PERSPECTIVES: TEN PATHS TO EVERYWHERE
God is not far from you.
—DEUTERONOMY 30:11
[God] does not exist, [God] is existence itself.
—CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD and SWAMI PRABHAVANANDA1
What is nonduality?
The nondual perspective is one which holds that our immediate, superficial perceptions of separation—of duality—are not ultimately correct, and that in its deepest reality, all of being is one. The boundaries we see all around us, between you and the outside world, between tables and chairs, are not ultimately real—though they may be partially true, or true in some relative way. Literally, nonduality came into the English language as a translation of the Sanskrit word advaita, which refers to the nondual tradition of Vedanta, a philosophical movement of Hinduism. In Jewish vocabulary, nonduality is expressed as Ein Sof, the Infinite, the ultimate reality of Being according to the Kabbalistic tradition.
There are many ways to approach nonduality, and many ways it can be described.2 Some are logical, others experiential. Some are religious, others secular. Some are theoretical, others experiential. Nearly all, however, insist that language is inadequate to describe nonduality. This is not because of a desire to be mysterious, but because language denotes; it describes; it marks and distinguishes one thing from other things; and it is part of the social community that created it. Yet if language is inherently dualistic, and inherently social, it is inherently incapable of describing that which is not an object to which one might refer, and which is not other than oneself.
By way of analogy, imagine describing the color “red” to a blind person. We might think of associations in our experience—heat, for instance—but these only suggest something of the tone of red; they cannot describe what redness is. Nor does the scientific account of wavelengths and frequencies, which says nothing about how redness is experienced in perception. Likewise, when speaking of the ineffable, language can only hint, gesture, and point, for any time I use a word, I define (demarcate, differentiate) its referent, and if nondual Being is everything and nothing, then such definition is self-contradictory.
Thus it is tempting, in writing a book such as this, to simply “gesture at the moon”: to provide poems and cryptic utterances which hint at a truth that is beyond communication. Occasionally, I will do just that; there is something in language which, when uttered from a place of stillness, resonates with silence anew. But this chapter tries a different way: it offers ten different perspectives on the non-perspectival, ten ways of looking at looking. Reflecting the structure of this book, the first five ways of looking are conceptual, the second five experiential. Doubtless, as the introduction noted, some readers will prefer rigorous logic, in contrast to the apparent vagueness of spirituality, while others will find the heady material too abstract, and prefer invitations to intuition and the wisdom of the heart. That is fine.
One pedagogical note. Traditional Jewish sources usually depict nonduality from the top down—that is, beginning with an infinite God and moving to the consequences—rather than from the bottom up, deriving insights from experience and then working our way “up” from there. Here, I’ve reversed the priority. For most people today, to start with God is to start from an unproven, uncertain, and highly debatable premise. Moreover, as the introduction noted, the word “God” carries with it all sorts of associations that have nothing to do with the nondual view: a character who acts in history, for example, or has some special relationship to prayer or ethics or ritual.
“It does not exist, it is existence itself,” say Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood of the Atman, commenting on Patanjali’s yoga aphorisms. The Atman here is the true Self, which is one with Brahman, the Ein Sof, all that is. Thus my rephrasing in this chapter’s epigraph, “God does not exist—God is existence itself.”
At first, this may seem a privation. But if the boundaries of self and other allow this truth to penetrate, then the seeming loss of the Friend is replaced by an intimacy greater than that which can be dreamed. This is not a question of dogma or cosmology, whether there is or is not an agent named the deity. It is a matter of ascribing the holy name to the immanent and transcendent, of addressing the true as God. To say “You” to the world is to transform the speaker, for now the You is the consciousness of I as well. There is, in a sense, no one else here. But then again, you aren’t either; only God, Godding. This is not solitude, but blessed dissolution, a dissolving which, the instant it is complete, re-creates all that we see and know, the self and its trials, justice and community—all reborn the instant separateness dies. Consider the surrender an act of grace.
NON-SELF, VERSION 1: THE SELF IS A PHENOMENON
Who are you?
Beyond your name, your familial role; beyond your profession and avocation—who are you? When pressed to reply, most of us offer something to do with a self, a personality—perhaps even a “soul,” something distinctively individual, psychological or spiritual. Our answers are usually vague, but firm; we exist, after all, even if we can’t quite pinpoint what that means. Both the amorphism and the solidity are natural; identity formation is part of the maturation process, and draws on external factors, such as personal, professional, and familial roles; physical traits such as gender, age, and body type; and internal characteristics, such as personality, thoughts, habits, preferences, and feelings.
Yet for all that, it’s quite hard to define what this “self” actually is. Look closely at the personality (or mind, or heart, or soul), and you discover that it is more a label than a reality—a phenomenon of perception, not a thing in itself. As a simple experiment, raise your right hand right now. Go ahead: just pause for a moment, raise your right hand, and then put it down. Now, whether you did or didn’t raise your hand, reflect on what actually happened. Did the thing you call “you” really raise your right hand? In fact, what likely happened were a series of mental processes, all of which were conditioned by factors outside of “you.” Maybe there arose a sense of curiosity, or playfulness, or even obedience, which was probably learned when you were a small child, or which maybe has something to do with genetic predispositions. Or, if you didn’t raise your hand, maybe some feeling of laziness, obstinacy, or contrariness arose—just as much learned from experience, from other people, from a thousand outside sources. Of course, the bundle of all of those feelings, plus myriads more, is conventionally referred to as “you.” But the bundle never actually does anything—it’s a label, nothing more. What actually acts, thinks, feels, dreams are one or more mental factors, usually in combination, none of which is actually “you.” They are the conditions which are necessary for the action to take place—not “you.” Who moved? The conditions moved.
