sublime kindness of emptiness
Non-duality does not mean oneness. It means 'not two.' This is an important distinction. The grandiose spiritual conception of Oneness carries disconcerting implications of homogenization; that, ultimately, we are all destined to be absorbed into Oneness; all the colors of the complex refracted rainbow of humanity swirled together into one big Divine Enlightenment Soup.
By pointing out that polarities, dualities and oppositions are 'not two', the non-dual view saves appearances and particularities while seeing through them. Things are "distinct, but not separate", as the brilliant philosopher, Peter Wilberg, point out. And by 'things' here, Wilberg does not mean material objects only, but all manifestations of form, from cement patios to the most subtle intuitions. That which is aware of all forms is distinct but not separate from those forms. The forms themselves owe their being to the awareness within which, and AS which, they appear, so wrote the Shaivite sage, Abhinavagupta, about one thousand years ago.
Awareness unclouded by conceptual designations renders evident the seamless coalescence of consciousness and its objects in what philosopher, Michael Kosok, calls "a transitive mutuality of relations". Where you start and where you end becomes quite irrelevant in the advent of clear, non-conceptual awareness of that which spontaneously unfolds within you, without you and as you. You and the wholeness of all manifestation are 'not-two' in a unity that is not uniformity.
In the wake of non-conceptual awakening, life turns out to be far more fulfilling and harmonious when the existential dread of being someone separate -- all alone in the universe -- is seen through and released. Consciousness flows more naturally toward the relational than the merely personal. You don't have to be anyone special, pure, accomplished or (shudder) holy to enjoy this sublime disposition. It's who you already are when you are not animating the deluded strategies of the separative ego. This, it turns out, is really good news which most us of dismiss as Pollyanna 'spiritual' fantasy bearing no useful relation to this often problematical thing we call real life.
Humility Based Disclaimer: PLEASE don't assume that because this site pays humongous homage to the truth and beauty of non-dual awareness that I am making claims to have realized or mastered that awareness. In truth, I have barely lifted the flap to peek inside the consciousness tent and it is truly endless, so much so that it appears to include the so called outside from where I'm peeking. Two pertinent quotes spring to mind here, the first from author, Gerald Epstein, MD,
"The most important discovery you can ever make is that you are not God."
and this from William Wildwood's blog, " You are pure awareness. Such a simple statement to make, but how do you transcend the duality of subject and object and know yourself to be pure awareness? Not just by thinking so, that's certain. And is pure awareness all you are? Because if not then maybe it's not sufficient to take that, and that alone, as the basis of your spiritual practice."
I most heartily recommend reading Mr. Wildwood's insightful article 'The Nonduality Trap' by clicking on the link above.
States of Soul
States of mind are closer to home than any place we can point to on a map. Yet, we spend almost all our time looking outside ourselves for the homeward path... (continue)
How alive is this? Living in the Shell of Self Defense
I'm no great shakes as a meditator, much too distracted by just about everything. Yet, even for an inward sojourner as lame as me there have been times during meditation when it becomes obvious that there is an impersonal dimension to awareness, but does that necessarily make the personal irrelevant or, gasp! as some non-dualists teach, even non-existent? I have begun to suspect that there is a baby being tossed in the non-dualist bathwater. A kind of benign nihilism seems to lurk in the endless non-dualist pronouncements that nothing is real, the world is an illusion, even emptiness, the true nature of all forms, is empty. Yet all this dazzling particularity, this endless magificent somethingness continues to arise, the non-dualist insistence that it's all empty begins to sound like claims that the emperor is naked when he's clearly wearing clothes.
It may well be, as the poet Shelley wrote, that 'the deep truth is imageless', but true non-duality, I would argue, accepts that the images, all of them, are not separate (not two) from that deep truth. The world, including our campaigning personal selves, is how deep truth manifests. Let us respect manifestations as sacred rather than dismiss them as illusions. In the process, we just might find that genuine humility that enables us to open to receive rather than continue to talk as though we know how it all is.
Consider the possibility that in this timeless present moment where alone life happens, we receive beingness from the same ineffable source that births stars and micro manages beehives. Mainstream religions have long tried to identify or capture this source, calling it God and ascribing omniscience and omnipotence to this Ruler of All, but even the slightest glimpse of it reveals that it is infinitely beyond our most comprehensively contrived Deist assignations. It is closer than one's breath, present as the very awareness which makes all things, including God concepts, non-dualist emptiness pronouncements and confused abstract ruminations, even possible. May we learn to celebrate it together with great joy.
