The Canon / Living / Contemporary Nonduality
Living · 1996
Eternity Now
Direct Path Advaita (Atmananda / Jean Klein lineage)Eternity Now is a collection of dialogues and reflections by Francis Lucille within the Advaita Vedanta "direct path." Its central claim is that consciousness, the ever-present knowing element in all experience, is one's true nature and can be recognised here and now, without long purification or graduated practice.
The method is investigative rather than doctrinal: the seeker examines present experience until the silent, witnessing awareness that is always already present is recognised. Crucially, Lucille's approach is feeling-based as much as intellectual, working with the felt sense of the body and what he calls the "perfume" of silent presence, so that recognition is tangible rather than merely conceptual.
Standing in the lineage that descends from Atmananda Krishna Menon through his teacher Jean Klein, Lucille is a key transmitter of the direct path to a contemporary audience. As a former physicist, he frames consciousness as the irreducible ground of experience, and through his student Rupert Spira this feeling-centred inquiry has reached the wider Science and Nonduality dialogue.
In its words
When the attention frees itself from perceptions that hold it in thrall, it discovers itself as that self-luminous space which is the true substance of the body.
As soon as you become aware that you are hypnotized, the hypnosis ceases.
The occurrence of these thoughts and feelings is less of a problem than your identification with them. As soon as you become aware of them, you distance yourself. You are free.
Your body is in you. You are not in it.
The world as well as your body and your mind are included in your true self. Love is inclusion. Understanding is an intermediate step, but the final destination, the true center, is the heart.
If you let go of the branch to which you are clinging without catching hold of another, you fall into the heart.
In fact, all things appear by themselves in consciousness, which is always in total openness.
From the moment you are alive, you are open. Openness is your nature.
Surrender and be what you already are, absolute stillness.
It is a tornado of freedom that blows where it will, erasing in its passage ephemeral attachments and false ideas, until only the indestructible remains: the true, the eternal.
Practices it teaches
Welcoming the Body — Francis Lucille's Direct-Path 'Just Welcome the Sensation'
This is Francis Lucille's characteristic somatic practice within the direct path: when an emotion grips you, you stop relating to its story ("he shouldn't have...", "what if...") and instead drop attention into the…
What Is Unbearable in the Now? — Francis Lucille's Present-Moment Inquiry
Francis Lucille teaches that psychological suffering is always a movement of mind between past and future — a memory replayed or a catastrophe imagined — and almost never a property of the bare, actual present.
Listening to Silence — Francis Lucille's Meeting of Awareness Through Hearing
Francis Lucille — carrying Jean Klein's "yoga of sound and sensation" — uses hearing as a uniquely clean doorway into Presence.
Where Is the Presence Located? — Francis Lucille's Sky of Presence Inquiry
Francis Lucille — a French former physicist (École Polytechnique), close disciple of Jean Klein, and a teacher in the Atmananda Krishna Menon direct-path stream of Advaita — teaches a precise self-inquiry that…
Awareness Says Yes — Francis Lucille's Welcoming Meditation
Francis Lucille teaches that meditation, at its simplest, is saying yes to everything — an unconditional inner welcoming of whatever appears in experience, moment by moment.
Lineage
The author
Francis LucilleRecognising awareness through feeling-knowing
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