This is a very simple example. But no matter how often you repeat the experiment, you will never find the “you” doing anything; it will always be some combination of mental and physical factors. We conventionally say that “I am happy” or “I am sad”—but is there really an “I” behind the happiness or sadness? Or is there only the experience of joy or sorrow itself? And yet, no one would claim that joy or sorrow is “me,” right? Suppose someone does something to make you angry. Are “you” really angry? Or is it more accurate to say that anger arose in the mind, because the conditions for anger were present, without any input from “you” at all? Indeed, perhaps “anger is present” is more accurate than “I’m angry,” even if the difference doesn’t seem like much at first.
This is how both Buddhist vipassana meditation and Hasidic bittul ha-yesh lead to liberation: not by some positive doctrine, but by a process of elimination. Keep looking, and the self is never there. In fact, all of your hopes, fears, dreams, loves, hates, tastes, predilections—each instance of who you are—is wholly caused and constituted by non-you elements. Now, we may get very used to these movements of the mind and come to understand them as ourselves. But that doesn’t make it so. Take a look for a few minutes (or hours, or weeks). As a reaction, idea, or emotion arises in the mind, try to notice it (obviously, a context of concentrated meditation makes this far easier) and query whether it’s “you” or something that is “not-you.” In my own spiritual practice, I’ve done this for many months at a time while on silent meditation retreats, and, at least in my experience, it’s “not-me” every time.
Now, of course, we all experience the phenomenon of the self—but this is just the way things seem from a certain perspective. The well-known Theravadan Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein compares the notion of the self to that of the Big Dipper. Really, there’s no Big Dipper, right? We all know this; there are just stars, light years apart from each other in reality, which viewed from a certain perspective look like the Big Dipper. Change the perspective, and the Big Dipper disappears. Now, does that mean there’s no Big Dipper? Well, it depends; from a certain perspective, of course there is, but not in any objective sense. Not really. Likewise, this self, which the ego fights so hard to aggrandize and protect, is just a label of how things look from a certain angle. A vital one, but just a label. And likewise with every phenomenon we experience.
What is there, really? Well, we’d have to ask the scientists, who presumably would tell us something about protons and electrons, or molecular bonds, or perhaps biology or chemistry. In traditional cultures, though, the constitutive elements of creation are known as the “four elements.” Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn, the fourth Lubavitcher Rebbe, explained in a 1869 discourse titled Mi Chamocha (literally, “Who is like You?”) that
When you carefully examine the nature of all physical beings, when you contemplate them well, you will find that material things are not actually material. For example, the substance of wood is actually made up of the four elements: fire, water, air, and earth, and yet, while it has all four elements, its existence is not any one of them. Rather, its being is the power that combines the four elements. So, the essence of its being is the Word that causes it to be (davar hamehaveh oto) and sustains it: the [Divine] Utterance . . . [W]hen you separate the elements, nothing remains. Thus there is no material thing without Godliness.3
There is never any “there” there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein; only various elements combining in different ways. Indeed, usually we don’t even experience the phenomena we think we experience. For example, if you are sitting in a chair, is the “chair” holding you up right now? Or is it really the various molecular properties of wood, metal, or plastic? Is the “chair” white, black, or another color, or is it the chemical properties of the pigmentation? And do you ever perceive the “chair,” or rather, different elements of it, like its size, color, and texture? Perhaps this seems obvious, yet we all suffer by wanting this thing and not that one, and by failing to realize that all things, both pleasant and unpleasant, are simply evanescent aspects of Being, arising and passing away like sparks from a fire.
More than chairs or constellations, though, it is the notion of the individual soul that causes us to suffer. The human ego is the product of billions of years of evolution; without it, our ancestors wouldn’t have run away from predators, fed themselves, or reproduced. We are hardwired to identify with the processes of our brains, to see ourselves not merely as bodies (which, we all know, will one day return to the Earth) but as truly distinct individuals, as personalities. Yet, our neuroscientists tell us, consciousness is not some immaterial, immortal phenomenon; it’s a trick of the brain.4 Our mental computers are executing programs at astonishing speed, but they are only programs, which the computers learned from somewhere else. The ego is a phenomenon—part of the world, not an observer or controller of it. Mind states are just patterns that arise and pass. None of it is I, me, or mine.
But try telling me that when I am in pain. The Jay program needs protection, love, aggrandizement, recognition; he needs to get what he wants, on shallow and deep levels. And most of the time, I identify with that program; I am Jay, so I need these things, and get angry, sad, hurt, upset when I don’t get them.
Once in a while, though, usually in the stillness of meditation, I see that “Jay” is a phenomenon that arises. Nothing is under Jay’s control; in fact, “Jay” is part of what’s not under control. Feelings arise—joy, loneliness, inspiration, anger—and “Jay” has nothing to do with it. In fact, the sense of “Jay” only arises when there’s something there to provoke it. This is the gateway toward releasing the yetzer hara, namely, the perspective that the self is what matters most in the universe.
For some, seeing through the illusion of the self is experienced as diminishment. Yet for the Hasidim, it is a gateway to bittul ha-yesh, nullification of the sense of self, and thus the highest of aspirations. For moving from nonself to nonduality is really quite simple: if there’s no self, what is there?
NON-SELF, VERSION 2: SELF-INQUIRY
If bittul ha-yesh and insight meditation gradually divest us of the delusion of self, self-inquiry—asking, over and over again, “who am I?”—attempts to immediately locate the Nothing, Self, or God within. Initially, as we saw above, most of us identify with our names, or senses of self-identity. I’m Jay, of course. But very quickly, this simple response becomes insufficient. As we have seen, “Jay” is a label, not an answer. It refers to me, but does not answer who or what I am. And then, as I refine my answer, I find not subjects but only objects of consciousness: the personality, memes, predilections, habits, and impulses of the self which arise in every moment. “Jay” is something which arises when the circumstances are right, and passes at other times. So that’s not “me,” right?
