What Is Spiritual?

Reflections on What A Contentious Post Stirred Up

Beautiful, ugly, impressive, disgusting, meaningless, grim, contradictory etc... It makes no difference, as long as it is life, vigorously pouring forth.

—Danish painter Asger Jorn

As you all know, I write mainly about nondual spirituality, and I try to stay in my lane. But on rare occasions, I stray and address issues of a  political nature, as I did in my last post, which I have since deleted. (It was a post calling for Biden to step down after his recent debate, and it resulted in numerous exchanges in both the comments and by email, in a few of which I was reactive and unkind). This post today isn’t about this or any other political issues, but rather, it’s looking at what that last post brought up for me in a more nondual or spiritually-oriented way.

The whole thing left me wondering where exactly the boundaries of this spiritual lane that I’m supposed to be in are? Is anything actually left out of nonduality? Political topics definitely have the potential to ignite heated conflict, and they often bring up resistance, defensiveness, hostility, fear, anger and a contracted sense of separation in myself and others.

One reason I tend to avoid writing about political issues is that it usually turns into a rough ride emotionally for me. I get triggered and upset, and I respond at times in ways that some people consider "unspiritual" or unkind. In earlier times, I would have seen such behavior on my part as unfitting and regrettable, but more recently, I’m ever-more comfortable being myself, just as I am in each moment, and in some ways, I even see it as part of my “spiritual mission” to upend and shatter some of those ideas about spirituality.

What if this whole messy disturbance of resistance, defensiveness, hostility, fear, anger, contraction, reactivity and so on is all part of life? What if it all belongs? What if it is simply momentary, impersonal weather, just another shape that present experiencing is taking? What if all of it is nothing other than radiant presence, this no-thing-ness that is dissolving as soon as it appears? What if spirituality isn't always about being calm and gentle and above the fray, undisturbed and beyond it all? What if the nondual whole includes getting upset, getting down in the muck, getting messed up a bit, even arguing or fighting for something?

As I've often said, what appears is like ever-changing kaleidoscopic Rorschach blots that the pattern-seeking mind is always reifying and interpreting—labeling them, putting them into categories, weaving narratives around them—and presto, the apparently solid and fractured world appears. And the confusing thing is, we each see a different world, a different movie of waking life, but we think and believe that we're all in the same movie, looking at the same thing.

In a bigger sense, of course we are. We're all aspects of an undivided whole that includes and transcends all the different viewpoints. It’s a bit like the left and right eye—they each see a slightly different picture, and together they make one whole vision. Likewise, the infinite movies and viewpoints of waking life are what we might call one whole indivisible unicity. There is a common factor in every different apprearance—the presence of it. It’s all experience, and it’s always arising here now in this immediacy.

In one sense, we're all a single I, the same undivided aware presence, and at the same time, as individuals, we are each a unique eye with a unique movie of waking life. And at that level, it can look like war. The white blood cells are attacking the germs, one political party is attacking another, two animals are fighting over the same meal, one person is disagreeing with someone else. It looks like war. But in fact, it all goes together and can't be pulled apart. The different teams are part of one single game.

The particular movie we each see is what our unique conditioning makes out of those Rorschach blots. Each movie is undeniably real as a movie, just as a dream is a real dream. But in both cases, the apparent objects and events in the movie or the dream don't have the substantial, objective, observer-independent, persisting existence outside the dream that they seem to have within the dream. That's the illusory part. This is obvious when we go to a movie theater or when we wake up from a nighttime dream, but it's much less obvious in the dream-like movie of waking life.

My movie is undeniably real as what I’m seeing. But if I think my movie is reality in some objective, observer-independent sense, and that you are therefore seeing the same movie that I’m seeing, and then you seem to be denying what I so plainly and undeniably see, that discrepancy can be very unsettling. It can bring up fear, anger and disbelief. This is part of why we have so much conflict and war. We all have different versions of history and different versions of current events, and yet we think that we're all talking about the same events.

But there are no solid “events” that can be carved out of the totality and pinned down. Events don’t hold still, and they look completely different from different viewing points. They’re actually not the same “thing” at all. That “thing” is a purely conceptual creation. It doesn’t exist. Zen Master Dogen realized this centuries ago: "Is it that there are various ways of seeing one object,” he asked, “or is it that we have mistaken various images for one object?"

Part of this nondual spiritual awakening stuff is about recognizing the bigger picture, the undivided wholeness, and the illusory nature of separation. Or put differently, it's about recognizing the emptiness, the no-thing-ness, the non-substantiality of what appears to be so solid and real. It's about understanding that what looks like a single objective reality "out there" that everyone is seeing, is not actually like that. It's about being less certain of our certainties—being open to fresh and unexpected insights and discoveries. It's about seeing how we get triggered and identified with our views and dug in and defensive, and how we lash out or withdraw.

But it's not about everyone turning into Ramana Maharshi or Thich Nhat Hanh. There's a place in this nondual whole for fiery cigarette smokers like Nisargadatta Maharaj or Charles Bukowski who sometimes yell at people, or for Kali with her necklace of skulls, devouring her own children. Spirituality isn't about always being gentle, soft, calm and nice and never using four-letter words or getting upset. It's not about leaving this messy world of unresolved conflicts behind and going to some transcendent utopia up in the clouds.

In fact, maybe the transcendental is right here in the seemingly mundane, even in the most chaotic and disturbing of messes. Maybe the actual perfection is found only in the apparent imperfection. Maybe emptiness is right here in the seemingly solid forms. Maybe everything belongs. It must, because it's all here.

It seems that this is a dark time for humanity. The world is on fire. The empire is crumbling. But who knows, maybe a New Age is dawning. One way or another, Joan Tollifson will soon be dead and gone. But for a while longer, and who knows how long that might be, she can still weigh in. Sometimes she's kind and gentle and lovable and open, and sometimes she's fiery and angry and opinionated and not very nice at all. Like all of us, she contains the whole universe. And eventually, the incoming tide will sweep her and her entire generation out to sea, as is the way of nature, to make room for the newborn and the New Age. 

Each generation thinks it lives in a very different world from the previous generations, and in one sense, that's true. But Charles Dickens saw beneath the changing surface way back in 1859, writing then about an even earlier time:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

---

Love to all…