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#3987 - Thursday, August 19, 2010 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Articles, interviews, and videos from Stillness Speaks www.stillnessspeaks.com have often been featured here. Now a recent interview of Chris Hebard tells the story of the man behind that website and how he came to encounter nonduality. This article appears in Nonduality Magazine, another outstanding online resource.
http://www.nondualitymagazine.org/index.htm
Our own Jerry Katz has an interview there, too, in case you missed that one back in July.
CHRIS HEBARD
Interview with non duality magazine
NDM: Can you please tell me how you first became interested in
non duality?
Chris Hebard: Oh, yes, of course, there is the story of Chris,
perhaps an interesting one.
First, let's state the obvious: there are no rules.
Truth is not found in the story, and no ones is more or less
important than any other.
Stories merely reflect truth in all it's glory, and this story is
no exception.
Nothing that is shared here is meant to imply anything. It is
simply the record of this journey.
Some come to this gracefully, gently, while others, like me, have
to be hit over the head with a 2x4.
There was absolutely no interest here in non-duality, at all,
before 2006.
Just the opposite, my life was total resistance to what is.
In fact, I would have placed non-duality in the trash bin along
with many other seemingly new age hi-jinx like power crystals,
pet psychics and UFOs.
But, as Robert Adams once said, "All is well and unfolding
exactly as it should."
The Chris story is a brilliant example of ignorance in it's
glory: one attempt after another to complete myself through
objects of all sorts: career, politics, philosophy, beliefs,
drugs, alcohol, woman, family, travel, luxury....the classic
symptoms of greed, lust and vanity, the bell weather of lack.
In a word, my prescription was simply, "More!".
Once thing was certain, this profound and deep sense of lack
could be satisfied through obtaining some object that was always
just out of reach.
Extroverted, entrepreneurial, even slightly sociopathic, this
certainty began a slow motion train wreck, culminating in 2006.
I was experiencing a crisis in all areas of my life. I was in
litigation with everyone from ex-business associates to the U.S.
government. I lost a very successful business that I had run for
over 10 years. I lived in economic fear as one problem seemed to
build on top of another. My entire economic estate was ruined by
costly litigation and unfruitful business plans.
My wife had divorced me, leaving with our one year old child. My
mother, father, Uncle and Grandmother had all died--all within
one year. Two of my pets died unexpectedly.
A routine surgery for an impacted wisdom tooth went badly
resulting in my jaw being broken, being wired shut for 5 months,
requiring 5 surgeries and causing the permanent loss of feeling
in part of my face.
I was facing a huge tax liability and was in danger of losing my
home.
I could not sleep. I had been taking sleeping medications for
many years and they no longer seemed to work. I would take the
medication and it would force me to sleep for a short period of
time-- only to wake up a few hours later, full of dread, fear and
anger. I was at war with the world, which I felt was treating me
unfairly.
One sleepless night, I experienced what I can only call a
complete breakdown.
During an extreme "dark night of the soul" experience,
I had a massive, catastrophic collapse which left me spent and
speechless, praying fervently to a God I did not believe in, the
only honest prayer there is: "Please help me!"
This collapse was sudden, left me completely empty, with not even
one ounce of resistance left in me, with no more answers of any
sort, in a sort of cathartic and limp state.
Pulling myself up from the floor, where I had been curled in
fetal position, still sobbing, I poured what was left of me into
a wing back chair,
While I sat in this darkened, private library in the middle of
the night, mentally and spiritually exhausted, in final despair,
with absolutely no clue on what to do with my next breath, much
less the rest of my life, a most peculiar phenomena occurred:
sitting in absolute silence, I noticed my thoughts arising to me.
Mind you: these were no longer "my thoughts".
For some peculiar reason, in this stillness, it was spectacularly
clear to me, that these thoughts, which were arising in the
stillness of 'me', were not me at all, or, more specifically,
that what I was had to be something quite separate from these
thoughts. For, it was clear that, if I observed these thoughts
arising, then, who was observing them, if not me? And, if it was
what I call 'me' that was observing these thoughts, then, what
exactly was this 'me' which so clearly did not include these
thoughts?
This was a profoundly unsettling awareness; in fact, it
completely shattered my world. Everything that I had taken for
granted up to this point, came roaring back into question: my
career, my marriage, every decision supporting the entire
direction of 'my' life. The only thing I was certain about was
that I was uncertain about everything.
In this space of not knowing, of complete uncertainty about
everything, I began to reach out for help. Desperately, I
searched for any clue as to what I was experiencing. For better
than a year, I locked myself in an apartment, meditating,
journaling reading everything I could locate, leaving my
residence only when I uncovered authentic teachers who might
offer me direction.
This initial experience, completed shattered and redirected my
life. I can not imagine how I could ever reconstruct it.
From there, I have merely followed the perfume. It has been a
spectacular journey that has honored me with meeting many gifted
teachers who patiently and gently tolerated my fumbling , feeding
my deep curiosity with insights and gem like experiments designed
to challenge deeply held beliefs that colored what remained of my
confusion.
This sadhana left nothing but scorched earth as lightning struck
many more times.
I suspect revelation never ends.
So, this is how my interest in advaita was born.
Read the entire interview:
http://www.nondualitymagazine.org/nonduality_magazine.2.chrishebard.interview.htm