What is Non-Dualism?
Two monks are sitting on a mountain top. One says to the other, “What is the essence of being?”
“Soy extract,” says the other.
(Yes, I made that up myself.)
Why were those monks on the mountain top anyway? Zen stories are full of them – the seekers after enlightenment, living the ascetic life, pondering for years in an attempt to ‘find’ enlightenment.
Enlightenment, Nirvana, Moksha, Awakening – all these are words for the ‘holy grail’ of spiritual seekers. The problem with all these words, and all the myths and misconceptions built up around the subject, is that it makes Enlightenment almost impossible for us to experience. We’re convinced that the mystical state is incredibly difficult to achieve. At most, perhaps ten or twelve people on the whole planet are actually enlightened. To achieve it ourselves? Highly unlikely. And those who say they are enlightened? Misguided at best.
The mission of this site is to show that enlightenment – or whatever you want to call it - is not difficult, inaccessible, or even mysterious. In fact, it’s our natural way of seeing the world, and it ‘happens’ to us automatically as soon as we stop trying.
In fact, applying effort is the only way to ‘mess it up’, because enlightenment is what happens when we stop all our efforts – our constant and habitual efforts of thinking, conceptualizing, and putting labels on the world.
The funny thing is that no effort is pretty difficult for us to achieve! (Precisely because we try so hard to do it.) To see for yourself how your mind habitually puts labels on things, visit Seeing the Symbolic.
To make enlightenment as easy as it really is, I’ve tried to do away with the usual words, and instead call it ‘non-dualism’. For many of us, this is a relatively fresh word, with no baggage attached. Non-dualism is simply seeing the world as it really is, without applying any effort to or laying symbolic meaning over what we perceive.
As soon as we do this– see the world as it really is– the world resolves into its natural state. We understand our relation to the world, and in that understanding, we realize perfect happiness. We also achieve the ability to manifest our world almost magically – to play with all the things we took so seriously before.
So this website isn’t about enlightenment – it’s about non-dualism, and how to ‘enter’ that state. Even though this is a Life Basics article, and I’m not supposed to go too deep, I’m going to write a bit more in the hopes that it will clarify what this is all about.
Here is what actually exists:
Just As Is
This is the essence of non-dualism. Now, I’ve chosen these three words very carefully. If I would have said ‘Just as it is’, that would have been all wrong, because what the heck is ‘it’? When we engage in true observation, all we’ll find is Just As Is.
‘Just’ is there because it gives us a feeling of soft ‘beingness’. Not the solid beingness that we think of when we think of reality (things like cars and rocks and popsicles), but a soft beingness that is there without really being imposing.
‘As’ is there because it imparts the sensation of a movement without any movement. Each moment is like this. I could sense movement if I thought of each moment as flowing gently into the next one. But since a ‘moment’ is just a funny line I’ve drawn, there really is no movement – just ‘as’.
‘Is’ locks down the ‘as’ and makes it real and tangible again. When you truly sense it, the world is literally non-dualistic, meaning that the only way our dualistic language can even come close to describing it is to rely on paradox. So, using our dualistic language, I’ll say that the world is solid and full of all of its manifest ‘objects’, and yet it is simultaneously true that there are no objects, no manifesting, and nothing solid or full. This describes a sensation, much in the same way that I could try to explain the color ‘pink’ to someone who has never seen it. We can’t describe a color in words – it must be directly experienced. In the same way we can’t deliver the true nature of an emotion, or even of someplace we’ve seen. We can describe it and create a vision in someone’s head, but that’s not the same thing as having the person actually experience it.
What I don’t like about descriptions of non-dualism is that they can quickly become confusing and mystifying. I’m always going to do my best to write with perfect clarity, and to describe every idea and concept in the most non-confusing way possible. My promise to you is that I’ll never, in these articles, purposefully try to make something mysterious or mystical.
You’ll notice that the sentence ‘Just As Is’ has no subject, and no object. It’s a state of being, and it’s a little bit like an action with passive qualities. This is one of the best ‘descriptions’ of non-dualism I’ve been able to come up with. But understand that it’s not very accurate. Here’s my comparison.
Non-dualism = Just As Is
Pink = Soft, warm, bubbly.
See how lame the description of ‘pink’ is? That’s about how good the description of ‘non-duality’ is. But nevertheless, I’ve written it down, so at least we can have an idea to latch onto for the moment. Just remember that the idea is not the experience. That’s what the rest of this site is for – to nudge you in the direction of a Direct Experience of non-dualism.
If you feel like all this is making perfect sense, you might want to check out Pitfalls on the Road to Non-Dualism. It’s designed to help you become aware of common pitfalls when we think we’re entering the Second Mountain stage of things.
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October 5th, 2007 at 10:59 am
[...] the ultimate teachings of ‘not arriving’ and ‘no training’ which are called non-dual teachings, the beginner feels comforted and believes he’s reached the final stage before he has reached [...]