Keep looking, keep asking, and nothing is found—or perhaps Nothing. What the Vedantists call the Self (Atman), the Buddhists call non-self, and the Hasidim call the ayin are three perspectives of the same phenomenon: the egoless, timeless emptiness, the nothingness one finds when one looks for oneself. It is an answer to the riddle of self-inquiry, which finds nobody home, but somebody seeming to notice. The Vedanta sage Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) urged his disciples: “Always and at all times seek for the source of the ego, the apparent actor, and on the attainment of that goal . . . the ego will drop away of its own accord, and nothing will be left but the all-blissful Self.”5 Likewise in Hasidic traditions, in which bittul ha-yesh, annihilation of the self, takes place both ecstatically, in the furnace of prayer, and contemplatively, by means of introspection. (We will explore methods for self-inquiry in chapter 6.)
From the seeming paradox of self-inquiry is born a radical reorientation. Normally, we identify with the body, or the space between our ears, or some phenomenon of consciousness or soul or personality that arises, habit after habit, over time. Each of us thinks he or she is this individual who moves around through the world and bumps into others along the way. Eventually, however, we identify not as the body in the world but as the world itself, the space of consciousness in which all of life appears to unfold. Consider the shocking, unsettling, counterintuitive novelty of this idea: that all of reality really is in your head—only it isn’t your head. Once, responding to a questioner who asked, “But the ant still stings, correct?” Ramana answered, “Whom does the ant sting? It is the body. You are not the body. So long as you identify yourself with the body, you see the ants, plants, etc. If you remain as the Self, there are no others apart from the Self.”6
This shift in awareness, born of self-inquiry, leads to the notion of the Self as Kosmos, as primordial awareness, as the timeless utterance of “I AM.” Here’s Ken Wilber, in an unpublished form called “From You to Infinity in 3 Pages” (to get the full effect, substitute your name for mine):
What you have been seeking is literally and exactly That which is reading this page right now. That Self cannot be found because it was never lost: you have always known you were you. That I AMness is a constant condition of all that arises, is the space in which it all arises, has nothing outside of it and thus is complete Peace, and radiates its own beauty in all directions. Jay arises in the space of that I AMness, Jay arises in this vast spaciousness, this pure openness. Jay is an object, just like a tree or a cloud that arises in the space of the Self that you are. I am not talking to Jay right now, I am talking to you. That which is aware of Jay is this ever-present Self. This Self is aware of Jay arising right now. This Self is God. God is reading this page. Jay is not reading this page, God is reading this page. The Self is aware of Jay and aware of this page. You are not Jay. You are what is aware of Jay. What is aware of Jay is an I AMness that itself cannot be seen but only felt, felt as an absolute certainty, unshakeable is-ness, I AM that I AM eternally, timelessly, unendingly. There is only this I AMness in all directions. Everything arises spontaneously in the space of this great perfection that is the Self, which is reading this page right now.7
NON-SELF, VERSION 3: INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND POSTMODERNITY
If the preceding perspectives on non-self seem too empirical, or even naive, consider the insights of the last fifty years of postmodern philosophy, which have relentlessly insisted that what we call the “self,” that is, the modern subject, is actually a social construction, an assemblage of memes, narratives, and values entirely made up of historically conditioned factors. My supposed need for security, home, and hearth is a late capitalist, bourgeois affectation conditioned by nineteenth- and twentieth-century advertising and cultural production. My tastes, preferences, styles, and self-identifications all are cultural constructions—even notions of feminine and masculine, sophisticated and down-to-earth, sane and insane.
Consciousness is really made up of memes, units of information that replicate themselves, a bit like genetic information does.8 In fact, every notion that you have, about politics, justice, identity, music, love, whatever, is a meme, constituted outside of “you” and replicated in sophisticated ways. To think that they are “you” is what the epistemologist Wilfrid Sellars called “the myth of the given.” It’s what happened when Descartes moved from the arising of thought (cogito) to the existence of the full-on modern subject (sum). A postmodernist would reply: yes, the thought arose—but that doesn’t mean there was a “you” thinking it. There was just a set of memes thinking the thought, interpreting it, and constructing a self on the basis of it.
Neuroscientifically, writes Daniel Dennett, “human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes,”9 a vast assemblage of learned behaviors, which, like software, operate the hardware of the brain.10 Enlightenment, in turn, is what the philosopher Susan Blackmore calls “waking up from the meme dream.”11 As Blackmore puts it, “we are just co-adapted meme-complexes. We, our precious, mythical ‘selves,’ are just groups of selfish memes that have come together by and for themselves.”12 The false self is a meme complex.
“Memes” may be a novel coinage, but what the word stands for is familiar on an anecdotal level. To take a Jewish example, the mainstream Jewish community is today very interested in “identity formation.” Notice that term: identity is something that is formed. Go on a trip to Israel, and you’ll have more of a “Jewish identity.” Don’t go, and you won’t. In fact, all identity is formed; none of it is really “you.” Identities are collections of memes, rhetorical moves and cultural practices, learned from outside and then assimilated into the mind. One who aggregates these memes under the rubric of an “identity,” says Ken Wilber, is simply “the mouthpiece of . . . a structure he doesn’t even know is there.”13 Some of these structures are good, others not so good. But it’s a mistake to confuse memes for a self. One who does so, Wilber continues, “is not speaking, he is being spoken.”14
If you like, you can even name your memes: the controller, the child, the traditionalist, whatever. For example, the Zen roshi Genpo Merzel uses voice dialogue to enable his students to see that, really, we are always performing one or another of these roles, like actors in a play.15 Seeing these voices and memes face to face can be of great therapeutic value, as shunned voices are known and recognized, and points directly to non-self. For Genpo, the self is like a corporation: it’s a set of agreements, a point of reference, and nothing more. All these voices are just the employees—only, unlike actual employees, most of them have no idea what the mission of the corporation actually is.
