From the Deconstructing Yourself Podcast
Here’s the unique audio recording: A Few Stray Points about Nonduality with Jake Orthwein.
Michael Taft: Hello and welcome to , the podcast for meta-modern mutants enthusiastic about meditation, hardcore Dharma, neuroscience, the Global Weirding, Tantra, nonduality, awakening, and so rather more. My name is Michael Taft, your host on the podcast, and on this episode, I’m being interviewed by Jake Orthwein. I desired to discuss a couple of necessary and somewhat random points on the subject of nonduality. And so I felt that Jake, who form of knows quite a bit about it will be the proper interlocutor to assist me unpack this fascinating topic. Jake Orthwein is a filmmaker based in Santa Monica, California, and a Dharma student of mine. You might have seen his YouTube video entitled “How Politics Became Pro-Wrestling.” And he’s currently working on a series of movies surrounding meditation, psychedelics, and predictive processing. And so now without further ado, I provide you with the episode that I call “A Few Stray Points About Nonduality,” with Jake Orthwein.
Michael Taft: Jake, welcome to the podcast.
Jake Orthwein: Very honored to be here, Michael, thanks.
MT: It’s great to have you ever here. In order you after all know, we’re gonna flip the roles, and I’m gonna have you ever asking me questions. So I’ll just give up the ground. You’re the MC. Take it away, Jake.
JO: Okay, so with this background topic, we’ve got in mind of nonduality, I assume the primary place to start out is likely to be: when this term nonduality gets used what two things are being claimed to be not-two or nondual?
MT: Yeah, great query to start out out with, because actually, it’s probably an important query. What nonduality are we talking about? And it seems that this can be a point of tremendous confusion since the term has clout and the term has recognizability. It’s got some pizzazz behind it and so people need to use it. However it seems that they use it in alternative ways to mean various things. And, most fundamentally, are talking about actually different nondualities. And so initially, let’s imagine, obviously, if there’s a duality, you wish two things. And as you said, which two things are apparently dual, but we’re saying are usually not dual? And I feel that that’s something that we’re going to be unpacking throughout the course of this interview.
But some really necessary things that may very well be nondual are different than all the various things that may very well be said to be nondual. So if we took any list of mundane dualities, or mundane sets of opposites; large and small, or loud and quiet, or big and little, or white and black, all of those, let’s imagine, Okay, those are usually not dual. But what would we get out of that? It’s like, Okay, now we’re really all committed, we’re gonna have a latest religion concerning the nonduality of salt and pepper. Well, who cares? I mean, possibly some chefs somewhere shall be inconvenienced by the mob of our followers or whatever, nevertheless it won’t really change anything. So what dualities are really necessary to see the nondualness of, actual collapse the duality of and a couple of of them can be for instance–and these are historically necessary–let’s imagine the duality between purity and impurity, between God and man, between mind and matter, stuff like that. That’s where it starts to get juicy, like necessary nondualities, and necessary ways to see that our fixation upon keeping things–let’s say the duality between sacred and profane. We’re attempting to construct slightly wall around our sacred stuff and keep all of the profane at bay, it becomes really necessary to see that in a method of it, there isn’t any separation between sacred and profane.
So good query, and we’ll unpack this as we go along. But I might claim that normally, over hundreds of years, especially of spiritual or spiritual history, the 2 nondualities that we’re going to most be enthusiastic about and that may get us probably the most bang for our buck, when it comes to, be life-changing in a really positive way, there’s really only two which might be central. After which there’s slightly handful of others which might be interesting. So the 2 are going to be: the nonduality between self and other; and the nonduality between, we’ll just say, emptiness and form. Although I could just as easily call that one between God and the world or awareness and the world. So those are the 2.
And what gets me off the bed within the morning is that truly those two are closely related. They usually’re closely related in a hierarchy, they’re different. And as I said, the difficulty is that folks are using the word nondual to mean various things and think that they’re using it in a way that is analogous, they usually’re really not. And these are the 2 that get confused on a regular basis. And the confusion is absolutely particularly pernicious, since the nonduality of self versus other, which I’ll, in a really Michael Taft fashion, just call Nonduality 1, is required to have Nonduality 2 but doesn’t equal Nonduality 2, which is the nonduality of emptiness and form. In order that they exist in a hierarchy and the implications of the primary one are contained in the second, but after all, Nonduality 2, the implications of it go much, much further. And actually, they find yourself form of looking like the alternative of one another. So it’s really interesting in there.
JO: You mentioned all these other, more mundane dualities from the very trivial like salt and pepper to the seemingly more necessary, like pure and impure for instance, or of more religious significance, you might say, and I assume possibly simply to relate these concepts in people’s minds, is it the case that to say something is nondual, to say two things are nondual, is to say that every thing on either side of that imagined duality is empty?
MT: Yeah, but you already said it if you said . So the things on either side of the imagined duality, and that’s it right there. It’s that the duality is just something–it’s like a category that you simply’re making in your head or two categories that you simply’re making in your head which might be different. So it arises within the imagination, it arises within the mind, nevertheless it is utterly mentally created. And it’s a giant a part of nonduality, to see that if you drop that mentally generated two different categories or two different boxes thing, if you drop that, suddenly they aren’t in two different categories, suddenly, the separation between them drops away. I might say that that’s related in necessary ways to emptiness, but not the identical thing as emptiness.
JO: Perhaps we are able to just start with this experience of what does it mean to say that subject and object are nondual? So what can be the investigation that one would undertake in meditation to find that? After which, what’s the exceptional results of that?
MT: Sure, I mean, we could undertake dozens, a whole bunch, hundreds of various techniques to note this. However it’s actually not that tough to note because again, what we’re doing there may be dropping a set of mental boxes that we generally use to orient our perception. I’m over here, other things are over there, and there’s a distance between them, they usually exist in a relationship that’s the connection of subject and object, right? So I’m doing things to an object or I’m perceiving an object and so forth. So all of those are the set of mental boxes that we’re generating around and inside the experience, and after we either drop those mental boxes, or stop them, or see through them, something quite different occurs. And we start to note and again through many various meditation techniques, and even simply because we would notice it someday, if we calm down in a certain way, or we could notice it through drug interactions, we could actually even notice it in various ways like being unwell or hit on the pinnacle. We are able to notice, when those categories, when those boxes are dropped, once they release, after we let go, there’s simply experience happening.
