The Ostrich and the Elephant

A blog on spirituality, science, philosophy, ETs, and mental health

Tag: Nonduality

  • Ajata Vada

    A warning:

    I would probably only read this article if you are very committed to awakening. If not, it could be unnecessarily challenging for you. This teaching is about as radical as radical can get – and true spirituality is already pretty radical!

    I want to emphasise though that I do not know if this teaching is true, or if it is the full truth; however, I think something Jesus said is appropriate here if it is true:

    “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find, and when they find they will be disturbed, and when they are disturbed they will be astonished, and will reign over the All.”

    A bit over two years ago now, I came across a video from the nonduality teacher Tom Das called “The highest truth is Ajata”. Hmm, I thought. I’d been on the spiritual path for 11 years at this point, and had never heard that word. I respect Tom as a teacher so I watched the video. (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RTlr5GdZXc).

    It was radical. Like, really, really radical. World-ending radical.

    At first I was excited to hear it. My whole life had been focused on awakening for 11 years, and I was so frustrated with not making the “progress” I wanted. Not actually waking up. When I heard it, I thought to myself, “Okay, this is going to change things. This is big.”

    Ajata is a Sanskrit word which means “unborn”. “A” being the prefix “not” and “jata” being “born”. “Vada” means “view”. What this perspective states is that “there is no creation.” “Nothing ever happened.” The world is not just illusory, it never even appeared to exist!

    After my initial excitement of feeling like this could be a breakthrough for me, a bit of fear crept in. Quite a bit. “Well, this is just one teacher”, I said to myself; “he could be wrong.”

    In the following months and years however, I came across more and more teachers who were saying the same thing. Ramana Maharshi, Papaji, Rupert Spira, A Course in Miracles, some awakened friends on Facebook. The evidence started to mount up.

    I wrote to Tom, initially, when the fear crept in.

    “Is it scary?” I said.

    “No, it’s not scary at all, Will. It’s heaven,” he said. “Ajata = total endless peace, love, and bliss.”

    Still, there were things I wanted in the world. I wanted a deep relationship with a partner. I wanted to write my book. Will that all disappear?

    I don’t know the answer to this question, and really, before I see the ultimate truth myself, what I think about it means absolutely nothing. Whether I believe or disbelieve in ajata is kind of irrelevant. The truth is the truth no matter what I think about it. It’s impossible to know what the coffee in Paris tastes like until travelling to Paris.

    This teaching would say that the world does not exist in any way, but only “God”, “the Absolute”, consciousness, beingness, the I Am exists.

    As Rupert Spira said once, “When the somethingness of the waking state starts to appear less and less like something, the nothingness of the deep sleep state starts to appear less and less like nothing.”

    There’s a tendency for the human mind to picture “nothing” as just an endless black void. But apparently that’s not what is experienced. This state is impossible for the mind to imagine, as I’ve been told. Only that it is everything we’ve always been searching for.

    One thing that makes me hesitate with this teaching is my teacher Isira. As best as I could tell, she was the most awake person I’d ever come across, and I remember her once mentioning the book, “The Disappearance of the Universe”, and dismissing the idea as not true. The world does exist, only our thoughts about it do not exist, she said.

    That was always my position on this matter until coming across the ajata teachings. But I still just don’t know. I can’t know until I experience the truth, whatever it is, for myself. All the philosophising in the world means nothing. Truth is experiential. Philosophy and spiritual teachings can lead you to water, but they can’t make you drink. At a certain point you have to dive in, even though you don’t know that it’s safe.

    This is why I think faith on the spiritual path is so important. Faith doesn’t mean belief in something without evidence, it just means that at a certain point you have to have trust and let go into the unknown.

    What are the benefits of this teaching though? Well, what do humans want more than anything? Eternal life and happiness. That is, apparently, what’s on offer with these teachings. What you truly are was never born and cannot die, and it is bliss. Eternal bliss as “God”. That is where the spiritual path ultimately leads. Yet people are running around picking up scraps of temporary happiness, mostly struggling. As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.”

