Last week when I was interviewing Rupert Spira for The Awareness Podcast, we talked about the idea of letting go of the teaching, the teacher, the tradition, and the personal self that brought you to the point of where you are right now and more specifically that which brings you to your awakening experience.
This is an important idea for all students on the spiritual path in whatever tradition you might be in because in order to assume or remember the true self-identity and remain stabilized in the direct experience of embodied awakening, it is essential that one leaves the thing that started the search to awaken and live in the present moment.
I received an email from someone the other day who’s been following our teaching for several years who feels that balance between A Course in Miracles and the direct path of nonduality is
the most important position of The Teachers of God Foundation so students of both paths can be comfortable.
At first that sounded reasonable: Take the middle way so no one is offended or left out and make everyone (or almost everyone) comfortable. I initially thought, Oh, this person is totally right on the money. And then I started reflecting: If I have preference for the middle way or staying balanced between the progressive path and the direct path, where does that leave the person who is not yet conscious of their true nature who’s finished with duality and is ready to move on? Where will they receive the benefit or the clarity of staying established as the true self and live the nondual understanding? Where will they see it as an example?
If we take a middle way approach between A Course in Miracles and the nondual direct path teachings and we don’t give our attention to what’s evolving in the new understanding as the Self, how or where does one become established in self-realization once awakening occurs?
The ideas presented in A Course in Miracles are tools of a progressive path of awakening that begin as one seeking for happiness, for answers to life’s big questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose? and ends with the end of the seeker.
The thing that brings one to the end of seeking is effortlessly let go, and there is no longer a seeker that seeks.
Is it time for you to let go of the shore — let go of everything that served you to the point of knowing the Self?
There are several lines in Workbook Lesson 189.6-7 that speaks to this so well, and honestly it should have been the last lessons, 360-365, in the Course to encourage the Course student that it’s time to let go of the course, tradition, teacher, or student that brought you here.
Wb.189.6-7
6. Today we pass illusions, as we seek to reach to what is true in us, and feel its all-embracing tenderness, its Love which knows us perfect as itself, its sight which is the gift its Love bestows on us. We learn the way today. It is as sure as Love itself, to which it carries us. For its simplicity avoids the snares the foolish convolutions of the world’s apparent reasoning but serve to hide.
Simply do this:
7. Be still and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God.
It's time to let go of the Shore.
You will come back to what brought you here after awakening and see it with eyes that see and know that you have always been you, only now you will include nonduality and duality as One.
There is only One.
By Bill Free
