Peter Russell | contemplativeinquiry

August 26, 2021

BOOK REVIEW: LETTING GO OF NOTHING

A compassionate and discerning book, drawing on a wealth of experience and understanding. Highly recommended. Peter Russell sets the note of Letting Go of Nothing (1) with the sentence: “The call to let go lies at the heart of the world’s spiritual traditions”. He adds, “Not being attached to outcomes, surrendering desires, accepting the present, opening to a higher power, relinquishing the ego, practising forgiveness – all entail letting go”.

The book is arranged as a series of brief, accessible sections exploring different aspects of the theme. Letting go takes many forms, depending on context. Here, Russell is not primarily concerned with letting go of things, like books, houses, jobs or the grid. His focus is on letting go of fixed beliefs and being right; immutable perspectives on the past or inflexible expectations of the future; the mental/emotional weight of judgements and grievances; disabling attachment to toxic or lost relationships. “We are not letting go of things themselves as much as the way we see them. Hence the title of this book: Letting Go of Nothing. Or, as I sometimes like to put it, ‘Letting Go of No-Thing’.”

Some of the 41 sections that follow are autobiographical. A Change of Mind recalls how a change in perception made space for a change of heart in a close personal relationship. Some are more about method – Letting In and Letting Be deconstruct the widespread notion that letting go of something necessarily means getting rid of it. If we are holding on to a grievance, for example, we are advised to let the experience in and become more aware of its discomforts. Pain, including emotional pain, evolved to let us know that something is wrong. It needs our attention. There are times for ignoring it, but this is not sustainable as our only response.

What we can do is learn to distinguish pain from suffering. Much suffering stems from aversion to pain (physical, mental, emotional), creating a surplus layer of discomfort. To a greater or lesser extent, we can disperse this added level of stress and tension. The work is subtle. It includes a level of not resisting resistance itself, and always finding spaces and possibilities for a degree of inner peace and freedom. Peter Russell is not in the business of sudden transformational release, although this too is possible. His way has more to do with skilful, compassionate engagement with the stream of experience as it happens. It is the work of a lifetime. Sections on Letting Go of Feelings, Letting Go of Story, The Root of Suffering and Fall from Grace explore his core philosophy in more depth.

Some of the sections set out liberating values – Forgiveness, Kindness, Wisdom. Others describe spiritual principles and practices – Sat-Chit-Ananda, Reframing Enlightenment, The Path of No Path. Russell is committed to an understanding of the world that summons us to ‘the deep peace of our true nature’. Matthew Fox (2), in a review, sees a social-ecological dimension in this work. For him, Letting Go of Nothing is an affirmation that our species can “wake up to down-to-earth spiritual wisdom that all our religions, when healthy, call us to – keeping it simple, understandable, and effective so that we and the sacred planet we share might become sustainable once more”. This simple book offers guidance at many levels.

(1) Peter Russell Letting Go of Nothing: Relax and Discover the Wonder of Your True Nature Novato, CA: New World Library, 2021 (Foreword by Eckhart Tolle)

(2) Matthew Fox is the author of Creation Spirituality and Original Blessing. His championship of an earth inclusive spirituality and his denial of original sin led to his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church and move into the Episcopalian communion. His most recent book is Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic – and Beyond.

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August 19, 2021

THE SUPPORT OF NATURE

“Carl Jung coined the word synchronicity to refer to the remarkable coincidences most of us experience from time to time. They are remarkable in that they usually involve two or more unconnected events coming together in an unlikely way. These events seem to be more than coincidences, more than pure chance. They often seem like miracles, bringing us just what we need at just the right time, opening up new opportunities in our lives or supporting us in some other way.

” … The Maharishi, with whom I had the good fortune to study in India, explained this as ‘the support of nature’. When he wanted to assess how we were progressing in our practice, he was not interested in our experiences in meditation itself … he was more interested in whether we had noticed what he called ‘increased support of nature’. By this he meant, did we notice the world supporting our needs and intentions? That is to say, did we notice more synchronicity in our lives?

