I’m catching up with him next week. Stay tuned!

“I had been trying to grasp “I am that” for years. After I discovered your revolutionary learn advaita at home in only 45 hours course and studied the suggested textbooks, I have lost the “me” in only 2 years. No trip to india. No being raped by a guru or wearing funny clothes or chanting.”

In other news, I got a phone call from His Bobness this morning. He sounds fit and healthy but said he’s getting old and feeling it at the gym. Always great to hear his voice. I didn’t even mind that he woke me up. :-)

It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.

“It happened on a May morning — I have forgotten the year — but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden,” he wrote in “LSD: My Problem Child.” “As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.

“It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.”

Read full story here.

I hope you are all either having – or had, depending on where your meatbody resides – a great new years eve.

I’ve got two requests:

1. TPN recently had a major technical disaster – two hard drives we were using on our server failed simultaneously – and as a result we lost all of our MP3s. If any of you have copies of the Advaita Show archives, and would be willing to upload them to TPN’s servers for me, please email me and I’ll give you the details.

2. One listener, Tom, suggested we get someone else to host the show who could interview advaitans. I know I’ve shouted out for someone to host the show in the past but I thought it was a great idea to do it again. Perhaps one of you wrote “get off my ass and do something useful” as one of your new years resolutions. :-) If you’re interested, again, email me.

Happy New Year!

WATCH NOW!

I’m suggesting we record on the FIRST MONDAY of each month at 9am AUSTRALIAN EASTERN TIME. That works out like this:

Australian Eastern: Monday 9am
California: Sunday 2pm
New York: Sunday 5pm
London: Sunday 10pm

How does that sound?

The folks at Advaita.org have even set up a place for advaitans to hang out. Here’s the location:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Nirgendwo/186/204/27

My name in SL is “Cameron Switchblade”. Come check it out, add me to your friends list, let’s hang out.

Thinker, philosopher UG Krishnamurti dead.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

BANGALORE: Thinker and philosopher UG Krishnamurti has died at Vallecrossia in Italy aged 89.

Krishnamurti, lovingly called UG by his friends and admirers, had slipped and injured himself seven weeks ago and was bedridden, his friends said.

UG’s longtime friends filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, Larry and Susan Morris and a few other friends were by his side when he died two days ago.

Krishnamurti, who had moved to Italy in January, suffered from “cardio spasm” for many years which became quite severe in the last days of his life.

As per his advice, no rituals or funeral rites were conducted, and he did not leave instructions on how to dispose of his body, his friend and admirer AP Frank Noronha said.

The cremation was carried out by Mahesh Bhatt on Friday.

UG is survived by two daughters and a son.

You can read more about UG on Wikipedia. I love these stories:

From 1947 to 1953, U.G. regularly attended talks given by Jiddu Krishnamurti in Madras, finally beginning a direct dialogue with J. Krishnamurti in 1953. U.G. describes one of their meetings as follows:

“We really didn’t get along well. Whenever we met we locked horns over some issue or other. For instance, I never shared his concern for the world, or his belief that his teaching would profoundly affect the thoughts and actions of mankind for the next five hundred years–a fantasy of the Theosophist occultists. In one of our meetings I told Krishnamurti, ‘I am not called upon to save the world.’ He asked, ‘The house is on fire–what will you do?’ ‘Pour more gasoline on it and maybe something will rise from the ashes,’ I remarked. Krishnamurti said, ‘You are absolutely impossible.’ Then I said, ‘You are still a Theosophist. You have never freed yourself from the World Teacher role. There is a story in the Avadhuta Gita which talks of the avadhut who stopped at a wayside inn and was asked by the innkeeper, “What is your teaching?” He replied, “There is no teacher, no teaching and no one taught.” And then he walked away. You too repeat these phrases and yet you are so concerned with preserving your teaching for posterity in its pristine purity.’”