So I’m now a lemon tree. Outside my window is a ravishing lemon tree. And in a standard mind set of an individual off the road I, over here am the lemon beautiful, shining, yellow lemon on the tree there, it’s actually wet within the rain, it’s form of a almost archetypal lemon. After which, if I calm down those boxes, if I relaxed the categorization, if I calm down the system of orientation I’m imposing on this, all that starts to occur is there’s just an arising of a lemon in vision, or if I am going even deeper, there’s only a yellow circle. And there’s no person seeing it. And it’s not pointing to an object, there’s just this experience of sunshine, right? And in order that’s an example of what that appears like after we drop subject and object.
JO: Okay, so there’s a relationship between this experience of subject-object duality. And you might say, like, the reification of the appearances, because as you said, like, relaxing the fixation of lemon as lemon also relaxes the fixation of you recognize, I’m over here, and the lemon is over there.
MT: Yeah. And actually, that starts to point at various kinds of practices, because to have a duality, because the word implies, now we have to have two things. So if we calm down, the fixation on the lemon as object that perforce relaxes the fixation on me as an object, so we could form of, in our practice, emphasize the non-objectness of the lemon. And we might form of get non-objectness of self out of that as a bonus, or we could work on the opposite end of the stick, and really work on non-fixation on self. And also you’d begin to notice immediately that objects of the world around seem less separate, seem less fixated as objects, and begin to have a powerful sense of non-separation. Either way.
JO: Okay, so I’m sure most of your listeners may have had something like these experiences, and so it’ll be familiar to them. But if you say, the lemon isn’t any longer a lemon, it just becomes something like, within the limit, just light, but you recognize, like a yellow circle, and so forth. In your experience, that’s not translating into some type of lack of resolution or smudginess, it’s like almost in the opposite direction. Otherwise you tell me. Is it more vivid? Or is it less vivid in virtue of like not having the conceptual categories imposed on it?
MT: It’s more vivid. And we could theorize about why just an arm-wavy form of theory is that relaxing the categories, relaxing the fixation frees up some, let’s say brain power for use for resolution. So actually, the clarity, the vividness, the brightness of the experience, goes up. And it’d only go up just slightly bit, nevertheless it might go up quite a bit. Either way, as a substitute of losing resolution, quite a little bit of resolution is gained.
JO: Right. So simply to introduce this distinction between nonduality and monism. The monist claim, as I understand it, can be something like: you wouldn’t find a way to inform the difference between a lemon and your shoe when you were to see the excellence between lemon and shoe as empty, which suggests this type of undifferentiation of experience. And what you’re describing sounds more just like the sphere of experience isn’t any longer divided from itself but all the things that’s appearing in it’s rather more vividly seen.
MT: Yeah, it gets complicated because monism and nondualism are different, and yet they’ll sound the identical and moreover, you might have one without the opposite, but you might even have each together. So there’s the potential of monist but not nondual, nondual but not monist, neither nondual nor monist, or each together. Right? They usually sound form of similar, but they’re different. So, monism is a metaphysical thing about what’s the elemental substance to the universe. And there’s three principal versions you possibly can have the materialist or physicalist monism; all the things is just fabricated from matter, and nothing else, the elemental substance, or you possibly can have idealism; the elemental substance is mind, it’s consciousness, or you possibly can have neutral monism; where it’s each. Or to place it in a different way, there’s some neutral substance that’s neither mental nor physical, but we don’t know what it’s.
So monism is like this view that there’s one fundamental substance. And nondualism will not be metaphysical, like that. It’s philosophical or spiritual. And it’s about the concept that things are usually not divided into separate entities or categories, which, you might see that’s subtly different but importantly, different, it’s a unique emphasis. It doesn’t really matter. We’re not talking about what it’s fabricated from, or what the elemental essence of reality is. It’s concerning the experience of reality.
JO: Right. Correct me if I’m unsuitable, though, but I feel like you might have a monism or nondualism concerning the relationship of experience to reality at large, and you possibly can have a monism or nondualism inside experience. You describe the monism as saying there’s actually one substance and it’s all consciousness or it’s all matter or whatever and nondualism’s claim is being inside experience, but don’t for instance, like Advaitans claim a nondualism between consciousness and the world. In other words, don’t they make the metaphysical version of nondualism?
MT: As I said, you possibly can have these mixed together. Yeah.
JO: Yeah, so there’s a monism metaphysical and experiential. And there’s a nondualism metaphysical and experiential. You’re only defending nondualism within the experiential case.
MT: I’m undecided, I’m now going, hmmmm. But typically, people don’t discuss monism experientially unless they’re mistakenly using the word and must be using the word nondualism.
JO: Got it? Yeah, I assume it will be like a psychedelic experience where it’s all one color, you recognize, something like that? Yeah.
MT: Yeah. Early translators of Buddhist stuff, they couldn’t work out the word nondual so that they just use the word monism. And in order that increased the confusion around this. And moreover, why do these Asian spiritual traditions and philosophical traditions trouble to make use of this really clunky word nondualism, once they too have a superbly good word for monism? Well, because they don’t mean monism. That’s not what they’re attempting to say. Right? They’re attempting to discuss something quite different.
JO: Which is that this non-separateness of phenomena if you’re not imposing conceptual distinctions upon them?
MT: Yes, yes.
JO: Yeah. So possibly I could just have you ever type of retread a few of that ground slightly bit. Again, because there’s this relationship that you simply appear to sketch between Nondual 1 as the popularity of nonduality of subject and object as being increasingly evident, as you see phenomena as empty. So the direction of progress toward realizing nonduality of subject and object is toward increasingly phenomena being seen as empty. Is that right?
MT: That’s a method of describing it. Yes, because after all, we are able to have nondual traditions that don’t discuss emptiness in that way.
JO: Okay, so with that picture of Nondual 1 on the table, what’s Nondual 2, and what’s the direction of travel toward it?
