Archive for the 'Nonduality Movement' Category

Deepak Chopra Introduces Nonduality … or Non-Dual Consciousness

January 6, 2012

This new article in the Huffington Post may be the first time Deepak Chopra has used the term “non-dual” in a high profile manner. Rather than the terms “nonduality” or “nondualism”, he speaks of “non-dual consciousness.” He realizes the term “non-dual” is non-friendly to most people, but that “consciousness” is familiar and vague enough to allow the reader to go to a comfortable and acceptable place “inside.”

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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Read more
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

Access above links at article home:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/consciousness_b_1179494.html

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:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra

http://deepakchopra.com

Posted in Gurus/Teachers/Sages, Introductory, Nonduality Movement | 1 Comment »
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The Only Two Guides You Need in Your Pursuit of Nonduality

November 16, 2010

Pursuing nonduality? In the old days you had to do Google searches, join email forums, read books, watch videos, listen to podcasts, go to satsangs, make pilgrimages to see gurus.

All that has changed. Now you only need two guides.

1. Facebook.
2. MeetUps.

Have a question about the reputation of a teacher? Want to know whether nonduality will affect your relationships? Ask your friends on FB. Want to hear the latest utterances of some enlightened dude or girl? Facebook. Want to chat with the hottest guru? Want to post your own confessions about the nature of reality? Want to know who’s who and who’s doing what? All you need is Facebook.

For your offline experience, no need to travel far to see a sage or guru. Attend a local nonduality MeetUp group. If there isn’t any, or if there isn’t one to your liking, start one.

Facebook and MeetUps are the only two basic guides needed for your journey to nonduality.

If there’s a third guide, may I suggest the place where the vision for popular nonduality found a home: Nonduality.com

-Jerry Katz

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The Nonduality Movement: Part Four

March 20, 2010

Hi Jerry,

I think with the advent of the internet, the overall scenario has indeed changed. If we think of it, some centuries ago, anyone interested in non-duality would have to search a living “teacher”, for most did not read or write. Till a few years ago, one had the option of reading books. But with internet, and mainly these forums, there is this opportunity to participate actively in a dynamic that was unavailable before. Where would I meet others to discuss these matters just a few years ago? Where would I be able to look more deeply into the hidden nature of the sense of ego that is revealed in these exchanges?
So…. this “new” environment certainly must make some difference. Or perhaps none, if it only leads to more entertainment to escape from the implosion.
-geo-

The Feminist (Women’s) Movement changed consciousness even though many influenced by it didn’t bother to study academic papers or to read the significant books or attend meetings. The message of the Feminist Movement about equal rights hit home on everyday fronts: voting, pregnancy, the workplace, relationships, lifestyles, politics, ecology. The Feminist Movement is a model for giving structure to the nonduality movement, as far as looking at it in waves and describing each wave and looking at the movement in terms of scope, social change, and effects on religion, science, and other disciplines.

I see the Feminist, Eco-Feminist, and Nonduality Movements as merging more fully. But it would be helpful to define the Nonduality Movement so that it can more easily fit into these other movements. Ken Wilber has somewhat of a movement going with the Integral Institute and the Integral way of looking at things.

A person could ride the Nonduality Movement on the backs of Intergral Theory, or quantum theory, or neo-advaita, or Sufism, or as a Catholic monk, or as a new ager, or as nothing. Primarily, the message of nonduality becomes known, accepted, debated, refined, altered, and then one lives life with a deep and serious valuing of that message which can be worded in different ways.

My objective is to declare that there is a Nonduality Movement and to begin to describe it. People can see it, especially those who have been on the internet for a few years.

If I were creating a panel discussion on the topic of the Nonduality Movement, who would people like to see on it?

The Nonduality Movement: Part One
The Nonduality Movement: Part Two
The Nonduality Movement: Part Three

Posted in Nonduality Movement, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

The Nonduality Movement: Part Three

March 20, 2010

The New Nonduality: The Nonduality Movement

Jerry Katz

In these times, both traditional and neo-Advaita exist in the matrix known as the new nonduality and they spread throughout the matrix thus creating what I call The Nonduality Movement.

The New Nonduality is in fact The Nonduality Movement. It is a matrix made up of every field of human endeavor. What moves through it, thus creating it, is the teaching of nonduality (usually along with a form of the word nonduality).

The word “nonduality” or one of its forms — nondual, nondualism, nondualistic, nondualist — serves as a marker revealing the movement.