” … It might sound like magical thinking, but I’ve noticed that the degree of synchronicity in my life often reflects my state of conscious. When I meditate regularly, especially when I have been on a meditation retreat, life seems to work out well, with many little coincidences leading me to just what I need at the right time. It’s as if the Universe has my best interests at heart and arranges for their fulfilment in ways I could never have dreamed of.

“Conversely, when I’m stressed, not in touch with myself but caught up in worry or in some other way off-centre, synchronicities don’t flow so abundantly.

“Furthermore, synchronicities seem to happen more often when I’m engaged with the world. I can sit alone in a cottage in the middle of a forest, at peace and in touch with myself, yet few synchronicities occur. Significant ones nearly always involve other people in some way. It is as if my interplay with others gives cosmic choreography greater opportunities to reach me.

“Although we cannot make synchronicities happen – it’s in their nature to occur ‘by coincidence’ – we can encourage their occurrence. We can support nature by taking time to step back from our egoic thinking and reconnect with our essential being. Then, grounded in our true nature, we can go out and engage fully in the world. We can go out and play – play whatever game or role best fits our intentions and best serves our awakening, and that of others.

“And then enjoy, and perhaps marvel at, the way nature responds by supporting us.”

Peter Russell Letting Go of Nothing: Relax Your Mind and Discover the Wonder of Your True Nature 2021 http://www.newworldlibrary.com – (Foreword by Eckhart Tolle)

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November 3, 2019

NON-DUALITY AND YOGA NIDRA

This post is built around Dr. Richard Miller’s approach to Yoga Nidra (1) and my response to it. The resource I am working with – a book and a CD – was published in 2005. My concern in writing is with how a “meditative practice for deep relaxation and healing” can also be what one reviewer (2) described as the “perfect tool” for the author’s non-dual teachings. For the recommended practices “require only presence, and as such represent both the path and the goal of non-dual practice.”

The word non-dual is a translation of the Sanskrit advaita, literally ‘not two’. I remember a podcast in which Peter Russell (3), a long-term practitioner and writer in this field, cautioned against a tendency to equate ‘not two’ with ‘one’. He then told an ancient Indian story about the making of clay pots. A potter takes a lump of clay and makes two pots. One clay; two pots. In the Indian tradition, this is a ‘consciousness first’ understanding, and modern versions draw on terms like presence, awareness, ground of being, or true nature to point to our ultimate identity as this consciousness. ‘God’ is also used in this way. The understanding is that we are never separate from this identity, though we may feel separate from it, or forget it, or ‘not believe’ in it. After all, most of our attention is on our individual life in the world with all its pulls, stresses and demands.

Early in his book, Richard Miller describes his first experience of Yoga Nidra:

“Our instructor led us through Shavasana, the traditional yogic pose for inducing deep relaxation while lying completely still on the floor. The instructor expertly guided us into being conscious of sensations throughout our body, as well as to opposing experiences, such as warmth-coolness, agitation-calmness, fear-equanimity, sorrow-joy, and separation-oneness. I was invited to rotate may attention through the sensations elicited by pairs of opposites until I was able to embody these opposing experiences with neither attachment or aversion to what I was experiencing.

“I drove home that evening feeling totally relaxed and expansively present. For the first time in years, I felt free of all conflict, radiantly joyful, and attuned wit the entire universe. I experienced life as being perfect just as it was and felt myself to be a spacious nonlocalized presence. Instead of my usual experience of being in the world, I was having a nonmental experience of the world being within me, similar to experiences I had known as a child”.

Miller’s motivation to continue was “a longing in me to consciously awaken into and fully abide as this sense of presence”. As well as becoming a yoga teacher and psychotherapist he has worked with Direct Path teachings as a student of Jean Klein. He describes the very term Yoga Nidra as a paradox, a play on the words ‘sleep’ and ‘awake’ as it means ‘the sleep of the Yogi’. The implication is that the normal person is asleep to their true nature through all states of consciousness – waking, dreaming and deep sleep – while the Yogi is one who is awake and knows his or her true nature across all states, including sleep. The practice therefore involves both deep relaxation and deep inquiry.