I remember sitting at Penn Station in New York one morning, and the obviousness of non-self simply appeared, in the midst of the crowd. All around me, I watched as thousands of people were replicating memes unconsciously, mistaking memes for self. Habits learned, dispositions, instincts. And suffering the predicament: natural desires to make more, do more, be more. If it weren’t for these desires, we’d be extinct; in this sense, happiness is “unnatural.” But it is possible too for consciousness to awaken, see what is happening, and look around, and then happiness becomes the most natural thing in the world. Life a profusion, flowing in a trillion faces, ants to adam, eagles to eve. And no separateness, no arrogance: Jay is also a feature of the ocean, and this voice too, though perhaps more aware of conditions. But that morning in Penn Station, early morning, tired and waiting for my train, there was an I behind the I, full of compassion and joy.
Another “way in” to nonduality is to begin from the premise of theism and work “downward” from there. For many, this suggests beginning from the conclusion. However, like philosophers before them, most Kabbalists begin from the premise that there is a One, that which does not change, and deduce that because the One is infinite, it is all there really is. In the example used by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Moses Cordovero (discussed in the next chapter), if we suppose that a physical object is just that object and not God, we have supposed limit in the limitless, which is a contradiction. If the object has its own separate existence, then the Ein Sof exists everywhere but suddenly stops at the border of the object; it is thus not Ein Sof. Therefore, the object must be filled with God. Whatever its form, its substance is Divine. Likewise, the self is a phenomenon which, like a rainbow, appears only from a certain perspective. If God is infinite, then by necessity, God is reading these words, writing them, and dwelling within them. Who else could You possibly be?
It was well understood by the Kabbalists that Ein Sof is not the same as what we conventionally refer to as “God.” So, even if You are God, you are not the master of the universe. Sorry. On the relative level, you are still you. On an absolute level, however, the phenomenon of “you” is something that happens to God, and the temporary agglomeration of consciousness and matter to which you are so emotionally wedded is like a ripple on a pond. In the metaphor of the Tanya, the great nondual Jewish treatise discussed in the next chapter, you are like a sunbeam which appears to have separate existence only because you are surrounded by non-light. Returned to your source, the sun, you are seen as you really are: total naught and Nothingness (ayin v’efes mamash).
Again, for us today, to reason downward from a theistic premise may seem abstract, or ill-founded. Yet for those who do have a belief in God, it serves to move consciousness along from a simple anthropomorphic notion of God to Ein Sof, the “God beyond God,” that which is arelational and omnipresent, a circle whose center is everywhere and whose diameter is nowhere.
Though nonduality is perhaps today most associated with mystical and nonrational modes of thought, it is also the ontological view of a number of different philosophical systems. In a sense, the classical philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, as well as their Jewish counterparts, notably Maimonides, in positing an unchanging One that is the true reality of all existent things, may be termed nondualistic, though they differ on the ontological status of those existents. The greatest Western philosophical influence on nondual Judaism, though, is likely Neoplatonism, which flourished from the third to sixth centuries and blended gnosticism, Judaism, Christianity, and Platonic thought into a mystical-philosophical synthesis. In the medieval period, Neoplatonism was transmitted into the Jewish world by Abraham ibn Ezra and others, and figured prominently, according to Gershom Scholem, in the Zohar.16 Plotinus (204–270 C.E.), the leading expositor of Neoplatonism, is the first to identify Athens’ philosophical One17 with Jerusalem’s religious God. The One of Plotinus does not admit of any change or generative action, since both would imply some lack in that which is posited as perfect. Thus the One emanates, like a full glass of water spilling over the edge, the Intellect/Intelligence (nous), and through the Intellect, the rest of the world.18 For Neoplatonism, the world is an overflowing of God: God did not so much create the world as manifest it, become it; this moment is the act of the One seeing Itself.
As with Maimonidean Aristotelianism, religious Neoplatonism was as much a contemplative practice as theory. Plotinus’s last words, recorded by his student Porphyry, were reportedly, “Strive to bring back the God in yourselves to the God in the All.”19 In the medieval period, Bahya ibn Pakuda’s work Duties of the Heart became one of the first Jewish texts to insist on inwardness and emotional devotion as central to religious life. The essential attributes of God, Bahya wrote, are utterly unknowable by reason—but somehow knowable by love. But the secondary attributes may be known through reflection on the wondrous complexity of the natural world, the human body, and the other daily miracles we often ignore. Thus Bahya prescribes both the apophatic path of negation and the cataphatic path of affirmation: the former to “pierce the cloud of unknowing with a dart of longing love” (to paraphrase the anonymous medieval Christian mystic) and the latter to stimulate love and gratitude by means of reflection on the natural world. Love is the connection between the two: both the knowing-less love of the mystic and the love brought about by reflection on what is.
There are many other Western instances of philosophical nonduality. For example, German Romantic philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel, and twentieth-century phenomenologists and post-phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, are in part monistic.20 However, our purpose in this chapter is only to identify possible avenues into a nondual Jewish perspective, and so expositions of these thinkers must wait. Before passing on, however, it would be wrong to omit perhaps the most famous Jewish nondualist of all: Spinoza.
