What is Non Duality and Why Does It Matter?

Image source: https://www.freedom.clinic/non-duality-not-two/

Often when I mention to friends or family members about my abiding interest in non duality, they ask, "What is it, anyway?"

Not an easy question to answer. This is certainly one where you don't want the Wikipedia version. For example, you might want to read Rupert Spira's introduction_to_non-duality Or it may be too opaque, and this interview within buddhist inquiry with David Loy could be helpful as a starting point - that it is about "not two".

Training in dualism begins for us very early. One can imagine a fetus in the womb has no sense of not two, and in the first weeks and months of life may not be perceiving divisions as much as later on. But soon the parents and other caregiver introduce the idea that the baby is a separate self from those around him or her, separate from things, entirely separate. And so the gradual development of what nondualists believe is the fiction of the separate self grows until the adult may be extremely skeptical that there is another valid way of perceiving the world.

Why it matters is that the vast majority of suffering we experience is as a result of living withing a framework of duality. Who doesn't long to end suffering? But as long as one believes one is a separate self, it is inevitable. If you look at the myth of the Garden and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, it could be interpreted as describing moving from an experience of non duality into duality, with all the suffering that accompanied that ejection from the Garden - separation from God, work involving toil and pain, childbirth being an experience of suffering, and suspicion and division between male and female, brother and brother, and so on.

What if our relationships were characterized by an absence of judgment, or attempting to "get" something out it the other? As Seal says in his song: Help me find someone peaceful and non-judgmental." Would that be "life without the pain"?

This week, my daughter shared with me a tweet that blew my mind. Funnily enough it was by someone I already follow on Twitter: 

The Hungover Pundit

@hungover_the

A friend once shared what she called the Parable of the Choir: A choir can sing a beautiful note impossibly long because singers can individually drop out to breathe as necessary and the note goes on. Social justice activism should be like that, she said. That's stuck with me.

Singing in choirs is a huge part of my life, so stagger breathing (which is what we call this technique) is very familiar. Also, since buying I-Hope-We-Choose-Love, trying to understand what it means for life is instinctive. And being an activist, struggling frequently with the demands of activism and the inevitable friction between activists at times takes up a lot of emotional space. 

This is what I want, so badly I can taste it. A world where not only in our activism but in all the spheres of life we know that we can drop out to breathe whenever we need to and come back in and the music just goes on and on regardless.

Where it is not a competition or a fight. Where within each couple, or family, or group, or country, or world, we take turns. No one has inexhaustible capacity. But it doesn't have to mean the defeat of our efforts when the energy is gone for one individual for a time.

So non duality matters because if I truly know, if you truly know separateness is the illusion, then conflict no longer makes any sense, and working together on everything including the #ClimateEmergency becomes the natural way forward.