This is why Chopra is a brilliant communicator to the general populace. He knows how to fuse the new and strange to the old and familiar. He knows how to lead people from the old to the new.

Rather than present the starkness/fullness of nonduality, about which nothing is granular, his teaching rests in what people can read about, learn about, feel, experience, get involved in, even worry about for gosh sakes, namely science, namely mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

By presenting the unknowable through the rungs of the known, he leads people to an understanding of nonduality. Few may know the falling down of the ladder that brings them to that understanding. Yet Chopra does what he is called to do, what any of us are called to do, which is to talk about what we can’t help talking about, which is Truth (or whatever you want to call it). We each talk about Truth in our own silly way, whether through essays, poetry, art, science, dance, sculpture, raising a family, selling insurance, etc.

Perhaps Chopra sees 2012 as the year of non-dual consciousness for the spirituality mass populace. Longtime readers of the Nonduality Highlights have not only known about non-dual consciousness for quite a while, we’ve even had a nonduality community online and in person since 1998. But Chopra isn’t talking about community. He’s speaking to individuals.

I wrote on nonduality.com that 2011 would be the year nonduality hits the mainstream: “Nonduality is headed to the major mainstream. When? I’m writing this in late 2010. It could be any day, literally. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the major mainstreaming of nonduality in 2011. ”

Gimme a break. So I was off by like four days.

Here’s Chopra’s article:

A New Year, and Possibly a New World
Posted: 1/4/12 09:10 AM ET

by Deepak Chopra

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Conscious , Consciousness , Dualism , Healthy-New-Year , Human Consciousness , Medical Materialism , Non-Dual Consciousness , Non-Dual Materialism , Paradigm Shift , States Of Consciousness , What Is Consciousness , Worldviews , Healthy Living News

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A New Year, and Possibly a New World

by Deepak Chopra

It’s fascinating, as time turns another small corner, to think of how worlds shift and collide. There is no evidence that a person as brilliant as Shakespeare understood that Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had already revolutionized the human mind. The same thing may be happening now, and many brilliant people seem unaware of how our present-day world — meaning our conception of reality — may undergo a seismic shift.

I’m not thinking of fossil fuels and Arab uprisings, not even of the 99 percent as against the 1 percent. Upheavals in the outer world are secondary, in the long sweep of history, to inner revolutions. We may be on the verge of such a one. What makes me think so is a trickle of medical articles, now greatly expanding, that are proving troublesome to mainstream medicine. These articles sometimes deal with cancer, sometimes with antidepressants, sometimes with the dashed hopes for gene therapies that seem constantly out of reach.

What these articles have in common is that treating the body like a machine isn’t panning out. The next breakthrough in cancer or psychotherapy or genetically-related disorders may come from an entirely different angle than the workaday materialism that “of course” looks at our bodies as physical objects like any other. That “of course” is the mark of a settled worldview. God “of course” created the world in seven days and the soul “of course” was more important than the body, which was a temporary shell while the soul worked its way through this vale of tears.

When settled worldviews crumble, we have to reinvent the world. So far, there have been only three categories from which to construct reality from the ground up.

1. Dualism, which separates mind and body.

2. Non-dual materialism, which considers only physical things and excludes the spiritual, mystical and supernatural.

3. Non-dual consciousness, which traces reality back to mind and beyond mind to the very potential for mind.

Dualism no longer satisfies professional thinkers. Putting mind in one box and the body in another settles no questions about either. We are left with half a loaf, unable to say anything reliable about pure mind but also unable to connect the subtle way that the body responds to thoughts and feelings. Yet curiously, the average person is a flaming, if secret, dualist. We compartmentalize our lives in countless ways. God belongs on Sunday, the material world dominates the rest of the week. We treat our bodies sensibly, yet when a mortal illness threatens, it’s time to pray. This kind of compartmentalism is understandable, but in the long run it’s frustrating, as witness the countless people who feel anxious and empty in their search for higher meaning.

