enabling abuse & control-over-others
From the very beginning, I was never down with ANY delineation of real-and-unreal, inside-and-outside… nor the elimination of such as: “you’re not the body, senses or mind;” the world is unreal; nothing-ever-happens (ajata) etc.
⚛️ Ajata and the wide-open-door-to-abuse: https://integrityintruth.com/ajata-and-the-wide-open-door-to-abuse/
WHY?
Firstly, it’s untrue.
Secondly, exactly who draws the line between real-and-unreal? And where do they draw it??
Thirdly, and perhaps the most important: in eliminating the body-senses-world you are eliminating the most efficacious routes to your true nature!!
As soon as anything is separated out from the Whole we are already skating-on-thin-ice. This is especially so if the renunciation is done at the bequest of spiritual leaders, as was the case in the ancient advaitic practice of renunciation known as Neti-Neti. This wholesale-elimination practice was adopted by many in the neo-Advaita space of contemporary non-duality…opening WIDE-the-door for harm, abuse and control-over-others.
Additionally, this wholesale renunciation led to sweeping judgements-of-others…literally, anyone who fell ‘outside’ the norms of such a rigid world-view. After 2 decades+ in such a dogmatic teaching I still, to this day, find myself pulling back from certain situations or thoughts or people as though some invisible line-in-the-sand exists…anywhere.
⚛️ Denial and the Duality-of-Non-duality: https://integrityintruth.com/denial-the-duality-of-non-duality/
In the early days following my arrival at SAT (The Society of Abidance in Truth, Santa Cruz, CA) I was encouraged to renounce my family. (read that again!)
Historically, and with certain spiritual traditions, teachers have manipulated families-of-seekers in order to achieve certain spiritual goals.
In the early 90’s, renunciation and the path-of-siddas, became a ‘thing’ at SAT and the discourses were largely centered on the renunciation of everything…everything. The world, your body/senses/mind were ALL entirely “unreal.” And while the real meaning of “unreal” was understood to mean “not separate” it never-the-less led to the dangerous hypocrisy of the split-mind.
During one Satsang I raised my hand and asked point-blank: “Are we truly meant to be automatons??” My question was dismissed.
That teaching dismissed the very thing — our body – which is, ultimately, the most efficacious portal to Presence and transcendence (if transcendence is your goal). This transcendence-addicted approach was largely equated with spiritual evolution. Is true awakening really marked by transcendent states pervaded with bypassing, dissociation and spiritual materialism?
Is that what awakening is??
In an early private with Nome, I asked about this need to dismiss the entirety of our experience as “unreal” and stating how that did not resonate with my prior experience as a young girl. Surprisingly, Nome’s answer to me was “You must have renounced in a prior lifetime.” (From then on this devoted heart relied on the inner teaching and silence which was vastly different than what was being presented in the public talks. I would, later, be the scapegoat for those outer teachings that I never believed in).
⚛️ The Scapegoat Phenomenon…Involving Sensitive Souls and Empaths: https://leslieread.substack.com/p/the-scapegoat-phenomenon
⚛️ The Mystery of Past Lives: https://leslieread.substack.com/p/the-mystery-of-past-lives)
Nome’s answer certainly rang true, yet his current teaching should have been my indication that this was never meant to be my path where, ever since my childhood, everything was included. From a naturally devoted heart (likely from prior lifetimes) I would enter states of what is now commonly called ‘flow’ and ‘bliss.’ Yet, from the beginning, Nome was touted as the only ‘awake’ teacher in this country…and there was a deep heart connection from which his internal communication flowed.
Additionally, and as Russ pointed out, this renunciate approach was successfully taught within an airtight insularity that is often found in cults. While I believe this was never overtly felt by the members of SAT that control was/is very much the case. In SO many, if not ALL, ways…this deliberate separation can harm one for life.
No doubt the wholesale rejection-of-everything would spiritually justify Nome’s decision to, later, place an “auric block” in my field restricting relations – primarily intimate relationships – ensuring his lies and deceptions would never become public knowledge. That occult move would affect every area of this life: mental, emotional, spiritual, relational, financial – everything.
While many of us never heard of the other contemporary non-dual teachers, as we were told Nome was the only realized teacher, when the mention of U. G. Krishnamurti came up Russ chimed-in with “How many people actually realize with such a non-teaching as Krishnamurti’s??”
U.G. was the Indian “anti-guru.”
Only recently, I watched a video where Facebook friend David Solomon, who was close to U.G. Krisnamurti, discussed U.G.’s basic approach in this way: “I don’t see UG as ever suggesting that we should ‘throw anything out.’ He was about accepting the world and ourselves exactly as we are…and in doing that, Life takes over and blossoms in its own natural Way. One’s own Life and what grows around that.
UG was not only staunchly promoting that everyone be themselves but recognizing all of Life around us has a right to be what IT is too. And to accept the Wisdom of our bodies, and accept the Wisdom of the natural world.”
It had always been my deep feeling that our body and, hence, the world was the most efficacious route to Freedom. So, it followed that all the talk of the body…the senses…and the world being unreal dragged any process of integration out for years, and, often, decades.
Not only was neti-neti inefficient and out-dated, it revealed so much of the utter hypocrisy of what radical non-duality actually is: the undeniable duality of non-duality.
