What
is Nonduality - Nondualism - Advaita?
Jerry Katz, editorEncylopedia Britannica article
Traditional
Various
authors and teachers
Brief
Explications
Lengthier
Explications
From What
Is Enlightenment magazine
From 'A Brief History of Everything', by Ken Wilber
Secondary
Nondualism and Ultimate Nondualism of Da Free John
Meeting
the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists and the Art
of the Self, by Anne Carolyn Klein
The
Rotten Root, by Drew Hempel
Advaita
Vedanta web site FAQ
The following exchange comes from Ken Wilber's
book A Brief History of Everything. This excerpt is the
entire contents of Chapter 13 from the book, and a
conversation that I thought was so succinct in explaining
and describing the nature of the causal and non-dual
conditions and processes that I thought I would include
it as part of my web page. Now I don't really have
permission from Ken to do this, so if you like what you
read here, please go out and and buy the book! --Phil
Servedio
A Brief History of Everything, by Ken Wilber
Realms of the Superconscious: Part 2
Q: You said that with the archetypes, you are looking
into the Face of the Divine, the first Forms of the
Divine. Most modern researchers reject all of
that as "mere metaphysics" at best, none of
which can be verified.
KW: First, you yourself must perform this experiment and
look at the data
yourself. Then you can help interpret it. If you don't
perform the experiment--the meditative injunction, the
exemplar, the paradigm--then you don't have the data from
which to make an interpre- tation.
If you take somebody from the magic or mythic worldview,
and you try to explain to them that the sum of the
squares of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the
squares of the hypotenuse, you won't get very far. What
you are doing cannot be seen in the empirical world. It
doesn't have simple location. And yet you are correct.
You are performing an experiment in interior awareness,
and your mathematical results can be cheeked by all those
who perform the same interior experiment. It's very
public, very reproducible, very fallibilist, very
communal knowledge: its results exist in the rational
worldspace and can be readily checked in that space by
all who learn the experiment.
Just so with any of the other interior experiments in
awareness, of which meditation is one of the oldest, most
tested, and most reproduced. So if you're skeptical,
that's a healthy attitude, and we invite you to find out
for yourself, and perform this interior experiment with
us, and get the data, and
help us interpret it. But if you won't perform the
experiment, please don't ridicule those who do. And by
far the most common interpretation of those who have seen
this data is: you are face to face with the Divine.
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Fulcrum-9: The Causal
Q: You mentioned that these subtle or archetypal Forms
issue directly from Emptiness, from the causal, which is
the next stage, fulcrum-9.
KW: When, as a specific type of meditation, you pursue
the observing Self, the Witness, to its very source in
pure Emptiness, then no objects arise in consciousness at
all. This is a discrete, identifiable state of
awareness--namely, unmanifest absorption or cessation,
variously known as nirvikalpa samadhi, jnana samadhi,
ayin, vergezzen, nirodh, classical nirvana.
This is the causal state, a discrete state, which is
often likened to the state of deep dreamless sleep,
except that this state is not a mere blank but rather an
utter fullness, and it is experienced as such--as
infinitely drenched in the fullness of Being, so full
that no manifestation can even begin to contain it.
Because it can never be seen as an object, this pure Self
is pure Emptiness.
Q: That's all very abstract. Could you be more concrete
about this?
KW: You are aware of yourself in this moment, yes?
Q: I think so.
KW: So if I say, Who are you?, you will start to describe
yourself--you are a father, a mother, a husband, a wife,
a friend; you are a lawyer, a clerk, a teacher, a
manager. You have these likes and dislikes, you prefer
this type of food, you tend to have these impulses and
desires, and so on.
Q: Yes, I would list all the things that I know about
myself.
KW: You would list the "things you know about
yourself."
Q: Yes.
KW: All of those things you know about yourself are
objects in your awareness. They are images or ideas or
concepts or desires or feelings that parade by in front
of your awareness, yes? They are all objects in your
awareness.
Q: Yes.
KW: All those objects in your awareness are precisely not
the observing Self. All those things that you know about
yourself are precisely not the real Self. Those are not
the Seer; those are simply things that can be seen. All
of those objects that you describe when you
"describe yourself" are actually not your real
Self at all! They are just more objects, whether internal
or external, they are not the real Seer of those objects,
they are not the real Self. So when you describe your-
self by listing all of those objects, you are ultimately
giving a list of mistaken identities, a list of lies, a
list of precisely what you ultimately are not.
So who is this real Seer? Who or what is this observing
Self?
Ramana Maharshi called this Witness the I-I, because it
is aware of the individual I or self, but cannot itself
be seen. So what is this I-I, this causal Witness, this
pure observing Self?
This deeply inward Self is witnessing the world out
there, and it is witnessing all your interior thoughts as
well. This Seer sees the ego, and sees the body, and sees
the natural world. All of those parade by "in
front" of this Seer. But the Seer itself cannot be
seen. If you see anything, those are just more objects.
Those objects are precisely what the Seer is not, what
the Witness is not.
So you pursue this inquiry, Who am I? Who or what is this
Seer that cannot itself be seen? You simply "push
back" into your awareness, and you dis-identify with
any and every object you see or can see.