MT: So let me just unpack Nondual 1 in one other way that may make clear this issue of awareness. And I’ll just use probably the most common metaphor that’s used in all places. But I’ll update it just barely, although it should still be outdated. So let’s postulate a movie being shown on a movie screen. And on the movie screen, there may be an individual and a train. And conventionally, we’d say okay, especially if I’m the person, I’m here, there’s a train over there. And I’m it. But from the sunshine of awareness, from the point of view of awareness itself, the person and the train are simply appearing in the sphere of awareness equally, right. They’re each on the screen, so to talk. And when it comes to being on the screen, they’re not separate in any respect. And so seeing that person and train are usually not separate in any way. They’re different. That is one more reason it’s not monism. The train and the person aren’t the identical rattling thing. One looks like an individual and the opposite one looks like a train. So one among the principal things about nonduality is it retains the difference. But we see that they’re appearing on the identical screen of awareness, they’re arising as contents in the identical field of awareness. And in order that’s Nonduality 1. Does that make sense to you, Jake?
JO: Yeah, yeah. And I see how that follows from this logic of, suppose you’re doing even strange, like dualistic Vipassana, and also you’re noticing different objects from this posture of seeming like a separate subject. But anything you possibly can notice goes to be one other object. And that doesn’t mean that every one those objects are literally the identical object. It just means they’re all objects. And if it looks like something to be a subject, that feeling is showing up as yet one more object.
MT: That’s right. That is the necessary thing is the sensation of being me, the body sensations, and the emotions, and the thoughts are only more quote, objects which might be appearing in the sphere of awareness. And so after we see it that way, all the things will not be separate, on this field of awareness. And in order that’s the nonduality of subject and object, very clearly. That is what most individuals are talking about once they’re talking about nonduality. And that’s Nonduality 1. And we are able to cartoonishly characterize it by its slogans like, I’m one with the universe, all the things is one, things like that. And there may be a form of an urge to call it one which again might point towards monism, nevertheless it’s not that it’s not different. We could almost say it’s all only one category.
JO: At this level, is the understanding still, that they’re appearing in awareness, which is to say like there’s awareness as a context, and there’s phenomena as contents?
MT: Yes, and in undeniable fact that the separation between those things becomes a non secular idea in this sort of Nondual 1. So then awareness becomes essentially sacred, mystical, the Eye of God, the One True Thing. It’s just this awakeness and all the things that’s arising inside this awareness all of the contents of awareness–and it depends upon which tradition which philosophy which religion–but all of the contents could be strongly shoved into the category. So, like they’re mucking up awareness or they’re a delusion that’s in some way leading us astray from our true nature as this awareness. Right? So, regardless that all of the things of the world are one and united in awareness, awareness is strongly different than its contents. This may be typified in something like Advaita Vedanta, especially original Advaita Vedanta, where awareness is basically God, and your awareness is similar as the attention of God. So now we have this god nature as wakefulness, but then all of the appearances in awareness are like this delusory hallucination that’s drawing us out of our God nature into mucking around within the shit of the world.
JO: Right, so I can hear echoes of the opposite dualities that you simply invoked at first of the conversation, like between sacred and profane and between pure and impure, and between transcendent and imminent, the attention is the sacred, transcendent and pure thing. And its contents are the mucky, gross, profane things.
MT: That’s right. It doesn’t should be that way. And there’s softer versions of all this, but that form of transcendental nondualism may be very common. And interestingly, for people raised in a Christian context, or Christian modernist context, apart from the I-Am-One-With-God part, it resonates really strongly with like puritanism. God is sacred and the world is profane. And so it has real resonances for Christians or other people in like type of Judeo-Christian culture.
JO: Right. So in the standard form of Christian dualistic posture, you’re still feeling like a subject referring to that pure, vast, sacred, untainted, transcendental thing.
MT: So when you’re still a subject, it’s not nondual, right? But yeah, you’re a subject referring to the transcendent deity or transcendent awareness. After which within the heretical, nondual Judeo-Christian view, you recognize that you simply are one with the deity. So that you get things for instance, in Islam, Al-Hallaj saying, Ana’l-Ḥaqq, right, I’m the reality. Now we’re going into full nondualism, where truth here is one other way of claiming, Allah, saying God. Within the Judeo-Christian-Muslim sphere, if you make this last move of, there’s no separation between anything including me and God, then then you definately’re often…
JO: Soon to be murdered.
MT: Yeah, soon-to-be murdered, nevertheless it does occur. We do see this coming up repeatedly with mystics, since it’s there to be experienced, right? It’s not that dueling philosophers got here up with this nondual idea after which decided to see in the event that they could have the experience. It’s a human experience that folks try to clarify in various ways.
JO: Okay, so that is Nondual 1. And as you said before, Nondual 1 could be approached and realized in a way that doesn’t reify it as absolute. But in those religious systems where it’s reified as absolute, you get this transcendental renunciative, dualistic orientation.
MT: Paradoxically dualistic orientation. Yeah, it doesn’t should be renunciative but almost all the time is.
JO: Would now, do you think that, be time to start out unpacking what Nondual 2 means? And what the direction of travel can be for that?
MT: Yeah. And the way in which that we’ve explained and undergone Nondual 1 makes it obvious, I hope, what Nondual 2 is. It sets it up. It begs the query because after all, in Nondual 1, we’ve ended up creating a powerful dualism between experience, or awareness, and the contents of experience. But in Nondual 2, we then collapse that duality as well and emphasize the nondual nature the not-two-ness of awareness and its contents, or experience and its contents, or if we use Buddhist language, emptiness and form. And this is definitely quite a bit deeper and in addition collapses any need for this renunciative transcendental mood because we’ve just collapsed the vertical dimension here that the transcendent move was attempting to create.
JO: It occurs to me, simply because it’ll be solution to arrange the practice here, we should always mention possibly how this pertains to your stack model. So the stack moves its way right down to awareness, which, as you were saying, is one other way of fascinated by what it means to have this recognition of Nondual 1, but then can move its way back up.
MT: Yeah, we’d say that happening the stack model is in your solution to Nondual 1, if you hit the underside of the stack model, you’re at Nondual 1. And then you definately return up the stack reintegrating all of phenomena back in. And that’s moving within the direction of Nondual 2.
