Originally posted by An Eternal Now:
http://www.dreamdatum.com/nondual-misinfo.html
[b]The misconceptions surrounding Transcendental Non
duality
This article is related to a common misconception with regards to
the Transcendental experience of Nonduality. Within the spiritual
circle, the term Non-duality is a very misunderstood or
misinterpreted term. It must be understood that the term has more
than one meaning and its perceived meaning largely depends on a
person's stage of spiritual awareness.
More often than not, a lower stage understanding of the term is
misconstrued as the Transcendental experience of Nonduality or
non-dualism. This confusion is largely compounded by so-called new
age spiritual materials.
The most common understanding of Non duality is related to the
issue of Polarity such as light and dark. In this semantic,
non-duality is explained as the non-biasness towards any side of a
pole. This is about the concept of there being no absolute good or
evil. In another word, it is about being non-judgemental. Many
spiritual materials believed that this concept of non-duality is
equivalent to enlightenment. This is not entirely correct.
Non-duality as a concept for no polarity is not wrong. However, it
should not be mistaken for non-duality as the state of
enlightenment. The term non-duality that is being used to describe
Enlightenment is actually describing a state whereby there is no
subject-object division. This is an experience that is difference
from the concept of no absolute polarity.
No subject-object division is the true nature of existence. The
method of realising this insight lies in the dissolving of the
'sense of self'. This often involves the continual and correct
letting go of mental grasping.
OK, that all I can think of and write about this topic. I will
revise and improve this article where the need arises.
For your necessary ponderance. Thank you for reading.[/b]
Agreed. We can say that the Nonduality of Subject and Object is
related to other forms of nonduality, yet other forms of nonduality
may not necessary bring out the essence of the Nonduality of
Subject and Object, which is the fundamental kind of insights known
as "enlightenment".
David Loy wrote in 'Nonduality' (highly recommended book on nondual
concept), first chapter, which is called 'How many nondualities are
there?'
In it, it distinguished 5 kinds of nonduality.
No concept is more important in
Asian philosophical and religious thought than nonduality (Sanskrit
advaya and advaita, Tibetan gNismed, Chinese pu-erh, Japanese
fu-ni), and none is more ambiguous. The term has been used in many
different although related ways, and to my knowledge the
distinction between these meanings have never been fully clarified.
These meanings are distinct, although they often overlap in
particular instances....
...The following types of nonduality are discussed here: the
negation of dualistic thinking, the nonplurality of the world, and
the nondifference of subject and object. In subsequent chapters,
our attention focuses primarily on the last of these three,
although there will also be occasion to consider two other
nondualities which are also closely related: first, what has been
called the identity of phenomena and Absolute, or the Mahayana
equation of samsara and nirvana, which can also be expressed as
"the nonduality of duality and nonduality"; second, the possibility
of a mystical unity between God and man. No doubt other
nondualities can be distinguished, but most of them can be subsumed
under one or more of the above categories....
A very short summary:
Dualistic thinking here, means thinking in terms of good and bad,
right and wrong, purity and impurity, being and non-being, black
and white and so on.
"Without relation to "good there
is no "bad," in dependence on which we form the idea of "Good."
Therefore "good" is unintelligible. There is no "good" unrelated to
"bad"; yet we form our idea of "bad" in dependence on it. There is
therefore no "bad." (Nagarjuna)
The second nonduality, the nonplurality of the world, is that
...due to the superimpositions of dualistic thinking that we
experience the world itself dualistically in our second sense: as a
collection of discrete objects (one of them being me) causally interacting in space and
time. The negation of dualistic thinking leads to the negation of
this way of experiencing the world. This brings us to the second
sense of nonduality: that the world itself is nonplural, because
all things "in" the world are not really distinct from each other
but together constitute some integral whole. The relation between
these two senses of nonduality is shown by Huang Po at the very
beginning of his Chun Chou record:
All Buddhas and all sentient
beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists.
This mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and
indestructible. It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form
nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things
which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought about in terms
of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it
transcends all limits, measures, names, traces, and comparisons. It
is that which you see before you -- begin to reason about it and
you at once fall into error.
This asserts more than that everything is composed of some
indefinable substance. The unity of everything "in" the world means
that each thing is a manifestation of a "spiritual" whole because
the One Mind incorporates all consciousness and all minds. This
whole -- indivisible, birthless, and deathless -- has been
designated by a variety of terms, as all as the One Mind, there are
the Tao, Brahman, the Dharmakaya, and so on.
The third nonduality, is the nonduality of subject and
object.
We have seen the connection
between the first two dualities: it is because of our dualistic
ways of thinking that we perceive the world pluralistically. The
relationship between the corresponding nondualities is parallel:
the world as a collection of discrete things (including me) in
space and time is not something objectively given, which we merely
observe passively; if our ways of thinking change, that world also
changes for us. But there is still something lacking in this
formulation. By itself it is incomplete, for it leaves unclarified
the relation between the subject and the nondual world that the
subject experiences. It was stated earlier that the nondual whole
is "spiritual" because the One Mind includes my mind, but How
consciousness could be incorporated has not been explained. The
world is not really experienced as a whole if the subject that
perceives it is still separate from it and its observation Of it.
In this way the second sense of nonduality, conceived objectively,
is unstable and naturally tends to evolve into a third sense. This
third sense, like the other two, must be understood as a negation.
The dualism denied is our usual distinction between subject and
object, an experiencing self that is distinct from what is
experienced, be it sense-object, physical action, or mental event.
The corresponding nonduality is experience in which there is no
such distinction between subject and object. However extraordinary
and counterintuitive such nonduality may be, it is an essential
element of many Asian systems (and some Western ones, of course).
Since the primary purpose of this world is to analyze this third
sense of nonduality, it is necessary to establish in detail the
prevalence and significance of this concept....
------
I came to realize clearly that
mind is no other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth,
the sun and the moon and the stars. ~ Dogen
