Non-Duality, Enlightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, … or whatever we want to call it, is a promised-land Shangri-la that’s out there. It has all sorts of powerful and mystical associations that swirl around it. It is one of the preeminent mythologies that has circulated among humankind for thousands of years. Gurus, books, meditation groups, charlatans, respected masters, and the practices and scriptures of several faiths, have, and are, all calling us to ‘the’ path; ‘a’ path, ‘their’ path, the ‘true’ path. And all of them are advising us what to do to ‘get there’. And all of them have different stories and different advice and a lot of it seems pretty cryptic and faith-based.
And, in the end, until you actually ‘get there’ no one can really tell you precisely what ‘it’ is.
The reasons for all the confusion are basically two.
The first reason is that experiencing ‘it’ is quite different from how most of us experience our lives. And it is not easy to transition from our normal/default experiences to the type of experience ‘it’ offers. It is difficult because to make the transition, much of what you think is real, who you think you are, and what you currently believe in – all has to be abandoned.
The second reason is that the state one obtains seems so different, at least initially, is that folks all down through history have idealized it. They have put it on pedestal and elevated it to something magical, mysterious, special. All of this reverence implies that it is somehow discontinuous with our normal life and experiences. They’ve made it into a thing to be spoken about in hushed voices.
But, this idealization of ‘it’ is unnecessary and it ends up obscuring things. Yes, it is difficult to ‘get there’ and, yes, it is a profoundly different experience once one does ‘get there’. But these difficulties and differences are still all just part of the full range of experiences available to us here in this existence that we find ourselves in. There’s nothing magical, supernatural nor discontinuous about ‘it’.
The reverence about ‘it’ seems to arise because many seekers experience a long struggle as they try to drop their beliefs about themselves, the reality around them and to abandon their ego-centric point-of-view. Such struggles can literally take years of meditation and effort. And, after such a long effort, when they finally do ‘get it’, they often feel as if they’ve made a massive breakthrough into a new awareness that is new and discontinuous with everything they’ve ever known before; and quite special. But this is not true.
And to compound the problem, when they have made their breakthrough, the things they begin to say can seem exceeding mysterious and hard to understand for the rest of us. And this leads us to think that they have, indeed, gone ‘somewhere else’ discontinuous with the world we see around us.
They will say things like, “I meditated and studied for years and, in the end, when I finally awoke, I found that I really hadn’t gone anywhere and that there never had been anywhere to go nor anything to do to achieve true realization except to see that I was already there and to stop trying to get there.”
After hearing such a mysterious pronouncement, the mystique and the mystery just grows for the rest of us.
I think there’s a lot of unnecessary confusion about all of this. Non-Duality, Enlightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, … or whatever we want to call it, is just another way that the awareness in each of us can be experienced. It is not mysterious, mystical, discontinuous or magical.
As the transition of an awareness filled with egoic beliefs migrates towards being an awareness that is empty of such beliefs, its regard for the existence it finds itself in is more and more infused with the truth that “It is what it is”.
But, awareness hasn’t gone any place. It has just exercised its option to become “…an awareness that is empty of such beliefs….”