People often compare my spiritual teaching to nonduality, and after almost 15 years, I haven’t said much about nonduality.
Honestly, the problem is that nonduality is a philosophical rabbithole.
The intellectual ego loves to opine, debate, and wallow in philosophical rabbitholes. It’s counterproductive to the process of ego dissolution.
Very simply, nonduality/oneness is the ocean.
Duality/separation is the droplet in the ocean.
You–a little droplet–experience yourself as separate and want to keep your separateness in your current body (aka staying alive) going as long as possible.
However, your droplet is never separate from the ocean (consciousness/physics energy (not the spiritual energy people talk about–that’s a rabbithole that spiritual seekers get lost in).
That’s it really.
So what is the spiritual awakening process that helps us to truly realize that we are both one and separate simultaneously?
And to realize that there is no conflict.
Nonduality and the Failure of Language
Waking up out of the dream of our ego in a spiritual awakening experience or through practiced spiritual dedication, we are confronted by the inadequacies of the language we use.
Despite whatever language you speak and how ever many you speak, languages have biases. They have things that they value and things that they don’t.
In modern English, we value transaction.
We have so many words for financial transactions and ways of getting stuff and experiences, such as:
- Loan,
- Purchase,
- Get,
- Buy,
- Return/refund,
- HELOC,
- Mortgage,
- Credit,
- Power purchase agreement (PPA),
- Product,
- Consumer,
- Seller,
- Stocks,
- Bonds,
- Mutual funds, and so many more.
I thought of these without really trying.
Additionally, modern English does not value spirituality. Honestly, it doesn’t even value emotions.
Our general emotional language is extremely sparse. Most people struggle to be with much less name anger, sadness, fear, anxiety, rage, happiness, and peacefulness. There are a lot more emotions that we feel and sensations that we experience. The inability to name them creates a sense of separation driven by the fear of the unknown.
The Dissolution of Ego and Loss of Reference Points
So where are our words for awakening–a subtopic of spirituality in general?
Even more scant.
It’s so bad that we’ve been pilfering other languages like Sanskrit to find a few.
In short, in the English language, we don’t know how to language much less think about oneness.
Thus, a perceived conflict between duality and nonduality is a failure of language. Our language does not give us the words to think about and accept that something can be both one and separate at the same time.
Awakening to Nonduality and Duality
Again, there is no problem between nonduality and duality. But when you’re stuck in your ego perspective, you will make plenty of problems. Again and again, the ego can make problems out of nothing.
How People Create Problems out of Nothing
There are many experiences that people have when they’re discovering the truth of nonduality/spiritual oneness. Some people come into a sense of peace and ease simply because their lives are already peaceful and easy. There was no problem in their current reality, but the ego made more than a few up.
Other people wake up to disease and trauma.
That’s not a peaceful waking up.
Both experiences are aspects of the separate self realizing the ocean of nonduality/oneness. All experiences are embraced. The peaceful tide and the surging tidal wave are equally one with the ocean.
In saying this, I’m pointing to the fact that oneness/realizing non-duality is not a feeling. It bears repeating:
All feelings and all kinds of separate experiences are embraced in the sea of oneness.
When people say, “I don’t feel oneness,” they’re talking about a feeling-state which is ephemeral. Too many people find their way to oneness through substances, and this creates an ideal experience in their minds that they try to replicate.
Trying to hold onto changing experiences causes suffering.
This is an essential tenet of Buddhism, which is a duality focused path. But there’s no real conflict with Buddhism and other dualistic spiritual paths and the reality of oneness and non-duality.
In awakening, we begin to see through the many false spiritual illusions and conflicts of our ego mind. This begins a process of reconciliation with realities like oneness that are realized (known heart, body, and mind), but not felt in the way that the ego wants to feel things.
And predominantly, the ego just wants to feel good, which is only one aspect of the totality of a human life.
Peaceful Co-existence in Reality
In short, nonduality and duality co-exist.
It’s not a problem. It’s not a thing to philosophize about.
The spiritual awakening process is the work to let go of the philosophizing intellectual ego and all other egos. The ego is a product of your upbringing and the social and physical environment you adapted to.
It has nothing to do with the NOW.
It has nothing to do with reality.
In the spiritual awakening process, you learn to see your ego and detach from these thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. In detachment, you ironically feel more separate at first. Later on, that additional sense of separation dissolves, and you see reality as much as is possible for a human to do.
