Tag: spirituality

Nonduality & Meeting the Meta-Crisis IV

The Crisis of Being

March’s Parts level is the most elementary. But the examination of raw data cannot by itself get us where we need to go. If we make inferences from data, ecological simulations, stripping out social, economic, or political conditions, what we get from NASA, the USGS, the UNFCCC, is a systems level report on climate and planetary overshoot. If we look to social science, economics, population studies, politics, public health, or the American Psychological Association, we get reports implicating a much wider field of crisis. If we back out even further to an evolutionary view, we get much closer to a contemplation of the unquantifiable, something much deeper than objective measures can reveal. Buried in the human psyche, nonduality merges the philosophical, cognitive, subjective, inter-subjective and spiritual dimensions of a micro and macro-crisis of Being.

That crisis of Being is the dualistic view itself. It has accompanied humanity throughout history, most recently accelerated by the Enlightenment. At its heart is what Terry Patten calls the Cornucopian Myth of endless material abundance. Each of us is integral to its creation and propagation, most especially to the modern supposition that we are rational actors separate from the world, that ‘problems,’ disturbances, imbalances, are identified and can be solved in a techno-bureaucratic way. The fact that many now identify duality as a mother principle is a long-overdue signal of its demise. Indy Johar speaks of duality as self-terminating; it contains the seeds of its own demise. To fully engage with nonduality, not to mention science, helps us see the depth of our entanglement with each other and the world and how deeply we are embedded in dualism. It is our default first principle, the primary delusion. We are automatically dominated by it.

Dualism is reaching exhaustion. There seems no end to the negative externalities, the violence it has wrought and continues to wreak. We want to believe the ethic of Enlightenment, rationalism, Cartesian dualism, can be uprooted, or at least that we must override it before we destroy ourselves. Despite all the benefits we now take for granted, we begin to realize that the world has never conformed to such an imposition and is now demonstrating in ever larger and immediate ways this flaw in our framework of reality. Continued exclusive reliance on duality as a first principle does not serve the biosphere. Persistently seeking solutions based on the premises of the past are only accelerating our descent toward collapse. To remain actors shackled to this Prime Directive took on the character of insanity long ago.

Since the world reflects to us that it is beyond our control, we must dispatch a critique that regards the world as manageable. Since political commitments derive directly from epistemic conditions, we need a radical reformation of our critical framework, not a renewed resolve to address single issues in tired piecemeal fashion. That is the sense in which duality is the crisis, because it induces us to misinterpret the nature of phenomena, which then gives birth to secondary delusions. We may find guidance in this unattributed observation, “If you don’t have a critique of capitalist modernity, you are contextually irrelevant. If all you have is a critique, you are spiritually impoverished.” In other words, a grasp of the nondual view is a platform for action required to unwind from duality in authentic, spontaneous, creative, and inclusive ways.

The Great Unraveling, as the Post Carbon Institute calls it, in its cultural, philosophical, metaphysical, economic, political, and social dimensions, is entirely the consequence of the dualistic view. A swamp of delusions is inexorably swallowing us up in an apotheosis of profound conflict. The familiar signposts that help us address it are disappearing. We must consider ourselves lost. I am often reminded of an observation made by Tom Atlee, an environmental, peace and social activist:

Everything is getting better and better and worse and worse, faster, and faster.

Yes, there have been a multitude of benefits flowing from the dualist view. And there may be disagreement about what is getting better and what is getting worse. But ‘faster and faster’ does not go on forever. Duality has brought with it rationalism and innovation but has also brought privatization and the growing weight of externalities. Add to this the more recent relentless, destructive, and increasingly intrusive commodification of even basic human needs (seed, land, and water), pandemic anomie, the surveillance state, the loss of anonymity, all of which decontextualize us from the sacred, from history, further separating us from nature and our nature. These aspects of the current social order are not accidents. Their roots may be subject to debate, but they are clearly sustained and amplified by an increasingly sophisticated daily avalanche of sympathetic stimulation, algorithms inducing repetitive dopaminergic behaviors along with deliberate deployment of the strongest human emotion, fear, triggering instinctive acts of self-preservation. All of it fosters continued separation. The current order propagates mass neuro-biological arousal and a deepening impairment of our decision-making apparatus, all reinforced by increasingly coercive forms of monetary extraction.

