Nonduality
I was 15 when an ostensible science teacher introduced me to the word “nonduality” in a month-long Metaphysics elective via selections from Ibn Arabi, so I have a pretty decent grasp on what attachment to this concept does to the mind of someone raised as a Western materialist.
I was a smart kid (n.b. I never got much smarter when I was 15), so these ideas were like fully psychedelic to me. I had transcendent experiences just from READING WORDS, and I was like, “I know the truth now,” and that is indeed when I started READING WORDS about Buddhism.
This was not a FAKE experience; my conceptual mind totally WAS inoculated against a bunch of harmful stuff after this. But it was still a few years before things began to happen to me that CONFIRMED the words I had read, and that’s actually when the trouble STARTED.
The trouble is that confirmation — that is, experiential evidence — makes concepts STRONGER. So even though I could say sentences like, “Just reading this in a book gives you NO CLUE what the reality of it is like,” all I was really describing was some sense of verbal ACCURACY.
I knew “that Ibn Arabi and Buddha stuff I read was TRUE.” That was a stance. It wasn’t the “transcendent experiences” that showed me what was beyond that stance. The world continuing to be exactly the way it was was what did that. I had the advantage of SOME PEACE, but that’s it.
The driver of the next period of spiritual growth was FRUSTRATION with the irreconcilability of this TRUTH with the WORLD. That is how Zen caught me — by responding to THAT FRUSTRATION with “Gaaaaahhhh!!! Whatever.” and just carrying on with it anyway.
People would only ever put it into words (even in books) out of this frustration, in ways that spoke directly TO it. And the best they’d ever do was to say things like “not one and not two,” which means something like “only neither and both are true,” which is a total ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
As far as saying anything whatsoever about it goes, the only choice is between INTENTIONAL paradoxes and unintentional ones. Anything that treats “nonduality” as a description of reality is necessarily the latter.
