Nonduality Explained: Finding Yourself
This is one of the number one teaching in nonduality, and it’s very effective because no matter how much you try to find yourself, you can’t do it. You can’t locate yourself because you are the one who is doing the locating.
No matter how much you look to any sort of object, you’re going to discover that you’re not it because that is you looking outward.
This applies even, and especially, to the mind. This is where so many people get confused because they start thinking that nonduality only has to do with outside objects: like trees and the universe and other people and things like that. They think it means there’s not two anywhere… Well, there are two trees, two people, billions of trees, and billions of people. If you mistake the teachings to mean that there’s not anything in the universe, then you get very confused because obviously, there’s tons of stuff out there, right?
The big problem is what you identify with.
Get rid of all that other madness because that’s just a distraction. Yes, we’re all one with the universe, and everything’s one, and everything’s working together, and you can have feelings of unity and stuff like that, but this isn’t what we’re talking about. We’re talking about locating yourself. Who are you?
The biggest obstacle between you and yourself is what we call the mind. It’s the critical mind. Really, it’s just this small part of your left brain that manages language and likes to talk, talk, talk, and define, define, define, and make things be things. You are not that.
This aspect of mind is the thing that most captures our attention. If it didn’t capture your attention, there would be no problem, right? If your attention is not captured by anything, you would always naturally know who you are because you’re you.
So, what is it that captures your attention so thoroughly that you confuse yourself into thinking that that’s you?
There’s really only one thing, and that is this Western conceptual mind that we have. If you just stop and listen to yourself for a moment, your mind always sounds very noisy. It’s always thinking about things, problems, adding things up, thinking about duality. So, it appears that there’s something inside your head that’s happening. You can imagine that all the words going through your head are actually making sounds in there, and so it captures your attention very effectively.
When you find yourself, you’ll see that everything else is simply going along with you. It is not you. Your mind is just a tool, like your hand is a tool, like a fork is a tool when you eat. All these words that go through your head constantly are not you. They’re just like the wind blowing. Buddha often talked about the river just… flowing by.
If you can locate yourself solidly in your being, then you don’t get captured by your imagination. In movies, this is shown well where the main character is pulled into a fantasy and has adventures. “The Wizard of Oz” is a good example: Dorothy, living her boring life in Kansas, is pulled into Oz and has all these adventures but wants to go home. Finally, she taps her heels and is back in Kansas. That is how your separate mind tends to capture you. The whole time she was in Oz, it felt like everything was going on. We get to the end of the movie, and it was a dream. But little kids are left thinking, “Oh, maybe it was real.” That’s how your mind plays tricks on you. It seems noisy and real.
The trick is locating yourself. The whole time Dorothy was in Oz, she was still Dorothy. You can be having an actual dream, sound asleep, but you’re still you. This is important because when we’re captured by this false self, we’re easily controlled, easily confused, and live in a state of madness. It’s like sleepwalkers or robots with their conditionings making them do things. We need a planet with real, awake human beings because we’re needed here as who we are. Without finding ourselves, we don’t have real human beings walking around; we have conditioned robots.
Finding yourself is one of the most important teachings in nonduality and actually not that hard to do. It’s not a matter of finding something; it’s just a matter of stopping enough, slowing down. so that who you are is revealed.
You’re always right there, solid, knowing what’s going on.
Finding yourself—you’re the one that’s searching, and your “self” is one hundred percent in your whole body. It’s not just in your brain.
Your mind feels like it’s nothing except your brain yapping away, but your true self is one hundred percent embodied, not only as you but as your whole history, your location, who you are. You’re connected to the whole world, your family, everything. Who you are is a vast, connected, awake being.
Finding yourself is the number one nonduality teaching. Who are you? Stop looking out there. Stop looking in here. It’s not just in here. It’s not just there. It’s the full you.
Who are you? Finding yourself.