There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges – the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light. 

— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Continuing regression into tribalism and fundamentalism of all kinds, religious, nativist, economic, ethnic, social, and ideological, threaten to unravel built-in constraints on the current social order. Bigotry, whether ethnic, racial, nationalist, or religious, is fundamentalism. All of it is conceptual. It may be explained by science, but none of it is supported by science. The nature of the conflict has become an aggressive, ‘my fundamentalism is stronger than your science.’ The world is either parsed into sharpening binaries to define allegiances in the global culture war as truth itself is systematically assaulted. All conceptual frames are inherently divisive. To express the nondual view is to step entirely out of every category of choice even while acknowledging the underlying motivations.

Since we continue to treat the natural world as a soulless resource, we believe we are entitled to continue cannibalizing it. We live and die at the altar of Growth. We are assaulted by the mantra of a positive future even as we see it being torn from our grasp. There is pervasive disenchantment with the world and a deepening regression into purely subjective pursuits of well-being. This is March’s Parts process, the most reactive character of culture to the illness afoot, becoming a profoundly malignant mass psychosis.

The compounded effect is the atomization of culture. We are turned into isolated units of production and consumption, while Process, the trust, unrestricted learning, community, collective resilience, social cohesion, and faith in our collective capacity is ignored, undermined, or even suppressed. Backlash is also afoot, wherein elites unleash the secret police (with and without badges) tasked with locking in the social order, primitive as it is, locking out dissent, radical new ideas, and the possibility of a more equitable balance of resources. According to Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, a new techno-feudalism is imposed, further stripping meaning from life. If we do not see the psychosis, we are complicit with it. Even when we do see it, it’s virtually impossible to extricate ourselves from it.

We are trapped in a context of meaninglessness, defined by consumerism. But the underpinning of that ethic is that we’re destroying every fabric of life, every aspect of the biosphere. We are infected by a toxic positivity—as well as our entitlement to reap the benefits; the belief that all problems can be solved by human rationality, human exceptionalism, the reduction of reality to statistics. This is the source of the need for ‘hope.’                                                  —Alnoor Lhada

Not that we must redefine hope away from its modern origins. In Lhada’s definition, hope becomes a product of disillusionment and a tool of disempowerment. It’s a derivative delusion distracting us from–or even rejecting–the present, a reversion to an imaginary future based on helplessness and a muddled comprehension of the present. I don’t mean to be simplistic. Hope is quite complex. It could be called fatalism, a conceptual escape, a failure to source our action in embodied experience. There’s an element of denial in hope resulting from an inadequate diagnosis, clinging to an idealized future, a rationalization for what we do not understand.

The nondual view is immediate. Its fullness leaves nothing out. It arises independently of time; we are unconcerned with the past or the future. We are concerned with the timeless. From that view, there is no room for hope. For that matter, there is also no room for fear because both hope and fear draw us away from the immediacy of meaning. Without meaning, we are adrift, “prisoners of context in the absence of meaning,” as Lhada puts it. Nonduality—choosing presence in the presence of hope and fear—becomes the only reliable source of meaning.

The collapse of faith in institutions is real, a result of deliberate intent. Extreme income inequality is the result of deliberate manipulation of tax codes, law, and money. The rising consequences of climate disruption are a result of deliberate poisoning of civic dialogue. War, hunger, and nativism all reflect intentional imposition of systems of dominance, exclusion, and neglect. If we witness the destruction of any common standards for truth-based dialogue, it is the result of intentional manipulation of information systems for the sake of profit over people. On and on. Even the definition of legitimate knowledge is a battleground. This is the world regressing into the most materialistic cognitive frame of reality, not quite, as March would have us believe, edging into the liminal space between the Parts and Process level of engagement with life.

