Nonduality
is a perspective that has been around for centuries in many different
traditions including Buddhism, Taoism, early Chan, Advaita Vedanta,
Kashmir Shaivism, the mystical wings of the Abrahamic traditions, as
well as in Western philosophy. And of course, there are many
subdivisions within each of those groups. More recently, there are
many people expressing nonduality who are unaffiliated with any
tradition—some who have no traditional background, and some who
have backgrounds in multiple traditions.
Eastern
spiritual traditions have been growing in the West. And over the last
few decades, as more of these perspectives have entered Western
culture and as social media and the internet have given us access to
more and more of them, there has been a veritable explosion of people
writing books, holding workshops, giving talks and posting videos on
YouTube, all offering various versions of nonduality. Sometimes there
are even (dualistic?) pissing contests over which version of
nonduality is the most nondual. And that’s really nothing new—such
contentious debates have existed for centuries between different
schools and traditions.
There
are differences and similarities between the many versions of
nondualism. But it basically means “not two.” There is diversity
in appearance, but no actual separation. Everything is one whole. We
are at once no-thing and everything.
One
way of seeing it is that our most fundamental reality, what we
are—the one constant, the water in every wave, that which we cannot
doubt—is this boundless awareness or presence that is seamless and
whole, without division or separation. What appears is infinitely
varied and ever-changing, yet it never departs from the immediacy of
this ever-present Here-Now and can never actually be divided up or
pulled apart. Our deepest nature is unconditional love, which is the
nature of awareness—it accepts everything, clings to nothing, and
finds nothing outside of or other than itself.
Dualism,
on the other hand, is where you think you are a separate person
encapsulated inside a separate body looking out at a separate and
fractured world. This belief gives rise to conflict and feelings of
being incomplete and threatened. From this perspective, you imagine
that up can exist without down, and that the goal of life is for up
to defeat down.
Nonduality
sees polarities such as up and down as inseparable aspects of one
whole, polarities that only exist relative to each other and are
therefore empty of any fixed position or inherent reality—e.g., the
ceiling is up in relation to the floor and down in relation to the
sky. Instead of opposites being at war, nonduality sees that
everything goes together, and that we can never find any exact place
where up turns into down—it’s a seamless unicity.
If we
watch a movie, we see a multitude of characters, objects, landscapes,
events, storylines and dramas, with close-ups and wide-angle shots.
Things seem to be moving in time and space. But actually, we are
always looking at the immovable, ever-present screen (Here-Now) and
what appears is one whole seamless moving picture. Life is very much
like this. It never departs from this one bottomless moment Here-Now,
but it appears as many different things moving in time and space.
If we
put aside everything that can be doubted right now, what remains? The
knowingness of being here and the bare actuality of present
experiencing are impossible to doubt. What can be doubted and argued
about are all the ideas, interpretations, formulations and
explanations of this living reality—the abstract maps drawn by
conceptual thought—the stories and beliefs about it.
When
we believe that we are a separate fragment encapsulated inside a
body, navigating our way in a fractured universe, we inevitably feel
anxious, deficient, incomplete, insecure. We think we are someone who
needs to get somewhere and accomplish something, that we are the
author of our thoughts and the maker of our choices, that we (and
everyone else) should be better than we are. We seek relief from our
uneasiness and dissatisfaction through possessions, knowledge, power,
money, sex, intoxicants, spiritual experiences, etc., all of which
ultimately leave us unsatisfied and disappointed.
But if we turn
our attention to direct experience instead of learned ideas, can we
find an actual boundary where “inside of me” turns into “outside
of me,” or is the boundary a mental image like the line on a map
between two countries? If we open to the bare sensations of our
discontent without thinking about it, do we find anything
substantial, or simply ever-changing vibrations, appearing and
disappearing? What if we look for the thinker of our thoughts or the
maker of our choices? Doesn’t every breath, heartbeat, thought,
interest, impulse, action and choice emerge from an unfindable
source? And what about the awareness beholding this whole movie of
waking life, the awareness that sees thoughts as thoughts? Is that
perceivable? Does that have a shape, a size, an age, a gender, a
nationality, a life situation, a place where it begins or ends? And
is there any actual boundary between awareness and the content of
awareness, between subject and object?
