The Spiritual Carnival, Part 3 (Exposing the Myth of Gradually Clearing into an Awakening)

This is a continuing series. It will make more sense to you if read Parts 1 and 2 first.

Everyone, every single one of us, no matter how sick or evil, is doing the best that we can in this moment. We cannot do other than what we are doing until we can. So I’m not telling you there’s some sort of Secret Teachers’ Club where everyone is counting big money and chuckling over your gullibility. It’s not like that at all. There are some terrific teachers who are doing terrific work. They are doing their best to wake up their students. But the truth is that only very rarely do they know how to achieve that.

The great, vast majority of nondual teachers are nice people doing good work. I have no complaint with any teacher, or any teaching – or anything else, for that matter. How could I? There’s only This. There is no comparison to This, and there is no alternative to This. This is It.

Any and all of us can state, “This is not other than myself, although it certainly doesn’t equal me.” Heck, we don’t even need it! I can help you test that right here and now.

Oh, yes, I need the world in order to seem to come to know myself objectively, meaning dualistically, but the truth is I don’t need to know myself. Consciousness is an arising. It is the fruit of these fleshy trees we’re wearing. It comes and goes. Reality doesn’t come and go. 

The experience of the “I Am” state, meaning Conscious Awakeness, is also temporary. It is the temporary experience of That which is not temporary. Language can’t be precise here, but this is close to the truth. 

You did know that I can’t tell you the truth, did you not? Whenever anyone adds, “And that’s the truth!” to a statement, you can bet your life that it’s not. I’ve said it myself, and I’m sure to say it again, in an off-guard moment. But whatever came before that affirmation is not the truth. The truth can’t be spoken (or written). Language can express something truthy, something quite truth-like, something truish, but never the absolute truth.

Several weeks ago I changed my title on this website’s “About” page to read, “Fred Davis is a spiritual unteacher.” I switched to that because it’s far more accurate than “teacher.” You and I are the very same thing. What could “I” possibly teach a “you,” when there is no such thing as an “I” or “you”?

I, Oneness, discovered long ago that I, Oneness, can only work with Oneness. The principal reason behind that is that there’s not anything other than Oneness. So, in sessions, it’s Oneness working with Oneness. There’s no other option.

If a teacher looks out at a group and sees a group, it’s already over. They cannot help you because they have not first helped themselves. They are not awake. Say, what does this term “awake” even mean? I notice that the word itself is one of the leading culprits of this epidemic of unconsciousness that’s been striking spiritual seekers for as long as there have been spiritual seekers.

Let me confess first: I am not awake! But don’t leave just yet, I’m about to bail myself out.

I am not awake. I am Awakeness. And guess what? So are you! And everyone and everything else is as well. So why is it that I am experiencing one version of Reality through the fred unit, and another through the one I’m wearing “over there” as the reader? There are two states that Awakeness can experience. It can experience conscious awakeness, and  unconscious awakeness, and apparently it finds the latter condition quite entertaining.

I say that because I notice that there are many more apparent non-seekers than there are card-carrying seekers, and that even within the tiny minority of seekers, the percentage of those who make the apparent shift into becoming apparent finders is dreadfully small. I notice that the world is always at war. Humans regularly ruin, rape and kill other humans. It is routine. And although I find that to be absolutely disgusting on a human level, I’m not a human. I am experiencing humanity, and humanity is what it is until it’s something else. I can’t find a problem, although I notice that the unit’s preferences frequently do not align with Reality.

The unit wants to live in a fantasy. It wants to live in a fantasy so badly that it’s constructing one every moment of the day. “Would,” “should,” “could,” “but,” “if only,” and other words of resistance help us live just outside of Fantasy World where everything is going our way. Another term for Fantasy World is Suffering World, and I ain’t gonna live there no more! You, however, are welcome to if you wish.

Fantasy World is full of teaching units that are trying to wake up seeking units, and seeking units that are going to teaching units in the hopes of clearing up gradually until they wake up. Good luck with that, but from where I sit, it ain’t gonna happen.

The short version of what happened on the night that the concept of The Living Method first was given to me, I was sitting in my living room, having a Biblical-style vision of myself standing on the landing at the top of my staircase. At the base of my staircase there were all the seekers in the world, though I’ve no idea how they all fit into my tiny living room. They were joined by all the teaching units of the world, who offered plenty of aid and assistance: community, support, love, literature, sermons and practices.

The idea was for the seekers to move up the staircase one step at a time, gradually clearing each step until they finally reached the golden landing, the place of “enlightenment.” Looking down I could see them climbing and clawing their way up my staircase toward the landing.  And I’ll never forget what I heard one teacher from below call out up: “Good luck! We sure hope this works for you, because it didn’t work for us!”

