PRIME POST! Why Nondual Teachings Are So Confusing

One of the most confounding aspects of nondual teachings—for both adherents and teachers—is the language. The deck is stacked against all of us. For one thing, most of us are following Eastern teachings. There are most certainly Western enlightenment teachings–I’m a great admirer of Socrates, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Emerson, just to name a few of them. But take it from me, the Western Way is not a broad one. It’s difficult stuff for me, and I’m used to what’s generally considered to be difficult material.

And while most of us grew up as Westerners, we did not grow up as philosophers or academics. Given how deep and dedicated we have to dig to root out Western enlightenment teachings beyond Plato, it’s understandable that we’re actually more comfortable with Eastern teachings and methods than we are with a Greek or Greek-inspired path. Those of you who were flower children—and there’s a whole big bunch of us old hippies who’ve found these teachings—will almost surely be more comfortable with what has come from India, Tibet, China, and Japan, because we cut our teeth on that stuff in the 60’s and 70’s.

So our teachings do not stem from either a European culture or a European language. Thus we are two steps behind before we ever open a book. I don’t mind telling you that I know pretty much squat about Sanskrit. I have several books and dictionaries, but I have never had the time or courage to really jump in. The only languages I can think of that I know even less about are Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese. Those are whole other worlds.

Even though I don’t know anything about Greek either, at least I understand something about their history and culture. I’ve read a good deal on both of those things, but more importantly, all of Western history and culture were birthed by Greeks. Most of us are living in updated Greek culture. One can’t profess to have a real understanding of 21^st century European or American culture unless one has a fairly good grasp of 5^th century Athens. (Granted the Greeks had some help from the Egyptians, but that’s a whole other story.)

I know from my experience with hundreds of clients and students that I am far from alone in my ignorance. My ignorance is not the exception, it is the rule. That’s not the case with all Western nondual teachers, but it’s the case for most of them, and odds are that it’s the case for you. So we don’t approach nondual teachings on a level playing field. We arrive in a linguistic and cultural hole.

Moving now beyond the cultural divide and the linguistics, let’s look at the subject matter. We are talking about the single most slippery teachings on planet earth. Next time around I hope I’m a nuclear physicist, or a quantum biologist, or something that is equally simple—at least they are if you compare them to the trials of studying and teaching truth. Science is all about the truth, but it does not focus on truth itself. They can tell you all about how to measure, harness, or overcome the forces that run our planet, but they cannot tell you what it is that’s measuring, harnessing, or overcoming.

Enter the mystic. Here’s a good online definition, with which I agree, of what a mystic is.

A person who claims to attain, or believes in the possibility of attaining, insight into mysteries transcending ordinary human knowledge, as by direct communication with the divine or immediate intuition in a state of spiritual ecstasy.

It’s that “transcending ordinary human knowledge” thing that really throws us, don’t you think? In other words, the primary reason we can’t talk to each other freely about nonduality is because it can’t be talked about. Nondual truth—your own true nature—is prior to language. The moment we open our mouths, we’ve lost. I don’t know if this will make any sense to you, but the reason that talking about enlightenment doesn’t work very well is that, in essence, we have to leave it to talk about it!

Most people, probably the clever ones, throw in the towel fairly early on this maddening pathless path, and go find an easier, vaguer, more symbolic, more social—and decidedly less direct path. Certainly I, and apparently you are not that smart.

There is another group, perhaps the most astute of us all, which upon weighing the obstacles and opportunities of prancing through the Gateless Gate, will assign the task of enlightenment to a future life—one in which we’re not so damn busy. Perhaps we could work it into the very same future life where we’re going to teach ourselves to fly backwards, which is slightly easier.

There’s yet another challenge we face in regard to these teachings. The subject, and thus the teachings about the subject, are both paradoxical. So even if you can figure out how to talk sort of about truth, you discover that it can’t be pinned down.

Is it this way, or is it that way? It’s both. Oh, thank you. Do things work like this, or like that? It depends on the situation. Please. For god’s sake, it even depends on who’s asking! Where we’re asking from will determine who it is that’s asking. We have a number of non-locatable “locations” to choose from.