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) is known by many Jews today chiefly as a heretic. Yet his tragic excommunication from the Jewish community was a response not to his monist philosophy (which was developed later) but to his claim that the Bible was the product of human authorship. Both were a consequence of Spinoza’s rationalism, which, together with that of Descartes, Leibniz, and others, helped initiate political liberalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, and other foundations of the world we live in today. Writing in a precise, mathematical way, Spinoza attempted to prove that there could only be one substance in the universe—and whether we call it Nature, the universe, Being, or God, really doesn’t matter.
Spinoza’s argument is as follows. All things are made up of what Spinoza calls “substances.” Substances are irreducible in definition, meaning that you don’t have to understand something else in order to understand what a substance is. By definition, a substance has certain attributes. However, no more than one substance can share a single attribute, because if it did, it would in part reduce to the other substance. But this means that no substance can limit another, because substances with nothing in common cannot cause or limit one another (e.g., the body does not limit thought, thought does not limit the body). Thus substances must be infinite, and thus there is only one such substance in the universe,21 that is, God, “an absolutely infinite being; that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes.”22 And so “there can be, or be conceived, no other substance but God.”23
Famously, for Spinoza, God is the equivalent of nature: deus sive natura, “God or nature,” in the felicitous phrase. This is certainly at odds with the traditional Jewish depiction of God as a personal being who rewards the good and punishes the wicked, and who loves Israel above all nations. Yet if Spinoza’s speculation seems too remote, remember that as with the other philosophers we have mentioned, Spinoza is a lover, not only a thinker. As he observes, “the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself . . . The love of God towards men, and the intellectual love of the mind towards God, are identical.”24 This is not quite atheism—compare Spinoza’s statement to Meister Eckhart that “the eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me.”25 Rather, nonduality may be said to be the place where mysticism and atheism shake hands. The cosmology may be identical, as there are no puppet-masters pulling the strings of our reality. Yet the stage is now a cathedral.
EXPERIENCE OF CHAYAH: UNITIVE MYSTICISM
Nearly every nondual sage will insist that only through experience can nonduality truly be known. Certainly, this makes sense; map is not territory, and reading a recipe is not the same as eating a meal. In the Jewish tradition, secret traditions are not secret because they are rarely disclosed. They are secret because they are experiential, and thus cannot be disclosed at all.
So it is no surprise that accounts of mystical experience, in all their classic forms, are present in nondual traditions: ecstatic raptures, contemplative insights, visions, and experiences whose very nature seems to defy description. Here we will look at five experiential ways of looking, mapped onto the five aspects of the soul according to Hasidic and Kabbalistic tradition: chayah (“soul”/mystical experience), neshamah (contemplative insight), ruach (love), nefesh (body), and most subtly, yechidah, that aspect of the self which is already enlightened, already at one with the One, for which “experience” itself is a misnomer.
Of the five, only the first category, chayah, contains the classic mystical experiences much studied by scholars. Generally, such experiences are described as possessing ineffability, a noetic quality, transience, passivity, unitary consciousness, timelessness, and a sense that the ordinary ego is not the real self.26 One simply knows this, in a way that is impossible to communicate. One is not alone; one is one with the One. In nondual Jewish sources, such experiences often result from ecstatic prayer, which we will explore in chapter 7. For example, one Hasidic text, translated by Arthur Green and Barry Holtz, says:
A person should be so absorbed in prayer that he is no longer aware of his own self. There is nothing for him but the flow of life; all his thoughts are with God. He who still knows how intensely he is praying has not yet overcome the bonds of self.27
Such peak experiences give a glimpse of that which cannot be communicated. They impart a kind of knowingness that is more certain than everyday knowing; that is to say, mystical experience is not less sure than ordinary experience, but more so. William James, for example, describes one mystical experience this way:
There came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyfulness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence . . . that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain . . . I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true.28
From my own experience, I can attest that if you follow the instructions of meditative, contemplative, and spiritual practices, the promised results do indeed occur: a dissolving of the sense of self; rapture in concentrated joy; transient feelings of immense bliss; and, for religious souls like me, a certainty that one is held and loved and engulfed by the Divine. It is worth the effort.
Yet if experience is essential, it is also problematic. First, it is difficult to conceive of an experience that is not an experience of something, a dualistic conceit. Even the idea that one experience is more an “experience of nonduality” than another is contradictory. What’s more, the recourse to experience invites a critique that all one is really talking about is an experience of connectedness, wholeness, and so forth. How can such experiences be verified? Perhaps Freud is right that mystical experience is but a womb-memory, or the neurologists that it is solely an internal, neurochemical event. What then?
Moreover, it may be impossible to resolve the dispute according to purely objective criteria, because the only way to investigate the truth of a mystic’s claims is necessarily subjective. Ken Wilber suggests that this is simply the nature of spiritual phenomena. Just as Galileo’s interlocutors had to look through the telescope to evaluate his claims, and just as a logician must adhere to certain rules in order to evaluate a proof, so too must a critic of mystical experience look through “the eye of spirit.”29 Repeat the procedure, and see what happens. Similarly, Pascal, in his Pensées, notes that “we know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart” and that, moreover, “It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them . . . Principles are felt, propositions proved, and both with certainty though by different means.”30 God, being one of those principles, is known with the heart, and the procedures of rationality are simply the wrong methods to test it.
Two of the most important nondual Jewish Hasidic masters, R. Dov Ber of Lubavitch and R. Aharon of Staroselye, split the Chabad Hasidic world over this very question. For R. Aharon, experience was essential, and justified the inevitable admixture of perception, separation, and delusion; thus R. Aharon exhorted his followers to mystical experience. For R. Dov Ber, spurious experience was worse than no experience at all, and so he restricted ecstatic practice to the few. Surely both views can be defended; ecstasy may be close to ayin, but it is not ayin; there is indeed a mixture of multiplicity, even in an experience of unity. The tension is right there in the original sources.