A full practice on Miller’s CD begins with two commitments – one to a form of mindfulness at the edge of sleep where, for the reasons pointed to above, it is OK to ‘fall asleep’ since there is a trust that the process will continue to run at other levels. The second is described as a ‘heartfelt prayer’, articulated as though it has already been fulfilled – for in the absolute, there is only now: Miller gives the example ‘my friend is whole, healed and healthy’. Then the meditation moves through seven stages, the first six of which address specific forms of awareness: body and sensation; breath and energy; feelings and emotions; thoughts, beliefs and images; desire, pleasure and joy; and witness/ego-I. The final stage (sahaj) is our natural state, ‘the awareness of changeless Being’. Each stage provides an opportunity to identify conventionally positive and conventionally negative experiences, and to hold both in a wider embrace. The sixth stage inquires into the very nature of the ‘I’ that believes itself to be a separate witness, enabling the simple being of the final stage. The whole practice lasts about 35 minutes.

I’ve been looking for an evening practice to complement my morning one. After only a week, it has the right feel, the right format and the right length for me at this point in my life. Over the last three or four years non-duality has become my common sense. During this period I have worked a good deal with the ‘Seeing’ experiments of Douglas Harding’s Headless Way (4) and also with substantial resources from Direct Path teachers Greg Goode (5) and Rupert Spira (6). A non-dual view, as a working assumption, is now both cognitively and experientially well installed.

I don’t have a deep interest in non-dualist metaphysics for its own sake. I am deeply committed to this world and my human life. What I find is that a non-dual model of reality adds to my experience of human life in the world, and cannot be separated from it. I find myself leaning in to this nourishing and illuminating possibility, and committed to commit to living by it. Roger Miller’s Yoga Nidra has met me where I am. I am very grateful for this gentle, life-affirming, and subtle practice, which helps to maintain me on this path.

(1) Richard Miller Yoga Nidra: A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Holding Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2005

(2) Stephen Cope, author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self and The Wisdom Of Yoga

(3) https://www.peterrussell.com/

(4) http://www.headless.org/

(5) Greg Goode The Direct Path: A User Guide Non-Duality Press, 2012 (UK edition)

(6) Rupert Spira Transparent Body: Luminous World: the Tantric Yoga of Sensation and Perception Oxford: Sahaja Publications, 2016

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February 12, 2018

PANPSYCHISM: A NOTE

Non-dualist author Peter Russell is happy to use the Western terms ‘panpsychism’ and ‘panexperientialism’ when discussing what he calls the “mystery of consciousness”. These terms are both modifications of ‘pantheism’ and the ideas have a kinship with those of modern animism. From a Druid perspective, I find it valuable to see this kind of connection being made with the non-dualist systems of Indian origin – whether Tantric, Vedantic, Buddhist or Jain. Challenging our modern mainstream culture’s assumptions about consciousness, Russell says:

“The underlying assumption of the current meta-paradigm is that matter is insentient. The alternative is that the faculty of consciousness is a fundamental quality of nature. Consciousness does not arise because of some particular arrangement of nerve cells or processes going on between them, or from any other physical features. It is always present.

“If the faculty of consciousness is always present, then the relationship between consciousness and nervous systems needs to be rethought. Rather than creating consciousness, nervous systems may be amplifiers of consciousness, increasing the richness and quality of experience. In the analogy of a film projector, a nervous system is like having a lens in the projector. Without the lens there is still a light on the screen, but the image is much less sharp.

“In philosophical circles the idea that consciousness is in everything is called panpsychism, from the Greek pan, meaning all, and psyche, meaning soul or mind. Unfortunately, the words soul and mind suggest that simple life forms may possess qualities of consciousness found in human beings. To avoid this misunderstanding, some contemporary philosophers use the term panexperientialism – everything has experience.

“Whatever name this position is given, its basic tenet is that the capacity for inner experience could not evolve or emerge out of entirely insentient, non-experiencing matter. Experience can only come from that which already has experience. Therefore, the faculty of consciousness must be present all the way down the evolutionary tree.

“We know that plants are sensitive to many aspects of their environment – length of daylight, temperature, humidity, atmospheric chemistry. Even some single-celled organisms are sensitive to physical vibration, light and heat. Who is to say that the do not have a corresponding glimmer of awareness?

