In this section my focus isn't purely on the metaphysics of either/or vs. both/and non-dual views (which is very important!) but on how people's lives are affected by it and particularly how they can be adversely affected by following an either/or, negation-based perspective of what a "non-dual spiritual awakening" and the alleviation of human suffering entails. The aim is to ultimately make clear how and why the popular contemporary non-dual spiritual paradigm which could be thought of as "liberation via (self) negation" or "no self, no suffering" too often causes more profound suffering in the end, in hopes of inspiring people to choose balanced, both/and approaches to consciousness expansion and alleviating suffering that don't cut away vital precious elements of their humanity. It's important to say again here that this doesn't discount the ways people are positively impacted from this paradigm (I myself was) and actually focuses on how it is the cost/benefit ratio becomes questionable for so many people, who find in it's either/or nature, to be a tragically double edged sword, (for some like a "Pyrrhic Victory" in which the gains are eventually offset by staggering losses, to the extent that the losses are equal to or greater than those gains.) It is the fact that the positives that for some people can be so great, that makes it very difficult to move on from it, as it was for me, even when they're also being harmed.
[Read more about what is meant by "contemporary non-dual teachings," and 5 divergences from their traditional contexts responsible for people being harmed.]
This will be a work in progress, so bear with me! It's hard to know where to begin in describing the great imbalance at the core of the often unseen worldview that today's popular either/or non-dual teachings and shift in perception they lead to, but I'll have to start somewhere, so let's look first at what I think of as a formula called the opposite extreme, in long form suffering caused by the opposite extreme.
Suffering Caused by "The Opposite Extreme" Formula
The opposite extreme formula is what either/or non-dual core solutions to suffering are based on - the antidote to any form of suffering is it's opposite extreme. Rather than seeing imbalance as the cause, for example having boundaries that are overly rigid, it sees the mere presence of boundaries as the source of suffering, and then seeks to eradicate boundaries all together, swinging to the opposite end of the pendulum - no boundaries, boundlessness. You can see that this is an all or nothing, black and white formula, and it is what renunciate spirituality is based on. Contrast this with the diagnosis being an imbalanced level of boundaries - overly constricted, rigid - and the antidote being to bring your boundaries to a level of balance, not too rigid, not too flimsy. The view here would be that inflexible boundaries are the problem, and the solution is to have more flexible ones. In this view, anything that causes suffering/is unhealthy at its' extreme level, is healthy when at a balanced level. Contrast this with a model in which there is no healthy level of what ails you - i.e. having any boundaries is the dis-ease and only dissolving them to be totally boundless, is the cure.
Naturally, at first, if you're suffering from suffocatingly rigid boundaries for example, swinging to the opposite end of the pendulum brings an immediate and extreme sense of relief! And of course the more extreme your suffering, the more profound the sense of relief will be.*
Given that either/or paradigms are binary by nature, so that seeming opposites like boundaried and boundless are mutually exclusive, it seeks to eradicate one of them, in this case the unwanted one - being boundaried.
[Diving deeper into the metaphysics here, we see that either/or non-duality, in it's black and white view, looks at a pair of opposites as mutually exclusive, whereas both/and non-duality in its' non-binary view sees all opposites as mutually inclusive, as their very nature is to be interwoven. This is a view in which non-duality is the unity of opposites, in seemingly binary polarities are co-dependently arising - meaning that can only ever arise together like two sides of the same coin. This means that trying to eradicate one or the other, is not only impossible, but creates disharmony. Taking the yin/yang, which represents this fundamental harmony of the unity of opposites, what either/or non-duality seeks to do is to tear apart yin and yang and discard one of them, and to be more precise to pick the polarity that is causing suffering - i.e. the one that is unwanted, for example boundaries, and try to eliminate it. You could see this as a divide and conquer mentality, in which there must be a victory of one side over the other, rather than harmonious co-existence brought about.]
