"One can have a mystical experience, and as is attested by those who have had it, it cannot be captured by words....This, however, does not stop the human mind from attempting to place the memory of it into some framework. Such experiences that “blow people’s minds” (meaning temporarily shatter their boundaries and structures of integration) do not really create a blank slate. Instead they are integrated into some mental structure. Either one has a framework that can handle them, or one looks for a framework that can."
Philosophically deconstruct non-dual reality? What a waste of time. You obviously don't get that it has nothing to do with concepts.
I probably would have agreed 10 years ago, but I now fully recognize the utmost importance of doing this, and that all teachings describing themselves as non-dual, no matter how rooted they are in "direct experience," are filled with beliefs about what is true. That should be obvious, but given their conceptual nature and status as a cause of suffering to be rooted out, beliefs were stigmatized and seemingly renounced by most of the modern "non-dual" voices that accompanied my path of "awakening." I hadn't yet seen what is now so obvious, that you're only paying lip service to renouncing beliefs and concepts when your spiritual path is lined with rigid beliefs about the nature of truth, not to mention Truth with a capital T, an "ultimate" or "absolute" truth. It's a blindspot similar to that of moral relativism claiming the superiority of the perspective that no perspective is superior.
No matter how rigidly or loosely we cling to beliefs about what is and isn't true, we're still liable to have our experiences shaped by them to varying degrees. Even if you often experience life without what seems like a conceptual overlay, no conscious human mind is concept-free, nor should it be. When you discover the power of beliefs to shape our experience, you'll likely agree. The point for now is that there are so many philosophical frameworks and traditions based on the direct experience of oneness, which could be thought of as non-dualisms. As one example, some interpret the experience of self-transcendence as proof of the utter non-existence of a personal self, while for others it's proof that we are more than just a personal self. Some teach and experience oneness and separateness to be mutually exclusive, while for others, they arise co-dependently. Some see the reality of non-duality as an escape hatch, while others see it as an inspiration to engage more fully.
So non-duality clearly means different things to different people, and that means they experience it and answer the question of "and how then shall I live," differently. As far as non-dual teaching dynamics go, there can be a kind of feedback loop...a belief (for example, the ego is non-existent) leads to an experience of "ego dissolution" that seems to prove and reinforce the belief that it has no existence, whether consciously or not. It didn't occur to me that there could be other ways of interpreting that experience, primarily because it was being taught in an authoritarian, dogmatic way, as an unquestionable "given." A novel experience that either beforehand or in hindsight we call oneness, eventually gives rise to an interpretation that informs our subsequent experiences. For example, before my first ego drop and oneness experience, I'd been hearing that the self doesn't actually exist, and after it happened, I further aligned with the belief that oneness requires my absence. Naturally, the more it happened, the more that belief calcified. This belief was part of a self-negating non-dualism, and it continually pointed back to a very specific perceptual expansion that felt like radical liberation from what had been described to me as "the prison of me," with its distinct "nobody-here-ness." Each time I felt that liberating "nobody-ness" in place of selfhood, it reinforced the belief that there is no self, tied to a philosophy that the Real Self and the Ultimate Truth is empty of self. This then encouraged me to use self-inquiry as a guide back to directly experiencing that.
Further down the road, when the accumulated effect of experiencing myself as only what is prior to manifestation (which I experienced solely as liberating for a long time), left me a serene but depersonalized shell of a person unable to fully engage in relationships, I discovered alternate interpretations of the nature of non-dual reality/truth, that led to a shockingly novel experience of it. In this non-dual paradigm, subject and object don't collapse but exist as a co-dependently arising relationship - rather than dual or non-dual, they're uni-dual. Hearing oneness described this way, the perception shift this led to was so dramatically different, and I cried tears of joy when it gave rise to a sense of profound intimacy, and a oneness of relationship that separate me was a fundamental part of, rather than a self-effacing absence. What I longed for began to happen - precious reality being breathed back into my sense of personhood, in a new way, within a uniquely expanded context. I was being called to deconstruct de-personalizing non-dual frameworks, after discovering how this self-negating paradigm colored (or dis-colored!) my experience of life and (what I was calling) non-duality, how entangled my perception had become in a web of dogmatic misconceptions about the "True" nature of capital R Reality, along with authoritative prescriptions about how one should live in light of these Absolute truths.
I knew there would be no way to step into the lived experience of self-affirming oneness without deconstructing what had become a prison of spiritual de-realization/de-personalization. I couldn't gain the freedom to be fully human without freedom from the strangle-hold this toxically reductionist dogma had on my sense of reality. Everything was riding on the possibility of a more convincing paradigm of non-duality, that could do what felt impossible - assure me experientially and cognitively as real and significant as a richly expressive person, re-ignite my enthusiasm for, my motivation and will to fully engage in inter-personal life, make it interesting/significant again, and re-associate me with embodied personhood. I desperately needed a solution to what had become an utterly conflicted question of the possibility and desirability of what I thought of as re-ifying the unreal, reviving what had seemingly died. I was carrying what felt like the burden of proof - proof of a truth I know longer wanted to be true - that we are all trapped in a delusion of phantom selfhood. So, deconstructing the supposed proof and re-visioning a new paradigm that experience would prove as more true, was the only hope for reviving the ghostly, and it led me to see that the real illusion I was trapped in, was the illusion that the self is just an illusion. Thank god that I was able, with the help of others, to deconstruct the old, and re-vision a different, life-affirming philosophy that leads to experiencing trans-immanence, and one that helped propel the phoenix in me into flight, resurrecting my vitality, and infusing profound significance into not just my life, but your life as well.