Counting the Notes in Beethoven's Ninth
Literalism and empiricism, useful tools in their place, build reductionist bridges that lead, not to reality, but to vanishing points requiring ever stronger magnifying lenses to parse out ever receding quirkier, quarkier building blocks. It is bridging metaphors, not hard facts, that open us to what is truly alive. This view is never accepted mainstream and thus poets remain, in Shelley's words, 'unacknowledged legislators of the world.' Dream images and images in general can convey information in ways words cannot. The writings of Carl Jung on active imagination, Henri Corbin on engagement with the imaginal domain, Gerald Epstein, MD, Mary Watkins, Tom Cheetham and James Hillman provide invaluable insights into the revelatory, life changing effects that can develop from learning how to work with images rather than with concepts.
“I've often lost myself,
in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake”
― Federico Garcia Lorca
a.k.a. Baba Ganoosh Ji
One Ton of Mara
There he was, sitting alone under a tree. Fresh or exhausted from six years of tapas, intense spiritual practice, fasting and discipline that would make an Amish school marm quake, now he sat beneath a dawn sky, rested, at ease, alert and about to wake up as The Buddha... (continue)
'To be or not to be, that is the question.' -- Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Sc.I
'Existence', from the Latin 'existere', meaning 'to stand forth, to stand out from', i.e., out in the sleight-of-mind realm of becoming, as opposed to the domain of actual Being. Of course God doesn't exist. Only illusions exist, arising spontaneously out of Being in this space-time tsunami called NOW, appearing once only forever as magically as each night's dream.
"In reality there is only the Source, dark in itself, making everything shine. Unperceived, it causes perception. Unfelt, it causes feeling. Unthinkable, it causes thought. Non-being, it gives birth to being. It is the immovable background of motion. Once you are there, you are at home everywhere." ~Nisargadatta Maharaj (thanks to Michael Coffman for this sublime Nisaragadatta quote).
There are no rules about how radical awakening can occur, primarily because it is already one's natural state.
This is not to say that some pretty good tips have not been given from time to time...
"Surrender the seeing to Brahman' -- Nisargadatta Maharaj
"Surrender the seeing to Brahman' -- Nisargadatta Maharaj
Is that cool or what? To THAT which is ontologically prior to, upstream of and superior to our ego centered consciousness, we are enjoined by Nisargadatta to surrender NOT our ego, our beliefs, our Scrooge McDuck fortune or our stash of worldly, mystical or artistic accomplishments... but SEEING itself.
Surrender seeing to THAT without which perception is not possible anyway. Sounds like a win-win or, at least, a removal of the ignorance that blinds us to what is actually happening in the act of perception, viz., what we call a personal perceiver is more like a relay station for perception spontaneously occurring by fiat of a non-local awareness so far beyond us, so superordinate to our limited faculties that we may as well call it Brahman, er, God.
Our neuroscience has done brilliant work trying to locate, or at least explain, the mechanics of awareness, without, so far at least, recognizing profound differences between consciousness of objects, on one hand, and awareness unlocatable as an object on the other. The latter can simply not be observed. It is THAT which makes observation possible. Bucky Fuller hinted at it with his lovely book title, "I Seem To Be A Verb."
Of course, we don't have to surrender anything. We can rely solely on our seeing as neuro-anatomically constituted, the self-same, optical imprint mechanism that once convinced us the world was flat... the same which now convinces us we flatline when the body dies.
Surrender seeing to THAT without which perception is not possible anyway. Sounds like a win-win or, at least, a removal of the ignorance that blinds us to what is actually happening in the act of perception, viz., what we call a personal perceiver is more like a relay station for perception spontaneously occurring by fiat of a non-local awareness so far beyond us, so superordinate to our limited faculties that we may as well call it Brahman, er, God.
Our neuroscience has done brilliant work trying to locate, or at least explain, the mechanics of awareness, without, so far at least, recognizing profound differences between consciousness of objects, on one hand, and awareness unlocatable as an object on the other. The latter can simply not be observed. It is THAT which makes observation possible. Bucky Fuller hinted at it with his lovely book title, "I Seem To Be A Verb."
