Healing into Awakening The Foundation for Nonduality

This episode features a recording of the Foundation for Nonduality and A Society of Souls Community Meeting from March 18th 2020. This opening message from Jason Shulman  can resonate with many during this time in history, and beyond.
 

I have been a musician and songwriter for most of my adult life. In the last few years, I’ve returned to writing music and composing songs. This song was written a few months before the Covid-19 emergency but it seems to me to embody an attitude we all need to cultivate right now in this time of love and danger. Consider it an adult lullaby with a sidecar of kindness.
 
Credits:
Written by Jason Shulman
Performed on April 3, 2020
© 2020 Jason Shulman & Great Faith Music

“In true nonduality, we understand that a fish never leaves the water. The fish never comes to the end of the water, even if it is an explorer fish, swimming this way and that. It never comes to the end of the ocean because its nature is to be in the water. The fish and the water are one. As long as we think “Here I am whole, and there I’m not,” we think there is an end to the ocean of self. But truly, there is no end to this ocean.”
-Jason Shulman
 
Link to purchase The Instruction Manual for Receiving God:
https://www.amazon.com/Instruction-Manual-Receiving-Jason-Shulman-ebook/dp/B003FS0KGS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1EX5W4T9O5MFC&dchild=1&keywords=jason+shulman+books&qid=1585406263&sprefix=jason+shulman%2Caps%2C277&sr=8-1

A guide to this poem (with a little help from Wiki): Avalokiteśvara is a bodhisattva who embodies the compassion of all Buddhas. This bodhisattva is variably depicted, described and portrayed in different cultures as either male or female.In Tibet, he is known as Chenrezig, and in Cambodia as Avloketesvar. In Chinese Buddhism, Avalokiteśvara has evolved into the somewhat different female figure Guanyin, also known in Japan as Kanzeon. The Master the poem speaks about is Ramakrishna, the Bengali teacher who died in 1886. In many ways, he united the dual, theistic path with the avaitic or nondual path. The weeds and the little Rockaway river are all found around my home in New Jersey.
-Jason Shulman

Dear Friends, In this new reading, which is about idealizing the spiritual state and thereby missing the state we are in—which is the only state that actually leads us to freedom—I say Your hands need to be empty in order to receive. Well, that’s true enough for a start but not completely true. Emptying your hands, that is, laying down your previous ideas of what should be and looking at what is, is important. But I would like to add this: even if your hands are not empty, that’s OK. In a sense, our hands can never be empty. We have, after all, a body that holds history in its flesh and a mind and heart that are based on echoes from the past and anticipations of the future. So the point is not to try to empty your hands so much as to know what is in them. When you know your history is in your hands, or someone else’s ideas or path, you are ahead of the game. Only return to yourself as you are is what I would say now.

Every time I see someone succeed along some portion of their spiritual path, I am brought to tears. What does “succeed” mean in terms of a spiritual path? To me, it is not about achieving some so-called higher state; it is not about gaining new powers or equanimity or even only getting insight into a psychological state, important though that is.  Instead, it is that moment when the heart surrenders to what is, when we stop defending against the human condition—even for a brief moment—and find in its vast imperfection and temporality a moment of deep acceptance that is so vast we suddenly feel connected to every other pulsating thing in the cosmos, all the other temporary people, all the mortal stars, all the earth and its creatures. It is in those moments we hear that sweet and bitter song of being alive and the harmonies of gratefulness fill our being. And it starts with being open to our own suffering. - Jason Shulman
 
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