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New Harbinger Publications - Den Boogaard Han Van

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50 pages

English

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Publié par	New Harbinger Publications
Date de parution	01 janvier 0001
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781626257481
Langue	English

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
H AN VAN DEN B OOGAARD is a Dutch psychologist, writer and translator. He regularly publishes texts on non-duality, and is chief editor of InZicht , the only Dutch-language magazine on non-duality. He has written several books, including a biography of Ramana Maharshi, an anthology of Wei Wu Wei and a collection of fifteen interviews with non-duality teachers from the USA, the UK and the Netherlands.
Han is married and has two daughters. He is currently working as a clinical psychologist at a centre for deafblind people in the Netherlands.
MEMORIES OF NOW
First edition published May 2013 by NON-DUALITY PRESS
© Han van den Boogaard 2013
© Non-Duality Press 2013
Cover photograph by Lucy Auch
Han van den Boogaard has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher.
N ON -D UALITY P RESS | PO Box 2228 | Salisbury | SP2 2GZ United Kingdom

eISBN: 978-1-908664-31-0
www.non-dualitypress.org
For my wife Lucy, and for all the wonderful teachers I’ve met along the way
Contents Cover Image Title Page About the Author Copyright & Permissions Dedication Preface Chapter 1: The stoneness of stones Chapter 2: God’s eye Chapter 3: Liberation is recognition Chapter 4: Silence and attention Chapter 5: Form and emptiness Chapter 6: Inner landscape Chapter 7: Time Chapter 8: Oneness Chapter 9: The sea of not-knowing Chapter 10: Memories Chapter 11: The Self of all things Chapter 12: Thisherenow (things beyond words) Bibliography Backcover
Even when Consciousness has veiled itself in a cloak of beliefs, doubts, fears and feelings, the taste of its own unlimited, free and fearless nature is embedded within every experience, and this taste is often experienced as a sort of nostalgia or longing.
This longing is often wrongly associated with an event or a time in our lives, often in childhood, when things seemed to be better, when life seemed to be happier. However, this longing is not for a state that existed in the past—it is for the peace and freedom of Consciousness that lies behind and is buried within every current experience.
What was present ‘then’ as ‘Happiness’ was simply the unveiled presence of this very Consciousness that is seeing and understanding these words.
Rupert Spira— The Transparency of Things
PREFACE
I was driving along a mountain ridge in the south of France. There were forests growing on its steep slopes, and above these the sky was perfectly clear and blue. Imperceptibly my thoughts went back to a holiday I had spent at the seaside as a child. Back then, the dunes had seemed to obstruct my view of the endless sea. Looking at all this sand, my image of the sea in my childish mind evoked a longing for this mysterious stretch of water—a longing that could never be fulfilled by seeing it or swimming in it. When I grew older I longed for summer during every winter, even when I knew this longing would never be fulfilled when summer would actually be there and the sun would show the world in its most beautiful guise.
Back home from France I realised that it had always been the same longing all along. It just hadn’t been a pure longing, for it had been mixed with nostalgia for something I once knew: the essence of summer, of sea, of the pure experience of ‘being there’. The Japanese call this feeling yugen , a word which has been described as ‘watching wild geese fly and being hidden in the clouds’. I resolved to make a record for myself of the moments in which this feeling of yugen had been there. Whether it was because of my resolve, or part of a natural unfolding, the moments became ever more numerous. I also ran across descriptions from other people pointing at the same kind of experience. Many were artists—Blake and Wordsworth, Cézanne and Rothko, Cage and Oliveiros, Kazantzakis and Pelletier, Kopland the Dutch poet. They too tried to capture the essence of things. Most of them, though, were philosophers and mystics—the old Zen masters, J. Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, Wei Wu Wei, Douglas Harding, Rupert Spira. Their recognition of the non-personal nature of Being and the apparent path towards it resonated time and again with ‘my own path’ and ‘my own recognition’.
