Blogging Nonduality In 2003–2004
Part One
[Ed.note: this is a blog called Nondualogicality I wrote in 2003–2004 when I was a member of a circle of Kali devotees in Laguna Beach and much more enamoured with the panpsychic interpretation of human consciousness. What I’m calling the ‘nonconceptual phase of ordinary awareness’ now, I called ‘oneness’ back then, more closely hewing to the Vedantic concept of Brahman. Otherwise, I think it holds up pretty well, which is why I’m resurrecting it here.]
Sunday, January 12, 2003
Who is writing this?
Everything we know and do is based on the idea that we are individuals, separate people who make decisions and interact with other people in ways funny, brilliant, and terrible.
To question this is more ludicrous than making Hilter a saint or calling G.W. Bush intelligent.
It is unimaginable to think that the “person” we think we are is really only an idea, even if it’s an incredibly varied, creative and complex idea.
You’d have to be crazy to think that you’re not a person.
Well, I’m crazy.
This particular blog is written by no one. It comes out of this head by the agency of these hands, but the fact is — for all of us — that there is only ‘this,’ ‘this’ being what is. It can’t be spoken, but we’re all it, and this apparent blogger is going to blog away at that point until you either get sick of it or you get it too.
So prepare to puke or maybe learn who you really are.
Monday, January 13, 2003
What have I gotten into? Or better yet, why am I writing this?
When one is trying to make a case for the non-reality of the person, it doesn’t help to keep referring to oneself as “I”. Yet anybody who speaks must admit to the existence of their voice. “My” voice has been formed out of a particular life’s experiences. If I am to determine why I’m writing, I have to start with these experiences.
Rather than bore you with the details, let’s just say that this life has been equipped with a personality that likes to please others. One way we know that others are pleased is to hear their praise. To be praised is to be singled out for special, positive attention, in short, to be admired. If I’m to be completely honest, I have to see the need to be admired as a primary motivator for my new undertaking, this weblog.
However, what I’m writing might not be deemed admirable at all by the reader. It’s very likely that many of you will think I’m totally full of myself, and totally full of shit. That’s ok. I’d think the same thing. So, if I can’t expect to get any admiration out of it, why continue?
To be honest, I want to write a book. Not just so I can be admired, although there is certainly some of that still at work. I want to make clear the obscured and occluded truth about our true nature. There are many levels of obscuration at work here, but we’ll stay with the psychological occlusions (behavioral patterns that limit us to thinking we are only the individual) and the many ways they are reflected in the culture at large.
So, I guess the reason I’m writing is because I believe I have something to say. Finding out about the one who believes this will have to wait for another day.
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Yesterday I received some feedback encouraging me to attempt to “convince the organism that it’s really one thing.”
By “organism” my friend meant the Earth as seen through James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, by way of the deep ecologists and the Wiccan folk. Peter Russell’s vision of a global brain is another source of the idea, that the Earth is a discrete, living organism complete with an evolving consciousness comprised of all the minds on the planet taken together.
I used to be really enamored of the global brain idea, and I believe it still holds water when you’re using it to look at the internet’s effects on society. A scientist might scoff, but it’s hard not to see how societal structures are developing in the context of internet-mediated communications, and that these structures are somewhat analogous to structures found in some form in the human mind.
But the idea that we’re all part of a larger global being is not the same brand of “oneness” as the truth pointed to by the nondual philosophies. Put another way, our being “one” has nothing to do with us being parts of anything. We are whole, each unto ourselves, and that wholeness is shared by all. In the context of this brand of “oneness”, nothing exists apart from it. It is all, and yet it is only itself. Everything we know as the world is contained by this oneness, but this oneness is blind to all the world’s kaleidoscopic affairs.
Oneness only has eyes for oneness.
The commotion we call life is like the Eveready bunny. It got started way back when and it will keep going until well past whenever. Oneness has been the bunny’s marching grounds, but the ground doesn’t pay attention to the bunny, and the bunny doesn’t give the ground a second thought.
In Hindu shaktism (worship of the Divine Mother) this is illustrated by the pairing of Shiva with Shakti as the composite deity known as Ma Kali. To Her devotees, Kali is the entire manifest universe, our bunny. But Kali stands on an immobile Shiva, prone beneath Her feet and seemingly unconsciousness. He isn’t. Shiva represents the oneness that knows only itself and Kali represents being in its form as everything else. They are eternal lovers that never get a chance to see one another.
Except when they together take the form of an individual person.