The same complaint could be aimed at non-dual materialism, but science, which is totally materialistic, has won a resounding victory on many fronts. Therefore, it’s an easy slide into believing that the scientific worldview must be correct. Non-dual materialism leaves no room for anything that cannot be turned into data. So it is incompatible with God, spirit, the soul and even the mind. The average person has bought into the notion, publicized constantly by the media, that the mind is the brain. After all, we can now watch the brain in real time as a person experiences love, faith, compassion and all other “higher” experiences that once belonged to the mind and the soul. But watching the brain at work is like watching an old tube radio light up when Beethoven is played. It would be naive to say that the radio composed Beethoven’s music. Yet just as naively non-dual materialists see no reason to look beyond the brain for an invisible thing labeled as mind.

This is the worldview that is crumbling while seeming to rise victoriously higher. Termites are silently chewing at the timbers. One notices this by being attuned to articles about the failures of the materialistic approach. Contrary to popular hopes, materialism cannot explain cancer or depression. It cannot tell you why talking to somebody can help your free-floating anxiety while tranquilizers may fail. Materialism sidesteps the mounting problem of side effects and the long-term damage to the brain from decades of taking psychotropic drugs. Materialism cannot explain what memory is, where it is stored on the cellular level, or why memories haunt us. There are many, many failures of this kind, and even in a field far removed from medicine like physics, peering into the void that gave rise to the physical universe has posed huge explanatory problems.

Which leaves the third worldview, non-dual consciousness, that is all but invisible on the scene. It has been invisible for a long time, certainly in the Judeo-Christian West, where only a handful of obscure names like Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, and Meister Eckhart flirted with the idea that all is one, and that “one” is consciousness. Today, some farseeing speculative thinkers in physics are coping with the possibility that we live in a conscious universe. A tiny handful of neuroscientists are grappling with the possibility that the mind controls the brain and not vice versa. It’s exciting fun to be part of this splinter group, especially if you relish the scorn of experts who inform you that “of course” you are completely off your rocker, a charlatan or a crypto religionist.

What the scorn masks is that “of course” will be thrown out the window if a new worldview takes hold. That’s what happened to the idea that “of course” God created the world according to Genesis. But the non-dual consciousness that was dominant 3,000 years ago in Vedic India cannot return as it once was formulated. The modern world isn’t about to throw science out the window. Instead, science must expand, so that we look at cancer, depression or the Big Bang and say, “Now I see.” (In particular, the mind-body connection with cancer needs exploring, as we will do in a later post.) A worldview succeeds when it explains more than the old one, when it opens people’s eyes and when it achieves practical results. In the next post, we’ll touch on how non-dual consciousness can do all those things.

To be continued

For more by Deepak Chopra, click here:

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That was asked by someone who has read scores of nonduality books.

The question is another stressful thought. If you don’t understand what stressful thought is, then what good were all the books you read about nonduality?

Read the article about pain and nonduality books.

Today I checked the Oxford English Dictionary Online, which includes quarterly updates, and there is no definition for nondual, nondualism, or nonduality.

Here is a definition I found today from
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002.

Nondualism Defined:

Main Entry: non•dualism
Function: noun
Etymology: 1non- + dualism
1 : a doctrine of classic Brahmanism holding that the essential unity of all is real whereas duality and plurality are phenomenal illusion and that matter is materialized energy which in turn is the temporal manifestation of an incorporeal spiritual eternal essence constituting the innermost self of all things
2 : any of various monistic or pluralistic theories of the universe

Citation format for this entry:

“nondualism.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (5 Jul. 2008).

I find the above to be a very limited definition of nondualism, although I like the metaphysical, almost poetic feel to it. I don’t know how useful the definition is.

Dualism Defined:

Now here’s the definition of dualism from the Oxford English Dictionary Online. I’m showing it because it could serve as model for defining nondualism, except it would include quotations from different cultures and nondual perspectives.

Entry printed from Oxford English Dictionary Online
Copyright © Oxford University Press 2008

dualism SECOND EDITION 1989
( dju l z( )m) [f. DUAL + -ISM: cf. F. dualisme (1755 in Hatz.-Darm.).]
1. The condition or state of being dual or consisting of two parts; twofold division; duality.
1831 CARLYLE Sart. Res. II. ix, In Teufelsdröckh there is always the strangest Dualism. 1833 Diderot Misc. Ess. 1872 V. 53 Among the dualisms of man’s wholly dualistic nature, this we might fancy was an observable one. 1841-4 EMERSON Ess., Compensation Wks. (Bohn) I. 41 An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole. 1877 E. CAIRD Philos. Kant ii. 12 A dualism between knowing and being, between the ‘me’ and the ‘not me’.