Every wave in the ocean is
inseparable from the ocean. Waving is something the ocean does, a
constantly changing movement that never holds to any particular form.
There is no actual boundary between one wave and another, and every
wave is equally water. No individual wave can decide to go off in a
direction other than the one in which the ocean as a whole is moving.
Is it possible that everything, including what seem to be “my”
independent decisions, are movements of a seamless unicity?
We can
call it mind or matter, consciousness or quarks or spirit or
intelligence-energy, but the truth is, we don’t know what this is.
Even to wonder what this “is” seems predicated on the dualistic
notion that this can be somehow formulated, grasped, pinned down and
re-presented – that this must be some-thing in particular that can
be singled out, seen, experienced (as a particular experience) or
possessed as knowledge. But unicity cannot be grasped anymore than
the hand can grasp itself.
There is no actual division between
subject and object, awareness and content, form and emptiness, self
and not-self, figure and ground, relative and absolute. The apparent
divisions are conceptual. And nothing that shows up is a solid,
persisting, inherently real, observer-independent form. It may seem
so, but the more closely we look, either with science or meditation,
we find that nothing holds still or stays the same, that everything
is mostly empty space, that nothing exists independently of
everything it supposedly is not, and that we never experience
anything outside of consciousness.
Each of us is seeing a unique
movie of waking life created by our unique conditioning, but is it
possible that the seeing (the awaring) beholding all the different
movies is unconditioned, undivided, un-encapsulated, boundless and
free? Don’t pick that up as a belief, but explore it in your own
direct experiencing Here-Now.
The search for freedom is rooted in
the belief that we are bound, that we are separate from the whole,
that we are this “me” at the center of our life story. But what
if this “me” is an ever-changing, intermittent appearance with no
independent existence? Could it be that, prior to all our accumulated
ideas about who or what we are, what everyone refers to as “I” is
actually the same limitless, undivided here-now (intelligence-energy,
seamless unicity, the Tao, wholeness, Totality, boundlessness,
whatever we call it)? As we wake up to the utter simplicity of what
is, right here, right now, we may find that all our insecurities and
fears of death fall away, for they were based on a false idea of
reality, like the fear people once had of sailing off the edge of the
supposedly flat earth.
If you
were to ask any number of writers, teachers, or speakers who use the
term to describe their own perspective what they each mean by
“nonduality,” you’d undoubtedly get a bunch of very different
definitions, some of which would probably be quite contradictory. So,
as with all words, and especially words like “nonduality” that
have no clear and obvious referent, it’s important to understand
what a particular person means when they use this word.
To me, as
I use it, nonduality means that everything is an unbroken whole in
which everything belongs. It is important to clarify that wholeness is
not uniformity. Right now, in present experience, there are
infinitely varied, ever-changing qualities of experience—different
colors, shapes, textures, sounds, aromas, tactile and somatic
sensations, tastes—and there are apparently separate and distinct
forms (me and you, dogs and cats, tables and chairs, hearts and
brains, planets and stars), each vividly and uniquely itself, and we
don’t confuse them with each other or mix them up.
There are also
different dimensions of experience, from the relative world of
personal relationships and everyday practical life to the subtlest
realms encountered in meditation or yoga. But all of this infinite
diversity and variation is appearing as one whole picture, one whole
movie, a holographic fractal field of seamless experience, one whole
undivided happening. And the closer we look, the more we discover
that the boundaries between apparently separate forms don’t
actually exist, and the forms themselves are never really solid or
persisting. None of them can be pulled out of the whole. In our
actual experience, THIS is an infinitely varied seamless whole that
never departs from Here-Now. Impermanence is so thorough-going that
no-thing ever actually forms to even be impermanent.
Nonduality
points to the ungraspable and inconceivable nature of reality.
Whatever words or concepts we use to describe it, they are never
quite right, because no word or formulation can capture the living
reality. Life itself simply can’t be pinned down. Nothing we say or
think is the truth.