1. Relative
2. Witness
3. Universal
4. Absolute

You see, the funny thing about our experience is that it will completely differ, contingent upon the observer. Reality doesn’t change, but our experience of it does. Reality is unmoving and unchanging, but our experience of it is all over the map. Oddly enough, who the observer is, and what the observer will find, is determined by where the observer is looking from.

We all love to think that there’s some nice, furry, objective truth out there somewhere, but that’s a lunatic fantasy. Not only that, but it’s a lunatic fantasy that the great, vast majority of our planet’s population is utterly lost in, but not more than about 99.99% of it. That’s doing real math, not just grabbing a thoughtless number.

The kicker is that they don’t want to be shaken from it. They are not only lost in it, they are sold on it! Thus they will accuse us of being inane and insane if we dare to share our precious philosophical beliefs and experience with the great unwashed.

I remember how, in early awakening, I would find it so exciting to walk into a Walmart and look at all the sleep walkers. The odds were incredibly high that I was the only one in the whole place who could be said (particularly by himself) to be a consciously awake being. I also recall how crestfallen I was when I figured out I was also the only one there who gave a shit.

The price of going sane is that in the West you will likely go there very nearly alone. Thank the gods for the Internet! Our numbers are considerable, but our percentage of the population is abysmal.

I went through the first 3 ½ years of awakening without any support beyond mass media—books and recordings. I did not have a single friend who was interested in this field, and I did not have a teacher. At first I didn’t have the humility to even think about getting one, and then once I reached the point where my frustration overrode my pride, I couldn’t afford one. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anybody. It was simultaneously the most wonderful and agonizing time of my life. In some ways it made my experience of living as a drunken and dying park bum look like, well, like a walk in the park!

Really clear teachers, by which I mean not only consciously awake teachers, but maturely awake teachers, do not register the relative phenomena of separation. They appear to be in the same world they always appeared to be in, but they are experiencing that world completely differently. I’m not saying they look around and see everything bleeding into everything else (at least not often—I certainly have seen it), because we are talking about Oneness, not sameness. It’s not quite this simple, but, essentially, Oneness experiencing itself as sameness is what we call the Void. Oneness experiencing itself as diversity is what we call manifestation.

See how slippery this is? The reason I bring this up, is that mature awake beings have no problem whatsoever in moving—in the space of a single paragraph—from the relative to the universal and back again. They often don’t even register the change of position, because they don’t experience a change of position. An authentic, mature spiritual teacher is not doing what I spent years doing in post-awakening. I refer here to my trying to figure out if I was, at the end of the day, the little man, or the Vastness—damn it!

I knew I had to be one or the other, which is precisely why I could never resolve the problem. I was operating under a false assumption. I’m not one or the other, I’m both. The relative is a bona fide view, and so is the universal. In between the two I spent quite a long time in what we call the witness state, which I’ll comment on.

Being that early-awakening-stage witness can make for an exciting time, yet it’s the only one of the four “locations” that is not true. Ultimately the witness will be seen to be just another thought. Or maybe that won’t be seen by some individuals, but that still doesn’t keep it from being just another thought. It’s a thought, plain and simple. There is no true thought, and the witness is not an exception to that rule. There are no exceptions.

You will not be bothered by having a teacher speak from the true Absolute view very often. When teachers declare they are seeing and speaking from the Absolute view, they are most often confusing the universal view, which they know about, with the Absolute view, on which they are not clear. I did it for years myself, so I am not throwing stones; I’m just pointing out potential pitfalls.

It is this moving up and down the scale of non-locatable locations that makes satsang, books, videos, and transcripts so incredibly confusing. For one thing, the teacher is not the only one moving up and down that scale. You, the listener, are doing so as well. This is along the lines of what a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, told us about rivers. It was he who first told us that “we never step in the same river twice.” However, he neglected to tell us that the thing which steps in the river—meaning you—is never twice the same either.

It is this same phenomenon that makes teachers appear to contradict themselves. If your spiritual teacher doesn’t ever contradict herself, then your spiritual teacher is not trying hard enough to stretch the boundaries of transmission. However, we adherents tend to think of contradiction as a weakness in the teaching, and will sometimes leave the very teacher we need the most. Life is hard, but there are no mistakes, so don’t fret.

I think I’m done with this. Whenever I write a new piece I am reminded of a quote from Leonardo da Vinci. “Art,” he said, “is never finished, only abandoned.”