— (Krishnamurti, U.G.; Arms, Rodney, Ed. [Third Edition, 2001]. Mystique of Enlightenment. Part One. from [2])

Their dialogues continued, but finally came to a halt. U.G. describes the final discussion as follows:

“Again I asked him if there was anything behind the abstractions he was throwing at me, ‘Come clean for once.’ Then he said with great force, ‘You have no way of knowing it!’ Then I said, ‘If I have no way of knowing it and you have no way of communicating it, what the hell have we been doing! I have wasted seven years listening to you. You can give your precious time to somebody else. I am leaving for New York tomorrow.’”

— (Krishnamurti, U.G.; Arms, Rodney, Ed. [Third Edition, 2001]. Mystique of Enlightenment. Part One. from [3])

After the break with J .Krishnamurti, U.G. went to the United States seeking medical treatment for his son, and stayed there for 5 years.

Which reminds me… Bob doesn’t have a profile on Wikipedia. How about we submit one?

“What Did It”

An acquaintance told me
that the great sage
Nisargadatta Maharaj
once offered him a cigarette,
“Thank you, sir, but I don’t smoke.”
“Don’t smoke?” said the master,
“What’s life for?”

If you are a fan of Cohen’s songs or poetry, I highly recommend the book. Many of the poems in this collection were written during his ten year retreat at the Zen Center on Mount Baldy. They focus mostly on zen studies and erotic relationships, two subjects which always go together in my mind.

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.

That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”

From a NYT article entitled “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t” which I came across via Scott Adams’ blog.

Step 1. I will post up the future schedule (a few weeks in advance) to a Google Calendar. You can view it here.

Step 2. If you want to come on any particular episode, look to the associated post up on the Advaita Forum. A link to the forum will be in each calendar entry so it should be pretty straightforward.

Step 3. Reply to the forum post for the episode you want to join, with your name, Skype ID and the topic you’d like to discuss.

Step 4. When it comes time to record the show, we’ll hook you in via Skype!

Hopefully that isn’t too hard to follow. Hit me up here with any questions.

I’m going to be in San Fran for the next few weeks. Any of you in that general area who want to catch up for a coffee let me know! You can reach me on my email or my US cell 310 9900666. I also need a sofa to sleep on! :-)

Cam

Anyway… I hope you enjoy the show.

Go to the forum.

If you’d like to leave us a comment, click here. 

See more photos from today’s session here.

Just letting you in case you start to panic…

So it’s next week folks. Here’s what my promise to you, because you’ve been so patient…

I, the true I, masquarading as an imaginary entity known as “Cameron Reilly”, will, to the best of “my” ability, which, as we all know, is ZERO because there is no entity to have “free will”, carry out the bidding of the Intelligence Energy next “Tuesday” (time being a concept) and will NOT use my iPod to record the show. I (the true there-is-only-one-without-a-second “I”, not the imaginary “me”, will use my (again, subjective relative concept, the phenomenon of the noumenon-which-I-am) laptop. I (true “I” again) will also (again, within the limits of the complete lack of volition that this non-entity has) faithfully continue to act the part of the foolish questioner for the benefit (nothing to gain, no-one to become, nothing to do, no path, you are already that which you seek) of the audience, even though I (true “I”) have been convinced for quite some years now that there is no entity called “Cameron” and that everything else concerning “life”, “the Universe”, and “Everything” is just a great way to spend “time” talking about nothing to no-one, selling books, pretending to be gurus, smiling serenely, etc. :-)

Eliot just emailed me to tell me he didn’t get to record a show with Bob this week. He is sorrier than Dick Cheney but them’s the breaks. Geeeez, between my iPod frakups, and Eliot’s miss, the intelligence energy must REALLY hate you people! What have you done to piss it off so much lately???

SO…

Here’s what I’m going to do.

Because I know you are all hanging out for your little burst of enlightenment this week, like rabid zombies who haven’t eaten human flesh in a week, I’m going to ring his Bobness in the morning and see if I can get 30 minutes with him on the phone or in person tomorrow. See if he can slip me into his busy schedule of … you know… being in nirvana and dealing with pathetic seekers trying to kiss his feet.

If he can fit me in, I will re-schedule my entire day around getting some enlightenment nourishment for you crazy people.

If he cannot see me tomorrow, then you’re just going to have to make do with the 2nd tier enlightenment on offer out there… you know who I’m talking about… until next Tuessssssday.

