Self is Illusion, Awareness is Everything?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Veritas6
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
V

Veritas6

Guest
Continuing the discussion from Does Anything Make Sense?:

What do you make of the concept of non-duality: awareness is everything. That there is “no argument, no proof, just experience”, that this somehow debunks dualism? I can’t make heads or tails of any of it
 
Last edited:
Why start another thread?

Non Dualism is a bit like quantum physics. It doesn’t seem to have much day to day practical value. What we need is Newton and something to deal with (what seems to be) our thoughts, anxieties and addictions.

But let’s look at the Holy Trinity. 3 or 1. And Jesus, God or man? Dualistic thinking makes us choose either / or. But the truth is closer to Both / and. Nondualism let’s us embrace that answer.

So what is our own deepest truest identity? Am I simply the guy who posted this response? As I said in the other thread, my real self is wrapped in mystery…and that is good.

Nondualism is a remedy. Most of us and most of history have been locked in independent self mentality and failed to live solidarity. That is why the world is a mess. Solidarity may be the best way to understand Nondualism. Who and what are you from a solidarity perspective?
 
If you want to unde stand Nondualism it would help to read Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ…if you dare.
 
This is a topic close to my heart. Ever since I began to think about God, the universe, and faith it has made more ontological sense to me to view things through the eyes of a greater unity. For example, did God create the universe from nothing? Don’t we have to acknowledge that it is at least created out of God’s will, desire and probabaly energy? Then there is the aspect of God’s omnipresence and that God somehow sustains all creation. God is immanent as well as transcendent. How can that be? Unlessall creation is a manifestation of God and all things are small, relatively independent expressions of God. None the totality, but all small unique expressions.

So I have spent most of my life trying to reconcile this feeling or awareness or strong sense of the greater unity with the strongly dualistic, us here-God there, infinitely out there view of theology.

Are you a heart? No, but you have a heart. It is part of you. Same for your brain and same for your ego. It is part of you but not your totality. Same for the many thoughts and feelings that come and go. They are part of you, expressions of you and in some abstract sense …you. But then again , not.

And we each are expressions of God, interconnected, bonded together by God;s desire for our existence. But none of us are Godhead. Our divinity is correlated to our awareness of our unity. The more we see ourselves ONLY as separate, independent beings the less we know our deeper reality as the body of Christ.

So Richard Rohr calls this An Alternate Orthodoxy. Sorry, i don’t think the Roman Catholic Church has ever held it. It was always too quick and too fearful and needed to define heresy, Monism, Pantheism, etc.

But how do we read the unity Jesus speaks of in John’s Gospel?
 
Last edited:
Shakuhachi said:
Are you a heart? No, but you have a heart. It is part of you. Same for your brain and same for your ego. It is part of you but not your totality. Same for the many thoughts and feelings that come and go. They are part of you, expressions of you and in some abstract sense …you. But then again , not.
Click to expand...
This is similar to the Theseus’ Boat problem: If you have a boat that needs repair, you replace a part. When another part goes bad you replace it as well. Let’s say this happens a number of times, so that every part of the boat has been replaced- is it still the same boat that you began with, or is it a completely different boat now?

If your brain is removed and placed in a machine that can keep it alive and functioning, are you now the machine, or are you your body- also being kept alive and functioning? Are you both? Where are YOU?
 
For me, part of nondualism is the humble understanding that whatever I have, knowledge, spiritual blessings or whatever is good, are not from myself, but from God alone. My ego can not attach itself to anything, because I didn’t create anything.

It is the gift received in contemplation and the Church did a poor job teaching it. In nondualism, you no longer see yourself as right and others as wrong, but as children of God who are also loved.

Over the centuries, the Church was ingrained in dualism to the point of causing violence against those who didn’t believe correctly.

The ego wants to create groups of certitude to belong to. We’re right and those protestants, buddhists or whomever, are wrong. Yay for me !
This is dualism.

Detachment from the ego driven agendas, takes a lifetime and only from the transforming grace God gives us, can this be achieved.

Prayer, especially contemplative prayer, is the source for developing a nondualistic spirituality. When we taste divine love, we begin to love divinely.

Jim
 
Last edited:
Yes, it is a different boat but it is still mine.

Brain still mine and body still mine but I guess I now live on a machine which is not me since it is inorganic.

Where am I ? Really same place i have always been, nonlocal. But my ego still reside in the brain.

How about that?
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top