With good reason, neo-advaitists try to end the suffering caused by narrow focus on particulars - to solve the problem of not being able to see the forest for the trees - by teaching relaxing your attention into open panoramic awareness. But, losing sight of the trees for the forest is just as treacherous, and non-dualists need to take more care to ensure we don't become apathetic to the particulars in the pursuit of the wide angle view, by teaching balancing the two without a hierarchy between them and without teaching panoramic awareness as the end goal, and rather as an important perceptual skill that helps to minimize the suffering of myopic fixation, and afford a holistic view of reality that helps us to engage with the particulars of life in a different, less suffering-inducing way. But, there's good reason to avoid the risk of becoming myopically fixated on the macro lens, the open, panoramic awareness as a replacement for targeted attention.

Yes, once you've spent a lot of time viewing from that relaxed, vast, expansive awareness, it can start to feel like a sort of hassle to put energy into focalizing your attention in order to fully engage with particulars Open awareness often feels like a relaxation, awareness becoming spacious, diffuse to the point that it could be difficult to or you could be resistant to putting energy into particulars again because it becomes too much effort, a hassle- this can end up as open awareness leading to a kind of focus ennui, as the question of why focus on particulars when this non-particular, gestalt awareness is so peaceful, unperturbed by the nuisance and effort of attending to particulars. But let it be known that non-particularity is not more spiritual or better, though it can feel and is often presented as preferable, and an ultimate spiritual goal, especially for those who suffer immensely from difficulty releasing focus on particulars, on minutiae, for example those on the more extreme end of obsessiveness, and rumination who tend to feel an especially strong pull towards the relief from fixation that radically open awareness can offer.

But, an aperture that strains to open is just as problematic as one that strains to contract.....                                                                                                                                    Read More ⬇​

​"I hope you didn’t come here to learn anything new tonight because you'll be sorely disappointed to hear that nobody showed up to teach nothing to no one...the exit door is to the left, and trust me when I say it's now or NEVER!"

A woman in the audience, Mary, has stepped up to the microphone with tears in her eyes and begins to tell her tale of woe. After five minutes, he starts getting hot under the collar, fearing he might snap and blurt out what he's thinking. DON'T YOU GET IT YET!? YOU DON'T FUCKING EXIST!!  He's biting his tongue, trying to keep his cool, crafting a new self-obliterating play on words he hasn't already regurgitated ad nauseam 

Before he can get it out, she chokes out the words, "My husband George doesn't take me seriously, it's like I don’t even exist, I don't know what to do!”

She's made it too easy! He's ready to deliver the final blow, but he needs to build suspense. Drawing from the the Playbook, insert drawn-out awkward silence, blink erratically while staring blankly ahead, sip water from the glass next to funeral parlor flowers. After several more minutes of exaggerated blinking and lobotomized stares, he's ready to execute.

"Okay Mary, imagine you’re George right now in a moment where he’s not taking you seriously. Really try to be inside his mind. What words are going through his head?"

She's closing her eyes, her breath becoming ragged as she breathes in deep and loud, holding it in her chest for several moments. On the out breath she whispers, "Mary…...is…...a…...joke."  

"BINGO! The bad news is that George is right, Mary is a joke! She doesn't exist. But neither does George! You are both illusions in a nightmare that never existed.  You're free, don't you see? Mary doesn't exist and nobody gives a shit!" 

Snickers from the crowd...

She's taken aback at first, her face all scrunched up and eyebrows deeply furrowed while she whispers the riddle to herself "I....don't exist...and no one gives a shit?" Silence...and then BAM! Mary gets the cosmic joke and erupts into laughter.

"Thank you," she whispers, wiping tears from her eyes. 

"So, who wants to go next?"  
​

To be on a humanistic non-dual spiritual path, we must transcend and include. You don't climb a ladder to the sky, cut off the rungs, and sever off the lower rungs that got you there unless theres something down there you're running from of course.

"Transpersonal," for example, can be misinterpreted as what is entirely NOT personal, or has nothing to do with the personal dimension of reality, so that it points to the notion of exclusionary transcendence  (transcending and excluding personhood in this case), but I see it now as pointing to what is more than yet includes the person/personal dimension.  Now you don't end up with disembodied, ungrounded and non-human transpersonal experience, but the down to earth embodiment of something that is personal and more than personal, an experience of personhood as an integral part of something bigger than itself- that transcends and includes it.  

This is a dramatically different experience from the experience of/experience of oneself as "something" transcendent that is cut off from what's transcended. It's not an impersonal, or non-personal experience, it's a MORE THAN personal experience that the personal you is/gets to be a part of.  Rather than a capital S "Self," that is INSTEAD of  a lower case s "self" it's the experience of Sselfhood (Jason Shulman). It's becoming personal + instead of something less than personal.

As Ken Wilber wrote of "egolessness" (which self-negating non-duality considers a coveted quality of all self-transcendent experience), "Egolessness does not mean "less than personal," it means "more than personal" Not personal minus, but personal plus..."

Questions to consider...

Can you feel the difference? How does it feel different?

If you shift from transcending & negating, to transcending and including, is there anything valuable you'd lose? Anything valuable you'd gain/get back?

 

 Scores of people, including myself, who eventually leave cultures like Neo-Advaita behind, cite the dryness, flatness - the extreme impersonality of it - as one of the biggest things that pushed them away in search of spiritual paradigms and experiences that are pro-social, fully human, that celebrate rather than denigrate individuality, and promote the preciousness of deep, rich vivacious personal relationships.

