a t i o n: This can be developed through “austerity, study, and the dedica-

tion of the fruits of one’s work to God”. Isherwood is at pains to point out that

austerity is more a control of excess rather than the self-punishing rituals of holy

men.

Through concentration, we are able to overcome the obstacles to enlightenment—

ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and the desire to cling to life. Of these,

ignorance is the root obstacle, and can be interpreted as ‘a misunderstanding of

that which you truly are’.

Of the great religious leaders, Bud-dha’s enlightenment is perhaps the bestdocumented, and it came about when hemeditated under a bo tree after seeingsickness, infirmity and death for the firsttime, having left his privileged life in apalace.

Little is known of Christ’s enlighten-ment as orthodoxy maintains that he wasthe Son of God. However, there has beena great deal of speculation about his spiritual quest, and even the authorizedNew Testament talks about his time alonein the desert when he battled with temp-tations.

The older the story, the greater themythos surrounding it, it would seem.Turning to the contemporary spiritualleader Andrew Cohen, who was men-tioned earlier, we get a fresh, and clearer,insight about enlightenment.

Cohen, who was born in the US in1955, had received the ‘spiritual’ insightas a teenager that all of life was connect-ed and that there was no such thing asdeath. These thoughts receded as Cohenturned his attention towards trying tobecome a successful drummer, but theysuddenly resurfaced when, at the age of22, he heard about the teachings of anIndian sage called Poonja, or Poonjaji.Cohen met him in 1986 in Lucknow, andwas told that the only obstacle to realiza-tion is the thought that one is not alreadyrealized.

Cohen recalls the meeting. “He said tome, ‘You don’t have to make any effortto be free’. . . In that moment I had a deep and clear experience or glimpse ofwhat no effort means. A brief moment ofcomplete freedom . . . It is so simple, soobvious, and in fact, right here with us all the time.”

Following that auspicious initialmeeting, the relationship between Cohenand Poonja flourished initially, but was

to end bitterly and acrimoniously. Never-theless, whatever their differences, Cohenhas kept close to that first insight helearned from the guru, and still makesstatements such as:

“Enlightenment is not far away. Itdoes not need to take time. As long as youinsist that it must take time, then you arestill interested in protecting yourself.”

H o w e v e r, enlightenment is not as easy as Cohen first suggests. He goes onto state that it requires “tremendous sacri-fice” and that you have to “struggle andface your worst fears”. Essentially, it isnot a casual matter.

It is, quite literally, a matter of life anddeath or, as Krishnamurti once put it, youare in a house that is burning down, andyou must act quickly and decisively.

His namesake, Uppaluri GopalaKrishnamurti—or U.G., as he likes to becalled—takes a more radical approach.“People call me an enlightened man—Idetest that term. I discovered for myselfand by myself that there is no self to realize—that’s the realization I am talkingabout. It comes as a shattering blow.”

U.G. maintains that enlightenmentcannot be brought about through effort.“It just happens, and why it happens toone individual and not another, I don’tk n o w.” Ultimately, enlightenment isman’s natural state, and any endeavor tofind it takes him away from it.

In forthcoming lessons, we will beginto explore enlightenment through theexperiences of those who claim to haveattained it, and through the discoveries of the Zero Point Field.

Bryan Hubbard

1 Proceedings of the Science of

Consciousness conference, held in

Tucson, Arizona, in 2002

2 Sleep, 1997; 20: 102–10


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LIVING THE FIELD

The previous lesson was an intro d u c -tion to enlightenment. This lesson, andthose to follow, will look at the subjectin terms of individual instances ofenlightenment. To better understand the cultural and spiritual backdro p ,h o w e v e r, we will confine our re p o rts toWesterners who have claimed to bee n l i g h t e n e d . .

Jean Klein (1916–1998), a Frenchdoctor, claims to have been enlight-ened—or ‘totally illumined’, as his

small band of followers described it—inthe mid-1950s. Although his teachingsmaintained a Western attitude, and con-tinually used his own terms to describe

reality as he saw it, his philosophy can betraced back to the ancient, non-dualistictradition of Advaita.

Klein’s teachings stressed that there isonly ‘one thing’ in the universe, and thatthe concept of a self separate from aworld of things and other selves is an illusion. Our true nature is simply an‘ultimate awareness’ that is beyond spaceand time, thoughts and objects of percep-tion.

This also means that we are not whatwe think we are; there’s no individual orperson. “Ultimately there is no longer asubject who sees nor an object which isseen. There is only oneness,” he wrote inThe Ease of Being (Durham, NC: Acorn


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Achieving total illumination

Following the Klein way of self-discovery

Jean Klein’s teaching doesn’t involve a method or process, and enlightenment is

not a state you progress or evolve towards. Instead, Klein emphasized a ‘direct’

approach to understanding your true nature of oneness, which can come about only

when we realize that we are already ‘there’, and that all acts of trying, achieving,

becoming, finding and understanding take us away from our true nature.

As he said of any method of self-discovery: “All technique aims to still the mind.

But, in fact, it dulls the mind to fix it on an object. The mind loses its natural alertness

and subtleness. It is no longer an open mind.

“Meditation belongs to the unknowable. The point of sitting in meditation is only to

find the meditator. The more you look, the more you will be convinced that he cannot

be found. Fu n d a m e n t a l l y, you are nothing, but you are not aware of this and project

energy in seeking what you are.

“When, by self- e n q u i r y, you find out that the meditator does not exist, all activity

becomes pointless and you come to a state of non-attaining, an openness to the

u n k n o w a b l e . ”1

It appears that a ‘giving up’ is acquired, but it may be more subtle than that. It is

being at ease with pure perception: “If you let your attention go to your ear, you’ll

feel that it is constantly grasping. It is the same with the eye, the mind and all your

organs. Let the grasping go and you will find your whole body is spontaneously an

organ of sensitivity. The ear is merely a channel for this global sensation. It is not an

end in itself. What is heard is also felt, seen, smelled and touched. Your five senses,

intelligence and imagination are freed and come into play. You feel it as being com-

pletely expanded in space, without center or border. The ego, which is a contraction,

can find no hold in this presence, and anxiety, like and dislike dissolve”.1

1 Klein J. Who Am I? Element Books, 1988

LIVING THE FIELDPress, 1984).

Klein’s upbringing was privileged andcultured, but not in any way extraordi-nary. He studied music and medicine inVienna and Berlin, where he explored therelationship between thought and feelingon muscle function. He left Germany in1933, and spent World War II in Francesecretly helping thousands escape fromNazi Germany.

Despite qualifying as a doctor, he saidthat he felt a lack of fulfillment, whichfinally culminated in his departure forIndia in 1950. It was a strange decisionbecause he had no plans to find a gurubut, instead, left France with an openmind and no preconceptions.

He did, however, eventually meet upwith a spiritual teacher—although Kleinnever did know his full name. “MyMaster always pointed out to me duringour life together that all perceptions needan ultimate perceiver. The ultimate per-ceiver can never be the object of percep-tion. Once false identification with thebody is understood, we are led to the

question ‘Who am I?’—and the one whoasks is himself the vivid answer. Thesearcher is himself that which is sought,”Klein wrote in Neither This Nor That IAm (London: Watkins Books, 1981).

The message throughout his talks andbooks after his enlightenment was funda-mentally the same, though occasionallypresented in a slightly different way.

“You are primal awareness. Life isonly primal awareness. Between twothoughts or two perceptions you are. Youknow moments in your life when athought completely disappears intosilence, but still you are” (The Ease ofBeing), and “At first, you may experiencesilent awareness only after the dissolutionof perception, but later, you will be in thesilence in both the presence and absenceof objects” (ibid).

Klein lectured throughout Europe andthe US for 40 years following his enlight-enment, and he died in Santa Barbara,California, in February 1998 shortly aftera massive stroke.

Bryan Hubbard


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LIVING THE FIELD

We continue our exploration of enlight -enment with a review of the life andteachings of the Australian spiritualteacher Barry Long.

Barry Long (1926–2003) had adirect and honest approach to theproblems of life. His basic mis-

sion was to free man from his unhappi-ness, a goal that could be achieved onlyby first facing up to the fact that every-thing changes and everyone dies.

Long was his ‘own man’, and claimedno heritage or school of thought. His ownspiritual journey began in 1957, while hewas the editor of a national newspaper inAustralia. “The truth, the pure intelli-gence of the universe, began to enter mybody,” he was to write later.