Poverty is the result of manipulation of money systems. By money-power, we mean the constellation of people, organizations, rules, and resources that control the form, issuance, distribution, and demands of monetary systems. We have been manipulated and coerced by that money-power to objectify, commodify, dominate, compete with, externalize, use up, trash, discard and feel numb about life on Earth, including each other’s lives.                

–Jem Bendell

Humankind is honed to a wheel of unending labor. We are captivated by the image of an arduous path of redemption and salvation. We are captured by an impossible utopian ideal: ultimate deliverance into a life of abundance, prosperity, and leisure. Indigenous cosmologies may be exceptions because they are not slaves to growth, but the basic story of modernity is a dogma of separation, aspiration, ascension, and ultimate release from the suffering of the world. Growth, which does not account for impacts on life-support systems, is pursued with the magical thinking of religious fervor. Virtually every aspect of modern culture is predicated on this principle. Economic and social philosophies bend at the knee of perpetual growth and align with a top-down spiritual ethic of continuous improvement.

Progress is the taproot of duality, the primary fuel of the meta-crisis based on the centrality of the individual, an aspiration to become something we are not yet, to nurture and enhance personal well-being at the expense of the collective. The growth principle of perpetual expansion, improvement, and innovation is aligned with and reinforced by religious dogma. In that world, we never fully arrive. We strive to get there, to fully inhabit our exceptionalism. Standing still, the end of aspiration, the end of growth, equals death…or even hell. In Buddhist cosmology, never having enough ishell. The spiritual ideal remains perpetually beyond our grasp. For many, it may only be realized upon death. On the other hand, realization is depicted in Buddhist science as a shedding more than an accumulation, an unwinding, a return to innocence, a relaxation into union with the world, becoming who we are from the inside out. What’s more, in the upper reaches of spiritual accomplishment, instantaneous realization is immediately accessible. There is no attainment. It is here, now.

It is impossible to achieve authentic sustainability with our prevailing economic, political, and cultural operating system if we continue to see the planet as dead matter upon which we impose our organizational talents. In late-stage capitalism, this assumption has become an unsubtle (and de-stabilizing) self-destructive form of control: inverted totalitarianism. The demise of the world is thus prophetic, self-fulfilling. Under the current corporate-state regime, the corruption and termination of planetary life-support systems is pre-ordained.

The nature of reality, the nature of mind, is the opposite of the growth imperative. The whole does not grow, does not seek to grow, nor does it shrink. It is a state of dynamic balance, the transmutation of energy shifting resources back and forth.The emergent nature of our entanglement with the world and each other is not denied. Instead, we are embedded.To embody nature is to be driven to act on behalf of the steady state, the equitable, balanced management of resources to serve and sustain the health of the whole. That steady state is a razors edge between attainment and attachment, a subtle coexistence. Which way we fall in any given moment will determine whether our approach sustains the culture of death or affirms life. That balance is intrinsic to nonduality and liberates us from ongoing insidious colonization by an ideology that extracts and organizes dead matter. We are once again granted meaningful experience.With this guidance, we can elaborate a multitude of ways to manifest this condition.

Nonduality & Meeting the Meta-Crisis III

A literal interpretation of meta-crisis suggests a combination of interdependent factors combining to create stress, most likely leading to, if we do nothing, unmanageable breakdowns. Complexity reaches an ungovernable state, suddenly and unpredictably reverting to a lower level. The various forms of stress reflected in crisis leave considerable leeway concerning its identity, scale, and impact. But one thing is likely: meta infers a superseding principle on a planetary scale. 

The current crisis is an internal one, referring to the collective mind, combining cognitive, philosophical, and spiritual factors having to do with the human relationship with the world; namely, our objectification of it. We have placed ourselves at a distance. We have created conditions categorizing the world as other, permitting us to reject others, to reject waste, to carve up the commons, to create registries of property and to accept the ongoing externalized violence committed in the name of progress.