The Self or the Seer or the Witness is not any particular
thought--I can see
that thought as an object. The Seer is not any particular
sensation--I am aware of that as an object. The observing
Self is not the body, it is not the mind, it is not the
ego--I can see all of those as objects. What is looking
at all those objects? What in you right now is looking at
all these objects--looking at nature and its sights,
look- ing at the body and its sensations, looking at the
mind and its thoughts? What is looking at all that?
Try to feel yourself right now--get a good sense of being
yourself-- and notice, that self is just another object
in awareness. It isn't even a real subject, a real self,
it's just another object in awareness. This little self
and its thoughts parade by in front of you just like the
clouds float by through the sky. And what is the real you
that is witnessing all of that? Witnessing your little
objective self? Who or what is that?
As you push back into this pure Subjectivity, this pure
Seer, you won't see it as an object--you can't see it as
an object, because it's not an object! It is nothing you
can see. Rather, as you calmly rest in this observing
awareness--watching mind and body and nature float
by--you might begin to notice that what you are actually
feeling is simply a sense of freedom, a sense of release,
a sense of not being bound to any of the objects you are
calmly witnessing. You don't see anything, you simply
rest in this vast freedom.
In front of you the clouds parade by, your thoughts
parade by, bodily sensations parade by, and you are none
of them. You are the vast expanse of freedom through
which all these objects come and go. You are an opening,
a clearing, an Emptiness, a vast spaciousness, in which
all these objects come and go. Clouds come and go,
sensations come and go, thoughts come and go--and you are
none of them; you are that vast sense of freedom, that
vast Emptiness, that vast opening, through which
manifestation arises, stays a bit, and goes.
So you simply start to notice that the "Seer"
in you that is witnessing all these objects is itself
just a vast Emptiness. It is not a thing, not an object,
not anything you can see or grab hold of. It is rather a
sense of vast Freedom, because it is not itself anything
that enters the objective world of
time and objects and stress and strain. This pure Witness
is a pure Emptiness in which all these individual
subjects and objects arise, stay a bit, and pass.
So this pure Witness is not anything that can be seen!
The attempt to see the Witness or know it as an
object--that's just more grasping and seeking and
clinging in time. The Witness isn't out there in the
stream; it is the vast expanse of Freedom in which the
stream arises. So you can't get hold of it and say, Aha,
I see it! Rather, it is the Seer, not anything that can
be seen. As you rest in this Witnessing, all that you
sense is just a vast Emptiness, a
vast Freedom, a vast Expanse--a transparent opening or
clearing in which all these little subjects and objects
arise. Those subjects and objects can definitely be seen,
but the Witness of them cannot be seen. The Witness of
them is an utter release from them, an utter Freedom not
caught in their turmoils, their desires, their fears,
their hopes.
Of course, we tend to identify ourselves with these
little individual subjects
and objects--and that is exactly the problem! We identify
the Seer with puny little things that can be seen. And
that is the beginning of bondage and
unfreedom. We are actually this vast expanse of Freedom,
but we identify with unfree and limited objects and
subjects, all of which can be seen, all of which suffer,
and none of which is what we are.
Patanjali gave the classic description of bondage as
"the identification of the Seer with the instruments
of seeing"--with the little subjects and objects,
instead of the opening or clearing or Emptiness in which
they all arise.
So when we rest in this pure Witness, we don't see this
Witness as an object. Anything you can see is not it.
Rather, it is the absence of any subjects or objects
altogether, it is the release from all of that. Resting
in the pure witness, there is this background absence or
Emptiness, and this is "experienced," not as an
object, but as a vast expanse of Freedom and Liberation
from the constrictions of identifying with these puny
little subjects and objects that enter the stream of time
and are ground up in that
agonizing torrent.
So when you rest in the pure Seer, in the pure Witness,
you are invisible. You cannot be seen. No part of you can
be seen, because you are not an object. Your body can be
seen, your mind can be seen, nature can be seen, but you
are not any of those objects. You are the pure source of
awareness, and not anything that arises in that
awareness. So you abide as awareness.
Things arise in awareness, they stay a bit and depart,
they come and they go. They arise in space, they move in
time. But the pure Witness does not come and go. It does
not arise in space, it does not move in time. It is as it
is; it is ever-present and unvarying. It is not an object
out there, so it never enters the stream of time, of
space, of birth, of death. Those are all experiences, all
objects--they all come, they all go. But you do not come
and go; you do not enter that stream; you are aware of
all that, so you are not caught in all that. The Witness
is aware of space, aware of time--and is therefore itself
free of space, free of time. It is timeless and
spaceless--the purest Emptiness through which time and
space parade.
So this pure Seer is prior to life and death, prior to
time and turmoil, prior to space and movement, prior to
manifestation--prior even to the Big Bang
itself. This doesn't mean that the pure Self existed in a
time before the Big Bang, but that it exists prior to
time, period. It just never enters that stream. It is
aware of time, and is thus free of time--it is utterly
timeless. And because it is timeless, it is
eternal--which doesn't mean everlasting time, but free of
time altogether.
