The Seer

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In the Sept/Oct Advaita Fellowship Newsletter, Wayne Liquorman writes:

I am periodically taken to task for not having a teaching style more like some of my preceptors - most notably, Nisargadatta Maharaj. Maharaj was famous for speaking from the standpoint of the Absolute. He would say things such as, “I was never born and I will never die” and “I am awake even when I am asleep.” Such assertively non-dual statements sometimes had the effect of shocking his listeners into a profound, transcendent Seeing.

I am sympathetic to this approach but I have rarely been comfortable using it. I feel much more at home when I am meeting my listeners where THEY are…most of them believing that they were born and will die and that they are asleep while asleep. From this point of “obvious” truth we can then proceed to examine the more profound, underlying nature of this “one” who lives and dies and sleeps.

No one can deny that there is EXISTENCE here. The nature of that EXISTENCE can (and has been) debated endlessly. But this EXISTENCE is self-proving. It is not a philosophical debating point but a self-affirming Truth. It is here at the center when you pull off the onion-like layers of your apparent self - the self that lives and dies and sleeps and wakes.

We are the victims of our beliefs. When you “believe” the pointers of a teacher such as Maharaj the inevitable result is a kind of nihilism in which all that is apparent (including yourself) is denied as meaningless and illusory. When you believe the pointers of a teacher such as myself the inevitable result is the sense of having a progressively deeper and truer knowledge about the nature of Existence.

So pick your poison. With a little luck…either one will kill “you.”

With much love,
Wayne