As I was sitting yesterday I had the very clear insight that, “What I am can never be separated from What I’m not.” The insight, like so many insights, came with a non-verbal holistic “knowing,” and then also the thought itself, which sort of framed the insight in mental terms. I’ve found it very interesting to reflect on the deeper ramifications of this insight and how it represents my current edge in practice-understanding.
First, the most direct meaning has to do with seeing the process of identification and release of identification—another way we could frame this movement is in terms of expansion and contraction. Typically people think of spiritual freedom in terms of the release part, but I’ve found that the release of identification is a natural movement of consciousness, not one that should try and be removed or manipulated. After all the effort to manipulate, and the impulse to remove, is itself a function of consciousness that is identified.
This misunderstanding of freedom comes from, I think in part, the methods that many practitioners use to discover an even greater freedom—to simply allow reality to manifest as it is. The methods I’ve used are mainly from the Theravada Buddhist tradition, namely vipassana meditation. One of the great skills of vipassana is to help release identification from experience, which I’ve previously taken to be “me” or “mine”. By examining and releasing this identification the sense of “me” has been able to expand and become subtler. That new subtle “me” then gets seen, becomes an object (as opposed to the subject) and identity pushes back even further. It goes back to the point where there is literally nowhere left to stand and “pop”—Nirvana.
But the habits of consciousness to “unconsciously identify” are very strong, and so we must cycle through the various layers of consciousness over and over again, so that the process of incorrectly taking ourselves to be this or that unwinds itself, to the point where there is a major shift of fundamental identity, wherein we are not primarily identified with any position whatsoever. This is real freedom, as it doesn’t require the contraction of consciousness to be stopped—that continues on without our consent—rather it allows the process of consciousness expanding and contracting to happen in a more unimpeded way.
The problem, or downside, with this method is that it uses expansion and release to encourage freedom, and so it can often gives the impression that contraction is “bad.” But again, it’s not the contraction which is problematic, it’s the habitual tendency for the mind to identify with experience, including the most subtle and empty types of experience, that prohibits freedom! In other words, methods like vipassana cultivate a reliance on a 3rd person witnessing type of experience, and thus has a blind spot with this particular mode of inquiry. All methods have their blind-spots, including non-methods.
I’ve come to see that what is really meant by “non-duality” is that reality is allowed—but not by someone—to manifest just as it is. Interestingly, how it manifests is through a pattern of cycling from gross, to subtle, to very-subtle experience, and then back to gross again. Ken Wilber calls this pattern, “evolution and involution.” If we look around carefully we see this pattern happening on all sorts of time-scales and in nearly every aspect of life, both in the inner and outer worlds. The seasons, the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, the birth and death of stars, the change of emotional states and moods, are all exhibiting this pattern… it’s just the way life operates. Knowing this we don’t need to try and stay in an expanded, or “enlightened” state. Instead, we can recognize that “this is it”, and has always been it. There is never anyway we could avoid what we are, nor is there anyway that we can get there.
And even so, I sit each morning, and notice that this understanding is slowly metabolized in deeper and deeper ways. And so evolution—happening simultaneously within the cycles of expansion and contraction—unfolds as well. It’s this “both-and” relationship to paradox that also characterizes the non-dual.
