Integrating Nondual Awareness Into Everyday Life

I got an email a while ago from a listener who asked about integrating unitive awareness into everyday life. Let me read you part of what he wrote:

“The act of remembering to let go and live out of one's True Self seems to be part of integrating unitive awareness into everyday life. But could you speak about your process of integration? Is it more or less a process of remembering - to be more aware of when one experiences separation/suffering, and creating positive feedback loops for returning to a state of unitive awareness? Or, is it based on having faith? If so, is faith the deep knowing of this nondual reality, like a pool that exists within us and we can always return to? I'd love to hear your thoughts.”

So that is what I  address in this episode. 

Transcript

I got an email a while ago from a listener who asked about integrating unitive awareness into everyday life. Let me read you part of what he wrote:

“The act of remembering to let go and live out of one's True Self seems to be part of integrating unitive awareness into everyday life. But could you speak about your process of integration? Is it more or less a process of remembering - to be more aware of when one experiences separation/suffering, and creating positive feedback loops for returning to a state of unitive awareness? Or, is it based on having faith? If so, is faith the deep knowing of this nondual reality, like a pool that exists within us and we can always return to? I'd love to hear your thoughts.”

So that is what I am going to address today. It is a topic that I think about but do not write or speak about much. That is because it is not that clear to me how this integration happens. At least not in a way that can be put into words. It is happening. I can see it happening. I see the difference between now and ten years ago when unitive awareness was first seen in a direct way. But how it unfolds and is incorporated into life is hard to explain.

Let me share a little bit about those first few months in the summer and autumn of 2012 after this nondual awareness happened. At first I did not know what to think. Actually I was not thinking about it at all. It had nothing to do with thinking. It was – and is still – simply being without thinking. That is what nondual or unitive awareness is. Thinking is a dualistic activity. Thinking has to do with distinguishing one thing from another and myself from others. It is about naming and organizing and categorizing. 

Unitive awareness is none of those things. It is consciousness. It is a seeing thorough the illusion of a separate self and abiding in awareness as all and in all. There is no way that this can be thought about because as soon as you think about it, you have already stepped back from it. For those first days and weeks I did not speak about it because I couldn’t speak about it. As the Tao Te Ching says: “Those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know.”

That knowing without speaking was complete just the way it is. I did not feel the need to speak about it. But after a while I began to think about it, and write about it, and speak about it. And that was also complete also in its own way. The thinking and the writing and the speaking came from the wholeness and was part of the wholeness, even though it could not adequately express the wholeness. 

I quickly found out that speaking did not communicate this reality very well. I preached some sermons about nondual awareness, which I later compiled into a book entitled Living Presence. From the feedback I received from my congregation I knew that I was not communicating to my people. They did not hear what I was trying to say. I think this is what Jesus meant when he so often added the words “He who has ears to her, let him hear.” 

After a few sermons of failing to communicate, I settled for what I could communicate, which was more standard Christian fare that was easier to hear. And that was fine. But I wanted to communicate to people about this unitive awareness.  So I wrote my first book Experiencing God Directly: The Way of Christian Nonduality” in 2013 and other books. Then after retirement I started my podcast and YouTube videos, which is where I am today.

So that is how I integrated nondual awareness into my ministry, but I still haven’t addressed how to integrate this into everyday life. So let me talk a bit about that now. These last ten years have been a time of integration. The best metaphor that comes to mind is the image of a flower unfolding. When the bud first begins to open, it seems like a sudden difference. The Light of God begins shining into the deepest recesses of one’s being and one sees clearly that there is no separation between oneself and God and everything else. 

Then it is a process of adjusting one’s eyes to the light, light eyes adjusting to the light after coming out of a dark room. One’s brain tries it best to make sense of this new reality. It tries to understand. That is what the brain does. It tries to understand what cannot be understood. And it is important to know that one never understands it better. One just finds some ideas and words that seem to approximate it better.  