…

“According to this view, there is nowhere we can draw a line between conscious and nonconscious entities; there is a trace of experience, however slight, in viruses, molecules, atoms and even elementary particles.”

Peter Russell From Science to God: a Physicist’s Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness Novato, CA: New World Library, 2002

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January 24, 2018

RESTING IN BEING

Last autumn I worked with two on-line resources developed by Peter Russell (1). The first was a brief meditation course, which nudged me into a particularly easeful and surrendered meditative style. The second was a webinar series under the Science and Nonduality umbrella (2), Resting in Being. From this I picked up a helpful definition of nonduality (a translation of Sanskrit advaita). Going back to the time of the Upanishads (3), it invites us to think of ourselves as clay pots. If we look at two pots together (or any number) we find only one clay. Peter Russell describes the clay as ‘mind stuff’. Older Vedantic tradition uses the language of divinity, whilst Tantric Buddhists speak of ‘primordial nature’ (4). Russell is careful to distinguish nonduality from union, unity, or complete identity. My human relationship to the clay (mind stuff, primordial nature) is one of ‘not I not other than I’ (5). I am distinct but not separate.

This ground reality is ever-present and pervasive, yet oddly hard to recognize. No recognition is necessary for a successful human life, yet without it many people experience a sense of loss and alienation or intuit that something of consequence is missing. We invent grail quests and ladders to heaven, strategies for enlightenment or redemption, to address the perceived deficit. These in turn tend to become displacement mechanisms, deflecting us from the very goal we seek. The direct approach points us back to our immediate experience. Peter Russell uses words like ‘being’ and ‘awareness’ – suggesting indeed that that latter might also be turned into a doing word: ‘awareing’. Process terms better express both the movement of experience and the stillness within it. Ursula Le Guin does the same with ‘Taoing’ (6).

As a term, I find ‘resting in being’ useful in guiding me into contemplative awareing. I feel opened, energized and expanded. My centre of gravity shifts. I feel porous, spacious, held within the whole: here, now and home. The years of contemplative inquiry have boiled down to this. It is the stance I am taking away. My remaining sense of inquiry concerns the influence of this stance on the rest of my life and I will look at this in another post.

(1) Spirit of Now website peterrussell.com

(2) https://www.scienceandnonduality.com

(3) The Upanishads Introduced and translated by Eknath Easwaran Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, CA: Niligri Press, 2007 (2^nded.)

(4) https://www.dharmaocean.org/

(5) https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/book-review-not-i-not-other-than-i/

(6) Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way Boston & London: Shambhala, 1998 (New English version by Ursula K. LeGuin with the collaboration of J. P. Seaton)

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November 21, 2017

INTENSIVE INQUIRY

Over the past two years, I have worked with three traditions apart from Druidry. These are Sophian Gnosticism, The Headless Way, and the Vietnamese Zen of Thich Nhat Hanh. Diverse as they are, they have all valuably nudged me in my current direction, which is one of intensive inquiry.

Through this inquiry, I am finding that what I call the Direct Path* is uniting the concerns of these three traditions, in a way that resolves the difficulties they raise for me, described below:

WAY OF SOPHIA To the extent that it is connected to a method, the Sophian (or Magdalenian) journey is a Christian Kabbalist one, a Jacob’s ladder from the apparent world to a Void beyond describable divinity and back again to a new experience of the world as kingdom, transfigured by a super-celestial vision. To the extent that I find a problem with this method, it is a tendency for the reality of my true nature to seem remote and hidden, obscured by a too-vivid myth making. The spirit gets drowned in the cocktail. When working with the image of Sophia, I found a more playful and free-spirited energy, not fitting easily in formal Gnostic Christian tradition. So, the system, as a system, doesn’t quite work for me.

HEADLESS WAY Richard Harding’s Headless Way – http://www.headless.org/ – is apparently non-mythic, and a variant, home-grown form of the Direct Path, or at least its first half. It is based on a set of experiments, which kick-start a non-dual recognition from the visual perception/brief shock of ‘not having a head’, and go on to further to develop the implications of this perspectival shift. The exercises worked brilliantly for me when I first did them. I experienced a powerful figure/ground shift, with the cultural common sense of subject-verb-object language very briefly driven out of me as the world sat on my shoulders. This then became narratized as the opening into an I AM, an ultimate identity of ‘clear awake space, and capacity for the world’.