About five years after this processbegan, he met a woman he described as a bhagavati, or God in woman’s form,and left his wife and children to travel toIndia with her. She soon left him, at

which time, he said he was in such painthat “I realized immortality. I passedthrough the level of death in the psycheand entered that realm of consciousnesswhere the bodies of man and woman areone with the nature of the earth.”

In 1966, he arrived in England, wherehe hoped to find a publisher for his spiri-tual writings. He was unsuccessful, butsecured a job as a subeditor on FleetStreet. Slowly attracting a group of fol-lowers, he gave his first public talks in1968. But it was not until 1977 that heformalized his teachings, holding regulartalks to small groups in his London home.

The Barry Long Foundation, estab-lished in 1985, organized his speakingengagements, which eventually took himaround the world, and published hisbooks and tapes. A year later, Barrymoved back to his native Australia, wherehe remained until his death.

Over the years, his teaching approachevolved, although the message was


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Be still and know the divine

Although Barry Long’s teachings owe nothing to any tradition, he likened his

approach to that of Krishnamurti, but felt that the Indian sage did not have an

understanding of the Western mind.

E s s e n t i a l l y, Long sought to free man from his unhappiness, which he defined as

the normal human condition of being happy one day, and unhappy the next.

To go beyond our emotional rollercoaster, we must get in touch with the stillness

of our being, which can be achieved only by putting right all the dishonest ways

in which we live and relate to others.

He offers no techniques or spiritual practices other than stilling the mind through

meditation to ultimately be able to see life for what it is—an ever-changing continuum.

He also stated that sexual union, done consciously and from a sense of love rather

than lust, could also aid spiritual progress.

Man is unhappy because he tries to avoid the facts of life—nothing is permanent,

and everyone will die, to name but two. We don’t need to retreat to an ashram to

realize our true nature, as ordinary daily life is our very own God-designed spiritual

p r a c t i c e .

If we can face these facts of life without expectation, sadness or any other emo-

tion, then our minds may finally get the point, become still and realize that each of

us is an individual and divine expression of the eternal ‘I’.

Through pain to immortality

LIVING THE FIELDalways the same. “I speak only of truth,life, love, death and God”—because, forhim, they were essentially the same thing.

“There is only one truth. It is beingwhere you are. And where you are iswhere your body is. You are life itself,personified on Earth. Life is goodbecause life is true.”

He often described himself as a writer,and he left behind an impressive body of work, which offered guidance on arange of subjects, including meditation,death, the raising of children and love-making. Perhaps his most impressive, yetinaccessible, book is The Origins of Manand the Universe: The Myth That Came toLife, originally published by Routledge in 1984, but now published by BarryLong Books, the Foundation’s publishingarm. It endeavors to trace the mythicalbeginnings of man on Earth, and wherehis evolution will take him.

The extraordinary claims made in thebook were typical of Barry Long. Hedescribed himself as ‘Master of the West’,among other things, and many mistookthis direct approach for bombast andboasting. But those who were close tohim describe another side that was caringand attentive, and he was always quietlyhelping others.

He developed prostate cancer, and thecourse of the disease slowly weakenedhim to a point where he was unable tocarry out any further public speaking. He died in December 2003.

As one commentator said, Barry Long always put himself on the line—afitting testament to a man with a directapproach to spirituality.

Bryan Hubbard


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LIVING THE FIELD

T h e re are many approaches to enlight -enment, but none is more idiosyncraticthan that of the philosopher/teacherDouglas Hard i n g .

Douglas Harding (born 1909) has asimple message for the world: hedoesn’t have a head and neither

do you. This Zen-like remark is, for him,literal truth, and one that he endeavors todemonstrate through a series of experi-ments for anyone who is deluded enoughto believe he has a head.

Harding’s headless realization cameto him suddenly in 1943, having spentmonths absorbed in the question: Who am I? He was walking in the Himalayaswhen suddenly, he says: “I forgot whoand what I was, my name, manhood, ani-malhood, all that could be called mine. Itwas as if I had been born that instant,

brand new, mindless, innocent of allmemories. There existed only the Now,that present moment and what was clear-ly given in it. To look was enough.

“And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair ofbrown shoes, khaki sleeves terminatingsideways in a pair of pink hands, and akhaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainlynot a head. It took me no time at all tonotice that this nothing, this hole where ahead should have been was no ordinaryvacancy, no mere nothing. On the con-trary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothingthat found room for everything . . . I hadlost a head and gained a world.”

But while this headless state could beviewed simply as a metaphor for selfless,universal consciousness, it is—for


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How to prove you don’t have a head

Douglas Harding has devised some tests for you to demonstrate to yourself that

you don’t have a head. In this one, you need four friends, one of whom reads out

the instructions while the others comply with them. You need a large piece of card

with a head-sized hole cut out, and a mirror about the same size as the card.

◆ First, hold the card at arm’s length, and note how empty, imperishable and time-

less the hole is. Then, see how perfectly filled the hole is—perhaps with the

curtains opposite, and your hands and feet. But you’ll also note that there are

limitations: it’s bounded by the card and quite small; it’s over there and not here

where you are; and it’s unconscious.

◆ Now slowly, and with total attention, bring the card towards you, as if you’re going

to wear the hole like a mask. Notice when:

❖ the card vanishes and the space in it explodes into infinity

❖ the space is no longer distant, but right where you are

❖ the space you were looking at becomes the space you are looking through.

◆ Still ‘wearing’ the card, look at your friends—and realize that only you are seeing

without limitation, and that they still looking through their cards. But perhaps

that’s just subjective delusion—after all, you’re wearing the card, too.

◆ So, keeping the card on your face, hold the mirror at arm’s length in your other

hand, and see in the reflection that you look like all of your friends.

How can it be that these two incompatible versions of you coexist? They don’t. The

‘real’ you is both alone and everything.

From To Be and Not To Be, That Is The Answer (London: Watkins Books, 2002)

Headless in the Himalayas

LIVING THE FIELDHarding—a physical fact. He believes wehave deluded ourselves over time that wehave a head.

There are several objections to hisapproach: 1 If I did not have a head, I would not be

able to see anything, and I’d be dead 2 I can see my head in a mirror 3 I can feel my head (it has its own sen-

sations, and I can touch it with myhands)

4 I just know I have a head.In response, Harding says: 1 This is an inference, not a direct per-

ception2 You have learned to recognize your

head in a mirror. Very young childrenoften think their reflection is that ofanother child. Besides, you see thereflection the same way as you seeanything else—as an object that existsin the vast emptiness that has itssource . . . where?

3 Yes, you can feel it, but you see itwithout an edge, without limit, theone great window

4 You think you know you have a head,but it’s not a direct perception, and ayoung child does not know he has ahead, even if he can ‘see’ it.

It’s interesting to note that Harding hasupdated and expanded his original bookOn Having No Head, and called it O nHaving No Head: A Contribution to Zenin the West (Arkana, 1986). His insightcertainly reads like one of those wonder-ful Zen koans that you either ‘get’ sponta-neously and immediately, or you justnever ‘get’ at all.

H a r d i n g ’s continued emphasis onproving the physical reality of his realiz-ation seems to detract from its essentialmessage—that consciousness is not cen-tered in a self, but that we are all a part of consciousness.

Bryan Hubbard


16

LIVING THE FIELD

One of the most enigmatic of spiritualteachers was G.I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949), whose legacy lives on to thisd a y.

Man is asleep. In fact, he sleep-walks his way through life and,as such, is no better than a

machine. This is the central message ofone of the most perplexing of spiritualteachers, G.I. Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff was a controversial figureduring his own lifetime and, although hisstrange teachings have influenced manysince his death in Paris in 1949, no onehas been able to fully explain his philoso-phy or even who he was.

G u r d j i e ff was born in 1866 inArmenia, and his semi-autobiographicalMeetings with Remarkable Men (NewYork: Dutton, 1969) suggests that hisapproach encompasses various spiritual

traditions, but also experimental science.Gurdjieff thus represented a fusion ofWestern science and Eastern mysticism.

Gurdjieff began his spiritual teachingin 1912 in Russia. Two years later, he wasjoined by the philosopher P.D. Ouspen-sky, whose time with Gurdjieff is relatedin the book In Search of the Miraculous(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949). Gur-djieff’s own writings were deliberatelyobscure, if not impenetrable. Perhaps themost accessible is Beelzebub’s Tales to hisGrandson (New York: Dutton, 1978).

Ouspensky gives a good account ofG u r d j i e ff’s approach to his students,which was, in turn, frightening, magical,kind and mysterious. It seems Gurdjieffwas endeavoring to shock his pupils fromtheir metaphysical slumbers.