JO: Is it true to say that, say you’re sitting and also you’re working down the stack until you get to awareness, or in a Dzogchen context, like Rigpa, at the very least in the meanwhile, isn’t that also Nondual 2? It’s just that you simply’re very vulnerable to dropping out of it if you rise up off the cushion, and all form reasserts itself or the thought contents reassert themselves?
MT: Only when you think that the underside of the stack is Nondual 2, and it may very well be, but only in a really limited way, right, since you’re not actually coping with any contents at that time. But more likely, it’s going to be just Nondual 1. You’re going to still are likely to experience awareness as a thing, and all of the contents of awareness, the world, the sense of self, as empty. But so long as awareness remains to be form of a thing, you’re still in Nondual 1.
JO: Okay.
MT: And so that you’re right, you might potentially make a Nondual 2 move there, but you may not. And for this reason, for instance, in lots of Buddhist contexts, and in addition within the nondual Shaiva Tantra context, you’re invited to note the emptiness of the attention itself, right? You’re never going to reify that. But in a Nondual 1 context, you’re almost strongly encouraged to reify the attention itself.
JO: To see that it’s not tainted by its contents.
MT: Well, and to think about it as a thing.
JO: The rationale why it will be instrumentally useful to say reify awareness is simply to find a way to totally recognize the extent to which it’s untainted by its contents.
MT: There’s that nevertheless it won’t be the usefulness that’s crucial there a lot as the type of spiritual feelings of awareness as being form of the one thing the one substance so it’s that’s where it starts to be this idealist monism.
JO: Okay, so say I’m within the position of the practitioner who’s been doing a bunch of Vipassana and dealing my way down your stack, and have reached the extent of awareness where all the things that’s appearing, seems very wispy and empty, and I feel like the attention that I’m is completely freed from those contents. How would I then start poking holes in that recognition or expanding it in a broader context?
MT: Well, the easiest way is to only invert the attention on itself, see that it’s empty. And that’s going to are likely to really subvert the flexibility to separate it from all the things. And that’s going to instantly make the following moves of then noticing that all the things that’s arising will not be separate from the attention, quite simple. But either way, the following moves are all about reintegrating experience. So let’s say you notice a thought arising in that context. And whereas before, we were emphasizing well, awareness is aware of the thought and different than the thought, now you notice that the attention and the thought are composed of the identical material. But let’s imagine they’re not separate. And that’s really necessary.
So you begin reintegrating all experience. And that’s where these other nondualities may help. They’re not the crux of the problem, but they really help. So for instance, if you’ve gotten a sense that something is sacred, and one other thing is profane, but you begin noticing each are the creative expressions of awareness and never separate in any way from awareness, then they can not have different levels of sacredness and profanity. They’re either equally sacred or equally profane because they’re shining with the identical light of awareness, so to talk. That is where you get all of the tantric stuff that seeks really on purpose and to prohibited acts and to form of experience the profane is to note that that’s just an idea, right? Profanity and sacredness are one other category. And so we collapse that, and we are able to collapse the large one, the large Nondual 1 idea, that awareness is sacred and the world is profane. Right? So that specific one can really help, you were mentioning that earlier.
After which we just get right into a profusion of techniques. But the purpose being there’s nothing in experience that isn’t a creative display of primordial purity, you recognize, is often how we would say that, or an ornament of emptiness is one other way I might say it. The thought is: its emptiness is form and form is emptiness. They’re never actually separate. It’s to not say they’re the identical thing. Again, we’re not turning all of it into one gray goo, mush oatmeal scenario. But they’re never separate.
JO: Right. Okay, so I’m type of seeing–you and I actually have spoken about this before–but when the Christian Original Sin account is in some sense concerning the dawn of self-consciousness, and in that exact same dawn, the dawn of sin as impurity, then, like the popularity of the purity of awareness, is subverting this concept of original sin. But then the popularity that all the things appears never was separate from it just gets you off on a very different foot with respect to how tainted and horrible human beings are…and that sounds good to me.
MT: Yeah, it’s an utterly different view, right? And after all, this is absolutely the view. And that doesn’t mean okay, which means I can rob, murder, steal, rape my way through life. And that’s just as sacred as anything. There’s strong prohibitions against those sorts of ideas, after all. There’s all the time a solution to make something right into a negative version of itself. And so we’re strongly advised to not go there. But alternatively, after we see everything of the world because the mandala, the sacred display of awareness itself, not ever separate from awareness itself, there may be a way during which all the things is complete, or all the things is in its right place. I’m avoiding the word perfect because things can still, on the relative plane, be pretty awful. But still, there’s a spot for awfulness within the mandala.
JO: Yeah, it’s not granting the proper imperfect distinction, after which saying it just so happens contingently to fall on the side of perfect that we live in one of the best of all possible worlds. It’s saying prior to that distinction between perfect and imperfect, there’s a way during which all of it matches.
MT: All of it coheres. Correct.
JO: Yeah. Yeah. Since you mentioned slightly bit earlier–and it’s familiar to me from Dan Brown retreats–you mentioned this primary step, or among the best first steps for starting to maneuver from Nondual 1 into Nondual 2 is that this gesture of inversion, inverting awareness upon itself, to see itself as empty. Is that the identical thing as that final quote, unquote, crossing-over instruction within the Dan Brown Mahamudra context?
MT: You realize, I’m not a Dan Brown teacher. So I don’t know what they’d say about it in that tradition. But that’s what makes it rigpa, which is Nondual 2. Previous to that, it’s still Nondual 1 until you invert awareness upon itself, see its emptiness. Now it’s rigpa, right? Now it’s fully awake awareness.
JO: What does jumping over that chasm feel like? In other words, like, how would one recognize the difference between: all the things’s really empty, I don’t feel like I’m separate from it, and now it’s really rigpa?
MT: I feel it’s different for various people and different for a similar person on different days or with different approaches. But just within the spirit of the query, I’ll answer and say all the things’s appearing as empty, and then you definately invert awareness on itself and see the emptiness of that, and it’s not trippy, it’s not suddenly hyper-cosmic or whatever. But any sense of any form of separation is gone. And there’s a real sense of and I’ll just use Dan’s words that he liked to make use of of vast, spacious freedom. I feel he called it.