From Kali’s perspective, each person is a puppet which She manipulates though their life by being them and their lives. Shiva lives as the light in each person’s heart, providing the core of being upon which that person’s existence rests. Most of the time the person never knows themselves as ‘this’ which lives in their heart. But sometimes this understanding is revealed in the context of a person’s life. Only then does Kali look down from Her completely insane activities and gaze into the eyes of a Shiva who is now fully awake.
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
From yesterday:
“Only then does Kali look down from Her completely insane activities and gaze into the eyes of a Shiva who is now fully awake.”
I sort of got off the subject with that fit of Vivekanandian rhetoric, but it does provide the segue into a discussion of the world.
If we are only oneness, and oneness only knows oneness, what is this thing we call the universe? It exists as an unthinkably enormous collection of objects in cause effect relationships, the seeming complete opposite of a oneness that knows only oneness. And unlike the oneness, which can be denied by anyone who hasn’t known it directly, the reality of a speeding big rig truck is a mighty convincing case for the reality of the manifest universe. At the very least you must admit to its apparent reality.
So what’s the relationship between the world and the oneness? Getting back to Kali and Shiva, the manifest reality (the apparent world) stands on the unmanifest reality (oneness that knows only oneness). Without the unmanifest to provide the foundation of being, the manifest doesn’t have the ground to stand on.
Yet the unmanifest is somehow so “other” from the manifest as to seem entirely separate. If everything is one, why is there this separation?
There isn’t, but you can only see this from the oneness side things. So until the oneness becomes known as one’s own being, you’ve pretty much got to take it on faith that this oneness is really there at all. If you decide that it is and that you want to “find” it, you’re probably going to want to do something about it. If not, you won’t. It makes no difference to the oneness inside you. As much as it is the very foundation of who you are in your life, it has remained unmoved and unchanged for all of eternity.
Friday, January 17, 2003
The literature of mysticism is full of accounts of the lives of its deified luminaries, the saints. These are the people who have come to know themselves as oneness who have also left enough of a wake to gain notice in the literature. But we’re not going to talk about these people. They are figments of the historical imagination.
The fact is that all saints are people first, but we rarely get to see the person side of the saint. History is usually very kind to saints, often erasing anything that would call their divinity into question, including ordinary human behaviors like getting angry or having sex. These more mundane qualities just don’t make good copy, and they violate traditionally held ideas about sainthood. Thus saints are projected to be paragons of absolute virtue built on mountains of high-fiber bedrock.
And yet we all know that it isn’t always quite so.
This isn’t about denigrating the saints. They are all blessed to know themselves as oneness. But it’s important to understand that this special kind of knowledge, the experiential knowing of oneself as oneness, is different from sainthood, the life stories that develop around a spiritual figure. Take the sainthood out of the saint and you get just another person trying to make their way through the world, just like you and me.
Knowing oneself as oneness is certainly very rarely accompanied by the kinds of phenomena and experiences recorded in the mystical literature. But what people believe about their saints is what they expect themselves to become. There exist volumes of quaint stories and tales of miracles to inspire us, but the beliefs that result provide the number one source of occlusion present in spiritual culture today.
It’s sort of like the eggs of the cowbird.
The cowbird finds an unattended nest with eggs, knocks them out and lays her own, and then leaves. The eggs are hatched and raised by their unwittingly adoptive parents.
The expectations we have about self realization (knowing ourselves as oneness) are the cowbird’s eggs. These ideas are raised as concepts in our minds, replacing the real understanding they pose as. By buying into these sets of commonly held beliefs about spiritual understanding, many very effectively hinder themselves from ever seeing that understanding come to their own lives.
Ideas about self realization and our own spirituality can fill our perceptual desktops with many layers of post-it noted spiritual “truths,” crowding out the experiential truth that is always present.
Thus, helping the saints down off their pedestals is exactly what they would have wanted, for anyone who knows themselves as oneness knows this: it’s being no one different than anyone else.
Saturday, January 18, 2003
Saturday night at home adding an entry to my blog.
There was a time in my life when Saturday night meant going to at least two or more rave events. This was during the trietary coming of my adolescence, which occurred between my 28th and 37th years, my “rave” era. [Ed.note: still going super strong today!]
But that doesn’t mean I don’t approve of the activity anymore. Most of my good friends and many people I admire I met in the context of the rave culture. The small gatherings and parties I attend today almost always have a dj lineup, and about half of my friends in the SF bay area could be on the list.