To look at the crisis within returns us to the world and restores us to its indivisibility. To imagine the planet as more than a visualization, we enter a sensing, intuitive, feeling level intra-action with planetary life beyond the human. Connecting at this scale is the nature of the transition we are in. We are feeling ourselves between worlds now. We’ve not left the old world behind, nor do we see more than the outlines of a new world emerging. But we surely sense ourselves in transition. We are in a liminal, fragile, some might even say treacherous, terrain. What are we to do? A Nigerian proverb declares, “To find our way, we must first become lost.” We cannot embark on any real journey with certainty about where we will arrive, especially when we are wandering between worlds. In some sense, arrival itself is a quaint notion, serviceable at times, but in the broadest sense, not so much. Perhaps we will never arrive. The case of humanity encountering profoundly disturbing and threatening conditions is also not far removed from either the transition of birth, or from receiving a terminal medical diagnosis. Our attention is immediately drawn inward. Shall we live or shall we die? What must die for us to live?

The feelings arising in this circumstance mostly align with what we expect. Feeling our way into an advancing radical condition elicits a flood of anticipation, fear, disorientation, helplessness, confusion, denial and even despair. It’s dawning on us that our lifeboat, the Ark of earth, has been cast adrift. We are tempest-tossed in the sea of the unconscious, reflexively reaching for guidance, for solutions. Ironically, accepting such an analysis produces an inexhaustible supply of abstractions as we grasp for meaning, much of which merely reifies the dilemma. It may be the way our minds work, meta-upon-meta, but abstractions do not explain the heart of the matter and distract us from exploring our innate capacities and a full view of our condition. So, we may resist the first impulse to grasp for medicine. Instead, becoming lost in not-knowing may be the most appropriate first response.

With an initial grasp of the nondual view, we can examine our responses, addressing systemic issues with a measure of confidence and vision. We may realize that while we are on the Ark, we should understand that we arethe Ark, we builtthe Ark. We have made the storm! Humanity is the flood!! There are plenty of signs of breakdown already before even touching the question of flawed human thinking. We can look to Nicholas Lattanzio, Terry Patten, Zak Stein or Daniel Schmachtenberger for deeper context. Many refer to it as a proliferation of rising existential threats. And since the term meta-crisis cannot be reduced to any single one of those threats, it is only by viewing them as interdependent that we arrive at the meta-view. While any of these perspectives may reference a seamless reality, wholeness, the essential definition of nonduality is too often stripped of spirituality with the notable exception of Steve March.

A Developmental Model for Meeting the Meta-Crisis

Steve March is a professional coach and founder of the Alethia Project. He takes a developmental view to coaching and applies it to humanity’s status, which he sees reflected in his model. According to that framework, we are already on a path of realizing deeper states of being and releasing ourselves from the destructive trajectory we are on.

He outlines a hierarchy of four cognitive states with the deepest being nondual awareness. It’s immediately apparent that overlaying this hierarchy upon the meta-crisis also reveals parallels with the common description of experiencing critical illness. We can readily interpret the planetary process as an immersion in a critical illness diagnosis reaching existential proportions.

March’s four categories represent distinct stages of attention and capacity both at a personal and a collective (or cultural) level. They are indicators of ways of thinking and ontological limitations on our grasp of our circumstances. These seem to be so clear and relevant as indicators of background awareness. We sense their potential as a means of intervention, as ways of expanding beyond the limits of category to a deeper comprehension of our condition: wholistic awareness, or nonduality.

March’s Levels of Attention:

·       Depth of Parts: Everything is experienced as separate. Things are nameable, things are structure. Very attached to identity. Assumption that there’s nothing deeper. The inner experience is of parts of self that feel different things, but none of them define us – there’s plenty of room to be more than any single state. Parts work can be very effective in opening more space for hidden sub-personalities to express themselves and become known, to be discharged, helping us become more available for access and participation in a wider field of emotional response.