This process does not culminate in a pile of ashes, as from it emerges the possibility of re-visioning, of consciously creating a new life-giving paradigm directly perceived and made palpable...
Philosophically deconstruct non-dual reality? What a waste of time. You obviously don't get that it has nothing to do with concepts.
I probably would have agreed 10 years ago, but I now fully recognize the utmost importance of doing this, and that all teachings describing themselves as non-dual, no matter how rooted they are in "direct experience," are filled with beliefs about what is true. That should be obvious, but given their conceptual nature and status as a cause of suffering to be rooted out, beliefs were stigmatized and seemingly renounced by most of the modern "non-dual" voices that accompanied my path of "awakening." I hadn't yet seen what is now so obvious, that you're only paying lip service to renouncing beliefs and concepts when your spiritual path is lined with rigid beliefs about the nature of truth, not to mention Truth with a capital T, an "ultimate" or "absolute" truth. It's a blindspot similar to that of moral relativism claiming the superiority of the perspective that no perspective is superior.
No matter how rigidly or loosely we cling to beliefs about what is and isn't true, we're still liable to have our experiences shaped by them to varying degrees. Even if you often experience life without what seems like a conceptual overlay, no conscious human mind is concept-free, nor should it be. When you discover the power of beliefs to shape our experience, you'll likely agree. The point for now is that there are so many philosophical frameworks and traditions based on the direct experience of oneness, which could be thought of as non-dualisms. As one example, some interpret the experience of self-transcendence as proof of the utter non-existence of a personal self, while for others it's proof that we are more than just a personal self. Some teach and experience oneness and separateness to be mutually exclusive, while for others, they arise co-dependently. Some see the reality of non-duality as an escape hatch, while others see it as an inspiration to engage more fully.
So non-duality clearly means different things to different people, and that means they experience it and answer the question of "and how then shall I live," differently. As far as non-dual teaching dynamics go, there can be a kind of feedback loop...a belief (for example, the ego is non-existent) leads to an experience of "ego dissolution" that seems to prove and reinforce the belief that it has no existence, whether consciously or not. It didn't occur to me that there could be other ways of interpreting that experience, primarily because it was being taught in an authoritarian, dogmatic way, as an unquestionable "given." A novel experience that either beforehand or in hindsight we call oneness, eventually gives rise to an interpretation that informs our subsequent experiences. For example, before my first ego drop and oneness experience, I'd been hearing that the self doesn't actually exist, and after it happened, I further aligned with the belief that oneness requires my absence. Naturally, the more it happened, the more that belief calcified. This belief was part of a self-negating non-dualism, and it continually pointed back to a very specific perceptual expansion that felt like radical liberation from what had been described to me as "the prison of me," with its distinct "nobody-here-ness." Each time I felt that liberating "nobody-ness" in place of selfhood, it reinforced the belief that there is no self, tied to a philosophy that the Real Self and the Ultimate Truth is empty of self. This then encouraged me to use self-inquiry as a guide back to directly experiencing that.
Further down the road, when the accumulated effect of experiencing myself as only what is prior to manifestation (which I experienced solely as liberating for a long time), left me a serene but depersonalized shell of a person unable to fully engage in relationships, I discovered alternate interpretations of the nature of non-dual reality/truth, that led to a shockingly novel experience of it. In this non-dual paradigm, subject and object don't collapse but exist as a co-dependently arising relationship - rather than dual or non-dual, they're uni-dual. Hearing oneness described this way, the perception shift this led to was so dramatically different, and I cried tears of joy when it gave rise to a sense of profound intimacy, and a oneness of relationship that separate me was a fundamental part of, rather than a self-effacing absence. What I longed for began to happen - precious reality being breathed back into my sense of personhood, in a new way, within a uniquely expanded context. I was being called to deconstruct de-personalizing non-dual frameworks, after discovering how this self-negating paradigm colored (or dis-colored!) my experience of life and (what I was calling) non-duality, how entangled my perception had become in a web of dogmatic misconceptions about the "True" nature of capital R Reality, along with authoritative prescriptions about how one should live in light of these Absolute truths.
I knew there would be no way to step into the lived experience of self-affirming oneness without deconstructing what had become a prison of spiritual de-realization/de-personalization. I couldn't gain the freedom to be fully human without freedom from the strangle-hold this toxically reductionist dogma had on my sense of reality. Everything was riding on the possibility of a more convincing paradigm of non-duality, that could do what felt impossible - assure me experientially and cognitively as real and significant as a richly expressive person, re-ignite my enthusiasm for, my motivation and will to fully engage in inter-personal life, make it interesting/significant again, and re-associate me with embodied personhood. I desperately needed a solution to what had become an utterly conflicted question of the possibility and desirability of what I thought of as re-ifying the unreal, reviving what had seemingly died. I was carrying what felt like the burden of proof - proof of a truth I know longer wanted to be true - that we are all trapped in a delusion of phantom selfhood. So, deconstructing the supposed proof and re-visioning a new paradigm that experience would prove as more true, was the only hope for reviving the ghostly, and it led me to see that the real illusion I was trapped in, was the illusion that the self is just an illusion. Thank god that I was able, with the help of others, to deconstruct the old, and re-vision a different, life-affirming philosophy that leads to experiencing trans-immanence, and one that helped propel the phoenix in me into flight, resurrecting my vitality, and infusing profound significance into not just my life, but your life as well.
This process does not culminate in a pile of ashes, as from it emerges the possibility of re-visioning, of consciously creating a new life-giving paradigm directly perceived and made palpable...