Into The Mystery Podcast, Ep. 3: Your Infinite Nature (On Non-Duality)

Rishika and Adi explore the nature of nonduality or Advaita — and what it means to experience the truth of ourselves not as separate individuals wandering a meaningless universe, but rather integral threads are woven into a continuous, Intelligent fabric of Being, continuously unfolding and witnessing Itself. 

Transcript

You're listening to the third episode of Into the Mystery. In this episode, Rishika and I will be exploring the subject of non-duality. We hope you enjoy. So before we begin, I thought I'd just clue in the listeners to the fact that we've already tried to do this episode once and decided that we need to do it over, Because when you talk about non-duality, It is such a relentlessly language-resistant concept that it's the sort of thing you can't package into a single idea and sort of throw it to somebody and say, Here, Look at this, Consider this, And let your brain play with it. It doesn't work that way. This is a topic, The truth of which lies outside all of the boundaries of language. Language can't really even touch it. So when we're playing with concepts like non-duality, These very subtle esoteric ideas, The best we can do is kind of point to them and suggest how to get in touch with them, But ultimately it's up to the listener or the practitioner to find their way there on their own. And Adi, I'm going to toss it over to you. Maybe you can start us off by offering a very basic definition of non-duality that we can then begin to explore. Well, You've already said something profoundly important, Which is that anything that we might discuss conceptually in ideas and language is going to be limited by the ideas and language that we have available to us. And our hope, I think, I'll speak for you here, Is that for those who are listening, That they might reach through concepts and words to attain the actual essence or heart meaning of what we're talking about here. But you're right, We're always forced to try to conceptualize something that can't ultimately be conceptualized and that's we're going to fail. We should just acknowledge that right from the beginning, We're going to fail. You know, In the old non-dual schools, And non-dual really just means, You know, I love the Sanskrit word Advaita, Which just means not to. And that's a good working definition for what non-duality is, But there are schools, Especially in India, Where techniques are used and one of the schools is, Or one of the techniques is Neti Neti, Which is roughly translated as not this, Not that. And when exploring non-duality, This technique is often employed to say that, You know, It's not this idea or concept and it's not that idea or concept. And so when we discuss non-duality, We're having to open our minds in a profound way to something that is not going to be boxable, Something that we can't place into a clean conceptual category. But the basic essence that we're getting at is to touch upon that reality that lies beyond all sense of difference or separation, All to-ness, All dualness. That's I think what we're after in this conversation. Right. I would, Well, I have, For my own purposes, Conceptualized it as the truth that all of the universe, All of creation is of a piece, Is a single, Single is not even the right word, But it's a continuous fabric, An intelligent tapestry in which each one of us is a thread and that the only reason the brain perceives us as separate people, Separate objects, Separate tribes or anything that appears to be apart from something else, The only reason we see that is because our brains are overwhelmed by the sensory input that comes in through our five senses. For example, We tend to identify with our bodies. My body is not the same as the chair, And my body is not the same as your body or the bodies over there. There is this appearance of space between us, But ultimately consciousness contains all of these things. We've mentioned maya before, Which is the illusion of physical reality. If maya were to drop away, We would perceive nothing but the intelligence or the brilliant creativity or the silence or the many other words that we have commonly applied to the divine. Yeah, The brain fails because the brain is designed to perceive things, Objects. It's designed to pick up on differences and being the center of our nervous and sensual systems. That's what its task is to do. It's not the right equipment for seeking this non-dual tapestry that we are talking about here. We need a different – I don't even know if tool is the best word, But I'll use it anyway. We need a different mechanism. We need a different possibility, Which we call consciousness. Consciousness is non-dual, And that's even articulated within science, Where even breaking down material substance to its most basic elements, Even closer than the atom, Deeper than the subatomic, Is what we're eventually left with, Is shit, The existence of consciousness. Yeah, Yeah. Well, That's a good point. I'm glad you brought up science because you think of an atom, We can call it an atom, But we know, I think most of us who have had a science class know that the atom is simply a bunch of spinning particles that are held together