originally published in Living Now magazine and www.livingnow.com.au

October 2010

Wayne Liquorman, Advaita teacher, was not always enlightened: 'I woke up, poured rum in my coffee, drank the entire day, had to score a couple of grams of cocaine every couple of days to make it through the week, and that had gone!'

I have always had a really strong affection for the word 'teacher'. As a child I saw the film, The Miracle Worker, about the deaf and blind woman, Helen Keller, and her meeting with the woman who was to have the most profound effect on her life. The powerful climactic scene has remained with me. Helen Keller (played by Patty Duke) stands next to the family pump as Annie the teacher (played by Anne Bancroft) pumps out the water. Annie is tired and frustrated after a thankless period of physical and mental warfare with the wild, uncivilised Helen, trying to teach her how to communicate with language. As the water spills over Helen's fingers, something breaks through and she finally understands what all the finger games have been about, connecting water to the symbol in her hand and the actual memory of its sound (pre the illness as a baby that caused her deafness). Annie leads her to the world around her, kneading into her hands the missing links that she has been blind to for so long, while Helen responds, fingering back the words that describe her surrounds. Finally after being embraced by her family, Helen finds Annie and gestures the question, 'Who are you?'. Annie spells teacher into her hand and Helen finger-spells the word back as Annie then holds their hands together to her own cheek nodding yes.

For me, it is a moment of the deepest beauty delivered so poignantly and passionately. It is the magic of coming home. The veil is lifted and the world is redeemed into what it has always been, but freshly flooded with gratitude.

Of course the power of the scene is in the totality of the whole movie and its depiction of the individual's misery amidst an often violent, ugly and unforgiving world – an inseparable whole.

I share this as an introduction to a very different teacher, whose words and presence might be described as the pointer to understanding but who more deeply to me is felt as the teacher, the student and the water, or rather life itself.

Wayne Liquorman was an alcoholic and drug addict for 19 years before being thrust kicking and screaming into sobriety. The event of his drinking and drugging literally drying up at the end of a weekend bender set him on a surprising investigation into what power in the universe could create such a change. He knew it wasn't his doing, despite up to that point feeling he was the master of his universe:

'I was someone who woke up in the morning, poured rum in my coffee, drank through the entire day, had to score a couple of grams of cocaine every couple of days, just to make it through the week, and that had gone! And I didn't want it to go. I wasn't looking for it to go. I thought I was doing fine! I wasn't interested in spiritual matters. I wasn't turning to the guy next to me at the bar and asking, 'What do you think is the source and substance of everything?'

The event was so dramatic, so clearly against the flow of his desire and his conditioning of being the master of his own destiny that, 'At that instant I became a seeker. Because I wanted to know what it was in the universe, that could do this to me!' He was to spend the next 18 months wandering through the spiritual market place. It was during this period he met his own guru, Ramesh Balsekar, an enlightened sage who had been a translator for Nisargadatta Maharaj (his teachings appear in the famous title I Am That) during the last three years of Maharaj's life. Ramesh had been the president of the Bank of India before his retirement and meeting with Maharaj. After an initial uneventful seminar with Ramesh, Wayne eventually found himself powerfully drawn to sit with him as much as he could. After spending another 18 months with Ramesh, editing his books and travelling as his 'roadie' for talks in the USA – there was the event of enlightenment, that he describes as 'only of interest to seekers'. He points out that the charged focus of energy around enlightenment in the spiritual community is sometimes believed to be a universally shared ultimate desire, but suggests that this clearly isn't so. His descriptions of enlightenment come from the questions of those who seek, and he continually comes back to defining it as simply as possible:

'When I talk about enlightenment, I talk about it very, very specifically, and it's extremely simple. In humans, at around the age of two-and-a-half, a profound shift occurs in which we change from spontaneous, free-flowing beings, to creatures in which everything is about 'Me!' and 'Mine!' and how to get what 'I' want and think 'I' need. It is the moment that the false sense of personal authorship (FSA) starts. It is the false sense that 'I' as this body-mind organism, am the source that makes things happen.

