Is it obscure? It certainly sounds like it when you hear people talking about it!
Tip of the day: Here’s the number one most important thing to understand about nonduality, nonduality teachers, and nonduality teachings:
- There is the actual nonduality experience,
- And then there are all the explanations about it.
- The explanations are NOT the experience
You must understand that you’re either fully in the experience, or you’re not. When you’re fully in the experience, there’s nothing obscure about it at all. It makes total sense because it’s so easy. When you’re not there and you try to explain it or you listen to something about it, then it sounds very obscure.
The thing I like to say is that is if you had even the slightest idea what enlightenment was, you’d be there… because it’s finding yourself. Once you locate yourself, you’re never lost.
The thing that causes us to get lost in the first place is a break in the natural consciousness you were born with. It’s really a break in the human continuum. It’s because you were taught wrong; you were taught to make life difficult when everything’s really quite simple.
We’re born, and the natural human experience would be to have elders and a society that teaches you how to solidly find yourself as you grow, so you come into yourself naturally as part of the growing process. Then you spend your whole adult life as an awake, contributing human being.
Instead, we’re taught to focus on objects. Even as little kids, we’re given toys to entertain ourselves instead of being entertained by constantly being with people who are teaching us how to do things and how to locate ourselves.
Imagine if you had grown up with all the people around you as fully awake human beings. Just naturally, you would flow into that.
Once you locate yourself as yourself you simply become normal. That’s all that’s happens. You can either be normal, and it totally makes sense, or you’re not there.
No matter how fabulous of a spiritual experience you’ve had, if it’s not absolutely permanent, if there’s any way it can go away, then that’s not it.
We would really benefit if people who don’t know what they’re talking about would stop talking about nonduality… That means you! That’s the majority of everybody, right? Everyone’s explaining it and talking about it, blah, blah, blah, until we’re just totally crazy.
That’s why nonduality sounds so obscure—you’re trying to find something so simple that it can’t be explained. You’re trying to find “Who am I?” Who are you? Obviously, you’re you right now.
There’s another little problem that happens in nondual studies. Actually, it’s a big, huge, humongous problem, and that is the context that human beings have had for the past 4,000 years. We’ve lived in this totally divided world where almost everybody is broken. So, someone who becomes unbroken seems like a very unusual person. We’ve been living in this context that the nondual state is hard to find and that only the most rarified, fabulous person can find it, like Buddha and all these people we sing songs about.
Nonduality itself is not obscure. If you’re hearing anybody talking about it and it sounds obscure, it’s because of one of several reasons: one, the person talking about it has no idea what they’re talking about. They’ve just read about it in books. Maybe they’ve spent 30 years studying the most obscure texts ever written. It sounds obscure because they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Or two, maybe they have actually reached the nondual state, but they’re still coming from this context of the broken society and haven’t had the opportunity to go into a totally new worldview where we understand that human beings are naturally meant to be awake like this.
Either of these kinds of teachings will sound very obscure.
Now, probably what I’m talking about sounds a little obscure to you too. The most important thing to understand is that we are talking about the simplest, most natural state that you can possibly be in. It’s called dropping the false face, right?
The false face drops, and there’s the true, real human being right there. That’s what we’re looking for.
So, whenever you listen to a nondual teacher, myself included, if it sounds obscure, just ignore that part. But if there are little bits of it that start to make you think, “Oh yeah, oh yeah,” feel it. When it’s truth, you just kind of just know it, right? So, when you hear someone who has stumbled accidentally on a good way to talk about it, then listen to that. Listen to the part that is not obscure because that’s what’s going to wake you up.