The World is My Mirror (5 page)

It is the simplicity that strikes at the heart of this. Working things out and wanting to control complicates matters. But if you have one of those minds that have to know, you are in for a hell of a time. This is speaking from direct experience. This kind of mind will not tame easily. It is like trying to wrestle a snake into a bottle. A mind like this has to have its nose rubbed into the dirt time and time again. It is like someone grabbing you by the hair and thrusting your head under water, allowing a short breath for confession, refusing, and then thrusting you back in for another round. It is not pleasant and it is not something you would want advance warning of, but that is how it is for some. This enlightenment is not what is on the advertisement flier that you imagined. No cosmic consciousness and blissful fulfillment here!

Perhaps you cannot have someone else’s path. Maybe you need to walk in the light rather than in the shadow of someone else. It is very appealing to take a short-cut and download a smart guy’s essay. You might even fool your teacher for a while; but you will never kid yourself. That guy can see right through you. He is too close, you see, and never misses a trick.

It’s quite exciting to hear an ‘enlightened being’ speaking about things that you thought were private and only rattling around in your own head. Having someone grab your attention in this way seems a way out of your prison of misery and despair. Now there is someone you can look up to, someone who really understands, someone who can point the way. It is easy to be seduced into that world, copy the patter and copy their message. You can find yourself hanging on their every word, quoting their sayings to blast other teachings and opinions on forums and blogs. It can be so subtle at times.

The teacher‌/‌follower relationship can be almost hypnotic. The mind starts elevating teachers to such high positions that if the non-dual teacher turned to Catholicism half-way through a satsang, some people would follow and look for the hidden meaning. The teacher knows best because they’ve been where you have not and seen what you have not. Listening to something you have not heard before can be quite powerful at times and keep you coming back for an update or the promise of another layer. But teachers appear in dreams, and if you find yourself sitting at the feet of an enlightened one then not to worry‌—‌you have just got one of those kinds of dreams rather than one of the other ones. Liberation follows few rules, I have noticed.

I do not think I could write a book like this one without talking about time.

Time is so wrapped up with thought, it is impossible to talk about time without referring to thinking. As I write this, I am sitting in my van at a retail park watching cars come and go and people either darting in and out of the terrace of shops or sitting at a pavement table sipping expensive coffee. A bloke’s just walked by drinking something out of a plastic cup. There are lots of different activities, then, wherever I look.

But what is going on if I am open to what is? Every image is constantly being updated, change is constant, nothing stands still. And how do I know this change? Well, guess what, something here moves not one nanometre‌—‌ever. It is this unchanging presence that has always been here, dressing itself up as novelty and change. It is not that something’s appearing in my awareness‌—‌no. Awareness, or, knowing, is appearing as constant change, constant novelty and constant potential.

This is non-separation. How obvious it is when it is seen. Past and future belong to thought and nothing else. So, where does that leave Now? I suggest we can eliminate Now from our enquiries. You would have more success knitting fog than getting your head round Now. Now is a thought because it is made out of past and future and we have already associated those two with thought.

If someone comes up to you and says, ‘Sorry son, it is hopeless. You have no future here,’ do not take offence. Thank him for his honesty and walk off with a spring in your step. There has only ever been one thing, which you can call ‘present-sensations-of-no-duration’. Sounds, sights, smell etc. constantly appearing and disappearing. You cannot grab this and make it into something. It is like trying to bring that Ferrari out of your dream last night and park it outside. It won’t happen.

A clock is a machine with a repeating event: tick-tock, tick-tock. Digital timepieces may change numbers at regular intervals with some other numbers changing occasionally and other numbers staying the same for a while. Imagine that you are standing in front of an analogue clock watching the second hand make a complete revolution. We can say the hand is moving and time is flowing‌—‌but what is really going on? I suggest the answer is ‘nothing’. Nothing happening. There is just the current event of hand movement that plods along in a timeless zone.

Time will appear real while you live in thought and fantasy. Here we can imagine next year’s holiday; here we can imagine getting old and dying. Just let this sink in for a while. Be amazed at what is going on. I cannot fathom it. No one can. It is just plain miraculous.

All you ever see is timeless, infinite, unborn, un-created stillness and silence‌—‌moving and staying still, changing and unchanging. These gobbledygook statements are why the mind cannot go here; it is out of bounds‌—‌no entry. This is reality in all its glory. You will not find yourself anywhere because there is only everything and everywhere. Try and stop life, try and start it. You cannot; it just happens.

You, the person, will never see this, never in a million years. They are incompatible you see; a person is time-based and this is not. If a person is time-based, he is fiction, fantasy and dream stuff. He is no different to the one in your dream being terrorised by Daleks or the one teaching Superman how to fly.

Absence can be a bit of a shock at first because there is nothing to hold onto. But like falling into a bottomless pit, after a while you can relax and forget about the impact‌—‌because it is bottomless and there will never be an impact! I suggest life is like falling, mostly holding onto ideas, thinking they are safety rails, sometimes noticing there are no rails and you are doing just fine. Nothing needs to be held onto‌—‌there is not anything to hold.