JO: Yes, spacious freedom.
MT: Spacious freedom, I all the time add the vast. Yeah, it’s spacious freedom. There’s just this sense of real spaciousness and freedom. And likewise, as you and I talked about slightly while ago, all the things just being slightly brighter and clearer. Not necessarily quite a bit, but slightly. And so that may sound fairly mundane, but when it’s truly applying to all parts of experience, it’s quite profound.
JO: Is that the identical or different than the ultimate step that you’ll often teach and it’s–I get that it doesn’t should be the ultimate step, nevertheless it helps to be this fashion–of seeing the emptiness of the doer or the meditator?
MT: I feel that’s a unique move that may often do something similar. But I might say that it’s potential that you might see the emptiness of the doer and still have an idea of awareness as a reified thing. And so we wish to essentially let go of the reification of even awareness itself.
JO: So, as this type of increasing recognition of Nondual 2 develops, what does it seem like to type of increasingly bring that off the cushion and into one’s life on the earth, as that understanding starts to grow?
MT: Well, if you take Nondual 1 off the cushion and integrate it into the world, it doesn’t integrate, it separates. As you said, you progress in an asceticism direction, you progress to separate yourself from all of the mundane activities because these are likely to embroil one within the delusion of the world. And also you’re going to are likely to need to go be apart and form of sit there and dwell in awareness itself. And so it has an actual signature of aloofness, which, after all, is one other way of claiming, transcendental, right? We develop into aloof, we’re higher than all of it.
That’s to not say that those traditions don’t allow practitioners to have interaction in life and so forth. But to the extent that you simply stop engaging on the earth, you’re often applauded as someone who’s form of getting it. Whereas the Nondual 2 traditions move in the other way, right, we’re going to have interaction more powerfully, engage with more enthusiasm, energy, clarity, humor, brilliance, whatever. We’re coming into the world as we see every a part of experience as not separate from our deepest meditation experience of awareness itself. And so to slow that move down slightly bit, typically, we do first experience Nondual 2 stuff, the nonduality of emptiness and form, still under a form of meditative laboratory conditions somewhere, you’re in a retreat, otherwise you’re in a quiet meditation in a quiet room, often together with your eyes open, because again, we’re including the world from the very starting. But still minimalist conditions, and possibly we are able to only notice that, recognize this awake awareness under those conditions. And so it’s form of in an unstable way, the minute we move, the minute anything happens, it form of collapses.
And so once now we have the slightest view of awake awareness, which is, by the way in which, a giant deal, not when it comes to experience, it might sound form of cool, nevertheless it’s not necessarily something that blows your doors off. However it’s a giant deal, since you now know what it looks like, so to talk, in scare quotes, then many of the path becomes about just stabilizing that. And it’s not a special state, it’s not a special experience, we’re attempting to stabilize, actually, the stabilization implies that we’re able to take care of that awake awareness view throughout every form of state, throughout every form of experience, throughout the six realms, to talk in that way. So it’s different. Sometimes I hear people say, Well, you possibly can’t maintain rigpa, because that’s only a state and states can’t be maintained. But that’s a mistake. Mental states and experiences arise inside rigpa. So actually, we are able to stabilize our recognition, we are able to stabilize our view. Or to place it in barely more correct language, we are able to stop falling out of the view, since the view of awake awareness is definitely fundamental.
JO: Possibly this could be place to usher in this distinction between sudden and gradual, which frequently gets invoked when talking about nonduality. How do you see the connection between nonduality and suddenness or gradualness of awakening?
MT: So we’d like so as to add one other concept in here to make this work. And that’s the primacy of awareness itself. Even in probably the most Nondual 2 traditions, there may be the concept of the primacy of awake awareness, or let’s say buddha nature or the tathagatagarbha or whatever, as something that’s previous to our human experience, previous to our experience of separateness, previous to our sense of ourselves as a struggling, sentient being attempting to schlep our way through samsara. And so, that concept is central. In other words, everyone listening is already at their root a bodhisattva, already at their root, a completely woke up buddha in some sense, and that that just must be revealed and even, to place it in higher language, recognized, not that it must be cultivated or generated or in some way created.
And so, once we’re coming from that place, which is a quite common place for each Nondual 1 and Nondual 2 to point to, the primacy of awareness, then now we have the potential of quick awakening. Which does actually occur to some small segment of the population. Vanishingly small, incredibly rare. But some people upon just hearing the concept that you’re already just this shining awareness that will not be separate from anything, just recognize that in that moment, after which it’s maintained stably ceaselessly. And in order that does occur.
JO: So I assume you might probably make a distinction between sudden enlightenment, within the sense of you get it identified, and then you definately’ve already done the stabilization, and sudden awakening within the sense of like a stating instruction that you might nevertheless should stabilize.
MT: Yeah, those can be different. Thanks. That’s an interesting distinction. However it doesn’t really impact the purpose I’m attempting to make, which is, we now have, based on this concept that you simply’re in some sense already fully awake, we now can approach that in two alternative ways. We are able to approach it from the view of a sentient being, from the conventional view of me as an egoic being attempting to work my way towards that. Or we are able to flip it on its head and say, Geez, working from the point of view of an egoic being, a sentient being, is already unsuitable, already getting in the way in which and let’s work as if we’re already a buddha, during which case, possibly no work is required, but you simply recognize it, and also you’re done. And so in a way that’s philosophically more pure, since you’re just well, if it’s true, that you simply’re already a buddha, then just recognize that straight away. And when you can’t, then we’re still just going to honor that possibility. And our entire practice is basically sitting there until you do recognize it, which is likely to be very gradual, by the way in which, paradoxically.