    There really is so much denial going on in humans. People, on the whole, are suffering a lot. Yet we often refuse to admit it to ourselves I think because we’re scared that there is no solution. That if we faced up to how unhappy we are we would just get stuck there and it would make it worse. People think the best they can hope for is brief periods of happiness interspersed amongst long periods of struggle.

    The spiritual path says there is a solution. And it’s better than we could imagine.

    Another benefit is that this teaching really removes your attachment to the world. Regardless of whether the world exists or not, our intense focus and fascination on the vicissitudes of life can distract us from discovering our true unchanging Self (capital S indicating the ultimate Self, not the individual self or ego). This teaching is a very powerful means for shifting our attention in that way.

    One thing I have noticed, however, with most people who advocate for the ajata teachings, is that they think the world = suffering, and that it can’t be any other way.

    While I think there is both light and dark in existence, and there will always be the full array of human emotion experienced, I don’t see it this way. I believe it is possible to create “Heaven on Earth”. Will it take a while? Yes, but I do believe it’s possible. And I do wonder whether there is an emotional avoidance inherent in the ajata teachings. Maybe if you see the world as inherently just suffering, you are more likely to reject it, and stay in this “absolute” state because it is “safer”.

    I don’t know if this is true, but it is a thought that I had. Adyashanti once said, “Don’t get stuck in enlightenment.” If you get stuck in enlightenment, the world will seemingly make you aware pretty quickly of your neglect of it.

    As I said, that’s just a possibility for me. I don’t know the truth of this yet. All I know is that I’m going to keep exploring until I find the highest truth myself. Until then, I leave you with this image:

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

    P.S. Something I’ve learnt a lot on the spiritual journey is to take the “middle way” approach. Buddha is credited with saying this, but in his case he meant it in terms of asceticism versus over-indulgence. The way I see it is that we should always plant ourselves firmly in the middle ground of any propositions and be open to the truth of each, if there is any. I’ve been surprised at how accurate the middle way generally is in this sense, and getting lost in extremes often indicates a blind spot. I don’t know if this is true of ajata, but it’s a possibility. Some teachers have often said the world is real and unreal at the same time. As I said, I will continue to investigate it either way, and even though it might take a while, I’ll get back to you with the results. 😉

  • Everything is Inside Your “Head”

    The type of spirituality I have mostly followed over the last 8 years is called “nonduality”, from the Hindu word advaita, which translates to “not two”.

    As you may have guessed by the name, this philosophy suggests that there is no such thing as separation – there are not “two things”. Everything, this philosophy suggests, is fundamentally the same. Made out of the same stuff. That stuff could be called consciousness. Pure awareness.

    A lot of people struggle with these ideas. The world around them seems so real and physical. It seems like there really is separation between things. But there’s a very simple way of showing that – even if the materialist paradigm of the universe is correct (which it isn’t 😉 ) – our direct experience can only ever be of pure consciousness and no separation.

    That is because, like the title of this post, everything you experience is actually inside your “head”. Now, even this isn’t true. Saying everything appears inside your head is making a concession to the materialist paradigm, where heads are real physical things themselves. And that’s not true. Your head, just like everything else, is just an appearance in and of consciousness.

    But for the sake of this post, I’ll make a concession to the materialist paradigm, in order to show that even if it is true, everything we experience is only, and can only ever be consciousness itself, without any separation.

    This is because of the way our brains work. A lot of people have an unconscious assumption that their eyes are portals that look out at the world. But this isn’t the way it works. Our eyes are receptors, which take in information, and transmit that information to our brain where images are produced. This is true for all our senses.

    Our eyes do not “look out” at the butterfly, they receive information which is then transferred to the vision processing area of the brain, where an image is produced (again, using the materialist paradigm).

    But if this is true, this means that everything you have ever experienced has been “inside your head”. There’s no room for the world to fit inside your head, so all you have ever experienced is your conscious representation of the world, never the actual physical world itself (which… there isn’t one 😉 ). There’s no room for space inside your head, therefore there’s no room for separation. Your brain just creates the perception of space and separation, but that isn’t your actual experience.