Integration is not so much understanding it with the mind. It is never understood. The terms spiritual growth or maturity don’t even apply. Ultimate Reality does not grow. It is here now in all its fullness. It is just as much present whether one knows it or not, or is aware of it or not or is aware AS it or not. It is not a matter of the human self somehow assimilating the Divine Self into itself. That is impossible. It is more like transferring one’s sense of identity from the small illusory self to the big Real self. 

It feels like a shift in perspective or focus, like shifting one’s focus to the background rather than the foreground. It feels a bit like changing seats in a car from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat. But instead of switching seats the human self realizes it was never in the driver’s seat to start with; it just thought it was.  It notices that it has always just been along for the ride and rests into that. 

With that shift the drama of life drops away. One might say it is a matter of having faith in the Driver, which is not you. You might say that is the role of faith. At the same time one realizes that one is not the human self anyway, so there is no one to have faith. There is only the Driver. It is simply being mindful as and living out of one’s True Self, the Deeper Self, which is the One Self of the Universe, the Only Self, which we call God. 

This recognition (which literally means re-knowing) is both instantaneous and at the same time it is a process. It takes no time at all, and yet it appears to unfold over time. How does this integration occur? I don’t know. Jesus compared it to a field that is sown with seed and grows even though the farmer does not know how it happens. My mind does not know how it happens. But it happens. There is nothing I as a human self does to facilitate it or to make it happen or even to let it happen. 

People sometimes ask if I have a practice of prayer or meditation. I respond that I do, but it is not a fixed discipline. It comes and goes as needed. Doing it seems to help sometimes and not doing it seems to help. That spiritual practice has changed over the last ten years. Now my meditation is seldom a time set aside to sit alone cross-legged on a cushion, even though I still do that sometimes. 

Now meditation is a continual practice. It is incorporated into everyday living. It happens throughout the day as I am walking, and sitting on my porch and doing chores. Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Peace is every step you take.” All life is meditation. Meditation is not something you do. It is life. For example meditation involves noticing that I am the consciousness in other creatures. In other people, in animals, in insects. I look into the eyes of an egret on the beach and I recognize myself. I am the consciousness in all living things, from the lizard on the sidewalk to the insects to trees and plants. I am the Life in all lives. I am Being behind all existence. Abiding in that awareness is meditation.

The same with prayer. I do not pray with words much anymore, although sometimes I do that. Now it is more silently directing thoughts and emotions and intentions to God. Like the trees direct their attention upward toward light, so my emotions are directed toward God. Prayers without the need for words. It is much more natural and efficient. The Spirit praying through us with groans too deep for words is how the apostle Paul describes it. It is what he calls prayer without ceasing.

All the while integration just happens without trying to make it happen. Is it a process of remembering? Yes, it feels like recognizing what I have always known but didn’t consciously realize it. So it is kind of recovering deep memory. The practice of mindfulness seems helpful. But mindfulness seems to be more a fruit of this awareness rather than a cause. It is living out of the Mind of Christ rather than the human mind. It is Divine consciousness rather than human consciousness.

Where does faith fit in? Christians talk a lot about faith, but what Christians normally mean by faith is a dualistic activity and very different than unitive awareness. Christians tend to use the word faith to refer to something an individual person exercises toward God. So it is by definition dualistic. Faith ca be seen as trusting the Divine Self and letting go of the human self, and then seeing that there is no one to let go in the first place! There is only God. Trusting that unitive reality is faith. 

I see faith as walking in this nondual awareness of what I really am. One might call it a moment-to-moment choice not to retreat back into our dualistic form of living, but it feels more natural than that. There is no choice I make. The choice just happens. It is grace. There seems to be a choice to live in the Spirit and trust the Spirit. But it is not a choice the self makes because there is no self. So it is a paradox. 

All this is a natural process. Unitive awareness is our natural state. It is as natural to living things as growing, as natural as flying is to birds and swimming is to fish. No need to be plan how to integrate it or be anxious about it if it is not happening as we think it should. Just let it be as it is. It is happening as it must. It can happen no other way. That is how integration happens all by itself – or as we Christians say – by the grace of God.