Beyond the 'I': Notes on Waking Up to Oneness
by Dhyan Dewyea
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dhyan DewyeaEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-05
ISBN: 0595459013
Number of pages: 154
Publisher: iUniverse, Inc.
Book Reviews of Beyond the 'I': Notes on Waking Up to Oneness
Book Review: Sober, insightful and mature assessment of spirituality and nonduality
Summary: 4 Stars
I was happy to receive a review copy of "Beyond the 'I': Notes on Waking Up to Oneness." Herein, Dhyan Dewyea has shared her soberly insightful and mature assessment of spirituality and, specifically, nondual spiritual awakening. Her cogent observations are combined with some autobiographic confessions that may remind readers of works in the last 25 years by Irina Tweedie, Bernadette Peters, and Susan Segal (the first and last are specifically referenced by Dewyea in the endnotes and reading list). Yet Dewyea's 127-page book reveals a far less turbulent ride than those women described in their own lives, and I would recommend this book over any of those prior works and many other spiritual works as well. Dewyea shares autobiographic material, but never allows herself to get bogged down in excessive personal details, sharing only as much as is needed to illustrate important points in her treatise.
German-born and -raised Dhyan Marlis Dewyea is to be congratulated for several achievements here. We might start with the plain facts that, first, she deploys clearer and more readable English than do many persons native to English-speaking lands; second, she has not tried to glamorize or popularize spirituality for the masses; third, she is consistently pointing with her words to realization of the Absolute Reality as everyone's True Nature beyond all shifting, fleeting states; and fourth, she is keenly aware of the various traps created by the insidious sense of "me," the selfish "I," the one who would try to own or usurp "being enlightened."
There is simple elegance in so much of what she writes. Dewyea presents a view of spiritual realization that is radically self-less, yet (and this is the reason for not giving her otherwise richly insightful book a full 5 stars) she tends more toward the **impersonal** view of enlightenment, rather than the **transpersonal** (see below, near end of review, for more on this).
Dewyea wisely expresses the truth of the old *via negativa* (negating way) or apophatic mysticism: "...this 'I' does not exist and has never existed." (p. xii) "Awakening is the realization that the person one took oneself to be has never existed, never had any substance.... there is no such thing as an 'I.'" (p. 6) "It is more like a 'NoSelf - NoRealization.'" (p. 7) "...one also discovers that there is no one who can awaken. It is therefore wrong to say 'I am awake'--whatever is cannot be had by anyone." (p. 8) "The answer to the question 'who am I?' is not 'I am enlightened." Enlightenment cannot be an attribute of a person because what it refers to is the realization that the personal 'I' is an illusion; the no-self does not have any qualities at all." (pp. 24-5) "The body-mind process... is freed from the 'me' idea. The body, its mind, and all else which appears, simply go on. It is quite liberating to have no 'I' idea attached to them." (p. 35) "The 'I' wants to be the one who possesses liberation, even attempts to 'get' it by leaving itself behind, and that is not possible, as it itself is in the way." (p. 69) "Our western language is based on the subject-object relationship... if there is no subject relating to an object, what can be said? ... When the subject and object both collapse, they are both revealed as immaterial, illusory, as not possessing any substance on their own. It is like falling behind them, into a center of eternity that is made of no other thing than bliss, everything arising out of it and subsiding into it. This kind of bliss is not a state that can come and go and turn into despair. It is not dependent on some condition. This bliss is what one is, fundamentally.... It is not something to 'get,' but what we are." (pp. 10-11, 69) "Recently, I read how someone described their healing work by saying 'this work will connect you to the source'; but the whole notion of 'connection' is wrong because you are not two. You are the source, whether it is cognized or not, whether it is veiled or not." (p. 121) "If one is attentive, one finds that there is an unchanging quality of awareness in which the changing world appears, an awareness that is never affected by the ever-changing content." (pp. 37)
There are abundant other insights that anyone interested in mystical spirituality will enjoy reading here. I will not quote anything further, so as to allow readers to get the full, direct impact of Dewyea's aphorisms in their original context.
Dhyan Dewyea describes experiential ups and downs throughout her years of spiritual deepening, but her wisdom-nature knows that none of these are permanent or truly satisfying, for, in line with the Buddha's "three marks of existence," she knows that they are changeable and not substantial and therefore not worth grasping onto for ultimate satisfaction.
