sendy...

appreciation for your post. i may not agree with all of it but the appreciation is there anyway.

EH....

"It becomes increasingly difficult for me to understand what is the driving force in the search for non-duality. "

i can speak only from my own mind as i don't know the contents of other's.
For me the search was for some 'inner' depth i intuited is the best way i can put it. There was something there i was not seeing but sensed.

i too, liked myself. i was a 'good' person. My idea of 'oness' was basicly an expansion into the universal spirit with an enlargement of myself or personality.

When it happened it was almost by accident and at the moment totaly unlooked for. In less then a nano second the change was so complete And so far from the above paragraph it was traumatic. It cost me every single thing i believed. It was terribly expensive.

i am hearig about non duality and bliss and love...it doesn't work that way. In none dual awareness there is no modification, it is stark and naked and only brilliantly aware.

So, i will give a piece of advice to you and to anyone else who thinks this may lead to beauty and bliss, it doesn't. If you have beauty and bless or feel whole in your being stay where you are...the last step is a plunge off a cliff that leaves you in permanent freefall, a ghost that plays the game of life as the superficiality it now is and there is no going back.

In discriptive terms this is what it is, no love no hate, no ugliness, no beauty, no beloved, no lover, no child, no parent, no male, no female, no happy, no sad, no life, no death, no lie no truth, no tomorrow, no yesterday....put a 'no' in front of everything you know, think, and percieve, and you get the idea.

Stay where you are, be happy or sad, it's being something....there is no room for a YOU in the brilliant aware nothingness, only a ghost appendage that plays the game of superficiality and calls it life.

This is as honest and straightforeward as i can describe it. It leaves the ego you nothing.

Very nice, but let’s try a little analysis, paragraph by paragraph. (This is going to take several posts, because it will be long). I’m not talking about merely accepting it because somebody else (even if he's a guru)says it’s so. I’m talking about actually analyzing what is said, in the light of reason, in the light of what is known, and in the light of what may be inferred from what is known.

Now, it is certainly possible that it might not be analyzable, but in that case, you’ve got nothing more than if I said there is a herd of 50 billion blue water buffalo on planet Omega Cowpat IV. You can’t analyze that, either, and so either accept it or don’t, at your leisure. But there is not one other thing you can reasonably do about it.
This paragraph is just littered with things that do not follow from one another, but it is almost impossible to untangle what it is saying.

If everything in the universe is not actually anything in the universe except illusion played out by "mind and senses," from whence do mind and sense arise? There is nothing that could produce senses, since there is nothing. There is nothing which could produce mind except, we must assume, the One Spirit.

But how is it that One Spirit apparently imagines itself not only to be many minds, but then each of those mental manifestations then begins imagining it possesses senses separate from each other mental manifestation (and presumably the One Mind).

And finally, how is it that this One Spirit then has it’s multitude of imagined minds and senses imagine up a universe that – absolutely remarkably – is quite similar for each of those separate, imagined minds? Why, with such a plethora of imagined separatenesses, should there be any similarity at all between what each imagines? Why, when purely imagined scientist manifestations measure the ratio of circumference of a cirle to its diameter do they each always arrive at precisely the same number? Is each not perfectly free to imagine anything it likes? Certainly, given the multitude of different cultures and different individuals that I am aware of, this seems to happen. So why, I wonder, can each mind imagine a God the way it wants, or perceive a comment as hurtful that others thought quite innocuous? Why does this not happen when imagining a red ball, or a lake or a tree or the planet Mars or the Orion constellation? It appears, for some reason, that all this imagining produces many differences, and many similarities, and as near as I can tell from what is said in the above statement, there is no particular reason for it.

When looked at analytically, then, this appears to be just pure, meaningless babble.

The analysis will continue...

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If you had experienced nonduality you wouldn't be saying it didn't exist. Some of us here have experienced it. Not everyone strives for it. The self isn't distasteful. We are much more than our labels. You won't come close to understanding it unless you experience it and even then it is indescribable.

