This week, we are working on six ways to non-dual. Today, we’re going to talk about erasing. This is the basic nondual exercise. This is the one that everybody talks about the most.
We’re saying there’s not two . This means that everything you look at you erase it.
Try to find yourself in your thoughts, ‘No, that’s not it, erase it.’
Try to find yourself in your emotions, ‘No, that’s not it, erase it.’
Try to find yourself in your I, ‘No, that’s not it.’
Of course we are not talking about actual physical reality. We are not talking about whether or not there are there two sheep out in the field. I mean, obviously, if there’s two sheep out in the field, there’s two sheep out in the field.
If there are two people then there’s two people. There’s you and there’s me. You can have two computers, you can have two… anything. All sorts of things actually exist.
Nonduality is just talking about your internal experience. There is not two experiencers; there’s the experiencer and then whatever that experiencer is experiencing. Those are the not-two things we are talking about.
Our language brains, our fixed brains, our left brain, tends to take the ideas we have about things and believe that those are real, when they are just ideas. The thing itself is real, the thought about the thing is not real.
Not Two.
With this practice we take every single idea and examine it. For instance: Is there a god? No. Is there no god? No. Is this thought right? No. Is that thought right? No.
With this practice we erase and erase and erase and erase and erase until we finally get down to nothing. This is a very effective way to find the non-dual state. The problem is that it can go on forever… because there is an infinite number of perceptions that you can have.
It can turn into a giant loop. If you spend all your time having a perception, then saying, “That’s not it.” Then having a perception, and saying, “That’s not it.” It can take forever. It takes so long that many Enlightenment traditions and teachings will tell you that it can take lifetimes and lifetimes.
Another problem is that when you erase like this, you will reach this place called ‘The Dark Night of the Soul.’ It’s dark to constantly undo yourself because you don’t have a way to tell if a perception is useful or not. Lots of our perceptions are useful. We’re human beings, we’re living our lives, right?
The only way that following this strategy can work is if you erase everything until you reach a point of total confusion where you don’t know what’s going on at all… but still don’t stop. Keep going, keep going, keep going until finally something happens so that you step back into yourself.
In the end it’s the process of finding zero. Rupert Spira is a good example of this process working.
Erasing is very effective, but it can take a long time. It’s nice to understand this concept because it can be done in just a flash. Eckhart Tolle is the perfect example of the flash of erasing. He’s very, very depressed, he’s getting ready to commit suicide, and he’s talking himself into it, right? He’s thinking, “I can’t take myself anymore.” Then he stops and goes, “Wait a minute. ‘I’ can’t take ‘myself’ anymore?” And he saw that that was two things, like two beings inside of himself. He realized what he was seeing. The ‘I’ (the real me) can’t take ‘myself’ (the fake me) anymore. But the fake me doesn’t exist!
He saw that the ‘myself’ was fake, and simply by seeing it, it dropped away. All that was left was him. So, there’s an example of the nondual spontaneously happening in a brief moment. He didn’t have any spiritual studies behind him at all.
So, let’s do this this thing! Okay? We’re not going to spend lifetimes belaboring this one. Let’s just do it. Relax. How many people are inside you? Close your eyes. There’s just one. Non-dual, there’s not two.
That’s it.