·       Depth of Process: With a more fluid view of world, everything, including identity, is in constant flux. Internally we connect with a flow of experience. We have a somatic sense that is meaningful, rich, complex – so multifaceted that it’s not easily put into language. The parts level might correspond loosely to a left-brain function. It represents the common rationality of seeing the world as a collection of objects other than oneself, as well as seeing the self as a collection of parts. Even so, gaining objectivity about the Process level, the identity and behavior of those parts can be quite liberating, leading to greater integration of the whole self, more freedom to feel.

·       Depth of Presence/Presence and Absence: In this depth we land in innate wholeness and completeness, that not only can we love but we’re made of love or compassion or relatedness, resilience, creativity, and intuition. This is a realm of innate virtues or qualities that may be acquired or trained on a (superficial) self-improvement path. The deeper path is that we now understand these things are intrinsic. They are what compose us. They can be unfolded, but not diminished or taken away. This level can be viewed as an integration of brain functions, a transcendence of both left and right brain, neither becoming dominant.

·       Depth of Nonduality: At this depth there is no separation. This is the level of source, of oneness. At this level we fully relax into the body, the mystery, without a need for anything to happen. This is the realm of mystical unity and ultimate freedom. The world, experience, are experienced as uninterrupted subject, held in unwavering absolute trust and confidence.

Thinking further about these spheres of contemplation and action, we can glimpse a few of the questions humanity is exploring just now to address the crisis/illness:

·       Self-improvement vs self-unfolding: must we become better people, improved people? Or must we become our authentic selves? Is the crisis or disease process revealing a need to improve how we implement known strategies for addressing dysfunction or that we need an entirely new strategy?

·       Stability vs instability: The meta-crisis is destabilizing. Yet it also calls into question whether there has ever been stability. What is it we are chasing as we pursue stability? A false security? What do we see reflected in our responses to crisis/illness? Can the strategy be modified if it doesn’t seem to be working? Maybe we must redefine stability to become more resilient.

·       Simplicity vs complexity: How do we define these terms? Where do we find balance between them? How do we come down in a measured way off the mountain of complexity into the plains of simplicity?

·       Control vs surrender: If remaining in relationship is a primary value, how does that influence our responses to crisis/illness? What are we surrendering to?

·       Centralized vs decentralized power: Where does our personal or collective agency lie? Are we deluded about what real agency is? What sustains and legitimizes power? How does power become transformational?

We can see the potential to develop a flow of perpetual inquiry to focus attention on these polarities and to explore deeper levels of imagination as either ego or eros drive our responses to the meta-crisis and in the critical illness space. Most people are thinking/experiencing the present moment in relation to crisis at March’s elementary Parts level, with fear, confusion, and reactivity. We are solution-oriented in the most reductive ways, seeking management models without much inquiry into how our view of reality has gotten us here. It’s disembodied.

The Process level of experience, by focusing on somatic responses, a feeling level flow of responses over time introduces a deeper level of inquiry. Seeing ourselves in an ongoing nonlinear, layered experience is also freeing, but it’s still not fully stepping into wholeness. The Presence level is a much more realized way of being that recognizes intrinsic qualities implied and activated by adversity. We can readily see a flow back and forth between these two initial levels in a dynamic process. The character of this balance between parts level and the process level mirrors, according to March, the larger cultural impasse.

Ultimately, developing nondual awareness is the deepest integration of experience—which, ironically, transitions into an escape from ‘experience’ altogether, entering a supreme unity with all, uncontrived, unaffected, living in trust, confidence, and benevolence. This model need not be formalized, although it may become a personal guide to discerning one’s patterns and responses to the shifting circumstances of an advancing illness/crisis, to become more mindful of the opportunities to elevate one’s awareness to a more inclusive, wholistic view.