However, we need not end in contradiction. In my own contemplative experience, I have observed what Wilber, following Abraham Maslow, helpfully labels as the distinction between prerational and transrational. If the skeptics are right that unitive experience is delusion, then it should be less than normal consciousness (i.e., pre-rational); it should be like getting high and not being able to think clearly. If the mystics are right that unitive experience is truthful, then it should be more than normal consciousness (i.e., transrational); it should transcend and include ordinary thought, not negating it but adding to it. (This accords with the Kabbalistic understanding that rational, discursive, dualistic faculties are associated with binah, or understanding; transrational, unitive ones with chochmah, or wisdom.31) The latter is, indeed, my experience; on retreat after retreat, I found my own chayah experiences to be—as the Jewish model suggests—“higher” and thus more inclusive than ordinary rational experiences. One does not see pixies during such experiences; one sees reality—including the rationalist critique of mystical experience, the logic of nonduality, and so on—more clearly. My experience is that chayah is more than rational, not less; it has the quality of clarity, not confusion. Such has been the experience of thousands upon thousands of careful meditators, joyful ecstatics, and spiritual journeyers, including many who hadn’t read any spiritual books telling them that all is one. There is a certainty, a remembering, a sense of Self rather than self, that is as indubitable as love.
Of course, no experience is any more an experience of nonduality than any other one. Ultimately, all states must be let go, together with all images that would reify the ineffable. This can be a subtle matter. It is one thing to say that God is “just this”—just Being and Nothingness, and nothing more. Yet chayah experiences, during which such knowledge seems certain, also tend to occasion phenomena such as love, ecstasy, calm, bliss, and a perception of holiness. Thus many contemplatives suppose that God is in the fire, or the earthquake, or the storm, and mistake the states which occasion holiness for holiness itself. This can lead to all sorts of suffering, because all states pass, as well as to a kind of idolatry and delusion, in which any experience becomes associated with God.
Consequently, as the spiritual path progresses, peak experiences become more and more subtle. Gradually, contemplatives learn to let go of even the most cherished experiences, relinquishing even the holiest and most beautiful of sensations in favor of a devekut to that which does not come and go, that which is unformed and unconditioned. Consider: if whatever special feeling you are having has not always been with you, from the moment you were born, it isn’t it. In this way the path progresses to ayin, true emptiness, which has no characteristics at all.
Of course, for most of us, chayah experiences are still precious; spiritual states are valuable teachers. So, along with discretion and negation, cultivating moments of proximity to the numinous—even if such a phrase begins to approach meaninglessness—remains essential to a life fully lived. These experiences are only brief uncoverings, but what the soul learns in such instants is deliciously hard to forget.
EXPERIENCE OF NESHAMAH: CONTEMPLATION
In the Chabad tradition of Hasidism, contemplation of the Divine omnipresence and unity is the primary form of meditation. Drawing on the Maimonidean tradition, the first two generations of Chabad—nearly alone among the Hasidim, who usually preferred devotional to philosophical practice—maintained that through contemplation, the intellect could become one with its Source. There is an ontological framework for this view: Chabad maintains the classical understanding of the Active Intellect (sechel ha’poal) and maps it onto the intellectual sefirot (chochmah, binah, and da’at, the first letters of which give Chabad its name), and R. Aharon in particular spends a great deal of time parsing the details. But for our purposes, these issues are of less concern than the method of contemplation and the experience of nonduality it purports to bring about.
As we will explore in more detail in chapter 6, hitbonnenut, nondual Hasidic contemplation, is more than mere thinking. It is a focused application of mental activity, coming back again and again to a single phrase or teaching, such as Ein Od Milvado—there is nothing besides God. This is not quite the same as mantra practice, in which a phrase is repeated in order to bring about a trancelike state, but it is meant to provide a depth of experience, a deeper “knowing” than mere understanding. Experientially, the result of focusing the mind on a single phrase, for perhaps an hour or more and to the exclusion of other thoughts, does indeed bring about a sense of profundity. More than that, however, I have found that insights arise during contemplation that, upon later and strictly rational reflection, seem quite solid and truthful. This, too, has its Kabbalistic basis—contemplation touches the depths of transrational chochmah, in addition to rational binah. And it suggests that the experience of neshamah is not only an experience, but a source of insight as well.
As we will also see in chapter 6, one may contemplate contemporary teachings as well as ancient ones. One that inspired me early in my own spiritual path is this paragraph from Rabbi Arthur Green’s introduction to Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer:
In all change and growth, say the masters, the mysterious ayin is present. There is an ungraspable instant in the midst of all transformation when that which is about to be transformed is no longer that which it had been until that moment, but has not yet emerged as its transformed self; that moment belongs to the ayin within God. Since change and transformation are constant, however, in fact all moments are moments of contact with the ayin, a contact that man is usually too blind to acknowledge.32
I remember reflecting on this notion one afternoon, sitting in the park twenty years ago. I had not yet learned how to meditate, and had no idea what nonduality was. I simply turned my mind, over and over again, to the persistent liminality of transformation, to the radical impermanence of all phenomena, the way they flicker in and out of being; to trees swaying in the breeze; to leaves budding, flourishing, and falling; to the currents of history, economy, and power. It was not all beauty—only a few generations down from the trees, and we humans have destroyed much of the earth. Yet in the flow of things, in what I would later conceptualize as Kali’s dance or God’s game of revelation and concealment, there seemed but one constant: the masquerade of Being itself.
Contemplation may also be so spare in its content as to ease the mind back upward from the insights of neshamah to the mystical experience of chayah. For example, following Genpo Roshi’s Zen instruction, allow yourself a vacation from ego right now. Simply take a full breath, and as you release, drop into the non-seeking, non-desiring mind—what the Zen masters call the ineffable light, musho ko. Non-seeking, non-desiring. Don’t try to accomplish anything, feel anything, know anything, understand anything. Definitely don’t try to figure it out. Just let it go; relax; drop into the ocean.