There are two important strands toGurdjieff’s teachings: sleeping man (seebox below), and man’s place in the uni-


17

How to wake up

Gurdjieff developed a series of exercises to help man ‘wake up’. As sleepwalkers,

or automata, we are a bundle of ‘I’s—in fact, there could be thousands of these

‘I’s within us, and each is unaware of the others. Each ‘I’ surfaces depending on the

stimulus, but the overall result is a disconnected personality that may at one moment

be happy, the next angry, then irritable, and so on.

Our task is to discover the ‘real I’, which can be done only through hard spiritual

and physical work. One example is the series of conscious ‘movements’ developed

by Gurdjieff. He also forced students to do hard labor at his center, including long

days of digging.

But perhaps the most significant of Gurdjieff’s exercises was ‘self- o b s e r v a t i o n ’ .

This involves seeing oneself from the outside, and objectively. As a result, we become

consciously aware of walking down the street, how we move our arms, how our feet

fall, what we do with our hands, and so on. We are also conscious of our thoughts

and emotions.

In introducing self-observation, Gurdjieff challenged his students to ‘stay awake’

for even a few minutes before falling asleep again—losing that self- a w a r e n e s s .

S e l f-observation can be carried out anywhere and at any time. We can do it

washing the dishes, preparing a meal or eating it, watching TV or reading a book.

It is surprisingly difficult to do for any length of time although, like any exercise, it

gets easier the more you practice, and you will eventually be able to self-observe for

longer and longer periods.

Man is a sleepwalker

LIVING THE FIELDverse, which includes some very strangeideas concerning cosmology.

Man can wake up only through rigor-ous self-observation, an often arduousprocess that will eventually end in therealization of the ‘real I’. Only then canman take his rightful place in the hier-archy of the universe. That place is farfrom being at the top, however—in fact,man is an important cog in the lowerorders of the universe.

G u r d j i e ff called his teaching theFourth Way, as distinct from the threeways that he said already existed, andwhich are: the Way of the Fakir; the Wayof the Monk; and the Way of the Yogi.The Fourth Way was a fusion of thesethree, which represent the intellectual,emotional and physical, respectively.Most men predominantly live in just one of these aspects, but the trick is tobecome adept in all three.

Gurdjieff’s legacy is as much to dowith the man as the teaching. Many of his students reported extraordinary hap-

penings around him. Ouspensky saidGurdjieff could transform his face untilhe was unrecognizable, and others said hehad ‘cured’ devastating internal injuriesthat he had suffered from a terrible carcrash.

Although his teachings were deliber-ately obscure, Gurdjieff attracted manyfollowers and students who carried on his work. One of these was Jeanne deSalzmann, who set up Gurdjieff centers inParis, New York, London and Caracasafter his death.

The work at the centers is more acces-sible than what was taught directly byGurdjieff, and much is made of the con-scious ‘movements’ he developed as partof the Fourth Way. Students also go outinto the community, and particularemphasis is placed on working with children.

Nevertheless, the centers remain trueto Gurdjieff’s central idea that man mustwake up if he is truly to become a man.

Bryan Hubbard


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LIVING THE FIELD

Tony Parsons is totally uncompro m i s -ing in his teaching that there is only onething, and that the idea of a ‘you’ t ry i n gto do things in the world is illusory.

There is only one thing, and the idea that there is a ‘me’ and ‘you’separate from each other is an

illusion. This simple philosophy, knownin the Indian spiritual tradition asAdvaita, is the constant theme of theteaching of Tony Parsons.

Parsons was born in London in 1933,and had a sudden realization of ‘oneness’while he walking through a park when he was 20. This ‘open secret’, as he calledit, was something that he shared only with those friends whom he felt wereready to hear it. Otherwise, he carried onworking as a publisher.

In 1996, at age 63, he ‘went public’through a series of lectures and a self-

published book, The Open Secret. Thiswas followed in 2000 with As It Is and, in2003, with All There Is, comprising dia-logues and lectures. All three books arepublished by Open Secret Publishing inShaftesbury, Dorset.

Parsons’ approach is Zen-like—youeither ‘get it’ or you don’t. No effort onyour part is needed because you are ‘it’already. As he writes: “All there is is this. Oneness is . . . whatever is apparent-ly happening . . . reading these words,breathing, blood coursing through thebody, sounds being heard, thoughts com-ing and going and feelings in the body—the sense of sitting in a chair, maybe.Here is oneness being aliveness as this.

“No effort is needed for that alivenessto be. Nobody is doing aliveness. Is any-body doing sitting in a chair? Thinking isoneness thinking ‘I don’t get where this is going’, or ‘This is too simple’. All is


19

The dream of individuality

There’s no ‘how to’ in Tony Parsons’ approach, other than to realize that there is no

individual to become realized. Meditation, stilling the mind and other disciplines are

also redundant because Parsons would ask who is doing the meditating. For him, it

is oneness meditating in order to reach oneness.

So, with no technique or path to follow in Parsons’ approach, we take instead a

section from his book As It Is ( S h a f t e s b u r y, Dorset: Open Secret Publishing, 2000).

“ For me, the first realization of enlightenment, or of the nature of who I really am,

is not something that can be expressed. What happened cannot even be called an

experience, because the separate experiencer needed to be absent for it to emerge

. . . One of the things I came to see is that enlightenment only becomes available

when it has been accepted that it cannot be achieved.

“Doctrines, processes and progressive paths that seek enlightenment only exacer-

bate the problem they address by reinforcing the idea that the self can find some-

thing that it presumes it has lost. It is that very effort . . . that continuously recreates

the illusion of separation from oneness. This is the veil that we believe exists. It is the

dream of individuality.

“The only likely effect of extreme effort to become ‘that which I already am’ is that

eventually I will drop to the ground exhausted, and let go. In that letting go, another

possibility may arise.

“Life is not a task. There is absolutely nothing to attain except the realization that

there is absolutely nothing to attain.”

The ‘isness’ of oneness

LIVING THE FIELDsimply aliveness, oneness, being. It can-not be taught or achieved. Who is apartfrom being to achieve being? Who canlose or gain this when this is all there is?Resisting oneness is oneness resisting.Seeking oneness is oneness seekingitself.”

As such, he has little time for gurusand practices that promise enlightenmentas a wonderful, fulfilled place. “Thisteaching reinforces the illusion that thereis such a thing as an individual who has afree will and the choice to become . . . Butthere is no person that becomes enlight-ened. No-one awakens. Awakening is theabsence of the illusion of individuality . . . When the dream seeker is no more,it is seen (by no-one) that there is nothingto seek and no-one to become liberated.”

Realization, therefore, is awakeningto the reality of non-individuality. “Therealization that the dream seeker is alsooneness is liberation, the uncaused,impersonal, silent stillness which is thecelebration of unconditional love. This isall there is.”

Taking this philosophy to its logicalconclusion, it would appear there is nothing to do or, more precisely, nothingthat needs doing. There is nowhere to go,nothing to achieve, because there is justone thing anyway. The true nature of thisoneness, as we can perceive it, is purespace. “Enlightenment has nothing to dowith you. It has nothing to do with per-sonal change. Get the sense of there beingno-one sitting there. Get the sense that all there is is space, that all you are isspace—just space, in which things appar-ently happen. When that begins to takeo v e r, then somehow the self dropsaway—it’s only a mirage anyway—andall that is left is the knowing of what is.”

P a r s o n s ’ direct, and extreme,approach resonates with many. It is aview that is also close to the Zero Pointphilosophy (although that idea acknowl-edges that the individual is an expressionof oneness and a necessary part of theprocess, a view with which Parsons mightnot agree).

Bryan Hubbard


20

LIVING THE FIELD

Toni Packer is one of just a handful of women who have become spiritual‘ g u rus’. Perhaps because she is comingf rom a Zen tradition, her teaching is anon-teaching that says little.

Toni Packer is an unusual spiritualteacher. Not only is she among thefew female ‘gurus’ in an arena

dominated by men, she is also one whoclaims no authority—she freely admitsthat she may be wrong—although shecomes from a rich Zen tradition.

The main thrust of her teaching is toclearly see and hear without distraction,to listen “to all that is going on, inside andout, without judgment”.

It may be Zen-like, but it is also verysimilar to the teachings of Krishnamurti,who often spoke of watchful waitingwithout expectation. And, like Krishna-

murti, Packer maintains that truth cannotbe taught, nor can it be reached by themind, or by rituals or practice.

Packer was born a Jew in Germany in 1927, but so fearful were her parents of the Nazis that they had their childrenbaptized as Lutherans.