But after all, the people doing these traditions are smart, they usually–over the various centuries and even millennia–have noticed all these little contradictions and gotchas. And typically, it’s slightly more nuanced than that, such as you mentioned, stating. And stating is a extremely fascinating thing, which is you possibly can take someone off the road who’s never meditated a day of their life. And in about three minutes, begin to point out them, even when it’s not awake awareness, you possibly can start to point out them awareness, and to separate that from experience in a way, or to point out how that’s different than their each day experience. And so if that goes deep enough you might even have someone have at the very least, as you brought up, at the very least a mini experience of awakening, right there. And what’s so cool about that, is that you would be able to then use that moment of recognition that they’ve experienced as the idea for his or her practice. For instance, in a number of Dzogchen contexts, you get identified first, like, here’s what awake awareness looks like, you’ve had at the very least a glimpse of it irrespective of how muddy and partial and obscured, but at the very least, you recognize, the direction of it, so to talk. After which after we start doing our meditation practice, if we do it from even that imperfect glimpse, we’re still miles ahead, because we all know where we’re going, in a way, regardless that there’s nowhere to go.
JO: Yeah, okay, so possibly this could be place to usher in this query of, to what extent different traditions actually honor the total recognition of nonduality, that you simply’re claiming the understanding of Nondual 2? The type of gradual approaches that we’ve been talking about are likely to be related to Theravada, where you’re doing Vipassana, at the very least at first, from a type of dualistic posture. And there’s this whole frame of purification and fetters and all this type of renunciative language. Do you think that the total realization of say for instance, like fourth path is Nondual 2 or Nondual 1?
MT: You realize, it’s a tough query, especially because Theravada has interacted with these Nondual 2 traditions for a thousand years or fifteen hundred years. And so it, itself, has modified to react to that. And you possibly can see hints, even within the words of the historical Buddha within the Pali Canon, that appear to hint at Nondual 2, like for nearly all the Pali Canon the Buddha will only discuss Nirvana in negative terms. You realize, what it’s not. It’s undying, and it’s unborn and it’s uncreated and all that. But there are a pair spots where he talks about it in positive language and says something prefer it’s unalloyed bliss or something, he says a couple of things like that, which might still potentially be Nondual 1. But there are some hints that begin to sound more like Nondual 2. But I might say as a degree of clarification, normally, more often than not, the way in which people work in a Theravada context goes to be either dualistic or at best Nondual 1.
JO: Yeah. So when you’re doing type of Vipassana with this three characteristics frame, and also you’re using anatta, the anatta being recognized there as this Nondual 1 insight.
MT: It’s going to steer to it as I said earlier, you’ve got to collapse at the very least one side of the duality and there you’re collapsing the self end of the stick. And so that you’re going to at the very least get the non-separation of self and other. And emptiness arises in later Buddhism as a wider concept because it could be applied to things that no person, within the early Buddhist context imagined, had a self. No one thought a rock had a self, they weren’t animists–definitely not a self in the way in which an individual needed to sell. And so it will have been weird to speak concerning the anatta of a rock.
JO: Right.
MT: But emptiness is the anatta of a rock, essentially, it’s the not-thingness of it. And so it’s a deeper and broader concept. But we are able to consider it as an unpacking of the implications of anatta.
JO: I feel this is definitely very helpful for people because one among the extremely common misunderstandings, especially in a Western context of even just Nondual 1 is that you’ve gotten to do away with certain functional facets of your self-construct, like the very fact that you would be able to discern the boundaries of your body. There’s this whole frame of: there’s something to be gotten rid of that was appearing, versus seen as empty.
MT: That’s right. And a part of that’s only a misunderstanding but a part of it’s experiential. I mean, when you do early Buddhist meditation techniques, which, by the way in which, I’m a giant fan of, I don’t think there’s anything unsuitable with them, I feel they’re powerful, there’s just more to do. But when you’re doing a lot of these techniques you’re doing a Vipassana deconstruction of the sense of self or whatever, especially on an extended retreat, it could be the case that fairly than seeing the emptiness of self, you simply have it stop, the entire self-construct stops or falls apart, or attenuates to the purpose of absolutely not arising. And so there may be an anatta, or various anattas which might be partial or complete, just stopping of the sense of self in a way, which might make it unattainable to operate walking around on the earth, but that are very impressive and intense, and do make it easier to to see through the development of self because how am I still having an experience when the sense of self is entirely gone? is a giant insight. Right?
JO: Right.
MT: So those occur, they usually could be then confused with the insight of no-self that comes from just seeing through the constructed-ness of it, while still having or not it’s fully functional, which after all is what we wish.
JO: Which is the excellence that the concept of emptiness was introduced to make.
MT: I feel it really helps. Yeah, but additionally the excellence is included so that you would be able to see the no-self of a rock.
JO: Right. So, emptiness is the blanket category, you possibly can talk concerning the emptiness of individuals, or the emptiness of phenomena, the emptiness of individuals is not-self, the emptiness of phenomena is just their emptiness. In each cases, what’s missing is a few imputed essence or independent existence.
MT: Correct. I mean, the concept of emptiness to me is–one of the best metaphor is the metaphor of words in a dictionary, which you’ve heard me use before. Every word in a dictionary, when you attempt to define the word, it’s defined using other words, and then you definately go to define those words, and people are defined by other words, you go to define those words, and people are defined by other words that may even be a bunch of the unique words. And it’s not like that’s useless. That’s incredibly useful. They exist in a network of relationships. Lets say they arise depending on one another. And now we have this incredibly complex network of relationships. But you possibly can’t, anywhere in there, discover a fundamental word, the one which is real, that offers all of them their realness. It is a network of relationships that may only exist due to all the connection. There’s nothing that in some way breaks out of that network and finds itself embedded in a deeper ground.
JO: That gives a type of fundamental ontology or like final ground.
MT: Yes. So it’s really useful. It’s not like that network is in some way–due to this fact we just throw all of it out. But neither is it real on this deeper ontological sense, as you said.
JO: So that you brought up slightly little bit of these positive qualities of Nondual 2, especially just like the more you type of move into the popularity of Nondual 2, the less you’re so concerned to be certain that you simply’re not reifying anything. And so I’m not saying you give up, that vigilance. However the less of a threat there may be that the looks of phenomena will threaten your pristine emptiness and so the positive qualities of awareness can begin to manifest. I assume there I’d just have you ever speak to those positive qualities and possibly what the connection is between them and compassion or like compassionate activity on the earth?
