Reflection 44

Welcome!


Shareable

How can I share with you my experience of red. It might be your experience of blue. How can I share with you my pain, or my pleasure. The taste of the apple pie we’ve had. It’s a secret thing. We are really separate and lonesome, aren’t we? - in matters of feeling and sensation. We are each locked up in a private world, lonely. But there is one thing we can share absolutely, without any shadow of doubt, and that is where we are coming from, who we are and what we are. Why is this utterly shareable? Because there is nothing there to go wrong. It seems to me that the Vision of the One we really are here is a hundred per cent or nothing. Either it exists or it doesn’t. If it exists, it’s a hundred per cent. Why? Because as St. Thomas A Kempis described it, it’s a vision of Eternal Clarity, the Country of Everlasting Clearness. I share that with you and with all its citizens. That’s sharing. The only thing we can really really share beyond any doubt. (Video Interview with Douglas Harding – His Life and Philosophy. Richard Lang)

The more I share “seeing” with others, the more I get familiar with it myself. I have had startling re-discoveries, for instance, of how perfectly clear “clarity” really is, at the moment of “showing” it to a friend. Or, walking with another friend, finding that together we were able to be the motionless witness (singular?) of the moving world in a more sustained way than I had been capable of previously. Jan.

I'd like just like to say that I've read a lot of books on spiritual awakening, but few have even come close to the simplicity and profound clarity of Mr. Harding's work, which I'm so happy to have discovered just a week ago. His experiments are quite similar to the "pointing-out instructions" of Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen practice—but for me a lot more effective! I'm just amazed to see that losing face, dropping egoic self-image, is so volitional and so incredibly easy. The hard part, I know, is keeping with this all the time, till it becomes a naturally effortless state to abide in, but at least now I'm certain—I can easily, directly SEE, with certainty—what terms like "nonduality" and "enlightenment" are actually pointing to. And with each successive glimpse I'm finding, quite pragmatically, my usual level of shyness rapidly dissolving. This is a superb teaching! (T.)

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