I was interviewed a few days ago by a woman who, in preparation for the interview, googled “nonduality.” She told me that she thought there would very little about the topic and that it wouldn’t be hard to prepare. However, she was overwhelmed by the choices. I told her it wasn’t always like that. Had she done the search more than ten years ago, the pickings would have been too slim to prepare for such an interview.

Comparing the search engine results for the word nonduality now and yesterday, it is clear that the teaching of nonduality has “moved.” It has diffused.

My eyes these days are on The Nonduality Movement in Western culture. We have seen the movement happen on the Internet. It began in its most direct form in the latter part of the 19th Century, which is when we find the first uses of the forms of the word nonduality. Prior to the Internet, there were many gurus and teachings that have advanced nondual teachings, yet one couldn’t say for sure that there was ever a Nonduality Movement during those decades.

We are in the midst of The Nonduality Movement. It means that the teaching of nonduality, in one form or another, through its diffusion, propagation, circulation, is finding everyone who is open minded about human potential and about who they truly are and why they are alive. That audience consists of the spiritual mainstream and everyone else who questions what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and what is behind what they are doing.

My thoughts are somewhat scattered on this topic, however they are coming forth as blog entires. Perhaps they’ll be made more coherent in the near future.

-Jerry

The Nonduality Movement: Part One
The Nonduality Movement: Part Two

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The Nonduality Movement: Part Two

March 20, 2010

The Nonduality Movement: Part Two

Read The Nonduality Movement: Part One

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “movement” as “A course or series of actions and endeavours on the part of a group of people working towards a shared goal.”

I don’t think a movement has to be as intentional and organized as the OED implies. For example, while the anti Vietnam War movement was intentional and organized, the Beat Movement was about freedom and being in the moment, rather than intent and organization. However, the Beat Movement was more of a meta-movement since it informed other movements, including the anti Vietnam War movement. This is from the Wikipedia article on the Beat Generation:

…the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had a huge influence on Western Culture more broadly. In many ways, the Beats can be taken as the first subculture (here meaning a cultural subdivision on lifestyle/political grounds, rather than on any obvious difference in ethnic or religious backgrounds). During the very conformist post-World War II era they were one of the forces engaged in a questioning of traditional values which produced a break with the mainstream culture that to this day people react to – or against. The Beats produced a great deal of interest in lifestyle experimentation (notably in regards to sex and drugs); and they had a large intellectual effect in encouraging the questioning of authority (a force behind the anti-war movement); and many of them were very active in popularizing interest in Zen Buddhism in the West.

In 1982, Ginsberg published a summary of “the essential effects” of the Beat Generation [35]:

* Spiritual liberation, sexual “revolution” or “liberation,” i.e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women’s liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.

* Liberation of the world from censorship.

* Demystification and/or decriminalization of cannabis and other drugs.

* The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets’ and writers’ works.

* The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early on by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, the notion of a “Fresh Planet.”

* Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.

* Attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler) a “second religiousness” developing within an advanced civilization.

* Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against state regimentation.

* Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road: “The Earth is an Indian thing.”

The Nonduality Movement is associated with promoting those values, though it is beyond promoting any values at all. Therefore, the Nonduality Movement is even more of a meta-movement than the Beat Movement. The Nonduality Movement is also more accessible than the Beat Movement was. It’s not defined by a handful of people, by coolness or being “in,” or by a literature, a music, a political stance, a lifestyle, or by a style of any sort, or by anything I’ve yet to identify. It is admitted not only that nonduality cannot be defined, but that it does not exist. Yet there is a movement founded in nonduality.

Where and how can the Nonduality Movement be identified? I’ll consider that and other questions in future blog entries.

-Jerry Katz

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Mysticism is More Like a Hobby These Days

March 8, 2010

The New York Times
March 8, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Mass-Market Epiphany
By ROSS DOUTHAT

from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/opinion/08douthat.html?pagewanted=print

Mysticism is dying, and taking true religion with it. Monasteries have dwindled. Contemplative orders have declined. Our religious leaders no longer preach the renunciation of the world; our culture scoffs at the idea. The closest most Americans come to real asceticism is giving up chocolate, cappuccinos, or (in my own not-quite-Francis-of-Assisi case) meat for lunch for Lent.