'It is this false sense of authorship that creates suffering, because the new perception is that 'I' am in control of things. Yet there is continuous evidence to the contrary – that 'I' am not in control. So a powerful tension is established.

'Later for some people, for whatever reason, that sense of personal authorship permanently dissolves. We can say it dies.'

Throughout his teachings he is clear that the FSA is not some kind of human failing, but rather it is an aspect of creation itself. Its arising clearly has an impact, but he shines a light on its claim of potency and encourages the seeker to test it out in the fire of their own life experience.

I'm entranced by his delivery of this fundamental pointer. It is the notional centre from which all the concepts hold so beautifully. It is as if the world opens up to include every possibility, all the teachings, all the movements, all the likes and dislikes. It is the water and the pump, Helen and Annie, before during and after. It is both the beauty and horror of the world and the individual impacts and perceptions felt within these. It is life itself in relentless 'conjurings', in which the personal, including the sense of authorship, is no more out of order than the movements of the planets.

These are Wayne's pointers which are flooding through these words. He makes it very clear that, in his model, enlightenment is an actual event, but it is not the thrust of the teaching nor is it something to work towards. It is deeply respectful of people's desire to relieve their own suffering, and does not reject any method or teaching that people are drawn to in their lives. It is the subtlety of this approach that sometimes finds peace entering through the back door.

I met Wayne first in a retreat in Hawaii and was literally bowed down by an energy I was not expecting. It was as if I had overdosed on a recreational drug and not necessarily in a pleasant way. The impact was intense and I was unable to lift my head to sit up straight and look in his direction. Tears flowed and I found myself sweating profusely, slowly becoming more and more unsettled in my stomach. It was as if my ears were filling up with the blood beating of my heart. I was about to crawl out of the room when a break was called and I was able to cool down.

Afterwards I felt as if my physical heart was going to burst and I had a cottonwool brain. Over the next couple of days I tended to sit to the back and side rather than directly in front as I was unwilling to risk a similar experience too soon. I found it amusing, however, to see myself as the week progressed inching closer to the front and centre: testing the waters, so to speak.

The 'guru burn', or shakti energy as I've since heard it described, although great for narrative adventure, was a very tiny aspect of the connection that developed for me with Wayne. Part of the delight is actually trying to pin 'the relationship' down with words for myself and seeing it forever slipping away. I have, in the years that have passed since my first meeting with him, spent joyful time reflecting on his presence, this resonance and the elegant way the teaching is expressed through him.

It is the teaching that comes alive but the teaching is ultimately inseparable from my experience of him. There is an aliveness for me with his descriptions of the world, my curiosity becomes vivid in his words that are never delivered as ultimate truths but rather as invitations to explore oneself. It is this lightness of touch that thrills me when I recognise it elsewhere. It has reopened the teachings from my past, allowing me to hear their words with renewed respect. It is in his particular way of pointing back to my own experience of the world that has been the release into the bounty of a deep living meditation.

That the fullness appears through an apparently ordinary man makes it more delicious. There is something in the release of expectations in him that seems to bring about a sense of humour in the people that gather around him. Often it is people who have been through the spiritual bazaar for many years and after all the searching find solace in the fact that, yes, they are STILL SEARCHING, and why not this? My heart opening through Wayne's teaching is a gift that has little to do with enlightenment or the concepts around it. This movement of heart does not exclude all the business as usual, strivings and sufferings in my own life, but the glimpses that arrive occasionally are full bodied and I'm deeply grateful for them. It feels particular to him and his pointers, but the gift of his words and presence is an expansion into what 'spiritual' might include. The great beauty of the teacher's gift to deliver the world into clarity is an extraordinary blessing. The expansion into the power of now involves the sweetest gift of all: That the apparent relinquishing of power is simply the recognition that the power may not have been 'mine' in the first place.

The quotes are from Wayne's books. The first two are from his first book, Acceptance of what is; the second is from his most recent, Enlightenment is not what you think. Wayne Liquorman is on tour on the East Coast of Australia during October and November. Paul Stack lives and works in Melbourne.

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