Today's Column

"That" Is Me

Introduction: The Radical Surmise

"I should introduce this thesis with the statement that my intention in pursuing my studies at Goddard is to enhance my qualifications to begin the practice of psychotherapy. My focus in this work has been what is known as Transpersonal Psychology, and as I’ve been doing for three semesters now, I go on herein with my notion that, for therapy to succeed, it must be based, consciously or unconsciously, in the idea that what really brings people into the consulting room is the pain of separateness and the quest for wholeness. This is vintage transpersonal psychology, of course, so what is my contribution? My little drop of water for this huge, leaky bucket we keep trying to fill is to add my assurance that the separation we feel is actually illusory, and most importantly, to advance the notion that things are, in some sense, arranged to appear this way."

The above is the beginning of my senior study for my Bachelor’s Degree at Goddard College. It was submitted and my degree was granted in August 2001. Most of what I want to talk about now was already contained in what I was saying then, but some of the ideas have taken eight more years to reach the point where they can be laid out in a way that makes them more accessible. What remains the same, always already there, is…

The Radical Surmise

The thing I want to “take back” is the word arranged. It’s unproductive and confusing to suggest that there is a plan involved. Awareness has no agenda. It’s not personal. If the mind wants to continue playing the game of separateness, then awareness is still there, unchanging. If the mind begins to realize separateness doesn’t add up, then awareness is still there, still unchanging. It doesn’t say anything. It’s just there, always already there, unchanging.

A lot of things have happened since my graduation but the single one that has made the most difference in my life is meeting Byron Katie. Katie lives what the ancient Indian sages called advaita. She doesn’t use any fancy terminology. None at all, in fact, or any metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. Katie offers a tool called The Work, which consists of four questions and a turnaround. In June of 2006 I went to a three-day session with her at Kripalu Yoga Center in Massachusetts. By the second evening, I realized I was with someone whose consciousness is fully grounded in the Oneness that seekers spend their lives searching for.

We all talked for hours about the crazy way that our beliefs mislead us and the cardinal question of why, if we are all one, we act the way we do. Katie’s answer? We just do. It’s simply the way that brains work. At the beginning. But there are other ways. Katie doesn’t say that the way she teaches is better or that her way is good and the way our brains usually work is bad. It’s just different. It’s an opportunity to see and live and function as if one were already just as grounded as she is. The secret, that everyone knows and no one believes, is that we are all awake and aware. But we keep insisting we won’t be.

People start looking for spiritual answers when the physical answers they’ve been working with stop working. They go to therapists, ministers, priests, rabbis, Zen centers, some go to India, and some find someone in the lineage of Ramana Maharishi, or someone else who either explicitly or implicitly is teaching advaita. All of the teachings of advaita can be summed up in two phrases. The word advaita simply means “not two.” Another way to say this is that separation is an illusion. There’s nobody here but us chickens. The other phrase is one that everyone who’s ever been on the spiritual path hascertainly heard. Thou art That. The Sanskrit is usually rendered as Tat Tvam Asi, and can be transliterated in many different ways. I Am That is another. My current favorite is “That” is Me!”

Main Street religion, both East and West, tends to bog down in the simplistic notion that the world is a mess because of ignorance, evil, or both. Advaita contends that there is no such separation. It requires no practices, no meditations, no strange postures or diets, no refraining from ordinary life or the idiosyncratic enjoyments of our sexuality. There is no separation. When we act as if there is we fail to fulfill the joyous and powerful destiny that is our birthright. When we notice what ego is innocently doing, we suddenly have new choices and beauty blossoms as the foundation of all our acts.

Oneness is ever present. To search for it is absurd, like going to the station and standing on the platform waiting for a train that you are already traveling on. Every problem you have is another ramification of separateness and separateness isn’t the case. The more upset you become, the more frantically you want this and want that, the more sharply the mechanism operates that turns everything inside out, like a reflection in a mirror.

A little more than 10 years ago, I cut away the roots of a lifetime of depression, simply by realizing that it was something I was doing, not some disease I had caught or inherited. What comes now is the realization that acting as if I am a separate being is also something I am doing, and just as innocently as I was depressing myself. Depression is something the mind does when it cannot answer the question to be or not to be. Separation is another kind of depression. The mind is a physical mechanism with millions of years of evolution, telling it to take care of itself first. Awareness looks out from within, with no agenda. Again, if the mind wants to continue playing the game of separateness, then awareness is still there, unchanging.

If the mind begins to realize separateness is not the case, then awareness is still there, still unchanging, and that same mind can begin to realize the complete absurdity of seeking. Falling back into the arms of this unexplainable mystery we continue to try to describe the indescribable, just so we can somehow suggest what we can’t explain. The only way to hear silence is to shut up. If you stop scratching around, desperately searching for peace, really just STOP, what happens?

Tat Tvam Asi.