It was never born, it will never die. It never enters
that temporal stream. This vast Freedom is the great
Unborn, of which the Buddha said: "There is an
unborn, an unmade, an uncreate. Were it not for this
unborn, unmade, uncreate, there would be no release from
the born, the made, the created." Resting in this
vast expanse of Freedom is resting in this great Unborn,
this vast Emptiness.
And because it is Unborn, it is Undying. It was not
created with your body, it will not perish when your body
perishes. It's not that it lives on beyond your body's
death, but rather that it never enters the stream of time
in the first place. It doesn't live on after your body,
it lives prior to your body, always. It doesn't go on in
time forever, it is simply prior to the stream of time
itself.
Space, time, objects--all of those merely parade by. But
you are the Witness, the pure Seer that is itself pure
Emptiness, pure Freedom, pure Openness, the great
Emptiness through which the entire parade passes, never
touching you, never tempting you, never hurting you,
never consoling you.
And because there is this vast Emptiness, this great
Unborn, you can indeed gain liberation from the born and
the created, from the suffering of space and time and
objects, from the mechanism of terror inherent in those
fragments, from the vale of tears called samsara.
Q: I can get a brief taste of that as you talk about it.
KW: Most people can connect fairly quickly with the
Witness. Living from that Freedom is something else.
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Q: How does that Witness relate to the causal
unmanifest?
KW: The Witness is itself the causal unmanifest. It is
itself pure Emptiness.
And if, as a yogic endeavor, you actually keep inquiring
intensely into the source, into the pure Subjectivity of
this Seer, then all objects and subjects
will simply cease to arise at all. And that would be
nirvikalpa or cessation--an actual yogic state, a
discrete state (it is, in fact, the fusion phase of
fulcrum-9). This is pure formless mysticism--all objects,
even God as a perceived form, vanish into cessation, and
so deity mysticism gives way to formless mysticism.
Because all possible objects have not yet arisen, this is
a completely unmanifest state of pure Emptiness. What you
actually "see" in this state is infinite
nothing, which simply means that it is too Full to be
contained in any
object or any subject or any sight or any sound. It is
pure consciousness, pure awareness, prior to any
manifestation at all--prior to subjects and objects,
prior to phenomena, prior to holons, prior to things,
prior to anything. It is utterly timeless, spaceless,
objectless. And therefore it is radically and infinitely
free of the limitations and constrictions of space and
time and objects--and radically free of the torture
inherent in those fragments.
It is not necessary to pursue the Witness in that
particularly yogic fashion, but it can be done, and it
does point up the unmanifest source of the Seer itself.
This is why many traditions, like Yogachara Buddhism,
simply equate Emptiness and Consciousness. We needn't get
involved in all the technical details and arguments about
that, but you get the general point--the Witness itself,
pure Consciousness itself, is not a thing, not a process,
not a quality, not an entity--it is ultimately
unqualifiable--it is ultimately pure Emptiness.
Q: Why is it called the "causal"?
KW: Because it is the support or cause or creative ground
of all junior dimensions. Remember that we saw, as
Whitehead put it, that "the ultimate
metaphysical principle is the creative advance into
novelty." Creativity is part of the basic ground of
the universe. Somehow, some way, miraculously, new holons
emerge. I say out of Emptiness, but you can call that
creative ground whatever you want. Some would call it
God, or Goddess, or Tao, or Brahman, or Keter, or Rigpa,
or Dharmakaya, or Maat, or Li. The more scientifically
oriented tend to prefer to speak simply of the
"self-transcending" capacity of the universe,
as does Jantsch. That's fine. It doesn't matter. The
point is, stuff emerges. Amazing! Miraculous by any other
name.
Emptiness, creativity, holons--and that is exactly where
we started our account in chapter I. These holons arise
as subject and object, in both singular and plural
forms--that is, the four quadrants--and they follow the
twenty tenets, which is simply the pattern that
manifestation displays as it arises, a pattern that is a
potential of Emptiness, a potential of the Dharmakaya, a
potential of the Godhead. And with that pattern of twenty
tenets, off we go on the evolutionary drive of holons
returning to their source.
That pattern embodies a creative drive to greater depth,
greater consciousness, greater unfolding, and that
unfolding ultimately un- folds into its own infinite
ground in pure Emptiness. But that Empti- ness is not
itself an emergent, it is rather the creative ground,
prior to time, that was present all along, but finally
becomes transparent to itself in certain holons that
awaken to that Emptiness, to that Spirit, to that
groundless Ground.
That same Emptiness, as Consciousness, was present all
along as the interior depth of every holon, a depth that
increasingly shed its lesser forms until it shed forms
altogether--its depth goes to infinity, its time goes to
eternity, its interior space is all space, its agency is
the very Divine itself: the
ground, path, and fruition of Emptiness.
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The Nondual
Q: So this causal unmanifest--is it the absolute end
point? Is this the end of time, the end of evolution, the
end of history? The final Omega point?
KW: Well, many traditions take this state of cessation to
be the ultimate state, the final end point of all
development and evolution, yes. And this end state is
equated with full Enlightenment, ultimate release, pure
mrvana.
