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Nuance of Wonder: Joan Tollifson

Joan Tollifson returns to the podcast three years after her first conversation. We talk about her June essay Two Inseparable Truths, on the relative and the absolute and the trouble with getting stuck in either one. Along the way: the silence of many nondual teachers in a dark time, what cancer and an aging body insist on that philosophy cannot, why she has never used AI, and why "I don't know" may be the answer closest to true. She closes by reading her essay Radiant Light in Dark Times in full.

Topics

  • 00:00 Introduction
  • 00:04 From political movements to the Zen Center
  • 00:06 Why she doesn't name names, and what bypassing looks like
  • 00:11 Two inseparable truths: stuck in the relative, stuck in the absolute
  • 00:19 Why she refuses final conclusions
  • 00:21 Old age, sickness and death as visceral teaching
  • 00:25 Cancer and what the body insists on
  • 00:28 Zooming out and zooming in: two ways through pain
  • 00:33 Why she has never used AI
  • 00:39 Siri, and what a machine can evoke
  • 00:46 Finding the divine in a construction machine
  • 00:49 Joan reads Radiant Light in Dark Times

Joan Tollifson

Joan Tollifson has been writing and talking about nonduality for decades, with roots in Zen and Advaita and a background that also includes radical nonduality, contemplative inquiry, addiction recovery, martial arts, somatic work, and visual arts. Before all of that came years of political organizing: the feminist movement, gay and lesbian liberation, disability rights, the anti-imperialist left, and Central America solidarity work. Born without her right hand and forearm, she wrote about it in her first book, Bare-Bones Meditation. She is 78 and lives in southern Oregon. She has been a frequent speaker at SAND gatherings over the years.

The two essays discussed

Her books

  • Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life
  • Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is
  • Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Nonduality
  • Nothing to Grasp
  • Death: The End of Self-Improvement

Also in the conversation

Douglas Harding, whose approach to headlessness Joan cites as an example of what she calls zooming out.

Father Arthur Polen, the Catholic monk whose painting Radiant Light, made after 9/11, hangs on her wall and gives the closing essay its title.

Huang Po, quoted in the essay: it is that which you see before you, begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.

SAND's AI series, referenced in the discussion of artificial intelligence, including the conversation with Tristan Harris.

Robert Moor's In Trees, the book about trees, family trees, and hierarchical trees that comes up near the end. His episode is here.

Previously on Sounds of SAND

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