Today's Column

Dear Katie and Arthur

Two good friends of mine, who are the authors of, “The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity,” have been reading the manuscript of my unpublished book, “The Feast That Eats Itself.” They’re really a gift, because, contrary to what usually happens with an agent or an editor who doesn’t think your book is ready, they actually took the time to tell me why they think it’s not. The essence of their comments is that I hadn’t said enough about myself, that I’d quoted other author’s too much, and that I hadn’t explained what the title I chose for my book means. Katie wrote, “There is so much territory to explore in that phrase (“The Feast That Eats Itself”), and I feel like you barely touched on this theme.”

Well, Katie, it’s hard to describe…

In fact, it isn’t possible to describe. But that’s what we keep trying to do.

Non-duality is like a watermelon seed. The more you try to grasp it the quicker it slips away. No one has ever described it. Not Buddha, not Shankara, not Byron Katie, not Ramana Maharshi, and not me. Just about the most that can be said is that telling “my” story is not the way to “describe” non-duality. I guess, though, that I can explain what I mean by “The Feast That Eats Itself.”
As I was banging away at the computer a year ago, shoehorning twenty years of journal entries into a few hundred pages of manuscript, I realized that the ancient image of the Ouroboros was a perfect way to illuminate what I meant by “The Feast That eats Itself.” The great wyrm – or dragon if you prefer – chasing its tail, is a characterization of the universal process that has been with us for thousands of years, and it illuminates the sudden insight that comes in one way or another to everyone who steps back and scratches their head about what’s really going on here. Meister Eckhart said something like, “The eyes with which I am looking for god are the eyes with which god is seeing me.” What I first saw was that the universe is a book that reads itself: there is only one thing here. One thing that has invented the incredible notion of separation. No reason for it. It just has.

Sometimes I get self-conscious about being a bookworm. “The Book That Reads Itself” transformed, broadened, I hope, into “The Feast That Eats Itself,” and as some years passed by, I was drawn back into the spiritual quest I’d let go fallow (yeah, right.) About ten years ago I had a spontaneous experience of Samadhi. And then it went away (yeah. Right.) Oh, no, it didn’t! These things don’t “go away.” I know now that what actually happened is that a tsunami was released inside of me that rolled back through the years of my memory washing away assumptions and judgments, deconstructing all the defenses I’d built up through fifty some years of thinking I was a separate being.

In 2006 I met Byron Katie, and realized I was sitting with a living Buddha. In the summer of 2007 I went to the School for The Work. A month later I had another spontaneous Samadhi. A year after that, I realized that there was no one who needed to have that overwhelming experience of bliss again. I went to a satsang held by David Carse, and met a friend of mine there, another “follower” of Katie. In the course of that afternoon, she said something to the effect of, “I’ve realized that there’s nothing to get,” and in my mind, I said, “And no one to get it.” About a month later, after another satsang with an illuminated being, it all settled in. The quest is over. There’s nothing to get. And no one to get it. So, let’s get on with it.

So is there nothing left for me to work on? No. There’s plenty to work on. This brain has plenty of “problems” to keep it occupied. My wife and my friends know what some of those things are. Am I immune to pain and sorrow? No. But more and more, as D. T. Suzuki said, “…my tears have no roots.” I just want to tell you that what is real here is not “me” in any way that I have previously known it. There’s nobody here. What is real is not the object of perception but the fact, the miraculous, unexplainable, irreducible fact, of perceiving. The heart of everything is awareness, and it is immutable. It does not begin, or end. It is not confined to here, or now. “I” and “here” and “now” are the same word. What is real is everywhere and everywhen, looking out of every window, absorbed in its most amazing discovery: separateness.

That is the feast that eats itself.