Suddenly there was a flash in front of the fred unit at the top of the stairs that made my vision-self close its eyes. When I opened them back up, there was no more activity on the stairs. Instead, the staircase was strewn from top to bottom with skeletons, many layers deep. The message hit like a thunderbolt: All of the pilgrims were dying on the way to God!

Nobody was making it to the top.

Suddenly there erupted in my head the single craziest thought I’d ever had. “What if we could wake them up FIRST? What if we could wake them up, and then lead them DOWN the stairs, gradually clearing as they went. Get the awakening thing out of the way up front. Until we have an initial awakening, we don’t have a clue what our teachers are trying to tell us, even if the teachers are very good ones.

The present state of the nondual marketplace is that we have put the cart before the horse. The horse can’t make any progress, because the cart is in the way. And the cart can’t move, because it doesn’t have a horse to pull it. So we stay stuck in a stalemate for years, decades, perhaps our whole lives, without getting anywhere.

For the followers, all spiritual teaching feels like it’s leading its followers toward truth. All spiritual seekers feel like they are making progress. We are learning more and more and getting better and smarter and soon, well…heck, enlightenment is a foregone conclusion. It’s right around the corner. We just can’t get to the corner! 

Every week I talk to people who’ve been hanging out just this side of the corner for decades. Name the path, I’ve woken them up. And they have been universally stunned. Because no one knows what awakening is until it happens to “them.”

The sense of progress is the nature of the spiritual game. But I show people over and over how the “sense of something” has nothing to do with the “truth of something.” Worse yet, once in a while a follower of some teaching will indeed wake up – chiefly in spite of the teaching! Chiefly in spite of their practices! Practices I suggest are to help seekers be clearer now, not later, because there is no later. It’s here or nowhere. Now or never.

Units don’t wake up. They are animated cadavers and do not possess the capacity to wake up. Characters don’t wake up. They are make-believe positions that get established by the arising psychology of the cooperative patterns that make up a unit. There is no one home. There is no one and nothing to wake up!

Except Awakeness. Awakeness can “wake up” by recognizing itself. It’s tricky, but it can be done. I know, because I do it day after day, one hot seat after the other, and I’ve been doing it for years. When I call this teaching The Living Method, people expect results. I can’t hide behind “soon,” or “later,” or “next life,” or any of that crap.

I put myself on the line with every Awakening Session Betsy books for me. I can’t ride on my reputation. It doesn’t matter if I’ve woken up a hundred people in a row – if I don’t wake you up in your session – then maybe I’m a fraud, right? Frankly most people who don’t wake up, which is quite a small minority, leave their Awakening Session knowing that the truth was presented to them, they just somehow couldn’t lock onto it.

A couple of times I’ve had repeaters. And they’ve woken up the second time around. What was the difference? They became able and willing to tell themselves the truth when it was presented to them. I present the same truth in roughly the same fashion to everyone I talk to. Which means that I always present the same truth to myself.

I start every session knowing that I’m talking to myself, and that I’m as awake on “that side” of the screen as I am on this one. On “this side” of the screen, however, there is not a hell of a lot of fredness left (plenty, really, but not so much that I can’t see through it), and there is absolute conviction as to who and what I am. What I understand is that since I’m looking through both units simultaneously, all I have to do is move the lens this was and that, until I’m seeing nearly as clearly through “that unit” as I am “this one.”

If I thought I had to get up in the morning and wake a unit up that day, I wouldn’t get out of bed. I would have no idea how to do that. But I don’t have to do that. It’s so simple. I just have to help myself a little bit, and I’ll recognize True Nature through the client’s eyes. Pop, pop, pop!

It’s an initial awakening, it’s not graduation. Teachers will play it down, conveniently forgetting that their own initial awakening was the most important shift of their lives. Nothing really happens until that shift is made. That shift is what everybody is overlooking. They’re playing it down, because they can’t help you with it today, right here, right now.

Before there can be acceptance of True Nature, which is a whole ‘nother ball of wax, there has to first be the initial breakthrough. Granted, if you don’t pursue clarity right away, the Knowing is going to pass and you’ll be fast asleep again. But even then you can’t completely unsee Truth once it’s been seen. 

I had an bright, clear, authentic glimpse-thing in 1992. I drank my way through it in no time. But I never forgot something. I couldn’t tell you about it. I couldn’t remember it. But I knew this thing was real, and that haunted me for the next 14 years until I had my larger awakening, which “took.” But it did not “take” without earnest pursuit, without working with it and for it for quite some time.

Even then I couldn’t clear by myself. I woke up reading a book, with no living teacher at all. But I couldn’t clear or stabilize (I’m languaging here – this is truish) until I got myself a living teacher, until I left the safety of the bleachers and came out onto the playing field. It took a whole damn village to clear fredness out. That’s right, no one cleared fred up, because there’s no fred. They helped me clear fredness out.

Clearing is a whole other deal, and it’s about 2:00 in the morning. Good night!

End Part 3
To be continued…