The Art Of Being Human: Duality & Oneness

As embodied beings, we simultaneously exist at levels of duality and oneness. This can be considered as a fundamental paradox of life. As we allow the dualistic aspects of being to exist within our experience, it becomes easier to know ourselves more fully and soften into the natural state of compassion and wisdom that we have within. This is a state that is based on oneness, that can only be experienced through existing at the level of duality. This is a 20-minute talk followed by a 20-minute practice.

Transcript

I'd like to start with a poem,

Another Rumi poem.

This one is called The Guest House.

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy,

A depression,

A meanness,

Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all,

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture.

Still,

Treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought,

The shame,

The malice.

Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

I think that it's easy being human,

Living our human lives,

To think that there's some certain way that we're supposed to be all the time.

And yet,

When we get caught up in that,

In the shoulds and musts,

When we get attached to certain aspects of self-identity and box ourselves in with that,

It becomes much harder to be present to what is actually occurring within us and to make space for that.

And to realize that even those seemingly difficult thoughts,

Emotions,

Feelings,

Can often be some of the greatest gifts that can bring about the next phase in our transformation into growing into who we are meant to be.

And so I've used this poem as a guide and a reminder for probably the last 15 years.

And for those of you who have not worked with me before in this format,

I've been a practitioner of acupuncture and oriental medicine for about the last 15 years and have gone through many different phases in my life.

Sometimes it feels like I've lived many different lifetimes within this one physical life,

As my mom,

Who's on here with us,

Could probably attest to for you all.

Must be interesting to watch.

But throughout all of those things,

All of those changes,

I've often had to continually come back to this idea of being a guest house,

Of realizing that there isn't one certain way that I am supposed to be and that I need to continually let go of those attachments to open to whatever is arising within.

Throughout that time,

Throughout the last 15,

20 years,

Part of what has helped me so much is the spiritual path.

I've practiced yoga for 20 years,

Qigong and meditation for 15.

I've studied with practitioners and teachers in many different traditions from Sufism to Buddhism to Taoism,

Hinduism,

Yogic tradition.

And I've learned so much from so many different teachers.

And one of the greatest gifts is realizing that we all have this ability to grow,

To change,

To move more towards the natural state that we all have within us of enlightenment,

Of compassion,

Of wisdom,

Of love,

To move beyond fear,

To find courage.

Because it's not about getting rid of fear.

As long as we're human,

Living in these biological bodies,

There's natural fear responses that will come up throughout our lives.

And so courage is not about not having fear.

It's about doing what we need to do even though we are afraid.

It's about facing our fears and realizing that the fear too is a guest that we can welcome into this guest house that can teach us so much.

It's one of the interesting things about pretty much all of the virtues.

I've been doing some writing in the last couple of years about the various virtues,

Humility,

Courage,

Generosity.

And one of the most amazing things about it is that we pretty much always have to have the opposite in order to be able to cultivate and express a given virtue.

And so we have to experience and have fear in order to be able to express courage,

To embody courage.

We have to have ego in order to be able to express humility.

That's part of being embodied beings at this level of duality is that we have to have the light and the dark,

The pleasure and the pain.

And it's through having both that we're offered this opportunity to find that middle path and to cultivate virtue and to cultivate deeper connections to ourselves,

To our true nature,

To our natural state where all of those amazing qualities arise from.

And in the last couple of weeks,

I've talked in a couple of sessions about the importance of self-compassion and about letting go of judgment.

And this dovetails into that because it's important to realize that we will always have these different feelings and thoughts.

It's not about not having that.

It's part of the nature of the mind and of being embodied beings.

You know,

There's a yogi meditator who was considered a very enlightened being and he used to give talks.

And one time somebody,

He was talking about the nature of the mind and thoughts and letting them go and somebody asked him,

So do you not have those thoughts anymore?

Do you not have thoughts of good and bad and right and wrong and discernment and judgment and all of that?

And he said,

Well,

No,

Of course I still have them,

But I see them for what they are and I let them go.

It's a continual practice.

It's not like we arrive somewhere and suddenly we don't have to worry about those things anymore.

It's training ourselves,

Our mind,

Our consciousness to continually return to the truth within us and to not get caught up in the illusion of the dualities of the mind.

We'll always have those aspects and that's part of what allows us to continually train ourselves to go deeper in connection to ourselves.

If we didn't have that to work against,

We wouldn't actually be able to continually deepen our connection to self and our inner growth.

And that's part of what I love about all the different spiritual traditions and religious traditions as well is that they give us different perspectives,

Different ways of understanding the whole and how our experiences fit into our perspective and our understanding of reality and our connection to ourselves.