Thus, her family survived in NaziGermany throughout the war, and emi-grated to Switzerland only at the end, in1945. While there, she met an Americanstudent with whom she went to live in theUS in 1951. In 1965, after raising anadopted son, Packer discovered T h eThree Pillars of Zen (Bantam Doubleday,1989) by American Zen Buddhist PhilipKapleau. It was the first book on ZenBuddhism to be written by a Westerner.

Kapleau returned to the US to set uphis own Zen center in Rochester, upstateNew York, close to Packer’s home.


21

How to become enlightened: First, do nothing

As the ‘mind’ is that which sees itself as separate, any movement of the mind merely

strengthens its sense of separation.

Enlightenment—to a troubled, fearful or sad mind—is the opposite of trouble, fear

or sadness and, therefore, merely a projection from that state. Thus, enlightenment is

not what you think it is because it is beyond thought.

The obvious answer is to ‘stop’ the mind, possibly through meditation or some

spiritual discipline. But even ‘stopping’ is a concept of the mind. It is also based on

reward—if I stop thinking, I shall be rewarded with enlightenment. But this is also a

movement of the mind, and strengthens the sense of separation, as does the idea:

‘I am enlightened, and you’re not’.

These subtle, and vital, arguments lie at the heart of Toni Packer’s teaching. In

one of her books, Packer writes: “This ‘me’, this ‘self, this ‘I’, is the accretion of all

our past experiences and the memory traces these have left in the brain. It is a

bundle of ideas, images and memories we have accumulated about ourselves: images

of what we are; what we are not; what we should or should not be; what we want

to become.

“An untiring struggle goes on to live up to the images we have of ourselves, no

matter how painful the conflict that arises between the way we want to see ourselves

and the way we actually are at any one instant. This perpetual dwelling in images, with

its inherent struggles and conflict, keeps us out of touch with the actual flow of life

instant by instant, and divides and separates us from one another. ”1

1 Packer T. Seeing Without Knowing. Springwater Center, 1995

A Zen way past the mind

LIVING THE FIELDPacker joined the center, where sheproved to be a ‘Zen natural’, and soonstarted teaching lessons when Kapleauwas away.

Kapleau wanted her to take over thecenter when he retired, but she was begin-ning to have problems with Zen. The textswere deliberately inaccessible, and manyof the practices—the bowing, chanting,the hitting stick used to keep meditators‘awake’, and the different outfits that areworn—seemed unnecessary and point-less.

Eventually, she set up her own center,The Springwater Center in New YorkState, where she still practices, and whichattracts hundreds of students all the yearround. Her teaching, if it can be sodescribed, can be summarized by the following, extracted from her bookSeeing Without Knowing ( S p r i n g w a t e rCenter, 1995):

“Do we realize that we do not attendmost of the time—that we are lostunawares in memories, thoughts, reac-tions, dialogues and endless personal

problems? Can we wake up from thissleeping and dreaming? Can we face our-selves as we are, and everyone and everything as it actually is with open eyes and ears—with an unclouded, com-passionate heart and mind?”

In other words, can we wake to theurgency of the moment? Packer antici-pates the expected response that it is‘impossible’ to live to that level of inten-sity all the time. But, she says, the enquiryis whether it is possible to wake up. It’snot a demand to do so.

This comes close to the subtlety ofKrishnamurti’s message. If we say thatwe should wake up because there’s awonderful reward at the end, we’re backin the old mind trap of effort and reward,or action with a purpose.

But, by just posing the question, themind may be altered to one of watchfulwaiting—and one that is without hope ofa reward. The mind stops as part of anatural process rather than as a result of acontrolling technique.

Bryan Hubbard


22

LIVING THE FIELD

In the previous lesson, we looked at thelife and teachings of Toni Packer. Itseems appropriate, there f o re, to nowlook at the life of her teacher, PhilipKapleau, an American who did much tobring Zen Buddhism to the We s t .

Following on from D.T. Suzuki,whose lectures he attended while at Columbia University in 1951,

Philip Kapleau (1912–2004) was centralto bringing Zen Buddhism to the West,but with a more Eastern flavor.

This is not so surprising as Kapleaustudied Zen at several monasteries inJapan, including three years under HaradaRoshi and a further three years withYasutani Roshi. Yasutani gave Kapleauhis koan (a paradoxical anecdote or riddlethat has no solution), with which he wres-tled until he attained kensho, the Zen termfor enlightenment.

In his seminal work Three Pillars ofZ e n (Harper & Row, 1967), Kapleaurecalls the moment. “’The universe isOne,’ Yasutani Roshi began, each wordtearing into my mind like a bullet. All at once, the roshi, the room, every singlething disappeared in a dazzling stream ofillumination and I felt myself bathed in adelicious, unspeakable delight . . . For afleeting eternity I was alone—I alone was. . . Then the roshi swam into view. Oureyes met and flowed into each other, andwe burst out laughing.”

He stayed with Yasutani until 1961and was finally ordained a monk. Hereturned to the US in 1965 and, a yearl a t e r, founded the Zen Center inRochester, New York. The center attract-ed many students, including Toni Packer.He semi-retired from the center in 1987,at the age of 75, and died there in 2004after suffering from Parkinson’s.


23

Beating the mind to achieve kensho

Zen’s main objective is to rid us of our conceptual mind. The Zen belief—as in

A d v a i t a of India and the Zero Point Field—we delude ourselves that each of us is a

separate, unique individual. The false ‘I’ strengthens our belief in separation, as does

any attempt to either enhance it—through gaining power or authority—or, paradoxi-

c a l l y, weaken it through meditation or attempts at enlightenment. This is because,

either way, it’s the conceptual mind seeking its reward.

Zen tries to tackle the problem in a different way. Invariably, a student is given a

meaningless koan such as ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ or ‘What was

your face before you were born?’, with which he must wrestle until he ‘gets it’

(reaching the stage of knowing there is nothing to get and no one to get it).

A Zen student will meditate upon his given koan in lengthy sessions of meditation,

or z a z e n. It can feel like a Zen boot camp, with the student rising at three in the

morning, eating basic food, sitting uncomfortably for hours in one position, and

sometimes being hit with a stick to bring his attention back to the koan.

Only the teacher, or r o s h i, can determine if you do really ‘get it’, which he will do

in a private session with the student. If, and when, the student displays the right

signs, he will be invited to stay on to deepen his enlightened state.

It’s an approach that is not for everyone. Some students have railed against the

strict discipline, the bad food, the freezing conditions, or all three. It is a series of

practices that have been adopted by some of the more controversial Western tech-

niques involving sleep deprivation and psychological bullying.

The riddle of life

LIVING THE FIELDKapleau tried to reinstate the tradition

and disciplines of Zen that Suzuki’s inter-pretation had left behind. Suzuki inter-preted Zen by concentrating on non-dual-ity and absolute nothingness, without itstraditional cultural and moral context.

For Kapleau, Zen’s three pillars arethe precepts, or philosophy, of the prac-tice of meditation, or zazen, and of satorior kensho, or enlightenment, which hesaw as a deepening process.

“Some enlightened people have per-ceived the truth that all life in its essen-tial nature is indivisible, but because theyhaven’t yet purged themselves of theirdelusive feelings and propensities, theroots of which are embedded deeply inthe unconscious, they cannot act in ac-cordance with their inner vision,” hewrote in Three Pillars.

The Western experience of Zen hasnot always been a happy one. Suzuki’s‘ p u r e ’ version was highly fashionable and attracted many artists of the BeatGeneration, including writer Jack Ker-

ouac, poet Allen Ginsberg and composerJohn Cage. But it was also terribly abusedby some Zen teachers in America. Sexualand financial scandals were rife at a num-ber of Zen centers scattered across theUS, involving teachers who had misusedtheir authority and power to elicit sexualand financial favors.

Kapleau, however, never abused hisposition with any of his students.Nevertheless some of his students,including Toni Packer, felt that hisemphasis on ceremony and tradition tookprecedence over understanding andenlightenment.

The fundamental problem of Zen inthe West lies in authority, or ‘transmis-sion’. Kapleau believed that Zen teacherswho had been ordained by their teacherkept alive the tradition of Zen, and werethe living representatives of the Buddhahimself. For some, this could sounduncomfortably like the Roman Catholictradition and the papacy.

Bryan Hubbard


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LIVING THE FIELD

A n d rew Cohen is one of the ‘new gener -a t i o n ’ of spiritual teachers, and hasquickly established a significant fol-lowing. Perhaps his major contributionto the debate over consciousness is that enlightenment is an evolutionaryp ro c e s s .

