The World is My Mirror Read online

  The World

  is

  My Mirror

  Richard Bates

  NON-DUALITY PRESS

  THE WOLRD IS MY MIRROR

  First edition published September 2012 by

  Non-Duality Press

  © Richard Bates 2012

  © Non-Duality Press 2012

  Illustration (p. iv) by Edward Ballard

  Richard Bates has asserted his right under the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,

  to be identified as author of this work.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  without prior permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Non-Duality Press | PO Box 2228

  Salisbury | SP2 2GZ | United Kingdom

  ISBN: 978-1-908664-26-6

  www.non-dualitypress.org

  Dedication

  This book has appeared because I crossed paths with one very special person.

  Many people who write about the unfathomable and mysterious phenomenon we call life or existence seem to have had a number of years reading spiritual books and quite a few trips to exotic places to hear the words of the enlightened. For me, there was none of this.

  I was a tough-minded individual that was just plain anxious and unhappy. I knew what I knew, and that was that.

  Lynn ‘Foxy’, you were my guru who I never even searched for. You appeared when it was time for you to appear and to kick-start a journey I never knew I needed.

  Your cosmic energy and aliveness broke through the toughest skin of any human.

  This book is dedicated to you, Lynn.

  The Game

  Furrowed brow

  To furrowed frown

  I’ll choose my move

  I’ll usurp your crown

  All is set

  Let the games commence

  Check the rules

  And make it tense

  The appearance of heat

  The first glimpse of fire

  Look at me now

  Let our faces retire

  Touch my hand

  Let’s embrace our demise

  The flames of collapse

  Enlighten the wise

  The ash of destruction

  It’s over too soon

  The tick of a clock

  A finger to the moon

  Awaken my friend

  It’s all been a game

  It’s fun to get caught

  But it ends all the same

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Game

  Setting the Scene

  Looking at What Is

  Relatively Speaking

  Rules of Grammar Are Not Necessarily Rules of Nature

  An Atheist Looks to a Christian for a Sense of Identity and Vice Versa

  Mind

  Life Anew

  Favouring the Teacher Over the Message

  Time

  Absence

  My Story

  Games

  The Lucid Dream

  Repeat Performances

  The Self

  The Old and the New

  Face To No Face

  The Appeal to Perfection

  Science: Tripping Over Its Own Shoe Laces

  Abstraction and Concepts

  Look Into My Eyes

  Creating the Drama

  The Fear of Other People

  A Person Can Only Seek

  Therapy: Being Honest

  The World Is My Scapegoat

  Breath-taking Stuff!

  Allegory and Storytelling

  The Message That Floats Your Boat

  Fantasy/Reality

  Come Fly with Me

  Children: No Better Guru

  Hatch, Match and Dispatch

  The Tentacles of the Universe

  The Relief

  Back Cover

  Setting the Scene

  Here we are, you and I, sitting in a little country pub somewhere in the thick of winter, by the inglenook fireplace. We are watching the flames licking up the chimney as we see the snow flurries out of the window. Dusk approaches. There’s the satisfying comfort that I have booked an overnight stay and the barman goes to bed only when I have downed my last pint of real ale, brewed locally and tasting like nectar. We contemplate how far we have come in this crazy life and where it is all leading to. We relax back in our red leather armchairs, pick at our snack of strong cheese and fresh crusty bread, whilst we just talk and ponder. Come and join me in the pages of this book.

  So what is this book all about? Does the world really need another book about non-duality? What can this one say that other books cannot?

  What follows is an ordinary bloke’s description of this amazing, unfathomable thing called Wholeness, oneness, and liberation. I want to convey that liberation is not somewhere else and at some other time. It is here in the everyday life that is totally fresh and totally new. I have not referred to many teachers and have not placed poems or aphorisms at the beginning of every chapter.

  To anyone flicking through this to see what all the fuss is about and with no real interest, I apologise. Prior to 2008, I would have been with you and put the book down again. I have no answer why this gripped me at the time it did. All I know is it just happens, like the heart beating and the food digesting. It seems life can be confused and life can be clear. But I will say this: there is an energy here that is totally ruthless and will stop at nothing until it finds. This unseen leviathan makes infinity look small. The frustration is that if you find yourself seeking and discover this kind of message it can drive you nuts because what you think you are seeking for will not succumb to pressure. I cannot give you what you seek because you do not have anything more or less than I do. Seeking and not finding, believe it or not, is not so bad. When not finding is finding, where do you go and where have you been? What follows is the best I can do, now.

