Open Enlightenment

A Non-Duality Meeting

I went to a non-duality meeting at the weekend led by a young teacher named Jeff Foster. Between ten and fifteen people showed up at a room in Brighton’s Quaker Meeting House to hear Jeff tell them how ‘this’ is ‘it’.

The creation in our minds of an individual gives rise in turn to a seeker that then invents an ‘it’ for which it is seeking. Awakening occurs and seeking stops when we have seen through both the quest and the individual and realise that ‘it’ was actually ‘just this’ all along.

This is classic advaita thinking. More specifically, it’s ‘direct path’ advaita. Almost every question from the audience was a variant of: ‘What can I do to get enlightened?’ And every answer Jeff gave was a variation on: ‘Nothing. This is it, already. There’s no “you”, no “it”, let alone any action to be performed that could draw one of them toward the other’.

‘But before your awakening,’ I asked Jeff when my turn came, ‘you had a practice that you performed?’

Jeff laughed and assured me he tried and practised everything, constantly, until it drove him to depression and despair. But then he woke up and saw how no practice had anything to do with ‘it’.

‘Sure. But I’m interested in what we’re doing now,’ I said, ‘and how these meetings function as a means of enabling people to awaken.’

‘So am I,’ laughed Jeff. ‘This is just something that I offer.’

I suggested that it was useful for people to have a practice. It didn’t matter so much what it was, as long as it enabled us to experience for ourselves how it has nothing to do with enlightenment. Every seeker reaches a point when he or she begins to see ‘it’ regardless of whether they practice well, badly, or not at all. It’s only at this point the teaching that ‘there’s nothing to do’ begins to make proper sense.

In reply Jeff said something that made me think very carefully. He said: ‘Every practice fails.’

It’s true – because every seeker is destined to realise that enlightenment is not something he or she could ever cause to happen. How could you make something happen that lies beyond your experience?

‘I failed,’ Jeff said. ‘I failed to find what I was looking for, because it was here all along. Every seeker fails.’

‘But every seeker must go through that experience for themselves,’ I said (thinking to myself: because sitting here and telling ourselves there’s nothing to be done isn’t likely to do much good).

‘But then everyone will try to “fail”,’ countered Jeff.

In the break I chatted with some other attendees. One had recently become interested in spirituality and for just over a year had been meditating diligently. Then he came across the non-duality teachings. He stopped meditating and started attending non-duality meetings instead.

I didn’t talk with him long enough to gain an understanding of the experiences he’d had. I hoped he was at the point where his practice had shown him there’s nothing to do, rather than simply being attracted to this as an idea. Perhaps it has a different effect on some, but I can’t see how the rhetorical game of a non-duality meeting encourages people to examine their experience rather than just think about it. Let’s not forget: it wasn’t non-duality meetings that led Jeff to his awakening. He tried everything, and practised until he exhausted himself.

I didn’t disagree with anything Jeff said, only the style of his teaching. As Jeff said, all practices fail, because no seeker discovers what they imagined they had set out to find. Likewise, all the maps and models for ‘getting there’ are stories, self-fulfilling prophecies (for the most part) that create the kinds of experiences they pretend to describe.

Ultimately, the practices, maps and models are just flipcharts, touchscreens and PowerPoint slides. Just supports for different styles of teaching.

Jeff Foster on YouTube, making an interesting point about the nature of depression.

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