So pausing for a moment to re-cap, the either/or non-dual view which treats opposites as mutually exclusive, treats suffering caused by the extreme form of something with it's opposite extreme.
And, so? This often leads to suffering caused by the opposite extreme, i.e. the opposite extreme of one form of suffering because another, new form of suffering. This is exactly what is happening for so many people who follow either/or non-dual teachings today. There are so many examples, but to give one from my personal experience, I ended up suffering from too much spaciousness, having become too spacious with not enough containment.
It's important to note that this is not an ailment commonly recognized by contemporary non-dual teachers today where balance isn't a typical topic, and it seems like there's no such this as too much spaciousness, so the goal isn't a healthy balance where the aim is both spacious and contained. If you aren't negatively impacted by too much spaciousness right away, which some are when they have a sudden or spontaneous experience of their sense of boundaries collapsing, it comes as a very unexpected surprise when it happens further down the road, as it did for me, after only experiencing it as positive and liberating for several years.
Re-cap: In the either/or non-dual model, many people find that the opposite extreme of one source of their suffering unexpectedly manifests as a new form of suffering.
*For some it happens quickly, for others it's insidious, so that they don't begin to suffer from the opposite extreme until further down the road. This is partly because there's a slow erosion of one's for example ability for healthy containment, when total boundlessness (i.e. spaciousness without containment) becomes more of an automatic default, including their being an aversion to, and judgment around containment.
Here, in the imbalanced either/or paradigm, instead of spending time cultivating flexibility of boundaries, to be able to have a choice/better control over them, and find a balance between too rigid of boundaries with too open of boundaries, which is a balance that brings long-term health both physiologically and inter-personally, your time has been spent developing a preference and value for boundary dissolution/boundlessness, further entrenched by spiritual teachers, discourse and communities that prioritize boundlessness and downplay or deny the importance/health of containment.
Common examples of the either/or opposite extreme formula...
Suffering from one extreme: An over-active loud and frenzied mind - too much thinking
Solution: An overly inactive, quiet/still mind - not enough thinking
Suffering caused by opposite extreme: Intellectual vacuousness, relationship problems from distaste for conversation, social anxiety because of lacking conversent-ness, memory issues, lost
Suffering from over-reliance on others
Solution is overly self-reliant - "everything you need is within you - you shouldn't need to source any needs externally" (Here, the positives are learning to source within what is unhealthy to source without, and being better able to be with a sense of lack)
Suffering from opposite extreme - too much isolation/alienation, intimacy avoidance, healthy relational needs going unmet
Healthy both/and- interdependency
......
A both/and perspective is that suffering is not caused by desire, seeking, thought, dependence itself (so does not need to be eradicated) but rather how we do these things - for example it's what we desire (unhealthy things) and how we desire (with expectations for permanent satisfaction from the object of desire). So the solution is never eradication, never resorts to throwing out (or killing!) the baby with the bathwater, but more nuanced, creative, and ultimately bringing harmony not extremes. This is a massive difference from the either/or model which can't see that one can have desires and be happy/generally satisfied with their lives, that one can both source happiness from within and from meaningful externals like healthy meaningful relationships, service to others, community. And that it is okay and natural to feel some degree of being unfulfilled, and suffering when you only look internally for fulfillment and cut yourself off from external forms of it. It makes unnecessary/tragic ultimatums - you can either have attachments or suffer for the rest of your life! You're suffering from desire? Renounce it completely! You suffer from too much reaching out and seeking? Cut your arms off. I don't think it's controversial to say this is an approach with absolutely no nuance. For some people, renunciation may be there path, and that's respected, but for it to be taught to the general public who are simply seeking relief from suffering feels wrong in the sense that it presents the most extreme intervention as the only effective and spiritual one, dismissing all of the non-extreme ways, in particular the middle ways of alleviating suffering.
You can suffer from too much thought and not enough thought, too much desire and not enough desire. Either/or trying to eradicate/exclude one polarity of a pair of opposites brings imbalance, and often suffering caused by it. Both/and's unity of opposites values balance, inclusiveness, wholeness established by the inclusivity of all polarities.