    Go outside at night and look up at the stars. Those stars are appearing inside your head. If the materialist paradigm is correct, your skull should be on the other side of those stars. Your whole world in fact, is surrounded by bone. Again, that is assuming the materialist paradigm is correct, which I maintain it isn’t, but it is still a useful example to show how the world we actually experience can only ever be pure consciousness without any separation.

    The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”

    What the materialist paradigm suggests isn’t that the world you experience is real and physical, because we know it can’t be – it suggests that there is the world you experience, plus the real world beyond what we experience. An outside, external world in addition to the one we experience.

    You’re sitting there reading this on your phone or computer. That phone or computer is “inside your head”. The materialist paradigm suggests there is *another* real phone or computer that exists beyond the one in your direct experience. There has never been any direct evidence for this real external world, because how could there be? It is just an assumption we have made because things really seem physical and separate. But it’s just not the case.

    We are still living in an outdated physicalist paradigm though. We have taken the world at face value without really questioning its nature. A little bit of investigation reveals that the world is very different to how we thought it was.

    Some people might find these ideas challenging, and they are. Waking up to reality is challenging. It dismantles all our beliefs, and that can be destabilising. As Jesus said: “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will be astounded, and will reign over all.”

    It takes a little courage to wake up from the dream of mind.

    And remember, even your “head” is just in your head. 😉

    Much love,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • Embodying the Divine Feminine

    In some spiritual circles, there is often a distinction made between what is called “The Divine Masculine” and “The Divine Feminine”. In Hinduism these are called Shiva and Shakti respectively.

    There is a lot written about these two principles, and I’m not here to write an intellectual rundown on these two ideas, not least of all because I’m not an expert in this field. Instead, I want to give a very simple rundown of how I see these two ideas relate to spiritual awakening.

    Shiva, the divine masculine, is often said to represent the absolute reality or consciousness; that which is beyond all form. Shakti, on the other hand, is often said to represent the manifest world, the life-giving energy of the universe, in all her beauty and horror.

    The type of spirituality I have mostly followed since my spiritual journey began 8 years ago is called “nonduality”, from the Hindu word advaita, literally meaning “not-two”.

    The basic premise of this school of thought is that all is ultimately consciousness, there is no true separation, and thus the separate self is ultimately illusory too.

    These teachings are really fantastic for those interested in ultimate truth and enlightenment. However, like all teachings relating to the nature of reality, they have their limitations. As far as I see it, the world is much more nuanced than can be simplistically put down into absolute statements about its nature, and too much emphasis on these teachings can lead to someone rejecting or neglecting the phenomenal world as merely “illusory”.

    As I see it, the world is only illusory in one sense – that is, its nature is very different than how most humans usually think it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s “not real”. If a magician performs an illusion, we don’t afterwards say “nothing happened”, we say “what we thought was happening was not what was actually happening.”

    This is the sense in which I see the world as illusory: It is made out of consciousness, not matter. The world is very much real as consciousness, but very much unreal as matter.

    That’s not to say we should disregard the idea of matter altogether – it is still the way consciousness is appearing so should still be taken seriously. I wouldn’t step in front of a bus just because I think matter is ultimately illusory. Illusory me would still die, and all the spiritual excuses in the world wouldn’t change that.

    So to just dismiss the world as illusory is to neglect the relative reality of the world, and often leaves people in an intellectual framework without embodying their awakening, or otherwise engaging in “spiritual bypassing”, which is using spiritual teachings as a way to avoid dealing with their issues.

    I recently came across a great spiritual teacher called Louise Kay, who I think embodies the balance between “masculine” and “feminine” perfectly. She is in part a nondual teacher, and simultaneously helps people come to terms with and embrace their emotions.

