Is teaching about nonduality just a mind game?

by Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering

The mind, which can only exist in duality, is playing a game trying to convince itself that there is no duality. It is a loop — the egoic mind thinks about nonduality, yet cannot experience it. Therefore this mind can never actually know it. Unless. Unless the egoic mind is not involved in observing.

From time to time we see certain fads and trends emerge, and nonduality is one of them. Everybody seems to be talking of it in spiritual circles. But what is really going on?

Consciousness is the totality of all that is
We have to begin with consciousness, which is the totality of all that is; all that exists. It is movement, action, thought, manifestations, the mind, the body, nature, creativity, destruction, and the fountain of potentiality. As such, consciousness is everything without separation or division. It is an ebb and flow of opposites and complements, unseparated and in a state of potential until the mind settles upon it to focus upon a fraction of it.

It is the mind that creates the separations out of consciousness, because the mind can only be effective if it parses out the pieces in order to experience, understand, or know anything. This is obvious, because to know what cold is, the mind must have a reference of hot, and so forth.

The mind is a well-functioning mechanism for navigating this world. It remembers where you live, who your friends are, how old you are, how to drive a car, how to use your computer, and on and on. HOWEVER, when this mind becomes influenced by parents, teachers, and other authority figures from an early age, it forms a belief that it is a separate entity with various identifying characteristics and attachments. We call this influenced mind the ego, the egoic mind, the self, the persona, “me,” and so on.

Here comes the suffering
The egoic mind is the cause of suffering, because it does not recognize the holism — the singular, inseparable movement of consciousness. Instead, the egoic mind fragments consciousness into pieces and believes that this is the way the universe actually is. While this is helpful to navigate the world, it causes suffering because it forms a sense of self. In this process the mind becomes mired in its own doing and continually feels compelled to become completed. This is because it does not know that it is already complete. This need to become complete causes desire to get something, to obtain something, to win something. As the Buddhists say, desire causes suffering.

Buddhist monk and accomplished physicist Mattieu Ricard said, “We usually identify completely with our suffering and become one with it. Yet, even when they torment us the most, we are not our suffering in the same way that we are not the sickness when afflicted by some ailment…What burdens us is a succession of sensations and thoughts that leads to isolate one aspect of reality that is then allowed to become our sole preoccupation, thus giving it undue importance. To cast off this burden, we must better understand what remains untouched by suffering within us.”

The nonduality of consciousness
Consciousness is nondual in that it is a singular, indivisible movement. There are really no parts. It is only the egoic mind that believes there are parts, because it has been conditioned to believe this based on the nature of the mind, the influences of authority figures, and the secondhand information that it has learned.

Ultimately, however, nonduality is an idea. It exists, yet the sense of self can never actually know this, because it is an instrument of duality. Complete unity and wholeness can be realized, but not by the mind. As soon as the mind thinks about it, tries to describe it, teaches about it, etc., then there is an instantaneous return to duality. Nothing can be explained or taught without duality. Language relies upon it. We need opposing ideas to understand what something is and what it is not, otherwise the mind cannot absorb the teaching. But we cannot mistake knowledge for awareness.

Can we actually know there is no duality?
This brings us to the last point: How, then, can we actually know there is no duality? Paradoxically, this can only be done without the use of the image-making, thinking mind. We may call this a realization, because it is not knowledge (knowledge is predicated upon duality: To know something is to not know something else, etc.).

The answer to how we can be aware that there is no duality is to be aware; not to know by way of language, judgment, criticism, analysis, concentration, or intellectual understanding. Observation without judgment is the key to realizing what has always been here. Awareness is something that exists prior to the mind and body. To be fully aware is to be in the moment, without past or future. Knowledge, on the other hand, is always from the past.

Nonduality only exists for you when there is no “you,” which means there is no past or future, just observing this present moment.