I used to get a lot out of raves. They were a group hug at a tribal gathering held in a psychedelic church’s revival tent on the set of Saturday Night Fever being used to shoot an episode of Sesame Street. We were convinced the raves would change the world, that they would bring unfettered psychedelic spirituality to the masses. We had all got the spirit right there on the dancefloor, at parties called ToonTown and Osmosis.
Sure we were high as kites, but that didn’t pollute the truth of the spirit there. To look across a room of 800 or so and see every face beaming joy was breathtaking. Introductions were unnecessary at these events. Everyone was tuned to that channel with call letters L-O-V-E.
But that often didn’t last too long. The problem was habituation. Too many nights of psychedelic splendor will take their toll. As real as it was on the dancefloor in the throes of serotonin enhancement, it usually didn’t last through the refractory period. Fortunately for the promoters and djs, there were always new people with virgin brain cells begging to be ravished.
From the early days of the nightclub establishment to the evolution of the rave community and finally to the emergence of a rave church, spirituality has always been a centerpiece of raving.
It is a transideological spirituality, and that is its best feature. As long as you’re not hurting anyone with it, believe whatever you want. It made each rave a symphony of belief and devotion to whatever higher power each person was beholden to, and that is the oneness that we all are.
Unfortunately, as habituation set in and people started chasing the high, things got a bit out of hand. There were many flaming re-entries in those days, and it stopped being spirituality at all for the most part. After a while it morphed into a kind of pillow parlor hedonism, with freeform altars remaining as tokens of spirituality.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m all for it in fact. But the oneness that we are is not in a psychedelic experience any more than in a bathroom experience. But many rave people made the psychedelic experience their spirituality in toto, and their practice became the quest for the highest peak high, and also the cause of their continuing ignorance. Many got stuck in the honey pot without ever coming to much real inner understanding.
The oneness that we are is not a peak experience. It is an ongoing awareness that lives in each one of us. Right now, each one of us is in the presence of that awareness. It’s not something that’s attained after an awesome drug or meditation experience, but it does seem to discover itself after a lot of personal transformation has occurred.
That’s the plus side of the psychedelic experience, it can greatly accellerate personal transformation. But accellerating transformation this way has its own risks, and it usually takes something of a toll from your life.
So feeling one on the dancefloor can be a memory to cherish forever, especially if you make it beyond the lightshow dazzle and spun out mornings to the real truth of your own being, as close in the common and mundane as it might seem in the throes of excessive and glorious bliss.
Sunday, January 19, 2003
This afternoon I took a call in the heat of a USENET debate. I related to my friend what I was doing and why I was so excited about it. I explained that the guy was playing right into my hands with his expectation-laden beliefs about vedanta and Self realization. My friend was amused and offered that I was excited because it was boosting my ego. That caught me by surprise, mostly because she was pretty much right.
But before you judge me for having an ego, let me explain.
I’ve always enjoyed a good USENET discussion. The practice has been efficiently edifying, especially when I encounter someone who ends up schooling me. I’ve learned the most when I’ve been shown just how much I didn’t know, and the more humiliated I got, the greater the lesson was.
But in truth I sort of did it for the ego boost too. I guess it’s an Aries thing. Some (many) might say it’s an asshole thing, because I practiced real hard at being a self-righteous juggernaut of what I liked to believe was crushing rhetoric, spiced with wit.
But then at some point, something shifted. The thing that I was talking and debating, but not really knowing about, this far off ideal that I believed very few were pure enough to be blessed with, this understanding that I never ever expected to occur in my life… suddenly made a home there, and in a somewhat impure home at that. That was a shocker. The next shocker was discovering that I (and everyone else) had always possessed this understanding, even when I (or they) didn’t see it. Another shocker was knowing that it didn’t make “me” any different, even though this simple perceptual shift changes everything in a way. The final shocker was seeing how much of an idiot I had been (and maybe still am) on USENET.
If the “me” that was me in 1995 encountered the “me” that is writing this blog, 1995 would have made it his mission to present this writer as a grandiose and sadly deluded fraud. I was unable to see what Self realization was or how it might be expressed, but I was quite sure my ideas and expectations about it were as accurate as any could be. Never in the history of all time and space could I have been more wrong.
Every expectation about Self realization is dead wrong. Whatever you believe Self realization to be, it is guaranteed to not be that way. There is just no possible way for the mind to render something that is not a thought, feeling, belief, memory, or any combination of these.
But the fact is that we are always the Self and we’ve always known it. Self realization is the experiential understanding of this fact. But it would seem that for this recognition to occur, something has to go. People usually call that the ego, but Ramakrishna had another term. The “idea of me” is just what you would think it is, the idea that we are individuals. That is all that really keeps us from knowing ourselves as we really are, this idea that we are limited to the form of our body and the contents of our mind.