    A lot of nondual teachers reject the usefulness of meditation practise. They say, “you already are what you seek, all you need to do is recognise this.” And this is true at an absolute level, and in my opinion can even be a useful teaching at a relative level, but it often leaves people sitting around “waiting for enlightenment”, with no change in their everyday life.

    It is a paradox as far as I see it. Yes, you already are what you seek, and yes all you need to do is recognise this, but at the same time practises may be useful in helping you see this. I say “may be” because in my estimation there are no rules for awakening. Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie both woke up in the midst of severe depression, without any previous spiritual path.

    The way I approach it now is to keep reminding myself that I already am what I seek, but at the same time, I’m going to do the practises because I feel they help my relative life, and who am I to say that helping my relative life won’t help wake me up? Anybody who says they have a simple answer to that question I think is deceiving themselves.

    I had some sessions with Louise and she actually told me that I’m already awake, just that it hadn’t sunk in fully yet, which was great to hear. I still struggle with a lot of depression and anxiety, largely related to my experiences over the past couple of years, so it’s a bit hard to be excited about while I’m still suffering so much, but it’s nice to think that my path is paying off.

    In conclusion, I think the Buddha’s teaching of “the middle way” is most appropriate here. Don’t get stuck in absolutes, and don’t get stuck in relativity – embrace both and see where it leads you.

    I’m personally excited to see where this path of opening up to my emotions will lead me. I’m only a beginner on this path but I feel it’s perfect for me, as my emotions were what so often made meditation difficult to maintain. A meditation practise that specifically focuses on embracing your emotions in unconditional love feels perfect for me.

    I’ll see how it unfolds from here…

    Much love,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • There Are No Others

    I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately. One of the greatest enlightened sages to ever live, Ramana Maharshi, was once asked, “How should we treat others?”

    He replied, “There are no others.”

    To a lot of people, this won’t make any sense. But when you look closer, what he’s pointing to is that what you really are deep down – consciousness itself – is not different for any person.

    The consciousness that is shining out of my eyes is exactly the same consciousness that is shining out of your eyes.

    It is all one. Literally.

    The reason most people don’t see this, apart from the enlightened few, is because we have been taught from the time we were little babies to regard ourselves as separate and distinct from everything around us.

    But this isn’t how we start out.

    When a baby is born, they have no sense of me vs other. Their experience is just a whole bunch of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and touch.

    They’re hard-wired to have preferences. They like the sound of their mother’s voice and dislike loud noises. But they don’t see themselves as separate from these experiences.

    Then people start pointing at them and saying this weird sound that they eventually come to know as “my name”.

    A mental construct of them as a distinct and separate self then starts to build.

    This is very convincing. The mind is extremely powerful at clouding over the blatantly obvious fact that everything is one.

    And this is reinforced and reinforced by society to the point that it really feels like we’re a separate self, distinct from everything around us.

    Then some people start to question this through various means.

    Maybe they see that it doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of neuroscience that there’s a special place in the brain where our “self” resides.

    Maybe they come across the teachings of an enlightened person and start to examine what experiential evidence there is for this self.

    Maybe they have a spontaneous awakening where they see this clearly with no clear “path” to this realization.

    Whatever the case, these awakenings are taking place in greater and greater number all around the world. There really is a great rise in both the realization and discussion of this topic.

    So what about you? How would your life change if you were to see clearly that everything is one and there is no true separation? How would the world look if a great mass of people started to realize this?

    As the late comedian Bill Hicks once famously said, “What’s going to happen to the arms industry when we realize we’re all one?”

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • On Pedophilia and Oneness

    Content warning: This post contains references to pedophilia, which may be upsetting for some people. Apologies if so. ❤️

    This post was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend about the spiritual teacher Fred Davis, who – about 40 years ago when he was a teenager – indecently assaulted some of his younger nieces. This created a bit of a storm within the spiritual community: some coming to Fred’s defence; others lambasting him and saying he shouldn’t be allowed to teach spirituality.