Precisely this narrative brought about my fall. I could feel the counter coup of my demoted ‘third person’ as it happened. The Monkey King learned to become the Monkey Emptiness and take up a geographically familiar position in the vacant space above my neck. I ended with a sense of ‘fool’s gold’, though in retrospect this seems unfair. I had an important shaking up because of not having a head. Returning to the same territory through different means, I now resonate with Rupert Spira’s understanding that Consciousness cannot know itself as an object. I had tried to become, as a sentient being in the apparent world, absolutely the eye of spirit and although I AM the eye of spirit, I could not become it in that way, because becoming it makes it a conceivable object in the finite mind. I can only enact it through what I call the sacrament of the present moment. It is more as if the finite mind – not separate, yet also not identical – offers itself as a vehicle.

MAHAYANA BUDDHISM: After an interval, I turned to Buddhism, in the form of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Community of Interbeing, – https://coiuk.org/ – which renewed an occasional relationship with one or another Buddhist sangha going back for over twenty years. This time round the wheel I made sure that I studied the Emptiness teachings directly and wasn’t satisfied with meditation manuals and the modern version of Buddhist psychology. My study included Thich Nhat Hanh’s 2014 commentary on the Heart Sutra, (1) Jay Garfield’s translation of and commentaries on Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (2) and Vasubandhu’s Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only, (3) a Yogacara practitioner text presented by Ben Connelly with a new translation by Weijen Teng. I didn’t, this time, work with the Zen literatures of China and Japan.

The result of my study was that in meditation I got a much fuller sense of consciousness being the underlying reality, which thoughts, feelings, perceptions and sensations passed through. This pointed beyond ‘no separate self-nature’ in the sense of Thich Nhat Hanh’s psycho-social-ecological view of ‘Interbeing’, to a fuller sense of Consciousness Only. This experience, a fruit both of study and of practice, helped warm me up to my present encounter with the Direct Path.

I consulted the Science And Non-Duality (SAND) website – https://www.scienceanndnonduality.com/ – since I knew that many Direct Path teachers are linked to that network. First, I took a brief online meditation course with Peter Russell – www.peterrussell.com/ – to find out what basic breath meditation would feel like in an Advaita context rather than a Buddhist one. It felt soft and spacious. But my main concern was with the kinds of inquiry into core identity associated with the Advaita approach, having run into problems with the Headless Way experiments and traditional self-inquiry (‘Who am I?), since I could quickly come up with a rhetorically ‘right answer’ without it meaning very much experientially. I soon came across a new work by Stephan Bodian – https://www.stephanbodian.org/ (4), a former Zen monk, who went on to train in Western psychotherapy and became a student of Direct Path teacher Jean Klein*. He provides a bridge from Zen to the Direct Path and his book is rich in carefully crafted practice suggestions. I also worked with the inquiry suggestions in Greg Goode’s Direct Path (5). Greg Goode – https://greg-goode.com/ is a student of Francis Lucille, himself a student of Jean Klein.

Now I am working with Rupert Spira’s – https://non-duality.rupertspira.com/ Transparent Body, Luminous World (6) contemplations, clear that the Direct Path is the centre of my inquiry. Rupert Spira is another pupil of Francis Lucille, and for me does most to bring out the Tantric as well as Advaita aspects of Klein’s teaching. For him, Direct Path realization is just as much about finding love in sensation and feelings, or beauty in perception, as it is about finding truth in inquiry. All is held in Consciousness. Once we know this, really feeling and tasting the understanding, the question becomes: how do we celebrate and live from this reality? This is the point at which the sense of an embodied spirituality, animist, Earth honouring, with a view of deep ecology, indeed Druidry, come back into their own, held within a Tantric understanding.

I’m moving towards a decision about whether to anchor myself in this world view. Once that decision is made (if it is made), my primary attention will move to the outward arc – here called the Tantric one. This will likely change my practice. The intensive contemplative inquiry will burn itself out, leading to a new spiritual centre of gravity that includes contemplation and inquiry but is no longer defined by them.