Of course, we don't have to surrender anything. We can rely solely on our seeing as neuro-anatomically constituted, the self-same, optical imprint mechanism that once convinced us the world was flat... the same which now convinces us we flatline when the body dies.
PS - There is nothing to believe in. Anything we believe in is merely an object of belief. Objects, nice though they are, are NOT that which is Aware.
PSA from the Ministry of Wagging Tails
It is important to unevolved souls to impose their wills, win at win-lose games and rise into worldly prominence. Temporal power is gratifying to hard core egotists, but when one begins to awaken even a little, power is seen more as a form of distemper than as a meaningful human achievement. One can rationalize, insisting that the power to do good justifies wielding it, but far more good is done through conscious service and cooperation than through top dog - bottom dog hierarchical power dynamics, mainstays of a nightmarish human history that has seen more than 130 million people killed in wars in the past hundred years alone. How fortunate for life on this troubled blue sphere that many humans have evolved beyond the grim, soul destroying need to wield power, along with dolphins, golden retrievers and the green wonder of spring.
many fires in the night
Scientific reasoning keeps its objects 'out there' where it can measure, analyze, weigh and categorize them. The very act of approaching objects this way ensures that they will ultimately disappoint, elude or bore us .
Psychological reasoning, as Roberts Avens notes, 'merges its subject with its object and ties up its beginning with its end.' The very act of approaching objects this way keeps us and them moving in circles or in spirals that deepen and ascend. Circles, as Norman Mailer once noted, "... are boring. They obey too many laws."
Mystical, intuitive reasoning apperceives objects as either utterly empty of independent existence or luminous to a degree that outshines form. The very act of approaching objects this way can lead, though not necessarily, to false extremes of nihilism or eternalism.
Psychological reasoning, as Roberts Avens notes, 'merges its subject with its object and ties up its beginning with its end.' The very act of approaching objects this way keeps us and them moving in circles or in spirals that deepen and ascend. Circles, as Norman Mailer once noted, "... are boring. They obey too many laws."
Mystical, intuitive reasoning apperceives objects as either utterly empty of independent existence or luminous to a degree that outshines form. The very act of approaching objects this way can lead, though not necessarily, to false extremes of nihilism or eternalism.
“The world is always burning, burning with the fires of greed, anger and foolishness; one should flee from such dangers as soon as possible.”
-- Shakyamuni Buddha
The most spontaneous thing of all is reality. Formulate concepts about it and you immediately bog it down in a molasses of pedestrian thought processes which solidify into religions, ideologies and other morbid parodies of vibrant life. Direct experience is a miracle that belief systems turn into dogmatic mush.
For a very long time we have wielded conceptual constructs to control reality. When you live in the heart's wide open beatitude of spontaneous engagement with experience, it becomes obvious that we are not meant to control the world but to love it to pieces and to serve it in a spirit of cooperation. It must be obvious by now, even to the most resistant among us, that Nature reveals her sublime secrets to those who love her, not to those who exploit her.
The most spontaneous thing of all is reality, which unfolds once only each moment, regardless of how brutal and self-serving we have become. But, who knows, maybe there is a limit.
If we copped to the truth and realized the extent to which desire, rage and despair recreate the world of time and space every day, we would immediately be a whole lot kinder to one another and to ourselves. When there is cessation of desire, rage and despair, the Buddha noted, there arises something unimaginably better.
For a very long time we have wielded conceptual constructs to control reality. When you live in the heart's wide open beatitude of spontaneous engagement with experience, it becomes obvious that we are not meant to control the world but to love it to pieces and to serve it in a spirit of cooperation. It must be obvious by now, even to the most resistant among us, that Nature reveals her sublime secrets to those who love her, not to those who exploit her.
The most spontaneous thing of all is reality, which unfolds once only each moment, regardless of how brutal and self-serving we have become. But, who knows, maybe there is a limit.
If we copped to the truth and realized the extent to which desire, rage and despair recreate the world of time and space every day, we would immediately be a whole lot kinder to one another and to ourselves. When there is cessation of desire, rage and despair, the Buddha noted, there arises something unimaginably better.