    Well, Fred, after spending much of his life as an alcoholic, and at times being homeless or in mental institutions because of this, finally joined Alcoholics Anonymous to try and fix his drinking problem. He did fix it, and ended up becoming a much-in-demand AA guide for others who were trying to do the same.

    As part of the 12-step program in AA, one of the steps is that you need to connect with and apologise to all the people you have wronged in your life. Fred did this, and obviously one of these things was writing to his nieces to apologise for his actions. He offered to talk to them too, if they wanted to. Four years later, a couple of them did, and they recorded the conversation and gave it to the police. Despite this being some 30 years in the past at the time, the state where Fred lived, South Carolina, had no statute of limitations for sexual offences, so he was brought before a judge and convicted of the crimes. The judge took into account his recovery from alcoholism and the good work he was doing being a guide for others to do the same, and sentenced him to weekend incarceration for a period of 90 days in jail, registration as a sex offender, and some other strict provisions for five years. Some may say this was too lenient, but I’ll let others be the judge of that. Fred wrote a blog post about this back in 2014 when it all came out, which can be found here, and it is an interesting insight into the nature of what happened. I recommend reading it:
    https://awakeningclaritynow.com/glass-houses/

    Which brings me to the topic of this post, and WHOAH, what a heavy topic it is. Probably the heaviest topic you could possibly discuss: An adult taking advantage of a young, innocent child for their own gratification, thereby causing untold grief and trauma to the victim. Like I said… heavy.

    So where to start with such a topic? How to start with such a topic?

    I have always found myself in a peculiar situation whenever the topic of pedophilia comes up. I obviously feel great remorse for the victims and the amount of suffering they must have endured as a result of their experiences, but I always also felt something else simultaneously: compassion for the perpetrators. I always felt, wow, this is considered the most reprehensible crime you can commit in society, and this person just committed it. That must be a horrible thing to experience, regardless of their guilt.

    This is not to say it’s not a horrible thing that they did – it is. It’s just to say: these people were so mentally unwell that they committed what is considered to be one of the worst crimes in society. And pedophilia, it must be said, IS a mental illness: There is no biological reason why an adult should be attracted to a pre-pubescent child, it makes no evolutionary sense. Therefore, the cause must be a psychological illness which has made them act in this way.

    Which leaves us in an interesting position. Most people who are mentally unwell are usually treated with compassion, even those who commit crimes. I myself committed a crime during a psychotic episode (assault), and I was treated (mostly) with compassion and understanding. But not pedophiles. Oh no, their crimes are just too egregious to have any compassion for whatsoever.

    I think this is wrong. I think every person deserves compassion and understanding regardless of the crimes they have committed. And yes, this too includes Hitler, the one person who is often singled out as the example for the most evil man in history.

    The reason being: I consider all life as one, you see. Not just as an idea, but as a fact. So I consider anything anyone does to another person that is harmful to the other person as a sign of a kind of mental illness on their part, a misperception about the nature of reality. If they saw clearly, I argue – if they saw truly that life was all one, then they would not have done it. But they weren’t seeing clearly, therefore they had some degree of mental illness.

    In fact, I consider 99.99% of the population to be to some degree mentally unwell. If you look into your own life, I’m sure you can find examples where you’ve acted a bit crazy or a bit irrationally. Sure, you may not be as mentally unwell as some people, but it’s still a sign of mental illness. In this sense, I consider everyone who doesn’t clearly see the oneness and interconnectedness of all life as, to varying degrees, mentally ill. This includes myself. I haven’t yet reached a point where I see life as all one all the time. I have had glimpses of it, which is how I am able to write this, but I don’t walk around all day seeing oneness. There’s still too much mental activity clouding my seeing of this simple fact.

    And it is a fact, even just from a logical point of view. When you think about it logically, life has to be all one, ultimately speaking, because it all comes from the same source. It is a logical impossibility that there could be more than one source for existence. Why? Because if there was more than one source, then it wouldn’t be the ultimate source, it would only be a relative source. If there was more than one, then there would have to be another source from which those two sources sprung. You can’t have a split at the base of existence. This is where the philosophy of nondualism is so accurate and so valuable. It is not the only truth, there are still other relative truths – but it is the truth. This is why it is called in Hinduism: advaita vedanta – which translates to “not-two”, and “the end of the vedas”, indicating this is the highest teaching.