MT: Yeah, the compassion quality can start arising strongly with Nondual 1, just because you’re not categorically separate. You’re not experiencing yourself as this atomized outside entity, but fairly deeply intertwined with all the things that’s co-arising. And so again, this may sound so mental and so philosophical however the experience is poignant and intense and naked and direct–it’s not mental in any respect–of the preciousness of living things, especially as you get a taste of the enjoyment and freedom of living outside of dualistic categories. There’s a form of wanting to share that with others, like, Hey, you’re trapped in your mind, you recognize, you simply take this sort of sideways step, and the issue is gone. And also you type of naturally need to share that.
It’s not that we are able to get this view of compassion as some form of hyper-lofty virtue that we’re attempting to cultivate really hard. But actually, it’s right there, it’s the thing that comes bursting forth, the minute dualism drops. That is why oftentimes, awareness is modeled, I hear a whole lot of people modeling it as this sort of aloof neutrality that’s in some way not only transcendent of all things but additionally is utterly neutral. And it’s really not neutral. The wisdom of emptiness all the time comes along with compassion. They’re never separate. And actually, in the event that they appear to be, then your wisdom is lacking. Something will not be complete there. Since you’re going to repeatedly be pulled increasingly into relationship. That’s even using the unsuitable verb. It’s that you simply recognize increasingly that there’s nothing happening except relationship.
JO: Right. You were never out of relationship. Yeah.
MT: Yeah. And in order that becomes central. So compassion is the proper word. However it doesn’t have all of the connotations I wish it did. Because it will be like, as you see the wisdom of emptiness increasingly deeply, the dance of relationship becomes increasingly powerful, increasingly beautiful, increasingly central.
JO: And the compassion, as an attitude, as you say, can show up very strongly as much as and including Nondual 1 however the expression of that attitude of compassion as relationship is rather more vividly realized in Nondual 2 since you’re not asserting your differentiation from the world.
MT: That’s right, it becomes central in Nondual 2. Yeah, after all, if we go to the history of Buddhism, where we get the primacy of compassion, beginning to be talked about is in Mahayana Buddhism, where in addition they–it’s the primary time they were emphasizing the nonduality of emptiness and form. So those two things seem to come back together and experientially that’s definitely the case.
JO: Okay, so if our hypothetically perfectly enlightened, Nondual 2 one that’s now fully inhabiting the world, in some sense that’s almost the exact same as they were before. And if that might have been recognized from the outset because emptiness and form were never separate. What’s different about that completely realized person’s experience and behavior from the one that has never heard of any of these things in any respect?
MT: Their behavior is likely to be indistinguishable, but their experience goes to be utterly different, utterly different, right? The entire definition of what’s modified is that their experience is totally modified. And one would hope that their behavior looks pretty different as well. However it won’t. And the rationale I’m saying it that way is because there’s no particular behavior that we could point to and say, well, that’s Nondual 2 behavior.
JO: Right.
MT: And if we could, then you might do the thing that many individuals do, which is then just try to mimic the behavior. So I might say, Well, you may not find a way to, but just again, within the spirit of the query, I might say, they probably are going to appear quite a bit more creative and engaged and be in what we would recognize as something of a flow state more often. And moreover, they’re probably going to are likely to be helpful, that’s one of the best solution to put it. It’s not that they’re necessarily a cartoon of compassion, but they’re going to are likely to be quite helpful in a method or one other.
JO: And regardless that you couldn’t necessarily recognize from any given motion, oh, yes, that’s Nondual 2 motion, over an extended time period, you must probably expect them to be say more spontaneous, or more compassionate, or whatever.
MT: Yeah, if we were to get into positive qualities. And I feel these are more recognizable from inside than without. But they’d show without. They’re going to be spontaneous, childlike, high energy, humorous, and engaged. They have a tendency to be dynamos of energy, and in addition really fluid really spontaneous, and sometimes striking, like lightning, very sudden and unexpected. But there’s no mood, it’s not like, Oh, they’re all the time externally blissful, or all the time externally this or that. It will possibly look many various ways. And the more that somebody is form of rigidly seeming to have one particular emotional state on a regular basis, it’s probably more likely that they’re acting fairly than being.
JO: They’re taking on some fixated, habitual pattern again, that mimics the–
MT: Yes.
JO: –the spontaneity. Yeah.
MT: But still, there are paths where we do exactly take those properties of spontaneity and compassion and flow-state type stuff and childlike behavior and all that and just start attempting to be that way as much as possible. That may be, let’s say, something like Taoism, where you begin working with that. And since you’re performing the qualities, with instruction and meditation, and with the proper help, that does help lead in that direction.
JO: Yeah, a part of the rationale I ask is that within the spirit of asking, Well, what’s all this nonduality business good for? I definitely understand why it will be good from the within. And as you say, the inner experience of being unfixated is completely different in a positive direction. But one can wonder on the idea of the misbehavior of varied people, specifically taking on this view, right that nothing to do exactly, and no internal government aside from the spontaneity of awareness, a method of putting it is whether or not there’s something you might say about it being a contemplative misunderstanding, fairly than an absence of just other faculties, it is advisable to learn because if anyone misbehaves, very palpably, from the vantage point of their awakening, is there anywhere to face to say they weren’t actually recognizing Nondual 2?
MT: I feel there may be, I feel that in the event that they were deeply recognizing or fully recognizing, it will be very hard to do any behavior that was explicitly malfeasant. It’s not that they couldn’t hurt someone. Because sometimes hurting people is mandatory, for instance, some form of trolley problem or something. However the type of just straight-up malfeasance, taking of actions which might be harming others simply for gratification. I feel that that directly indicates that they’re not actually fully there. But additionally any tradition that has survived, the traditions which might be still here, explicitly say this over and another time: you don’t use this philosophy to behave badly on the earth. You are usually not to try this. And it is likely to be they’re just attempting to protect their reputations. But I don’t think so, I feel they’re saying like, identical to anything, you possibly can misuse this. And the actual area of misuse will not be the people who find themselves fully awake or fully liberated, however the people who find themselves partially awake, who use this as license to act badly, that’s an actual danger zone. And so, traditions have put a whole lot of guardrails in there and training wheels to be certain that doesn’t occur. But after all, it still happens.