And that's another area where it's so easy to think that there's one right or one wrong and those who have been taking classes with me know that I tend to draw on a lot of different traditions because I think they all have something beautiful to offer.

And for me,

It's about not being attached to a specific way of framing it.

It's about what can take us into deeper relationship to ourselves and to help us to grow.

And there's a parable that I love.

It's one of my favorites.

In a village,

There were four blind men.

They never had experienced an elephant.

And one day they heard that an elephant was coming through town in a caravan.

And so they had someone lead them to the elephant and they all ran up and they touched the elephant and they didn't want to get caught.

So they just ran up and grabbed the elephant and they all went away and they met to compare notes later.

And one of them had grabbed onto one of the elephant's legs and he said,

Oh,

An elephant,

It's like a giant column that supports a building.

Another had touched the side of the elephant and he said,

What?

No,

You're crazy.

An elephant is like a wall.

A third had grabbed onto the ear.

He says,

You both are nuts.

An elephant is like this thin fan.

And the fourth had grabbed onto the trunk.

And he was like,

I don't know what y'all are talking about.

The elephant is like this giant snake.

And all four of them had had a direct experience of what an elephant is.

But each of them only had one part of the story,

One perspective.

And so we go through life having one experience of the all.

And we think that that is the all.

Or we're constantly looking for one perspective that can encapsulate the all.

But the very nature of every perspective of every word that we use is that it only exists in the realm of duality,

Which by definition,

By its very nature,

Can never be the all.

We live these lives as individuated beings.

And we continually yearn to return to the experience of oneness,

Something that transcends this limited state of differentiation,

Of duality.

And we have moments of it.

And they can be of bliss and ecstasy,

Of peace,

Something that takes us beyond our limited sense of self and connects us to something bigger.

And we can have this desire to hold on to that and to only have that as our experience.

But it's not possible.

We always have to work with this play of duality and oneness.

When it comes to meditative practice,

This relates to the balance of the mind and the soul.

You can use different words to describe it,

As I said,

Words are always references to something else,

Often something that's ineffable,

Something that can't truly be encapsulated in that way.

But the mind is our filter between the oneness,

The reality that we are all always a part of,

And the relation to duality between self and other.

Because we have both occurring simultaneously,

And the mind,

When it's in its proper place in the organization of our multidimensional being,

Its place is to be that mediator.

But so often,

We have a dark thought or a judgment or something come in,

Something we like or don't like,

And we develop this attachment and aversion.

And then the mind starts to try to take control,

Because the mind ultimately wants to feel that it's in control.

But the more the mind is in control,

The less the soul has room to breathe and to experience.

Because when the mind is in control,

It limits our ability to experience reality as it is,

In all of its beauty,

In all of its challenge,

In all of its fullness.

And ultimately,

In my perspective and experience,

That's a lot of what makes life worthwhile,

Is having the play of duality and oneness,

Of knowing that we're both simultaneously,

And sometimes we'll have experiences more towards one end of the spectrum and sometimes towards the other.

But it's both,

Always,

Regardless of if we're consciously aware of it or not.

You know,

I've used the metaphor before of a wave in the ocean,

You know,

That the ocean is the unified oneness,

The absolute,

The divine,

That we are all always a part of and from which we come from and to which we will return.

But while we're inhabiting these physical bodies and we exist as an individuated being,

We're like the wave where you can distinguish it,

You can make out its edges,

It goes through all of these changes,

But it's still discernible as an individuated wave,

And then eventually it crashes back into the ocean.

Another way of looking at it,

This would be like a finger on your hand or an organ inside of your body.

We can label it,

We can describe it as an individuated part,

And yet it's always connected to the greater whole.

It's never separate.

So our consciousness can be directed in either direction.

Most often when we're not being mindful and aware,

Our consciousness is drawn outwards into the realm of duality and it gets caught by the mind by attachment and aversion,

By desires,

By pain,

But we have the ability to direct our consciousness inwardly as well towards the underlying oneness that we are always a part of and that is our true nature.

For me,

That's part of why we practice,

Is to retrain our mind and to retrain our consciousness to cultivate that connection deep within.

And the more we do that,

The more we can fully immerse and experience the beauty that is always here,

Always around us.

We use the breath often in practice because the breath is also symbolic of the mediating between duality and oneness.

It moves in and out,

Connecting external and internal.

Above the sense organs,

We have two eyes,

Two ears,

One tongue for taste,

And one body as a whole for touch,

But the nose is simultaneously dual and one.