    But please don’t take offence to what I’m saying either. I’m not labelling you personally as mentally ill, I’m just saying it is the nature of the mind, because of the way it evolved, to often misunderstand things. You see, as I’ve mentioned numerous times in my blogs, our minds really did only evolve for basic biological functions and to survive in the apparently physical world we inhabit. It didn’t evolve to understand reality, only to survive and reproduce in it. There’s some great work done by the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, where he computer-modeled evolutionary scenarios to see which conditions would win out. To his surprise, the one determining factor in evolutionary success was survival – i.e. passing on your genes – not perceiving reality as it really is. Here is his Ted talk on the subject (20 minutes), called “Do we see reality as it is?” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY He ends the talk with the quote: “Dare to recognize that perception is not about seeing truth; it’s about having kids.”

    So how does all this relate back to pedophilia, you might ask? Well, as I mentioned, I think we are all, to some degree, mentally ill, because we do not see reality accurately. Some of us function well in this survival-oriented paradigm, others function less well, but in neither case are they seeing reality accurately. And this I believe is where all harm stems from: not seeing things clearly. If Fred Davis, or Hitler, or anyone else you want to mention, saw clearly at the times they were committing their crimes, they would not have done them. Why? Because they would see that it was really just another aspect of themselves they were harming. As the nonduality teacher Gary Weber once said, “It would be like cutting off your own hand – it just wouldn’t make sense so you wouldn’t do it.”

    So I believe everyone deserves compassion and forgiveness. Not because their crimes don’t matter or the victims suffering doesn’t matter – it does, and people should still be sent to prison if they commit these acts in order to protect others and to act as a deterrent for others. But everyone deserves compassion and forgiveness, because when we harm another it is only ever because we are not seeing clearly. We are acting from a deluded perspective, and thus are deserving of sympathy, not hatred and judgment.

    What a world we would live in if people saw those who committed heinous acts as deserving of understanding and compassion rather than hatred and derision? A much nicer one, I think.

    Something else came up when I was talking to my friend about this, and that is the idea of “what you resist persists”. Eckhart Tolle – another great spiritual teacher – once said that he thinks a big part of the reason there is so much pedophilia in the Catholic church is because of their demonization of sexuality. If you demonize something, you often, in a strange way, make it somehow more appealing. Just like the illegalization of drugs. If someone says you can’t do something, you kind of want to say, “Oh yeah? Why not?” Tolle noted that the suppression of sexuality in the Catholic church often led to it becoming distorted and manifesting in perverse ways. I agree with his judgment on this (although I accept there are most likely other factors too, but I don’t want to make this post any longer than it already is). [Important note: I just want to be clear here: I am *not* saying that we should accept pedophilia and then it might go away; we should *always* as a society say that pedophilia is wrong and immoral, I am only talking here about the demonization of sexuality in the Catholic church (and, to a lesser extent, society as a whole) which has led to sexuality manifesting in perverse ways.]

    The spiritual teacher Adyashanti once said this too: “Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering. If you resist confusion, you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.”

    I think the same goes for things like pedophilia. In the case of the Catholic church, they have resisted human sexuality to such a point that it has become a taboo perversion for them, rather than a natural expression of love and unity (or whatever else you want it to be, so long as it’s done with mutual respect and consent).

    But it’s not just the Catholic church who do this: we do this all over society. Imagine a society where instead of demonizing and hating pedophiles, we treated them with understanding and compassion. Imagine the effect that would have on the pedophiles themselves? If you’re told by society that you are the lowest of the low, beyond forgiveness, you are more likely to act in that way. If society instead treated them with understanding and compassion, the would-be pedophile might instead think, “oh, I am just mentally unwell, it’s not that I’m an evil person”, and they would be much less likely to commit the act in the first place – they would seek help and feel supported.

