Saturday 28 February 2009

Mesmerised By The Story.

I've been perusing what material exists about nonduality on the Internet. There are great gobs of it and nearly all of it makes me chuckle. There's talk of certain celebrities that are nondual, making the namaste sign to each other, and lending their beautiful speaking voices to tapes of non-dual literature. "What is Kelly Ripa's spiritual connection to Meg Ryan?" was asked very seriously in one blog. What it's like to "experience nonduality" is gone into deeply. Gurus are compared and rated. Everyone is positively riveted to the story of becoming that doesn't really exist. All the traditional paths to enlightenment are studied and analysed and torn apart, or heeded with reverence. The idea that duality and nonduality are mutually exclusive seems to be accepted as a matter of course, with little acknowledgement that oneness is oneness no matter what the appearance. Of course all of it's divine. The stories are thrilling and contradictory, but I get the feeling I'm hearing a babble from inside a penitentiary. There is nothing wrong with seeking. There is nothing wrong with devotion. There is nothing wrong with hanging onto a specific concept of spiritual awakening and defending it to the hilt. There's nothing wrong with hanging around in the lotus position for hours until some state of stillness and bliss is reached, yet I think most of these things have very little to do with liberation. Which allows everything and is everything, yet is nothing, being something. That nothingness thingy I slip in sometimes, and others slip in (like the apparent individuals linked to on this blog), it's a biggie. It isn't lingered on with description, for however useless description is for what I try to describe, nothingness defies it most of all. There is nothing, so the appearance is an absolute miracle. Stunning. Illusory, real and unreal, and apparently most amusing.

2 comments:

geofrank said...

As I make my way up the calendar of your blog I revel. Sometimes it helps me in having to use the thoroughly unsatisfactory tools of words and concepts to think of the "nothing" as....well it IS truly nothing however it isn't empty but rather full...to overflowing with everything that seems to be.

No One In Particular said...

Hey Geofrank, don't worry, you can't get it wrong whatever you do.