by a force, Which we could call consciousness. That most of our bodies are in fact empty space, And yet we perceive them as solid objects. So if you start to strip away those categories or those containers of individual pieces that we collect together and call a thing, Then you start to get down into those really deep layers that you're talking about where there is nothing left but consciousness and consciousness in movement. That's right, And that's what we're attempting to point to here. And of course, That's why it's so difficult because as we go beyond all material descriptions of things, What do we have left to talk about when we've gone even deeper than the movements of the subatomic? What language do we have then? But it's clear that there is an existence of something there. Maybe we can't put our finger on it, Maybe we can't objectify it, But there is clearly a consciousness, A tapestry of consciousness that is within and through and around everything. Yeah, And it's absolutely experienceable and knowable, Just not given the habitual tools of the mind. For example, We did our first episode on awakening, And I think we mentioned that for many people who go through the awakening process, Their, For lack of a better word, Initiation to that process is an experience of non-duality where the veil of separation suddenly drops and they're able to see the whole fabric, Even if for a moment. And that's enough to kind of jumpstart the development on all of your levels, Mental, Physical, Emotional, The development of that awakening process in which you begin to incorporate that awareness into your habitual understanding of what reality, What used to be your understanding of reality was. Yeah, Or even something so ordinary as falling in love or the experience of making love where we can very clearly feel a melting of the boundaries that separate one from another. Yeah, That sense of disappearing into something larger. Yes, Which we do in ways we don't even realize, Such as, You know, I think of going to music shows early in my life and the way that when you really give yourself to the music and to the circumstance, You are one body of movement generating enormous amounts of energy. And I wouldn't say that that is an experience of non-dual consciousness necessarily, But it does give us a hint at what's possible when our boundaries dissolve. Yeah, It's very much, Maybe not an experience of it, But it is sort of a peripheral expression of it maybe. When anytime you've got a group of people together, A big crowd, And it begins to sort of operate as one individual mind or you're sometimes a sports team or a ballet troupe or something, And they seem to be flowing as a single consciousness, You do get that sort of chill up your spine that says, Oh, Something's happening here and my brain can't quite make sense of it, But that's what art's for, Is to give us that experience of dissolving into something or linear boundaries drop and something new can saturate us. You're right, There's a peripheral glimpse of what's possible in us through such things. Now of course we can't live in a non-dual way simply by being a part of a group. I think a lot of people attempt that. They try that. They try to belong to something to feel a sense of inclusion or oneness, And there's something very human about that, Very precious about that, But it doesn't necessarily satisfy us in our deep desire to lose the boundaries that define what we are and to feel ourselves one with life. Yeah, Yeah, That call to home that we've talked about before. Exactly, Exactly, Because every group, No matter how well-intentioned or beautiful our groups are, There will always be our group and the other group, And as long as we have that other, There's two. And so eventually all of our work in this field of experience will bring about a dissolving not only of our personal boundaries but our familial boundaries, Societal, National, Biological, Human, All of the boundaries will dissolve. Yeah. I think it's a natural result of progression on the spiritual path that as you bring up all of your previous identifications with your body, Your gender, Your name, Your family, Your tribe, And anything else that you've applied to yourself, That whole accumulation of quote-unquote stuff that we begin to question and strip away, You do really get to a point where there's not much left. There's not much left to define you, And some of the spiritual teachers have referred to that as becoming nobody. Yeah. And just becoming a ghost and just moving through society with that awareness. And you're right, You obviously can't discount or discard the need to live among your fellow citizens in this dual cinemascape. Oh, I like that. Yeah, Cinemascape, Yeah. Well, There is that element of separation all around us all the time, And I think one of the things that I see people often misunderstand about the notion of non-duality and unity is that it is somehow going to make us homogenous, That we're all going to agree that we'll find some kind of harmony where we can all see the world in a similar way. And I think that's erroneous. I think that we have to do it away with that idea in truly experiencing non-duality because I think of non-duality, The experience