[Extract from the upcoming book: Stillness of the Wind – An introduction to Nondual Therapy]
“If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin.”
C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings
My first experience of conscious awakening was as a toddler. On the edge of acquiring language, and thus the verbal mechanisms of thought, I lay on a bed. I was two years old, and had been put there (I imagine, to take a nap) by my mother. I lay on the white sheets, not sure what to do. I was aware that my legs were short, hardly reaching beyond the pillow, child’s legs, and I marvelled how they had grown, because before they had been shorter. I gazed loosely towards the window where the afternoon sunlight was glimpsing through the curtain. Downstairs, I could hear my mother in the kitchen.
I idly began reciting the word: “Guitar, guitar, guitar” in my head, like a mantra, until the syllables lost meaning and the word spiralled into a senseless oblivion, with no relation at all to the object. In wonder at this, I tried the same thing with my own name: “Georgi, Georgi, Georgi.” Suddenly I became strange to myself. I was not me, not this name. So who was I? Rapidly, I became conscious of consciousness, and conscious of the consciousness of consciousness, into pure, unidentified consciousness, unconditional to body, bed and parent downstairs. Yet still, I was here.
I tried it with my mother “Mummy, mummy, mummy.” She also spiralled out of form. She was not who I thought she was. All was living consciousness – a kind of brilliant and familiar, greater home. And then I was gone. I don’t remember where.
These sporadic awakenings would continue throughout my life: return visits to consciousness beyond time and physical space. They were so frequent in childhood years that a deep curiosity surfaced as to where I had vanished in the unnoticed interims, when I wasn’t conscious in this way – when days, weeks and sometimes months passed by. Where had I been?
It was an early conviction that I was here to understand the meaning of life, and these awakening experiences were part of that.
Because of these awakenings, I assumed there was nothing exceptional about it. It was clearly in the “Now”, and clearly an opening to a powerful source of living and life. I thought others experienced the same, and I got the impression that it wasn’t so important to the task of living and so it wasn’t talked about. It became like a secret resource, best not named.
Yet the mystery of why this degree of liberated consciousness is not sustainable as a constant perspective continued. Why did I still need to become less conscious, soporific, entangled and attached in all the wrong directions? Why was I still afraid? Into adulthood, the spaces between awakenings for some decades became longer and the periods of stupor more pervasive. I was living my life. But at breakage point, decades later, when while walking the dogs, a powerful awakening occurred that shocked me again into a strangeness of my own life, or what the Buddhists call “Beginners Mind”. How did I come to be here, with these people, in this religion, in this country? Where had I been? How did I choose for this?
These awakenings are like a magical hatch to eternity that restore freedom to the forms of life, whenever most needed. Yet always, after the ecstasy there is the laundry: the realization of our freedom through layer after layer of form, many of which are buried deeply in the unconscious. Awakening by itself was spiritual survival, but in the art of living, there was still much to be realized.
This process led to the book I AM HERE, which differentiates between the awakening of consciousness, the enlightenment of unbounded sentient awareness, and perception through emptiness. In simple terms, this is the deep relaxation of mind, heart and body. Many answers to the riddle of the continued sense of entrapment are waiting for spiritual seekers in that book.
Until the I AM HERE process, I had been awakening from the head up, but the sentient heart was still held prisoner. Later, the heart was open to unconditional love, yet the body was still held prisoner. There was an unconscious condition on love. The condition was marked in all of those experiences which are NOT loving, or what would be conventionally classed as outright evil.
Unconscious fears, repressed anger, energetic blind-spots of depression were still calling towards the beloved to come home. I was attached to the body through conflict – through a resistance to allowing the physical experience of wonder (and terror) of life in physical form.
This last stage (the drop into emptiness) of the I AM HERE process is also the third position that liberates the fear with which the windows of consciousness and awareness are stained. It is a journey through the unconditional to a space where even conditions are not excluded.
The beautiful twist is that with this final stage of liberation (a quantum shift in life form and perception), the journey was not at its end, but at its beginning. Only then, did I feel that I began to live for real. The process continues, yet the suffering is no longer identified as private or personal. Indeed, it becomes senseless to make that division (between self and other) in the service of life.
In the process of self-realization, we move through structures of duality. These structures are known from the birth of our civilization. From East to West, ancient philosophies address dialectics. The thesis, antithesis and synthesis – a primary structure of polarity and transcendence, or a war between opposites and the equilibrium of the third point in the higher paradigm.