It is possible, for a moment, to see from God’s point of view, as long as no assumptions, no expectations, no intentions are maintained. And from the perspective of Emptiness, there’s nothing that needs to be done, and nothing of note that has ever been done. Of course, mind states are transitory and conditioned, while the nondual is not, so let’s not erect idols of our experiences. But the pressing concerns of the relative will return soon enough; if what we seek is balance, and the ayin is one half of the truth, can we really say that we devote proportional time to approaching it?
EXPERIENCE OF RUACH: LOVE
Isn’t it true that, ultimately, we do what we do for love? Achievement, to attract love and learn to love ourselves; service, to love others; self-gratification, to try to feel love; the pursuit of justice, since out of love springs obligation; religion, to feel the love known as God’s. Rather than ask, then, how love gives a glimpse of the nondual, one might do well to ask how nonduality brings about love.
The literature of nonduality is filled with words of love, from ecstatic Sufi poetry to the prayers of the Hasidim, from devotional kirtan to the erotic letters of medieval nuns. R. Aharon, for example, wishes us “to have the heart on fire with desire and passion to do the avodah [worship, service, practice] of YHVH and to connect to God’s blessed unity, and to nullify himself through Torah and mitzvot to connect to God’s wisdom and will, to extend God’s will into real action, by means of deeds.”33 But more than that: for the greatest of nondual teachers, love is a necessary condition for realization; it is an ingredient of it, for God is experienced as love. R. Aharon elsewhere says that intellectual knowledge without emotional connection is mere imagination.34 Likewise Ramakrishna, the founder of modern Vedanta and also a self-described bhakta (devotionalist), preferred God with forms to God without form, and likened pure nondual speculation to playing only one note of a flute.35 And likewise, the spiritual text known as The Cloud of Unknowing says that “He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be caught and held; but by thinking never.”36
In chapter 3, we will see how form and the formless interact in the life of the mystic, how the act of addressing this moment of Being as “You” yields an almost miraculous response from the One addressed as God, Christ, Krishna, the Beloved, Shechinah, Goddess, or Friend, and how none of this need depend on theology, faith, or belief. In chapter 7, we will explore four ways in which love may be practiced along the nondual path: ecstatic prayer that opens the heart, conventional prayer, the love of people as a nondual love of God in multiplicity, and the heartrending path of tshuvah. Such movements make clear that what some people mean by “God” is equivalent to what others mean by “love.”
Of course, the ebb and flow of wisdom and compassion is a cyclical motion in which one nourishes the other. I’ve told the story before, but I remember so clearly leading a meditation session on a two-week retreat, several years ago. Because, like the Dzogchen nondualists, I was meditating with my eyes open, the group of my fellow meditators filled my field of vision. At one point, I saw one of them move, which usually causes me irritation. This time, though, I felt only compassion—hoping her meditation was not disturbed, that she wasn’t in too much pain—and immediately, I noticed how natural love appeared for me, when I am not clouded and confused.
This is the oscillation of my life. When I remember Who I am, I find it is easy to love almost everything, even the stupidity and wastefulness of our society, even those who have broken my heart. When my mind becomes distracted, I forget, and it feels impossible to love—least of all myself. And so much of my own spiritual work recently has been to submit to love always, to love myself unconditionally, and, as the Hasidim say, to extend that light as much as possible—to the legal papers as much as the poetry, the shopping as well as the dance. I fail more than I succeed, but I try to love the failure.
And what I have seen, occasionally, is that the love exists independent of subject and object; that it is a way into the nondual as much as a radiation from it. Devotion empties the self just as contemplation does, filling the mind instead with a love of the Absolute. The means is different, but the endpoint is the same: the heart loves what the mind knows.37 Yes, in the ecstasy of eros, whether sexual or spiritual, made up of prayer or dance or lust, there is a sense of the lowering of boundaries, the merging of that which is separate. But even without consummation or rapture, even when the feeling of separateness arises, I have found that the path of love leads to a kind of relinquishment of ownership, a barrierlessness of lovingkindness. In the last year, I have suffered loss and rejection, and have felt betrayed, left alone, cast aside. I continue to grieve and rage and mend and heal. Yet this nondual love endures—not as a steely sort of determination, but as an endlessly pliant surrender, a gateless gate that leads to the presence beyond subject and object. It is unjustified, it is embarrassing, it is unsophisticated, and it is real. It inheres in the bud emerging from the branch, the erosion by water of rock. Humans are clinging animals; we yearn for the mother’s embrace. But when the notion of externality is released somewhat, it is possible to discover a wider holding that contains all and is all and loves, finally, all. It is a thaw that eventually melts into liberation.
EXPERIENCE OF NEFESH: THE BODY
The Creator is found in every act of physical movement. It is impossible to make any motion or to utter any word without the power of the Creator. That is the meaning of “the whole earth is full of His glory.”
—KETER SHEM TOV38
Since nonduality is essentially a proposition about how things are, most of the ways to know it are intellectual or emotional in nature—but not all of them. Western science now confirms that body and mind are far more related than Platonic/Cartesian dualism would suggest: mental attitudes can affect healing processes, and somatic conditions influence thought. Thus it is no surprise that body-oriented practices such as yoga, exercise, and diet can powerfully open consciousness to its essential condition by reducing the chatter of mental noise that ordinarily obstructs it. On one level, these practices simply relax the mind by relaxing the body—or in the case of diet, by purifying the body of toxicants. Yet it is also possible that spiritual work such as yoga and advanced forms of concentration practice enable subtle energies, of which we in the West still understand relatively little, to flow more freely and connect with their source as well. A belief in such energies is not necessary to apprehend nonduality: nonduality is not about which energies do or do not exist, but rather what all of them, and all matter, are in essence. Similarly, it is not that the experience of relaxation, energy, or connectedness is the experience of nonduality. Every experience is the “experience” of nonduality, expansion no more than constriction. However, these encounters with the numinous immanent in physicality create an aperture in the veil of self-concern and self-aggrandizement.
