"Nonduality? WTF!!!"
I was in the middle of a rather stressful day. You see, a hearing was scheduled for Wednesday, and my boss more or less threw it at me. Which means I have to go to jail tomorrow afternoon rather than work preparing for the hearing I have on Friday. Which means that instead of writing this, I should be drafting a hard-hitting cross examination. Suffice it to say, the nonduality question more or less sprang up out of nowhere. So I responded to his email in kind:
"Nonduality? What the fuck are YOU talking about?"
His answer was oh-so-enlightening. It said, simply: "Nonduality." Well, yeah, we got that far already. I wasn't really thinking much about it. What I was really thinking about was how to get one guy out of jail and how to keep another guy from going in. So I emailed him back some bullshit linguistic answer about how "duality" means something comprised of two parts, so "nonduality" would thus be something not comprised of two parts. A bit of a wiseass answer, to be sure, but I was operating on high stress and low caffeine.
I went out for a cigarette break, thought more about it, and decided to write a more detailed message when I got home. Now, I don't purport to be an expert on such things as nonduality. I live inside my head most of the time, so some of the stuff that rattles around is buried pretty far near the bottom. My recall isn't what it used to be, so I dug around and came up with the following, not-so-great answer. I throw this out there in the hopes that there are people who know more than I.
* * *
It may be easier to think about if you consider what duality is first. For me, the easiest way to think about duality is in very simplistic terms. I generally look to Greek and Roman polytheism as a guide here. I dig thinking about the Greek gods and goddesses because they seem so very human in nature: they all have good attributes and bad attributes. One of the ongoing themes in Greek mythology is the struggle between good and evil. Indeed, this is the ongoing theme in most literature, classic or contemporary. In that structure, good and evil must coexist; one cannot exist without the other. There are so many examples of these sort of "opposites." How would we know peace if we did not have war? Without black, there would be no white. Yet the concept of nonduality takes all of this and throws it out the window. "Black and white?" is asks. "But what about shades of gray? Black is not black and white is not white -- they are ALL just variants of gray. All this gray simply exists, without the interaction of black or white."
Nonduality posits that there ARE no opposites, and that duality itself is merely an illusion. There is no male/female, active/passive, and so forth. There are no good words to explain nonduality, because it's a realization. How can one assign words to something that must be realized? Thus, ego (sense of self, sense of living, sense of time, planning, etc, etc.), the way it is commonly viewed, is bullshit. We do not think; we merely are present.
When I was a little girl, my mother presented me with the idea that people are not people, and brains are not brains... we merely float around, and this higher being (which some people call God), is really the force that controls life and thought and sense of self. As a 10-year-old, I pictured a huge cauldron over a fire with brains floating around in it like some odd soup, and some bigger-than-life "thing" (for lack of a better word) prodding the brain soup with a huge broomhandle. Strangely, I still sometimes get that picture in my head. Which may explain why I'm as odd as I am today.
The funny part about explaining nonduality, is that it can only be explained in terms of what it is NOT. It's a total mindfuck. And a horrible connundrum, in that the concept of duality itself is needed to explain nonduality. But I'm totally getting ahead of myself here.
It may be easier to think about if you consider what duality is first. For me, the easiest way to think about duality is in very simplistic terms. I generally look to Greek and Roman polytheism as a guide here. I dig thinking about the Greek gods and goddesses because they seem so very human in nature: they all have good attributes and bad attributes. One of the ongoing themes in Greek mythology is the struggle between good and evil. Indeed, this is the ongoing theme in most literature, classic or contemporary. In that structure, good and evil must coexist; one cannot exist without the other. There are so many examples of these sort of "opposites." How would we know peace if we did not have war? Without black, there would be no white. Yet the concept of nonduality takes all of this and throws it out the window. "Black and white?" is asks. "But what about shades of gray? Black is not black and white is not white -- they are ALL just variants of gray. All this gray simply exists, without the interaction of black or white."
Nonduality posits that there ARE no opposites, and that duality itself is merely an illusion. There is no male/female, active/passive, and so forth. There are no good words to explain nonduality, because it's a realization. How can one assign words to something that must be realized? Thus, ego (sense of self, sense of living, sense of time, planning, etc, etc.), the way it is commonly viewed, is bullshit. We do not think; we merely are present.
When I was a little girl, my mother presented me with the idea that people are not people, and brains are not brains... we merely float around, and this higher being (which some people call God), is really the force that controls life and thought and sense of self. As a 10-year-old, I pictured a huge cauldron over a fire with brains floating around in it like some odd soup, and some bigger-than-life "thing" (for lack of a better word) prodding the brain soup with a huge broomhandle. Strangely, I still sometimes get that picture in my head. Which may explain why I'm as odd as I am today.
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