Today I am going to get back to basics. I am going to describe how to abide in nondual awareness, as much as that can be described. Nondual Awareness is indescribable. To describe something you have to stand back from it. There has to be some distance between you and what you are describing. Yet there is no distance between what we are and nondual awareness. We cannot stand back from nondual awareness. That is an impossibility. Yet this is what I am attempting today.
If I were to use Christian language I would call this dwelling in the Kingdom of God or living in the Kingdom of Heaven. Kingdom of Heaven is the term Jesus used and is probably better translated the Spiritual Realm. This is also called living in the Spirit or walking in the Spirit or abiding in Christ or simply being in Christ.
The first thing I need to say here that this is not an experience. There are spiritual experiences, and I have had some, as have most people who have been on a spiritual journey for any length of time. The apostle Paul lists his spiritual experiences, which he calls “visions and revelations from the Lord.” He describes one with the words “whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know. God knows.” So there are a lot of spiritual experiences.
Some spiritual seekers are experience junkies. Just like some people travel the world seeking new and fresh adventures or engage in extreme sports looking for a peak experience, some spiritual adventurers seek exotic or profound spiritual experiences to add to their spiritual resumes. They can list off the spiritual teachers they have learned from and groups they have been a part of.
There is no shortage of spiritual experiences to be had and spiritual insights to be discovered. If that is what you want, you can spend your life accumulating them for your spiritual scrapbook. But nondual awareness is not one more experience to be had. Nor is it the culmination of all experience or the highest of all experiences. Nondual awareness is that in which all experiences – including spiritual experiences – occur.
Christians will talk about a conversion experience or a born again experience. They will talk about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I have experienced that when I became what is commonly called a born-again Christian or an evangelical Christian. But nondual awareness is much deeper than that. It is what Jesus was really meant when he spoke of being born of the Spirit.
Rather than calling it an experience I would call it a shift in perspective. It is seeing everything and experiencing everything from a unitive perspective as everything. We are used to seeing everything from a personal perspective, as individual separate beings. Nondual awareness is stepping back from the self and seeing from the perspective of the Whole, which some people would call the Self with a capital S, but I think is better described as Non-Self or the All.
One ceases to be as a separate entity and is nothing in the sense of not a thing. Yet at the same time one is everything. One is the All. We seem to be all separate things, yet we see that these separate things are actually nothing. They are phantoms, a temporary collection of particles or energy or waves whatever the universe is made of. All these things exist in a spacious Presence, and one knows without a doubt that one is that spacious Presence.
This may sound like I am describing a dramatic spiritual experience. The funny thing is – and it is literally funny because sometimes I just I burst out laughing – the funny thing is this feels entirely ordinary. It is not an extraordinary experience at all. It is what we have always known, but as a separate entity we did not see it. Who we really are has always seen and known at a deep level. We have always been this One Reality but did not know ourselves as this. So it is not an experience. It is a realization, a recognition, a revelation. It is a waking up from what we aren’t to notice what we are.
It feels like remembering something long forgotten. It is a shift in identity. From the age of two or so we have been conditioned to believe that we are separate beings with a name and a body and a history, and are different from other persons with different names and bodies and histories. But deep within is the knowledge that we are really not a separate person with a name, body and history. We have simply forgotten.
So really it is a type of amnesia. That is why novels and films about amnesia are fascinating to me. We all have amnesia. We have forgotten who and what we were when we were small and before we were born. We have been brainwashed during our early years into thinking we are something that we are not. Spiritual awakening is literally waking up from that false identity to see our true identity. When we wake up, we realize that at a deep level we have always known who we were. We just did not realize that we knew.
After awakening it is simply a matter of abiding in our true nature. When first seeing this, we see it constantly, even though we cannot describe it. But in time the old patterns of thinking try to reassert themselves. But they never completely succeed in luring us back into forgetfulness. We cannot unsee our True Nature. But the false identity seeks to reestablish a foothold in our life.
That false self reasserts itself. That is when some people think they have lost it. They think they were enlightened, but now are not. So they start to think that Nondual Awareness is just another experience that comes and goes. But the truth is you haven’t lost it. It is here always. It is like the air that is always present though you may not consciously think about it. It is like the ground under our feet. Tillich called it the Ground of Being. We do not think about the ground, but at some level we always know it is there. It literally grounds us.
It is like a vast reservoir beneath the surface of everyday human consciousness. The water table is always right under our feet. It is just a matter of digging. Jesus used this analogy when talking to a woman at a well. He talks about Eternal Life as a spring of Living Water flowing up from within us. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Nondual Awareness is always within us. It is just a matter of whether we drink from this spring or let it sit unconscious under the surface of life.
I sense this – intuit this – nondual awareness always. This Presence is never not present. How could presence not be present? What I really am is never not present. I am this Presence. It is just a matter of whether this awareness is at the forefront of our human consciousness or in the background. Often it is in the background, but it takes no effort at all to notice this, pay attention to this, and live as this.
This might again sound like I am describing some dramatic experience, but it is not. It is amazingly ordinary. Ordinary life. The familiar Zen saying puts it well: “In the beginning, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; later on, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers; and still later, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.” Like Schrodinger's cat which is both alive and dead, mountains and rivers are always both mountains and rivers and not mountains and rivers.
Everyone alive knows this at some level, no matter how deeply it has been suppressed. They just don’t experience it at the level of ordinary consciousness. So how do you abide in this nondual awareness? How do you abide in Christ or dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven? Everyone has had a taste of this, no matter how small. So the key is to return to that taste and enlarge it. Abide in that taste no matter how small until it grows into full consciousness.
I compare it to a tiny hole that opens into the Kingdom of heaven. The eye of a needle is what Jesus called it. He also called it the narrow gate. You may only be able to fit one finger through that gate into the kingdom of Heaven, but that is enough to start with. Do that and wiggle your finger to enlarge the opening. In fact what you are doing is not enlarging the opening so much as making yourself smaller like Alive in Wonderland. Make yourself smaller and smaller. Less and less ego. Less self. Identify less and less with your personal separate self, because the self will never fit into the Kingdom of God. You need to leave it behind completely to enter the Kingdom of God. Jesus said to deny your self. Let your self dissolve into the vapor which is what it really is anyway.
However you want to picture it – enlarge the opening or decrease your self to fit into the opening – do that. Until you find yourself where you always have been, inside the Kingdom of God. Then we see that the Kingdom of God is everywhere, including the regular world of day to day existence. Then it is no effort to abide in it at all times. We cannot NOT abide in it.
You know what it is like after you go on a retreat, and you have to return home. You want to bring the spiritual feeling from that retreat back with you into your ordinary life, but you find it quickly fading away. You have lost that sense of spirituality. That is because you have confused the Kingdom with a feeling, an experience, a place, a discipline, a schedule, or a teacher. So you feel like you have to go on another retreat to get it back again.
The truth is that you never lost it. You just lost sight of it. It is still here now, because there is only here now. Return to that which is deeper than experience. That core sense of the Kingdom – Kingdom consciousness - may seem tiny. Jesus compared it to a mustard seed. But it you pay attention to it, meditate within it, then the Kingdom of Heaven will grow from that seed into everyday consciousness.
The Kingdom of Heaven is here now always and everywhere. You know that. You simply need to recognize that knowledge and abide in that knowledge and live in that knowledge and live out of that knowledge and awareness. It is not difficult. In fact it is simple and ordinary. How difficult is it to be who you are?