Andrew Cohen (1955–) doesn’tquite fit the standard Identikitpicture of an enlightened master.

For one thing, he’s a youngish, urbaneAmerican with a ready smile, and hisstyle is unassuming. Perhaps because ofhis ‘guru-next-door’ persona, Andrew has attracted a large following in both theUK and the US, where he’s based.

He is a native New Yorker, and hesays he had an unhappy childhood. Hisfather died when he was 15 and, even tothis day, his mother, Luna Tarlo, insists

his enlightenment is nothing more thanself-delusion and narcissism.

Andrew claims to have had an earlyspiritual experience—when he realizedthat everything was one—but this wasforgotten in favor of a career as a rock-music drummer.

By the time he was 22, he acceptedthat the world of rock music was not forhim—so, instead, he dedicated himself to rediscovering his early realization.This took him on a global odyssey thatembraced Sufi and Zen masters, Krishna-murti and vipassana meditation, before hediscovered H.W.L. Poonja in 1986.Andrew quickly became Poonja’sfavorite student, and Poonja’s Advaitateaching reinforced his earlier realizationof the oneness of life.

There are varying accounts as to whathappened next. Some maintain there was


25

Enlightenment is easy

For most spiritual teachers, it’s enough to be enlightened, and to realize the

Oneness of all life. For Andrew Cohen, manifesting that realization in our behavior,

actions and words is what really counts.

So, if enlightenment is as easy as he claims it is, why haven’t more of us achieved

it? It’s because we are wedded to our egos and to the idea of separateness. “When

you cease to be infatuated with yourself as being a separate entity, compulsively

preoccupied with problems and ambitions, then you will realize lovingness,” he tells

us in his major book, Enlightenment is a Secret (1991).

Love is the source of enlightenment, and true love is impersonal. “It is impersonal

love alone that reveals the perspective that is needed to see things as they are,”

he says.

But most of us don’t want to see things as they really are. Instead, we like to busy

ourselves with our self-created problems. “If you’re not ready to struggle and face

your worst fears, then you have no business seeking for enlightenment in the first

place,” Andrew maintains. “A person who is not serious feels that they have all the

time in the world.”

But having come to a point of spiritual crisis, enlightenment can happen instanta-

n e o u s l y. “It does not need to take time. As long as you insist that it must take time,

then you are still interested in protecting yourself,” says Andrew.

That, for Andrew, is the secret of enlightenment. It’s not difficult, and it’s not only

for the very few. It is, in fact, part of our evolutionary inheritance—although, paradox-

ically perhaps, it is ultimately an impersonal one.

The guru next door

LIVING THE FIELDa major falling-out, but the end result wascertainly that Andrew went his own wayand developed his own teaching.

One major disagreement is said tohave been about enlightenment itself. ForAndrew, enlightenment is just the begin-ning, and it needs to be manifested ineveryday life and behavior. A profoundinsight, on its own, isn’t enough.

The parting of the ways led Andrew tohis later teaching of evolutionary enlight-enment, which holds that enlightenment,properly manifested, can give evolutionitself a jolt, and propel mankind to thenext stage of development.

As he puts it: “For most people, non-duality is just an inner experience, aninner recognition that ultimately there isonly One. But in evolutionary enlighten-ment, the whole purpose is to destroyduality in the material world, using one’sown body, mind and soul. I’m speakingabout going beyond the personal, about adynamic communion in which the auton-omy of the individual is in no way lost,but the ego or the attachment to the sepa-rate self sense is perfectly destroyed.”

It’s not clear how evolutionary en-lightenment is any different from thework of other enlightened beings whohave gone out into the world to teach themessage of Oneness. After all, if theretruly is only One, what more need bedone?

Andrew’s approach is direct, and hesometimes uses strong language. Poonjawas a liar, and other teachers such asKrishnamurti failed. Why? Because theywere unable to live up to the truth theyhad realized of non-duality. It is certainlythe case that some ‘enlightened’ teachershave been womanizers or alcoholics, butto judge them as failures seems a strongclaim, and one that places the accuser ona higher level.

These issues are regularly explored in What Is Enlightenment?, a magazinethat Andrew helped found, as well as inhis books, such as Enlightenment is aSecret (Corte Madera, CA & MokshaFoundation, 1991) and Autobiography ofan Aw a k e n i n g (Corte Madera, CA &Moksha Moksha Foundation, 1992).

Bryan Hubbard


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LIVING THE FIELD

Ram Dass is an explorer of human con -sciousness—first as a psychologist,then by experimenting with LSD withTimothy Leary and, finally, as an inter -p reter of the Hindu tradition.

Ram Dass (1931–) is a throwbackto the Sixties, and many still iden-tify him as a cult figure from an

era of drug experimentation and theembracing of Eastern religion. In truth, he is much more interesting than that, andhe continues to be a pioneer of humanconsciousness, even after a stroke has lefthim in a wheelchair and, for a long time,unable to speak.

He makes few claims for himself—hesays he is not enlightened, nor is he any-one’s guru—but he is a wonderful inter-preter of the rich traditions of Hinduism,

and has made them accessible to theWest.

His career seemed to be set on a fairlyorthodox path after gaining a doctorate inpsychology from Stanford University. AsRichard Alpert, he coauthored a standardwork on childhood psychology while alecturer at Harvard.

But this approach was abandonedwhen he met Timothy Leary, who wasalso at Harvard. With Leary, Alpert start-ed experimenting with LSD in 1961, butthe university was quick to disapprove ofhis new line of research and threw himout two years later.

In 1967, he traveled to India where hemet his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, andassumed the name of Ram Dass, whichmeans ‘servant of God’.

Although immersed in the Hinduism


27

Lending money to a saint

Ram Dass’ teaching has been by example rather than with words, voluminous

though the latter have been. He has always maintained that he is neither a guru nor

enlightened, and his many books have been written as an Everyman on a spiritual

o d y s s e y.

His life has also been a celebration of his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, who died in

1973. Although Maharajji, as he was affectionately known, came from a Hindu trad-

ition, he claimed no specific method and no particular philosophy. As he said: “It’s

better to see God in everything than to try and figure it out”.

There are plenty of other Maharajji comments in a similar vein, such as “When

you loan money to a saint, don’t expect to get it back”, and “See all women as

mothers, serve them as your mother. When you see the entire world as your mother,

the ego falls away”.

Some of his sayings display the humor that has been the hallmark of Ram Dass’

own teachings. One typical example is Ram Dass’ description of a retreat he was on,

where he was doing z a z e n (Zen Buddhist meditation) on the koan: ‘How do you know

your Buddha-nature through the sound of a cricket?’

Ram Dass takes up the story. “So all the time we were sitting there ‘being empty’,

I was of course planning my answer, because I didn’t want to make a fool of myself

. . . when I went in to see Sasaki Roshi, I cupped my hand to my ear like Milarepa

listening to the sounds of the universe. I figured I’m a Jewish Hindu in a Catholic

m o n a s t e r y, so I’ll give him a Tibetan answer to a Japanese koan. I was really just

delighted with my own cuteness. And he looked at me and rang his bell and said,

‘Sixty per cent!’”

The hippie Hindu

LIVING THE FIELDof his guru, Ram Dass has neverthelessexperimented with a wide range of spiri-tual practices—from devotional yoga,Zen Buddhism and karma yoga to Sufismand Jewish studies.

His best-known book is Be Here Now(New York: Crown Publishing, 1971),which has sold over a million copies. Itput him on the map, and could have madehim a millionaire in the process, but RamDass, as a demonstration of the messageof his guru to “love everyone, feed peopleand see God everywhere”, gave away allof the book’s proceeds to groups that fedthe starving in Africa.

Since then, he has written a range ofbooks, and his recent output suggests thathe is not losing his powers. In 2001, hewrote his exploration of ageing, Still Here(New York: Riverhead Books), followedby Paths To God (New York: Harmony

Books, 2004), his commentaries onHinduism and its holy book, theBhagavad Gita.

Ram Dass’ later output is all the moreremarkable, given the stroke he sufferedin 1997 that left him with aphasia (loss of the ability to speak or to understandspeech) and partial paralysis. His speechhas been restored with the help of a ther-apist, but he is still confined to a wheel-chair.

Over the years, he has set up andhelped to fund several charitable founda-tions providing help for people who aredying, and for those in prison.

While Ram Dass may not be enlight-ened, he has certainly ‘walked the talk’,and made the world a better place for the many who have been touched by hiscaring and compassion.

