The Usefulness of Uselessness

What good is nonduality?

This article was written for the new issue of the Dutch nondual magazine InZicht, where it appears in Dutch translation. This issue of InZicht is on the theme “What good is non-duality?” This is the English original of my contribution:

The Usefulness of Uselessness

In a sense, what makes nonduality liberating is its uselessness. It's not a seven-step, future-oriented program leading to self-improvement. It's not about fixing the "little me," the character in the story of "my life." It's not about the future. It's totally about right here, right now, just as it is. It's about the nature of reality, and what we are and are not, prior to all our ideas about any of this.

Nonduality simply means that nothing exists independently of everything else. Everything is an undivided and indivisible whole. It all goes together and cannot be pulled apart. And it's never what we think it is. Our thoughts about this undeniable happening are like maps. They conceptually carve up the seamless whole into apparently separate parts, freeze these imaginary creations into seemingly solid and persistent "things," categorize and label them, and then develop stories about them, including stories of cause and effect.

Much of this mapping serves a functional purpose in everyday life. But maps are never the territory they describe, even though mapping is something the territory is doing. We can all see that the map of Chicago is not Chicago. And we can notice that Chicago itself is an ungraspable, unresolvable, ever-changing happening inseparable from the world supposedly outside of it. The same is true for each of us. "The body" is a conceptual abstraction of a living reality that is fluid, ever-changing and utterly inseparable from its environment.

This whole movie of waking life is very much like a dream—undeniably a real experience, but with no substantial, objective, observer-independent, persisting existence outside of the dreaming consciousness. When we recognize the dream-like nature of the movie of waking life, and when we see the "me" at the center of the story as a kind of dream character or mirage, the whole drama loses its seriousness and begins to feel more playful. The thought-sense of being a separate, encapsulated self falls away more and more. The idea of "my life" as something apart from all life no longer makes sense.

We begin to see how everything goes together, the things we like and the things we don't like. Apparent opposites such as up and down or good and bad are recognized as inseparable polarities that only exist relative to each other, empty of any fixed position or inherent reality. We're no longer imagining that the light could or should someday vanquish the dark, or that we can have only pleasure and no pain. We stop arguing with reality. Life becomes more fluid, more enjoyable. We're not constantly judging everything, not endlessly caught up in thought-generated conflict and misery.

When we believe we are a separate fragment with free will encapsulated inside a body, navigating our way in a fractured universe outside of us, we inevitably feel anxious, deficient, incomplete, insecure and in perpetual conflict. 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, relationships, intoxicants, comforting beliefs and spiritual experiences, all of which ultimately leave us unsatisfied and disappointed.

So to discover the nondual nature of reality is potentially enormously transformative, freeing us from unnecessary suffering, conflict and confusion. It won't eliminate pain and painful circumstances, which are part of life, but it will diminish or eliminate the added suffering that comes from our mistaken ideas and all the resistance and seeking they generate. When we realize that everything is an inseparable, choiceless happening that no one is authoring or controlling, it frees us from guilt, blame and false pride. When we really see that everyone is doing the only possible in each moment, compassion is the natural result.

In terms of freeing us from suffering, nonduality might be the most useful perspective there is! But as soon as we frame it that way, as a useful means to an end, we are back in the mental realm of duality, seeking future benefits for an illusory separate self who seems to be presently lacking. So the most essential key is that it's all about right here, right now. It's not about a better future, and it's not about the character in the story, the voice in the head, the self-image, the little "me." It's about the all-inclusive, unbound, presence-awareness, the seamless present experiencing, that we are and that everything is.

What liberates us is not picking up a new belief system, but exploring and discovering all this directly for ourselves. If we look openly at our actual experience, we can't find an actual boundary where "inside of me" turns into "outside of me." We can't find a "me" authoring our thoughts or making our choices. What we think of as "my body" turns out to be ever-changing sensations, appearing and disappearing. We find that every breath, heartbeat, thought, interest, impulse, action and choice emerges from an unfindable source.

When we look to what we most fundamentally mean by the word "I" without referring to thought or memory, we find no-thing we can grasp. There is only the undoubtable knowingness of being here now as this boundless, centerless awaring presence and this infinitely diverse but seamless present experiencing. This is what we most essentially are.

Prior to all the things that seem to divide us, we are all the same aware presence. Awareness doesn't have a shape, a size, an age, a gender, a nationality, a life situation, a location or a place where it begins or ends. All of that appears in awareness. Like unconditional love, awareness has space for everything to be as it is and space for something new to emerge. It clings to nothing. When we see as awareness, from wholeness rather than from separation, we see everything with unconditional love. There is no "other."

Every apparent form is like a wave in the ocean, each wave a unique but indivisible movement of the same limitless, centerless, here-now intelligence-energy, primordial awareness, seamless unicity, wholeness, totality, boundlessness, no-thing-ness, or whatever we call this ungraspable actuality, just as every wave in the ocean is equally water, equally ocean.

As we wake up to the undivided nature of what is, 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. Compassion for everyone, ourselves included, being exactly the way we are, along with an ease of being and a natural joy in life are the fruits of this discovery.

This discovery usually seems to unfold gradually, and yet that unfolding always only happens now, for this one bottomless moment is all there ever really is. To imagine an unfolding over time takes thought and memory to conjure up. So the key is always right here, right now—not yesterday or tomorrow.

Any so-called awakening doesn't happen "to me," the character in the story. It isn't even something that happens. Boundless awareness and present experiencing, what we most fundamentally are, that which we cannot doubt, is never absent. It is ever-present. It's what here-now is. It's what everything is. It's all there is. No word can capture this indivisible aliveness. And yet here it is, showing up as trees and birds, freeways and airplanes, waking life and deep sleep, you and me and all these words. Is this nondual actuality useful? Or useless? Who can say? It simply is. And that's the beauty of it!

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Clarification on my last post:

In my last post, Is Spirituality an Escape?, I feel that I didn’t make it clear that Robert Saltzman is a dear friend and that his comment about me, in the context in which it was offered, was intended and received as a push coming from love, not a criticism, judgment or put down. I also realized that I didn’t adequately clarify what Robert meant by Rupert Spira (and by extension me) “not letting the floor drop.”

As a result, I added a post-publication “addendum and clarification" to that last article in the online version I linked to above, which is on my Substack home page and on the app, and you can find that clarification below the main article there. And at the very end, I added the entire drawing from which I used a part at the beginning of that last article.

The point of that post was not to critique Rupert or myself or anyone else, but to raise the larger question of where each one of us is coming from in any moment when we offer or receive a so-called “spiritual” message. And I’m not taking a position. My expression is pretty bare-bones, but I do use words like “God” and “radiant presence” and “the Holy Reality” at times, and I also appreciate the way Robert strips them all away. I appreciate both Robert and Rupert, and I’m grateful that there are many different ways of seeing, pointing out and celebrating what is. Each one of us is an absolutely unique expression. It all belongs.

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Love to all…