Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
tradition or whatever, but the six accomplishments; control of the
mind and emotions, control of the sense organs, restraining
behaviour, responsibility, ability to do one's duty, patience and
forbearance towards pairs of opposites such as heat and cold, trust
in the words of the teacher and scriptures, ability to focus on a
single object of mind, okay? Now, I can't disagree that the people
that I've met that are able to do all of those things tend to be
people that I admire and pay attention to, and are established in
Truth. So I can't say that that's not a great thing to want to
master. But these are not the practice of being; these are the
practice of self-control. And I was just wondering, is there any
evidence in your travels or journey, and is there any evidence that
the mastery of these traits leads more quickly to liberation than
simply paying really earnest attention to life and lessons that it
inevitably delivers every single day?
GREG GOODE: Those teachings, when I first heard that list,
that's a list that's given in Advaita Vedanta as pre-requisites for
successful metabolising of the Vedanta teachings. And when I first
saw that list I thought, “Wow, that's really cool, you mean there's
something beyond that? That's just the pre-requisite for
enlightenment? That sounds like enlightenment itself.” I didn't
know too much about it. What I think it's doing, I think that list
has a function, and it's not that you can't get there without it, it's
that it lessens the probability of spiritual bypassing. So that it
lessens the probability that you'll take the nondual goal and the
nondual teaching and try to solve lower level issues with it.
So let's say that's someone's cold and they don't have very much
forbearance for being cold, and then the weather turns hot and
they don't have very much forbearance towards being hot, and
they learn a little bit about nonduality. So it's quite possible that a
person will say, “Well, I can use nonduality in order to not be cold
anymore.” I've known all kinds of people, I remember one person
asked me, they wrote to me and asked me, they want me to be
their philosophical nondual counsellor, and their presenting issue
was: “I need to go to the dentist, can I do nondual inquiry
instead?” [Laughs] Like “Can I make the pain go away by nondual
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