Bryan Hubbard


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LIVING THE FIELD

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) wasthe best-known ‘non-guru ’ of the 20thc e n t u ry. He wanted no followers or dis -ciples; he denied any method or systemthat would give enlightenment, and hefamously disbanded an org a n i z a t i o nbuilt around him that would have givenhim instant fame, adulation and riches.

Instead, Krishnamurti spent his lifetravelling the globe on an incessantlecture tour while establishing sever-

al schools that were based on his teach-ings.

Although he had no personal possess-ions, he was fêted by the rich and famous,including such personages as Georg e

Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley andCharlie Chaplin, and many wealthy peo-ple looked after him while he was on histravels.

One of his most fruitful friendshipswas with theoretical physicist DavidBohm, who explored with him the natureof the self, the observer and the observed,in several illuminating dialogues.

Bohm described Krishnamurti’sapproach as scientific because he wouldapproach a subject with no expecta-tions—as if it had been the first time hehad thought about such things.

K r i s h n a m u r t i ’s life is almost asextraordinary as his teachings. He was theeighth child of a Brahmin family, born


29

Thought is Time

Krishnamurti’s ‘enlightenment’ occurred while watching a workman digging up a

road. Suddenly, in that moment, he said he realized that he was the workman and

the person watching, as well as the observer, the road and the spade.

From that came one of the central themes of his approach—that there’s no

difference between the observer and the observed. In other words, the ‘observer’ was

a fiction because it was no more than an assemblage of thoughts and past hurts,

or ‘the past’, as Krishnamurti often described it.

Man’s problem is that this past is forever trying to meet the challenge of the

present, so something that is dead and limited endeavors to grasp something that

is unfathomable, limitless and constantly in flux—which, of course, is impossible.

It’s far better to simply observe this dead past that we call ‘me’, and watch its

movements. In this choiceless awareness, this false self will evaporate and be the

fiction that it truly is anyway.

Instead of paraphrasing his thoughts, here’s what Krishnamurti himself has said.

“Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are

inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our

action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the

past. Thought is ever limited, and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There

is no psychological evolution.

“When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the

division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the

experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then

only is there pure observation, which is insight without any shadow of the past or of

time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation of the mind.”

I am the road and shovel

LIVING THE FIELDnear Madras, India. In 1909, he came tolive with his family at the TheosophicalSociety’s India headquarters, where hewas ‘discovered’ a few months later by one of the Society’s heads, C.W.L e a d b e a t e r, who saw in the youngKrishnamurti the incarnation of the nextworld teacher. Krishnamurti was thenbrought to England, and raised byLeadbeater and Annie Besant, theTheosophists’ leader.

But, in 1929, he turned his back oneverything that Besant had built forhim—an organization, thousands of fol-lowers and vast wealth—in a speech thatsaid: “Truth is a pathless land”. The mainthemes of this shocking pronouncementwere to be repeated by Krishnamurti forhis remaining 57 years in talks around the world, many of which were repro-duced in countless books. Krishnamurtiwrote only one book himself—The Firstand Last Freedom (New York: Harper &Row, 1975).

His fundamental teaching was thattruth could not be arrived at by anysystem or religious belief because theseare thought constructs. All thinking is thepast, and the past can never grasp thedynamic, ever-changing present, wheretruth is found.

Instead, all man can do is keep con-stant watchful attention on the mind’smovements—its desires, fears, ambitionsand so on. This attention, however, can-

not be judgmental, and cannot be donewith an intended endpoint such asenlightenment—because all that is mere-ly the movement of the mind pretendingto be attentive.

Towards the end of his life, Krishna-murti spoke to the United Nations in New York, where he was awarded the UN1984 Peace medal. A year later, aged 90,he visited India for the last time, and gavehis final talk there in January 1986, anddied a month later.

Since his death, his reputation hasbeen damaged by accusations that he hada long-standing affair with the wife of oneof his best friends, during which time shehad had two abortions.

Bryan Hubbard


30

LIVING THE FIELD

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) livedand died in a temple in the foothills ofthe holy mountain of A runachala insouthern India. His message was sim -ple, and surpassed all religions andbeliefs: just find the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’.

Ramana Maharshi was arguably the greatest spiritual teacher ofthe 20th century. Although he

lived a very simple life, speaking rarelyand writing even less, thousands flockedto him over the years, including the richand famous.

Celebrated English writer SomersetMaugham visited him during the 1930s,and used the experience as the basis for

his novel, The Razor’s Edge. Some whostayed at the Arunachala ashram formonths or years recorded his dialogueswith visitors and devotees, and it is thesethat we have to thank for leaving us acomprehensive collection of Ramana’sessential teachings.

Ramana wrote very little: one shortpamphlet called Self-Enquiry, which heprepared in 1901 when he was 22, and 40Verses on Reality, perhaps the best writ-ten summation of his teaching.

Born on 30 December 1879 in south-ern India, he was named Venkataraman.At 12, his father died, so he went to livewith his uncle in Madurai, and attendedthe American Mission High School. At16, he spontaneously self-realized when


31

Inklings of immortality

The ‘I’ word is probably the most used word in our entire vocabulary. It always

precedes a description of our body’s actions—I am running, I am eating—as well as

our moods and mental states. But can the ‘I’ that is thinking or in a bad mood be

the same as the one associated with the body? Ramana Maharshi points out that ‘I’

completely disappears during sleep, when we are unaware that we even have a

b o d y, and yet, there is still an ‘I’ that is dreaming.

So, although we use it a lot, we don’t truly understand the origins of ‘I’, which

Ramana describes in his book 40 Verses on Reality as a “unique first principle”.

What, then, is our true identity? For Ramana, there is only one thing in the universe,

so we must be that. We are “name and form, the person who sees, and the light by

which he sees: he himself is all of these things”. Elsewhere in the Ve r s es, he writes:

“The duality of subject and object, and trinity of seer, sight, and seen can exist only

if supported by the one. If we turn inward in search of that one reality, they fall away. ”

Although we wrongly identify our true self with the body, there is something deep

within us that knows we are eternal—and this inkling of immortality is a clue to our

true nature.

We are not our body or mind, which Ramana says are the same thing—nor are

we the world, time or space. Indeed, where are time and space without us? “We are

one and identical now, then, and forever, here and everywhere. Therefore we, time-

less, and spaceless being, alone are.”

To realize this, we need to constantly and earnestly ask the question: Who am I?

When we do this, the false ‘I’ falls away, revealing the biblical truth of ‘I am That’.

U l t i m a t e l y, says Ramana, even that pronouncement suggests a weakness because

if we are That, why should we need to reassure ourselves of the fact?

Who am I?

LIVING THE FIELDhe had an overwhelming feeling that hewas about to die. Where does the ‘I’thought come from, as it seems to survivethe body, he wondered. The body and the world arise together, and the bodythen creates the ego/mind, but none ofthese are the ‘I’.

Within six weeks, Venkataraman hadleft home, and was heading for Aruna-chala Hill. Although it is a famous loca-tion, considered by the Hindus to be themost holy place on earth, Venkataramanhad never heard or it and didn’t evenknow where it was, but had an instinctivesense that he had to go there.

He made his home in the basement of an old temple there and, for severalyears, spoke to no one, spending hours insamadhi, or union with the infinite,despite being bitten by the temple rats,and having stones thrown at him by thelocal children.

When he started speaking again, hewas regarded as a sage, and his reputation

began to grow. In 1907, one of his devo-tees called him Bhagavan Sri RamanaMaharshi, which means ‘Divine EminentRamana the Great Seer’, and the titlestuck.

His day-to-day life was utterly simple.He never moved from the temple; hewore only a loincloth, and he ate what-ever vegetarian meal was placed beforehim. Despite the many visitors to the ashram, Ramana continued to spendmany hours in samadhi, but usuallyanswered the incessant questions asked of him. His advice was invariably to urgethe questioner to discover the answer tothe ultimate question, ‘Who am I?’

He died of cancer in 1950 at the age of 70. On his deathbed, he said to hisgrieving devotees: “You say I am goingaway, but where can I go? I am alwayshere. You give too much importance tothe body.”

Bryan Hubbard


32

LIVING THE FIELD

U.G. Krishnamurti (1918–) lives out ofa suitcase, stays with friends and shunsp u b l i c i t y. Despite his best efforts, hehas become something of a cult in hisnative India as the ultimate non-gurug u ru .