*People who have the strongest imbalances/are suffering from an extreme imbalance like extreme rumination, obsessive thinking etc. are most likely to get hooked on states of radical silence and stillness of mind because the more extreme the suffering the more profound the relief. People who have relatively balanced opposites are not the ones attracted to promises of a totally silent mind. This fact also comes into play when looking at why either/or non-dual teachings should not be taught indiscriminately, and especially not to an emotionally imbalanced demographic which is in fact the target audience.
[Read more about what is meant by "contemporary non-dual teachings," and 5 divergences from their traditional contexts responsible for people being harmed.]
This will be a work in progress, so bear with me! It's hard to know where to begin in describing the great imbalance at the core of the often unseen worldview that today's popular either/or non-dual teachings and shift in perception they lead to, but I'll have to start somewhere, so let's look first at what I think of as a formula called the opposite extreme, in long form suffering caused by the opposite extreme.
Suffering Caused by "The Opposite Extreme" Formula
The opposite extreme formula is what either/or non-dual core solutions to suffering are based on - the antidote to any form of suffering is it's opposite extreme. Rather than seeing imbalance as the cause, for example having boundaries that are overly rigid, it sees the mere presence of boundaries as the source of suffering, and then seeks to eradicate boundaries all together, swinging to the opposite end of the pendulum - no boundaries, boundlessness. You can see that this is an all or nothing, black and white formula, and it is what renunciate spirituality is based on. Contrast this with the diagnosis being an imbalanced level of boundaries - overly constricted, rigid - and the antidote being to bring your boundaries to a level of balance, not too rigid, not too flimsy. The view here would be that inflexible boundaries are the problem, and the solution is to have more flexible ones. In this view, anything that causes suffering/is unhealthy at its' extreme level, is healthy when at a balanced level. Contrast this with a model in which there is no healthy level of what ails you - i.e. having any boundaries is the dis-ease and only dissolving them to be totally boundless, is the cure.
Naturally, at first, if you're suffering from suffocatingly rigid boundaries for example, swinging to the opposite end of the pendulum brings an immediate and extreme sense of relief! And of course the more extreme your suffering, the more profound the sense of relief will be.*
Given that either/or paradigms are binary by nature, so that seeming opposites like boundaried and boundless are mutually exclusive, it seeks to eradicate one of them, in this case the unwanted one - being boundaried.
[Diving deeper into the metaphysics here, we see that either/or non-duality, in it's black and white view, looks at a pair of opposites as mutually exclusive, whereas both/and non-duality in its' non-binary view sees all opposites as mutually inclusive, as their very nature is to be interwoven. This is a view in which non-duality is the unity of opposites, in seemingly binary polarities are co-dependently arising - meaning that can only ever arise together like two sides of the same coin. This means that trying to eradicate one or the other, is not only impossible, but creates disharmony. Taking the yin/yang, which represents this fundamental harmony of the unity of opposites, what either/or non-duality seeks to do is to tear apart yin and yang and discard one of them, and to be more precise to pick the polarity that is causing suffering - i.e. the one that is unwanted, for example boundaries, and try to eliminate it. You could see this as a divide and conquer mentality, in which there must be a victory of one side over the other, rather than harmonious co-existence brought about.]
So pausing for a moment to re-cap, the either/or non-dual view which treats opposites as mutually exclusive, treats suffering caused by the extreme form of something with it's opposite extreme.
And, so? This often leads to suffering caused by the opposite extreme, i.e. the opposite extreme of one form of suffering because another, new form of suffering. This is exactly what is happening for so many people who follow either/or non-dual teachings today. There are so many examples, but to give one from my personal experience, I ended up suffering from too much spaciousness, having become too spacious with not enough containment.
