Living Non Duality
The thinking mind in the more regular stress filled life of ‘me’ is usually about how life could have been, should have been (!!) or is possible to be in the future, for a separate me. As this me thought/ analysis/ binary logic based intellect functions it creates more and more layers of how I should live my life in order to achieve what I now believe life should be or ought to be. So an entire psychological realm comes into operation and is fuelled by the underlying stress of the first presumption that I am a separate part which is constantly threatened by a so called separate world or others. As this thought system fails to deliver the happiness or bliss it had promised in time, it begins to question its assumptions and finds to its astonishment that it is not needed at all for the astounding whole of life to appear and function which is always completely whole without any independent separate parts. Thought then is humbled and widened and gets philosophical perhaps and Godly. Behaviour seems to become naturally charitable and relaxed. Yet even this new widened understanding knows in it’s humility that no thought is required at all for life to be as it is. Spontaneous living seems to happen then and there is no more analysis anymore of whether this life is being led by narrow or widened thought. There is a huge yet subtle shift which knows that life has been the same always whether I thought my efforts had made it so or whether I had tried to understand it or not.
This reminds me of a lovely zen saying I had read - If you understand things, things are as they are. If you don’t understand things, things are as they are.
Living Non Duality is then just always already so. Everything and all that happens is already always non dual and happening by itself irrespective of what the thinking mind may say.
The thinking mind in the more regular stress filled life of ‘me’ is usually about how life could have been, should have been (!!) or is possible to be in the future, for a separate me. As this me thought/ analysis/ binary logic based intellect functions it creates more and more layers of how I should live my life in order to achieve what I now believe life should be or ought to be. So an entire psychological realm comes into operation and is fuelled by the underlying stress of the first presumption that I am a separate part which is constantly threatened by a so called separate world or others. As this thought system fails to deliver the happiness or bliss it had promised in time, it begins to question its assumptions and finds to its astonishment that it is not needed at all for the astounding whole of life to appear and function which is always completely whole without any independent separate parts. Thought then is humbled and widened and gets philosophical perhaps and Godly. Behaviour seems to become naturally charitable and relaxed. Yet even this new widened understanding knows in it’s humility that no thought is required at all for life to be as it is. Spontaneous living seems to happen then and there is no more analysis anymore of whether this life is being led by narrow or widened thought. There is a huge yet subtle shift which knows that life has been the same always whether I thought my efforts had made it so or whether I had tried to understand it or not.
This reminds me of a lovely zen saying I had read - If you understand things, things are as they are. If you don’t understand things, things are as they are.
Living Non Duality is then just always already so. Everything and all that happens is already always non dual and happening by itself irrespective of what the thinking mind may say.