Letting Go of Nothing

My first encounter with Peter Russell was at the Quaker meeting house in Cambridge in the autumn of 1978 when I was studying for my PGCE. At the time, he was an early teacher of TM, into which I was duly inducted and began my path as meditator. A few years later, he was a keynote speaker at a Network meeting at Regents College at the time on the publication of his Global Brain (I recall that the English title was along the lines of The Awakening Earth) and I attended with a group of pupils from Winchester College. Since that time, Pete has become very well-known as a leading author on science, consciousness and spirituality, and in this short and simply written book he distils the experience of a lifetime into crystalline insights in around 40 short chapters.

The titles are evocative – it is not just a question of letting go, but also letting in and letting be, returning to natural mind, not resisting resistance, effortless meditation, just pause, letting go of ego, retire, forgiveness, kindness, wisdom, letting go to the future. Eckhart Tolle goes straight to the point in his foreword when he writes that ‘you are the awareness behind your thoughts’ and that it is possible for us to identify increasingly with this space of awareness rather than the narratives of the mind – letting go of the identification with thought.’ He continues, ‘you begin to realise that you are not a person but an essential and intrinsic part of the evolution of universal consciousness’ – for me, this is a gradually dawning realisation along the path.

Letting go is also release and surrender rather than an attempt to control and hold on. Pete points out that in fact ‘we are not letting go of things themselves as much as the way we see them’, attachments in a Buddhist sense. One example is letting go of the story behind an emotional response, and indeed here we have to let in before we can let go: a lot of our suffering arises from resistance, hence his advice not to resist resistance… resistance is futile.’ We are encouraged to do something about our sense of discontent when the answer lies in a change of being rather than in doing. In this sense, the natural mind is already a space of peace and contentment if we simply drop into it, fully present and accepting in the moment.

In asking the question who am I, the answer is ‘Yes I am’ rather than ‘I am this or that’. Thomas Troward refers to this as the experience of being a centre, and writes that what can say I am in you is the same as what says I am in me: as Pete puts it, ‘we all share the same sense of being. In that, we are all one.’ For me, this is the most essential metaphysical and spiritual insight for our time, from which everything else can flow in terms of ethics and politics. Pete then explains this in terms of the Vedantic sat chit ananda where sat is true essence or being (I Am), chit is consciousness, and ananda is not so much bliss as ‘the great contentment that comes from returning to our own being.’ Awakening is accompanied by a sense of peace, love and freedom emanating from the sacred and timeless.

‘Let the mind retire’ and step back from your preoccupations, then retire again ‘to become aware of what is there, beneath the sensations and feelings.’ That consciousness before the formation of the self as representation – then we can reconnect with our essential being. To forgive is to release, to love is our true nature, and ‘the wisdom we seek is already there, at the heart of our being.’ Pete asks if the Buddha had it easy (interestingly, the dictation system came up with ‘border’, so maybe Buddha is not on its system) – yes, in the sense that we are subject to more distractions, yet his path was hard while we have a multitude of spiritual sources at our disposal. Looking at human prospects, Pete advises that we need to be firmly rooted in the ground of being like trees, and that ‘we’ll need to let go of whatever stands in the way of our being smarter, more creative, more resourceful, and more compassionate human beings, more in touch with our self, able to respond to change with greater clarity and wisdom.’ This wise book speaks to the essence of the human condition, and I can’t recommend it too highly as a companion along your path.