We have one nose with two nostrils.

When we inhale,

You have two streams of air that come in and then mingle and become one as it enters into the body.

It's a meeting place of duality and oneness.

It's important in this journey as humans that we open to the uncertainty,

To not knowing.

As I said,

The mind likes to be in control.

It likes to believe that it quote unquote knows.

But when we believe that we know something,

It actually is the biggest impediment to learning when we believe we already know.

It's when we open to not knowing that we have the ability to learn so much more and to experience ourselves and reality as we are in each moment.

So we'll go ahead and move into the practice.

I haven't reviewed the posture in a while,

So I'll run through that quickly.

If you're seated,

The most important thing is that your knees are below your hips.

So you want to make sure that your knees are below your hips.

If you're seated on a cushion or a pillow,

Bolster,

This will open the fronts of the hips and release tension.

It also opens the energetic channels and circulation that moves through the body.

You can sit in Sukhasana,

Easy pose,

Just simple cross-legged pose.

You can sit with your two feet,

Ankles on top of each other with the heel and the perineum,

Which is an acupressure point that stimulates flow through the central channel.

You can use half lotus or full lotus.

You can also kneel,

Again making sure that your knees are just below your hips,

Keeping this open and soft.

The most important thing is that you're on a stable base and you're able to release as much tension from the body as possible.

That helps the meditation to go more smoothly and can help us access deeper states within ourself.

If you're seated on a chair,

Similarly you want to make sure that your knees are below your hips,

Naturally relaxed.

I'm fine if anybody needs to lay down or prefers to lay down,

You're welcome to do so.

I know in some traditions I can be more strict,

But I feel that the most important thing is that you're able to be in a stable and easeful posture.

The more you can actively release tension from the physical body,

The easier it becomes for the mind to also release tension and relax,

And the easier it becomes to move more deeply into ourselves and into the practice.

We'll be starting with abdominal breathing at the first part of the practice,

So for those of you who have not done that with me before and may not be familiar with it,

With abdominal breathing you just want to let your abdomen expand as you inhale and let it move back in and contract as you exhale.

Many of us when we're not conscious or aware of it will breathe into our chest and raise the shoulders,

And that's more likely to bring us into the sympathetic nervous system,

Fight or flight,

Whereas abdominal breathing helps calm the mind and drops us into the parasympathetic,

The rest and digest.

It doesn't have to be a super deep breath,

The most important thing is that you don't bring in any excess tension,

So you're going to be very soft and subtle at the beginning.

Then we'll move into guiding the awareness through the body.

So if you will,

Please go ahead and take your posture,

However that may be.

Whether you're lying down seated in a chair or seated on the floor,

You can close your eyes and begin to check in with your body.

Become aware of your base,

Making sure it's stable,

And feel the solidity beneath you,

How it supports you and holds you up.

From that stable base,

Allow your spine to rise naturally up towards heaven,

Keeping the natural curves,

Making sure that the head is centered over the shoulders and spine,

For many of us means we may need to gently tuck the chin a little bit and move the head back slightly,

Allowing the crown to reach up towards heaven,

As though a string were attached to the crown of the head,

Just very gently pulling upwards.

Allow the shoulders to relax back and down.

Release any unnecessary tension from your face,

Forehead,

Your eyes,

Your jaw,

Relaxing the shoulders and the torso,

Relaxing the hips and the legs.

And gently become aware of your breath.

Breathing and exhaling through the nose if it's accessible for you.

Serving the breath flowing in and out.

Begin abdominal breathing.

You can place your hand on your abdomen if that helps.

With every inhale,

Feel the abdomen expand gently into the hand.

Every exhale,

Feel it contract gently inwards,

Allowing the chest and shoulders to remain relaxed and still as the abdomen moves out and back in.

If you have thoughts come in,

You can acknowledge them.

And just gently guide your awareness back to the breath and the movement of the abdomen.

With every exhale,

Letting go of the thoughts and releasing any unnecessary tension in the body.

Goodway to Continue letting go of the tension in the body with every exhale.

And now also bring awareness to your mind.

Notice if you feel tension in the mind.

With every exhalation,

Allow the mind to soften.

It works hard all day long.

And just for now,

Allow the mind to rest.

Continue abdominal breathing as you bring awareness to the head and the brain.

Notice if there is any physical or mental tension in this area of your body.

Every exhale,

So let go of any unnecessary tension.

You can think of it like ice melting,

Creating a waterfall that cascades through the center of the body,

From the head all the way down to the lower abdomen.