JO: In some sense when you’re taking on the mantle of the purity of awareness to justify the ethics of your actions, that’s, in some sense, identical to not fully recognizing Nondual 2 since you’re claiming some place from outside the contingent law or moral code or whatever of transcendental justification. It’s sometimes–it’s just an expression of that distinction. Yeah.
MT: Yeah. And it all the time finally ends up the excuse. There’s form of two excuses. But the standard one is: it was a teaching, the person I harmed I used to be attempting to remove their dualism about this harm or something.
JO: I needed to sleep with their wife, don’t you see?
MT: Yeah, in an effort to crush their dualistic attachment. And that’s an actual obvious problem. The opposite one, which I feel is form of interesting, and almost worse, is: my awakening was so deep. I like didn’t see the boundary I used to be crossing. To me, that’s this weird humblebrag where you’re using your crime to discuss how awake you might be. But additionally, it’s a deep misunderstanding. It’s the thing you were saying earlier, Jake, we don’t lose distinction. We don’t lose resolution.
JO: There’s this beautiful phrase from the tradition to capture that of like, view as vast because the sky, conduct as high-quality as barley flour. Yeah, all of the distinctions are still there. Yeah.
MT: Yeah. So what stuff haven’t we talked about that you simply’re excited or interested to discuss?
JO: I suppose there’s some stuff about–in what sense is that this, or is that this not God? But you tell me whether you think that there’s more you’d prefer to say there?
MT: It gets dicey. since it all depends upon what you mean by God.
JO: Right.
MT: Is it a creator being? Is it the prime reason behind the universe, or what? But you possibly can definitely have, even Nondual 2 traditions which have, some form of relationship, possibly even a central relationship, with at the very least a stand-in for type of an ultimate principle. Even when the last word principle is empty, it’s still the bottom layer. So even in Dzogchen you’ve got Samantabhadra. Right, Kuntuzangpo, who’s the–not symbol of–but is the personification of awake awareness or the bottom of being? Right? And there it’s, and, and also you’ve got loads of Dzogchen practitioners praying to Kuntuzangpo to assist them to develop into liberated and so forth. And sure, within the tradition, they are saying over and another time, well, that’s not God and that’s simply a personification of awake awareness, your individual rigpa or whatever, or dharmakaya.
Eventually, all those distinctions between the dharmakaya, and the bottom of being, and rigpa, and all that, which finally at one point, are all dissolved, principally in experience. But we are able to, from one end of the argument, say, Well, clearly they’re aware that this may very well be mistaken for a god and so that they’re saying it’s not God and it’s empty and so forth. Okay, but in one other way, in what way is that not God? As type of this ultimate awake awareness that doesn’t die between incarnations and so forth, it’s there ceaselessly. And same thing is there in nondual Shaiva Tantra with Shiva and Shakti because even in Dzogchen Samantabhadra has his consort, Samatabhadri. In a way, they’re very similar personifications.
So again, the traditions insist that these are personifications, etc, etc. And yet, it’s pretty hard to land on what is likely to be the necessary difference, except the dualistic one, which is: well, it’s separate for me in some fundamental way. That’s, after all, what the traditions are so adamant about dissolving.
JO: Probably at the very least some versions of the supernatural one too, right, within the sense of, like, can intervene within the laws of physics, but–
MT: But boy, in all of the traditions that claim it’s not God, and so forth, that form of intervention is total, but you possibly can change anything, you possibly can turn your body right into a rainbow, you’ve heard of Rainbow Body, right?
JO: Yeah.
MT: But there’s an excellent deeper type of Rainbow Body. I feel it’s called , you possibly can appear as a completely manifesting human being after which just disappear again after which appear over here and disappear again, and so forth. And so definitely any idea of the laws of physics not being transcended is blown away by these sorts of concepts. I feel what’s necessary here is that they’re never saying that it’s a separate, transcendent entity that’s in some way ceaselessly separate in the way in which that a dualistic Western creator god is.
JO: The laws of physics are to be viewed, in the identical sense as every other conceptual appearance.
MT: Absolutely.
JO: Now you’ve intrigued me by invoking Rainbow Body and a few of these styles of more supernatural claims which might be made on the idea of those experiences. Okay, so this sense of it being deathless in some necessary sense, since it persists across any apparent incarnation. That’s one definitely you’ve borne out in your experience. Is there a spot where you say, I am going this far and no further with the standard supernatural claims? Or is it a wait-and-see? Or how do you concentrate on it?
MT: It’s a wait-and-see, I mean, otherwise, I might claim to have superior knowledge to those folks. And while I’m not bowing to them as the last word source of information, I’m also not saying necessarily I do know higher. But I’ll say this, I’m not qualified to show Rainbow Body practice, and neither am I currently trying to realize that.
JO: Right.
MT: So I’ll just say, well, that’s above my pay grade. I’ll let anyone else worry about it. Yeah, because I don’t know.
JO: Awesome, okay, anything that you think that we’ve missed, or that you simply would like to cover? Before we call it?
MT: The entire purpose of this discussion, for me, is to assist people understand that the word nondual is used very in a different way in several traditions to mean really various things. And so after we call something nondual, and we call one other thing nondual, they is likely to be utterly different. They usually might discuss what they’re trying to realize quite in a different way, and the best way to get there quite in a different way. And so now we have to acknowledge these distinctions in an effort to navigate this territory with the smallest amount of problems. And in order that’s the entire point here. Not that you simply in some way should know all this to meditate, or you’ve gotten to know all this to have the experience. Obviously, you don’t. Because lately, all these traditions are completely available using a browser or whatever. We’d mistake them for one another or think they’re talking about similar things. And also you’re going to find yourself very, very confused. Whereas hopefully this discussion if nothing else, goes to assist at the very least clear up slightly little bit of that confusion.
JO: Beautiful. I hope so. It was great fun for me. Thanks a lot for having me.
Yeah, fun for me too. And I actually appreciate you being willing to come back on the show and ask all these questions, Jake. So thanks a lot.
JO: My pleasure.
MT: All right, man.