⚛️ The Existential Danger of Radical Non-Duality: https://leslieread.substack.com/p/the-existential-danger-of-radical
“You know being around someone whose main objective in life was to NOT falsify himself…and doing his darndest to prevent us from doing that to ourselves. That’s just a Blessing… there is no explanation… I can’t imagine being any luckier than that.” ~David Solomon
Both the Krishnamurtis were against “A Way.” Every person had their own way.
The ‘way’ was about taking what comes one’s way in stride.
⚛️ The Case for Ultimate Independence: https://leslieread.substack.com/p/the-case-for-ultimate-independence
As Humans we live in this world…on this planet. Who, exactly, would draw any line and where would they draw it?
Jeff Brown said it fairly succinctly…and with a pardon for ALL the necessary f**k bombs…
Pamela Wilson (in the landmark book Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom, Spet. 28, 2007, by Rita Robinson) stated: “Not ‘neti-neti’ but ‘YES-i-YES-i’ ” A succinct statement revealing the subverted feminine-half of the spiritual journey and bringing it down to earth to embrace ALL of what it means to be Human. ❦
It’s my feeling that, at this point in our spiritual evolution, we are moving definitively away from any patriarchal paradigm and, perhaps, any need for an external teacher…and most certainly, away from the dogmatic approaches of many of them.
⚛️ The Ultimate Demise of Fundamentalist Spirituality…The Arrogance of Superiority: https://leslieread.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-demise-of-fundamentalist
There is no doubt that this life was/is arguably one of most disturbingly and existentially harmed (aside from the insidious accounts of sexual abuse seen in cults such as the Osho cult) not only by my immediate teachers but by the sweeping collusion in the non-dual space by teachers looking to protect their meal-ticket of teaching.
⚛️ The following short recording (22 min.) details the occult controls over 4-generations of my family to which Rick Archer (Buddha at the Gas Pump) suggested I just ‘walk away’ primarily because he was covering for Adya’s brand: https://www.dropbox.com/…/Recording%208B%20…
For my Astro-nerd friends, perhaps this will be signified by the momentous move of Neptune into Aries for the 1st time in 160 years, where it will stay until 2039 and where it will conjunct Saturn at the very beginning of the entire zodiacal wheel…something that hasn’t happened for over 9,000 years…THIS is the day I am typing this.
☯️ everything is already Whole and One
☯️ No need to separate anything out or figure out what, when, and where, how, to separate it out.
☯️ …or worse, be told WHAT to separate out (recently I was told that ‘activism’ isn’t holy!)
If we cannot actively stand-up for our most cherished values, how can we really call ourselves “spiritual?”
Thank you for following my work (and it has been work) in digging myself out from having been silenced (under a death threat)…and way more…at the hands of non-dual teachers.
Warmly,
-Leslie @integrityintruth.com ❦
⚛️ Integrity in Truth: https://www.integrityintruth.com
⚛️ And on Substack: https://substack.com/@leslieread/posts
I wish I had written the following poem…posted by Glenna Erickson Bain on FaceBook:
It’s All Real…All of it. 🌷
~A Poem by Jordan Bates
Family, friends, animals, people, bodies, Earth, music, art, trees, soil, sun.
It’s Real.
It’s not an illusion.
God is not “generating an illusion of a world.”
No, God is being the world.
The world is the literal concrete Body and Heart of God.
It’s all Real.
Non-duality can so easily be used as a means of hiding from this Realness.
By writing the world off as “illusion,” the throbbing, gushing Heart of the world is kept at arm’s length.
By repeatedly asserting that “it’s all unreal,” “it’s all meaningless,” “there’s no one here,” “there is no body,” “there is no world”…
A subtle closed-off-ness can be allowed to persist.
By dismissing this universe as a mere “hologram” or “video game” or “theatrical production” or “movie appearing on the projection screen of consciousness”…
The soft animal-body of this cuddly life can be unconsciously rejected.
One can secretly block oneself from really-truly-deeply-viscerally noticing that the One Poem is written in flesh and bone.
When bones break, it doesn’t feel like a simple reformatting of pixels in a hologram.
When parents weep over the dead body of an innocent child, only a voice of confusion and coldness would ask them why they are grieving the loss of an imaginary character.
They’re grieving the loss of God.
A once-in-existence expression of God.
They’re Real, and their grief is Real.
When they grieve, God grieves.
When we suffer, God suffers.
When we are tortured, God is tortured.
When we are burned at the stake, God is burned at the stake.
When we are raped, God is raped.
When we die a slow and frightening death in a hospital on a ventilator, God dies this same slow and frightening death.
God is not “hiding in the Absolute” in perpetual non-attached, pain-free peace.
No, God is our attachment.
God is our pain.
God is our fear.
And God is also Absolute peace.
God feels it all, for God is all of it.
All of it.
It’s all Real.
True enlightenment is not to escape the human experience.
It is to arrive fully in the human experience.
To land fully on Earth, with a wide-open heart, ready to feel it all and respond wisely and compassionately.
To dig one’s feet into the ancient soil of our Mother, feel her pulsing heartbeat, and know She is Real.
Know She is God.
Know that her children are God.
Know that you are here to Serve Her.
By being exactly who you are.
Living true.
Fully, bravely, with an open heart.
Amen. 🙏
