Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
TRIP: One of the things I like about your work is that you
diminish this feeling that people have who are on a spiritual path
that there's either Buddhahood or nothing, or that where they're at
is somehow insufficient, or that they should not feel really happy
about what they are. And I think that your work helps people to
feel good about where they are because it creates a logical series of
phases that people tend to go through, and obviously nobody fits
these phases perfectly, but they go through these and it ultimately
leads to abiding in content-less awareness. And so I know we're
not going to have time to go through them all, but people start
with disconnection, and then there's conflict and codependence,
can you speak about that framework that you've created to help
people understand where they're at in their evolution there?
PETER FENNER: A little bit, but we also can recognize that again
from this result level perspective that there's nothing we need to
do before we can be at the culmination of the path. So as soon as
we begin to talk about different states, it's really easy for people to
lock into trying to discover where they are, and then looking for
what's next, so what do I have to go through next, how do I have to
evolve and transform before. And again from the nondual nothing
needs to happen, there's no action, experience, insight, teaching,
or realization that's needed before we can be in and rest in our
natural state.
Having said that, I just notice that we have different relationships
to our experience that can act like obstructions to this natural
resting, and the main ones are attraction and aversion, like just
being in that conditioned state of mind in which we're assessing
whatever we're experiencing in terms of whether we like it or we
don't like it. I like this, I want this, I want more of this, I want this
to last, or I don't like this, I want this to go away, I don't want to be
here, I want to be out of here, I'd like this to diminish. So for as
long as we're in that reactive state, nondual awareness doesn't
present itself to us, because the energy is wrapped up in either
trying to maintain what's happening, or in trying to escape from
some mentally constructed prison.
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