of non-duality as being a lot more like a salad than a smoothie where there are the individual parts, But they come together to form a whole. And all of the individual parts are absolutely necessary to the whole and aren't intended to be blended together. And I think that's where a lot of the political and ideological confusions arise is that many people strive for oneness and unity and harmony in a way that tries to erase differences rather than elevate them to the level of appreciation. And I think that's what we need in truly considering a non-dual experience of life is that absolute adoration of the multiplicity, The diversity within a wholeness, Within a oneness. There's so much beauty to be found in the individual and that beauty can exist not as a contrast to the overall whole fabric of a society or a world population, But as sort of an ornamentation on it. Oh, I love that. Ornamentation, That's beautiful because that's exactly how we experience ourselves. It's like we go through this journey where all sense of separation and difference and uniqueness and individualism are erased through our practice, Through our awakening. And we might think of that as becoming homogenous or I used to refer to it as becoming a cookie cutter Buddha, That you're just adopting some kind of mold of Buddhahood. But it's something altogether different because after this annihilation of separateness takes place, We are much more, I love the phrase you use, We are much more an ornamentation of the one than we are. Yeah, That's beautiful. Well, It's only when once you remove all those restrictions, All of the old artifacts of personality and social conditioning, Until you remove those, You can't fully express yourself from a place of pure truth and simple pure being. Yes, And that is a lifelong task because we have innumerable trances that we have consciously and unconsciously bought into that keep us from experiencing that non-dual knowing. When the false construct of our personality is dissolved, What's left is God. That's what's referred to by the resurrection is that what can be destroyed, Let it be destroyed. What remains, What lives is true and it has a life of its own. It has a voice of its own. Yes, Exactly. One of the ways that the traditional Advaita school, Which just means non-dual school within the yogic and Vedic tradition, Uses for this discovery of oneness is to begin to examine the I, Your sense of I. Who am I? What am I exactly? This process of investigation will take us through am I a body? Am I the thought I have in my head? Am I the feeling, The emotion that's present? Am I the sensation in the body? Am I the environment? As these investigations take hold deeply in our experience, We start to see that there's a commonality here in that we all use this phrase, This word I or I am. If we begin to investigate that, What is that exactly? And we parse out all the things that separate and define us through separation and individuality, We start to see that this I that looks through your eyes and looks through my eyes or listens through your ears or my ears, It is indeed the same I. It's the same subject experiencing itself through every form. What most resonates with my own experience as my path has progressed of beginning to not sense my boundaries as being so solid anymore, Beginning to experience this sort of transparency where what comes through my field of experience is simply a phenomenon that I have an awareness to witness with and that awareness is the same as your awareness, Is the same with everyone else's in the world. I love that. That's such a. . . There's a couple of really juicy ways to talk about the non-dual nature of existence and transparency is one of them. As we refine ourselves and do our due diligence to dissolve our separateness, There is a way in which we become that transparent window through which existence is looking and that's one of the really exquisite ways of describing it. It's very much a sense of becoming ever larger than I thought myself to be in a very subtle way. Endlessly. Endlessly, Yeah. I mean, You go deep enough into meditation and you can have that experience of being the entire universe. Yes. It sounds, I think, Often when a casual listener hears a phrase like that, They tend to chalk it up to some kind of poetic or exaggerated explanation, But it's actually literal. It is. The statement is actually a literal one. As difficult as that may be to conceive. I had one very powerful experience in meditating. I was doing some pranayama as well, Which really intensifies these things in my experience anyway, In which I literally forgot who I was. I was fully conscious. I was fully present as a pinpoint of awareness, But I couldn't remember my name, My gender, What state or country I was in, None of those things. It was just a pure field of awareness and it was profound. It was profound peace and nothing but light, Nothing but harmony of some sort around me. I literally, When I came back out of that particular session, Had to reestablish myself and where I was in the world. I'm in Mexico right now and this is where that happened. When I came out of it, I thought I was in California and it took me a good couple of minutes to sort of