2. Gram. The fact of expressing two in number.
1874 SAYCE Compar. Philol. vii. 276 We find many others [languages] in which the formal expression of plurality has never passed beyond that of dualism.

3. A theory or system of thought which recognizes two independent principles. spec.
a. Philos. The doctrine that mind and matter exist as distinct entities; opposed to idealism and materialism.
b. The doctrine that there are two independent principles, one good and the other evil.
c. Theol. The doctrine, attributed by his opponents to Nestorius, that Christ consisted of two personalities.

1794 MATHIAS Purs. Lit. [1798] 65 Then he introduces..the two principles or dualism (a little more French jargon) the monde animé and the monde machine. 1836-7 SIR W. HAMILTON Metaph. (1877) I. xvi. 293, I would be inclined to denominate those who implicitly acquiesce in the primitive duality as given in Consciousness, the Natural Realists or Natural Dualists, and their doctrine Natural Realism or Natural Dualism. 1847 BUCH tr. Hagenbach’s Hist. Doctr. I. 93 The Gnostic doctrine of two supreme beings (dualism). 1864 PUSEY Lect. Daniel (1865) 529 The characteristic error of the Zend religion, its Dualism, was its blot from the first. 1872 LIDDON Elem. Relig. iv. 148 Manicheeism was the Dualism which had acquired a Christian flavour by coming into contact with Christianity. 1882 FARRAR Early Chr. I. 263 The dualism the existence of matter as the source of evil apart from God finds a distinct expression in the Wisdom of Solomon. 1882-3 SCHAFF Encycl. Rel. Knowl. I. 669 According to dualism existence itself is based on a contrariety which appears in philosophy as spirit and matter.

4. Chem. The theory, originated by Berzelius, now abandoned, that every compound is constituted of two parts which have opposite electricities.

1884 MUIR Princ. Chem. I. ii. iii. §54 Dumas’ discovery of the chloracetic acids which marks the beginning of the revolt against the compound radicles of dualism.

Defining Nondualism:

You can see how much of a challenge and, really, how much fun it would be to define nondualism using the OED model. What’s the earliest use of the word nondualism? What quotations would you select? How about the words nondual, nondualist, nondualize, nonduality? They, too, would have to be defined in the same detail. Certainly there are fine quotations using those words.

And how about definitions for neo-nonduality? Neo-nondualist? Neo-nondualism? Or — I think I just invented a word — neo-nondualize?

–Jerry Katz

Also see What Is Nonduality?

Four elements describe this nonduality or nondualism, though some will have experienced one, two, or none of the first three.

1. A person experiences a sense, or an intuition, of existence (or God, Truth, reality, etc.). The sense may arise spontaneously, or out of suffering, or out of joy, out of immersion in a spiritual tradition, or out of any number of experiences whether combined or isolated. More mundanely, a person is curious about life and senses there are significant things to be learned.

2. Energized by a deep and persistent valuing of their sense or intuition or inner knowing of existence (or God, Truth, reality, etc.), the person is driven and drawn toward the pursuit of a full understanding or realization of their sense or intuition or inner knowing. More mundanely, a person hungers for all kinds of knowledge, goes to school, studies, reads, observes, develops intellectually and otherwise.

3. The person reaches the end of their journey or pursuit, although they do whatever, for them, is right, and which may include practice and study.

4. The various creative expressions emerging from the life lived within any of the above three phases, or beyond all of them, bear the hallmark of non-separation (sometimes accompanied by the more mystical hallmark of oneness experience). Regardless of whether or not I can associate the creative expression with any of the first three phases, I consider that form of expression one of nonduality. I am likely to bring it to the attention of people. As noted, the hallmark of non-separation is evident in utterances from people who simply recognize reality as nondual, without having gone through any of the first three phases.

No doubt I will be updating this description of a people’s nonduality. Your comments are welcome.

A blog is needed because the places mentioned above aren’t sufficient to contain what I want to say.

A blog is more like a dry sauna, whereas a Live Journal or an email list such as Nonduality Salon are more like hot tubs. I like the isolation and long sweat of the dry sauna. The hot tub is too social.

You’ll see the word “nonduality” a lot. My works are branded “nonduality.” More about branding in the next entry.