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on 'practicing' nonduality
Nov. 8th, 2007 11:14 amI’ve considered myself a student of nonduality for a number of years now, but I have to admit that for much of that time, my understanding of nonduality has been mainly intuitive. When I would read teachings by Ramana or Nisargadatta or from the more esoteric Zen traditions, those teachings would resonate strongly with me; and yet, if I were asked to explain nonduality to someone else, I would always have trouble doing so. I suspect many others are like that, too.
My great friend and teacher Jerry Katz recently wrote a book about nonduality (amazon.com | amazon.ca) that I believe he hopes would explain it to laypeople -- to the masses, as it were. In it, he lays out the common nondual threads that run through numerous spiritual traditions, and provides a place for various perspectives to reach a common understanding of nondual reality.
But this too can seem a bit abstract, and despite my love for philosophical discourse and debate, I've still been on the hunt for practical means to cultivate nondual insight, and for ways to practice nonduality in everyday life. A recent interview that Jerry gave to a new site called Authors Audio provided some great insight to me on these counts. (The audio for the 30-min interview is here, and the Authors Audio website is here.) Some notes I took from the interview are below.
Where duality means "two-ness," nonduality means "not two," or non-separateness. It's the sense that a person is not separate from something that is greater than themselves, from a deeper, more meaningful reality than that which we experience in the everyday world.
Everybody has had that sense that there is something deeper than what's on the surface of our everyday lives. Nonduality is the recognition that we are not separate from that Reality, and the practice of nonduality is the absorption of our attention in that fact. In very simple terms, there is a three-step journey to full nonduality:
It's the valuing of the perception that there's something greater than our everyday lives which resonated with me the most strongly. When people with a spiritual inclination are struck by this insight, it's difficult to assign enough importance to that insight to turn the pursuit of it into a practice. There's simply too much going on in our everyday lives all the time. But if we can give ourselves permission to value that insight, to make it important enough in our lives to seek it out and to let our awareness abide in that insight in a conscious way, then we're on our way to embodying an enlightened ideal in everyday life. That's just what will arise naturally out of that pursuit. And until now, this just hasn't struck me hard enough to make it stick.
(x-posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
nonduality)
My great friend and teacher Jerry Katz recently wrote a book about nonduality (amazon.com | amazon.ca) that I believe he hopes would explain it to laypeople -- to the masses, as it were. In it, he lays out the common nondual threads that run through numerous spiritual traditions, and provides a place for various perspectives to reach a common understanding of nondual reality.
But this too can seem a bit abstract, and despite my love for philosophical discourse and debate, I've still been on the hunt for practical means to cultivate nondual insight, and for ways to practice nonduality in everyday life. A recent interview that Jerry gave to a new site called Authors Audio provided some great insight to me on these counts. (The audio for the 30-min interview is here, and the Authors Audio website is here.) Some notes I took from the interview are below.
Where duality means "two-ness," nonduality means "not two," or non-separateness. It's the sense that a person is not separate from something that is greater than themselves, from a deeper, more meaningful reality than that which we experience in the everyday world.
Everybody has had that sense that there is something deeper than what's on the surface of our everyday lives. Nonduality is the recognition that we are not separate from that Reality, and the practice of nonduality is the absorption of our attention in that fact. In very simple terms, there is a three-step journey to full nonduality:
1.) We perceive that there is something more meaningful, more complete, and deeper than our everyday reality.( Read more... )
2.) We value that perception -- we desire to know more about that something that's more meaningful, and we place importance on developing a more constant connection with that Reality.
3.) We pursue that non-separate Reality -- we undertake spiritual practices to abide constantly in that non-separate Reality.
It's the valuing of the perception that there's something greater than our everyday lives which resonated with me the most strongly. When people with a spiritual inclination are struck by this insight, it's difficult to assign enough importance to that insight to turn the pursuit of it into a practice. There's simply too much going on in our everyday lives all the time. But if we can give ourselves permission to value that insight, to make it important enough in our lives to seek it out and to let our awareness abide in that insight in a conscious way, then we're on our way to embodying an enlightened ideal in everyday life. That's just what will arise naturally out of that pursuit. And until now, this just hasn't struck me hard enough to make it stick.
(x-posted to
nonduality)