Despite the psychological nature of March’s model, there can be no doubt that our drift is a spiritual crisis. Others may have differing root beliefs about the dysfunctions driving it all, of overcoming separation, and technical solutions are so appealing. March’s developmental approach addresses the transformational potential of nonduality. The nondual view is personal, spiritual, and collective, transcending and including the dominant cognitive frames of our time.

Nonduality & Meeting the Meta-Crisis

Below is the first in a series of posts, perhaps five, on what the non-dual view implies for our outlook and behavior in relation to the deepening global crisis we are facing. It is meant as an exploration, not necessarily a definitive conclusion.

Humanity is in the grip of a rising confluence of conditions which are becoming more evident, more palpable, and more pressing by the week. Some of these conditions have reached existential proportions. Taken together, they reflect a flawed worldview, a grand delusion generating deep trouble for life on earth. That delusion has us believing, as in the past, that all contingencies will coalesce into a drama wherein we will create new ‘solutions’ to address old problems. This has become magical thinking. I hope, as this commentary continues, it will become clear that this framing itself ispart of the crisis. Not as though we are ineffectual when it comes to exercising influence in the world, just that our earnest efforts cannot continue to spring from within the imaginal realm in which we live. Fortunately, our vision is clearing. We are discerning the magnitude of the consequences of our actions. But we do remain captured by a conception of who (or what) generates influence and how it is propagated. Quite simply, how we see the world is always becoming the world we see. This is the central concern. 

The primary issue addressed here is nonduality. What is this view and how does it implicate action in the world? If embodied nonduality were to replace our old ways of doing things, becoming a primary critical framework, representing our true nature as well as the necessary shift in worldview, then that embodiment, since it implies an end to separation from nature, would naturally direct our action. We would be embarking on an extended, if halting, return to sanity. Perhaps not so immediately away from a dualistic view, but deliberately integrating the non-dual into a wholistic perspective on our presence, which is what Buddhist philosophy says we are already doing anyway. Moreover, that embodiment would not rightly be characterized as a manifestation ofnonduality. We would be exploring the totality of Being itself. It is not even our nature we would become; we would be realizing the nature of nature, becoming actors aligned with the nature of reality itself.

To fully realize the nondual view, though, is not a conceptual event. It is not something to be attained. Just the opposite. It is innate. Few, if any of us, will make such a total and immediate transition to a nondual view of Being. Transition will be gradual, filled with moments of regression and confusion, carefully monitoring our habits of thought and noticing how deeply we are captured by linguistics. But along the way, we will divest ourselves of the very idea of attainment or, for that matter, non-attainment. Nonduality can be described and lived, but it is not an object of persuasion. It arrives with the collapse of intellect, of any distinction between self and the world, between so-called internal and external experience. Granted, this is a radical proposition, but not beyond our grasp.

Acting from the nondual view does not require grounding in any spiritual tradition. But we recognize there is something intrinsically spiritual about it because of this principle of embodiment. There is something deeply resonant about establishing an energetic coherence between earth and sky, between mundane existence and the Divine, the micro and the macro-universe. This is the implication of full embodiment. To establish that coherence is to approach the supreme union found at the heart of all spiritual traditions. That union is expressed in the awakening of the heart itself. No world view nor any conceptual filter is required to enter nondual mind. It is accessible to anyone at any time. Yet also, nondual mind is not just another ‘experience’; it exists beyond experience. Trungpa Rinpoche said our attachment to ‘experience’ is the medium of our capture by the world of suffering. Spiritual development is entirely about interrupting the reflexive (and almost instantaneous) attachment to the matrix of values and beliefs that drive our lives. The issue is also not solely how the nondual view may inform our expression in the world, but also how a worldview confines and inhibits our expression.

Approaching this topic therefore requires three things: 1) that we comprehend the nondual view 2) that we define the Meta-Crisis and realize its mechanics 3) that we understand how the two are related and formulate a new approach to being in—and aligning with—reality.