*DIRECT PATH: I am specifically referring to the lineage begun by Jean Klein, combining Advaita Vedanta, India’s classical renunciate spirituality, with Kashmir Shaivism, a form of Tantra. The Direct Path is an exploration of objective experience in the light of our enlightened understanding, rather than a turning away from our experience in favour of its background of pure Awareness, as is the case of the Vedantic approach. If the Vedantic path is the path from ‘I am something’ – a body and a mind – to ‘I am nothing’, the Tantric path could be said to be the path from ‘I am nothing’ to ‘I am everything’. If the Vedantic path is one of exclusion and discrimination, the Tantric path is one of inclusion or love. The Direct Path brings them together.

(1) Thich Nhat Hanh The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2017

(2) Nagarjuna The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995

(3) Ben Connelly Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara: A Practitioner’s Guide Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016

(4) Stephan Bodian Beyond Mindfulness: The Direct Approach to Lasting Peace, Happiness and Love Oakland, CA: Non-Duality Press, 2017

(5) Greg Goode The Direct Path Salisbury: Non-Duality Press, 2012

(6) Rupert Spira Transparent Body, Luminous World – The Tantric Yoga of Sensation and Perception Oxford: Sahaja Publications, 2016

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September 24, 2017

FORGIVENESS

Wisdom from Peter Russell, consciousness researcher. meditation teacher, and author.

“The conventional understanding of forgiveness is of an absolution or pardon: ‘I know you did wrong, but I’ll overlook it this time’. But the original meaning of forgiveness is very different. The ancient Greek word for forgiveness is aphesis, meaning ‘to let go’. When we forgive others, we let go of the judgements we may have projected on to them. We release them from all our interpretations and evaluations, all our thoughts of right or wrong, friend or foe.

“Instead we see that they are human beings caught up in their own illusions about themselves and the world around them. Like us, they feel the need for security, control, recognition, approval or stimulus. They too probably feel threatened by people and things that prevent them finding fulfillment. And, like us, they sometimes make mistakes. Yet, behind all these errors, there is another conscious being simply looking for peace of mind.

“Even those we regard as evil are seeking the same goal. It is just that for one reason or another – who knows what pain they may have endured in their childhood, or what beliefs they may have adopted – they seek that fulfillment in ways that are uncaring, perhaps even cruel. Deep inside, however, they are all sparks of the divine light struggling to find some salvation in this world.

“Forgiveness is not something we do for the other person so much as something we do for ourselves. When we let go of our judgements of others, we let go of the source of much of our anger and many of our grievances.

“Our bad feelings may feel justified at the time, but they don’t serve us – in fact, they usually cause more damage to ourselves than they do to the other person. The freer we are of our judgements, the more at peace we can be in ourselves.

“This change of perception is the essence of a change in consciousness. When I first heard of higher states of consciousness, I imagined they would bring awareness of subtler dimensions, possibly new energies, or some other aspect of reality that was beyond my everyday perception. Over the years, I have gradually realized that enlightenment is seeing the same world, but in a different light. It is not so much seeing different things so much as seeing things differently”.

Peter Russell From Science to God: A Physicist’s Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness Novato, CA: New World Library, 2002

Peter Russell had an early involvement in Transcendental Meditation (TM). To this day he says that the Beatles’ greatest contribution to culture was in showing the door to TM and other eastern contemplative systems. He took a degree in physics and experimental psychology at Cambridge University followed by a Master’s in Computer Science (and an early interest in graphics). On presenting a doctoral proposal on meditation to the psychology department he was laughed out of Cambridge, this being the 1970s. But soon afterwards he was offered a place, complete with his own ‘stress laboratory’, at Bristol. Before long he was invited by IBM to offer stress reduction programmes based on TM and his findings about what it could do. More corporate work followed. A pioneer in the field subsequently given its Theravadin Buddhist name ‘mindfulness’, Peter Russell is still active, with an involvement in Science and Non-Duality – https://www.scienceandnonduality.com – and his own Spirit of Now website at – www.peterrussell.com -.

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