This living reality is nondual in the sense
that it includes everything, and also in the sense that the
apparently opposite polarities go together and only exist relative to
each other—they are not separate or opposing forces in which one
can or should defeat the other. Nonduality thus includes (and
transcends) apparent duality. It doesn’t get stuck on one side of
any conceptual divide, such as oneness or multiplicity, individuality
or unicity, mind or matter, self or no-self, free will or
determinism, powerlessness or responsibility, practice or no
practice, it is or it isn’t. Nonduality doesn’t land anywhere. It
might be described as “not one, not two,” or in the words of Zen
Master Dogen, “leaping clear of the many and the one.” It might
be called groundlessness.
Nonduality recognizes that nothing ever
actually resolves into a persisting form, and that the apparent self
at the center of our experience, the apparent “me” who is
seemingly authoring “my” thoughts, making “my” decisions, and
performing “my” actions, is nothing more than a mirage with no
actual substance. It is a phantom created by a mix of ever-changing
thoughts, sensations, feelings, stories, mental images, and beliefs.
Everything is happening by itself. There is no actual boundary
between inner and outer. The inner weather is as impersonal as the
outer weather. None of it is personal, none of it means anything
about the imaginary “me.”
Even any idea we might have of a
larger self, a Big Self—like Consciousness or Awareness—is
actually unfindable. There can even be a compelling intuitive or felt
sense of this unseen seeing or Ultimate Subject, this Eye (or True I)
that cannot see itself, but even the subtlest sense of this open
aware space is itself another appearance in present experiencing that
cannot actually be separated out or pinned down.
All we have is just
THIS—present experiencing, from the most apparently solid to the
most subtle and transcendental. This unfindable aliveness or
no-thing-ness never actually forms into some-thing substantial that
can be separated out from the wholeness of just this. Any ideas of
meaning or meaninglessness, purpose or purposelessness, are
thought-created add-ons with no actual reality.
“Nonduality”
is, of course, a word, a conceptual idea, but it points to the nature
of reality itself. It points to something that cannot actually be
conceptualized! It points to THIS, right here, right now, just as it
is!
The thoughts and ideas about this living actuality are always
dualistic, but THIS is nondual. In other words, the conceptual maps
of this living actuality are always in some way dualistic, but the
territory itself is nondual. Of course, mapping is something the
territory is doing, and this living reality includes thoughts and
ideas and maps—but from a nondual perspective, they are recognized
as simply appearances or waves of energy, without mistaking the
content of them for the actuality they claim to describe or
re-present. They are useful within everyday relative reality, but
they are never really true.
Getting lost in philosophy and
metaphysics and trying to think our way to liberation is not, in my
experience, what liberates us from our imaginary bondage. What
liberates us is the falling away (or seeing through) of the imaginary
problem, which never actually exists in the first place!
By giving
open attention to the bare actuality of what is, prior to all the
words and explanations about it, by relaxing into the simplicity of
just this, it might be noticed that no problem and no self remains.
There is simply hearing, seeing, thinking, sensing, etc. And when the
thought-created confusion pops up, it can be seen for the illusion
that it is, and in the seeing, it dissolves again quite naturally.
And nothing is ever really a problem. Everything is included—even
the apparent confusion, contraction, suffering, and identification as
a separate, encapsulated self is simply another wave-like movement of
this indivisible shoreless ocean.
Conditioned thought may label what
shows up “confusion” or “ego” or “awareness” or
“unicity,” or any other word-label-idea. But the actuality never
resolves into any persisting form, and nothing can ever really be
pulled out of the whole. No one is doing any of it, and nothing is
ever what we think it is.
These words are only pointers or maps.
The juice is in the aliveness itself, and that cannot be captured by
any words or concepts. Words can only suggest, point out, or invite
the recognition of nondual actuality. But here’s a big clue: it’s
always already the case. Nothing needs to be different from exactly
how it is. How it appears to be never holds still, yet it never
departs from Here-Now. The living actuality is NOW, right here,
utterly simple, obvious and immediate. It is never absent or hidden
in any way. It’s not something in particular (this, but not that).
And it’s not nothing. It’s this inexplicable aliveness—the
astonishing presence and marvelously freeing no-thing-ness of
everything.
Nonduality is not a philosophy. It’s the sounds of
traffic and the taste of tea, the fragrance of blossoms and the smell
of garbage, colors and shapes and movement—breathing,
heart-beating, sensing awaring thinking feeling being –
ever-present, ever-changing – not one, not two – just this.
By
Joan Tollifson at scienceandnonduality.com on January 22, 2025
