Letter from the Field: Standing as Awareness
Hi, Fred:
Was just watching your video “Nonduality: The Foundations of Inquiry with Nondual/Advaita/Jnana Spiritual Teacher Fred Davis“. :Wonderful video!.
Great comments about seekers stuck in seeking.
Looking back at our last two sessions, if you remember, Dave was stuck in a subtle non-duality – awake Dave trying to come up with the right approach to Oneness.. I wonder if a number of people don’t get stuck at this point in a way similar to how I did.
In thinking about this in retrospect, I realized that my mind was fixated on and conditioned by the phrase “standing as awareness.” Well, if one is standing as awareness, one is a fixed subject looking at something which is other than awareness, and non-duality will never be seen.
How subject we are to mental patterns! Thankfully, you came up with the more true and less dualistic and static injunction to “pay attention to what is looking out of your eyes.”
It made all the difference.
Hope you found this of interest.
Thanks and love,
Dave
I’m glad my friend Dave heard what he could use to make the leap of no distance. I hope you’ll find what he heard and has shared here helpful as well.
To my knowledge the teacher who initially came up with the statement “Stand As Awareness” was Atmananda Krishna Menon, the founder of what we know today as “The Direct Path”. I don’t think he meant to stand as Awareness as if it were a noun, which it is not, but rather to stand as Awareness the verbness, which it is. Then there is no looker and no looked at – only looking.
You don’t “have experiences”. You are this experiencing.
November 4, 2016 @ 4:52 am
There’s that noun-ing still trying its best! And no matter how good (and we all know how good that’s been), the noun-ing itself can’t keep the “noun” alive without it’s persistent verb-ing! (although that was a great trick to put the noun BEFORE the verb as THOUGH it came first!)
Be! , Mike-ing