John Welwood on colorful/less human beings

"See, we're always coming back into duality. Duality is where we live, at least if we are householders living in the world. 

You can make a distinction between what's an "ultimate realization" and what's a complete life for human beings.

This is part of the problem with Westerners who try make nondual realization the only focus of their life. They often focus on nondual realization, while neglecting their human embodiment.

As a result, their lives can be rather colorless; they're not interested in being colorful human beings. They see the human realm as uninteresting somehow.

I would say that the complete fruition of the nondual is to come back and play in duality. This is the Tantric idea—that we must engage with the manifest realm.

If we were only here to dissolve into the absolute, what then would be the purpose of incarnation?

In the East— in Tibet and in India, among other places— there was a rich human soulfulness out of which the nondual traditions grew. The nondual teachings grew like a rare flower out of this rich human soil.

In modern Western culture, we don't have that rich human soil, that soulful soil, in the same way. Our soil is pretty depleted from the soul's point of view.

So when these nondual teachings come over from Asia, it's like a rich flower being planted in barren soil.

So what you often find among Westerners who become interested in nondual teachings is that they haven't been able to develop a rich human life and they are disconnected from community.

Not being able to have good relationships with people, they use the nondual teachings as a kind of consolation, or escape, or remedy for this.

I think that's a perversion and it becomes a form of spiritual bypassing."

https://www.johnwelwood.com/articles/interviewPathways.pdf