Okay?

Let the complaining begin.

When I got home an hour later to edit it, before I could get the file off of my shiny Apple iPod, the hard drive failed on me, yet again. Sometimes it corrects itself in a couple of days, so I’ve been sitting here…. watching the kettle boil… so far – nothing. It’ll be a shame if you don’t get to hear this show, cuz I really think you cats would have dug it. But there you go. See Gilbert and Charlie? I tried to give you want you want but the Universe had other plans. So maybe that’s a sign…

I tell ya what – if we get into the Top Ten, I’ll do another video podcast. That’s your motivation. :-)

VOTE FOR THE ADVAITA SHOW

Well – here’s the product you’ve been waiting for!

A must for all enlightened non-dualists – it’s the “Who Is Asking The Question” t-shirt!

Once you have this advaita accessory, all you’ll need to do – point!

It’s a black t-shirt and here’s what it has on it:
”

Get yours today! Be the envy of your friends… who don’t exist…

Stay tuned for some really exciting news next week as we kick this thing back into gear, and I know that all of our excellent hosts along with Cam and myself hope that you have enjoyed the great podcasts that we have been providing for your listening pleasure since February 2005…the ride has just started folks.

:)
Mick Stanic
Co-Founder, The Podcast Network

Between the 29th of September and the 3rd of October, The Podcast Network web site will be undergoing some major server work that will increase (fingers crossed) both the speed and the reliability of the service you have come to love and cherish ;)

Access to the web site and the functionality of the RSS feed will at best experience a small blip of down time… and at worst…well..it could vanish into the bermuda triangle that is tech land for upto four days. I have also had to switch of the ability to post comments on all the sites till we are fully operational as well.

Stick with us through this little hick-up and I promise we will return to normal transmission as quick as possible.

Thanks guys and gals…

Mick Stanic
Co-Founder of The Podcast Network

Example:

Cameron: Ok, dobrá, tady je Cameron, sedím zde s úmyslem poprvé nahrát Neduální show nebo advaitovou show, už si nepamatuji jak jsme to chtěli nazvat.. a já zde sedím se Sailorem Bobem, poprvé jsme se s Bobem setkali před zhruba 16,17 lety, mně bylo tehdy asi 18 let a Bob mne představil subjektu neduality. Tak Bobe, co kdybychom začali tím, že by jsi řekl lidem něco o tom, jak jsi se dostal ke studiu neduality.

Bob: No, není na tom co studovat, ale já se k tomu dostal tak, že jsem mÄ›l problém s alkoholem a to mne pÅ™ivedlo na sezení.. ? ..pÅ™estal jsem pít, ale zanedlouho jsem zase začal pít. Vrátil jsem do protialkoholního kroužku.. a pÅ™estal znovu pít a nÄ›kdo mi tam dal knihu, která se jmenovala .. ? .. napsaná byla katolickým knÄ›zem, který byl alkoholikem a v úvodu té knihy prohlásil, “nám alkoholikům je dána druhá životní Å¡ance”. To mne zasáhlo jako blesk, protože .. ? .. a pod touto vÄ›tou, “nám alkoholikům je dávána druhá životní Å¡ance” bylo pÅ™ipsáno “a jak tuto druhou Å¡anci využijeme?”. A to bylo jako druhý blesk.. ? ..do té doby jsem ničemu nevěřil. Na tÄ›chto setkáních jsme si povídali i o Bohu, kdo to je, jak tomu rozumíme.. ? ..co je to co nám dává tuto druhou Å¡anci, existuje nÄ›co jako Bůh, duch nebo tak podobnÄ›? A to se stalo nejdůležitÄ›jší vÄ›cí v mém životÄ›.. ? ..dostal jsem pÅ™es to ke kÅ™eÅ¡tanství, zajímal jsem se o knihy, hledal tento subjekt v novinách.. Myslím, že to byl rok 1961 kdy jsem pÅ™estal s pitím a v roce 1962 sem pÅ™iÅ¡el MaháriÅ¡i (zÅ™ejmÄ› jiný než RM?).