In this way a wickerwork construction of memories and experiences of myself and others slowly developed. It aspired to show, in all sorts of ways, how the path of ‘unpersoning’ wound its way in ever-changing perspectives: from inside to outside, from time to timelessness, from I to Self, from separateness to Oneness, from experience to Emptiness. Of course these descriptions are nothing but words, and words are never that to which they are pointing—in particular the words that are written in capitals in spiritual literature. Still they endeavour—sometimes elegantly, sometimes awkwardly—to point to that which is without perspective, to that which is there before something can be thought or said about it. In the end, I hope it will be clear that without any perspective or viewpoint there is no inside or outside, no time, no experience, no self and no other.
This book is not about me, not about my travels, memories or spiritual experiences. Together these only make a two-dimensional picture that might contain a three-dimensional truth if you’re able to look at it with an open mind and a loving heart. The picture itself doesn’t really matter. The important thing is the switch from flat to deep. Unknowingly, you make this switch many times a day, during those moments in which you suddenly forget yourself. But when you’re really aware of it, the true depth of life will be recognised as the unchanging Now, and you will know that this is the only truth.
THE STONENESS OF STONES
There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
Walt Whitman
I just was , without beginning or end. During the first years of my life this being extended itself in all directions. I was carried by a river that never overflowed the banks of the present. Crawling on the floor and playing in the street I found myself in a magical place that set my senses afire. I didn’t have a name yet, nor a face. I didn’t feel I was acting on behalf of myself. In fact, I didn’t feel I was acting at all. I saw things happening by themselves. Life was a mysterious movement. I felt like a leaf blowing in the wind. I was as malleable as dough, and the moon was no bigger or further off than my hand clutching at it. When I closed my eyes, the world disappeared. When I opened them, the world was there again. When I was happy, everything around me was radiating with happiness. When I got angry, the whole world exploded with rage. When a desire arose in me, I totally lost myself in it. When I was afraid, the world seemed to grow numb and turn into ice.
I didn’t know the smallest thing then about benefit or intrinsic value. I knew nothing of profit motives and margins, but no one needed to tell me what our house smelled like, what the footsteps of my mother sounded like and what I had eaten yesterday. I used to sit and watch things when there didn’t seem to be anything of interest to be watched. I used to listen when everything seemed silent, and I heard life making itself noticed as sound. I witnessed a world that took care of itself without effort and allowed me to play without end. In that way I came to know the stoneness of stones and the wetness of water.
But somehow, one day the simplicity of undivided being seemed to vanish without my noticing it in any way. I lost my way in life when it became ‘my life’. Only once in a while I suddenly remembered who or what I actually am. How could this happen?
A young child is still pure awareness without any sense of form or identity. Only immediate reality attracts its attention, and it would keep experiencing itself as the pure, untainted, formless Consciousness that it truly is, if only a certain drastic change would fail to occur. But that change never does fail to occur, because pure Consciousness seems to narrow itself into a personal consciousness. For centuries this been talked and written about as ‘the fall from paradise’.
When a child is two or three years old, it develops a sense of ‘I’. It starts to look at itself as a limited being, like the rest of humankind. “We have grown down, not up,” Douglas Harding wrote. “Instead of being present and together with the stars—and all things under the stars—we have shrunk away and withdrawn from them. Instead of containing our world, it now contains us—what’s left of us.”
While we are growing up, we never hear anyone refer to our original Self, because the Self is hardly ever experienced consciously. Consciousness, which is totally open at first and capable of experiencing every dimension of existence, contracts and narrows into an unrecognizable version of its very own Self.
In this way all of us, slowly but inevitably, develop an image of ourselves as a transient, vulnerable object that’s separate from all other objects and appearances. This idea is the core around which an endless series of thoughts and emotions is circling, like electrons around an atom. The fallacy of this is not seen because the millions of unconnected thoughts and associated emotions seem to form one whole, like the picture frames of a movie. The ‘I’ is simply not able to be aware of its own limitations, let alone its own non-reality.
When the whirlpool of thoughts is fully developed as a self-generating system, Consciousness very rarely experiences itself outside of the narrowness of thought anymore. The circuit is closed and the child experiences itself permanently as separate fro