  You will have to see for yourself what this is about. You have to taste the food before you leave the restaurant; if you eat the menu it’s a bit cardboardy and stale. What I try to do is to use what we have to hand, to explore experience‌—‌not to eliminate it.

  The message of this book is that what appears to happen, does not. To see this may require investigation on a grand scale. Use the mind and take it to its limits. If you feel like a doer, then ‘do’. You do not need to listen to those teachings which go for the jugular and say there is no you that can neither do or not do. I am not saying that it’s an incorrect formulation‌—‌it is not. The thing is when ‘you’ can say that, knowing it comes from a place you never thought existed, your disappearance will be your everything. The teachings and the teachers are like a boat that carries you across the river; they are left for someone else to use going another way. I wonder if that could be called compassion?

  I suggested that you ‘use the mind’ and the mind is an awesome piece of kit, but it can take on too much too easily. Asking it to contemplate consciousness, awareness or no-thingness will cause it to malfunction. The mind’s a very practical fellow and can come up with some useful strategies to keep this body functioning and life happening: it adapts in milliseconds, not millennia. Take, for example, the ability to recognise a familiar face among crowds of thousand: quite a feat if you bear in mind faces do not differ in the same way a tree differs from a sausage.

  So the mind deserves respect. It does its job admirably. It creates colour, sound and furnishes a world for you with interesting things to entertain and excite you. But why not respect its limits? Give it some space now and again
and allow it to rest. I promise it will thank you.

  The mind is a label slapper: drawing lines and making things appear to be solid and unchanging. It loves to predict and to know. This is a survival strategy that has great benefit to this sophisticated tube that puts things in one end and expels from the other. The mind and body function perfectly in the environment that created them.

  The mind is also soaked in ignorance and bravado that renders it necessary to create what is actually nonexistent. I am thinking of an independent self or person residing in the body somewhere, owning the body and calling it ‘mine’. It then becomes seduced by its own creation‌—‌the narcissist of narcissists, if you like.

  In a way, it has not made a mistake, this is what comes with the territory. It is useful to tell a lie and know someone else cannot read your thoughts. The trouble is that self creates the notion of non-self and so a world out there gets created by default. There is no escaping it.

  It can feel mighty uncomfortable, though, to be pushed around by people you perceive as ‘other’ in a huge, ancient pre-existing universe. You feel a temporary part, a visitor on an alien planet. Life becomes serious business.

  The searching, though, is life searching, life getting depressed and life getting frustrated. It is a game, a game that is taken very, very seriously. Once seen, this game is breathtaking. The mind could never have come up with this one. Who sees...? Life sees, that is who.

  Your experience is the only one you know of. Use it, do not lose it. Non-separation is all that is re-discovered. Wholeness sees itself in its apparent forms and greets itself round every corner. I invite you to be brave and take a look. When you look with honesty you only see yourself.

  The world is my mirror. Reflect on that!

  Looking at What Is

  We believe there is something called ‘space’. Not only outer space, but the space around us. Now, in this space there are things‌—‌objects. We are convinced these objects have a life of their own: they have independent existence. In this way a sense of permanence is created in order for planning to take place; for future events to occur; for ‘life’ to happen. This seems so self-evident that any idea to the contrary feels ridiculous. This is the world of the individual, the person, the ‘me.’ What follows is an attempt to see if this is true. I don’t want to put anything else in its place. If we cannot confirm this commonsense axiom through enquiry, what shall we do? If the very ground of conventional existence can be questioned and shown to be unsound, then like a bouncy castle with the valve open, it starts to deflate and change shape. If you see reality as it actually is, you are in for a shock. You will get over it and a sense of normality will return, but you will never go back to ignorance. The reason is because there is no one to go back and no back to go to.

  The world as it appears is the only world you will ever know. Trying to escape this world for some special one made from just awareness or consciousness is not possible. The illusion is all we have. There is no such thing as awareness or consciousness without an object. Have you ever experienced an apple and at the same time been absent? It does not make sense, does it?

  And yet awareness gets bandied around in some spiritual circles as if it is the ultimate goal or the absolute. Thinking of awareness or consciousness in this way is the catalyst and impetus for a lot of seeking activity. Awareness seeking seems so much better than everyday life. Everyday life is problematic, messy and untidy, even when we think we have imposed some sort of order or control. We want something with smoother edges and more symmetry. This is not to say that ‘something’ is not always present even in deep sleep and prior to birth. It is just that deep sleep and prior to birth have a habit of looking after themselves. What we are interested in is this appearance business, this world that keeps showing up that intrigues and scares us in equal measure. Consciousness has the ability to disguise itself and ignore itself when it appears as a world. It is truly astounding the lengths it goes to in order to appear lost in its own creative abilities.

