Here are answers to questions sent in about my conversation with William Barker last week on non-dualism and enlightenment. There were problems with the recording, so this is just a transcript, although we did find dealing with the questions was, for some reason, a bit peculiar, like we were doing a Saturday morning call-in, so we might do this again, share an audio file for part one, but deal with questions in part two, without sharing the audio.
What is enlightenment?
Darren: You said maybe it’s just feeling great, feeling fabulous. But surely there’s something... Surely these people that we mentioned last week, and all of them stretching all the way back through the tradition, right the way back to Jesus and Lao Tzu and all of the biggies. Surely they’ve got something, wouldn’t you say?
William: I think the feeling great is probably a by-product of what they’ve actually got, which is some kind of perspective that the rest of us don’t have as often as they have.
Darren: But have they plumbed depths that we haven’t?
William: Possibly. Or at least it appears that way. For me, it’s what they're doing with their attention and where they're putting it. They’ve built a habit of putting their attention on what you could call the big me.
Darren: That would be in the Indian tradition self-with-a-capital-S. Not small-s-self.
William: Yeah, that’s it, yes. So I guess if they have anything, they have that perspective, that kind of big, wide focus.
Darren: But that still sounds to me like a kind of just technical gimmick, really. There is such a thing as an extraordinary person, and some of these people really are amazing, and wonderful. Worthy of profound admiration and love. I remember reading of Robert de Ropp saying to Ouspensky that Gurdjieff must have been a very strange man and Ouspenky, who was an old skeleton by then, covered in cobwebs, he burst into flames and said, ‘strange, strange!? He was extraordinary! You cannot imagine possibly how extraordinary this man was. He was phenomenal.’ And that seems to me more than kind of playing with attention and so on. I mean, some whole life explosion is going on here.
William: It would seem so. It could it be though, that, if we took Barry Long for example, that you and other followers would find the man extraordinary?
Darren: I would, yeah.
William: But could it be that many other people would find him just very normal and not extraordinary, and that’s not a fault in their perception.
Darren: I don’t know about that. I would say the same about a lot of wonderful things like nature, Bach, love, all kinds of extraordinary experiences that most people would just think, ‘huh? What’s the big deal? I’ve seen a tree.’
William: So… what is enlightenment? Did we answer that?
Darren: No, but nobody ever does. And if you do, you’re nobbling the audience.
William: Why’s that?
Darren: Because whatever it is, whatever the truth of life is, it’s not a literal thing, so you have to express it non-literally, either through art, or through the flow of conversation. That’s why, when someone has spiritual authority, or any authority, they have a quality to their voice that just… you incline your ear. You listen. They could be talking about their toenails… there’s just something there.
William: They do have good voices. So it’s just a tone?
Darren: A song.
William: We should sing then.
[Darren and William break into a lovely two-part harmony.]
How do you tell the difference between a charlatan and a non-charlatan?
Darren: There’s lot of charlatans about, that’s for sure.
William: And I think there are also well-meaning charlatans who don’t know they’re charlatans. They’re just deluding themselves and their audience.
Darren: I think you’ve described the human race there.
William: And there are presumably levels of enlightenment.
Darren: You attract the guru that you’re ready for. Let’s say guru in the widest possible sense, including your grandfather or some silly psychologist who’s into positive thinking or whatnot.
William: Tony Robbins.
Darren: Tony Robbins, yeah.
William: Or Jordan Peterson.
Darren: I see. So you attract the guru that you’re ready for and then you sort of go up the guru tree.
William: Yes, and when you’re up the tree, your perception looking down was never wrong. I mean, you were right at that time for that guru, or teacher, or artist or whatever. And you don’t or you mustn’t then look back and say, no, he was wrong. Even Jordan Peterson said a few good things.
Darren: Before he started crying a lot.
William: I suppose then, that in some ways you’re guru to yourself.
Darren: Right. I think that if I appeared to myself, if I went back in time and appeared to myself as a 24-year-old man, disguised, but it’s me, I could easily get myself to follow me. If you, erm, follow me?
William: Yes, but I don’t know. I was listening to Jeff Foster. He’s a guy that was on the scene, the non-dualism scene.
Darren: He’s a teacher?
William: He was a teacher, yeah. And he’s sort of come out of it now.
Darren: Married now. No need to impress anyone.
William: I heard him saying the other day that he had spent time in the houses of nearly all the famous teachers that we would know of. And he said, without exception, they are all totally, totally human. They get angry with their partners. They shout at the dog. They get irritated.
Darren: Neighbours have overfilled the fucking bins again.
William: All of that stuff. Which sort of reminded me of what Ian Wolstenholme said…
Darren: Yet another guru.
William: Another guru who had been working with Barry in his foundation for about ten years, before he was cast out.
Darren: He was cast out?
William: Yeah.
Darren: Sounds very biblical.
William: They had a disagreement.
Darren: What about?
William: I don’t remember, but he said that when he’d known Barry he just knew him as a friend, as a normal person who had a beer and a sandwich and all of that so he wasn’t aware of the extraordinariness, but he was aware of what a good teacher he was.
Darren: But old Ian might have been, I remember him, he’s a bit of a twiddly little middle-classer. Perhaps he couldn’t see the extraordinary. You know what they say, if you go to the ocean with a little cup, all you can take back is a little cup.
William: But how do you go to the ocean with a cup the size of the ocean?