Author Archives: Zareen

Nonduality cannot be defined, and this is the trick of authentic spiritual studies, because we are addicted to our language. It’s natural. Human beings are born craving language. Take a little child and raise them with people who speak six different languages, and the child will grow up speaking six different languages fluently. Our brains …

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Nonduality is ancient. Hi, everyone. I am Ma Prem Zareen, and this is a series of short videos going through all the concepts of what nonduality is and isn’t. It’s the same ideas I worked through in my short book The Daily Book of Awakening. I’m going through all those different ideas and putting a …

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Why is greed so destructive? Looking at this from a non-dual perspective, one of the things we can probably all agree about is that greed is usually unexamined. Almost anything that’s unexamined is going to, in the end, be destructive. But it’s particularly destructive these days because we have been taught from the day we …

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Live on Zoom and Youtube Dec 11, 2024 02:00 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Join us for a lively talk on all about gurus! Guaranteed to be not what you think. Zoom – Youtube –

Lead us from the false to the real is a profound saying, chant, or prayer that deserves closer examination. At a surface level, it might seem like a simple request—asking to be brought into a state of reality. But a deeper look reveals a more profound implication: we are acknowledging that the state most people …

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It’s interesting to look at this idea with an open mind because our beliefs fix our minds into a static state—particularly spiritual beliefs. For instance, if you believe that enlightenment is very difficult to attain, you’re stuck. If you believe that enlightenment is a special event or realization that only the most “beautiful” people can …

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So, we’ve been watching this TV series, made for TV, on Netflix. It’s about aliens. It’s called Roswell. It’s set in Roswell, New Mexico, and it’s about aliens landing in ’47.

In this story there are aliens left in the town who grew up in glowing pods. It’s so funny to watch because, as the show goes along, you can tell the writers are literally making it up each episode. I don’t think they had a full plot to start with; new characters will come in whenever they need something weird to happen. Everyone in the show is super beautiful and handsome. People die and then aren’t dead. And it’s full of existential angst.

As we watch this show we’re always shaking our heads at the leaps from reality that are required to follow the plot, and commenting that if you’re writing a show about aliens, you can do any crazy thing. Add some aliens to a plot and boom! You can do anything. You can go in any direction; you don’t have to be moored to any reality at all.

This is just like living in the dual state… which is the opposite of nonduality. When you’re living in the dual state, you’re living in a projection of yourself rather than knowing who you are and living your life as your actual self.

The actual self is very simple. You know who you are—you’re just a “boring” you. It goes very deep, however. If you take a minute to stop and feel the essence of yourself it is also the essence of everything. It’s your connection to earth and reality. In the nondual state everything is real and connected.

The dual state is just the opposite. It’s always projected onto other things—the things we see, the things people have said about us, what we’ve been taught about Heaven and Hell. We’re always trying to find spirituality rather than just being a human being whose nature is to do spiritual things. In the dual state you’re always projecting out of yourself. People literally invent the stories of their lives as if it’s very bad fiction.

So many of our spiritual teachings, like “create your own reality,” or A Course in Miracles, are literally about how to invent your best projection. It’s like “How to Become an Alien 101.” In A Course in Miracles—the basis of it is that we come from somewhere else, and we’re here to learn a lesson. We’re not even from here; we’re not even from Earth.

We are aliens living on the earth. Stuck entirely in our heads.

The Nondual state, on the other hand, is solid and real. You can’t invent your own reality—you live inside a shared reality with not only every person but also everything: all our relations, all the animals, the stars, the molecules, and the energy. We live inside an actual reality that we are a part of. One of the basic prayers of monks studying nonduality is: “Bring us from the false to the real.”

Our alien story and living constantly in projections is very persuasive. We do the opposite. We put a lot of work into bringing ourselves from the real to the false, trying to make the false a powerful alien shell of illusion.

So, nonduality and aliens: watch the show Roswell and you’ll see what I mean. Have a good laugh at how it’s so obviously made up. It’s a total metaphor for living in the dual state—you can make up anything about your life that you want. Like the self-help gurus? Their job is to teach you how to make up the very best thing you can possibly make up about your life… and hopefully end up with lots of money.

Nonduality teachers are the opposite. We say, “No, real reality is just fine. Come out of the projection and into who you actually are.”

Little sidebar: I actually have a friend who totally believes in aliens. She’s written some books and stuff, and she was just telling me last week that the aliens are coming, and their job is to teach us to live in the nondual state.

I’m like, “Oh yeah, sweet, nice.”

But I’m thinking, “We can do that ourselves; we don’t need aliens to come teach us how to be human beings.” This is our birthright. This is what we do.

Anyway, come out of your alien state and be a human being on Earth. Amen.