Decentralized Nonduality Culture
* Book: Nonduality Culture: A decentralized, self-correcting, creation-based conduit for nondual expression.
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Discussion
John Wren Lewis:
"First, beware of philosophies that put spiritual concerns into a framework of growth or evolution, which I believe are the great modern idols. Both are important phenomena of eternity’s time theater, but as paradigms they’re old hat, hangovers from the age of empire-building and the work ethic. We should know better today, when astronomers have shown that the kind of planetary destruction that was once imagined as a possible divine judgment could in fact be brought about at any time by the perfectly natural wanderings of a stray asteroid.
The “I want it now” attitude, so often deplored by spiritual pundits as a twentieth-century sin, is in my view a very healthy sign that we are beginning to be disillusioned with time-entrapment. A truly mystical paradigm has to be post-evolutionary, a paradigm of lila, divine play for its own sake, where any purposes along the line of time, great or small, are subordinate to the divine satisfaction that is always present in each eternal instant. Mystical gnosis is knowing the instant-by-instant delight of Infinite Aliveness in all manifestation, irrespective of whether, from the purely human standpoint, the manifestation is creative or destructive, growing or withering, evolving towards some noetic Omega or fading out.
My second warning is to mind your language, for the words we use are often hooks that catch us into time entrapment. For example, when we use the term “self” with a small “s” to describe individual personhood, and “Self” with a capital “S” for the fullness of God consciousness, the notion of the one gradually expanding into the other becomes almost inescapable, again concentrating attention along the time line. Mystical liberation, by contrast, is the sudden discovery that even the meanest self is already a focus of the Infinite Aliveness that is beyond any kind of selfhood.
Again, when the word “home” is used to describe eternity, there is an almost irresistible temptation to think of life as a journey of return, whereas mystical awakening for me has been like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz: the realization that I never really left home and never could. Here too T.S. Eliot has the word for it: “Home is where one starts from.”(10) Finite life is a continual instant-by-instant voyaging out from the “eternal Home” into the time process to discover new “productions of time” for eternity to love as they arise and pass away.
Against this background, the main positive advice I would give to spiritual seekers is to experiment with any practice or idea that seems interesting—which is what the Buddha urged a long time ago, though not too many of his followers have ever taken that part of his teaching seriously. Ancient traditions and modern movements alike may be very valuable as databases for new adventures, but to treat them as authorities to be obeyed is not only “unscientific”—it seems actually to go against the grain of the divine lila itself, since novelty is apparently the name of the time game . I suspect gnosis comes as “grace” because there are as many different forms of it as there are people. Yet because we’re all in this together, sharing experience is integral to its fullness. Whatever experiments you make, share your “failures,” your hints and guesses, and your awakening too if it happens, with warts-and-all honesty, because “everything that lives is holy.”