    This is not to say it is wrong to feel anger, or wrong to feel sadness when things like this happen. That is a misunderstanding of what I’m saying. Anger and sadness are legitimate responses to bad or unwanted situations. So I’m not saying don’t feel anger when things like this happen. I’m just saying, look to see if you can’t also find the part of you that contains forgiveness. The part that has understanding and compassion. The part that knows this person acted out of their own illness, not out of a conscious decision to harm another person for no reason.

    Thanks for reading, and as always,

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • Spiritual Teachers I Have Loved (including some controversial ones!)

    I’ve listened to many many spiritual teachers over the last 7 years since my spiritual journey began. As I mentioned in my first blog post, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, I consumed endless hours of youtube videos, read books, and watched interviews with teachers from all around the world, the best I could find. Below is the chronological list of teachers who I have found most helpful to me on my path.

    Gary Weber

    I was initially attracted to Gary because he seemed very down to Earth and came from a scientific background just like myself. He was also very involved in brain research on the differences in brain wiring that so-called “enlightened” people had compared to “regular” people. He is also a subject in the new book by Dr Jefferey A. Martin which is a research book on this topic called “The Finders”, which I highly recommend for the scientifically minded among you!

    Videos of Gary:
    Interview with Robert Wright –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNLDpizTrFQ (48 mins)
    “Gary Weber stopped thinking, got smarter, and sustainable” –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEOujFKnHwc&t=303s (19 mins)

    Eckhart Tolle

    Eckhart Tolle is a great teacher for a general audience, and one of the best introductions for learning to live from a place that is not so dominated by the mind’s chatter. I highly recommend the interview series he did with Oprah where they went through his book “A New Earth”. (His first book is called “The Power of Now”)

    Documentary with Eckhart Tolle –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3CunRgjXBk (138 mins
    Oprah series –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0hxYtkNOaw (12 part series)

    (Okay, time for a controversial one!…..)
    Osho

    I don’t usually like telling people that I have loved listening to Osho because there is so much controversy surrounding him and what happened at his ashram (ashram is a Hindu word which basically means a spiritual hermitage or monastery/community). I don’t know the details of exactly what happened, although I think a lot of the negative stuff that happened was actually perpetrated by the person he left to run his commune, Ma Anand Sheela, while Osho went into silence and seclusion for 3 years while his ashram was being built. But despite all that, and despite his often (intentionally) provocative and playful nature which some can find confusing, I found him to have an incredible amount of insight in spiritual matters, and I do consider him someone who was enlightened.

    Note: I will just add that if Osho were indeed responsible for any of the crimes or allegations leveled against him, then I would just say that his enlightenment was not as complete as I previously thought. Enlightenment is a process just as much as it is a “shift of perception”, so you can still get some “enlightened” people behaving badly – all it means is that they haven’t fully integrated their awakening yet. However, I am very skeptical of the claims against Osho, because a lot of people had reason to dislike him. I should also add that he was never charged with a crime (unlike Sheela), despite the FBI doing their best to do so. That’s all I’ll say on that matter. His teaching remains great in either case.

    Videos of Osho:
    Baby, My Whole Work is to Confuse You –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xggTJCCxFss (16 mins)
    With Meditation Life Will Be a Sheer Joy –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHgNVRnkO88 (10 mins)

    Adyashanti

    Well, what can I say about Adyashanti…
    Aside from Isira, who I mention in the end of this post, Adyashanti is the teacher who had the most profound effect on me, and who I considered my main teacher for most of my journey. Another teacher I listened to a bit, “Kiran” (aka Mystic Girl in the City), once described Adyashanti as “the shit”, and I think that’s about the best description anyone has ever made of him. He is an incredible teacher, and would be one of the first I would recommend people listen to, along with Eckhart Tolle and Isira.