But losing this idea of me doesn’t change how we’ve been as a me. That’s been set by a lifetime’s experience. It’s an encoded pattern or cellular connection in the brain. We are the Self at all times, whether we know it or not. Why should coming to know ourselves as we really are change the things that we’ve been all along? The patterns of behavior known as the personality operate independently of being, allowing us to remain the one that we’ve always been in the full and complete knowledge that we were never that one.
So you may still get an ego boost every now and then, but only in the full and complete understanding that you were never the one who got boosted.
Monday, January 20, 2003
Identity, The Self, and the Snare of Significance
Why don’t we know who we really are? Why are so many of us limited to the idea of being a person instead of understanding ourselves as limitlessness itself? Such questions are especially perplexing given the fact that we’ve never been anything else! What exactly is Maya’s veil, this trickery that has us seeing snakes instead of ropes?
The process of identity forms the crux of the problem. We identify as the individual person we know ourselves to be. We have always known ourselves as this individual, and as much as we’ve changed over the course of our lives, we’ve always been just us. It’s all we’ve ever known, and that’s a clue to who we really are.
However, the sages tell us that we are not individuals at all, that we’re never born and that we won’t die either. A sensible person might not make much sense of this, but the sages insist it is so. Somehow, something that is not born and never dies gets born into a life that ends in certain death. It’s as if the unborn gets stuck in being the born, like a child getting stuck playing with gooey bubble gum.
What we call “the mind” has evolved to do many things. It could be argued that one of its most important functions is to rank, to prioritize and label experiences and memories. We learned very early in our evolutionary history that some of our neighbors were stronger, and some were downright dangerous. If we wanted to survive we had to remember who to look out for and who to ignore. In essence, we learned what was significant. So the mind came up with a way to mark memories with varying levels of significance, and thus identity was born.
Significance, the mind’s function of ranking memories with attached emotion, is the cause of identity. We (as individuals) are what we find significant, with the idea of being an individual person at the very top of the heap. This “idea of me,” as Ramakrishna called it, is actually just a thought, but because it is the most significant thought in our heads, it clouds our perceptual capacity and we miss the truth that’s as plain as the nose on our faces.
The reason it’s missed is this: who we really are is perfectly insignificant. We rest in ourselves in every moment, whether we are awake or asleep, shining deep within our hearts. The mind has evolved to see the significant (that which brings comfort or hardship) and ignore everything else, so how can we expect it to see the constant yet unmoving, silent presence of what is often called “The Self?”
We can’t.
This tragedy is further compounded by that fact that almost all of so-called “spiritual” culture makes who we really are to be the most significant thing in the universe. We are led to believe that there’s nothing greater than “The Self,” that all the worlds arose because of it and that the entire universe rests on its being. That may well be true, but when the mind factors in and marks the inferred significance of this, it effectively eclipses the truth. We may as well have just blown off our foot with a shotgun!
What can be done about this? Perhaps not a whole lot, but if we endeavor to realize that what we are looking for is who we are right now, we might not waste so much time seeking something big and mighty and glorious — that is, significant. We might do a bit better to seek out the small and quiet and quite unglorious, for that’s much more akin to the wholly insignificant yet constant presence of this most significant of truths: we are all the One, The Self, right now.
[edited by Bruce Morgen]
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
There are times I’m prone to delusions of grandeur. They usually come during periods of elation, like the one I’m in right now. It makes it easy for me to see how a big time guru can end up as one of the vanguard of the grandiose.
For how could you be a bigtime guru without being grandiose? They build ashrams all over the world, go wherever they like whenever they want, and have thousands of adoring devotees treating them like living deities.
Look at Ammachi. She tours her international ashrams giving darshan to literally thousands of devotees, 90% of which are convinced she is the incarnation of the Divine Mother just because they can get a hug from her.
There’s the infamous Adi Da. He bought himself an island near Fiji and took his whole community there. He’s been accused of forced wife swapping and other kinds of whoopee and is becoming known for his bitterness at not having been recognized as the “World Teacher.”
There’s also Gurumayi, head of the SYDA Yoga organization, with ashrams large and small all over the US. Every Sunday her devotees chant the guru gita to her picture on tv via satellite. Perhaps teledarshan is the wave of the future.
But I honestly can’t see how any party to any of this could ever take it very seriously.
