We love each other, because we are each other. That doesn't solve the violence by itself. Purposeful action is required, but it lights the way.
A journey into nonduality deepens our comprehension, explores the meaning of nondual embodiment and what it means to be alive. If we look toward Buddhist wisdom, Chogyam Trungpa says, “Dharma is the realization that ending is not possible.” To say it another way, Buddhism continuously negates the existence of arrival, of a destination. Though we may aspire to an ultimate attainment, what we are bound to discover is that there is no there there. There is no substance to the belief that there is an ultimate ‘end’ to the Path. The entire Buddhist path is about arriving at a non-existent destination. Which is to say, to embody the Path is to become that negation. Existence & non-existence coexist. Such a paradox transcends identity in every moment.
To embody this paradoxical condition is to realize the unity of Ground, Path, and Fruition. One is no longer identifiable as an identity. Labels, polarities, cannot stick to a non-identity. Embodying this is beyond politics, beyond getting there, beyond being there, entirely beyond conventional activism or advocacy. This is the essence of becoming nonduality in the world, which is to fully become becoming. Always here. Always present in the most comprehensive sense. And yet, never arriving at any identifiable completion. A shining Being, (while) not-being. This is not only the union of the path. This is the nature of change, becoming the nature of change itself.
How the nondual view becomes a way of being may not look the same for everyone. But the embodiment it brings will fundamentally alter the quality of our outlook and behavior regardless of how we decide to direct our energies. Nonduality is immediate, comprehensive and without boundaries. It is universally applicable to all circumstances, all ‘issues.’ Nothing lies beyond its reach. The fullness of Being, the vast diversity of action and thought are included within its limitless benevolence.
But make no mistake, embodying nonduality is also a threat to the keepers of the master narrative. The capacity of the economy of death to digest and co-opt alternative narratives should never be underestimated. Maintaining the integrity of nondual presence is imperative because it is suffused with aliveness and creative potential. Its character is complete openness and inclusion of all phenomena, neither rejecting nor accepting either ideologies or behaviors, regarding each as equal expressions of the essential truth of Being. We are subsumed by it all and attached to none of it because an identifiable ‘me’ is no longer the actor. There is no one to defend and no longer anything to defend.
Does the nondual view threaten to become just another form of fundamentalism? How could that be? An inherently inclusive framework, the nondual views righteousness, ideological purity, tribalism, activism or preconceptions about the sources and use of power equally. It doesn’t deny intellect. It just doesn’t live there. Its source of power lies elsewhere, in its grounded, unlimited, and unwavering open-hearted nature. Here, no conceptualization is required, or even possible.
There is no will, no weighing of alternatives, no decisions to be made. But neither is anything pre-determined. There is no meta-guidance, no ego, no super-ego. There is no objective view. Right action is clarified, instinctive, and automatic. To whatever degree the nondual view accrues power, it is not for the purpose of persuasion or control, either of which would presume the existence of Others to be persuaded or controlled. Its power lies in its intrinsic logic, wielded as an expression of something entirely different from how we normally see power manifest in the social or political world.
The attention we put on this view may be an evolutionary phenomenon, implying we have little control whatsoever. Some people refer to the growing influence of nonduality as evidence of an awakening planetary consciousness. While we may assume we still retain a measure of autonomy, as if some innate control over our own decision-making process cannot be extinguished, the unfolding of phenomena is beyond our influence. Not that this evolutionary turn is entirely determined. Just that it is surely a response to aggregate human actions over millennia.
In whatever way one arrives at the evolving quality of presence offered by nonduality, the same result is yielded both ethically and spiritually. There are not different versions of nonduality. In this rising awareness, the possibility of compromise for the sake of political or emotional expediency falls away. We are ruthless in this respect. How we express this realization cannot look like a familiar approach to ‘changing the world’ which satisfies arrogant conceptions of human agency. We are no longer even bound to regard the ‘human’ as the agent of change. We are open to becoming infected by the more than human world. We are already infected by the invisible living world. We are shaken out of our presumptions of centrality and superiority. If we are paying attention, we may realize the world is speaking to us, as if in a dream, in ways we previously did not notice, forgot, or simply ignored.
Nonduality does not select out individual aspects of modern civilization in a hierarchy of the most urgent. We grasp the interdependence of all dimensions of existence and learn to hear previously silenced or unheard voices. The more-than-human world is speaking to us in its own dialect. Being its own version of intrinsic wisdom, its reflections of life (and death) are to be treated as equally relevant, equally perfect, and equally related to all other aspects. If by this new arrangement we address the primary delusion of the Meta-Crisis, we bring awareness to the whole. We are not shirking a moral or ethical duty to act on behalf of the whole because every issue is every issue.
How, then, do we disperse, or sporulate, this embodiment into a new economy? Nonduality requires us to leave behind the secular materialist mold. We are released from classical physics and patterns of seeing rooted in duality and familiar responses to suffering—even when it manifests as deranged behavior. We enter a realm of anarchy, an unbounded nutrient-rich potentiality. To be sure, slipping the massive inertia of sympathetic arousal and becoming an alternative to conceptual frameworks is no simple task. But even modest appetizers of liberation become fuel for further exploration.
