Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
MORGAN CARAWAY: Well, yes. For me in the question of being
a seeker, which I'm sure we've all shared it. I know John shared it,
I loved reading John's story, and it's a great story, there are just so
many meetings with some of these personalities. But with
everybody there are these ideas that we have about the whole
process, there's ideas about what enlightenment is, what
awakening is. There's ideas that one person is somehow closer to
God than another, or can speak on God's behalf. And these can
lead to all kinds of abuses, authoritarianism. One of my little
pastimes is reading about cults, and when it goes bad. Power
essentially.
WIZARD: Yes.
MORGAN CARAWAY: Political power would be the same, but it's
just for me I was just trying to go ahead and help smash those
ideas. I don't know if it is helpful, I don't know if I succeeded, but
I just figured there are all those little ideas. For me, for instance, I
was reading As It Is years ago, by Tony Parsons, have you read
that?
TRIP: I have not.
MORGAN CARAWAY: It was my first introduction to nonduality,
and I was reading it and Tony has his awakening story, and he was
walking across the park in England, and he just talked about how
great and how blissful it was. So for a long time I was just looking
for that experience that would indicate that awakening has
happened. And I think there are all those stories.
I was reading Brad Warner who wrote Hardcore Zen, he was
talking about reading about the old Zen masters and their
enlightenment experiences. He said somebody had thrown a rock
and it dinged on a bell, or something, and he was hoping he could
have that same experience or something like it. And it just never
happened for him that way, but I guess the main point is it's not an
experience that we're looking for.
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