Non-dual awakenings (regardless of how you define non-duality) will always be profoundly powerful and in most cases life-changing, with a palpable sense of before and after, yet the nature of the transformation that unity consciousness can lead to, and the likelihood that it will elevate long term wellbeing or impair it, depends on what you do with it, what implications you draw from it and how you decide to apply them to your life, and perhaps most importantly, how this shifting consciousness influences your worldview, motivations, values and life goals. The nature of the experience and role that unity perception and expanding our consciousness beyond the limits of our egos will play in our lives is naturally influenced by the philosophical lenses through which we interpret and assign meaning to non-duality on a conceptual level, for example what distinctions we make (if any) between what is real and unreal, beliefs you form around the nature and importance of selfhood, the value of interpersonal relationships, how to approach and shrink our human suffering, as well as your perspective on what spiritual “awakening” and a spiritual path entails.
If you're reading this, then like me, your path has led to brushes with, or full-on revelatory experiences of self-transcendence, oneness, ego dissolution or what some call "ego death," and you've likely resonated with the term "non-duality" as a description of it. If you're one of these people you've probably had something you've referred to as a non-dual awakening, and in your desire to understand it, delved into one or many different philosophical frameworks based on non-duality, and their associated teachings. And perhaps like me, you were drawn at some point to reductionist non-dual teachings from traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism, and have dabbled or gone all in with traditional and/or new-age appropriations of Advaita Vedanta.
To offer a preview of what's to come in my musings on non-duality, I'll be exploring my transition from an "either/or" to a "both/and" perspective of non-duality and how it's led to my passionate desire to re-conceive of the term "non-duality" as "uni-duality" in order to minimize the harm that negation-based non-duality often leads to, and to truly reflect how I've come to experience, perceive, and understand the nature of oneness, which is dramatically different from how I understood it in the earlier chapters of my non-dual exploration, in which you arrive at non-dual truth via a process of elimination - diminishing, de-realizing, falsifying the existence of things like separation, the ego, personal identity, and the world of form, reducing all of reality to a supposedly pure, infinitely vast self-knowing awareness. For reasons I explore throughout these pages, I feel deeply called to flip that script.
If you're reading this, then like me, your path has led to brushes with, or full-on revelatory experiences of self-transcendence, oneness, ego dissolution or what some call "ego death," and you've likely resonated with the term "non-duality" as a description of it. If you're one of these people you've probably had something you've referred to as a non-dual awakening, and in your desire to understand it, delved into one or many different philosophical frameworks based on non-duality, and their associated teachings. And perhaps like me, you were drawn at some point to reductionist non-dual teachings from traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism, and have dabbled or gone all in with traditional and/or new-age appropriations of Advaita Vedanta.
To offer a preview of what's to come in my musings on non-duality, I'll be exploring my transition from an "either/or" to a "both/and" perspective of non-duality and how it's led to my passionate desire to re-conceive of the term "non-duality" as "uni-duality" in order to minimize the harm that negation-based non-duality often leads to, and to truly reflect how I've come to experience, perceive, and understand the nature of oneness, which is dramatically different from how I understood it in the earlier chapters of my non-dual exploration, in which you arrive at non-dual truth via a process of elimination - diminishing, de-realizing, falsifying the existence of things like separation, the ego, personal identity, and the world of form, reducing all of reality to a supposedly pure, infinitely vast self-knowing awareness. For reasons I explore throughout these pages, I feel deeply called to flip that script.
I want to flip the script of non-dual paradigms that are focused on the absence of self, and reducing form to formlessness. Part of why I want to do this is to give validity back to the individual, sacredness back to our humanity through the realization of trans-immanence in which the spiritual and the material co-arise, healing this split between the two. To discover god beyond form, in silence, stillness, vastness and then to recognize and commune with god in and as all form, manifesting everywhere, as all things, including the human condition itself, filling and spilling over everything everywhere. To invite us to see something shockingly ironic - that everything reductionist non-duality teaches is not god, is not "the absolute," or is in the way of it, is it - the "absolute" is every thing that this paradigm believes it must negate in order to reveal!
On a philosophical level, which informs our actual experience of non-duality more than you might realize, the flip is from reduction-based paradigm of non-duality to one based on emergence- these can be confusing words at first, they certainly were for me when I learned them, but they work really well to describe these two dramatically different paradigms when it all comes together.
Negation flips to the both/and of more than
"You are not your ego." becomes "You are not just your ego." / "You are more than your ego."
Reality as this or that flips to the paradoxical both/and of this and that:
Example: "Nothing is separate, everything is one" becomes "Everything is both separate and one simultaneously."
Reductionist de-realization to emergent affirmation:
The world is no longer just an appearance, a dream, an illusion - god, et al. has emerged from itself, as itself, into all form and phenomena (at which point it's become everything in relationship with itself!)
"__ is just an appearance/an illusion" (only X is real) becomes "__ is a real manifestation of X."
Example: "The world of form is just an illusion concealing X"- "The world is a real expression of X (god, etc.)"
Truth becomes both/and, not either/or...
Truth becomes paradoxical
Everything turns into yes, and...
Everything is a real evolved expression of whatever you think of as "source"
On a philosophical level, which informs our actual experience of non-duality more than you might realize, the flip is from reduction-based paradigm of non-duality to one based on emergence- these can be confusing words at first, they certainly were for me when I learned them, but they work really well to describe these two dramatically different paradigms when it all comes together.
Negation flips to the both/and of more than
"You are not your ego." becomes "You are not just your ego." / "You are more than your ego."
Reality as this or that flips to the paradoxical both/and of this and that:
Example: "Nothing is separate, everything is one" becomes "Everything is both separate and one simultaneously."
Reductionist de-realization to emergent affirmation:
The world is no longer just an appearance, a dream, an illusion - god, et al. has emerged from itself, as itself, into all form and phenomena (at which point it's become everything in relationship with itself!)
"__ is just an appearance/an illusion" (only X is real) becomes "__ is a real manifestation of X."
Example: "The world of form is just an illusion concealing X"- "The world is a real expression of X (god, etc.)"
Truth becomes both/and, not either/or...
Truth becomes paradoxical
Everything turns into yes, and...
Everything is a real evolved expression of whatever you think of as "source"