There’s no need for this to get you down; there’s no need to withdraw from life. No. You could not if you tried, anyway. When consciousness, when life itself, lets go of thinking that it is something rather than everything, it marvels at itself, celebrates itself in all its forms. There is one canvas here coloured in the most intricate of ways. The paint depicts infinite variety with all its wondrous colours. But take a closer look; it is all made of paint‌—‌one scene, one canvas built like an Etch A Sketch. Go and give it a shake, start afresh and draw something else.

Absence is actually made out of presence. If you discover you cannot locate yourself and yet do not disappear in a puff of smoke, then there is a mystery going on. Why is there still something felt? Why is the sun still shining and all the rest of life still turning up? It is simply because all these activities are an expression of what you are. If they are an expression of what you are why should they go away? Everything that appears, including thought and itchy elbows, is Wholeness appearing as that. In a dream there might appear to be lots going on including emotions like fear or ecstasy. But there is only one dream and one dreamer. When you wake up there is no time delay while bits of the dream get put away somewhere special; the whole lot goes together.

I expect you have heard it said that words cannot capture this. Not so. They do just as a good a job as anything else. Wanting them to mean anything is the difficulty. Words on a page or words clothed in sound reflect timeless presence. Seen in this way, words take their place in heaven next to my pint of lager and take-away curry.

I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t anxious. There seemed always something to be worried about. It might be the dentist appointment or the fact that I had broken something belonging to my brother and hid it away in a cupboard, and was sure my crime would be rumbled by someone any day now. Life seemed a constant problem. There was always something going on.

I am the youngest of five boys. My dad always said he didn’t know where I came from. He was telling the truth of course, except not in the way he meant it to sound. We owned our own house in a small farming village near Daventry, Northamptonshire, England. I remember the farmer leading his cows down the lane next to our house and watching while one or two fancied their chances of escape and jumped our white ranch fence to leave well formed hoofmarks on the lawn.

In the summer when I was about five years old, I would sit in the back of the corn trailer with a few other kids in the village and watch while the combine shot its booty among our bare feet as we pushed the grain towards the chute for bagging. Summers were hot and life was slow.

As I was the youngest, a clear pattern of family life and rules preceded my appearance. My parents were working class and we survived through strict money management. My Mum hated living in the village. She was away from the town she grew up in and now lived among people who were a constant topic of behind-doors criticism. This must have caused more friction and atmosphere than my developing self could tolerate. I developed a pattern of absorbing other people’s frustrations in an attempt to relieve them of their burden. I turned away from my own joy to provide mental comfort for others in a private world made up of mental characters; this led to depression, anxiety and seeking later on.

Memories of this early time in my life come and go, but the memory of one incident is made of triple reinforced concrete surrounded by a lead-lined box. Something had happened one day and my Mum was in a rage I hadn’t witnessed before. She said she’d had enough and was leaving. She opened the kitchen door and walked at great pace down the path that led to the road. I can remember running after her so fast that my legs turned to jelly. I, at 4 or 5 years old, took it on board that I could bring her back. I could sort it out for her. I don’t know what I said to her but my reward was being told off for crossing the road without looking. My mum returned after a breather and a visit to the local shop and life simply carried on.

That incident and a few others changed the view I had of people; they were not to be trusted. I protected myself by withdrawing so far within myself and feeling so isolated that spontaneity took a back seat and self-management took its place. This became the pattern that dominated. Life became serious. I suspect this is the same for most people, although our significant events are different.

Schooldays were tough. I hated lessons. I was so tense trying to keep myself from falling apart and feeling so shy and anxious all the time, I had nothing left mentally to study with. All my efforts were to keep at bay this worthlessness and hatred I felt inside. Everyone was smarter, better looking and more comfortable with themselves and other people than I was. There was a longing not to be what the voice in the head was telling me, a longing to really fit in, although I never felt I did. I wasn’t too bad at bluffing though. I had quite a few friends but hated others joining the friendship that I thought was exclusively mine. I could not cope with someone new I didn’t know muscling in. If they were very sociable and made my friends laugh I would automatically take that to mean that I was boring and uninteresting.

You see, I was living totally in my thoughts. The world had become a hostile place full of mental characters created to make my life a misery. I hated being noticed by anyone. I hated drawing attention to myself. I thought I could hide from life and especially other people. It was as if I were on constant guard to protect this pathetic creature that was sucking the life blood out of me. It continually needed to be fed with reassurance, and if that reassurance was not forthcoming, I would take it as confirmation of my intrinsic worthlessness and badness.

Whenever I met other people it always seemed to result in taking the lower rung of the ladder and looking up at them. They were more important, more intelligent and more worthy of success. This is what separation meant to me. I felt isolated and alone in a very nasty place full of objects, places, buildings and people that were weighing me down more and more.

I left school with no qualifications. I could not engage with education. I was too scared of it. I could not allow myself to ask a silly question or get something wrong and look a loser in front of anyone. It was as if I said to myself, ‘If you do not try too hard there is little chance of not being perfect.’ Being perfect was the standard I set myself. Other people were perfect, so I thought, and if they knew something I didn’t, the assumption was they had been born with this knowledge and were special. I didn’t know and could not risk exploring and showing others what I thought I could hide from them‌—‌my worthlessness and utter stupidity.

There was always a battle raging within. Sometimes it was a little disturbance of the peace, at other times‌—‌carnage. Resting I could never do; I had to be ready for that surprise attack and fend off anyone with a pass key to the inner locker.