Not I, Not other than I: The Life And Teachings Of Russel Williams
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When you see completely clearly – that is, when you see with a clear mind – then you find that the “I” is delusory and you can let go of it. It will go naturally – the mind won’t hold on to it anymore. All things arise out of the unmanifest, therefore all things that have arisen have the unmanifest behind them, so when you see their true nature, you find that there is nothing. Therefore they must have been delusory. You should bring mindfulness into daily life and give your full attention to everything you possibly can – but just one thing at a time. For example, you might be washing the ...more
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This is what mindfulness is – full of that object at that moment – not cluttered up with a lot of other things. It’s coming out of you – not out of anyone else. You’ve found the true teacher – not out there, but inside you. When you move beyond fear to a little more freedom, it begins to show itself for itself, by itself. It’s almost as if there’s something inside you unravelling and showing you who you really are. The only problem is you can’t put an identity on it.
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From time to time we all have thoughts that we don’t want, which shows that there is a part of our minds which is always detached from thinking, which stands back and observes it. As we become clearer inside, a distance begins to open up between us and our thoughts. Gradually a space appears between thoughts – and meditation can help in this – and eventually thought is no longer automatic. We experience stillness. And this inner peace spreads to the people around us. People sense it when they’re near you, and it spreads to them. You become a much more amenable companion; people become drawn to ...more
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You can just be instead of think. Unless you specifically want to think of something that’s useful, it’s just a habitual process which goes on inside our heads. Positive thought is one thing – irrational thought is another. A lot of the time we think things we don’t want to think, so who’s in control? When this happens, ignore the thought and go down into the feeling area. Gradually this brings some control, the ability to think when you want to, and to not think when you don’t need to.
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Sometimes thoughts have such a powerful momentum. The way to curtail that is to move from thought into feeling. The mind has to be active, never still. If it turns from thinking into feeling, even in the sense of feeling nothing, it is still aware. It is still doing something even when there’s no activity. Consciousness can become still – but it doesn’t think it is still; it just knows it. When you examine the nature of the mind at stillness, it’s actually very energetic – a contradiction in terms. The stillness which is so-called silence can be very active, because of all the energy it ...more
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Feeling is the key to appreciating consciousness because consciousness only knows things through feeling, whether it be coarsely, or extremely finely, or anything in between. It only knows feeling.
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If you truly give your full attention – and I mean full attention – to another person, if only for a second or so, without any thought at all, you’ll find you give yourself to that person. There is only that person, and he or she will blossom in that moment, through your attention. In the seeing there is only that which is seen. So if you are without concepts or ideas, you see things truly for what they are.
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It’s almost as if suffering is a result of the conflict between thought and feeling. It is. Thought means moving away from being truly conscious of things, moving away into ideas, into separation. It doesn’t work. This is why a person who lives in empathy will pick up other people’s feelings very easily, their troubles as well as their joys, and experience precisely what they’re going through; not necessarily their thoughts, and not necessarily wholly their emotions, but they will come to know them, as people. In that way, you come to understand other people, and accept them for what they are.
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In many ways we only know the world around us – or the universe for that matter – in terms of seeing it as a reflection of our inner world. We don’t see it as reality; it’s just a screen on which we project our world. Different people see different things at the same time. If you go outside on a clear night and see thousands of stars you can sense-feel them within yourself, for that is your nature. It’s not separate from you. All that’s between you is space – and that space is consciousness. That’s your nature. That is consciousness – it’s in here, not out there. One area we can’t translate ...more
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The only thing you can do to prepare the way is to clear the mind. It’s no good trying to think and understand it. It won’t work. What you have to do is to train yourself to be more fully aware of what you’re doing. That’s why I instruct people to put their mind in their hands and be consciously aware. Let your hands tell you what you want to do rather than the other way around. Do this and your mind will gradually clear. And when you reach the stage where you virtually have a clear mind, there is the chance of something arising. It’s within you already. It’s your own nature in the first ...more
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Emptiness is the key – the clear, empty mind. Whatever you observe becomes the whole content of the mind. You gain access into a totally new dimension from which all these things arise. In Buddhist terms, this is the unborn, uncreated, unmanifest which is the essence of everything. You can observe the whole world arising – a very interesting process. You can see the falsity and the delusory duality in it, and the manifestations of different forms of the same thing.
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And yet we are so afraid of losing this form. It seems to be part of being human to be afraid of death. There is nothing to be afraid of; it’s just like going into the next room. The manner of dying may be painful, or perhaps people are afraid of losing the idea of self – they may think it means annihilation. I sometimes wonder if it’s not fear of death, but fear of birth which is the problem. Birth is a very traumatic ex...