A classic example in nonduality is between the experience of being ‘everything’ and the experience of being ‘nothing’. This duality is created through an attachment to the effects of perception – even in its purest form. In emptiness, it becomes clear that everything and nothing are one. In emptiness, the “thing” itself disappears as existing in separation. The whole conceptual map gets redrawn. The key scientific example of where everything and nothing are one can be found in atomic physics – in a single elementary particle, that is both here (in the perceivable physical dimension) and not here, at the same time. This is the matter of which we are composed.
We know there is natural polarity everywhere in creation. From the form of our own bodies into groups of two (legs, arms, eyes, ears) coordinated through a central trunk, through to the basic organization of our conceptual reality (Inside, outside/ in front, behind/ past, future/ up, down/me, you).
Nondual therapy recognizes that these dualities also exist energetically in the realm of thought and feeling. Through offering the synthesis to repeating duality traps, it brings forward nondual positions that can be channelled therapeutically to set energy contractions free, layer by layer. This is beneficial as a technique both for practitioners and for individual meditators.
A core example can be found in the spiralling duality between anger and fear. The fear which is uncontainable on the inside tends to get expressed outside in the form of anger, which is a threat. This fear can become anxiety when traumatic experience has created an additional layer of fear about the feeling of anger. At the same time, anger brings negative feedback and isolation.
Anger and fear are both instinctive reactions to the separation that is perceived between ourselves and others. The nondual position or striving of both configurations of anger and fear is towards compassion – the energetic acknowledgement of interdependency and togetherness in passion (which in its root means the same as suffering).
When compassion is energetically and physically brought forward to the duality of fear and anger, both can begin to transform. If this does not happen, then the energy of fear and anger become blended as dread (fear and threat), which then solidifies in the form of depression. Depression is an energetic barrier between ourselves and others (and between ourselves and our own living form). We isolate, we stop opening up, we break the living connection, the inner circulation gets severed.
Another example of a duality of suffering and a nondual position is innocence. The realization of inherent innocence is the elixir for which both guilt and accusation are striving. It is the transformative frequency that will unlock the twin trap with a liberating effect on all three layers – thinking patterns, feeling contractions, and physical centres of stress and imbalance.
Nondual positions include the present moment, consciousness, awareness, peace, love, unity, innocence, purity, freedom, compassion, the body, stillness, care, belonging, bliss, happiness and silence.
The first error in working with nonduality is paradoxically in the formulation of a duality. It is assumed that freedom, for example, can only be here when there is no limitation or conditions.
This formulation immediately moves freedom into an either-or, ‘all-or-nothing’ structure. We deny ourselves the freedom that is always here, making it dependant on conditions in time and space (we will be free, ‘when’, or ‘if’…).
A first definition of a nondual position is that it is unconditional to time and space. For example, innocence exists within ourselves, irrespective of the conditions of guilt and accusation. The innocence is always here. We are born in it, we suffer in it, we condemn ourselves in it and we die in it. Yet innocence is always here. Its source prevalence is simply obscured by our own mental and sentient contractions.
An example of a therapeutic saying offered within nondual formulations is:
“The duality of slavery is liberation.
Freedom has no opposite.
In freedom, liberation and slavery are one.”
C.G. Jung was a pioneer of nondual therapy, as was stated it clearly:
“We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it.”
The creation and ejection of that which we consider “other” is a causal root of suffering on an individual and collective basis.
To summarize, Nondual Therapy is a form of spiritual psychology designed to offer energetic entry points to increased neuroplasticity, emotional intelligence and physical health. In this, there are certain key formulations.
1. Spirals of duality move according to the belief in absolute separation in which binary mind attempts to identify difference between the self and the ‘other’.
2. The roots of these dualities are connected with mental identification and feeling attachment.
3. Nondual positions are ever-present and abundant, existing independently of conditions of time and space.
4. No nondual position is separate, each of the qualia, when reconnected, will bring the others in its trail and take the journey of self-realization forward.
5. Awareness of the twin traps of energetic duality interwoven with mental programming represents an important avenue to healing and increased quality of life.
6. Life is the greatest healer and teacher. Nondual therapy, at core, is about trusting life, unconditionally.
The teachings presented in I AM HERE find expression in Nondual Therapy. These therapeutic tools bring the means through which it is possible to liberate unconscious structures and blind-spots which still place limitations on our freedom in the art of living.
