The Non-Dual Nature of Reality

Have you noticed that if you think of any two opposites there is always a common dimension underlying both of them.

For example, if you think of near and far, that underlying dimension is space. If you think of hot and cold, then there's temperature. And if you think of sadness and happiness, they're also on a spectrum.

You may be feeling sad, but if you feel less sad, and lesser and lesser, you end up being happy. And vice versa, if you're less happy and less happy, eventually you end up being sad or depressed.

So the price of joy is the vulnerability of grief. You can't have one without the other.

But the mind is built on these beliefs in dualities; in opposites. Which it holds on to very strongly. Some of them are just immovable.

Like the duality of life and death, existence and inexistence, something and nothing.

These opposites seem like they have no common dimension. But this is not true.

In the deepest insights communicated by sages and mystics and poets you see this common theme that these dualities are not really true. That there's something underlying them.

And in modern days the word being given to these kind of teachings and understanding is called Non-duality. Not two, not even one.

So we ended our last video with a quote from the Zen master Dogen Zenji,

"A stone woman gives birth to a child at night."

And there's a context to it, which we covered in the previous video on green mountains walking.

You might want to watch that first, but that context is around consciousness. What it is like to be conscious. It is like being a mountain; remaining perfectly still as everything moves by. And you observe it simply because of this quality of you-ness; this quality of being conscious.

But the question remains where did this consciousness come from? Because it does have a start. At the beginning of every life, consciousness emerges.

And this will go against many spiritual teachings and so on that are being spread around these days, but that is becoming enamored with consciousness; the state where there is experience, and is ignoring the other side.

That nothing; the lack of experience, the stone woman that gave birth to this child.

In the words of another sage, Nisargadatta, who has had the most impact on my understanding non-duality, he calls consciousness the child of a barren woman. Which is quite similar to what Dogen said.

The child of a barren woman.

There's two ways to look at it. One is that the child must be imaginary; unreal. But you can't quite say that about consciousness. You can't deny that it is here.

So, it is unreal in the sense that it is dreamlike. It's not the permanent state of reality. It emerges. And everything in it emerges with it, as a dream.

And just as when you wake up from a dream, you can say that everything that happened in it wasn't quite real, you cannot deny that the dream happened. That it was experienced.

But the other way to look at it, the child of a barren woman, is that it proves that the woman is not barren. She gave birth.

And if a stone woman gives birth to a child that is alive, that is living, then the stone woman cannot be dead.

So, consciousness has emerged from unconsciousness, something has emerged from nothing. And so they are not polar opposites with no bridge between them. They are two ends of a spectrum.

A common reality that encompasses everything. All possibility and the power to take a possibility and realize it. To have it turn into a life.

This reality is what gave birth to this universe.

To all the stars in it. And from that stardust this planet and all the organisms on it. And it is the same reality which allows that insentient matter to be taken together, to be arranged in a pattern, then have some activity passed through it, and have that activity reflected as experience.

From what is considered insentient and unconscious and nothing, that is where life has emerged from.

And most minds they just draw a blank to this nothing; turn away from it. Because how do you contemplate what is unknowable and unobservable?

But to turn away from it is the cause of much suffering. Because this duality of something and nothing, this is the duality of life and death.

This is what causes us to strive for whatever we can achieve in this one lifetime to the detriment of everyone else, everything else.

And at an even more fundamental level, this duality gives rise to the idea of me and others. The idea that there are these entities; these sentient entities, which exist in their own right, separate to everything else. Gives rise to the idea of self and soul.

And the God who will maybe save the souls and grant them an afterlife much like this one, but better.

But such beliefs require faith, whereas reality requires no faith or belief. It just is how it is.

The proof of it is in the moment that you catch consciousness arising.

And you can do that. You can do it on the borderline of sleep or through meditation. There's a moment where experience reappears from a state where there is no experience. No sense of time or space.

Nothing. Just nothing.

And that is where experience begins.

So what is called insentient or unconscious and nothing is where life begins. And as it begins, you know that nothing not by observing it, but by being it.

There's nothing there that can be called me; the sentient entity.

I am the nothing.

But that nothing is brilliant. It's amazing.

It's the very basis of everything.

This is the realization where all opposites converge into a whole. A realization of the non-dual nature of reality.

And to arrive at it, you need only focus your attention on the sense of existence; the sense that, "I am".

And watch how it is at the very core of all your experiences of this entire life. And as your attention focuses on this fact of being, it will carry on as you go to sleep, or you meditate, and you'll catch the moment where this "I am" emerges.

That is the most beautiful moment of creation. The only moment of creation.

The rest is just transformation; an expression of this very same ingredient, this existence that emerges from nothing.