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This is one meditation I’ve developed, which I will guide you through: Feel down here, a little bit above the navel – you’ll find the right place. Centre yourself there, in feeling. Observe the breathing, in the sense of the expansion and contraction of the outer part of the body, as if it were a balloon. The body just breathes as it wants to, regardless of how you think it ought to breathe. Just observe this expansion and contraction for a few minutes… You see it has a very calming effect. We are becoming quite peaceful… Just this gentle movement, this comfortable gentle movement… Again, look ...more
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Here, for a moment or two, we have been able to sharpen the consciousness to a degree, to its most subtle state, so it is not pointed in any way but spread, so it might detect the slightest movement, if movement were there… You couldn’t experience that peacefulness and warmth without a subtle form of feeling. It’s not as coarse as the normal sense, and as it spreads further out, it begins to detect things of a deeper nature, which are always there, even though you never noticed them before. I won’t tell you what they are; you’ll find out for yourself. It’s almost as though consciousness is ...more
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We are coupled up with the angelic order unknowingly. I ask you to believe this; I’m preparing you for your own experience, so you won’t think you’re deluding yourself. There are one or two people here who have experienced some of these things already. There is a progression, and this involves a blowing out of the worldly conditions which hold you here. That doesn’t mean to say it’s a particular place at the end of the rainbow, a place that we were...
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I do not believe in long meditation practices. Once you make contact and get the process going, a quarter of an hour or even 10 minutes is quite adequate. Do it seven times a day, until you have a continuum going all the time, rather than once a day. If there’s a gap you lose the momentum, but if you keep it up, every couple of hours or so, there is a continuum. Switch it on, switch it off – learn to do that and you’ll find you have a continual flow all the way through, which can even penetrate through to sleep as well. You could compare it to how a horse eats. Did you know a horse’s stomach ...more
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This is one of the problems with early morning meditation in particular. The mind sometimes rejects it, because you’re forcing it. In this way, the mind does it willingly all the time. It doesn’t ever reject it, because it knows it will find peace in it.
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One of the things about the world that has always amazed me is that people believe that peace means to stop fighting. But it doesn’t. Peace is freedom, not a cessation of hostilities. You need more than simply an absence of aggression. You need friendship, which means giving not taking. Receiving perhaps, but not taking. You need love, which comes from down here, not from the head. If everyone and everything could come down to this place of love, the world would be a totally different place. In fact, the world would not even exist anymore.
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Now when you reach the end of conditioning – when the grasping and the aversion have fallen away – this is what is left: consciousness is born into another area and begins to quietly assimilate its true nature, which has already been glimpsed to some degree in the physical sense. All you really have to do is to examine these experiences as they arise, which means being very careful in the consciousness of observing. This is a very difficult thing because you can’t control consciousness. You can use it, in the sense that you can know you’re thinking thoughts you don’t want to have and ask ...more
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The trouble with thinking is we have certain concepts associated with emotional states; and in thinking about those, we arouse the emotions and become lost in them. It’s an interesting thing to examine how many different selves you have, associated with different feelings. And then, when you have a list of these different selves – and believe me it’s a rapidly growing list – ask yourself: which is the real one?
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You can’t see yourself as others see you, and mostly you have the wrong idea anyway, because you assume others think as you do and usually they don’t. It’s important for us to feel that the world – at least the immediate world around us – approves of us. But when you understand that nobody sees the same way you do, then you realise that it doesn’t really matter what other people think of you. You understand that everyone is operating from a selfish point of view; they’re only concerned with themselves, or what you can offer them. They’re not concerned about you. When you reach the point where ...more
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Never mind what other people may think – if you feel it is right for you, then it is right for you, and stay with it. If others don’t like it, it is unfortunate. And as you learn more about others, you begin to give them more space, you begin to look at their nature, and compare your nature with that. This is how you come to learn about yourself. To that extent, the world becomes your teacher. “Space” is actually quite a good description of the difference between being identified with a feeling and being less identified. In the less identified state there is a space around the feeling. The ...more
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Dhamma means doing, whereas Buddha dhamma is recognition of the doing. You can say two things about this: there is Buddhism as a belief system and there is the way of the Buddha, which is a recognition system. The latter is totally different and doesn’t require any book learning at all. When you have book learning, a belief system arises, and at very best, this will only help to create an even state of mind for a short period of time. This is samatha, which you have to keep renewing because it is conditioned, as opposed to vipassana, which leads to the opening of the mind to see things ...more
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If you give your whole attention, your wholehearted attention, to any person, if only momentarily, you’ll see how they respond and blossom. They will feel, “I am recognised, I am a somebody.” But if you give half-hearted attention, whilst you’re thinking of something else, they’ll feel, “I’m not here; I am not being recognised.” People need that recognition. The same applies to household tasks: dusting, polishing, washing the floor, washing the dishes, and so on. Give them your full attention, don’t think of other things. The now is all there is, so learn to live in it. And surprise, surprise, ...more
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Am I really saying that you should give your whole attention – with a loving aspect – to a piece of crockery? Yes. As if it were a living creature. In the moment of doing, the object reflects your love back to you by virtue of its mirror action. Try it and see – this will produce a wonderful karma. Whenever you come to do these tasks, be it washing the dishes or washing your socks or stockings, whatever, do them with your whole attention just for those moments; gently, carefully, as if you’re dealing with a living creature. Observe how you feel and you’ll find it’s really worthwhile. A lot of ...more
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You might forget to do it of course – if so, try again and watch how the process works. Once you realise how it works, and once you experience its benefits, you’ll continue to do it. It’ll enter into different parts of your life more and more and you will be much more content. This is the way of the spirit. Your spirit is being indulged and shared within the world, with inanimate objects as well as animate. You’ll become much more friendly to other people and they will begin to respond, after a period of time, if not immediately. Some people take longer than others. I remember, from my own ...more
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Generally, this is the way we can begin to change ourselves, in little everyday things that don’t require a great deal of effort at all. Where possible, we should give ourselves a bit of time and sit down for 10 minutes, be still, quiet, and allow things to subside and to feel deep within our...