But that is not the "final story," according to
the Nondual traditions. Because at some point, as you
inquire into the Witness, and rest in the Witness, the
sense of being a Witness "in here" completely
vanishes itself, and the Witness turns out to be
everything that is witnessed. The causal gives way to the
Nondual, and formless mysticism gives way to nondual
mysticism. "Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is
Form."
Technically, you have dis-identified with even the
Witness, and then integrated it with all
manifestation--in other words, the second and third
phases of fulcrum-9, which leads to fulcrum-10, which is
not really a separate fulcrum or level, but the reality
or Suchness of all levels, all states, all conditions.
And this is the second and most profound meaning of
Empti- ness--it is not a discrete state, but the reality
of all states, theSuchness of all states. You have moved
from the causal to the Nondual.
Q: Emptiness has two meanings?
KW: Yes, which can be very confusing. On the one hand, as
we just saw, it is a discrete, identifiable state of
awareness--namely, unmanifest absorption or cessation
(nirvikalpa samadhi, ayin, jnana samadhi, nirodh,
classical nirvana). This is the causal state, a discrete
state.
The second meaning is that Emptiness is not merely a
particular state among other states, but rather the
reality or suchness or condi- tion of all states. Not a
particular state apart from other states, but the reality
or condition of all states, high or low, sacred or
profane, ordinary or extraordinary.
Q: We already discussed the discrete state; now the
Nondual.
KW: Yes, the "experience" of this nondual
Suchness is similar to the nature unity experience we
earlier discussed, except nowthis unity is experienced
not just with gross Form out there, but also with all of
the subtle Forms in here. In Buddhist terms, this is not
just the Nirmanakaya--gross or nature mysticism; and not
just the Sambho- gakaya--subtle or deity mysticism; and
not just the Dharmakaya-- causal or formless mysticism.
It is the Svabhavikakaya--the integration of all three of
them. It is beyond nature mysticism, beyond deity
mysticism, and beyond formless mysticism--it is the
reality or the Suchness of each, and thus integrates each
in its embrace. It em- braces the entire spectrum of
consciousness--transcends all, includes all.
Q: Again, rather technical. Perhaps there's a more direct
way to talk about Nondual mysticism?
KW: Across the bo ard, the sense of being any sort of
Seer or Witness or Self vanishes altogether. You don't
look at the sky, you are the sky. You can taste the sky.
It's not out there. As Zen would say, you can drink the
Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, you can swallow the
Kosmos whole--precisely because awareness is no longer
split into a seeing subject in here and a seen object out
there. There is just pure seeing. Consciousness and its
display are not-two.
Everything continues to arise moment to moment--the
entire Kosmos continues to arise moment to moment--but
there is nobody watching the display, there is just the
display, a spontaneous and luminous gesture of great
perfection. The pure Emptiness of the Witness turns out
to be one with every Form that is witnessed, and that is
one of the basic meanings of "nonduality."
Q: Again, could you be even more specific?
KW: Well, you might begin by getting into the state of
the Wit- ness--that is, you simply rest in pure observing
awareness--you are not any object that can be seen--not
nature, not body, not thoughts-- just rest in that pure
witnessing awareness. And you can get a certain
"sensation" of that witnessing awareness--a
sensation of freedom, of release, of great expanse.
While you are resting in that state, and
"sensing" this Witness as a great expanse, if
you then look at, say, a mountain, you might begin to
notice that the sensation of the Witness and the
sensation of the mountain are the same sensation. When
you "feel" your pure Self and you
"feel" the mountain, they are absolutely the
same feeling.
In other words, the real world is not given to you
twice--one out there, one in here. That
"twiceness" is exactly the meaning of
"duality." Rather, the real world is given to
you once, immediately--it is one feeling, it has one
taste, it is utterly full in that one taste, it is not
severed into seer and seen, subject and object, fragment
and fragment. It is a singular, of which the plural is
unknown. You can taste the mountain; it is the same taste
as your Self; it is not out there being reflected in
here--that duality is not present in the immediateness of
real experience. Real experience, before you slice it up,
does not contain that duality--real experience, reality
itself, is "nondual." You are still you, and
the mountain is still the mountain, but you and the
mountain are two sides of one and the same experience,
which is the one and only reality at that moment.
If you relax into present experience in that fashion, the
separate self-sense will uncoil; you will stop standing
back from life; you will not have experience, you will
suddenly become all experience; you will not be "in
here" looking "out there"--in here and out
there are one, so you are no longer trapped "in
here."
And so suddenly, you are not in the bodymind. Suddenly,
the bodymind has dropped. Suddenly, the wind doesn't blow
on you, it blows through you, within you. You are not
looking at the mountain, you are the mountain--the
mountain is closer to you than your own skin. You are
that, and there is no you--just this entire luminous
display spontaneously arising moment to moment. The
separate self is no- where to be found.
The entire sensation of "weight" drops
altogether, because you are not in the Kosmos, the Kosmos
is in you, and you are purest Empti- ness. The entire
universe is a transparent shimmering of the Divine, of
primordial Purity. But the Divine is not someplace else,
it is just all of this shimmering. It is self-seen. It
has One Taste. It is nowhere else.
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Q: Subject and object are nondual?
KW: You know the Zen koan, "What is the sound of one
hand clapping?"
