How Can Non-duality Help Me Now?
This is the latest book by the Warden of Shanti Sadan.
It focusses on questions raised recently by enquirers into the non-dual teachings, and answers that can help us on the way to inner discovery.
There are chapters on:
What is Non-duality?
If Non-duality is True, Why is Meditation Needed?
What is Faith According to the Non-dual Teachings?
Are My Ideas About the Supreme Being Important?
How Can I Find the Reality Behind Appearances?
Does Non-duality Lead to Special Powers?
What is the Relation Between Thought and Awareness?
Can There Be a Name for the Nameless?
Seeking Happiness, Should I Pursue or Give Up Desires?
How Can I Enquire Into What is Beyond the Mind?
Non-dual Meditation: Am I Doing it Right?
Non-duality: Why Don’t I Feel It?
A Guiding Principle: Does This Change?
How Can My Self Be the All?
Is Non-duality Incompatible with Human Love?
How Can Non-duality Help Me Now?
Even at the beginning of our search, there is something in our immediate experience that is unchanging and self-luminous, and this is the opening that leads to joy and ultimately to transcendence.
From: What is Faith According to the Non-dual Teachings?
Is there anything or anyone with whom we can entirely absorb our individuality into a whole that nothing can dissolve? The answer is yes, it is the ultimate Truth or God, understood as the name for the reality untouched by the passing of time. This is the being that underlies our being. In this we can melt our separateness into an everlasting completeness. This is where our deepest needs are fulfilled.
From: How Can I Find the Reality Behind Appearances?
In meditation there must be techniques to manage the mind’s dynamics and complexity. Yet the aim of meditation is to transcend technique; in fact it is to transcend completely the mind and all complexity. Technique is a way of doing something. What we ultimately seek in meditation is not doing but being—the being of our true innermost nature, the universal reality in all.
From: Non-dual Meditation—Am I Doing it Right?
Our preconceptions cause us to misunderstand the goal of these techniques and to believe that they are further ways to make the best of our circumstances. In fact, the intended outcome of these methods, rightly applied, is that we will be enabled to receive and absorb the full meaning of the non-dual teaching. This essential message is not how to cope with our situation, but that our true position is entirely other than we currently believe it to be… Our real nature is not a part of the phenomenal world, but the consciousness in which the universe of forms appears.
From: How Can Non-duality Help Me Now?