reestablish my presence here, Which speaks, I think, To not only the non-dual nature of consciousness, But the fluidity of it. You're hitting on a couple of really salient points here. One of which is that our non-dual realizations, Our realizations of unity take many forms because there are psychological experiences, There are energetic experiences and then there are boundless experiences. You reminded me as you were speaking of the Sanskrit word used to describe our non-dual nature, Sat chit ananda, And its threefold nature, Which is sat being this eternalness of being, The presence of being always, That there's always being now. Chit which is the awareness you spoke of, The consciousness, The fact that not only is there this experience of being, But there's an awareness of being and this field of love and well-being and absolute inner fulfillment that exists in the recognition of those things. Yes, And in that piece, There's such a profound absence of the things that typically trouble us when we're identified with our physical bodies in our everyday lives. There is just, There are no demands, There are no problems. This is starting to sound a little bit hippy-ish, But. . . No, It's truth. It is, But it's so hard to convince people that that's a place that you can quote unquote go. That that is an experience that's available to you anytime you want it if you're diligent enough to go looking for it. Yes, Well that's the point is that nobody can be convinced unless their interest draws them inward. That's a call. We spoke about that a little bit in the conversation on God, Which is it's a call. It's a call to that awareness of your innate non-dual awareness and it's not for everybody. I don't know that it's supposed to be for everybody. Certainly everybody is welcome. Everybody is invited to the party, But it takes as you're indicating, It takes a real sincerity and it's largely why the technologies of yoga were developed because to walk in this world with that awareness at your disposal requires all sorts of things. Discipline, Refinement of body, Refinement of your psyche. Yeah, The body needs to be conditioned and able to concentrate and facilitate the movement of the spiritual energies that are necessary to inform our experience around that. I was trying to explain this to somebody a few days ago and we were talking about non-duality. Non-duality in the context of religion and specifically Catholicism, Christianity. It occurred to me that if you want to talk about the Garden of Eden and the fall from grace or being cast out, However you want to term that, That is in fact a description of how we experience our separation from the whole. I don't know how you would interpret it, But I tend to think of the snake in the garden as being the ego, Which once Adam and Eve had an awareness of their ability to judge right from wrong, To compare things to other things, To be aware of their nakedness and that that was somehow undesirable. We could have a long discussion about that, I suppose. And we should. Yes, I guess we should. But that cast out, That term of being cast out of the garden is simply losing our awareness of our non-dual nature, Of our absolute constant unbreakable connection to God. Right. Beautiful. I love that you're bringing this up because it's true, But we are slowly conditioned and taught to develop a material awareness that keeps us housed within a body, A name, A sex, An age, And that forgetting runs deep, But it begins as the analogy of the Garden of Eden so clearly articulates, It begins with this self discriminating feature, Which decides this is good, This is bad, This is right, This is wrong, This is me, This is you. And if we can call the serpent the ego, Or maybe we refer to it as that metaphysical principle of separation that we can all invest in, It is. It's a temptation away from the paradise of our inner being. And there's a profound forgetting that goes on that only becomes apparent as we enter into deeper layers of experience within ourselves. That reminds me of a meditation technique that I think I learned from you actually of sitting in meditation and saying, I am Rishika, I am female, I am American, I am, And then continuing all the way down the line and applying every possible word to oneself that you can possibly come up with. And at some point, It's almost like saying the same word over and over again, Until it no longer makes sense to your mind. Like suddenly, The brain will just sort of snap out of its reverie, And there's a shift in perception that happens. And I can remember very distinctly this happening to me on a number of occasions where this is where the words fail, Right? So I wish I could describe what the shift feels like. But it's almost like you suddenly your brain suddenly perks up and goes, Oh, You know, I am this, I am all this. And yet none of it, If that makes any sense. It does. Well, When we run through the list of our identities or attributes, I am male, I am female, I am whatever may follow, What's left is I am. I am. And that is our primal name, I am. And it's the name that we forget and overlook constantly in our experience. But it is, You know, Even when God reveals itself to Moses, It reveals itself as I am that I