Usually, of course, w e need two hands to clap--and that
is the structure of typical experience. We have a sense
of ourselves as a subject in here, and the world as an
object out there. We have these "two hands" of
experience, the subject and the object. And typical
experience is a smashing of these two hands together to
make a commotion, a sound. The object out there smashes
into me as a subject, and I have an experience--the two
hands clap together and experience emerges.
And so the typical structure of experience is like a
punch in the face. The ordinary self is the battered
self--it is utterly battered by the universe "out
there." The ordinary self is a series of bruises, of
scars, the results of these two hands of experience
smashing together. This bruising is called
"duhkha," suffering. As Krishnamurti used to
say, in that gap between the subject and the object lies
the entire misery of humankind.
But with the nondual state, suddenly there are not two
hands. Suddenly, the subject and the object are one hand.
Suddenly, there is nothing outside of you to smash into
you, bruise you, torment you.
Suddenly, you do not have an experience, you are every
experience that arises, and so you are instantly released
into all space: you and the entire Kosmos are one hand,
one experience, one display, one gesture of great
perfection. There is nothing outside of you that you can
want, or desire, or seek, or grasp--your soul expands to
the corners of the universe and embraces all with
infinite delight. You are utterly Full, utterly
Saturated, so full and saturated that the bound- aries to
the Kosmos completely explode and leave you without date
or duration, time or location, awash in an ocean of
infinite care. You are released into the All, as the
All--you are the self-seen radiant Kosmos, you are the
universe of One Taste, and the taste is utterly infinite.
So what is the sound of that one hand clapping? What is
the taste of that One Taste? When there is nothing
outside of you that can hit you, hurt you, push you, pull
you--what is the sound of that one hand clapping?
See the sunlight on the mountains? Feel the cool breeze?
What is not utterly obvious? Who is not already
enlightened? As a Zen Master put it, "When I heard
the sound of the bell ringing, there was no I, and no
bell, just the ringing." There is no twiceness, no
twoness, in immediate experience! No inside and no
outside, no subject and no object--just immediate
awareness itself, the sound of one hand clapping.
So you are not in here, on this side of a transparent
window, looking at the Kosmos out there. The transparent
window has shattered, your bodymind drops, you are free
of that confinement forever, you are no longer
"behind your face" looking at the Kosmos--you
simply are the Kosmos. You are all that. Which is
precisely why you can swallow the Kosmos and span the
centuries, and nothing moves at all. The sound of this
one hand clapping is the sound the Big Bang made. It is
the sound of supernovas exploding in space. It is the
sound of the robin singing. It is the sound of a
waterfall on a crystal-clear day. It is the sound of the
entire manifest universe--and you are that sound.
Which is why your Original Face is not in here. It is the
sheerest Emptiness or transparency of this shimmering
display. If the Kosmos is arising, you are that. If
nothing arises, you are that. In either case, you are
that. In either case, you are not in here. The window has
shattered. The gap between the subject and object is
gone. There is no twiceness, no twoness, to be found
anywhere--the world is never given to you twice, but
always only once--and you are that. You are that One
Taste.
This state is not something you can bring about. This
nondual state, this state of One Taste, is the very
nature of every experience before you slice it up. This
One Taste is not some experience you bring about through
effort; rather, it is the actual condition of all
experience before you do anything to it. This uncontrived
state is prior to effort, prior to grasping, prior to
avoiding. It is the real world before you do anything to
it, including the effort to "see it non-
dually."
So you don't have to do something special to awareness or
to experience in order to make it nondual. It starts out
nondual, its very nature is nondual--prior to any
grasping, any effort, any contrivance. If effort arises,
fine; if effort doesn't arise, fine; in either case,
there is only the immediacy of One Taste, prior to effort
and non-effort alike.
So this is definitely not a state that is hard to get
into, but rather one that is impossible to avoid. It has
always been so. There has never been a moment when you
did not experience One Taste--it is the only constant in
the entire Kosmos, it is the only reality in all of
reality. In a million billion years, there has never been
a single second that you weren't aware of this Taste;
there has never been a single second where it wasn't
directly in your Original Face like a blast of arctic
air.
Of course, we have often lied to ourselves about this, we
have often been untruthful about this, the universe of
One Taste, the primordial sound of one hand clapping, our
own Original Face. And the nondual traditions aim, not to
bring about this state, because that is impossible, but
simply to point it out to you so that you can no longer
ignore it, no longer lie to yourself about who you really
are.
Q: So this nondual state--does this include the duality
of mind and body, of Left and Right?
KW: Yes. The primordial state is prior to, but not other
to, the entire world of dualistic Form. So in that
primordial state there is no subject and object, no
interior and exterior, no Left and no Right. All of those
dualities continue to arise, but they are relative
truths, not absolute or primordial truth itself. The
primordial truth is the ringing; the relative truth is
the "I" and the "bell," the mind and
the body, the subject and the object. They have a certain
relative reality, but they are not, as Eckhart would say,
the final word.
And therefore the dilemmas inherent in those relative
dualisms cannot be solved on the relative plane itself.
