Nonduality Salon (/ \)

Satyam Nadeen

From the back cover of Satyam Nadeen's book, From Onions to Pearls, we read:

"In March of 1992, Michael Clegg entered an overcrowded county
jail near Jacksonville, Florida, convicted of the manufacture of an illegal
drug called Ecstasy. He was held there for 2 years while awaiting
sentencing. While in prison, he realized that a lifetime of spiritual searching had
brought him no closer to the elusive state he was seeking, so he gave up
trying. In surrender, he was overwhelmed with relief and bliss.

"The next several years were spent in a deepening process he
calls the 'deliverance', as layers of preconditioned ego personality were
peeled away to reveal the eternal Pearl of Consciousness.

"On August 15, 1996, Satyam Nadeen was released from a federal prison to
re-enter the world Michael Clegg had left."


From Satyam Nadeen's book, From Onions to Pearls, page 20 following:

However strange it seemed to me at the time, about a year into
the county jail scene, suddenly out of nowhere I was struck with an interest
in reading the works of Ramana Maharshi, a name out of the distant past,
one mentioned by Rajneesh. For the preceding year I had been listening to
several hundred tapes by channeled entities like Ramtha, Seth, Abraham,
Lazarus, Emanuel, Bartholomew (my favorite), and countless 'ascension'
masters, like Sananda and Ashtar. So you see, for me to request Ramana
was a request out of left field at the time. Along with Ramana's books, my
friend included a copy of I Am That by Maharaj Nisargadatta, and Wake Up and
Roar, I and II by Poonjaji. Basically, all these men are from the spiritual
tradition of advaita vedanta, or nondualism, and maintain a fairly
straight line of reasoning along these lines. It was certainly interesting. I
enjoyed their works at the time and read them over and over again,
because there was something there beckoning to me. But it was one Ramesh
Balsekar, a student disciple of Nisargadatta, whose book I again coincidentally
found a year later after reading the other advaita guys, that really did me in.
Now he's not saying anything different from his buddies, but he said it,
delivered with Grace, in just one sentence that hit me right in the
intuitive heart. His masters had given me some advaita tidbits that took a year
to percolate down to my heart, along with many mantras like the "Who am I?"
kind of inquiries and voila! Lightning struck home. All he said in his
opening chapter was "Consciousness (Source--All That Is--God) is all there is."
WOW!!! He said it and I could actually see it, know it, feel on fire
with it, and begin to live it. In the advaita school, God is the source and the Subject of all
Consciousness. Everything else is the appearance or object of the
Subject as phenomena. But in this case, Subject and object are one and the same
energy. The role of a "doer" can only pertain to the Subject once we
conceptually separate these two words of Subject and object in the world
of duality or appearance. The role of the one "done", or puppet if you like, can only be
the object of the subject, and not the subject of further objects.

The bottom line, folks! You have no free will.
You don't make the choices.
You are not the doer.
Neither is anyone else out there the doer.
There is only consciousness acting through the individual
mind/body organism that we call this bag of skin and bones.
Once you get this, and I mean really get it, say, like St. Paul
got it when he was struck down by some kind of Divine Lightning and in a
flash clearly saw the ignorance of his former thinking, then I would say you
have received your wake-up call. The very thought that Consciousness is all
there is, and I am not the doer, kept me in a blissful swoon for months. It's
easy to understand how Buddha just sat there for a couple of weeks under the
Bodhi tree when he got his wake-up call. Ramana Maharshi sat on a mountaintop
for three years without moving when his alarm clock went off. In fact, his
body was so emaciated and eaten up by insects he almost didn't make it off
that mountain.
The awakening itself is a sudden event. It may seem like the
events leading up to it I are a gradual happening, but here's what happens.
Let's say we are all climbing steps toward awakening. Destiny, the handmaiden
of Source, dictates that on the 697th step, so and so will be awakened.
So he plows along for years and years and reaches step #692, where he starts
to see the light shining over the horizon. But when step #697 is reached,
POW! There it is, seemingly sudden, even though it took 696 prior steps to
soften him up before he reached it. So why didn't I respond to this penetrating concept the whole
time I was reading Ramana, Nisargadatta, and Poonjaji the preceding year? They
all said it, more or less, though not in those exact words? Because I
hadn't reached my preordained step yet. But when I "accidentally" came across
a book by Ramesh and read his opening statement, there I was, just leaving
my symbolic step #696 with one foot poised in midair. My whole preceding
54 years had been a softening process for this one awesome moment. The
whole two years in that county jail cell had sufficiently removed any clinging
to a "me" identify so that Source could now penetrate and permeate as the
identify of Subject I AM THAT.

From Onions to Pearls
By Satyam Nadeen
New Freedom Press C-1996
Post Office Box 3029
San Rafael, California 94912
1-888-363-3738
http://www.satyamnadeen.com

Nonduality Salon (/ \)