By John Cowan
So, it is my first year of attending Quakers, and at a Forum someone is explaining what you do during meeting and I am asked a direct question about my feelings about the explanation. And I say, “Well I keep asking myself, who is holding the inward light?”
Which everyone thought quite funny. I think they thought I was joking. But I was not. This inward light and finding out about my sins through it and somehow that would fix something seemed reasonable but clumsy. Since my purpose then and quite a bit of the time during Forums is, not to provoke hilarity, but to find out things of importance, I pulled back from the conversation. In the following months I discovered to my surprise that despite not quite understanding all this, I knew enough to function.
I have had one foot in the world of non-dual spirituality for a long time. Coming from the Hindus and Burma, and China, and Japan is the spiritual theory that we are not two. We are not one either. Somewhere in between. Hard to think for someone born dualist, thinking all entities separate. As a matter of fact in the world of normal problems every non-dualist I know talks like a dualist. I mean how would you get someone to pass the salt if you had to account for the fact that you and she and the salt were nearly really one. But not quite.
In the spiritual world, (and in the scientific world too. Surprise?) non-dualism works better. For instance, do you think God is in constant contact with you? Easier to explain if we are a web of reality. Easier to imagine. Everybody is in contact with everybody.
I wandered off in my way of thinking to think this way: My basic self is “Awareness.” I can impact everything especially the rest of what is attributed to me such as mind, body, thoughts, feelings by simply being aware of them. Indeed I can remove things from mind, heart, and maybe even kidneys, by simply being aware of them. (Seems like Jesus did a lot of this last. They are called “miracles.”) This is now my routine.