Nonduality, Oneness and Existential Aloneness

If you have experiential glimpses of unbound consciousness, if you see there are no actual boundaries to be found in the sense data, if you sense there is no outside world and that everything is interior to your own consciousness, is that nonduality?

Yes and no.

I often call this first awakening. It’s actually a more subtle, transparent form of duality.

How come? Because consciousness is not the ultimate truth. It’s the last place for the identity to hide.

At this stage oneness is something that opens up every now and then, but it has not yet devoured the person experiencing it.

As an insight, it’s the recognition of Self, Consciousness, God, and everything being That. Most of the time it’s not abiding or embodied. This is because the identity structure itself is still intact and operating, maintaining the fundamental paradigm of self. It now identifies in a way that is non-substantial, liberating and all-inclusive, taking more subtle forms ... so it may feel as if it is gone.

Prior to the deeper stages of awakening the basic mechanisms of dualistic relationship are still playing out. But now it appears as the spiritual matrix of ‘everything is consciousness’!

I have met teachers who discuss nonduality but with further interaction admit it’s not abiding for them. This can be a pitfall. Before seeing through the paradigm of identity, nonduality can solidify to a mental construct.

If you are still living reality through a view, if you can differentiate between waking, dreaming and deep sleep, if you still experience objects, if there is a sense of distance/closeness … it’s not the stateless state.

When hearing a sound, if there is a sense of locality of the sound, you being there as a ‘hearer’, the fundamental scaffolds of space-time are still filtering the experience.

The hearer, heard and hearing as one indivisible occurrence, non arising arising — just This and nothing else!

I like to define nonduality as irreversible energetic release in which the world is lost forever.

When I experienced my first glimpses of embodied nonduality, triggered by my kundalini awakening in 2013, I had no idea what had hit me. Even though these moments lasted only a few minutes, the impact on my being was massive. The nervous system and energy body was suddenly wide open, saturated with an overflow of aliveness. I felt vulnerable, speechless and raw, and got at times into situations that were not exactly safe, without being able to discern or differentiate healthy boundaries, feeling everything as an expression of fundamental oneness.

At those moments the experience of Viivi was wiped out, and consciousness had suddenly no fixed or bound location, being everywhere and everything simultaneously. It shook off the experience of Viivi as if it was a cloth it had been wearing. The environment was vibrating and felt very intimate, without a sense of separateness or distinguishable boundaries. When I looked into the eyes of the person in front of me I was literally looking into myself, and my mind ceased. The immediacy of the indivisible totality felt more real than real; the experience was very much like the Big Self that is often discussed in connection with Hindu enlightenment.

These types of experiential glimpses are a foretaste of how it feels when the 6th fetter (subjectivity) drops away, and the center of the experience permanently dissolves. It’s an energetic release in boundlessness that is quite ineffable, an unraveling that resembles a psychedelic experience but experienced fully sober, and often lasting some years. To me the shift, when it finally happened, was quite dramatic. The personal identity left the system, and the illusion of doership collapsed. Something unknowable, impersonal and mysterious was operating the body and speech, and it was clear that this is how it had always been. First the experience felt like Universal Subject, but when the innermost reflection reversed the subjectivity itself fell away, and an even more bizarre phase in the unraveling began, that I nowadays call no self.

For a year or two after the release I was immersed in a phase that was characterized by all-encompassing unity, deep grief and inexplicable loss. The memory of the separated state was gone, and I found it impossible to understand that ´others´ were not living this. This may sound strange, but it was actually one of the major challenges at that time, making it hard to have a realistic sense of relational situations. The few connections I had left from my life before fell eventually apart. These relationships had dysfunctional and toxic dynamics, and the contrast in the unfiltered state felt stark and physically distressing. However, releasing embodied behavioral patterns takes time. It’s almost as if a certain karma simply needed to be lived out, which is perhaps the key in surrender and giving birth to genuine compassion.

The karmic momentum of the experience of Viivi was still going on, even though the person was gone (or rather seen to have never existed in the first place). There was full awareness and incapacity to turn away from the experience, yet it took a moment to see the way I was compromising in the relational dynamics. When I broke the coping mechanisms that had largely created the experience of Viivi in the first place, some sort of core existential terror released and left the system.

For the first time in my life I started to experience freedom from emotional dependencies, and on a planet driven by craving and desperate need for validation, it felt wonderfully alien and spacious. I started to realize how different the experience was from the consensus reality, even though apparently there was no difference whatsoever. I begun to deeply enjoy and appreciate the paradox of aloneness.

This is the reality of ONE-ness: fundamentally speaking, we always are in a relationship only with ourselves. There is no psychological other. Grieving the loss of ´me´ was grieving the loss of everything I had wanted to experience in life, the allure of deep connection.

I tasted emptiness, again and again. I discovered pure connectivity, absence of continuity. It’s not connection in any way a self understands connection — an attempt to re-live unconscious parental wounds and unmet childhood needs in our adult relationships, or in spirituality. Looking back at the experience of self, that is what I had called love and it had been a powerful experience ... so immense that it eventually broke me. 

Even the most sublime expressions of ecstatic love seem to be aspects of the unconscious psyche illuminating, in a process of dissolution. You think you love the other, you think you love God, when in fact it’s just the fire burning ´you´ in ashes. It’s such a paradoxical dissolution. For the mystics, that kind of love seems to remain available, even after no self realization. Whenever the heart spontaneously digests shadow material, it transmutes into bliss. There can be deep devotion when this happens, a state of humbleness and awe, as the nameless ONE gives birth to itself.