The Nondual View

Articulating the nondual view is the first principle to resolve toward a more effective engagement with everything. My immersion in nonduality occurred through Vajrayana and Dzogchen practice. According to that tradition, any description of the awakened state defies logic. Its nature transcends logic entirely. But we may apply a simple nomenclature to our experience which can help us grasp the essence of nonduality. The Vajrayana framework of awakening provides perspective on delusion, suffering, the self, happiness, and all the neurotic or self-limiting behaviors and obstacles we face in this interval between birth and death. That framework is distilled into three elements, or ways of understanding our individual and collective journey: Ground (View), Path (Meditation), and Fruition (Conduct).

The Ground is defined as the pure, unconditional, uncorrupted nondual nature of reality, the ontological nature of mind, deeper than any definition of self, undermining the centrality (and existence) of self altogether.  It is the truth of what Buddhists call emptiness, the ultimate nature of phenomena (lacking any intrinsic nature). The Ground is the foundation, the embryonic source, the preconscious substrate in which we are ultimately held. It is the fundamental unity of all things and from which all phenomena spring. Everything is subsumed within it. It is wholly positive. Its nature is unwavering stillness, confidence, and trust.

Path is our experience in the world of form, where we become aware of our internal responses to experience. The evolution of awakening is applied to the interval between birth and death, piercing ignorance, delusion, working with all dimensions of our internal process, arriving at an ever more refined comprehension and resolution of the elements of personality (sensations, perceptions, mental activity, and consciousness) which contribute to deluded states of clinging and repetitive habits we experience as suffering. These elements of what we call personality, our flawed and biased ego-identity, are the primary temporal limitations of our individual and collective lives.

The Fruition is the full realization, the awakened state, the choiceless condition, reflected in our intra-active presence with the world. It is the arrival of supreme confidence and trust in one’s capacities, knowing that, in the words of Nicholas Lattanzio, “you can’t really make a mistake because there is no ‘you’ that could choose to make a mistake.” The culmination of traversing a Path of awakening may take a single life or many lives, even eons of lives if we were measuring by the standards of what we imagine as time. It is the accomplishment of resolution and release from the elements of personality arising in meditation, the dissolution of habitual mental patterns, from the cycle of self-defeating interpretations of sensations and perceptions, of thought and consciousness.

This interval from the first breath to the last is the karmic realm, governed by the law of return. If we look at this seemingly linear course of events through the nondual lens, we realize that in an absolute sense, there is no such thing as isolating a View to cultivate, no Path to traverse, no Conduct to undertake, no Fruition to achieve. Such distinctions are artificial. They are all equally present and completely interpenetrating. To focus on achieving any state of realization is a relative phenomenon, not an absolute. To indulge in such phenomena is part of the ‘self-improvement project’ which captures so many of us. It is the familiar application of antidotes, conceptual remedies (solutions) to what we regard as our flawed view. For the nondual viewer, there is no linear quality to experience whatsoever. To think otherwise would be a self-deception. Within the logic of nonduality, the essence of every phenomenon is none other than the Ground, the nondual state itself. There can be no distinction between such things as ground, path, or fruition. No personality project can exist because everything is already perfect.

This awakened state is the essence nature to which all nondual teachers refer. It can be found or lost to everyday awareness, but since it exists out of time, as the substrate of everything, it is always present, always true. It cannot be lost. It can only be found. It is the bright and empty and fecund interval within every instant, always shining in uncreated beauty, transcending every form of suffering we may inflict upon ourselves. It is a resting place between raw direct experience of the world and the instant of identification with experience, safely labeling and categorizing everything so that it fits within our comfort zone.

Though uncreated, it is intrinsic to all experience. It has no identifiable source. To be more precise, ground, path and fruition are all happening simultaneously. There is no progression from one to another. There is no objective barrier preventing us from experiencing the unity and inseparability of all three, the clarity intrinsic to all three. We cannot even say there is any such thing as experience since it implies a distinction between an apprehend-er and that which is apprehended (subject and object), neither of which can be found.

