Below is the first in a series of posts, perhaps five, on what the non-dual view implies for our outlook and behavior in relation to the deepening global crisis we are facing. It is meant as an exploration, not necessarily a definitive conclusion.
Humanity is in the grip of a rising confluence of conditions which are becoming more evident, more palpable, and more pressing by the week. Some of these conditions have reached existential proportions. Taken together, they reflect a flawed worldview, a grand delusion generating deep trouble for life on earth. That delusion has us believing, as in the past, that all contingencies will coalesce into a drama wherein we will create new ‘solutions’ to address old problems. This has become magical thinking. I hope, as this commentary continues, it will become clear that this framing itself is part of the crisis. Not as though we are ineffectual when it comes to exercising influence in the world, just that our earnest efforts cannot continue to spring from within the imaginal realm in which we live. Fortunately, our vision is clearing. We are discerning the magnitude of the consequences of our actions. But we do remain captured by a conception of who (or what) generates influence and how it is propagated. Quite simply, how we see the world is always becoming the world we see. This is the central concern.
The primary issue addressed here is nonduality. What is this view and how does it implicate action in the world? If embodied nonduality were to replace our old ways of doing things, becoming a primary critical framework, representing our true nature as well as the necessary shift in worldview, then that embodiment, since it implies an end to separation from nature, would naturally direct our action. We would be embarking on an extended, if halting, return to sanity. Perhaps not so immediately away from a dualistic view, but deliberately integrating the non-dual into a wholistic perspective on our presence, which is what Buddhist philosophy says we are already doing anyway. Moreover, that embodiment would not rightly be characterized as a manifestation of nonduality. We would be exploring the totality of Being itself. It is not even our nature we would become; we would be realizing the nature of nature, becoming actors aligned with the nature of reality itself.
To fully realize the nondual view, though, is not a conceptual event. It is not something to be attained. Just the opposite. It is innate. Few, if any of us, will make such a total and immediate transition to a nondual view of Being. Transition will be gradual, filled with moments of regression and confusion, carefully monitoring our habits of thought and noticing how deeply we are captured by linguistics. But along the way, we will divest ourselves of the very idea of attainment or, for that matter, non-attainment. Nonduality can be described and lived, but it is not an object of persuasion. It arrives with the collapse of intellect, of any distinction between self and the world, between so-called internal and external experience. Granted, this is a radical proposition, but not beyond our grasp.
Acting from the nondual view does not require grounding in any spiritual tradition. But we recognize there is something intrinsically spiritual about it because of this principle of embodiment. There is something deeply resonant about establishing an energetic coherence between earth and sky, between mundane existence and the Divine, the micro and the macro-universe. This is the implication of full embodiment. To establish that coherence is to approach the supreme union found at the heart of all spiritual traditions. That union is expressed in the awakening of the heart itself. No world view nor any conceptual filter is required to enter nondual mind. It is accessible to anyone at any time. Yet also, nondual mind is not just another ‘experience’; it exists beyond experience. Trungpa Rinpoche said our attachment to ‘experience’ is the medium of our capture by the world of suffering. Spiritual development is entirely about interrupting the reflexive (and almost instantaneous) attachment to the matrix of values and beliefs that drive our lives. The issue is also not solely how the nondual view may inform our expression in the world, but also how a worldview confines and inhibits our expression.
Approaching this topic therefore requires three things: 1) that we comprehend the nondual view 2) that we define the Meta-Crisis and realize its mechanics 3) that we understand how the two are related and formulate a new approach to being in—and aligning with—reality.
The Nondual View
Articulating the nondual view is the first principle to resolve toward a more effective engagement with everything. My immersion in nonduality occurred through Vajrayana and Dzogchen practice. According to that tradition, any description of the awakened state defies logic. Its nature transcends logic entirely. But we may apply a simple nomenclature to our experience which can help us grasp the essence of nonduality. The Vajrayana framework of awakening provides perspective on delusion, suffering, the self, happiness, and all the neurotic or self-limiting behaviors and obstacles we face in this interval between birth and death. That framework is distilled into three elements, or ways of understanding our individual and collective journey: Ground (View), Path (Meditation), and Fruition (Conduct).
The Ground is defined as the pure, unconditional, uncorrupted nondual nature of reality, the ontological nature of mind, deeper than any definition of self, undermining the centrality (and existence) of self altogether. It is the truth of what Buddhists call emptiness, the ultimate nature of phenomena (lacking any intrinsic nature). The Ground is the foundation, the embryonic source, the preconscious substrate in which we are ultimately held. It is the fundamental unity of all things and from which all phenomena spring. Everything is subsumed within it. It is wholly positive. Its nature is unwavering stillness, confidence, and trust.
Path is our experience in the world of form, where we become aware of our internal responses to experience. The evolution of awakening is applied to the interval between birth and death, piercing ignorance, delusion, working with all dimensions of our internal process, arriving at an ever more refined comprehension and resolution of the elements of personality (sensations, perceptions, mental activity, and consciousness) which contribute to deluded states of clinging and repetitive habits we experience as suffering. These elements of what we call personality, our flawed and biased ego-identity, are the primary temporal limitations of our individual and collective lives.
The Fruition is the full realization, the awakened state, the choiceless condition, reflected in our intra-active presence with the world. It is the arrival of supreme confidence and trust in one’s capacities, knowing that, in the words of Nicholas Lattanzio, “you can’t really make a mistake because there is no ‘you’ that could choose to make a mistake.” The culmination of traversing a Path of awakening may take a single life or many lives, even eons of lives if we were measuring by the standards of what we imagine as time. It is the accomplishment of resolution and release from the elements of personality arising in meditation, the dissolution of habitual mental patterns, from the cycle of self-defeating interpretations of sensations and perceptions, of thought and consciousness.