Ken Wilber was convinced by the authentic voice of Da Free John. Then Da Free John became Adi Da and took to spinning off to his own island universe, forcing Wilber to publicly disapprove of his activities, only to do an about face a few years later. Wilber knew then what he knows now. Da knows himself as oneness, but in the context of a psychology that is predisposed to grandiosity… just like me.
It’s a bit scary to see that I have these same tendencies myself. Not that I would *ever* want to be regarded as a living god. But I do get elated and sometimes catch myself starting to believe my own hype. My conviction about what I am saying doesn’t waver, but my faith in what others are going to get from it varies greatly depending how elated I am.
I think it could be this elation that sets a life on the path to becoming a bigtime guru. Being surrounded by adoring devotees who lap up whatever yogaprop you give them while treating you like God would seem to offer a very slippery slope for a personality now lacking the need to keep up appearances. And instead of managing the sociopsychological circus that erupts around them, they usually pay it no mind at all. And as the pedestal gets built higher and higher, all that is left is the supposed greatness of the guru and the blessings they believe they bestow to their devotees, which in all cases is a big fat zero.
Because big time gurus do their devotees a tremendous disservice by allowing that pedestal to be built at all, for it conveys the impression that Self realization will entitle them to the same kind of life. Combined with the many ridiculous things that people believe about their bigtime guru’s “powers,” and you end up in a cyclone of occluding expectations obscuring just about everyone’s awareness.
It’s been exciting for me to finally get my thoughts down on “paper”, but I need to be vigilant and ready to keep things in perspective. Outside of the friends that I have pushed here, I don’t have many readers. But that still doesn’t stop me from being somewhat grandiosely convinced that I’m right about these things and that others will find themselves in agreement.
Who knows? One day I might write a book and go on the satsang circuit, acquiring my own community and building centers as I get hailed as the latest new world teacher. But then it will be discovered that I once was prone to dress as a cosmic gogo dancer and attend sexual fetish parties, bringing the whole thing down like those buildings we all remember. And when the dust finally settles and I get to see the true extent of the devastation, I hope I can laugh when I realize I fell into the same exact trap I had ranted about so many years ago in this weblog.
Friday, January 24, 2003
Yesterday was my last night at the Kali temple, but I’d actually left well over a year ago. As much as I loved the devotees and the devotion, the place had come to reek of significance.
I moved here two and some years ago to be close to this temple. I was an active participant in its daily activities as I looked for a job, and even after I found one I spent many evenings sitting at puja, discussing the temple’s future, or hanging around to watch the “X-files” and eat pizza.
It’s a good crowd to be with, and I’m sorry I left them so abruptly. But I had suddenly developed an allergy to the place, as I had to cats when I was 12. It was the many superstitious beliefs that come with traditional hindu ritualism and how they determine where the significance lies.
For let’s face it, it’s only a statue on the altar. Not that it doesn’t work as a stand-in for the real thing. It *is* the real thing, but then so is everything else. That’s why I had a problem with it. Why should some things be a ‘better’ real than others? It seems to me that all ‘things’ must be equally real whether better or worse, not better or worse to be more or less real.
For them it was a question of purity. Most of the customs of hindu ritualism have to do with making things “pure,” that is, undefiled by the world. This is done by the chanting of various mantras and other means such as using water from the Ganges River, which is regarded as holy despite the fact that you really can’t call it pure. I went along with it all as a courtesy to the group. As much as I tried to rock the boat in other ways, this was obviously their hobby, and who am I to question anyone’s hobbies.
But the idea of purity is linked to the idea of power. That made the things on the altar powerful. There was a crystal yantra on the altar that had been worshipped by a Shankaracharya from South India (not to be confused with *the* Adi Shankaracharya.) During puja people would offer flowers on this altar, but not above the line where the crystal yantra was placed. This was not permitted to prevent it from being robbed of the power placed there by the Shankaracharya. All it would take was an inadvertent touch.
That’s what holiness is, power through a belief in purity. It’s one thing for people to be holy, but a piece of glass shaped like a little penis? But that’s what a lot of hindu ritualism is about, keeping things pure to keep them holy. And that’s mostly what the temple seemed to be about. I found out that it wasn’t what I was about, and so I spent the next year or so trying to get back to SF/Oakland, which is where I’ll be headed next week.
And as I leave the beautiful canyon I’ve shared with them, I wish the Kali kids much success. May they build a beautiful temple and share the bliss of shakta devotion with the rest of the world, and through this come to see the heart they share with all of Ma’s creation, their underlying existence as oneness itself.