It's important to note that this is not an ailment commonly recognized by contemporary non-dual teachers today where balance isn't a typical topic, and it seems like there's no such this as too much spaciousness, so the goal isn't a healthy balance where the aim is both spacious and contained. If you aren't negatively impacted by too much spaciousness right away, which some are when they have a sudden or spontaneous experience of their sense of boundaries collapsing, it comes as a very unexpected surprise when it happens further down the road, as it did for me, after only experiencing it as positive and liberating for several years.
Re-cap: In the either/or non-dual model, many people find that the opposite extreme of one source of their suffering unexpectedly manifests as a new form of suffering.
*For some it happens quickly, for others it's insidious, so that they don't begin to suffer from the opposite extreme until further down the road. This is partly because there's a slow erosion of one's for example ability for healthy containment, when total boundlessness (i.e. spaciousness without containment) becomes more of an automatic default, including their being an aversion to, and judgment around containment.
Here, in the imbalanced either/or paradigm, instead of spending time cultivating flexibility of boundaries, to be able to have a choice/better control over them, and find a balance between too rigid of boundaries with too open of boundaries, which is a balance that brings long-term health both physiologically and inter-personally, your time has been spent developing a preference and value for boundary dissolution/boundlessness, further entrenched by spiritual teachers, discourse and communities that prioritize boundlessness and downplay or deny the importance/health of containment.
Common examples of the either/or opposite extreme formula...
Suffering from one extreme: An over-active loud and frenzied mind - too much thinking
Solution: An overly inactive, quiet/still mind - not enough thinking
Suffering caused by opposite extreme: Intellectual vacuousness, relationship problems from distaste for conversation, social anxiety because of lacking conversent-ness, memory issues, lost
Suffering from over-reliance on others
Solution is overly self-reliant - "everything you need is within you - you shouldn't need to source any needs externally" (Here, the positives are learning to source within what is unhealthy to source without, and being better able to be with a sense of lack)
Suffering from opposite extreme - too much isolation/alienation, intimacy avoidance, healthy relational needs going unmet
Healthy both/and- interdependency
......
A both/and perspective is that suffering is not caused by desire, seeking, thought, dependence itself (so does not need to be eradicated) but rather how we do these things - for example it's what we desire (unhealthy things) and how we desire (with expectations for permanent satisfaction from the object of desire). So the solution is never eradication, never resorts to throwing out (or killing!) the baby with the bathwater, but more nuanced, creative, and ultimately bringing harmony not extremes. This is a massive difference from the either/or model which can't see that one can have desires and be happy/generally satisfied with their lives, that one can both source happiness from within and from meaningful externals like healthy meaningful relationships, service to others, community. And that it is okay and natural to feel some degree of being unfulfilled, and suffering when you only look internally for fulfillment and cut yourself off from external forms of it. It makes unnecessary/tragic ultimatums - you can either have attachments or suffer for the rest of your life! You're suffering from desire? Renounce it completely! You suffer from too much reaching out and seeking? Cut your arms off. I don't think it's controversial to say this is an approach with absolutely no nuance. For some people, renunciation may be there path, and that's respected, but for it to be taught to the general public who are simply seeking relief from suffering feels wrong in the sense that it presents the most extreme intervention as the only effective and spiritual one, dismissing all of the non-extreme ways, in particular the middle ways of alleviating suffering.
You can suffer from too much thought and not enough thought, too much desire and not enough desire. Either/or trying to eradicate/exclude one polarity of a pair of opposites brings imbalance, and often suffering caused by it. Both/and's unity of opposites values balance, inclusiveness, wholeness established by the inclusivity of all polarities.
*People who have the strongest imbalances/are suffering from an extreme imbalance like extreme rumination, obsessive thinking etc. are most likely to get hooked on states of radical silence and stillness of mind because the more extreme the suffering the more profound the relief. People who have relatively balanced opposites are not the ones attracted to promises of a totally silent mind. This fact also comes into play when looking at why either/or non-dual teachings should not be taught indiscriminately, and especially not to an emotionally imbalanced demographic which is in fact the target audience.