User:WillWare/Non-duality

Lately I've been reading a lot of non-duality literature: Scott Kiloby, Jan Frazier, Tim Freke, Eckhart Tolle. I've also been taking an Advaita meditation class.

What do I find fascinating about this topic?
I took an interest in this stuff after stumbling across Kiloby's book Love's Quiet Revolution, which described his experience of spiritual awakening. It grabbed my attention because of its similarity to what the Buddha described. What particularly grabbed me was his statement that having awakened, his spiritual questing was ended. The Buddha said the same thing:
 * "Seeing thus, the instructed disciple grows disenchanted with (whatever impermanent thing is being discussed). Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, Fully released. He discerns that Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world."

Eckhart Tolle
Tolle started the current rage of non-duality stuff with his book The Power of Now. When it came out in 1999, I skimmed it but didn't get what he was talking about. Coming back to it after reading the other people, I can see that he didn't bother to provide the kind of dramatic description of his own experience that these other people did.

Scott Kiloby, Jan Frazier
I went to a talk by Scott Kiloby in Westerly, Rhode Island, on 3 March 2011. He seemed to ramble without much direction for quite a while, but when he started talking about death and grief, things got more interesting and useful.

He distinguishes between stories and direct experiences. Kiloby avoids pronouns, so he sometimes talks in the passive voice in a slightly odd way. He talks about how all stories were "seen through". What this means is that he instantly recognizes stories as stories the moment they come into his consciousness.

On the topic of grief, he talked about losing a dear friend in the past year, and how the story of that friend is as accessible to him through memory as it ever was while the friend was alive.

He talked about the typical person's fear of death really being the fear of the end of their story. They'd be "happy" with a continuation of the story that gave them something to complain about, like being a cripple or being in pain.

Since he sees his story as a story, he's not particularly interested in when it ends or whether it ends, because he's being here now. Concern over when the story will end is really a dwelling in fantasy, an escape from the present moment.

For those of us who have not had the Awakening Experience with capital letters, what I believe is beneficial is to develop a capacity to see things in this way.
 * Distinguish between stories and direct experiences. Fear and suffering almost always come from stories, almost never from direct experiences.
 * Cultivate practices that make that distinguishing easier.

I went to a talk by Jan Frazier in February in Amherst. After the talk I asked her if her own awakening had given her any insight into any sort of afterlife and she said she had no insight about it, but her own fear of death, or concern for staying alive, had ended. Her book is When Fear Falls Away. She has a different voice as a writer but otherwise says much the same stuff as Scott Kiloby. Neither has ever mentioned anything supernatural, as far as I am aware.

Advaita, Tim Freke
Tim Freke talks about essentially the same Atman idea, and in his book Lucid Living, he actually walks you through how to get to that place, at least in some weak temporary form. This whole physical universe is one big dream being dreamt by a universal consciousness, and "I" am some kind of instance of that universal consciousness.

Rupert Spira
A big believer in the law of the excluded middle, his reasoning goes approximately like this:
 * I experience both the body and the mind, so the law of the excluded middle says that the experiencer is something else. "I" am having experiences, so some kind of "I" exists, which is not the body or the mind. When I look for this experiencer, I don't find anything objective. Anything with objective qualities would make it experienced and not the experiencer.
 * We exist and are that which knows or experiences, but we have no objective qualities or properties. We now conclude that we are unbounded, because a bound in time or space would be an objective quality.

Phenomenology and the Present Moment
The Advaita thing (as I understand it) is this: You are not really a person, you are the awareness within which phenomena arise. Space and time are phenomena arising in awareness, which has primacy over space and time. When you perceive this really clearly, you'll experience bliss and you'll see that you are intimately connected to all other people and everything else. You can call this Atman, and the identification with other people and things is the "Atman equals Brahman" realization.

A story is any mental construct, anything that isn't right here right now in the present moment. Anything involving the past or future is a story. Anything involving the pronouns "me" or "you" is a story. A direct experience is what you experience when you scan your body. You experience sensations right now. It's possible that "your body" is a hallucination, and you can have experiences in dreams where the referents clearly aren't real, but the experiences are self-evidently real. If you are doing something distracting such that you are not having a direct experience of your body, then in some sense your body does not exist, at least not as a phenomenon in your awareness.

In support of the notion that time is a phenomenon, consider the hypothetical case where the universe was created five minutes ago, with all the fossils set up to cause it to appear billions of years old, and with everybody having memories that appear decades old, and paper records apparently going back centuries, etc. That's wildly unlikely but possible in principle. So what we call "the past" is really memories and records and the belief that they describe time gone by, and what we call "the future" is hopes and fears and plans and theories and expectations.

Can one demolish space as easily as time? I could theorize that I'm a brain in a vat and somebody is feeding me an apparently three-dimensional image of a room with a computer on a desk and a chair under my non-existent rear.

The Law of the Excluded Middle
One popular non-duality idea is that the Atman, the experiencer of all things, cannot itself be experienced or perceived. Therefore anything that can be experienced or perceived cannot be the Atman. I think of this as a sort of law of the excluded middle.

I'm not sure I buy this myself, and a lot of the reasoning appears to hinge on assuming this is valid. I've spent most of my life believing that what I call my mind is simply the activity of my brain cells. Obviously the brain cells can be experienced and perceived, if I cut open my head and hold up a mirror. I can non-destructively see a tiny fraction of my brain cells by using an optical instrument to look at my retina. So it seems to me like my brain cells occupy the excluded middle ground between experiencer and experienced.

What is this mystical "experiencer" if it isn't my brain cells? Is it the pattern of activity, distinct from the brain cells but depending upon them as a fire depends upon a fuel source? I think the Buddha once argued this case: when the wood runs out, the fire stops, and it hasn't gone anywhere else, it's just gone.

So I'm being asked to believe that behind my brain, there is some other-worldly "self" that perceives everything, and the brain is a sort of physical radio receiver for its vibes. I'm also hearing that whatever "animates" my brain is the same thing that animates everybody else's brains, and underlies the rest of what I know as physical reality.