Nondual Spirituality?

What's that!?

When people who don’t know me hear that I write books, they often ask what my books are about. And then I’m not sure what to say. There’s no obvious word or phrase that seems to describe what I’m passionate about, what I write and talk about, and what my life seems to be centered on. Sometimes I blurt out something about “meditation…awareness…nondual spirituality.” And then usually the person who asked the question looks at me blankly, and I feel the words I used completely missed the mark. It’s actually a good question, one I often ask myself.

In response to it, I’ll share with you an excerpt from the new book I’m working on where I attempt to offer a brief overview of what the book is about. While it seems like a plausible answer to the question, the very nature of this living reality here now is that any form it seems to take is ephemeral, evanescent, protean, ungraspable and instantaneously dissolving, so this cannot by its very nature be captured in words. It’s alive! But still, life moves us to say something. So, here’s the excerpt from my book-in-progress:

What do I most hope to convey in this book? That you are okay just as you are, that everything is sacred, that simply being alive is enough, that the perfect path is exactly the one you are on, that nothing could be other than it is in this moment, that it is possible in any moment to wake up from thought-induced suffering and find the joy in life as it is, that there is immense freedom in no longer needing to know what this is and in simply being what you actually cannot not be—this one bottomless moment, here-now, just as it is.

The awakening journey, as I see it, is about finding the love, the beauty, the joy, the wonder, the wholeness of life right here in each ordinary moment. It's about seeing how we create needless suffering and confusion by the ways we think about and resist what shows up, and by the ways we live mostly in our thoughts, mistaking abstract conceptual maps for the experiential living actuality without even realizing that this is happening. This pathless path of moment-to-moment (always now) awakening is about waking up from the habitual trance of conditioned thinking and the thought-sense of being a separate, encapsulated self in a fragmented alien world, and discovering the open, spacious, unbound aliveness and aware presence that we are. It's about realizing the centerless fluidity and wholeness of everything, the no-thing-ness that is mysteriously showing up as this whole universe. This aware presence, this present experiencing, this aliveness right here, right now is the heart of what this book is all about.

Awareness or open attention is the transformative power that gradually (and always only now) has the potential to loosen the knots of confusion, dissolve imaginary problems and awaken us to the miracle that is always here but often over-looked.

Unconditional love is the nature of awareness—it has space for everything, it allows everything to be as it is, it clings to nothing, it sees from wholeness. Seeing from wholeness brings forth total compassion for everything being just as it is, and it gives space for everything to change and for something new to emerge. When we really fully see someone, we naturally love them. We see everything as a seamless whole that cannot be pulled apart. We know that it all goes together and that everything belongs.

This boundless awareness, this unconditional love, this seamless presence is our very nature, what we most fundamentally are and what everything is. And yet, it often goes unnoticed and is often seemingly obscured, although it is never not here. Consciousness gets lost in the delusion of separation and duality, identifying as a small, limited, encapsulated self, feeling deficient and incomplete, endlessly seeking and resisting, perpetually in conflict with the seemingly outside world of not-me, trying to control the uncontrollable and in despair and anxiety when it can’t.

Can we choose to willingly shift our attention, drop out of delusional thinking and drop into nonconceptual presence? There is no simple yes or no answer to this question. Verbal-conceptual-philosophical formulations such as "free will" or "determinism" can never fully capture this living reality. It certainly seems that sometimes we can choose to shift our attention or direct our activities, but then at other times, it seems that we cannot. We will explore this question of choice and choicelessness, and the more central question of who or what this apparent chooser-author-director-thinker-self actually is or isn't, and hopefully this book will encourage us all to explore these questions directly in our own experience and not get stuck in fixed ideological positions.

The awakening journey is a pathless path of direct exploration and discovery. It's not about belief or ideology, philosophy or metaphysics. It may include a philosophical perspective, but that's not the essence of it. The essence is this presence or present experiencing or aliveness that is ever-changing without ever departing from the immediacy of right here, right now. It is always just this. Presence is experiential, not conceptual. It is never not here, but it can be unnoticed and unappreciated, or it can be fully realized and enjoyed. Being awake is about total intimacy with life, not detachment from it. The words in this book are only pointers to this ever-present wordless reality, and of course, this reality includes words, ideas, concepts and imagination! Everything is included.

Words and thoughts are an aspect of this whole unfathomable happening, but when we mistake the content of the thoughts and the stories they tell for the truth, we suffer. The heart of any true spiritual teaching is the listening presence, the openness and the direct seeing from which it emerges, and if it's liberating, it touches us at a deeper, more intimate level than thought or analysis can reach.

This isn't about going somewhere else or getting something that's missing. Truly, nothing is lacking. It's about recognizing what is here now. And that is not something hidden or mysterious. It's right here as this cup of tea, this spring breeze touching the skin, these sounds of the freeway, this dance of light and color, this smell of rain drenched earth, this beloved dog or cat, this perfectly flat tire, this apparently wrong turn, this all-consuming fire—this aliveness, this presence, this immediacy—just this, exactly as it is.

—excerpted from a forthcoming book

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Love to all…