The space two to three inches below the belly button in the center of the lower abdomen.

Every exhale releasing tension,

Allowing the awareness to flow,

Directing your consciousness from the head down to the lower abdomen.

Feel the awareness accumulating in the lower abdomen.

You may feel a sense of fullness or heaviness or warmth.

If it helps,

You can visualize a sun resting in your lower abdomen.

Become fascinated with exploring the sensations in this area of your body.

Notice what guests are currently residing in this room of your guest house.

Begin to notice how whatever sensations you might be experiencing in the lower abdomen there is also a stillness that underlies all sensation.

Focus on the stillness.

Attune to it.

Feel it.

Feel the vastness of the stillness.

Feel the vastness of the stillness radiating from your lower abdomen throughout your entire body.

Feel the vastness of the stillness radiating from your lower abdomen throughout your entire body.

As you become aware of the stillness throughout your entire body,

Allow its vastness to continue spreading out from your center.

Feeling the stillness in the air around you.

Feel the vastness of the stillness.

Feel how this stillness has no boundary.

Seamlessly connects within and without.

It is an ocean of unbounded awareness.

Omirs in your brain that suppose you came from the mid- according to what's being Now consciously pull your awareness back to the core of your body as though there were a magnet in your lower abdomen drawing all the awareness back to itself.

Feel the physical sensations in the lower abdomen.

Become aware of the felt sense of the body as a whole.

Become aware of your base,

Feeling the solidity of the earth supporting you,

Holding you up,

Simultaneously connected yet separate.

Become aware of the air around you and the place where the air meets the physical boundary of your skin simultaneously connected yet separate.

And when you are ready,

Try to maintain a connection to the stillness within as you gently and slowly begin to open your eyes and take in the world around you.

As you look around,

Realize that you are immersed in this reality like a fish in water,

Not separate.

It's a constant practice,

This being human.

Concentration and meditative practices can help us develop our humanity.

They can help us to become more present within ourselves and with the world around us.

They can help us move closer to perceiving reality as it is,

As individuated beings that are continually immersed in and a part of a greater whole.

To me,

That's the art of being human,

Of managing that dynamic balance of simultaneous duality and oneness.

Thank you all for joining me again this afternoon.

If you have the ability after we sign off,

Then I would recommend just take some time,

Just feel in your body as you observe the world around you.

Be aware of your breath,

Connecting the inside and the outside,

Maintaining that connection between self and other and duality and oneness.

Thank you.

Reviews

It's amazing how often when I sit for my meditation that your talk is exactly what I need to hear. This morning I was awakend at 3am by my pets wanting to play. Normally I would be able to settle them and go back to sleep. But today I could not and I found myself judgmental, worried and generally in a bad mood.
And I thought, what is wrong with me?! Then I listened to this talk and I thought oh right, nothing. Thank you for reminding me that having these feelings is just another part of the experience of life. Just another guest in the house..
🙏☀️

Loved this meditation. Will keep practicing. Loved the fish analogy and cascading of the water down.

i also enjoyed this talk and meditation. it reminds me to pay attention to the contrast. i recently saw a behavior in someone else that i also can have that behavior. it’s interesting, when i see it in someone else i recognize the behavior better and i become more willing to change. (noticing the contrast)

Thank you..This was beautiful ...I remember having a meditative experience where I could not feel the boundaries of my body, how I was positioned, the mind became almost perfectly still. The peace was immense. It’s the same feeling I receive with an act of love/service. That oneness and joy is so real. You experience your true nature. I appreciate these talks so much. Blessings! 🙏

Wow. Incredibly powerful for me! The ocean of unbounded awareness that I connected with during the meditation was deep!
Thank you 🙏🏼!!

You have a way of lifting the heaviness and calming the chaos. And I can breathe again. It's always exactly what I need to hear. Every time.
Thank you!! 🙏🏼💗💫

A beautiful talk explaining the nature of duality and the experience of being human. I found the talk enlightening and the guided practice easy to follow. I particularly liked the analogy and parables and the reference to everything is acceptable...acknowledging and not attaching. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. 🙏💓🙏

Great I’m definitely a follower

Beautiful message, Thomas. The entire ocean in a single drop. Grateful as always for your teaching. 🙏

Listening after a spinal surgery. Very imagistic-sleepy-expansive as I come out of anesthesia. What a long strange trip.... thank w for this guidance!

Thank you. Always love the poem , The Guesthouse and appreciate your talk on duality and Oneness. Thank you for the image of the wave and the ocean and the 4 blind men’s perceptions of the elephant. 🙏✨