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#3609 - Thursday, July
30, 2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
The Myth of Seeing, by cee http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1601458452?ie=UTF8&tag=nondualitysal-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1601458452
Review by Jerry Katz
The Myth of Seeing is not
merely nondual and instructional, but artful, literary, and
interesting. It is about the world of the Guru and the world of
fretting students, the dream world and the waking world, and the
fine lines between them that stand as both stumbling blocks and
awareness itself.
What is the myth of seeing? The throwaway explanation, as any
dilettante of nonduality knows, is that there is no seer. Cee's
revelation is poetic and authoritative:
Don't get me wrong I love to look
It's just that I stumbled in the vicinity
Of a Guru
Suddenly my eyes failed me
The dream world is the vehicle for this teaching. "There is
a very fine line between your dream life and your waking life.
Your true identity is hidden in that fine line," Celeste
declares to the attendees of her Dream Workshop.
The line is thin but it stands out enough to stumble upon. The
theme of this book is stumbling into truth. It's the only way to
go. There's no horizontal walk to truth in which you can stop for
popsicle on the way. It's a hard stumbling upon something:
Suddenly my eyes failed me
Falling to my knees and weeping for joy my
Head touched the floor
The investigation of what you stumble upon may have a linear
process of day to day practice, but no one begins a practice
unless they've stumbled ... upon the reality of what one is ...
the Guru ... the sense that something isn't right ... the world
inside out ... unalterable love ... Truth ... the lie that their
life is.
Besides the Guru Celeste (based upon the life of Cee), there are
three other main characters who are students of Celeste. While
Celeste, her sister Janet, and Celeste's Guru all come to life by
virtue of Celeste's love, the three main students are thinly
developed, with their pasts and personas sketched out just enough
to give Celeste something to push against in order for the story
to unfold.
Each of the students, each fearful and contracted in his or her
own way, undergoes some degree of character development,
eventually stumbling in the direction of self-realization.
However we don't care so much. Why? Perhaps the author intended
to keep the relationship with the students impersonal. About her
own Guru, Cee (Celeste) says, "He really didn't care about
me at all, as a person. ... He didn't care about my story. He was
the imageless mirror that reflected my own truth, the truth of us
all. ... He didn't treat me nice." Perhaps the reader is
expected to regard the three main students in the same way and to
somehow assume the bearing of the free and imageless Guru.
There is no character development of Celeste, nor should there
be. In her own words, Celeste confesses that she is "out of
time," "here," "always already
fulfilled," "pleasure unbounded," "birthless
and deathless." Her everyday life is full of events as
simple as going through a hardware store or as involved as
helping her sister die which Celeleste says is "the hardest
thing I've ever done." Celeste experiences most intensely
because there is no character to develop, no character to get in
the way of pure experience.
What I enjoyed most about this book are Celeste's (Cee's) stories
about her life, from her girlhood "devouring of
beauty," to meetings with her teacher, her secret spirit,
her stumblings upon her Guru's specific words, the moment when
everything changed when she was driving a bus, her poems about
truth. I liked hearing about Celeste and Janet and Celeste's
Guru. Those people are real.
This is a fine book about the Guru and the seeker and depicts the
impersonal kind of relationship between teacher and devotee. It
is artistic and memorable. What is remembered is the Guru.
Waking up from the book's dreamworld, its supporting characters,
and their stumbling, what remains is the Guru inviting you and
showing you where and how to look. Waking up from the Guru's
pointing, all that's left is the Truth. From the lips of the
Guru, Celeste or Cee, Truth is all this book could be about. The
Myth of Seeing is an exquisite and unique form in which to
receive the confession of Truth.
For the pursuit of nonduality, I highly recommend The Myth of
Seeing and Cee's previous book, The Way of Knowledge, which will
teach you how to do self-inquiry and includes a chapter on dream
work.
~ ~ ~
The Myth of Seeing, by cee http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1601458452?ie=UTF8&tag=nondualitysal-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1601458452
The Way of Knowledge, by cee http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1601451709?ie=UTF8&tag=nondualitysal-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1601451709