A DELICATE BALANCE

Living with Two Realities

Perhaps one of the foremost challenges in spiritual life is to find and accomplish a balance between Duality and Non- Duality.

In non- dual meditation we can, with a focused and patient effort, experience directly our own innate divinity and enter into Unity with the source of our Being. We can literally hangout with God! When the meditation session is over and we step back into our familiar world. Our love, peace, serenity, joy and feeling of connection can vanish in an instant as we discover that flat tire, clogged plumbing or our companion asks why we didn’t do such and such! That of course is a very short list! I should point out here that the meditation does not actually stop, it just mutates into our life’s details and we face that with our ordinary mind that is hopefully in the process of evolving toward our meditative state. Until it arrives there we fall quickly into our patterned thoughts and reactions. The shock can be severely disheartening!

If you can relate to this welcome to the cold shower of what is. Please don’t let this be such a shock. It is the experience of most of us. I do not know anyone who was able to skip this step. It shines a very bright light on one of the basic truisms of spiritual life. We must learn, through consistent effort to bring the spiritual state into our life experience, for that IS our spiritual practice.

There are no magic mantras or simple solutions to this that I know of. However, if we can understand the structure of Reality we can begin to move toward mastery. First, be clear….duality and non-duality are not in opposition. Sometimes we speak and think of duality as undesirable, like it’s our enemy. We do the same with ego. But, the actual “problem” is our ignorance of the essential balance of the two realities. They are a system. Duality has it’s function and relates to the perceptual,3-D world. In a sense it is our spiritual classroom. The non-dual describes the state of transcendence that leads us into capital T truth. It is so because in the non-dual we run out of language. The idea of philosophical or theological debate seems, well, kinda silly. When the Divine Presence is coursing through you, like a broken dam of loving energy such discussions are just not that engaging in my view. So, we can use the Buddhist model of the Union of the Two Truths. Duality is our conventional truth, our daily lives, our familiar world. Non-duality is emptiness, our Ultimate Truth It is the direct experience of our Divine nature and our unified connection with all that is. We have learned that the quantum field is empty yet contains all possible realities, that we draw our realities out of the field with our thoughts. When those thoughts manifest, usually as matter, they enter the conventional truth of everyday existence, conventional truth. When they cease to exist on that plane they return back into emptiness. This is an expression of energy, intelligence and frequency. It is a process. These two aspects of reality flow in and out of each other and we dance in that flow.

If we can hold firm the realization of the fluid nature of conventional truth we can always remember impermanence. This Impermanence is one of the main distinguishing factors of the two truths. The non-dual is likely ever evolving but it doesn’t flow into non-existence in the same way. In fact, existence is more or less a non-issue in non-duality. If we can learn to view life experience as a fluid, even dream-like unfolding of thought and perception it becomes a bit less tangible making it much easier to roll with the punches. Some find it useful to view all of life’s dramas and comedies as lessons or even karmic manifestations. This is the nature of every aspect of duality. It is temporarily real, it matters in a relative way and usually elicits a response and likely action on our part, but it is simply a page from your life’s script.

The non-dual state is like our anchor. It keeps us connected to the ONE. We do not drift. This is what I have shared with you about the essential understanding of the limited nature of the ego personality and its central role in duality. It is the product of the dualistic mind. It is addicted to perception and opinionated interpretations of those perceptions. It is a construction as is the whole of conventional truth. If we see this as who we are in truth and nature, we are stuck in the dualistic world. That’s the problem. The misidentification. As we realize ultimate truth we come to know ourselves as expressions of the Unified, Divine Source of all that is. We are nothing less than a unique manifestation of the Mind of God. We are that now, have always been and will always be. The more we train ourselves to claim that identity, the more certain we are of this Ultimate Truth, the more gracefully we can move in the dual world. There is no struggle then. Gracefully like the flight of an eagle, full of Grace like a cell in the Divine Body, we flow in balance.

Moving streams and rivers are classic illustrations of the nature of the TAO. We tend to identify with the moving water, but in Truth we should identify with the flow!