  Trying to escape from this conventional world you have come to know will only add to the anxiety and frustration when you are attempting to realise something else called awareness or the absolute. I guarantee you that even after the most illuminating satsang or mind-blowing retreat, you will still need to eat, sleep and use the bathroom. The sun will still burn you and the wind will dry your skin. That is how it is. That is how things are.

  Perhaps you can then just relax into the mystery of things and surrender to the All Powerful. But there is no mystery to life; there is just life. To know where it came from, and why, is not possible, simply because that needs ‘two’ and there is only ‘not two’. If you knew what the world is and where it came from, that would only be more fantasy created by a mind that thrives on stories. If you knew the ‘secret’, then you would think you were godlike, and that would make you very poor company. Thinking you know what anything actually is, is what got you into this mess in the first place.

  There is nothing wrong with seeking. The problem is finding, or even not finding, and making a big thing of that. Finding what you are looking for is the worst thing that can happen. The reason is simple: it is bogus!

  If you are one of these people who discover the truth as a result of your intense investigations, the chances are you will try and pass it on to others‌—‌you know, to save them the trouble of going through what you have been through. This is how the spiritual market place gets erected. Practices and rituals become a ‘path’ to enlightenment.

  But even the messages that say there is nothing to find, that you are it, have the potential to set the mind off again by contemplating nothingness. Now to sit and meditate on nothingness is madness. You are being very unkind to the mind. It will try and help and then start coming up with gobbledygook to support you and your endeavours. You will then get angry with the mind and wish it would just go away‌—‌very unfair to something that is just being true to its own nature.

  There is only one erroneous, insidious and downright terrifying idea: that is believing and feeling oneself to be a separately existing thing.

  If you are one of these truth seekers it is because, for some unfathomable reason, that feeling of separateness has played the leading role in the drama you call your life. Not everyone experiences separation the way you do. Some get on with their lives sometimes feeling happy, sometimes less so. And even if all their worldly pursuits are a form of seeking, it does not grip these people to the extent that they continually contemplate existence and being. They simply get on with their lives. There is no need for retreats and ashrams for these guys. They are not in a state of bliss, but they are not obsessed with themselves either.

  Your obsession with you is the problem. Of course I am talking about the objects of your dream, not ‘real’ people with ‘real’ lives. I am talking about the belief in the solidity and permanence of the dream that feels out there and separate. It is not. It cannot be. This is what separation amounts to‌—‌a sense of otherness.

  You can do nothing more than accept things as they are. How could you do otherwise? Seeking is seeking for something that is ‘other’, something separate, and, like Father Christmas, there isn’t one.

  If you want anything to do, do this: the next time you see, touch, smell, taste or hear an apple, ask yourself if any of those experiences can happen in your absence. If not, where is the ‘apple’? The answer to this question is highly personal and might not be available in words. It is like watching a child playing with his trucks in the sand-pit and asking his thoughts on awareness or consciousness. He’ll look at you, smile and then absorb himself once more in building a sand dune or refilling his lorry at his depot. What you cannot see is that he is given you the best answer you will ever get. The difficulty is, you are looking for more.

  Liberation is like having one of those fairground grabbers come along, pick you up, take you somewhere neutral, spring clean you, coat you with an anti-static spray and then throw you right bac
k into the thick of it. Only this time, although everything appears just like before‌—‌nothing seems to really stick.

  The world is appearance only: it has no reality or power of its own. Without no-thing, some-thing cannot appear. Without appearance there is no no-thing to even be contemplated. This is why there is only Wholeness. However, I shouldn’t bother contemplating Wholeness‌—‌you will only turn it into something objective. When you do that there will appear to be a division into two. Just thought I would save you the trouble, that is all.

  Trying to describe this to someone locked into the consensus reality that most people share is not possible. There is a blindness that will not allow any consideration of reality being other than what they have been brought up to believe. To be a person is to see a world that is fully formed and extended in time and space. Objects seem to have inherent existence, an existence that seems to require no cognition. Amazing! What a trick! A moment’s reflection, however, brings this assertion into question and renders it impossible. This impossibility arises not because it is too far-fetched, but because the very appearance of anything is the appearance of knowing, experiencing and presence.

  Relatively Speaking

  Relatively speaking there is a ‘me’ and a ‘you’ and it would be silly to say there is no distinction. However, if we look closely, a so-called other person from your perspective‌—‌which is the only one you have‌—‌can only appear in your consciousness.