This interval from the first breath to the last is the karmic realm, governed by the law of return. If we look at this seemingly linear course of events through the nondual lens, we realize that in an absolute sense, there is no such thing as isolating a View to cultivate, no Path to traverse, no Conduct to undertake, no Fruition to achieve. Such distinctions are artificial. They are all equally present and completely interpenetrating. To focus on achieving any state of realization is a relative phenomenon, not an absolute. To indulge in such phenomena is part of the ‘self-improvement project’ which captures so many of us. It is the familiar application of antidotes, conceptual remedies (solutions) to what we regard as our flawed view. For the nondual viewer, there is no linear quality to experience whatsoever. To think otherwise would be a self-deception. Within the logic of nonduality, the essence of every phenomenon is none other than the Ground, the nondual state itself. There can be no distinction between such things as ground, path, or fruition. No personality project can exist because everything is already perfect.
This awakened state is the essence nature to which all nondual teachers refer. It can be found or lost to everyday awareness, but since it exists out of time, as the substrate of everything, it is always present, always true. It cannot be lost. It can only be found. It is the bright and empty and fecund interval within every instant, always shining in uncreated beauty, transcending every form of suffering we may inflict upon ourselves. It is a resting place between raw direct experience of the world and the instant of identification with experience, safely labeling and categorizing everything so that it fits within our comfort zone.
Though uncreated, it is intrinsic to all experience. It has no identifiable source. To be more precise, ground, path and fruition are all happening simultaneously. There is no progression from one to another. There is no objective barrier preventing us from experiencing the unity and inseparability of all three, the clarity intrinsic to all three. We cannot even say there is any such thing as experience since it implies a distinction between an apprehend-er and that which is apprehended (subject and object), neither of which can be found.
In this same sense, we can even say there is no such thing as meditation since meditation implies a meditator and something to be meditated upon. In this way, subject-object duality reigns. In nonduality, no such division exists. Even so, in a relative sense, meditation reveals the nature of the world or the nature of mind. We can conjure images of the world we want or focus neurotically on self-improvement. We can extend gratitude, love, healing, and compassion to ourselves or others. We can project a multitude of things.
Meditation is entering the process of creation. Sitting like a mountain I become the sea, then the tree then the silence of abstraction. All mental and existential exigencies climax into a death rattle. Meditation is entering the process of creation. The exact moment of birth of bud to flower, of cloud bursting into rain. It is a natural process in its movement into creativity.
The ground zero where eureka manifests is meditation. It is that swampy Sundarban where man-eating tigers prowl looking for errant minds. Meditation is the moment of the big bang which sent matter oscillating into orbits creating planets and ecosystems, milky ways and blackholes. Meditation is a time warp where thoughts run parallel and in accompaniment falling off the cliffs of illusions. Then there is no parallel left.
Meditation is like the Pied Piper leading away the rats of Hamlin into the sea of ubiquity. Where the cobra folds its fangs and burrows for the winters, there is meditation. Where the sunning cat ponders the dancing wag tail, there is meditation. All that is in the big bang moment of creation, which is also destruction, there is meditation.
---Meenakshi Negi, Dehradun, India, 2023
The nondual condition has no object of being, no experience-er, nothing to be experienced in an absolute sense. If ground, path, and fruition are in perpetual union, there is no one to meditate, nothing to meditate upon. Whatever we imagine meditation may accomplish, it is already here, arriving directly in the disguise of relative experience. If from the nondual view there is no such thing as meditation, then there is also no such thing as post-meditation. Any division between a moment when we are focusing on relative attributes, any intention, or witnessing all qualities of separation between phenomena dissolve is no longer separate from any other moment. No division of the indivisible can be found. Linear time has dissolved. Our access to the nondual view is complete and uninterrupted. Every moment becomes a meditation or, more accurately, non-meditation.
All binaries collapse. There is no such thing as freedom since there has never been bondage. There is no rest since there has never been fatigue. There is no clarity because there has never been confusion. The same can be said of every apparent polarity by which we distinguish between phenomena, good and evil, friend or foe, pleasurable or painful, constructive, or destructive acts. As we fully examine this field of being, looking beyond duality for the moment, we see no intrinsic value structure nor any means by which to measure phenomena, no code, and no law. All phenomena are thus equal, arising independently and spontaneously from an origin that is no origin whatsoever. Every phenomenon is equal to every other phenomenon. This is not a denial of the imbalances of the world as we know it. It is the basis of the uniform nature of nondual awareness.
Quantum theory supports this view. Karen Barad, in her comprehensive Meeting the Universe Halfway, claims no evidence to confirm phenomena exist prior to our engagement with them. We do not engage with the world because it exists. It exists because we engage with it. This claim is the result of decades of meticulous experiments interpreted by our finest minds. Since our engagement with and influence in the world is irrevocable, no singular phenomenon can be identified nor referred to as an isolated event. ‘Phenomena’ refers to an emergent relational flow of co-creation, an ongoing mutual engagement. There cannot be any such thing as a singular phenomenon. How could it be isolated, or even exist, if there is no thing to intra-act with it?
When we say all phenomena are equal, we are referring to ongoing intra-active mutual creation. This is an animist view of the universe, attributing agency to what the material view would regard as the inanimate. We are received and conceived by the world in equal measure. As this is so, we must accept that we exist as a holographic universe, each of us the whole manifesting as a part just as other ‘parts’ within our field of existence are expressions of the whole. What appears to us as the material world has agency, just as we imagine in our supreme arrogance, that humans alone possess agency. We are removed from our pedestal of supremacy.