About twenty years ago I noticed something about my mind that seemed extraordinarily important to me for spiritual seekers, but to my surprise I couldn’t find more than partial mentions of it in spiritual literature.<\/p>\n
After reading and skimming many books over a period of about five years, I managed to find partial mentions in three places, two of which are pretty obscure: a book chapter<\/a> by Buddhist psychologist Susan Blackmore; a few pages in a book by P.D. Ouspensky; and a paragraph in a book by Anadi (Krzysztof Jerzy Strzelecki). <\/p>\n (Brian, if you’re here, this is what got me interested in Anadi.)<\/p>\n I probably failed to look in the right places, and I probably overlooked discussions of this phenomenon because I misunderstood them, but I spent a lot of time looking and that’s all I found. I kept thinking, “This should be better known. Somebody should describe this in writing and publish it. Since I can’t find any such descriptions I should write one myself and put it on the Internet.” <\/p>\n But I was reluctant to do this because I didn’t consider myself to be an expert on spiritual matters. (I still don’t but I’ve grown less cautious about publishing.) <\/p>\n I kept thinking these thoughts for about five years and then finally I wrote the article. By that time I had been publishing realization.org for seven years but I didn’t feel comfortable putting my opinions there so I created a new website, this one, and put the new article here. For the next eight years it was the only article on this site. It’s still on the home page. I now realize that the article is wrong or seriously incomplete in at least one significant way but I haven’t bothered to revise it because as a practical matter, it’s very helpful to seekers in its current form. Its flaws don’t interfere with its usefulness.<\/p>\n Here’s what I noticed twenty years ago. There are four main points:<\/p>\n One of these days I’ll update those observations. But today I just want to show you a satsang video that I stumbled across a few years ago in which one of Francis Lucille’s students describes most of what I just said and asks Lucille’s opinion. I was startled when I ran across this video because the student reminds me so much of myself. He has noticed exactly what I noticed and like me, he thinks it’s extremely important. In twenty years, this is the only video or book I’ve run across that gives me this impression. <\/p>\n (The student uses different words and concepts than I did to describe the phenomenon, but he is describing the same thing. This is a good opportunity to practice looking beyond words and concepts to that which they describe<\/i>, which is an extremely valuable intellectual ability.)<\/p>\n Lucille’s reaction: Both those states are mental phenomena. They are not a direct experience of Brahman. He uses different terminology — at one point he calls Brahman “the receiver in chief” — but that’s what he means. However he thinks the gap<\/i> (his word for something closely related to the “snapping out” that I described in point 2 above) is significant for a different reason than the one I gave.<\/p>\n This is an extremely meaty conversation and well worth listening to until the end. Some of it may seem overly intellectual but it’s not all like that.<\/p>\n\n