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#2286 - Friday, October 14, 2005 - Editor: Jerry Katz

Here are a few excerpts located when entering the keyword "nonduality" into the Google Print Search, which finds excerpts within books: Try it at http://print.google.com/. Thanks to Dustin for pointing it out to me.

Included is the book title and a brief selection.

--Jerry

Dzogchen Essentials: The Path That Clarifies Confusion

The whole purpose of Dharma practice ... is to understand the great purity and equality. This is the great vastness, longchen, the vast space where everything fits, everything! The different schools of Buddhism variously call it nonduality, the realization of emptiness, the union of samsara and nirvana, and so on. The fact that everything is nondual is not a recent invention nor a Buddhist one; it is the actual nature of phenomena from the beginning. As the Buddha said, "Whether the buddhas appear on this earth or not, the essence of phenomena never changes." The nonduality aspect, the great vastness, is unchanging. It has never been fabricated, nor is it something that we create.

~ ~ ~ 

Limitless Mind: A Guide to Remote Viewing

by Russell Targ

Nonduality refers to the idea that most things are neither true nor not true, but rather the result of our projection onto them. The Buddhists teach that every time you make a distinction, you make an error and cause suffering. Nonduality is an invitation to give up all ideas of separation and judgment (but not necessarily discernment).

~ ~ ~

The Book of Secrets

This is advaita, this is nonduality. And if you cannot feel this nonduality, then all the philosophies of nonduality are useless. They are just words. Once you know this nondual existential moment, then only can you understand the Upanishads. Then only you can understand the mystics -- what they are talking about when they talk of a cosmic oneness, a wholeness. Then you are not separate from the world, not alien to it. Then the existence becomes your home. And with that feeling ... all worries are lost.

~ ~ ~

Voices of the Living Grail

We do not overcome duality. We restore ourselves to the One by merely accepting nonduality. We cannot abolish darkness, greed, evil, and so forth, because they do not exist in the harmony and balance that is the essence of God.

~ ~ ~

Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview

If we turn to another tradition, we find the works of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and dramatists to be replete with instances of the paradoxical, or agonistic, form of articulation. (The tension of the opposites is played out on a grander, religious scale in the poetry of John Milton.) For our present purposes let us cite Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" as an outstanding example of a poetic rendering of the logic of nonduality.

Here the anthem doth commence:

Love and constancy is dead;

Phoenix and the Turtle fled

In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov'd, as love in twain

Had the essence but in one;

Two distincts, division none;

Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;

Distance and no space was seen

'Twixt this Turtle and his queen:

But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine,

That the Turtle saw his right

Flaming in the Phoenix' sight;

Either was the other's mine.

Property was thus appalled

That the self was not the same;

Single nature's double name

Neither two nor one was called.

Reason, in itself confounded,

Saw division grow together,

To themselves yet neither either,

Simple were so well compounded:

That it cried, How true a twain

Seemeth this concordant one!

Love hath reason, reason none,

If what parts, can so remain.

It is almost as if Shakespeare had studied the logic of Nagarjuna or the eight or none hypotheses of Plato's Parmenides before composing these extraordinary verses.

Among the many literary examples that could be cited, one more will have to suffice. The twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens inscribes a beautiful version of the logic of contradictory identity in his "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":

Two things of opposite nature seem to depend

On one another, as a man depends

On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.

Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace

And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,

A passion that we feel, not understand.

Morning and afternoon are clasped together.

And North and South are an intrinsic couple

And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers

That walk away as one in the greenest body.

In solitude the trumpets of solitude

Are not of another solitude resounding;

A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.

The partaker partakes of that which changes him.

The child that touches takes character from the thing,

The body, it touches. The captain and his men

Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.

Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,

Sister and solace, brother and delight.

Stevens' poem, too, resonates in uncanny ways not only with the verses of Shakespeare's "The Pheonex and the Turtle" but with the paradoxically articulated texts of Heraclitus, of Mahayana Buddhists, and of Nishida.

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