Yoga, tai chi, qigong—these are disciplines that are hundreds, even thousands, of years old. And all of them have nondual perception among their central goals: not a mental perception aided by the body, but perception by the body-mind as a whole. While this may seem radical to some, it makes obvious sense if situated in the context of a nondualistic ontology and an open-minded agnosticism regarding subtle energies. If such a path speaks to you, then, as the Jewish sage Hillel said, “Go and learn.” If it does not, remember that simply being in nature, if the mind is quieted and the heart is opened, can provide an intimation of immortality, a melting away of the distinctions between self and other. As the American nondualist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:
Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.39
Indeed, in our age of ecological devastation, the unification of body and mind may be the most crucial of nondual practices. In recent years, earth-based religionists, system theorists, holists, and ecofeminists have argued that the split between matter and spirit, body and soul, nature and culture, is the formative rupture that engenders the imperializing, dualistic outlook of oppression of the Earth, of the Other, and of women.40 We are used to boundaries, and as Ken Wilber has said, every boundary is a battle line—the most intuitive is most destructive. The moment we establish a boundary between what is mine and what is yours, we at once fly in the face of ecological interdependence and perpetuate the objectification and exploitation that our hyperdualistic culture has brought about. For most nondualists, the “interbeing” (to quote Thich Nhat Hanh) of all life on earth is not the final step on the path—but for many, it is the necessary first one. Our human tendency to dualize, hierarchize, reduce, and despoil is where our delusion begins and ends. In terms of practical consequences, healing the divisions between human/nature, heaven/earth, male/female, and insider/outsider may be the most important aspects of the nondual path. Fortunately, nature abhors a binarism. If we sincerely disassemble the stone walls between body and mind, earth and sky, and male and female, then perhaps, like ivy, we might open cracks of life where light may enter.
Indeed, the “enlightenment of the body” is, as described in chapter 8, the most radical reorientation of who it is that gets enlightened, or what spiritual states are all about. Suppose the experience of the body, without any emotional or psychological correlate, were accorded respect; would our identification with the ego/mind not loosen as a result? The truth is, you are not your mind. Your mind is a sophisticated assemblage of countless programs, executing over and over again in an evolutionarily honed effort to keep you safe. It is marvelous—but it is not “you.” Enabling the body to experience realization helps undo the notion that only what happens to the mind matters.
A dragonfly alights on my windowsill, its aquamarine body shimmering, its wings translucent and exquisite. I quickly forget errands and agendas, am opened to wonder, am rendered both speechless and effusive in the presence of grandeur. And then I remember.
EXPERIENCE OF YECHIDAH: JUST THIS
The truth is so obvious that it cannot be stated: because the Infinite memaleh kol almin, fills all worlds, it fills every particle of what you see before you now, every movement of mind, every stirring of heart. The nondual God is yotzer or u’vorei choshech: creator of light and former of darkness—and as a result, every experience is an experience of Ein Sof. Just this and nothing more; there is no need to look outside for anything, to seek anything, to find anything, to do anything. Desire seeks its own extinction; motion seeks rest; and the simple feeling of being, the mind resting in itself, can be sweeter than the most delightful of pleasures. Please, shema, try to hear these words not as prose on a page but as if they might be addressed to you directly, for You are all there is. The programs in your head are ripples on the pond. You are not them; you are the pond itself, the whole field of your awareness—not the person running around inside of it. And because What you see before you now is the Divine Indwelling, the ultimate mystical union is none other than ordinary experience. Just Being, with no special sense or pretense: this is the Zen ox-herder’s “return to the marketplace,” in which all is exactly as it was, yet somehow luminous, translucent, at once more real and more evanescent than before.
This is the experience of yechidah, the face of the soul which is union with God. Not rapture, ecstasy, or an altered state of mind, but a somehow inflected perspective on that which is before us all the time. Imagine: that God is in this place, but you somehow do not know it. Yet even the not-knowing is God. There is nothing else. As Adyashanti has said, “There is only life living itself, life seeing itself, life hearing itself, life meeting itself as each moment.”41 Or in the words of Rabbi Rami Shapiro:
God is the sole Reality. God is the Source of all things and their Substance. There is no thing or feeling or thought that is not from God, even the idea that there is no God! For this is what it is to be All: God must embrace even God’s own negation . . . Thus we read “I am God and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:5). Not simply that there is no other god but God, as our Moslem cousins say, but that there is nothing else but God, which is what their Sufi masters whisper to the initiated.42
When I was younger, and an academic student of mysticism, I always imagined that mystical union would take place in some far-off place, under special conditions, probably to someone else. But when, on my first meditation retreat many years ago, the spark of God masquerading as me was blessed to recognize Herself at last, I was startled to realize the obvious: that since God is everywhere, mystical union would look perfectly ordinary, and would take the shape not of angels and clouds but of trees, walkways, bathrooms, and tables. I cannot describe for you the sanctity and joy I felt in those first hours of self-recognition. For a time, it was as if every object God/I touched was the delicate cheek of the Beloved, every taste was like kissing the lover’s soft lips, and every gaze was into the eyes of God seeing Godself. All that was needed was quiet and concentration, an opening of the heart, a relaxing of the discursive mind. It was a kind of homecoming, a reunion with a lover who never had left.