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There’s a bit of a joke here: it’s been said that Buddhist monks spend their time contemplating their navels. Actually, there is a lot to be said for that, because that’s where that still small space is, deep within the body. If you allow your consciousness to drop down into that area and be more peaceful and expansive in consciousness, you find it is very warm and comforting and that it takes you away from the ‘thinking box’ for a while. So in that way you can learn to be still. You don’t have to try to stop your thoughts; they will cease on their own when you become complete within that ...more
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So we learn to live with our basic nurturing instincts, in a more homely way. We begin to base ourselves there rather than in our thoughts, and then we find that even our thoughts begin to change in their nature into a much better form. We can bring about a great deal of change within ourselves without a great deal of concentrated effort. It ...
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If you find you are too serious, let that go, because it will lead to trouble. You want a light-heartedness, which is open rather than closed. Concentrated thought closes your mind; it’s not open to receive anything, it merely contains what is there. But if it’s completely open, then it has a passage in and out and it’s not necessary to grasp and stop it. That’s what we need – information coming in and out but not necessarily held, so we can be familiar with things but not necessarily possess them or be possessed by them. If you collect a lot of thing...
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An Exercise There is another exercise you can play with: wherever you are, look straight across the room opposite you. It doesn’t matter what object you look at – just fix your eyes to the object, and see that there is you and there is that. Be aware of the duality between you and it. Now, without moving your head, or your eyes, take your attention off that object and gradually bring it around to the periphery, so that you become aware of everything around the object, and eventually so that you can see the whole room in your vision… Now tell me where duality is, and where you are in relation ...more
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The Ego Self only exists through the unsatisfactory. It does not live through the satisfactory because that involves union. The self requires separateness, to prove its existence. This is why many people can’t sit down for long; they have to get up and be doing, to reinforce the ‘I am’. This is the discomfort zone. On the basis of unsatisfactoriness, we seek more unsatisfactoriness, because if we lose that, we lose self. This comes from not knowing what self really is. The self is trying to reinforce something which it is not. It doesn’t realise that in a sense it is not a thing at all. It is ...more
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Alcoholism and Awakening I was in an alcohol treatment centre, at 38 years of age. I was searching for something, I did not know what, and the alcohol treated my illness. I was irritable, restless, discontented, but with a bottle of brandy I was fine. I am still very ignorant in many fields, but I have had several insights, one of which saved my life. Some people with my illness, alcoholism, never have that insight, even though they are more intelligent than me. Who, or what, decides who receives the insight and who doesn’t? I think – and perhaps at a later date you may see this for yourself – ...more
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You and I are here with a physical aspect, assuming that we were born. But consciousness was never born into this body; it became attached to it. It was never born as the body, which is why it can eventually leave it.
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Practices such as meditation and chanting can take you away from the conditioned world temporarily, which gives you a chance to appreciate the difference between the conditioned and the unconditioned. And what you find, in deep meditation for instance, is a void which is beyond measure and beyond dimensions. Consciousness expands way beyond the body – in fact, it isn’t even conscious of the body, only this vast, boundless emptiness. Keep going there – don’t try to see anything, but keep the mind’s eye open. Sooner or later things will arise and show themselves to you. And in that showing you ...more
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The very factor of not being content is the source of all of our problems. Since we have a conceptual area of duality, we assume that something is missing, and therefore we have to add to it. In the conditioned world, all these things are subject to change, as is the self. So this world is never going to be wholly satisfactory, and you’re just building more discontent on discontent upon discontent to make it worse. The answer is to go deep down within, and ask yourself, “Why am I discontent?” Now if you look deep down you find there is no discontent at all. There is just an idea that has ...more
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Consciousness is what I am, not who I am. There is a big difference. The real entity is the consciousness, not me being conscious. If you can experience that, only then will you realise a degree of contentedness, because then there is nothing missing. All is well with the world.
