Imagine there’s a sense of belonging, at the core of any form we could ever take, that can never be taken away, and which can always be accessed through an open, inner door.
How would it be if the love we feel for another was experienced as a love that is never possessed, that moves through us and through all forms and which is never lost?
Can we imagine a peace which is always here, regardless of the condition of heart or mind, regardless of our wars and conflicting cultures? A peace that underlies all winning and losing; all competition and collaboration; all birth and death; and all thought?
“We live in a time, a place and a culture in which the cognitive functioning aspects of the brain and mind have been elevated as the pinnacle or place to operate from, at the loss and exclusion of understanding the great wisdom and contribution that the heart brings. And so we’ve been imbalanced for a very long time.”
DARA WILLIAMS
Is it even rational to believe that peace depends on the end of war to exist? Or that love depends on the absence of hatred?
Such layers of misconception, with dreadful consequences, are facilitated by our fundamental belief in negation: that we can cease to be. Out of this belief in the choice between being and non-being, existence and non-existence, presence and absence, we go to war with ourselves. Life declares war on life, and declares it an endgame.
Consciousness conflicts with consciousness; and experience competes with experience. We split the psyche into pieces and suffer an endless repetition of affliction, when all that is needed is to begin to open some familiar inner doors and to begin exploring who we truly are.
No Time, No Space
A core conditioning is found in the belief that we are definitively separate from each other and from the whole. This perceptive consensus takes differentiation and reframes it as absolute division. It states that we’re utterly separate from the Source of what we are; from the earth of which we’re composed; from our ancestry; from other forms of life; from the universe; from each other; and from manifestation. The belief in separation gives us an illusion of control and the urge to control is primarily driven by fear. Fear, in turn, can only arise where there is this core belief in separation, so it becomes a catch-22.
This fundamental conditioning of the Separate Self is paradoxically shared by all of us: it’s consensual. Because the methodology of Nondual Therapy ventures beyond common conditioning, it could be received as conceptual. Yet all this conditioning – and the conditions of our suffering – are based on the concept of absolute separation – which never stands up to conscious inquiry.
Take some time and look around the space you’re in right now. Let your eyes softly scan the objects in view. Are they separable from your seeing? Be aware of the pull of gravity on the body. Is this pull of gravity separable from the feeling of it? Is the pull of gravity on your body, separable from the pull of gravity on all you can perceive? At some time today, take a moment to unconditionally take in another person. Is this other person separable from your experience of them? Is anything that occurs in conscious awareness separable from the awareness that allows it to be experienced? Is this awareness in you, free of content, separable from the awareness in anyone or anything else?
Thus, the deeper delusion of the modern era: the one belief we all share, that unites each mind in Western culture, is the belief that each human is separate from the rest. The inner world conflicts with the outer. The human world competes with heaven and earth, as if it were separate. We work on ourselves, as if one part were the fixer and the other broken, ignoring the one that has the potential to be aware of both. We criticize and humiliate ourselves, as if we were only the victim and the accuser were some separate, abstract judge. At times it can seem, that even our attitude to the ground on which we stand is one of suspicion and enmity.
Separation is our conditioned default, and based on this belief, humanity is at war with itself. Separation demands us to see an experience as ‘other’ to who we are. Having made it ‘other’, we judge it. In judgement, we decide what we want and what we don’t. We then try to withdraw consciousness from what we don’t want, as if that would negate it. Clearly, to negate what has already been seen in consciousness is a lie. But consciousness brings life, and when it’s withdrawn, it can make uncomfortable thoughts and feelings go away (for a while).
Thus, the inner judge or critic is born. Judgement (when taken as an arbitrator of reality) splits the psyche into the stuff it likes and the stuff it wants to get rid of. The desirable stuff is owned, and the undesirable is abandoned. Yet the undesirable is still there, repressed, now with the added suffering of abandonment. A complex of conflict is formed within the psyche, in which experience becomes fractured through apparently opposing and incompatible opposites. This energetic density in turn encourages the belief that all experience should be dictated by the mind. When the mind fails in its grasp of ‘reality’, confusion ensues, which creates more fear and generates an increasing irrational cleaving towards structures of belief.
Take the example of ‘Human Versus Nature’. Nature is ultimately beyond the control of the human mind. Volcanic eruption, hurricane, earthquake, drought or plague can disempower humanity in a moment. We are helpless in nature, just as in birth and death. Because we are afraid, we create a separation. We talk of nature as if the human were not part of it; as if our bodies and minds were not mammalian, as if we have a separate existence from the sun, moon or even the oxygen in the air. Nature is perceived as an unruly ‘thing’ outside of our cities, and sometimes showing up in the cracks in the concrete. Nature is a threat to our sanity, our health, our homes and our communities. When we’re surprised by its power and beauty, we try to grasp the pleasurable aspects and to control the fearful. Most of all, we collectively negate the magnificence of nature by withdrawing our consciousness behind a shield of separation. We see trees in our boulevards as if they were furniture, not living beings. We relegate animals as inferior life-forms, as if life could be measured, rationed and quality-tested. We ignore the miracle of our own breathing and attempt to repress and control the spontaneous intelligence of our own bodies.
