The Nondual Diary: Living Realization with Scott Kiloby
IT’S BEEN A COUPLE OF MONTHS since I sat in a live-video meeting with my teacher. This afternoon I sat in just such an Internet meeting once again. And it took me all of about thirty seconds to fully recall why I do them.
As you may have noticed here on Awakening Clarity, I can wax philosophical from time to time. It’s my conditioned nature, and is almost surely the result of my being a pseudo-intellectual autodidact. To keep some of you from looking it up, an autodidact is just someone who’s self-taught. A pseudo-intellectual, of course is a long word for pretender. Although I’ve spent a few semesters in college classrooms, and did well there, I basically have a very good, very solid elementary school education. I am bright enough, but between the ages of 12 and twenty I missed a whole lot of stuff most people from my background don’t miss. Such as school. Thus I overdo it verbally in compensation. It’s not intentional; it just happens.
Scott, however, is a lawyer, so he’s got nothing to subconsciously prove about IQ or higher education. Being a lawyer doesn’t make you a genius, but they don’t pump many fools out with a Juris Doctor, either. See, there is my affliction, right there. I could have said “law degree.” I didn’t. I knew there was a technical academic term for it—though I couldn’t remember what the hell it was. A quick Google exercise and I got to look more informed than I actually am. I worship at the House of Google.
Just so you know, I am not looking for a cure for my word addiction. I think everyone needs a bad habit of which they can be fond. Mine is wordiness, whether I’m writing or speaking. Betsy says Ilecture her about as often as I engage in real dialogue. Oops. If I’m speaking in public, with or without a lectern, I’m one of those asses who don’t just talk, but rather hold forth. I enjoy it. Generally the audience does as well, though I do see a person wince now and again. I’m almost 60; we’ll all have to just live with it.
But wordiness is not always a good thing in nonduality. Which brings me back to Scott.
Scott is an author and a fine wordsmith. It was the quality of his teaching through books that led me to contact him directly. In live meetings, however he’s more likely to go experiential on you than intellectual. He shoots right past jargon and into actual experience. Today he first led us through exercises to notice awareness, which is trickier than you may think. He then expanded on that through showing us how we layer stuff and more stuff onto that raw seeing and then dare to call it the unvarnished truth. There’s nothing like denial to get one through the day.
In showing us how that layering happens, Scott is sharp and clear. Where I might bone up on medical terms and give you a fine layman’s lecture on the anatomy of the human hand, Scott cuts to the chase and suggests we simply notice that our fingers don’t think. They only feel. Everything after that uncomplicated feeling is layered on. That pointing is so beautiful. So simple and alive. So now. Which is why Scott calls this teaching Living Realization. He first suggests we notice what’s happening in the area of our fingertips. Next, pay attention to what’s happening in the area of our minds. It’s two completely different things, and only one of them is directly related to reality.
I saw clearly that my fingertips just feel. That’s all they do! They are feeling tools. My mind then tells me a story about what they feel. It’ll tell me why. It’ll tell me how that feeling relates to everything else in my world. It’ll tell me if it’s good or bad; a fun thing or a depressing thing. It’ll tell me a whole lot more than I want or need to know. My mind is a storytelling tool. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone loves a good story. But we suffer when we believe them. This is how to unlearn unconscious beliefs.
All this from touching a desk.
Oh. About that thing that’s noticing what’s going on in your mind. That is not the mind doing self-examination. That is You doing Self-examination. That is Awareness. That’s the pay dirt. As St. Francis of Assisi said, “What we’ve been looking for is what is looking.” Turn around. Look within.
Scott would tell us to “observe without thought.” It’s good advice. The whole process might be just a little too simple and immediate and effective for my pseudo-intellectual, autodidactic taste, but it’s quite sound advice. The whole thing is beyond simply being thinkable. It’s actually doable. Which must be why Scott calls Living Realization “The Doable Practice.”
For online meetings with Scott Kiloby, go to his website.