It shouldn't be surprising that the quality of impersonality as a spiritual ideal is ubiquitous in most self-negating non-dual teachings. An example is the frequent talk of non-dual consciousness being characterized by impersonal love, and they seem to be pointing to a love that transcends particularity. But, as I've come to see it, love for all humans at once, and not just one in particular isn't impersonal, it's universal love! A powerful and transformative feeling that radiates out towards all of humanity rather than one person or group of people.

I ask if it isn't more fitting, warm, and human to call it universal love. And taking it further, to flip all notions of "spiritual" impersonality to universality. This probably won't be quickly embraced by die-hard Neo-Advaitists, given that their teachings are literally, and self-reportedly, de-personalizing, centered around permanently stripping humanity of identity and personality in order to step into the supposed truth of selfhood's non-existence and the reward of annihilated suffering. Yes, achieving impersonality is boasted as success in these teachings, whether or not it agrees to call it achievement (since achievement is a value of the non-existent ego, after all). But, if more individuals make this flip, and share why it's so important, it could catch on. And it makes a difference. 

Impersonal love (or impersonal anything, for that matter) is no longer on the list of qualities I want my spirituality to nurture, but a sense of universal inter-connection, benevolence and compassion is at the top.
                                                                  

 "You are not looking at the sky, you are the sky. You're not touching the earth, you are the earth."

I heard statements like this so often in non-relational, either/or non-duality, where you can only be this or that, that hasn't embraced the paradox of both/and. If you are not touching the earth but simply are the earth, you don't get to have personal contact with it. You negate your experience of relationship with the world when you have to negate yourself to become it. But you can be both a person touching the earth, and the earth itself, in a uni-dual relationship, and a most precious paradoxical one! Non-dual relationship, in which subject are not just separates, and not just one, more more than one. Now the universe gets to experience being in relationship with itself in/as all the different ways it's come to express itself! 

No need for anything to dissolve, only a oneness of multiplicity to be realized. In my experience, dissolving completely into something or many things at once, so that you lose all sense of distinctness and individuality is not intimacy, it's an experience of disappearing and merging into a non-relational oneness,  without with-ness. When you experience being two individuals who are also one, you can feel something different from ordinary connection or undifferentiated merging, a  feeling of communion, in which self and other become the one as two. 

Different from regular connecting, "what you're communing with, you're also one with." I don't have to lose myself, my particularity, individuality, to become a tree, a dog, the woman gazing in my eyes, neither of us are excluded, instead, it's like what I take to be myself expands to include them. I can take the world into me, without it negating me. And this has changed everything

In the first phase of my spiritual path, when I was very immersed in Neo-Advaitic spirituality which placed a great emphasis on things like detached impersonal "witnessing," the non-existence of self and separation, simply being rather doing, as precursors to a radical sense of perfection, the states of awe and perfection I experienced were often what could be described as "non-participatory" - a term I got from Jason Shulman when he described a kind of awe in which the experiencer stands back, apart from, and  dis-engages with what's now perceived as just what Ram Dass called "the passing show." Moments in this detached, transcendent kind of awe-infused perception which I then would have thought of as non-dual, were precious to me, and while I still have them sometimes, I am drawn towards a different kind of awe-infused perception that calls me not just to be, but also to do, to engage inter-personally in the goings-on of life in a profoundly new way, instead of only being non-participatory,  disengaged reverie.

This perception involves a deeply engaged participatory awe that doesn't require a sense of self, of separation, or anything else that Neo-Advaitic spirituality presented as merely a mirage or in the way of Reality with a capital R, be transcended and invalidated, excluded, it doesn't require abstaining from anything, because now the awe comes from the perception that whatever I thought of as transcendent, is not separate from anything I ever thought needed to be transcended. This non-duality is not the non-existence of separateness, of reducing materiality to immateriality, but non-duality of the material and the immaterial, of beyond and within! This is the non-duality of trans-immanence, and from this perception, the divine is incarnate, it has materialized, and is participating in every moment as the un-manifest made manifest.

The participatory awe of transimmanence that I experience doesn't require me to stand back, to dis-engage, detach, rise above, or transcend anything except for the conviction that oneness, the transcendent, formless divine, stands apart from or can be separated from form and separateness, etc. It doesn't require a sweeping view only, a still or silent mind or body, it doesn't request purity - a busy mind, impurity, and even the most painful emotions are precious,  they are god (choose your favorite word) as busy thoughts, impurity, and painful emotions. Now I'm called, as one of these precious expressions of the absolute, of god, to open my heart to it all, to myself, as an act of opening my heart to all of god, and to act , interact , be deeply involved,  not just witness it and say that it's all okay and perfect so there's nothing to do...now perfection(ism) is one of the furthest things from a spiritual ideal, along with any notions of "enlightenment" that involve qualities like perfection or ease that are supposedly attained by pushing away anything that causes dissatisfaction and dis-ease, and seeking a perpetual nirvana that is not also known by its other name, samsara, is itself a hindrance to be overcome by being embraced too as an expression of the absolute, of god, in this case, struggling to accept the bittersweet imperfection of it's own humanity. Only in its human condition does god struggle with perfectionism, and when man realizes that imperfection is a quality of the divine, that struggle loosens, and we perceive the divine preciousness of imperfection and feel compassion for the all too common crushing disappointment that the spiritual or material pursuit of perfection tends to lead to.