nonduality

Many Buddhists, as well as those in other contemplative traditions, often speak about nonduality, but what is it? And is it something we can experience living a worldly life?

Nonduality literally means 'not two,' implying oneness, unity. More deeply, it means seeing past conventional wisdom, conventional ways of seeing, speaking, and understanding. It means seeing left as being relative to something else from a certain point of view, but that such a thing as left doesn't ultimately exist. It means being able to see beyond our limited, human perspective, glimpsing the greater whole and totality of life, its oneness where our experience is relative and ephemeral, like globs of foam floating down a river.

Nonduality means being able to take in the present moment, as it is. It means that, in the words of Richard Rohr, "You learn not to divide the field of the moment or eliminate anything that threatens your ego, but to hold everything—both the attractive and the unpleasant—together in one accepting gaze." And that is something I think one can certainly do living a worldly life, although such a life can present challenges to developing (or uncovering) such a way of seeing.

Things arise and cease, but things are also empty, like globs of foam on a river—and nonduality is being able to switch our gaze from one reality or mode of seeing to the other. This idea of two ways of seeing brings to mind the line, "These are the world's designations, the world's expressions, the world's ways of speaking, the world's descriptions, with which the Tathagata expresses himself but without grasping to them" (DN 9).

Language itself is conventional, limited, and incapable of fully describing what we're talking about; it can only point us towards such experiences. Generally speaking, however, we don't tend to see life through the prism of nonduality, but quite easily see and make distinctions, likely due to the evolutionary advantages of such. Nevertheless, we do seem to have the ability to perceive the world from a nondualistic (or one might say, unobstructed) POV, penetrating into this ultimate reality or whatever you want to call it, while still functioning in, and speaking about, regular, conventional, everyday life.

To use another image from SN 22.95, one can see and interact with the mirage of dualistic experience (existence/non-existence, etc.) while apprehending its underlying emptiness.