How Can Non-duality Help Me Now?

Non-duality can help us now by showing where to find four precious and life-giving resources. These are: a refuge, a foundation, a direction and a purpose.

Where do these boons come from? Their source is Reality itself, non-dual, one without a second. This source is trans-cendental, but in the world of relativity we encounter it in the form of teachings, recorded in ancient texts, and presented in the language of our time, by those who have discovered the essence in themselves and thus apparently assumed the role of teachers, although no agency can truly be attributed to them.

The teachings disclose that we are living under the burden of a misapprehension regarding our own situation. Until now, our human consciousness has revealed to us a world of opportunities and dangers, together with some limited and fragile capacities that we have been granted in order to survive and perhaps prosper. We attain or achieve moments of well-being and happiness, but these prove incomplete and impermanent. We feel a want of security, strength, purpose and fulfilment, and so a cloud of anxiety hangs over us.

The non-dual teachings can guide us to a source of security, strength, purpose and fulfilment. On the way, an obstacle must be overcome. This obstacle is more apparent than real, but it gains stature from an effective disguise. The obstacle is a preconception, which prevents us from hearing the teachings, or rather, worse, it distorts and dilutes their meaning. This expectation assumes the disguise of ‘being realistic’, but in fact stems from ignorance of Reality.

The assumption is that non-duality will be another assemblage of ideas and strategies, similar to those we have already encountered—some related to our religious heritage, others presenting themselves as innovations—all purporting to make the most of those fragile and limited capacities to survive, prosper and endure our situation. This presumption is dignified as an attitude of realism, because so far we have not been able to form an idea of anything greater.

The non-dual philosophy is presented in combination with practical teachings. Our preconceptions cause us to misunderstand the goal of these techniques and to believe that they are further ways to make the best of our circumstances. In fact, the intended outcome of these methods, rightly applied, is that we will be enabled to receive and absorb the full meaning of the non-dual teaching.

This essential message is not how to cope with our situation, but that our true position is entirely other than we currently believe it to be. This is because, from the highest standpoint, the world of opportunities and dangers is a phenomenal appearance, not the absolute truth. Our real nature is not a part of the phenomenal world and its constrictions, but the Consciousness in which the universe of forms appears.

In order to assimilate this revelation, we require inner qualities including the capacity for voluntary mental quiescence and sustained one-pointed concentration. These resemble skills prescribed by those schools of personal development whose purpose is to enhance our individual condition, rather than to transcend it completely. Thus our preconceptions lead us to mistake the means for the end, and the teachings bring no relief of our fundamental problem. It is only when we have been brought to a point of readiness by much experience of life, that a fresh possibility emerges.

When all attempts to find happiness by enhancing our individual inner resources have failed, then we may be receptive to a message which is not a variation on anything our mind has, or could have, formulated before, and the true import of the teachings makes some impression on our understanding.

Now there appears before us a further divide between our present standpoint and the objective, as we understand it. We may intuitively recognise, or intellectually accept, that the non-dual teaching on the essential identity of the human and the transcendent, does follow from the principle that the whole transcends the parts. But this rational consent is accompanied by a sense of regret. Direct knowledge that the individual consciousness is not in essence different from the Universal, may be, we acknowledge, in principle possible for rare spiritual heroes. But, we confess, it is certainly beyond the scope of our own, quite ordinary, capabilities.

Yet once again, the apparent defeat arises from a misapprehension regarding what is required and expected of us.