Nondual Spirituality

What Is It?

When people ask me what I write and talk about, I don’t have an answer that feels truly satisfying to me. Currently, I often go with nondual spirituality, which might mean many different things. We put things into categories (biology, physics, philosophy, medicine, etc) to help us point them out, but life itself isn’t actually divided up into neat little separate boxes. Both nonduality and spirituality are umbrella terms that include widely divergent perspectives. If you asked any number of folks who give talks and write books about nonduality and/or spirituality what that means, you’d get some very different and contradictory answers. This article is about what these words mean to me. Tomorrow I may find better words for what I’m writing about, so take these words lightly.

Nonduality, as I see it, means that while there is diversity and infinite variation, there is no real separation. Everything is an indivisible, seamless whole with no outside or inside. The borders and seams are either porous and fluid or purely conceptual. I sometimes call this unbroken wholeness either unicity or groundlessness. Unicity emphasizes its all-inclusive fullness; groundlessness emphasizes its no-thing-ness or emptiness. Emptiness, as I’m using it, means empty of any essential, substantial, solid, persisting, objective, observer-independent existence or nature. It means that no separate, persisting, autonomous “things” ever actually exist, including a self. Forms are a kind of frozen appearance of what is actually momentary, ever-changing, relational flux. As the great Zen sage Nagarjuna pointed out, impermanence is so thorough-going that no “thing” (no apparent form) ever actually forms or persists to be impermanent. In understanding nonduality, I resonate with the way Zen speaks of “not one, not two,” or “leaping clear of the many and the one.” Nonduality includes the dance of apparent duality. It is beyond all ideas, and yet it includes ideas because it includes everything. It points to not fixating or getting stuck on one side of any apparent polarity.

Spirituality is a word I’m less comfortable with because it can be understood in ways I definitely don’t mean it. For example, I don’t mean spirit as opposed to matter, nor do I mean some kind of soul that survives death, nor do I mean angels or religious beliefs. So, what do I mean by spirituality?

To me, everything is spiritual. Emptying my ostomy bag, taking out the garbage, being stuck in a traffic jam, or watching a movie is as spiritual as meditating, praying in a temple, or being in the company of a guru. Spirituality is life itself, this one bottomless moment. Spirituality is a way of seeing that regards everything as worthy of attention, a way of seeing that is fresh and open, rooted in direct present moment experiencing, not in ideas and beliefs about this. Spirituality is being awake to the aliveness, the vibrancy, the presence, the intelligence-energy, the radiance that is shining forth everywhere. The word spirit comes from spirare or spiritus, meaning breath, breathe, wind. Breathing is often a focus of spiritual practice for many reasons. It is always present, it is both voluntary and involuntary, it unites inside and outside, it is vital to life, and like wind, it is invisible and ungraspable, yet immensely powerful and transformative. You can’t pin it down or box it up, and yet, it is obvious and undeniable, requiring no belief.

Nondual spirituality recognizes the no-thing-ness of everything, the inseparable interdependence or wholeness of everything, the emptiness of everything (empty of any abiding essence).  In this indivisible wholeness, everything is included, everything belongs, nothing can be pulled apart from the whole. Polarities only exist relative to one another, and you can’t have one without the other. There are no one-sided coins. You can’t defeat the darkness and have only the light.

Nonduality reveals that there is no self in the way we imagine—there is no author thinking our thoughts, no chooser making our choices, no doer performing our actions. Yes, there is what we call a person here, but that person is more like a whirlpool or a wave than some kind of permanent, persisting “thing.” It’s a pattern of energy, but even the pattern is always changing. “The body” is a concept, but the living actuality to which that word points is continuous change inseparable from everything else that is supposedly not the body. We can’t live without food, water, air, sunlight—basically, nothing can exist without everything else. Like the jewels in Indra’s Net, everything is a reflection of everything else. Experientially, the body is ever-changing vibrations, tinglings, and other sensations—it’s not a solid, autonomous thing. The word “mind” seems to suggest a cohesive entity inside the body performing various activities such as thinking, imagining, perceiving, remembering, and so on. And yet, no such entity can actually be found, and all those activities are interwoven with everything we think is “outside” of us. “The self” is a mental image, a kind of mirage made up of thoughts, sensations, memories, stories, ideas. If we look for it, it cannot be found. So, yes, there is what we call a person here, what we call a body, what we call a personality, and there is a functional sense of boundaries and agency—but all of those “things” are more like verbs than nouns. Everything is a movement of the whole universe. A person is like a waving movement of the ocean, and no wave can go off in a direction independently of the ocean.

And what is “the ocean”? Whatever this whole happening is, it is utterly ungraspable. The whole is not some giant object that we can see. It is infinite, limitless, without beginning or end. It has no inside or outside and no other. It doesn’t hold still, and yet, it never departs from right here, right now. “It” is not really an “it” at all, but more of a vibrant it-less-ness. It is always just this: the taste of tea, the autumn breeze, the spring flowers, the sound of a chain saw, the aroma of food cooking, the smell of shit, the pulsing thoughts and sensations we call anger or fear or grief or joy, these little black shapes appearing on the screen being instantly translated into meaning—this whole amazing dance. Life as it is.

And it seems that “life” has many dimensions or ways in which it can be seen or experienced. It can be seen in the everyday way as me going to work, raising my kids, shopping for groceries, and so on. It can be experienced as a nonconceptual dance of colors, shapes, sounds, and sensations. It can be seen as the abstract maps (formulations and ideas) generated by thinking and conceptualizing. It can be felt as energy and vibration. It can disappear entirely in deep sleep. The thought-sense of “me” can appear and disappear. There can be a sense of being boundless impersonal presence-awareness, or a sense of encapsulation and separation. There can be the human perspective, or the cosmic or subatomic perspectives. And I would say, these are all simply different ways that reality shows up or appears, all equally real.

Much of spirituality is about trying to improve the person, control the attention, and have certain experiences and not other experiences. Nondual spirituality isn’t prescribing anything like that, but it’s not against any of that either—it simply recognizes that all of that is an impersonal movement of the universe that might or might not happen. There is always simply what is, as it is—all of it a choiceless happening with no one separate from it to be in or out of control. There can be apparent choosing and controlling, but if we investigate any of this closely, we find that all of it is an inexplicable choiceless movement. Recognizing this doesn’t mean we no longer make plans or apparent decisions, or that we might not apparently “choose” to meditate, see a psychotherapist, or participate in a movement for social change. It simply means recognizing that the urge, desire, interest and ability to do any of these things is a movement of the whole. The “me” who seems to be pulling the levers is a mirage.

Recognizing this is wonderfully freeing and relieving. It relieves us of guilt and blame, and gives us compassion for ourselves and everyone else and the world being just as we all are in each moment, including the times we feel judgmental and angry and not compassionate. It’s all impersonal weather. In this moment, it cannot be otherwise than how it is. We are this present experiencing, just as it is. We cannot be other than exactly how we are, and we can never stay the same from one instant to the next.

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