Nothing you can do to the "I" or the
"bell" will make them one; you can only relax
into the prior ringing, the immediacy of experience
itself, at which point the dilemma does not arise. It is
not solved, it is dissolved--and not by reducing the
subject to the object, or the object to the subject, but
by recognizing the primordial ground of which each is a
partial reflection.
Which is why the dilemmas inherent in those
dualisms--between mind and body, mind and brain,
consciousness and form, mind and nature, subject and
object, Left and Right--cannot be solved on the relative
plane--which is why that problem has never been solved by
conventional philosophy. The problem is not solved, but
rather dis- solved, in the primordial state, which
otherwise leaves the dualisms just as they are,
possessing a certain conventional or relative reality,
real enough in their own domains, not but absolute.
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The Immediacy of Pure Presence
Q: Are there any orthodox or mainstream Western
philosophers who
recognize nonduality?
KW: I always found it fascinating that both William James
and Bertrand Russell agreed on this crucial issue, the
nonduality of subject and object in the primacy of
immediate a wareness. I think this is very funny, because
if you can find something that these two agreed on, it
might as well be coming straight from God, so I suppose
we can embrace nonduality with a certain confidence.
Russell talks about this in the last chapters of his
great book, A History of Western Philosophy, where he
discusses William James's notion of "radical
empiricism." Now we have to be very careful with
these terms, because "empiricism" doesn't mean
just sensory experience, it means experience itself, in
any domain. It means immediate prehension, immediate
experience, immediate awareness. And William James set
out to demonstrate that this pure nondual immediate- ness
is the "basic stuff" of reality, so to speak,
and that both subject and object, mind and body, inside
and outside, are all derivative or secondary. They come
later, they come after, the primacy of immediateness,
which is the ultimate reality, as it were.
And Russell is quite right to credit James with being the
first "mainstream" or "accepted"
philosopher to advance this nondual position. Of course,
virtually all of the mystical or contemplative sages had
been saying this for a few millennia, but James to his
eternal credit brought it crashing into the mainstream .
. . and convinced Russell of its truth in the process.
James introduced this nondual notion in an essay called
"Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" And he answered
that consciousness does not exist, which has confused
many people. But his point was simply that if you look at
consciousness very carefully, it's not a thing, not an
object, not an entity. If you look carefully, you'll see
that consciousness is simply one with whatever is
immediately arising--as we saw with the mountain, for
example. You as a subject do not see the mountain as an
object, but rather, you and the mountain are one in the
immediacy of the actual experience. So in that sense,
consciousness as a subjective entity does not exist--it's
not a separate something that has an experience of a
separate something else. There is just One Taste in the
immediateness of experience.
So pure experience is not split into an inside and
outside--there is no twiceness, no twoness, about it! As
James characteristically put it, "Experience, I
believe, has no such inner duplicity."
And notice that duplicity has the meaning of both
"twoness" and "Iying." The twoness of
experience is tl~e fundamental lie, the primordial
untruthfulness, the beginning of ignorance and deception,
the beginning of the battered self, the beginning of
samsara, the beginning of the lie lodged in the heart of
infinity. Each and every experience, just as it is,
arrives as One Taste--it does not arrive fractured and
split into a subject and an object. That split, that
duplicity, is a lie, the fundamental lie, the original
untruthfulness--and the beginning of the "small
self," the battered self, the self that hides its
Original Face in the forms of its own suffering.
Small wonder that D. T. Suzuki, the great Zen scholar,
said that James's radical empiricism (or nondual
empiricism) was as close as the West had gotten to
"no-mind" or Emptiness. That's perhaps too
strong, but you get the point.
Russell had a rather thin understanding of the fact that
the great contemplative philosopher-sages--from Plotinus
to Augustine to Eckhart to Schelling to Schopenhauer to
Emerson--had already solved or dissolved this
subject/object duality. But aside from that misunder-
standing, Russell introduces James's great accomplishment
in a very
clear fashion:
The main purpose of this essay ("Does
'Consciousness' Exist?") was to deny that the
subject-object relation is funda- mental. It had, until
then, been taken for granted by philoso- phers that there
is a kind of occurrence called "knowing," in
which one entity, the knower or subject, is aware of
another, the thing known or the object (the "two
hands" of experience). The knower was regarded as a
mind or soul; the object known might be a material
object, an eternal essence, another mind, or, in
self-consciousness, identical with the knower. Almost
everything in accepted philosophy was bound up with the
dualism of subject and object. The distinction of mind
and matter and the traditional notion of
"truth," all need to be radically reconsidered
if the distinction of subject and object is not accepted
as fundamental.
To put it mildly. And then Russell adds, "For my
part, I am con- vinced that James was right on this
matter, and would on this ground alone, deserve a high
place among philosophers."
Q: So they both caught a glimpse of nonduality.
KW: I think so, yes. It's fairly easy to catch at least a
brief glimpse of nonduality. Most people can be
"talked into it," as we were doing a moment
ago, and at least get a little taste of it. And I think
this is exactly what William James did with Bertrand
Russell, in person, which is what Russell himself
reports. Right after he says, "I am convinced that
James was right on this matter," Russell adds,
"I had thought otherwise until he persuaded me of
the truth of his doctrine." I think James just
pointed it right out to him! See the mountain? Where is
your mind? Mind and mountain . . . nondual!