In this same sense, we can even say there is no such thing as meditation since meditation implies a meditator and something to be meditated upon. In this way, subject-object duality reigns. In nonduality, no such division exists. Even so, in a relative sense, meditation reveals the nature of the world or the nature of mind. We can conjure images of the world we want or focus neurotically on self-improvement. We can extend gratitude, love, healing, and compassion to ourselves or others. We can project a multitude of things.

Meditation is entering the process of creation. Sitting like a mountain I become the sea, then the tree then the silence of abstraction. All mental and existential exigencies climax into a death rattle. Meditation is entering the process of creation. The exact moment of birth of bud to flower, of cloud bursting into rain. It is a natural process in its movement into creativity.

The ground zero where eureka manifests is meditation. It is that swampy Sundarban where man-eating tigers prowl looking for errant minds. Meditation is the moment of the big bang which sent matter oscillating into orbits creating planets and ecosystems, milky ways and blackholes. Meditation is a time warp where thoughts run parallel and in accompaniment falling off the cliffs of illusions. Then there is no parallel left.

Meditation is like the Pied Piper leading away the rats of Hamlin into the sea of ubiquity. Where the cobra folds its fangs and burrows for the winters, there is meditation. Where the sunning cat ponders the dancing wag tail, there is meditation. All that is in the big bang moment of creation, which is also destruction, there is meditation.

      —Meenakshi Negi, Dehradun, India, 2023

The nondual condition has no object of being, no experience-er, nothing to be experienced in an absolute sense. If ground, path, and fruition are in perpetual union, there is no one to meditate, nothing to meditate upon. Whatever we imagine meditation may accomplish, it is already here, arriving directly in the disguise of relative experience. If from the nondual view there is no such thing as meditation, then there is also no such thing as post-meditation. Any division between a moment when we are focusing on relative attributes, any intention, or witnessing all qualities of separation between phenomena dissolve is no longer separate from any other moment. No division of the indivisible can be found. Linear time has dissolved. Our access to the nondual view is complete and uninterrupted. Every moment becomes a meditation or, more accurately, non-meditation.

All binaries collapse. There is no such thing as freedom since there has never been bondage. There is no rest since there has never been fatigue. There is no clarity because there has never been confusion. The same can be said of every apparent polarity by which we distinguish between phenomena, good and evil, friend or foe, pleasurable or painful, constructive, or destructive acts. As we fully examine this field of being, looking beyond duality for the moment, we see no intrinsic value structure nor any means by which to measure phenomena, no code, and no law. All phenomena are thus equal, arising independently and spontaneously from an origin that is no origin whatsoever. Every phenomenon is equal to every other phenomenon. This is not a denial of the imbalances of the world as we know it. It is the basis of the uniform nature of nondual awareness.

Quantum theory supports this view. Karen Barad, in her comprehensive Meeting the Universe Halfway, claims no evidence to confirm phenomena exist prior to our engagement with them. We do not engage with the world because it exists. It exists because we engage with it. This claim is the result of decades of meticulous experiments interpreted by our finest minds. Since our engagement with and influence in the world is irrevocable, no singular phenomenon can be identified nor referred to as an isolated event. ‘Phenomena’ refers to an emergent relational flow of co-creation, an ongoing mutual engagement. There cannot be any such thing as a singular phenomenon. How could it be isolated, or even exist, if there is no thing to intra-act with it?

When we say all phenomena are equal, we are referring to ongoing intra-active mutual creation. This is an animist view of the universe, attributing agency to what the material view would regard as the inanimate. We are received and conceived by the world in equal measure. As this is so, we must accept that we exist as a holographic universe, each of us the whole manifesting as a part just as other ‘parts’ within our field of existence are expressions of the whole. What appears to us as the material world has agency, just as we imagine in our supreme arrogance, that humans alone possess agency. We are removed from our pedestal of supremacy.