    Videos of Adyashanti:
    “What is enlightenment?” –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLQD90Las5c (10 mins)
    “The enlightened shoe” –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ChPAO9AYzI (5 mins)
    “I want to wake up.” –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fjxAZ5ogGM&t=46s (2 mins)

    Ramana Maharshi

    I never really read much of Ramana’s work – not that he had a whole lot to read – what I know of him mostly comes from quotes I have seen, but I still consider him one of the greatest enlightened masters to have ever lived. His presence even just in photographs is palpable.

    Fred Davis

    Fred has a bit of a checkered past: He was charged (40 years after the fact) of indecently assaulting 2 of his nieces when he was a teenager. Not a very nice story, but he was charged for the crime and sentenced, and today he is now a very good spiritual teacher. He has a very direct, straightforward way of explaining concepts that can be difficult to grasp, so I highly recommend him for that. Some people refuse to listen to him because of his past, which I understand, but I believe people can make amends for their pasts if they are truly remorseful, which I believe Fred is.

    Videos of Fred:
    Buddha at the Gas Pump interview:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF3QKeBatPM (2 hours)
    “The Easiest Way to “Achieve” Realization” –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8OtW1qilVA (6 mins)

    Bentinho Massaro (Another controversial one!)

    Bentinho came onto the scene as a young, fresh-faced nonduality speaker a few years ago, and he was great at what he did. He was certainly very clear in his teachings. He then moved into more empowerment/manifestation style teachings, at which point a lot of people (including me at the time) started to not resonate with him as much. I now see the value those teachings can have, and I now consider him a fantastic teacher of both nonduality and empowerment/manifestation teachings. He has been accused of being cocky and egoic, and I can definitely see why he rubs some people up the wrong way – to me it’s still possible that he has a bit of an enlightened ego – but regardless, as far as his teachings themselves go, he’s one of the best in my opinion.

    Video of Bentinho:
    “Completely Resolve the Spiritual Search in 90 Minutes” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJU8clQBff4 – (1.5 hours)

    Bashar (channeled by Darryl Anka)

    This is where my interest in spirituality took me a little bit more… out there. As I mentioned in my previous blog, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, I came across this person who claimed to channel an extraterrestrial being called Bashar on an interview program called “Buddha at the Gas Pump”. I was very skeptical at first, but was soon blown away by the clarity of his teachings and guidance. He ties in nondual philosophy with empowerment teachings, and really opens up your mind to the possibilities of the world we live in. Fantastic teacher!

    Video:
    Darryl Anka’s Buddha at the Gas Pump interview:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zMDMtv5XwY&t=3s (2 hours)

    Isira

    Well, as with Adyashanti, what can I say about Isira…
    I think she is hands down the greatest spiritual teacher I have come across in my seven year journey into spirituality. I have not yet seen anyone who has both the depth and breadth of understanding of spiritual matters (aka life matters!) as Isira does. Like Adyashanti, she is essentially a “middle way” teacher – able at one point to direct someone to the absolute truth of who they are (consciousness) and then in the next moment provide pin-point guidance on any topic I have ever heard someone asked her a question about. As I mentioned in my previous blog, I was volunteering with Isira for 2 years before a big shift happened for me, and in that two years I was constantly amazed by the clarity and truth expressed through this teacher. I find it hard to imagine finding another teacher as good as her. A+!

    Videos of Isira:
    “Breaking the Habit of Stories” –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na9uyjXpPK8 (4 mins)
    “Who Am I?” –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L030ETI0qz4 (3 mins)
    “Do We Have Free Will?” –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAXT2SDOrNY (2 mins)
    “What meditation does for you” –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnwI4YPAnc (6 mins)

    To end with, I’ll just add special mentions to some other teachers who I’ve loved listening to: Byron Katie, Mooji (unfortunately now in his own controversy, although I am very skeptical about this because the article written on him was written by someone who intentionally sets out to defame spiritual teachers), Gangaji, Rupert Spira, Jac O’Keeffe, Nisargadatta, oh and of course Jesus of Nazareth 😉 (another pretty controversial guy there too! 😛 )

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

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