Try to describe a time you felt joy and replicate exactly to me what you experienced in that moment so I can feel exactly what you felt.

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For those of us who undergird our faith in a holy text of scripture, the "illusion," i.e the immanent text which exists in this world (establishing a duality between Spirit and world), actually plays a fundamental role in the process of salvation from this world.

We can't deny that the "flesh" or the "text" or the "world" has it's "real" place in the overall plan of the Creator.

In other words, even if the world-to-come should do away with duality, it can't annihilate it, since it is part and parcel -- root and branch -- of that which might grow out of it.

God may have been nondual before He spoke the world into existence. But He did speak the world into existence.

He may repent of having spoken the world into existence. . . . He may take actions to undo what He hath wroght. . . . But since He is God, He cannot undo completely anything He has done since whatever He does He does as a necessary element of His Being, His Will, and His Purpose. (God doesn't make mistakes even though He might make it appear that way for a higher goal.)

What I'm trying to say is that even if one element of dualism appears to be an "illusion," the illusion has just as much reality as the other pole of the duality since any other state of affairs can represent nothing more than Divine Solipsism: divine onanism designed to assuage the bordom of everlasting solitude.


Dan

But what about noise and thought? Are they not included in non-duality?

I think the word "illusion" gets tossed about too often. The sensory world is not "an illusion". It can be an obscuration into noticing the eternal aspect of reality, but it is not an illusion, its only a temporality. But the temporality is eternally temporal because of its association with the eternal. There is not one without the other, and if your non-duality does not include and embrace the temporal as something more than an illusion, then you are fooling yourself for another "story".

Silence and no-thought are tools to attempt to lessen the obscurity provided by the temporal. The eternal is not really "hidden" anymore than the heads hides the tails on a coin. Silence and no thought are attempts to really "see" the tails (eternal) absent the heads (temporal). Non-duality is the ability to know the whole of the coin, the heads, the tails, their separateness and their integration and how all those seemingly contradictory views are all true, but partial descriptions.

-TC

That's nicely put.

-TC

. . . Then androgyny is the closest we can come to nonduality. Androgyny is not an elimination of gender. It's a non-separated union of the two. Androgyny is very much like the doctrine of the incarnation.

In the Person of the Incarnate Christ, we have two natures (not two persons) --- Divine and Human --- inseparably united without loss or mixture of separate identities, without loss or transfer of properties or attributes, the union being personal and eternal (RB. Thieme, Jr.).

In the soul of each and every person we have two natures (sensory/worldly and spiritual) inseparably united without loss or mixture of separate identities, without loss or transfer of properties or attributes, the union being personal and eternal.

What the mystic experiences is not the dissolution of the union (which is impossible) but rather a role reversal (a rolling over) concerning the missionary position through which his mind has ever been impregnanted.

The enlightened experience of the mystic is the experience of what it is like for the spirit to mount the flesh in spiritual copulation rather than the flesh always being on top where it can never seem to really get impregnated with the seed of the spirit.



Dan

I'm curious as to why you think I might disagree with this.

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This actually sounds like ego lamenting a loss.

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I don't know if you agree or disagree. I was simply responding to your statement about experiencing non-duality.

My claim is simply that the experience of nonduality is like the experience of duality. Both are poles of a metaphysical duality (and here we enter an infinite regression/progression of dualities based on the transcendence of lower dualities) which cannot be destroyed once God has spoken it into being.

As I claimed in another response in this thread, I don't deny the experience of the mystic . . . whereby he transcends the normal experience of duality. But imo . . . what the mystic experiences is the first time the spirit side of the duality of flesh and spirit gets its opportunity to go topside in the hierogamic coupling. My stance is that what the mystic experiences is not "non-duality" but androgyny: he is experiencing the true union of the conscious and the subconscious mind. [Where . . . I might add . . . the subsconscious mind is more "real" than the conscious mind; where the conscious mind spread its le . . . wings in the presence of the subconscious mind.]



Dan