This, at least, is the stern message of Luke Timothy Johnson, writing in the latest issue of the Catholic journal Commonweal. As society has become steadily more materialistic, Johnson declares, our churches have followed suit, giving up on the ascetic and ecstatic aspects of religion and emphasizing only the more worldly expressions of faith. Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnamable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.

Yet by some measures, mysticism’s place in contemporary religious life looks more secure than ever. Our opinion polls suggest that we’re encountering the divine all over the place. In 1962, after a decade-long boom in church attendance and public religiosity, Gallup found that just 22 percent of Americans reported having what they termed “a religious or mystical experience.” Flash forward to 2009, in a supposedly more secular United States, and that number had climbed to nearly 50 percent.

In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever. A would-be mystic can attend a Pentecostal healing service one day and a class on Buddhism the next, dabble in Kabbalah in February and experiment with crystals in March, practice yoga every morning and spend weekends at an Eastern Orthodox retreat center. Sufi prayer techniques, Eucharistic adoration, peyote, tantric sex — name your preferred path to spiritual epiphany, and it’s probably on the table.

This democratization has been in many ways a blessing. Our horizons have been broadened, our religious resources have expanded, and we’ve even recovered spiritual practices that seemed to have died out long ago. The unexpected revival of glossolalia (speaking in tongues, that is), the oldest and strangest form of Christian worship, remains one of the more remarkable stories of 20th-century religion.

And yet Johnson may be right that something important is being lost as well. By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

What’s more, it’s possible that our horizons have become too broad, and that real spiritual breakthroughs require a kind of narrowing — the decision to pick a path and stick with it, rather than hopscotching around in search of a synthesis that “works for me.” The great mystics of the past were often committed to a particular tradition and community, and bound by the rules (and often the physical confines) of a specific religious institution. Without these kind of strictures and commitments, Johnson argues, mysticism drifts easily into a kind of solipsism: “Kabbalism apart from Torah-observance is playacting; Sufism disconnected from Shariah is vague theosophy; and Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming.”

Most religious believers will never be great mystics, of course, and the American way of faith is kinder than many earlier eras to those of us who won’t. But maybe it’s become too kind, and too accommodating. Even ordinary belief — the kind that seeks epiphanies between deadlines, and struggles even with the meager self-discipline required to get through Lent — depends on extraordinary examples, whether they’re embedded in our communities or cloistered in the great silence of a monastery. Without them, faith can become just another form of worldliness, therapeutic rather than transcendent, and shorn of any claim to stand in judgment over our everyday choices and concerns.

Without them, too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

Posted in Nonduality Movement, Spirituality | 1 Comment »
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The Nonduality Movement: Part 1

February 26, 2010

The Nonduality Movement

The earliest use of the phrase “nonduality movement” was, to my knowledge, October 25, 1999, on the Nonduality Salon email forum, by myself.

The context was one of humor since, while it was clear there was both the energy present for a movement and the actual expansion of online communities, it was not yet clear that there was indeed such a movement as a social/spiritual/cultural phenomenon.

To play down the boldness of such a claim as a nonduality movement, and to thereby reduce the possibility for a ground of cultishness, I couched my announcement in humor. Also, that’s just my personality, to sometimes use humor when I’m not sure how else to approach an issue or topic:

“I think it would be cool if the Nonduality movement made it into the list of cults to watch out for. Any way we can push for that?”

This comment reveals three things: One, that a nonduality movement was perceived. Two, that I wanted to point it out. And, three, that I wanted to acknowledge its potential degeneration, but not in a serious way, lest seriousness feed the possibility of such degeneration.

Though I was preparing for the breaking down of the movement into cultishness, eleven long Internet years later it has not happened. In fact, the movement has no center, so cultishness of the movement as a whole doesn’t seem possible.

The movement has kept itself honest by inviting all voices and by encouraging the formation of new communities and welcoming the strongest criticism.

My way of encouraging the movement was by encouraging people to form their own email communities and to “steal” members from my email community, Nonduality Salon. That makes no sense in any world of business, but if you want to start a movement you have to give up your own position, the fruits of your work, and your own life.

Now, you don’t give anything up for a higher cause. You don’t give up anything for any reason at all. You let happen what needs to happen and later on you, or others, might look at what happened and describe it as having given something up for some purpose or some good.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “movement” as “A course or series of actions and endeavours on the part of a group of people working towards a shared goal.” I’ll talk about that definition in the next part of this series and give my modified definition as, clearly, I don’t think a movement has to be as intentional and organized as the OED implies.

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