Q: So they were onto a taste of Zen? A taste of the
Nondual?
KW: Well, a glimmer, a taste, a hint of the nondual--this
is easy enough to catch. But for the Nondual traditions,
this is just the beginning. As you rest in that
uncontrived state of pure immediateness or pure freedom,
then strange things start to happen. All of the
subjective tendencies that you had previously identified
with--all of those little selves and subjects that held
open the gap between the seer and the seen--they all
start burning in the freedom of nonduality. They all
scream to the surface and die, and this can be a very
interesting period.
As you rest in this primordial freedom of One Taste, you
are no longer acting on these subjective inclinations, so
they basically die of boredom, but it's still a death,
and the death rattles from this liberation are very
intense. You don't really have to do anything, except
hold on--or let go--they're both irrelevant. It's all
spontaneously accomplished by the vast expanse of
primordial freedom. But you are still getting burned
alive, which is, gosh, just the most fun you can have
without smiling.
Fundamentally, it doesn't matter what type of experience
arises-- the simple, natural, nondual, and uncontrived
state is prior to experi- ence, prior to duality, so it
happily embraces whatever comes up. But strange things
come up, and you have to stay with this "effortless
effort" for quite some time, and die these little
deaths constantly, and this is where real practice comes
into view.
Neither James nor Russell did this, and it clearly shows
in both of their philosophies. Russell announces that he
completely agrees that the subject and the object are
derivative to primordial awareness. And then, in his own
life, he promptly goes right back to identifying with the
derivative subject, with the derivative self, with the
little rational mind, and he constructs his analytic
philosophy based on this lie, based on this duplicity.
What good is that? He doesn't have a clue where this
nondual state will actually lead.
Even James doesn't penetrate into this primordial state
with much profundity, and so his radical empiricism
degenerated very rapidly into sensory phenomenalism,
which collapses into Right Hand empir- icism and
pragmatism--an extremely disappointing development,
American to the core. Although this certainly doesn't
detract from the amazing first steps that he took.
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Enlightenment
Q: You said nonduality doesn't reject dualism on its own
level.
KW: No, that would miss the point completely. These
dualisms-- between
subject and object, inside and outside, Left and
Right--will still arise, and are supposed to arise. Those
dualities are the very mechanism of manifestation.
Spirit--the pure immediate Suchness of reality--manifests
as a subject and an object, and in both singular and
plural forms--in other words, Spirit manifests as all
four quad- rants. And we aren't supposed to simply
evaporate those quadrants-- they are the radiant glory of
Spirit's manifestation.
But we are supposed to see through them to their Source,
their Suchness. And a quick glimpse won't do it. This One
Taste has to permeate all levels, all quadrants, all
manifestation. And precisely because this is the simplest
thing in the world, it is the hardest. This effortless
effort requires great perseverance, great practice, great
sincerity, great truthfulness. It has to be pursued
through the waking state, and the dream state, and the
dreamless state. And this is where we pick up the
practices of the nondual schools.
Q: Does "Enlightenment" mean something
different in these schools?
KW: Yes, in a sense. There are two rather different
schools about this "Enlightened" state,
corresponding to the two rather different meanings of
"Emptiness" that we discussed.
The first takes as its paradigm the causal or unmanifest
state of absorption (nirvikalpa, nirodh). That is a very
distinct, very discrete, very identifiable state. And so
if you equate Enlightenment with that state of cessation,
then you can very distinctly say whether a person is
"fully Enlightened" or not.
Generally, as in the Theravadin Buddhist tradition and
the Samkhya yogic schools, whenever you enter this state
of unmanifest absorption, it burns away certain lingering
afflictions and sources of ignorance. Each time you fully
enter this state, more of these afflictions are burned
away. And after a certain number and type of these
entrances--often four--you have burned away everything
there is to burn, and so you can enter this state at
will, and remain there permanently. You can enter nirvana
permanently, and samsara ceases to arise in your case.
The entire world of Form ceases to arise.
But the Nondual traditions do not have that as their
goal. They will often use that state, and often master
it. But more important, these schools--such as Vedanta
Hinduism and Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism--are more
interested in pointing out the Nondual state of Suchness,
which is not a discrete state of awareness but the ground
or empty condition of all states. So they are not so much
interested in finding an Emptiness divorced from the
world of Form (or samsara), but rather an Emptiness that
embraces all Form even as Form continues to arise. For
them, nirvana and samsara, Emptiness and Form, are
not-two.
And this changes everything. In the causal traditions,
you can very definitely say when a person is in that
discrete state. It is obvious, unmistakable. So you have
a clearly marked yardstick, so to speak, for your
Enlightenment.
But in the Nondual traditions, you often get a quick
introduction to the Nondual condition very early in your
training. The master will simply point out that part of
your awareness that is already nondual.
Q: How, exactly?
KW: Very similar to when we were talking about the
Witness, and I sort of "talked you into" a
glimpse of it; or even further with the nondual One Taste
of you and the mountain. The Nondual traditions have an
enormous number of these "pointing out
instructions," where they simply point out what is
already happening in your awareness anyway. Every
experience you have is already nondual, whether you
realize it or not. So it is not necessary for you to
change your state of consciousness in order to discover
this nonduality. Any state of consciousness you have will
do just fine, because nonduality is fully present in
every state.
