Real-World Nonduality by Greg Goode

Author:Greg Goode [Goode, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781999353513
Publisher: New Sarum Press
Published: 2019-01-22T22:00:00+00:00

Francis Lucille

But it wasn’t until I first met Francis Lucille and experienced the perfume of nonduality for the first time that things changed. Francis and I became friends. There was a period, over a year and a half, maybe two, in the beginning that I didn’t have to work, and I just went to his retreats. I attended lots of satsangs in the NYC area as many new Advaita teachers began to appear on the scene, most notably Gangaji, Wayne Liquorman, and Catherine Ingram. But I just really resonated with Francis.

When I first met Francis he invited me to accompany him to his next scheduled meeting, which was in Boston. We drove, which was a wonderful opportunity to just be together in a relaxed way. It was during our ride that I did something that felt egoic, for which I apologized, and Francis immediately said, “Oh don’t worry about it, Jimmy. It’s not who you are.” Imagine knowing you didn’t have to kill the ego in order to be free of it!

You see I had grown up believing that the ego, with its wants and desires, was the source of suffering. One could even argue, as the Buddha did, that on an individual level the ego was the problem and had to be gotten rid of. I mean, wasn’t it my ego that suffered from being self-conscious and insecure? Wasn’t it me who felt jealous when someone I liked showed interest in someone else? Or angry when I wasn’t being heard or paid attention to sometimes? After all, didn’t the problems somehow have to do with something being wrong with me that I had to fix or overcome? Certain spiritual teachers would even say that in order for there to be enlightenment, the me had to disappear or that thoughts had to stop and the mind had to be quiet. And with the same breath they’d say there was no mind outside of thinking and that the mind was the ego that stood in the way of our true self.

When Francis said to me, “It’s not who you are,” I felt an immediate sense of relief. I felt off the hook, so to speak, because I saw something, a separation of sorts, inside. He then went on to explain that, if I could see the behavior and feeling, if I could stand apart from it, I necessarily wasn’t it, and that explained how I was feeling.

Boston was such a wonderful continuation to our first meeting in New York that I wanted to take every opportunity I could to be with him in order to learn everything about the direct path. You see, I was tasting what I had only been reading about all those years concerning the direct path and, for what felt like the first time, I was beginning to know with Francis what those words really meant.

Like when he’d point out that thoughts and feelings happened in the same place as did bodily sensations and sense perceptions, and that “it” was none other than this awareness I referred to as me.

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