Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#2596 -
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nondual Highlights
Sometimes, a hug is all what we
need. Free hugs is a real life controversial
story of Juan Mann, A man whos sole mission was
to reach out and hug a stranger to brighten up their lives.
In this age of social disconnectivity and lack of human contact,
the effects of the Free Hugs campaign became phenomenal. http://youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4
This is Unimaginable and Unavoidable: Irresponsible Writings on Non-Duality, by Guy Smith, was reviewed ih Highlights #2148: http://www.nonduality.com/hl2148.htm
Now Guy Smith has published a new book: Mystery Not Mastery: Groundbreaking Non-Duality. This issue features a selection from the beginning of the book.
Excerpt from
Mystery Not Mastery: Groundbreaking Non-Duality
by Guy Smith
This text and everything is
nondual. Language is innately dualistic
and therefore cannot express nonduality. Nonduality expresses
regardless of textual dualism, not because of it. Therefore, this
text cannot ‘succeed’, and therefore criticism of it is
nothing other
than truism.
~ ~ ~
This book breaks new ground. (1)
It charts and examines in pioneering
detail the (seeming) evolution of dualisms from wombexistence,
through birth to adulthood, to death and beyond; (2) It proves
irrefutably that senses of self are innate to (apparent)
organismic
functioning (regardless of ‘enlightenment’: they
continue through
enlightenment and only disappear in death); And (3) It elucidates
the
multiple ways in which language thoroughly miscommunicates
nonduality: including the dumbfounding observation that even as
words
say ‘words cannot tell the truth’ they speak as though
they are
telling the truth, and the subversive implications of this for
nondualism. (see note 1) Basically, it’s a comprehensive
guide to
nonduality and the speaking of it; and it includes an
appendix Coral
Reef of Correspondence on the subject.
‘Nondual’ means ‘not
two’ and it refers to the fact that there is no
actual division in reality: no ‘this’, ‘no that’,
no ‘here’, no
‘there’, no ‘now’, no ‘then’, no
‘inside’, no ‘outside’, no ‘mind’,
no ‘matter’, no ‘you’, no ‘not you’,
no ‘real’, no ‘unreal’.
It’s instinctively felt in
the fall of twilight, when visual
diversity disappears as night, as that single blanket of
blackness.
It’s intuitively known in the recreation of a record
playing, when
the babbling hubbub of thought is lulled, to reveal one wash of
presence. And it’s there in the beer, or bottle of wine,
when
everything softens and blends for a time… and then the
unicity is
obvious.
Mystery Not Mastery has
two fundamental characteristics that mark it
out from other (spoken and written) nondualisms. Firstly, it
concerns
with dualism as well as nonduality, to a degree of
detail and reach I
haven’t encountered in other texts. That is to say, it
considers
exactly what the illusion of dualism consists in, how
this illusion
is born, and how it then evolves. Secondly, this book is
literary.
Many texts on nonduality, and on ‘spirituality’, have a
‘lightweight’, even ‘trashy’ feel: in other
words they’re (in part)
characterised by imprecision of expression, imprecision of
concept,
inattention to detail, vagueness, cliché, generalisation,
oversimplification and poverty of prose quality. This is
understandable: nonduality has nothing to do with quality of
expression, and it’s easier to write and read lesser quality
text:
so naturally more of these texts get written and read. This
text, then, is written in the manner that it is, because as far
as I
can see everything that can be said of nonduality with lesser
quality
of expression has already been said (the more limited the
expression,
the less it can express): and there didn’t seem to be any
enjoyment
in just regurgitating this (as some other texts seem happy to
do).(see note 2) To express something with more precision, more
detail, more clarity and more reach, it’s necessary to use a
greater
diversity of vocabulary and literary form; and to make this more
advanced expression more easily accessible, a heightened
attention to
scansion is needed – for example, a fluency of rhythm makes
detailed,
involved, delicate and intricate observations more effortlessly
‘taken in’. All in all then: if you want to say
something subtle or
abstruse, you have to produce something more literary. Please don’t
be put off by this: on the contrary, may it be attractive for you
to
discover things you didn’t know before, things not written
before,
things requiring a little more care than the norm, as it was for
me
writing them. Anyone with a basic level of English can read this,
so
long as they happen to have the inclination to, and don’t
mind the
occasional dip into a dictionary if necessary. What the detailed
and
involved thoughts in this text refer to are actually realities
that
are extremely easy to see: the key is to directly
perceive what the
text is indicating – everything this text claims is entirely
perceivable (and so irrefutable and unsuspicious) – and once
perceived, the idea just vanishes as surplus to requirements.
What’s
more, so long as you’re not skimreading, not forcing the
pace, the
prose has a very smooth, languid, fluid flow to it… it sails
you
along… makes the voyage easy… and it actually doesn’t
matter if you
don’t compute a word of it: like I say, comprehending the
concepts of
a nondualistic text has no bearing on knowing nonduality.
Nonduality
is known when all is seen through: when all is known as
a singular,
nonsubstantial ‘is’. So if, while reading, or in any
other instance,
there’s a sense of omnipresence, oneness or nothingness
–
weightlessness, seamlessness, dislocation or syrupiness – that’s
what’s trying to be indicated here, not the dawning of any
mental
comprehension. I wish you a very lovely read.
Note 1. Throughout this text, the
terms ‘nondual’ and ‘nonduality’
denote the nondual nature of reality; ‘nondualism’,
and hence
‘nondualist’ and ‘nondualistic’, denote the
attempts to indicate this
nonduality through language; and ‘dual’, ‘dualism’
and ‘dualistic’
refer to the illusion of distinction, division and
multiplicity,
which is synonymous with ‘cognition’ or ‘thought’.
Note 2. I’m not saying that
more throwaway nondualism is less
valuable. Analogous to ‘pubchat’ it has the value of accessibility
–
‘getting a message across’ as easily as possible –
whereas with this
text (analogous to ‘literature’ possibly) the driving
concern is with
creating a more rigorous and rich expression, more detailed and
exploratory: a fuller expression of reality. Having ‘done’
more
throwaway literary forms in This Is Unimaginable and Unavoidable
(my
first book), I instinctively craved something new.
~ ~ ~
Read more from and order Mystery Not Mastery at http://snipurl.com/xcby