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I feel attached to things like the wind and the trees and the water and the sky, and the physical senses. Does all that have to go as well? I enjoy it. I would question whether you are attached to these things. When you look at them you are at peace within yourself. So it’s the peace that you’re looking for. And you can’t cling to peace. You pay attention to these phenomena – the wind or the trees – and find them restful. And you can’t have rest at the same as clinging to something. You have to relax, and become as one with them, so there is no attachment whatsoever. That is the natural state ...more
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The Importance of Humour All the while we try to lighten the load (laughs). It’s a joyful thing, not a heavy thing. The more you laugh about it, the better. The more you play with it the better. Don’t be too serious – play with it, and enjoy the play. Where else does joy come from apart from play? If you become too serious you get bogged down and fall into depression. If you are light-hearted you absorb things. In the play you learn far more than through being serious. In depth, in experience – that’s how we learn. Granted, this is the most serious thing you ever did in your life, but it ...more
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When you are tense, mentally, physically or emotionally, you can’t learn, no matter how hard you try. But when you are open and light-hearted, you can absorb almost everything. So light-hearted buoyancy is what we require, to allow these things to arise from within – and some from without. You have a door that is always open, in both directions. It is all balanced. You can’t do it when you are deliberate. That just closes the doors to any kind of learning. Just be open and enjoy. It is a very simple way of looking at it, but it’s absolutely true. You can do so much in a jocular fashion that ...more
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It should never be a question of praying for anything, but of giving thanks for what one is. From a traditional church point of view, the whole business is to get something from someone else – when in actual fact we already have everything, so there is nothing to be asked for.
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Becoming Still An Exercise in Stillness I have been trying to change gradually for a long time but it’s as though I know the script but can’t put it into action. The medicine is there – I look at it but I don’t take it, or I just take a little bit of it, even though I know it is good for me. You need the practice of being still. Here’s an exercise you can play with – and I mean play, without being too serious: Take a look at any part of your body – a finger or a toe, anything at all. Take a look at it and note that it’s separate from the you that is looking. Now take a look at the table… It’s ...more
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Dealing with Difficulties I have had a lot of difficulties. Then a lot of the difficulties will disappear. It doesn’t mean to say you won’t have little problems that arise from time to time, but they can be dealt with quite easily. If you look back in your life, I am quite sure that, like everybody else, you’ve been up against obstacles which seemed almost insurmountable at that time, great troubles. But looking back now, you think, “What was I so concerned about? It was nothing.” Your problems today are of a similar nature. Often you only need to let issues rest for a while and they will cure ...more
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Whatever it is you want, practise it now. If you want peace start being peaceful now. Don’t go looking for it tomorrow; it won’t be there. It’s now. If you want to be happy, start being happy now. If you find that the mind is drawn to things which create unhappiness, don’t let it go there. Stay cool, and you’ll find you are happy, content, without needing anything. Imagine yourself at the end of a day soaking in a nice warm bath. You relax, the mind relaxes, the body relaxes. Everything relaxes and you are content. Why can’t you do it when you are not in the bath? Just stop doing things – ...more
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The trouble is, we have conditioned ourselves over many, many lifetimes – including this one – to keep busy doing things, instead of being inactive. But you don’t have to do. You can respond to things, but you don’t have to go seeking to do things. It is totally habitual. There is nothing there. The mind has been trained to be busy, that’s all. We have to untrain ourselves. But at the same time, you don’t do nothing. You are aware – that is doing something. Even if you seem to be sitting doing nothing, your eyes can be seeing and you are conscious of what you see; your ears are hearing and ...more
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The main thing is to be aware of being comfortable within. If you can do that, you can observe things which come in and produce a little discomfort, and examine why they produce the discomfort. You can quietly observe them and then return to the comfort. It’s surprising – the comfort in here is already out there with you in everything you see. This is the real nature of things: the comfortable area of being ‘part of’ rather than ‘separate from’. The main thing is that when these things are operative you have a buoyant attitude. You can’t get depressed; you ride alon...
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We tend to cling to the things that bring us suffering, but not the things which give us freedom. When you are reasonably happy, you’re open-minded and would give anything away. But with a little depression, you close everything into yourself, and develop a bigger ego, because you’re so aware of yourself. When you are happy you aren’t aware of yourself; you’re so open that you don’t realise there is a self there. So being selfless means happiness. As long as you don’t try to contain it and leave it wide open, you will always be content. It means that you can’t get hurt, as if you’re so soft ...more
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