The transition from merely defining nonduality to opening to the full dimensions of the crises becomes a contemplation of ways of being which are still highly sensitive to the seductions of the dualistic view. It’s as though we are standing offstage, practicing our lines, gathering our wits, fraught with feeling, aligning our intentions, and steeling ourselves for the uncertainty, the audacity of irrevocable performance—and response! When we see so much suffering, conflict, and imbalance in the world, it’s very easy to be drawn back into a dualistic view, out of our source, out of a connected heart-based view, to disconnect and slide into a decision-making process driven by intellect. Great care is required.
Presence begins with letting go of agendas, defensive strategies rooted in oppositional thinking. Conceptual knowing becomes anachronistic. It is, in the words of Trungpa Rinpoche, to become ruthless in the face of the unending flow of seductions. If we are temporarily thrown off our stance, that doesn’t mean change is not crucial or that it’s not occurring, just that it may not be happening according to our personal self-interested clock. Eastern traditions regard time as cyclic, as a highly attenuated unwinding. Our sensitivity to the flow of change in the world need not shut down. It merely needs to slow down. We can still acknowledge the full scope of a fearful world in pain and remain connected to Being, as Being.
Nothing is excluded from this view. Nor is anything absolutely accepted. Not the suffering of the lost, the greed of the wealthy, the deceit and derangement, the narcissism, manipulation, or unabated recidivism of the power-hungry. Neither the striving of the seekers nor the nobility of the compassionate are beyond the essential spaciousness of awareness. Neither the amorality of the sociopath nor even the murderous intent of the psychopath is excluded. Every act is regarded equally as a fleeting nuance in an ever-shifting magic mural of timeless awareness. There is nothing out of place. Nothing ‘happens’ at a wrong time. In fact, nothing ‘happens’ at all.
We act in the relative world, yet in an absolute sense, nothing need be done. Urgency does not serve our ultimate intent. It’s more important to remain in relationship than it is to do anything quickly. Drifting from our sacred roots can never be part of the solution. The union of Path and Fruition (meditation and conduct) is the expression of this singularity. Embodiment becomes a new definition of freedom grounded in relationality, spirituality, feeling. And yes, co-existing with intellect. It becomes the Tao of compassionate action.
How can activism rooted in the sacred unity of self, other and earth appear as anything other than a new and universally expressive compassionate balance? How can the pursuit of justice not arise from sacred practice? Living in the present moment dissolves every arbitrary division of reality into internal and external realms. There are no true boundaries between personal ritual, expressive presence, the collective journey, or the natural river of consciousness. Nor is there any way to say that continuously informing and returning to pure vision is not the pursuit of justice. We can no longer even speak of activism without understanding that the only true activism arises from our zero-nature, the consciousness of the planet, acting through us as a trans-corporeal singularity, the only matrix in which we have ever lived.
We are initially invited to be still, to sense the socio-biological nature of phenomena, the subconscious, evolutionary, karmic engine driving events. Presence attunes us to egotistical behaviors which might cloud our uncertainties in spiritual jargon as we leap into the critical discourse of acting on behalf of the whole. A total experience of the present moment with complete trust, without restriction or hesitation, with aliveness and confidence, becomes accessible in this moment. Our natural presence itself assumes the flavor of ritual. Still, acting authentically remains susceptible to self-interest.
Embodied nonduality implies a redefinition of the old rules. Enacting decolonized presence invites uncontrived spontaneity, inviting us to be affected by the fugitive, what clearly breaks free of the conventional rules-based order, cracking through the confines of the typical, the prescribed. We tend to the small, the relational, the elemental quality of belonging. We approach the original state, a supreme letting go. We are no longer transfixed by the ongoing drama of cause and effect that defines the realm of suffering. We collapse like a bundle of kindling freed of all binding, standing apart from the dominant paradigm while hospicing its demise. There is release there, even a promise of peace there.
The deeper we go into the moment, the more we relax out of progress, out of getting there, out of striving and especially out of a deeply embedded fear of death, the more we sense what needs to be done. Being becomesdoing. Utopian techno-futures in which we invent ourselves out of our predicament are no longer relevant. We approach a vision of how to do-bee-do-bee-doo this moment, to unwind ourselves from the hegemonic influence of the plantation, of empire built on compliance and isolation. We touch life, we accept death, the end of progress, the end of time. We are no longer strangers in the night. We never have been.
We accept the prospect of imminent radical change, whether it appears as collapse or dissolution or chaos. And since we enter a supremely spacious view, standing in the moment extends far beyond a narrow definition of now. Living in this expanded moment is the only way to hold both the promise and the grief of where we are. The agency we have imagined as humans, now manifest in our broken relationships, is a false construction having no relation to our true condition. This awakening propagates itself. We are building capacity for a wider breakthrough, prophesied centuries ago by Tibetan Bönpo shamans, restoring the fractured balance between humans and the more-than-human world, circumventing the mind control we call the neoliberal order of the Western world.
To re-sacralize is to recover the physical and energetic locus of universal relationship, bringing every Other into our heart. We become the dervish mentality, the Shambhala warrior, agents of the invisible, dismantling the internalized empire even as we enter the halls of power to recover a culture of life. We become the energy of transformation, making peace with our demons, healing instead of killing, sharing instead of hoarding, cultivating instead of extracting, listening instead of shouting.
To channel energies such as these is surely to stand in the eye of the storm, surrounded by profound spiritual and moral corruption, economic and ecological injustice with unwavering courage and integrity, attending to what is dying, restoring relational guardianship in all its dimensions with unyielding dignity, fueled by illuminated compassion.