U.G. Krishnamurti is the ultimatenon-guru. Unlike his famousnamesake Jiddu Krishnamurti,

he refuses to give public talks, turnsaway would-be disciples and followers,and tells everyone he has nothing tos a y. He travels around the globe, stay-ing with friends in New York, Londonor Bombay, and lives out of a 10-lbsuitcase in which he keeps all of hisworldly possessions.

Despite his attempts at anonymity,he is a celebrity in his native India, anda biography, published by Penguin, was

on the bestselling lists there for ninemonths in the early 1990s.

He describes his ‘enlightenment’—for want of a better term—as his‘calamity’. If cornered, his message isbleak. There is no such thing as enlight-enment or mind. Instead, we are reac-tive robots or computers, fed by theillusion of thought that we are some-thing more or that life could be better,he says. He likes to throw ‘grenades’, ashe puts it, to shock people out of theirconventional thinking, although hiscentral message is not so different fromother spiritual teachers we’ve coveredh e r e .

Although there is no hope, it doesn’tmean that things are hopeless, he hassaid. There is certainly no hope for theindividual, because there is no individ-ual or center that has thoughts and


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An enlightenment recorded

Here is U.G. Krishnamurti’s own account of his enlightenment, or ‘calamity’.

“The linking gets broken, and once it is broken, it is finished. Then it is not once

that thought explodes; every time a thought arises, it explodes. So, this continuity

comes to an end, and thought falls into its natural rhythm.

“Since then, I have no questions of any kind, because the questions cannot

stay there any more. The only questions I have are very simple questions like ‘How

do I go to Hyderabad?’, questions necessary to function in this world. And people

have answers for these questions.

But for those ‘spiritual’ or ‘metaphysical’ questions, nobody has any answers. So

there are no questions anymore.

“Everything in the head had tightened—there was no room for anything there

inside of my brain. For the first time I became conscious of my head with everything

‘tight’ inside of it . . . when this ‘explosion’ takes place (I use the word `explosion’

because it is like a nuclear explosion), it leaves behind chain reactions. Every cell

in your body, the cells in the very marrow of your bones, have to undergo this

‘change’—I don’t want to use the word—but it is an irreversible change, an alchemy

of some sort.

“It’s like a nuclear explosion. It shatters the whole body. It’s not an easy thing;

it’s the end of the man. Such a shattering blasts every cell, every nerve in your

b o d y. I went through terrible physical torture at that moment. Not that you experience

the ‘explosion’; you can’t experience the ‘explosion’—but only its after-effects. The

‘fallout’ changes the whole chemistry of your body. ”

The non-guru guru

LIVING THE FIELDexperiences. All concepts of the indi-vidual, of family, of race, nationalityand civilization have to be abandonedfor the ‘other’ to exist.

As a young man, Krishnamurticlearly believed in enlightenment ofsome description, and he met both hisnamesake and Ramana Maharshi (pro-filed in Living The Field Lesson Thirt y -t w o). But today, he dismisses them allas ‘con artists’ who have nothing togive, and who are no different fromeveryone else.

U.G. (Uppaluri Gopala) Krishna-murti was born in 1918 in South Indiato a wealthy Brahmin family. His fatherwas also a theosophist, the movementthat discovered his namesake and senthim to the West. Indeed, his life hasbeen interwoven with that of his famousnamesake through the years, beginningwith a chance encounter on a beach inIndia in 1925. Throughout the follow-ing years and into the 1960s, the twomet up occasionally—U.G. often

attended J. Krishnamurti’s lectures, butclaimed that he was very bored byt h e m .

In the early 1960s, U.G. left his wifeand child in India, and started roamingthe streets of London as a penniless,homeless tramp. His spiritual crisis, or‘calamity’, occurred a few years later,when he was 49.

For him, and for those who wit-nessed it, the ‘calamity’ was like adeath and rebirth. From that timeonwards, he has had the sense that allsound comes from within him, that hedoes not have a body, and that there isno center or ‘I’ that connects events and thoughts into a continuum.

He has been one of the most chal-lenging, and enigmatic, characters whodoes not let anyone stay within their‘comfort zone’. Whether many haverisen to the challenge, or grasped theprofundity of his message, is a diff e r e n tm a t t e r.

B ryan Hubbard


34

LIVING THE FIELD

Ramesh Balsekar (1919–) is perhaps an unlikely exponent of the great IndianA d v a i t a philosophical tradition—or sohis credentials would suggest. He is aformer bank manager who still enjoys around of golf and, as a young man, wasa bodybuilder and badminton player.

It’s reckoned there’s a guru for every-one and, if that’s the case, RameshBalsekar must be the spiritual guide

for the middle classes. Before becoming aguru, Balsekar was the president of aninternational bank. He also still has timefor a regular round of golf.

Throughout his banking career, he hadall the appearances of a middle-class wayof life—gaining a commerce degree from

the London School of Economics, gettingmarried in 1940 and raising three chil-dren. He was also a bodybuilder andplayed badminton to a competitive level.

It was only two years after he retiredin 1977 that he began to change. Theflashpoint came when he met Nisar-gadatta Maharaj, a teacher of the Advaitaphilosophy, which argues for non-duality,and a successor to Ramana Maharshi (seeLiving The Field Lesson Thirt y - t w o) .Within months, Balsekar was translatinginto English Nisargadatta’s talks, whichhe gave every day at his home in Bombay.

Nisargadatta eventually saw Balsekaras his own natural successor and, by1982, Balsekar felt he was ready to givehis first public talk on Advaita. Since


35

So who wants to be enlightened?

Enlightenment, or realization, is the end point for many on the spiritual path. This is

probably because they imagine the state to be one of uninterrupted bliss. Or as

Ramesh Balsekar puts it, “an occurrence where there are lights blazing and bliss

coming out of the ears”.

There are several problems with this: this blissful state is merely our imagining,

and is probably a reaction to our current troubled lives. And, if enlightenment involves

the dissolution of the individual ego into the absolute, exactly who is left to experience

the bliss?

These issues are central to Balsekar’s philosophy. For him, enlightenment was

no earth-shattering experience. He described his own enlightenment as a “mild but

distinctive occurrence”, but this could highlight the point made in earlier Living The

F i e l d lessons that there are degrees of enlightenment.

In his talks, Balsekar has said that knowledge is the best path to enlightenment,

and is far better than surrender, for example. This may be so, but it also indicates

Balsekar’s own emphasis and position, which suggests that his enlightenment is

more to do with an understanding of the intellectual concepts.

Another ‘truth’ takes us to the heart of Balsekar’s teaching, and of A d v a i t a. He

maintains that there is only one thing—consciousness—and so there is no ‘me’ that

is separate from ‘that’. So, realization, if it is anything at all, is a full recognition of

this fact, and so is nothing more than a case of mistaken identity that’s been

r e m e d i e d .

Even so, says Balsekar, even this statement is nothing more than a concept, and

you can choose to believe or disbelieve it. The one indisputable fact is ‘I am’; from

there, you just have to realize that this ‘I am’ is impersonal.

The banker who became a guru

LIVING THE FIELDthen, he has written 20 books, of whichperhaps the most celebrated and accessi-ble is Consciousness Speaks (Mumbai,India: Zen Publications, 2001). He con-tinues to give regular public talks, and heholds informal sessions at his home inBombay every day.

His followers reckon Balsekar is thereal thing, and is as true to the Advaitatradition as were Nisargadatta and Ma-harshi before him.

As he puts it, “Consciousness is allthere is”. In other words, there is no ‘me’or ‘you’, just ‘it’, which is what we trulyare. This view is reinforced by the Hinduscripture, “Thou art the doer, Thou art theexperiencer; Thou art the speaker andThou art the listener.”

Balsekar has also written: “What isthe ultimate understanding? That there isno one to understand anything.”

But, as with many other gurus beforehim, Balsekar has his detractors. Someclaim he is a womanizer, and there areaccounts that he has made approaches toattractive young female followers at histalks. Also, he has never denied that hehas a mistress.

Others are uncomfortable that he is so commercially minded. Photographs of himself as a muscle-bound body-builder are for sale at his home, and hesells his books at a higher price thanoffered in the shops. Purists argue thatsomeone who has realized the oneness

of life needn’t charg e — p r e s u m a b l ybecause there’s nobody to pay andnobody to receive. Instead, he shouldhave faith in the process, which will provide.

Balsekar is aware of the criticisms,but he remains non-committal. “You’vemade it a problem, so you solve it,” hesays.

Just like a bank manager, in fact.Bryan Hubbard


36

LIVING THE FIELD

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939–1987) was an enigma. Born in Tibet, hewas a Buddhist who went out of his way to shock his Western devotees. Hedied of alcoholism in 1987, leavingbehind a divided legacy between thosewho see him as an enlightened being,and others who believe he abused hisp o w e r.