Yet we are nature itself. It never was separate from our bodies, emotions and minds. We are nature in action. Even the current misconception of the Separate Self is a natural phenomenon – part of the pendulating movement of evolution as the individual expands through unity.
The idea of absolute separation is a fallacy, yet much as we depend on inherent unity, it bothers us. We shrink our perception into the consensually understood concept of separation and deny one of the greatest resources available to the living brain – the resource of its own Source.
Baruch Spinoza put it well: “Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.” Yet, we continue to move as if we are essentially contrary to nature. We forgot what it is to shine as the sun; to rage as a storm; to be unbounded as the sky and to express with the spontaneity of birdsong. Collectively, we’re resisting life, becoming a natural form, which William Wordsworth called: “the still, sad music of humanity.”
It’s not enough to separate from the natural world, we’re also conditioned into separation from each other. The same formula applies: we withdraw our consciousness from what has already been seen to try to negate it. When that contraction becomes habitual, then we become less conscious. We shutter up the windows of perception in a misconceived attempt to fix our world through censorship of experience.
In this conceived separation between humans, our unconscious shame can manifest as disgust towards our friend. Our subliminal contraction of guilt can show up as an accusation of the government, or another external authority. Our denied fear can explode as rage towards an outer trigger. Our unfelt sadness can color our world with an appearance of cruelty. Our resistance to life breeds subconscious attitudes that are often inherited, such as: “life is grief” or “the world is bad”.
All of this is based on duality, and at its core, our first mental judgement is based on the belief in the dualistic opposites of good and evil. This belief has split our psyche through many dimensions and it is a primary cause of fear.
The more we invest the separated, so-called ‘outer’ world with the energy of our inner afflictions, the more we depend on the conceived ‘other’ (our enemies, society, the world). The ‘other’ is what informs us as to who we are. In this, the Personality becomes shaped by projection. We disinvest from direct experience and invest in the imagined experience of others, to get a sense of who we are. We lose connection with our natural authority and delegitimize our inherent sense of truth.
As we give away power, we biologically experience a loss of vitality. Yet we must continue, so we draw energy from survival reflexes – the adrenaline rush that comes when a lion is approaching – and we must fight or run for our lives. Yet there is no lion and no immediate survival threat, so in time, we burn out through the accumulation of unreleased stress. We freeze inside ourselves, moving into sentient poverty, and we dissociate from direct physical experience.
We are born free as creatures of bliss, compassion, friendliness, innocence and curiosity. Among us, there is a tremendous love and natural belonging. Burning beneath our numbness, negativity and grief is a celebration of life and a passion for being here. All of this is continuously empowered by a universe suffused with peace. This peace feeds, soothes, honors and affirms us from within. There is purity in our lust; clarity in our confusion; innocence in our crimes; and belonging even in the thralls of rejection.
Our sense of truth, freedom and peace is never lost, yet we have collectively learned to deny it. We do this, because of resistance to pain and the fear of suffering. We are still learning the secret melody of our sorrow and the healing elixir of the truth within our most forbidden emotions. Yet in denying the spontaneous arising of emotion, we also reject the experience of the Nondual Qualities of our True Nature.
The sword of judgement that divides our experience into good and bad is both a curse and blessing. The effect of our current mental programming into all-or-nothing dualities is a fragmentation of the human psyche. Through the attempted negation of unwanted feelings, we freeze the energy of life and this creates a density which walls us from the whole, reinforcing the belief in separation. To liberate the Felt Sense of unity, we need to be ready to honor these frozen areas of the psyche, and then allow them to melt back to Source.
As these energetic blocks are made of repressed emotion and pain, liberation begins with allowing feelings to be felt with an open curiosity. It continues with subtle changes in attitude in which we release the agenda to negate suffering, and rather, begin to appreciate it as an inseparable effect of manifestation. In doing so, a plethora of secondary suffering can be released as healing through the path of least resistance. When we become aware of a contraction, the space of awareness opens around the tense area of density. This space alone brings relaxation and a subtle presence of loving acceptance. In this space, the contraction begins to unfold, merging with that love. When a contraction melts into love or another Nondual Quality, there is often an infusion of peace. This sense of peace characterizes the completion of an evolutionary cycle of form through the human psyche.
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