So change of state is not the point with the Nondual
traditions. Recognition is the point. Recognition of what
is always already the case. Change of state is useless, a
distraction.
So you will often get an initiation taste, a pointing
out, of this Nondual state that is always already the
case. As I said, I think this is exactly what James did
with Russell, in a small way. Look at immediate awareness
closely, and you will see that subject and object are
actually one, are already one, and you simply need to
recognize it. You don't have to engineer a special state
in which to see this. One Taste is already the nature of
any state, so pretty much any conscious state will do.
Q: It's simply pointed out.
KW: Yes. You've seen those silly newspaper puzzles,
something like, "There are fifteen Presidents of the
United States hidden in this picture of the ocean. Can
you spot all fifteen?"
Q: The comedian Father Guido Sarducci has a joke on
those-- "Find the Popes in the Pizza."
KW: We'll get in trouble here! Maybe we better stick with
Presi- dents, who are used to being blankly humiliated.
The point in these games is that you are looking right at
all the faces. You already have everything in
consciousness that is required. You are looking right at
the answer--right at the Presidents' faces-- but you
don't recognize them. Somebody comes along and points
them out, and you slap your head and say, Yes, of course,
I was look- ing right at it.
Same with the Nondual condition of One Taste. You are
looking right at it, right now. Every single bit of the
Nondual condition is fully in your awareness right now.
All of it. Not most of it, but absolutely all of it is in
your awareness right now. You just don't recognize it. So
somebody comes along and simply points it out, and you
slap your head--Yes, of course, I was looking right at it
all along.
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Q: And this happens in the training?
KW: Yes. Sometimes right at the beginning, sometimes down
the line a bit, but this transmission is crucial.
But the central point we were discussing is that, because
this Nondual condition is the nature or suchness of any
and all states--because this Emptiness is one with
whatever Forms arise--then the world of Form will
continue to arise, and you will continue to relate to
Form. You will not try to get out of it, or away from it,
or suspend it. You will enter it fully.
And since Forms continue to arise, then you are never at
an end point where you can say, "Here, I am fully
Enlightened." In these traditions, Enlightenment is
an ongoing process of new Forms arising, and you relate
to them as Forms of Emptiness. You are one with all these
Forms as they arise. And in that sense, you are
"enlightened," but in another sense, this
enlightenment is ongoing, because new Forms are arising
all the time. You are never in a discrete state that has
no further development. You are always learning new
things about the world of Form, and therefore your
overall state is always evolving itself.
So you can have certain breakthrough Enlightenment
experiences--satori, for example--but these are just the
beginning of an endless process of riding the new waves
of Form as they ceaselessly arise. So in this sense, in
the Nondual sense, you are never "fully"
Enlightened, any more than you could say that you are
"fully educated." It has no meaning.
Q: Some of these Nondual traditions, particularly the
Tantra, get pretty wild.
KW: Yes, some of them get pretty wild. They are not
afraid of samsara, they ride it constantly. They don't
abandon the defiled states, they enter them with
enthusiasm, and play with them, and exaggerate them, and
they couldn't care less whether they are higher or lower,
because there is only God.
In other words, all experiences have the same One Taste.
Not a single experience is closer to or further from One
Taste. You cannot engineer a way to get closer to God,
for there is only God--the radical secret of the Nondual
schools.
At the same time, all of this occurs within some very
strong ethical frameworks, and you are not simply allowed
to play Dharma Bums and call that being Nondual. In most
of the traditions, in fact, you have to master the first
three stages of transpersonal development (psychic,
subtle, and causal) before you will even be allowed to
talk about the fourth or Nondual state. "Crazy
wisdom" occurs in a very strict ethical atmosphere.
But the important point is that in the Nondual
traditions, you take a vow, a very sacred vow, which is
the foundation of all of your training, and the vow is
that you will not disappear into cessation-- you will not
hide out in nirvana, you will not evaporate in nirodh,
you will not abandon the world by tucking yourself into
nirvikalpa. Rather, you promise to ride the surf of
samsara until all beings caught in that surf can see that
it is just a manifestation of Emptiness. Your vow is to
pass through cessation and into Nonduality as quickly as
possible, so you can help all beings recognize the Unborn
in the very midst of their born existence.
So these Nondual traditions do not necessarily abandon
emotions, or thoughts, or desires, or inclinations. The
task is simply to see the Emptiness of all Form, not to
actually get rid of all Form. And so Forms continue to
arise, and you learn to surf. The Enlightenment is indeed
primordial, but this Enlightenment continues forever, and
it forever changes its Form because new Forms always
arise, and you are one with those.
So the call of the Nondual traditions is: Abide as
Emptiness, embrace all Form. The liberation is in the
Emptiness, never in the Form, but Emptiness embraces all
forms as a mirror all its objects. So the Forms continue
to arise, and, as the sound of one hand clapping, you are
all those Forms. You are the display. You and the
universe are One Taste. Your Original Face is the purest
Emptiness, and therefore every time you look in the
mirror, you see only the entire Kosmos.
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