What do we expect of a guru or enlightened person? Mostof us have a preconceived idea

of how a guru should behave, and it probably embraces the virtues of saint-liness, austerity, celibacy and self-denial.

The Tibetan Buddhist ChogyamTrungpa Rinpoche set out to shatter thisimage, and to deliberately shock his followers in the West. His drinking andsleeping with students was legendary, andhe often conducted his seminars whiledrunk and occasionally had to be carriedoff stage. He eventually succumbed to

alcoholism, and he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1987, at the age of 48.

Even his transformation from devoutmonk to alcoholic and womanizer had asurreal edge. It occurred after he crashedhis car, when drunk, into a joke shop. Thejoke, thereafter, was on us, it seems.

This turn of events could never havebeen guessed from his beginnings. Hewas born in 1939, the eleventh in a line of Trungpa tulkus, who are eminent in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He wasalready famous in Tibet for his teachingsat the time he fled, in 1959, when theChinese invaded. He crossed the Hima-layas on foot and ended up at OxfordUniversity, where he studied comparativereligion.

After the car crash, which left himpartially paralyzed, he renounced hismonastic vows, married an Englishwoman and went to live in America. Hisinfluence there was profound, and he cre-ated a number of centers and institutions


37

Mind yourself

The core of Trungpa’s teaching is mindfulness meditation. In Tibetan Buddhism, ‘mind’

has a definite meaning, and essentially it’s that which distinguishes humans from trees or

rocks—a sense of duality, and an association with the ‘other’, which is something different

from the perceiver.

The logical progression would be to state that ‘as I exist, therefore the other exists also’.

But often we seek confirmation of our existence from the other more than from our own

sense of self, and here the problems begin.

For Trungpa, mindfulness meditation is an approach to put the focus back on us.

It has four elements—mindfulness of body, mindfulness of life (a focus on our desire to

cling to things), mindfulness of effort, and mindfulness of mind—although we have space

only to look at the last, and most important, of these.

Mindfulness means intelligent alertness or watchfulness, although it’s not concentrating

on any one thing. It’s something that is very simple—we are aware that we are—and it

doesn’t involve projections of enlightenment. It’s just being mindful one moment at a time,

about one thing at a time.

As we start out, it seems as though we have two personalities: that which is doing the

watching, and that which is being watched.

But mindfulness encompasses the act and the experience, and soon we get to the

place where we just do it, with no implication involved, not even mindfulness.

Born to be wild

LIVING THE FIELDthat continue to thrive today. T h e s einclude the Naropa Institute in Boulder,Colorado, the first Buddhist university in North America, and Shambhala, amovement devoted to his special practiceof mindful awareness. The famous BeatGeneration poet, Allen Ginsberg, was astudent and teacher at Naropa.

Trungpa also wrote several classicbooks, including Meditation In Action(Shambala Publications, Boston, 1969),the first book written by a Tibetan teach-er for Westerners.

Not only was he a drunk, but hisbehavior was often abusive. In onefamous incident, he dragged poet W.S.Merwin and girlfriend out from theirroom, and forced them to strip naked.Although Trungpa never mentioned theincident, it caused a stir among theliterati, and many called for a boycott of the Naropa university.

Needless to say, the views on theRinpoche’s methods are, at best, mixed.

Poet Kenneth Rexroth said, “Trungpa has unquestionably done more harm toBuddhism in the United States than anyman living.”

Historian and Trungpa student RickFields was more ambivalent. He said:“He caused more trouble and did moregood than anybody I’ve ever known.”

Explaining his own erratic behavior,Trungpa wrote: “He acts unexpectedlyand the atmosphere of tranquility is dis-turbed, which is very painful. The physi-cian (one who is supposed to heal you)becomes wild, which is terrifying. Wedo not want to trust a wild doctor or surgeon. But we must.”

Shortly before his death, he nominat-ed an American, Osel Tendzin, as the‘minder’ of his operation until the 12thTrungpa was old enough to take charge.Unfortunately, Osel was perhaps a littletoo keen to follow in his master’s foot-steps. He died from AIDS in 1990.

Bryan Hubbard


38

LIVING THE FIELD

Despite the name, Wei Wu Wei was nota Chinese master. It was the pseudonymof Irishman Te rence Gray (1895–1986),a theatre impresario who also happenedto be an expert on wine and A n c i e n tEgypt. His works were among the van -g u a rd to bring Buddhism to the We s t ,and his reputation reached cult status, a position it enjoys still today.

I t isn’t clear why Irishman Te r e n c eGray adopted the name ‘Wei WuWe i ’ as a penname for his eight

books on Buddhist philosophy. It alsoi s n ’t all that clear why he abandonedthe theatre. He was an impresario whostaged the plays of Somerset Maugham,among others, so that he could write thebooks in the first place.

Whatever the reason, he successful-ly retained his anonymity from 1958,when his first book was published, until

several years after his death, in 1986. One of the best explanations comes

from Gray himself, in an introductionhe wrote to his first book, F i n g e r sPointing To w a rds The Moon ( B o u l d e r,CO: Sentient Publications, 2003).“ Tom, Dick and Harry think they havewritten the books that they sign (orpainted the pictures, composed themusic, built the churches). But theyexaggerate. It was a pen that did it, orsome other implement. They held thepen? Yes, but the hand that held the penwas an implement too, and the brainthat controlled the hand. They wereintermediaries, instruments, just appa-r a t u s . ”

This is straight out of the pages ofA d v a i t a p h i l o s o p h y, which is based onthe concept that there is just onething—consciousness, the Tao, T h eField—in the universe. As such, there


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Why you can’t become enlightened

Here is a typical tract by Wei Wu Wei, taken from his first book, Fingers Po i n t i n g

Towards The Moon.

“On the plane of being, everything is. On the plane of existence everything

seems. There are no living beings (as the Lord Buddha said) because living is a

function of time and exists only on the plane of seeming.

“Being is (even our language makes that conclusion inevitable), but ‘living

things’—beings apparently engaged in the process of changing from hour to hour,

year to year—are a function of time and merely seem to exist.

“Enlightenment is: it is just the normal state of being (as opposed to existing).

“Thus, it was possible for the Lord Buddha to say that no such thing as ‘enlight-

enment’ exists, either—for if it is the state of being, it has no need of a name, is noth-

ing separate and nameable, and can only be so-called as an estimation regarded

from the plane of seeming.

“It is clear, therefore, why the Masters said there was nothing to be attained, that

‘there are no such states as before and after attainment’, for you cannot attain some-

thing you already have, and there can be no states of before and after something

that is already there.

“But, looked at from the plane of seeming, there ‘seems’ to be something to be

attained, and states of before and after such attainment . . . but so to regard it would

be deliberately to adopt the false vision of the plane of seeming (or dualism), which

it was the aim of the Masters to eradicate.”

The Irish Chinaman

LIVING THE FIELDis no individual doer, so why shouldTerence Gray lay claim to that which hedid not do?

We do know that he was deeplyinfluenced by the teachings of RamanaMaharshi (see Living The Field Thirt y -t w o) and Douglas Harding (see L i v i n gthe Field Tw e n t y - f o u r), both of whomhe met, and he was widely read in bothEastern and Western philosophy andmysticism. As such, he was for a longtime a ‘pilgrim on the way’, as hedescribed himself.

Gray was born in 1895 into a well-established Irish family, although hewas raised on an estate near Cambridge,England. He was educated at OxfordUniversity and, after graduating, hebusied himself, first as an Egyptologist,which culminated in two books on thesubject in 1923, and then as a theatreimpresario. He established ‘dance dra-m a s ’ and, in 1926, launched the Cam-

bridge Festival Theatre in the GogMagog Hills.

He was closely involved with theEnglish writer Somerset Maugham,whose plays he produced. A l t h o u g hthey never saw eye to eye over drama—Gray was too much of an iconoclast—the two stayed close.

As his interest in drama waned,Gray intensified his studies in Easternmysticism, which included a periodwhen he traveled throughout the A s i a nsubcontinent, and visited A r u n a c h a l a ,the holy mountain where RamanaMaharshi had set up his ashram.Maugham followed, and he recountedhis own experiences in his novel T h eR a z o r’s Edge.

Gray retired from writing in 1974,and saw out the rest of his days in aquiet, and anonymous, retreat with hiswife in his villa in the South of France.

B ryan Hubbard


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living the field - what doctors don't tell you · living the field but whether the thinking is...

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