What’s left after unveiling

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“Whatever we care to call the ultimate reality, we cannot define or qualify it because the brain is incapable of processing this kind of data.”

— Bernadette Roberts

 

The process of unveiling will eventually bring us in contact with ultimate reality – a reality we cannot define or talk about using words.  We can say:  we are not stupid and we are not smart, and we are not our body parts and we are not our thoughts, and we are not our emotions, nor our reactions, but we cannot actually say what we are.  Bernadette Roberts expresses this nicely in the above quote.

And who is Bernadette Roberts?

Bernadette Roberts is a self-made Buddha. She was a Catholic nun for 10 years following the Christian contemplative path. When she reached what the Catholics consider the closest you can get to God this side of the grave, she left the monastery with the intention of serving God in the world.  She went back to school, held regular employment, got married and had four children.

During the 20 years after leaving the nunnery, she reached full enlightenment without any formal teacher or guidance. She describes this process as the path to no-self. You can read the full story in her books.  She is refreshing in that she is a no nonsense person and expresses herself without any dogmatic bent.

The experience of no-self is the ultimate unveiling.  Identifying with negatives has gone, identifying with positives has gone and all that remains is the experience of being all that is.  How do we get to this experience?  I paraphrase Bernadette:

Since self cannot experience ultimate reality as it truly is, then the only way to do so is to be prepared to relinquish every last thing we know as self — everything we experience, in fact.

It appears that the key factor is willingness. It is the willingness to give up everything we experience.  Another word for this is renunciation.  Renunciation is disinterest in worldly things.  If we have renunciation, we would certainly be willing to give up everything we experience in the world.  We can say the same thing a different way:  with renunciation we are only interested in becoming enlightened or knowing God and think about that day and night.

How far do you want to go?  People talk about working towards enlightenment, but the true first step is becoming willing to give up everything.  Not many people are really interested in that.  They think enlightenment is keeping it all and getting more.

Unveiling

Next week I will be visiting the Bay Area and catching up with friends.  On Sunday, August third I’ll be speaking at the Harmony Center for the Joyful Spirit.  To go along with my talk I suggested the movie Kumare be played at their Friday night movie get together.  It is a documentary about a fellow from the East Coast that comes to Phoenix and pretends to be an Indian Guru.  Once he has collected together a group of followers and indoctrinates them in his spiritual path, he does an unveiling where he reveals his true identity.

movie kumareIt is an interesting and complex film.  Kumare’s message is that we all have the answers wtihin us and don’t need external teachers to tell us what to do.  This is my philosophy as well and “the answers are within” happens to be the title of one of  my books.  The talk I am giving is called Unveiling and will go more into the process of uncovering or revealing our true identities.  (Video of talk.)

We all have an identity. In fact we all have multiple identities or perhaps it would be better to say, we all have a multifaceted identity.  Our identity is made up of the stories we have about ourselves.  Many of us on the spiritual path of awakening have noticed how our identity has changed as we’ve progressed.

For me, I was largely unconscious of my identity in the beginning.  As I became more aware, I began to recognize certain facets of my identity and then I began to question them.

For instance, I called my self “insensitive” for many years in my teens and twenties.  Then I realized that I was actually overly sensitive and had built up a wide variety of strategies that protected me from overwhelm.  One of those protective mechanisms was insensitivity.  So one of my identities changed from “insensitive” to “very sensitive”.

These days the question is, “Am I very sensitive?”  And the answer is no.  If I can say, “I am ______”, then I am not that thing.  The truth is that I am not anything that I can say in words.  All labels and description are just constructs.  I am not a construct.  These things are my identity but they do not come close to expressing what I truly am.

I have found the process of unveiling is more like an elimination process.  I never can see or express who I truly am, but I get close to knowing who I truly am by finding out what I am not.

During the unveiling process, I may have first thought I was stupid or fat and then I realized I wasn’t stupid or fat.  I replaced that identity with the idea that I was smart or shapely.  Finally I realize that I’m not smart or shapely either.  If I was smart and shapely then who would I be if I get old and no longer can think and my body is falling apart.  So, I am not smart or shapely.

Similarly I have found that I am not anger or sadness, I am not my reaction to anything.  I am not my form.  If you remove my eyes, I still seem to exist. So I am not my body parts.  If my brain stops working (I’m in a coma.) people point to me and call my name.  I still exist – so I’m not my brain.

There are many paths to enlightenment and here is another tool:  See if you can find what you are?  The easiest way is to eliminate everything you are not.  Tell me what you end up with.

 

Plastic

bottles

Buy sparkly water in glass bottles and reuse again and again with reverse osmosis water.

About fifteen years ago a friend said to me, “you drink out of plastic bottles?”  That one statement was enough to end my use of plastic bottles.  I never reasoned it out.  It was really an intuitive decision.  Although, I have to admit, my intuition was “informed” by my training as an environmental chemist as well as an human physiologist.

Plastics are known endocrine disrupters.  This means that they mess up the way our normal hormones work in our body.  I’m not an expert on all their effects, but at the time I was studying estrogen in college and I knew that plastics as well as many other chemicals we use mimic estrogen.  Too  much estrogen can lead to an increase in inflammatory issues among other problems.

When the research on BPA (Bisphenol A) hit the news I just thought, “are we surprised?”

Then I was really shocked when people continued to use plastic and felt placated by the BPA free stickers.  My mind thought, “great, they have replaced BPA with some new chemical that is probably worse, but not tested yet”.

The bottom line is that plastic bottles leach chemicals that are harmful.  BPA is just one.  Another is a class of compounds called phthalates.  Phthalates are found in all plastics and other products like perfumes, cosmetics, personal care products and detergents.  When I worked in an environmental lab in San Francisco we were unable to get water that was free of phthalates – which means if you are not drinking reverse osmosis water or something like that you are probably drinking phthalates as well.

I’m prompted to write about this today, because I was just reading a recent study on how phthalates are linked to increased incidence of type II diabetes and insulin resistance.  This is a nice summary of the findings if you are interested.  Basically, people with higher levels of phthalate exposure (as measured by increased metabolites in their urine) have a higher rate of insulin resistance and type II diabetes.

I recommend everyone minimize their exposure to plastics.  Keep your water in glass, use glass containers to store food, and don’t heat food in plastics in the microwave.  Don’t be fooled!  Just because manufacturers will sell you food in plastic or plastic coated paper does not mean that it is safe for consumption.  And bless your liver.  It is busy breaking these things down and flushing them out of your body.

Glass is essentially made of sand and it is inert.  Even if some heavy metals find their way into the glass, scientists have found that glass has a low propensity for leaching.  Nothing in and nothing out.  Colored glass has the added benefit of energizing the water it holds, especially when set out in the sun for a few minutes.

To get a nice stock of glass bottles, buy some sparkling water and reuse the bottles.  I hope everybody does this right away so that people stop looking at me weird when I pull out my bottle.