Miranda,
Nonduality speakers say there’s nothing to know or get or see, right? Then they say there’s been liberation or whatnot, right? They got a timeline of their life, one guy wrote about years of seeking then bango! There was liberation. But he’s writing about it and talking about his search. Then the bloke goes, there’s no time. What am I missing? Is it (because) I’m not liberated? But they say no one's liberated and life's happening to no one and no one can understand this!
Confused as per usual,
K.
Dear K.,
Crazy shite, innit it? Nonduality speakers are not wrong when they say this can’t be clearly and rationally spoken about or understood. The very idea of rational or logical thought is simply a belief, after all. But they often speak in ways that obscure what they often call “this message,” and somehow a number of them seem to feel they are speaking about it in the clearest way possible. Of course, no one is ever choosing words or thoughts, which when realized makes the whole enterprise a bit like a sitcom.
Seeker: How can you talk of your past when you say there is no past?
Speaker: No one is talking about anything. There is no me to have a past.
Seeker: But you wrote a book about your search.
Speaker: No one wrote it. But you can buy it for £10.50. It’s a good read!
Seeker: But who would read it?
Speaker: No one could read it. But you don’t know that, because you are a “me.”
Seeker: I am you?
Speakers: Well, that is true, but that’s not what’s being said.
Seeker: What’s being said?
Speaker: Nothing is being said. There is no one to say anything.
Seeker: I am confused.
Speaker: The “I” is confusion.
Seeker: I give up.
Speaker: Nice try. But there is no “you” to give up.
🙂
The world that appears is the only world that exists, or if we want to be very nondual, we can say “apparently” exists, since even with only our own seeming senses and perception we can glimpse that the solidity and “realness” of the world has no foundation. And if we include other ways of looking, however limited, we can find echoes of this in physics, neuroscience, philosophy, Eastern spirituality, etc. It’s not a new or novel idea. Basic nonduality is very simply the suggestion that separation is illusory. Yet this can sound like a denial of any appearance, which is absurd since appearances are all there is.
The difficulty in speaking of this is that the language we have, much more so than indigenous human languages, is rooted in separation. So any way of saying that separation is illusory ends up sounding like some “one/thing/being” that “knows/sees/realizes” that separation is illusory. And that is actually as far removed from this as you can get.
As Nancy (Neithercut) once wrote, “Awakening is not about diminishing or erasing the sense of self, the self remains, the dream of separation continues. Yet the feeling of separation, the feeling of being a doer of life disappears. It is simply beyond belief or imagination. That is why it is impossible to describe, and truly impossible for those who have not experienced this to believe there is such a thing.”
This can be pointed to or alluded to, but all words will always be misleading.
But to try to put it simply, many people have nighttime dreams with an entire history and timeline. I seem to have a memory of what we call a dream in which I had an 11-year-old sister, and my mother had married my Uncle instead of my father. I can still feel echoes of how deeply I loved my sister in the dream. Yet her image is unknown to me outside of these flashes of what we call memory, of a dream that was not even what we call “real.” In the dream, there was as much a sense of past and future as there seems to be “now” --- actually more, since I didn’t seem to doubt the reality of time and space in the nighttime dream.
The speaker you alluded to has a story about an imagined past. He also once said thoughts of the past don’t arise very often. Where is the past he writes about? Where can it be found except in his “memory,” and what is a memory? Like the story of my imagined family in my dream, the story of his “past” appears in this. Even if seeming “others” might verify parts of his story, my guess is that they would not even tell it the same way. Time and space, bodies and feelings and thoughts, though arbitrary abstractions of what is seamless, seem to appear, and are in fact all that there is to what we call life.
The speaker who talks of no separate self does not vanish into some deeper cosmic essence or become “no one.” Again, to quote Nancy, “When the self is recognized to be illusion, the dream does not end... self does not disappear... It is known that this mentally fabricated worded world is the only world we exist in, that we are the dream, that there is no outside to the dream This is it, what ever it looks and feels like.”
And that includes what we call memories, seeking, speaking of nonduality, or whatever seems to appear. There is nothing else. There is no one else. There is only ever this, and what this is or why this is or how this is or even if it is anything like what we call “this” at all…well, there is no liberation or non-liberation that will ever offer the answers, as the questions themselves are simply an artifact of your beautifully impossible, unimaginable, imaginary life. And, as they say in nonduality land, not even that! ❤
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