Fred’s Journal 2.14.18: Take the Crown Off the Teacher
Before you read this piece, please understand that I owe Eckhart Tolle my life – and he gets some heavy durn credit for my so-called awakening, too. I haven’t listened to him for years now, but that’s probably because I didn’t listen to anything else for several years, and I just can’t go there anymore. But his picture is in my study, along with one of my personal goddesses, Byron Katie, and another of my dearly beloved, Adyashanti, who taught me so, so much, and who gets a lot of credit for whatever clearing has occurred here. I love these people, all the way down in my bones. Put your pistols down, please.
Now let me tell you about the experience I went through in my seeking and earlyish post-awakening stages. You may find it helpful. If not, to hell with it, it’s not going to be a very long post.
I remember what it was like for me. I pretty much thought that Eckhart Tolle could walk on water. I knew that Eckhart had had some kind of a super-duper-mega-awakening, with angels and trumpets, and probably lightning and LSD-like colors and trails, and he was channeling God, was he not? He just sat in a park. Hell, he didn’t even have to go to the bathroom! And now here he was rich and famous. What a charmed life for this cherubic elf from another world! Sign me up!
And then, a few year later, I came across Byron Katie. After reading A Thousand Names for Joy, I realized that old Eckhart might’ve had himself a doozy, but the biggest-clearest-mostest-giganticus awakening that ever occurred was what Katie had had – hands down. Everyone else just shut up and sit down!
Now, let me say here that I was cursed with having an explosive, fairy-tale type of awakening with all the bells and whistles. No matter! After reading Katie’s book – well, my goodness! The comparatively next-to-nothing, no popcorn, no slam-dunk, total-loss-of-identification thing that happened here, well hell, it didn’t even qualify as an awakening. I mean, the way I read it, she was in this constant woo-woo, orgasmic bliss-state of innocent wonderment every day, all the time, sort of like Glenda the Good Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz on mushrooms.
I swear to you that after reading that book I was so confused that I began to deny my own awakening. After all, I had something happen which heretofore had looked and smelled something like an awakening, but if someone was to put a gun to head, I remained confident that I’d kick him in the groin and take my chances.
Thank God for Adyashanti! Yeah, he had several awakenings, in fact, and although they sounded much juicier and more authentic than my little flash in the pan, they still sounded a whole lot more like what had happened to me in 1992, 2006, and 2007. But damn it, I had lost mine and he hadn’t! He was a winner, and I was a loser! Oh, the agony.
So, up the pedestal he went, and he got crowned along with Eckhart and Katie, and I could sort of passingly identify with him, even though as time went on, he began to look more and more like an alien, which affirmed his specialness to me, and he had also become just a little too damn clear, which I was alternately deeply grateful for and profoundly resentful about! Oh, I was so wracked with envy that my very blood probably ran green for a couple of years.
These people were not people at all! They were superhumans, or mutants, like from the X-men movie-comic franchise, or maybe they were all three aliens! All I knew what was they surely weren’t made of the same ordinary clay that I had come from. They were MORE, much more, than little Mr. Faker-Fraud-Fred.
It took years for me to tear down the pedestal I built for these people. In fact, I’m still having trouble with Nisargadatta Maharaj’s, even though he would eject me from his loft in disgust if he were alive to hear about it. What do we even say about these people who have become so central to our lives?
We say, “Thank you.” We can respect, and perhaps even, if we still have a leg stuck in relativity, admire our teachers. We can support them in ways we see as fitting, but we make them super people at the expense of our own apparent progress, happiness, and full liberation.
If we forever hold our teachers too high, we will forever hold ourselves too low. We will never be enough. We will always be lacking. We will be picking up every bit of come-back bait that is cast in our direction. We will forever have a story of future, and we will forever live with the ghostly sense of separation.
There is only one thing going on. YOU are that one thing. No teacher is writing this. No student is reading it. This is not MY teaching, this is YOUR teaching. You left it for yourself so that you could wake up through most apparent units in most apparent locations in what would be experienced by the unit as a damn hurry!
When you begin this type of nondual inquiry, you are like a monkey handing yourself a grenade. You worry with it, and fuss over it, but never fear, at some point it go BOOM!
