You cannot practice ‘nonduality’

by Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment

How do you shift beyond duality when duality is the only way the mind works and the only way to communicate? The word nonduality is poorly understood. Whenever the mind works, it works in duality; there is no other way. Only observation without thought can perceive totality. Even “practicing” nonduality is engaging in duality.

Nonduality. It’s the phrase du jour. It seems that people in our society grab hold of a certain term and take off with it until the term is relatively meaningless; or until it’s absurd. Nonduality is one of these terms, and the use of it presents a paradox of outrageous proportions.

Nonduality means not dual — whole and without separation or division. Dual means split into two parts. Nonduality applies to the nature of consciousness as a totality of all that is. The mind , on the other hand, is an instrument that brings experience to awareness. To do this it needs to fragment the totality of consciousness into pieces, into a sense of relativity.

There is no better representation for the interplay between mind and consciousness than the yin-yang symbol. There is a circle, which represents wholeness, but in the circle are two identical “fish” of different colors, black and white. This represents the fragmentation of the whole into two distinct complements. Overall, the yin-yang symbol represents both duality and nonduality. However, even though a mono-colored circle may represent nonduality, it would not convey the fact that the mind fragments this nonduality into complements and opposites.

Unless you can actually realize that this world is a perpetually flowing movement of consciousness, and that all you sense is simply a formation of one single and undivided consciousness, then nonduality is nothing more than an abstract idea. And ideas are not realizations; they are artifacts of the same brain that attaches to notions such as nonduality.