am. And if we know that I am in its, Not in a conceptual way, But in its original form, In its true name and its true face, We see that that is indeed our primal identity, It is our primal self. And there was also available in that realization, The experience of eternity, The understanding of I want to say the capriciousness of time. Because time is something that serves to localize us in a particular point on a timeline or in a story. So you know, If you're acknowledging time, Then you're necessarily in between the things that have already happened and the things that have yet to happen. And of course, We're always talking about staying in that present moment, But we're talking about in yoga practice, Staying in the present moment as a permanent state without the looking forward and the looking back. And as long as we have this factor of time to deal with, It almost stands in the way of our seeing ourselves as larger. I'm not sure that made sense. Well, You're hitting on something important, Which is that as these investigations run deep in our being, We realize that not only is there a limitation in identifying myself as male or American or whatever I may identify myself as, Father, Brother, Whatever, Is there's also a limitation in identifying myself with anything of a past or future. Because if we're really telling the truth, Really telling the truth, The only thing there really is, The only time there really is, Is now. And so to be aware of this primal I am is to be aware of a now that is forever constant and true and certain. And so our identity and our ways of forming or framing ourselves in time becomes less and less necessary. Yes. Okay, So we've talked a little bit about what non-duality is and what the experience of it can be like, But you made a point that I would love to have you expound on about how would you get deeper in touch with the state of non-duality and identify less with your previous adjectives and stories and so on, That you actually experience more of a sense of individuation. Which seems like a big paradox to me. So you're becoming, On the one hand, More integrated with the whole or more aware of yourself as part of everything, Of the I am, Of the one, And yet individuated. Well, That's a massive subject and it probably deserves its own episode, But let's say something brief about it here. When we look at our formulaic identities, Whether it is our sex, Our age, Our gender, Our interests, Our political leanings, Our nationality, Our ethnicity, Whatever it may be, We see that all of those, In a sense, Keep one belonging to a particular kind of group. And as an identity takes place in us within a group, I mean, Of course we are social animals, So I'm not trying to overlook that here. We're really talking about a much deeper style of inner investigation, But as those identities with all groups of any kind begin to dissolve in our awareness, We find that we don't really belong to any group, Or we could say we belong to all groups, And the need to identify oneself according to some external material or factor or quality becomes unnecessary. And as a person is, So for me practically in my life, That means I don't consider myself male or female. I don't consider myself, Even though I have a male body. I don't consider myself Republican or Democrat. I don't consider myself American and not even human, Because all such distinctions create a boundary around me. And while I have no problem with any of those labels, None of them can truly define me. And as a person comes to that awareness cleanly and truly, They begin to experience an individuation of consciousness, A way in which being is here manifest without taking its identity from any one thing in this world. And so there's a profound freedom that arises in an individuated expression of being. I may even have my own opinions or I may have my own preferences, But if I'm being true to the non-dual nature of what I am, Then those preferences or opinions, They don't define me. Right. Right. They're always open to question and you're always free to move in any direction and beholden to no one. Oh, That's a nice definition of individuation in a way. So Adyashanti actually said something really beautiful about this that I think of often. He said, An ordinary man seeks freedom through enlightenment. An enlightened man expresses freedom through being ordinary. Yes. Well, See, There's something very paradoxical in that, That to be ordinary is an extraordinary experience in a world full of, Let's say, People, Egos that want to be extraordinary. And there's something extraordinary about being ordinary and that's the taste, That's the beautiful simplicity of this true identity with non-duality. In other words, I'm no longer anything special nor do I need to be. Right. Right. And you don't have to devote that mental energy and all of the neurosis that goes along with it to trying to impress anybody, Trying to impress yourself, Trying to make yourself into something that you weren't already designed to be. And this idea came as a great relief to me, I think, As I was going through my initial awakening process to just realize that there was nothing to do. There was nowhere to be. I mean, I was already here, It was already