Is Nonduality true, or am I in delusion? (continued)

[Note: This thread is a continuation of the second Nov. 10 posting, so you might want to read that first.]

If by “God” we mean the concept that can either be proven or disproven, I remain on the fence - agnostic in a strong sense. If we mean, though, the fullness of the present moment, the “all” of experience itself, then of course I love and ‘believe in’ God.

(This is very similar to what Buber said.)

Let’s take ‘God’ and the myths out of the discussion. Let’s use ‘tat tvam asi’ - you are That. Because it’s only a hop, skip and jump from That to my understanding of God anyway.

Skeptic: Can ‘tat tvam asi’ be really proven? This is just a sensation. After all, really dumb people think Jesus is talking to them all the time. So, when you say that you have an experience of God, all that does is make me look at you askance. Moreover, no matter how profoundly you gesture at the present and say ‘just look,’ and indeed, no matter how profound my own experience of that sacred present is, it remains a mental experience, which can be attributed purely to changes in brain chemistry. Yes, I have an experience and that experience is the same that many mystics have of Oneness. But that doesn’t mean there is oneness.

Reply:

First, let’s be clear what the Choice really is. We have two internally consistent views. If all is one, then this Awareness that one can gain, in moments of full contact and contentment with the present, is “it.” If not, then we have to say that all the enlightened people are wrong – from Bodhidharma to Ram Dass. These people, many of whom spend the majority of their lives watching their minds and clarifying the process of thought, are all making a fundamental mistake. And the only ground we have for saying it is a mistake that they are making is our own skepticism. The dumb Jesus people can be explained by way of the stained glass metaphor; they are filtering a true Light experience through a series of lenses. It would be wise, then, to clear away those lenses – for many people, this includes cleansing out the word ‘God’ too. For me, my emotional relationship with the One is so fundamental that, even if it is a stained glass of my own, it is one which appears to me to embody really fundamental ways in which I look at the world. The Friend feels as real as absolutely anything else. But I digress.

The second point is, how do we know anything at all? When something seems true, we have a number of different ways to verify whether it actually is. We can check it against external phenomena – e.g, if someone says the sky is green, we look up and see that it isn’t. This cannot be done for ‘all is one.’ We can note interrelationships – quantum stuff, or energy stuff. We can also note that every thing is actually empty of separate existence, in the Buddhist way, or in interbeing. Nonetheless, even if everything is ultimately empty, there is for the transitory period of time a separate phenomenon. The chair will eventually be dust, it ‘contains’ the carpenter and the logger and the rest, but for now the One is congealed in the form of a chair. Granted, the chair is mostly empty as a physical matter as well, since atoms are mostly empty space. Granted even that there is no there there, since the bits of atoms that are not empty space are more probabilities of energy than little bits of stuff. So it is that Buddhist/monistic ontology seems more accurate than conventional ontology, even extending to the subatomic realm which, I assume, the mystics had no idea about.

Yet even with all of that, there remains the question of whether the experience of oneness is in any way related to the actual oneness. There’s a nice congruity, but that’s about it.

Well, how do we know anything at all? Beyond the correspondence theory of truth and veridicality, there is the quality of knowing itself. It’s odd that on a meditation retreat, what we are doing is clearing the mind - purely, vipassana-style, no adding in nice God thoughts here - and this very clear experience of sacredness arises, and yet it is to be subject to so much more doubt than, say, the experience of anger.

Skeptic: Well, see the distinction there, because anger is purely a subjective mental state, whereas ‘tat tvam asi’ claims to be saying something about the world. Moreover, our intuitions on retreat are notoriously incorrect - he loves me, she hates me, etc. What happens is that our minds get moving and since they have all this space, they really get moving. But they are as often wrong as right. Third and finally, I do note clearly the desire I have surrounding the idea of oneness, enlightenment, and God. I really want it to be true, I want it not to be delusion. Thus I am more skeptical about truth claims regarding it than I would be about something about which I am dispassionate.

Reply:

Let’s go back to what the choice is here. In contentment and presence, there is an abiding unity and a primordial peace that is experienced. We become more compassionate. We become more aware. I (though not everyone) have a deeper, richer sense of the holy. In other words, according to every index of what God and/or holiness and happiness is, there is more of it in this state of presence. What is on the other side? Only the rigorous maintenance of a truth which has been inherited from a dysfunctional, ‘scientific’ society. Who started this meme that there is no spirit in the tree? It began as a necessary corrective to superstition – stained glass, not light.

For all that, I would still not abandon truth for the sake of everlasting light and peace. Call me crazy. It’s important to remember that, because if truth is the real God, then even in wrestling with the existence or nonexistence of God, I am doing so l’shem shamayim. And a love of truth also. So there we are again, turned around: the atheist interrogator is serving God. God in the form of truth.

The world’s contemplative traditions say trust in the experience. Surrender these concepts, stop writing on the computer, and be with what is actually going on. That may be the answer. What is going on right now, and can I be with it. To repeat from the beginning, because we’ve almost come back around to it – the ‘God’ we’re trying to establish is not the God that is a concept. It is the God that breathes, the state of tat tvam asi. When we look at our experience of oneness, we note that it is not a vague oceanic feeling. It is an oceanic feeling that comes with a great attention to detail. The wind blows through the tree branches. Maybe the mind gets a message from the branches (“Hi! Now you’re getting it.”) or not. But the central thing is the perception of the branches themselves. Ultimately, the message/insight can arise from the mind anyway – why not, that’s the One also.

Add in that the authors of the Bible also seem to be talking about this same sense of the sacred. I mean, what do we think they were talking about? Why did people offer sacrifices?

So on one side: all the mystics, religious geniuses, etc. On the other, a handful of skeptics. Even most great scientists had mystical religious belief. So, even apart from all the beneficial effects – well, this is why people have humility.

- I note, though, that in this place, there is not a lot of space for the sacred. There is chanting, and people bow like crazy. But it seems a bit disconnected from the actual core practice, which is more about observing the mind and how it works. The impermanence and selflessness of emotions. The way to stop clinging to them by watching them instead of identifying with and being tossed by them. And thus, the way out of suffering - by not clinging to our desires for the world to be different than it is.

This aligns very congruently with a theistic worldview. Accepting the world as it is means accepting God and not denying It. But alignment is not the same as necessity. As I have noted on many retreats (without remembering I’d noted it before) the people I feel a kinship with are those who are moved to watch the sunset. That aesthetic, Romantic sensibility - that is also at the root of my religious belief. As I wrote recently, real religion isn’t a matter of belief, it’s a matter of love. Which is why artists with no God idea are more religious than fundamentalists. That’s just how I relate to the world.

What I think I think about Joseph and other pure vipassana teachers is that they are very religious in this way, because they are clearly in love with seeing clearly. They’re not in love with devotional practices or language. But to see clearly the world as it is – how much does it matter if we use the word ‘God’ or if we subscribe to nonduality?

Briefly, it is the case that the nondual truth feels, on retreat, more true than other ideas. So that should mean something.

I thought I’d gotten somewhere, but I’m not sure whether I have or not. I accept this process of thinking and questioning. The key is to constantly return to contentment and yielding and acceptance of what is, with an open mind as to how we conceptualize that. Keep drinking from the well, and being mindful, and these excursions can be part of my process.