The Spiritual Carnival, Part 1 (Warning: That “path” of yours is probably circular.) by Fred Davis

This post is the first of a short series. I’ll put out short additions as I have time.
I plan to do a video on this same topic, so watch for that post as well.

I have been polite long enough. Five years ago, after a few months of experimentation, I began to tell the spiritual teachers who were then my friends the truth about what I was doing. They didn’t believe me. They told me that what I was claiming was impossible.

I confess that I, too, found it unbelievable, but I simultaneously found it undeniable. What I told them was that I was waking people up in a single session. I told them that I had stumbled onto some kind of “method.” They told me that the Official Guru Word was that methods couldn’t work. They were the stuff of charlatans and con men.

The whole waking-people-up thing was so shocking to me that I would have been perfectly willing to go along with what they said, except for the one question I still had to ask myself: “What do I do with all of these awakened beings?” I simply couldn’t deny the evidence that was before my eyes. But they weren’t seeing what I was seeing, which made it very easy for them to disavow.

I caught a lot of heat, and I lost a bunch of friends. I was not yet thick-skinned, and I really got my feelings hurt. Who got their feelings hurt? No one, but it sure felt like a Fred did – that was the experience, even though there was no nondual truth to it.

Insofar as relationship went, a fun time was not had in Relativity Land during that period. I even tried to quit teaching just a few weeks after Nonduality Press published my first book, Beyond Recovery. I deleted the few videos I had at the time, took down the page that offered private sessions, and quietly “retired” from teaching on the Internet seven months after I’d started. I left the website up, but I didn’t focus on it.

I figured, “Heck, I written my book, I’ve done my part. I don’t want any part of this “competitive thing”, or whatever it was, and who knows, maybe they’re right. I don’t really care, I just don’t like this discomfort, thus I’m going back to my living room and get back into some delicious heavy reading.”

I did just that, and I loved the first month of not teaching, the first month of now almost unlimited reading time. It was nice to not have to look at my videos and see a Southerner with a crazy laugh instead of the Eckhart Tolle-like persona I’d always thought I’d have if and when I taught. I didn’t look quite right, or sound at all right, and my own opinion was that my presentation was ludicrous.

And then the universe let me know that while this new non-teaching-heavy-reading thing might be my plan, it was not the plan. The steady-Eddie online book business that I’d been running for nine years suddenly dropped dollar volume by 60%. It never came back. I looked back now at that “extra money” I had picked up for sessions and realized it would now be really handy to use as rent money!

My motives for spiritual teaching had always been shallow and self-serving. I had hoped that an “enlightened Fred,” which is what I expected to end up with, might be able to corral himself some money and girls. Provided, of course, that I didn’t end up living in a cave. I was always a man of extremes. Now I was dropping the girls and cave options, and going straight for the money. Oh well, it is what it is. Awakeness is perfectly happy to use an apparent individual’s selfish motivation for its own purposes.

Fortunately, during my time off I had devoted myself to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I owe every bit of this teaching to him. He taught me that if I wanted to be on the leading edge of something, then I’d better expect slings and arrows. In fact, he told me I should welcome them! If I wasn’t causing any controversy, then I probably wasn’t doing much of anything either. A lack of heat would mean I was doing pretty much what everybody else was doing.

Emerson told me that my only job was to serve the “original spark of God” that was burning inside of me. I didn’t need anyone’s approval. I could simply be myself. Wow! What freedom! It had never dawned on me that being an ordinary guy with a unique, contrary teaching was just fine. How funny is that? I’m not telling you I’m proud of everything I thought or did, I’m simply reporting on it as honestly as I can bear.

End of Part 1