now, And everything was already available to me. And everything else that I had taken seriously in terms of the self-actualization in my life, Of trying to become something, All of that was irrelevant. And it's a little bit terrifying, But once you kind of get comfortable with that idea, It's like, Oh, I can just get up in the morning and enjoy my life now. There's no need to go through all of the strenuous activities we go to try and make ourselves into this larger than life character. Well that's, You know, You're articulating something that we haven't yet spoken of, Which is, First of all, What a person listening to this might ask themselves, Like, Why the hell do I even want non-dual consciousness? One of the… That sounds horrible. Well, It's like, Yeah, It's like, Well, Why shouldn't I just go have a beer or something? But you're touching on something here, Which is that the ordinary way of living a life is a life of struggle, And it's a life of strain, And it's not only a life of trying to become extraordinary in some way, But it's a life lived in constant pursuit of security, Pleasure, Power, And… And a life of envy. Yeah, Envy. All of the trappings, If you will, Of the egoic life of separation and to understand what non-dual consciousness really is and what its real impact is on our life is to understand that it's also the end of suffering. It's the end of separation, Which is suffering. It's the coming home. Coming home. Coming home. You know what we should talk a little bit about is the idea that you're always meeting yourself, That if we truly become aware and embody the truth of our non-dual nature, We realize that I'm talking to you, But I'm actually talking to myself, In a sense. Once you become truly accustomed to that perception, It's almost impossible to harm another being, At least with malice, Because you are simply harming yourself or some part of yourself. It would be like mutilating your own body. Exactly. Exactly. Ram Dass tells a fun little story. Can I tell it real quick? Ram Dass shares an interaction with his father, Where his father was urging him to charge more money for his books and Ram Dass was expressing why it was important to him that everyone had access to the work he was putting out and his father wasn't understanding. He said, You know, Dad, Last year when you represented Uncle Harry or whatever his name was, When he was going through that legal issue, He said, Yeah. He said, I bet you worked really hard on that, Didn't you? And the dad said, Yeah. He said, I bet you charged him a pretty penny for that work, Didn't you? And his dad said, Well, No, It's Uncle Harry. I wouldn't charge him for that work. He said, Now you see my dilemma. For me, Everybody's Uncle Harry. Oh, That's beautiful. It's a very beautiful way of just articulating something so profound that they're really isn't an other. There appears to be, But in essence, There isn't. Can I offer one of my favorite quotes? I've probably quoted this so many times. It probably makes people ill by now, But Nisargadatta has this exquisite non-dual phrase where he says, When I look inside and see that I'm nothing, That's wisdom. And when I look outside and see that I'm everything, That's love. And it's between these two that my life flows. And when he says those beautiful words, There's a way in which he is describing the inner reality of the non-dual experience that I'm no longer a thing, I'm no longer an object in my own awareness, And no longer do I have a separating boundary between myself and the world, But that there's this exquisite flow between that inner nothingness, Emptiness, Or spaciousness, And this connectivity with everything. And to truly understand the non-dual life is to understand that statement intimately and deeply, And to understand how profound and beautiful it is, Even as we stream ourselves through our ordinary everyday experiences. So, I brought a poem today that speaks to this concept of non-duality, And it touches upon both the separation and the reunion. That's by Meister Eckhart, Titled When I Was the Forest. When I was the stream, When I was the forest, When I was still the field, When I was every hoof, Foot, Fin, And wing, When I was the sky itself, No one ever asked me, Did I have a purpose? No one ever wondered, Was there anything I might need, For there was nothing I could not love. It was when I left all we once were that the agony began, The fear and questions came, And I wept, I wept, And tears I had never known before. So I returned to the river, I returned to the mountains, I asked for their hand in marriage again, I begged, I begged to wed every object and creature, And when they accepted, God was ever-present in my arms, And he did not say, Where have you been? For then I knew my soul, Every soul, Has always held him. So beautiful. Sweet. Thanks for listening to this episode of Into the Mystery. We hope you gained something useful. If you'd like to learn more about our work, You can go to our websites. Mine is at adivadra. Org, A-D-I-V-A-J-R-A dot org, Or visit rishikas at interdimensionalyoga. Com. If you have questions or topics you'd like to hear about in future episodes, Be sure to drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.