Oh, your special bonus prize for having scrolled down this far is a link to a short video that Robin in Denmark sent out today. I love visual stuff, because it goes beyond language. If this one did use language, I think it would say, “The lights are on, but there’s no one home.”
Love,
Fred
February 14, 2018 @ 10:24 am
Great article, Fred! I’m so grateful that you were my first nondual teacher, so I was able to skip all this. I clearly picked up from you right away that your awakening (and anyone else’s) was my awakening. No one is less awake than anyone else. Awakeness just manifests differently through each unit: different experiences, colors, feelings, levels of clarity. But we all experience exactly what we need to experience in the moment, and we are all precisely as awake and clear as we are supposed to be, which, if you take a moment to notice, is absolutely awake and crystal clear.
And thanks Robbin for the beautiful video!
❤️Kathleen
February 14, 2018 @ 10:47 pm
Thank you, Kathleen! ♥
February 14, 2018 @ 12:11 pm
I read your book, “Awaken Now”, yesterday. I thought I had woken up. This morning, I’m not as sure. This is a frustrating and repeatedly disappointing game, it seems. PS, I also am a fan of Byron Katie, Adyashanti, Tolle (and Mooji). I downloaded a book, I Am That, by Nisargadatta yesterday, but have not read it yet.
February 14, 2018 @ 10:47 pm
Who was it that woke up? What is doubting it?
February 14, 2018 @ 3:30 pm
I am a woman of few words but I do want to take the time to say, ” thank you Fred”! It is a wonderful experience for me to read your posts and watch your videos. I especially like this one. It resonates with me. Keep up the good work!
February 14, 2018 @ 7:50 pm
Thanks, Sue! I appreciate your encouragement.
February 14, 2018 @ 4:02 pm
“There is none good but one, that is God”. Thanks for the clarity of your repetition. I think I heard somewhere, repetition is the mother of clarity. Sometimes it takes 2000 years! And when One is willing and ready to smell the Awakeness, time and teachers is some of what It wakes to. I thank apparent outer, instead of agonizing over it. And Fredness shows I have already done that. Double thanks!
February 14, 2018 @ 7:51 pm
Double thanks back to you, Mike!
February 14, 2018 @ 8:07 pm
Wonderful piece of writing Fred …
I was once in one of those lines waiting to shake hands with Prince Charles..The bagpipes played him in with much pomp and ceremony wearing a beautiful blue velvet jacket and kilt….all that was missing was the crown…Anyway he worked his way along the line shaking hands in the traditional way and making a few comments here and there..To my absolute jaw dropping astonishment when he got to me he clicked his heels together and raised his hands in a traditional Namaste greeting and bowed gently whilst looking intently into my eyes..he then proceeded down the line shaking hands as he went … Oneness greeting Oneness…Only one Crown … ?
February 14, 2018 @ 8:39 pm
Wow, great story!
(Terry also has a great Leonard Cohen story.)
February 14, 2018 @ 9:35 pm
This was a wonderful post and goes right to the heart of the matter for me. Oneness is Oneness. There aint no other way to say it, is there?
I’d love to hear Terry’s Leonard Cohen story!
February 14, 2018 @ 10:49 pm
Ask about it in satsang. It’s worth the group’s time to hear it, I think. It’s VERY funny. 🙂 ♥
February 16, 2018 @ 7:39 am
As would I. A close friend of his told me that he attained Self-Realization some years before he passed.
February 15, 2018 @ 8:25 am
No need for pedestals. There are those who had Self-Realization without having read any of the authors you mention and others, let alone a teacher, except for their own inner guru.
February 15, 2018 @ 10:33 am
What isn’t well known is that 99% of those people will either not recognize it, or they will completely misinterpret what’s happened to what. Though such an apparent breakthrough will have some inherent value, it’s ultimately not what it’s all about. Many awaken, but very, very few will ever clear.
February 16, 2018 @ 8:45 pm
Nisargadatta would say, “I’m not all that!”
February 19, 2018 @ 8:08 am
Richard Nixon said, “I want to make one thing perfectly clear”, while centuries earlier, Nagarjuna claimed that there is not the slightest difference between nirvana and samsara, which is another way of pointing to the ability of the mind to mistake a rope for a snake.