The silliness of talking about nonduality
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
Nonduality is a misunderstood and misused term. We perceive, interpret, judge, and know things only by use of the mind as an instrument of consciousness. In order to know anything at all, objects and events must be dual. This is because anything nondual would not be detectable or knowable.
What can you experience without duality?
For anything to be exist it must do so in comparison to something that is the opposite.
So “nonduality” has become a buzz word in spiritual circles, and it is quite absurd for many good reasons. We cannot know anything that requires living in this world without duality: To know light there must be dark; to know hard we must know soft; to see an object there must be the contrast that is not the object; to know cold there must be hot; and so on. This is encapsulated in the Taoist symbol of yin and yang — contrasting, opposing, and complementary parts of duality.
If there is a beingness that does not have any characteristics to report or describe, then this sense of being may exist as nondual, but you can never describe it or what it is like, because to do so you need duality. Language requires duality to describe anything.
Consciousness contains all elements, phenomena, expressions, feelings, emotions, mentations, objects, people, animals, nature, and so on, as a complete and unified wholeness. That which is beyond, or prior to, consciousness is nondual but cannot be known by the sense of self, because the self fragments all of reality, all of what it perceives in consciousness, into duality.
Nonduality in its truest sense is complete silent stillness, yet this does not even come close to describing it. I am talking of a silence that cannot be created and is therefore not the opposite of noisiness. Can this be known to the mind of the self? Of course not, because the self has been conditioned to think and act out of duality. Duality is necessary for thinking, acting, behaving, dreaming, perceiving, discerning, deciding, judging, searching, and so on.
The ego likes the idea of nonduality
So what is the point of discussing nonduality if not to appease, excite, and stimulate the egoic mind that loves to bite into concepts and phenomena? People think that there is a way to “practice” nonduality, but this is just a game of the ego chasing its own tail and feeling good about itself and its abilities. I
f you want to be nondual, go to sleep and have a deep, dreamless reality. And in this dreamless sleep you will not see, hear, feel, taste, or smell anything — nothing will be explainable or knowable to the limited mind of the self. When you awaken back into the world of duality there will be nothing of that dreamless deep sleep that can be described, yet some essence of a “you” had existed within it and still exists.
The self lives in the world of duality. What is nondual, therefore, is beyond the ken of the self. As long as we think about it or try to explain it, it becomes an idea built out of thought.
Is this all there is to nonduality? No, but you would need to enquire into the self until it is exposed as an illusion, an idea, an image of what we take ourselves to be. When this enquiry results in a realization then thought comes to an end, a state that is, once again, impossible to accurately describe.
