Nonduality is still a lie. This is one of my favorite ways to look at it because there’s no way you can define the non-dual state. So anything that you say about it really isn’t the truth. Something that isn’t the truth is a lie.
So, no matter how much we try to define it, we’re still basically lying.
I heard this great quote from some Zen monk that “reality cannot be spoken, and yet we have to have the courage to try.” Knowing that there’s no way you can 100% define it frees you from that. So we can go ahead and just lie all we want!
There’s a part of us that knows and sees truth, but it can’t be defined in words. Words are the tool we have to communicate with. But there is a lot more to consciousness than just words.
There are many times in life where we’re not using words to communicate, right? And then we’re not in the lie. Imagine you’re walking along with people, just enjoying the walk and not talking. There’s no lie there.
Now, imagine you’re in that same situation, walking along with people, and everybody’s chatting about what a nice day it is, what they did at work, what their mom said, what their kids said—just chat, chat, chat. But everybody knows who they are, and that talking is just talking. Then no lies are happening. It’s just chat, chat, chat, talk, talk, talk.
That’s what it’s like when a nonduality teacher is trying to talk to you about nonduality. That’s why we can say anything at all—because we know that the chatting is just chatting. My chatting can actually make interesting things happen for you, and you telling me things can make interesting things happen for me. But it’s not the words that do it. The actual human-to-human transmission comes differently from the words. If you know that the words themselves are never exactly saying the right thing, then you can laugh about nonduality still being a lie.
We can’t completely and totally say the truth, and that makes us free, right? That’s the same freeness of knowing who you are. It’s the absence of conflict; it’s the absence of confusion. Confusion itself can be talked about endlessly, but the only way we can talk about the absence of confusion is to go beyond talking, to stop talking about the absence of confusion.
In the end, it’s the understanding, the being-to-being, that matters—the me interacting with my full world that matters.