Reason or Revelation?
As we seemingly progress toward the heart of the Teaching, by which I am referring to most of the forms of nondual spirituality, we come to understand a fundamental truth. While our brain is an either/or machine, Reality is not set up to accommodate it.
The brain works pretty much like a computer does–in a binary language through which it composes a binary world. It perceives this self-invented world as being a series of opposites, and believes that life is a harrowing journey from a certain beginning to an uncertain end. During the course of this life we make a long series of perilous choices between 0 or 1, off or on, black or white, hot or cold, large or small, male or female, and on and on.
The only problem with that assessment is that it’s not true. It’s the assessment, and the agreement by which almost all of us operate, but it’s simply not true, and its not sustainable.
Nondual teaching, by any name, views the world as temporary, as illusion, as dream. With as complete an understanding that we have at any moment about this fundamental truth, the wisest among us then proceed in our daily affairs to operate as if it’s not true. We move in the world with the practical strategy that everything counts--how we live, love, consume, discard–the entire spectrum of human life.
And…
We simultaneously experience the sure knowing that ultimately nothing matters. Everything is already just as it should be.
Being Truth, coming to experientially know our True Nature, no matter how much or how little the preparation, or through which gateway it occurs, in the end comes only by way of revelation.
Operating skillfully within our day to day lives is chiefly accomplished through reason–but it is reason that has been informed by revelation. The more informed Awakeness becomes about Itself, the more skillfully it shows up in and as the relative world. Our job is develop the willingness to give up the body to the body that we might take on the world as Awakeness.
Spiritual truth, by which I mean Reality, is never about 0 or 1, off or on. Truth is always about 0 and 1, off and on, black and white, hot and cold, and on and on. It’s never either/or. It’s always both/and.
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