Dewyea comes to nondual realization without much prior education in nondual spirituality. We learn that in her early adulthood in the 1970s she participated in humanistic and bioenergetic psychology movements being imported from the USA to Germany. She traveled to India in her late 20s, and had some experience perhaps then or afterwards of J. Krishnamurti's teachings and Osho Rajneesh's chaotic meditation. References to Zen meditation, Gurdjieff work, the Diamond work of H.A. Almaas, the teachings of Jean Klein, the Enlightenment Intensives, etc., enter her narrative. But she candidly admits coming fairly late to India's advaita (nondual) spirituality, for instance, saying of the most eminent of modern advaita sages, Sri Ramana Maharshi, "until very recently, I had no idea who he was or that the 'who am I?' question was his main teaching or that he had anything to do with Advaita." (p. 14)
Among other gems in Dewyea's book are a critique of the entire corporate-world "motivational" scam; for instance, "The claim that 'you can have what you want' is so general that few people pause to consider whether it is true.... A whole industry is being powered by this claim, and by employing emphatic repetition, the credo is dressed up as a fact. Instead of questioning the assumption, a person may be led to feel he or she just lacks self-determination or suffers from too much self-doubt. And the implied solution?--invest in more programs and seminars...." (p. 99)
Dewyea has also usefully redeemed meditation as having a useful place within nondual spirituality, though never as a "technique" for a "me" to "achieve something." She writes: "The innate faculty of watching, or awareness, does not think or do or move, but is rather aware of thinking, doing, moving. It is not about having or looking for great 'meditative' experiences.... Meditation is not about becoming a 'seasoned meditator'.... It is about becoming acquainted with the faculty of witnessing whatever is appearing within one's consciousness, an awareness that itself is never touched by the arising content." (p. 48) "Today, there seems to be almost a backlash against meditation, often coming from recent Neo-Advaita doctrines.... But if it is discovered that there was never anyone who 'practiced,' it follows that there is no one 'not' to practice. And when critiquing practice, who is there to take a stand, either for it or against it?... Maybe one way to look at meditation is to see it as the never ending answer to a never ending question." (pp. 58-60)
My one quibble with this book, and many books/articles about Awakening and nondual spirituality, is the consistent tendency to emphasize the **impersonal** rather than the **transpersonal.** The transpersonal transcends yet *includes* the personal, the human. This latter approach is favored by transpersonal psychologists like John Welwood, philosophers like Ken Wilber, and spiritual teachers including myself. Dewyea explicitly writes, "...this knowing is immediate, impersonal awareness being home in itself.... I call it a shift in perspective.... This is the absolute end of the search...." (pp. 114-5) "There are movements of the body-mind and these are now experienced more like impersonal functions instead of the activities of an 'I'...." (p. 117) Elsewhere in her chapter, "A Play without Actors," she deconstructs personal relationships: "If there can never be two, the idea of a personal relationship cannot be upheld--only two separate beings or things can relate. But letting go of the idea of relationship goes completely against the grain of what everyone has learned." (p. 123).
Yet a transpersonal (not merely impersonal) nondual spirituality allows for full "inter-personal" human relationship within an absolute context of the supra-personal, non-relational Reality. Hence, as i've often shared with interlocutors, we can be *fully involved* while being *fully uninvolved* (Jesus: "in the world, but not of it"). Our True Nature (Open Awareness) is realized as THIS nondual ONE which can *never* be in relationship and yet paradoxically (by expressing as the MANY and as "i and thou, thou and i") is *always* in relationship. This "sweetness" of relationship is also available in nondual devotion (in India known and practiced as *abheda bhakti* or *parabhakti*), a phenomenon readily witnessed in the lives and teachings of obviously liberated nondual sages Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Amma Amritanandamayi, Shankara, Nagarjuna, Milarepa, Hsu-yun, et al.
Dewyea's "impersonal" words are profound, yet, IMO, there is the very real danger for some readers of spiritual "aridity" (as great Christian mystics termed it), mere conceptualization, or, much more seriously, actual *depersonalization.* (A quick internet search will bring up professional mental health webpages, and, even more poignant, support groups for those individuals suffering from the clinical condition known as depersonalization; their descriptions can sound a lot like nondual realization, but are in fact marked by alienation and suffering, not fulfillment.)
Do we need to always only refer to Awareness impersonally as "it" or "that"? Language is potent, and the best spiritual teachers wield it in flexible ways to suit the needs of listeners. Given so many prior distancing abstractions about spirituality, it would seem that intuitive language rendering Awareness more "intrinsically evident" right HERE as one's "true Source-I" or "Infinite, immediate Truth" is to be favored. Meister Eckhart understood this when he wrote and preached some 700 years ago that "God is at home (here), man is abroad." The late British mystic and teacher of Self-inquiry Douglas Harding (1909-2007) understood this immediacy of the Divinely Absolute "No-thinglike" Awareness in his grand "experiments in the science of the 1st person," easily available at www.headless.org. As i always say, Absolute nondual AWARENESS is right HERE, as THIS Reality. It is no mere "it" or "that," the pronouns which Dewyea and so many others use to refer to Awareness.
And yet we can appreciate why such "impersonal" sounding pronouns (it, that) are used, to indicate a "beyond-the-me" approach to spiritual teaching and counseling, lest anyone aggrandize themselves with "I am enlightened."
Nevertheless, such impersonal language seems to put the matter of awakening at some "distance" away-- and Dewyea's lovely point, expressed repeatedly throughout her *highly recommendable work* is the immediacy, naturalness, and availability of Our Real Nature as Awareness.
All in all, this is a very good, easily readable work for anyone wanting/needing to question all assumptions--worldly or "spiritual" assumptions. And the truth shall set ye free (from 'ye'/'me').
--timothy conway
enlightened-spirituality.org
Summary of Beyond the 'I': Notes on Waking Up to Oneness
The road to awakening is fraught with many hazards, dangers, as well as incomplete liberations. Dhyan Dewyea, writing from years as a spiritual explorer, has marked the terrain and noted the milestones creating a handy and useful road map for those who are embarking on or are already following the path. This book is wise and necessary medicine for the journey to oneness.Chris Dube, Urban Mystic Books, Editor
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