Nonduality and the Two Truths

What I've learned on my spiritual journey

Some decades ago, when I first started meditating, the general atmosphere around what was and what wasn’t possible for a westerner (in particular) to achieve on a Buddhist or nondual path, seemed quite limited. Enlightenment was a distant, extremely exotic concept that was not seriously considered as a realistic option for most non-monk practitioners, and even then, it might take many lifetimes, especially in the Buddhist Theravada tradition, where I began. Promises otherwise were widely considered wishful thinking at best, and borderline fraudulent at worst.

These days, of course, mindfulness and meditation are widely accepted and to some degree practiced, even penetrating the citadel of western reason, the scientific establishment; not a month seems to pass without a new study involving a meditator in an fMRI, while countless PhD phenomenological studies demonstrate the extent that meditation and mindfulness can affect our inner lives in (mostly) positive ways. While many of these studies are principally psychological in nature, my focus here is not just that, but the deeper spiritual purpose of the teachings.

So, as the possibility of Self-Realization and enlightenment is slowly being brought into the lives of westerners as a way of life, how might this be going for the average serious practitioner, such as myself? That is what I want to share here, and indeed is the reason for this blog in general.

As I said above, the potential for an enlightenment experience, let alone being enlightened (whatever these words might mean), was thought to be remote as recently as 30-40 years ago. Now we know this is not the case. I will distinguish here between enlightenment experiences and living from enlightenment, which is much rarer; however, one thing I have learned is that enlightenment experiences per se, are not so rare. Part of this is that people who have experienced this have been able to make contact with each other through the internet, where previously there may have less opportunity for validation; that’s certainly the way its worked for me.

Here is my initial 2002 awakening experience, taken from my diary of few days after:

“A couple of days after coming home from my recent retreat, I was just dropping off to sleep, when a lot of energy just came over me, from my abdomen, and streaming up my legs. There was nothing strictly wrong with the energy, but it felt pretty strong and I freaked me out a bit as it went on for several hours.

I called my spiritual teacher and spoke to her a few days later, and she began working with me by asking me to focus on what I was avoiding, some sort of discomfort and fear in my chest related to the energies I had experienced flowing up my legs and body. By doing this, and not looking the other way, this image came to me of the surface of the earth covered in tiny people. Then my attention moved below the surface of the earth and there was this huge wide river, larger than you could imagine. She suggested I move towards it, which I did, and as I did, I noticed that it was full of something sparkly. I moved closer still, and I realized that the river was not made of water, but of consciousness, sparkling away at me. There was this very interesting sense of the sparkly awareness being both unchanging and the source of all movement, simultaneously. I continued moving closer, and as I did, I sort of merged with it and everything became this awareness and I felt as if the top of my head had come off and everywhere I looked was nothing but consciousness.

I had this distinct sense that this was what I had always been looking for; I couldn’t believe it was here now, that this was happening. It really seemed that I had come down to something really big, silent and basic – a sort of substance - in my experience, and in a way, this is what I had been resisting, and which had caused me so much anxiety in the course of doing so. I must say, being in it made my everyday concerns seems extremely unimportant.”

At the risk of a) reifying this experience (all the better to cling to), and b) taking personal credit for this occurring (which is the opposite of a desirable outcome on this path), I write this out in full because I want to make it clear that this can and did happen to someone with no particular spiritual precursors or interest in spirituality, whose principal motivation was getting to the bottom of, and reducing his suffering. In other words, with a bit of work, and luck, this can happen to anyone.

This is encouraging news of course, and also brings me to my next main point, that this experience (and subsequent similar ones I had), do not mean a personality makeover. It is most definitely not a panacea, where all one’s “human” problems are basically resolved, at least in my case. And don’t think I wasn’t hoping for this, and to some degree, still do. A good news and bad news situation, you could say.

The reason this blog is titled the Two Truths, is because at this point I had discovered, at least experientially, the "absolute" truth of existence, according to most eastern philosophy, and mystics of all traditions, that everything is made of timeless consciousness or awareness, that is “always, already” here. The other truth is the "relative" truth of our everyday subject-object life, where we seems to exist in a world of obviously separate objects and people that come and go in time - the one versus the many, apparently fundamentally different from each other.

If the awakening experience does not explain or solve everything in the conventional world, and the usual result is a reversion to old ideas and patterns, what exactly is the relationship between the two truths, what is the point of it? Indeed philosophically, there are some knotty problems here: how can the unified, eternal, reality of consciousness somehow be the same, or even co-exist with the universal human experience, the temporary, entity-bound life and death and suffering? And does the age-old approach of Indian philosophy expressed here devalue human life; human life may be transitory and full of suffering, but does that mean it is without value? Many might argue that its very transitoriness expresses its preciousness.

The answer given in the traditional Two Truths doctrine, which attempts to make sense of this, and is a staple of both nondual Buddhism and Hinduism, is that there is absolute unchanging Truth, with a capital “T” on the one hand, and the more provisional and ever changing dynamic of human and other life on the other.

Advaita Vedanta attempts to solve this dilemma by asserting that only the unchanging pure consciousness is real and everything else an illusion. I’m personally not persuaded by this, which seems to me to set up another massive duality, precisely the opposite of what is being proposed. Other traditions, such as Kashmir Shaivism, believe that the appearance of change and individuality is real, but that that there is no separation from the ultimate reality. I think this is closer to the truth, but again, it begs the question of how what is temporary and changing is also in some way identical with what is permanent and unchanging.

For potential and actual practitioners, who this blog is aimed at, the point of this somewhat heady discussion is that both sides of the equation seem irreducible, so how do we work with this, especially if our personal biography has been very difficult, including as we all know, the common history of wars, trauma, poverty, addictions and suffering of every kind. Not to mention “old age, illness and death” as the Buddha himself highlighted.

I continue this discussion in part 2, please click on button below:

The Two Truth, Part 2