Non-dualistic spirituality, third eye openings, ego death, and learning to swim in “grayland”.
I have heard people, myself included, complain about how the “problem” with religion, politics, media, the different generations, and the world at large, is dualistic thinking. At the heart of conflict and warfare is our propensity to think in absolutes, to cling to our own belief systems while vilifying belief systems that contradict our own. Dualistic thinking is self-righteousness in action. “I am good, you are bad”, “I am right, you are wrong”, “This is beneficial, that is detrimental”, “This is an asset, that is a liability”, “I failed, I succeeded”, “It’s all or nothing”.
Our need to see ourselves as good, as righteous, noble, whole, as having chosen the correct path, spouse, job, way of life, is so powerful that it blinds us to the fact that the idea of goodness or righteousness is subjective and ever-changing. What may seem cruel in one circumstance (say killing a kitten) might be kind in another (killing a kitten who is in immense pain but unable to die). The field of ethics — a branch of philosophy that “involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior” — has given us an extensive lexicon (eco-friendly versus eco-unfriendly, moderate versus fundamentalist, organic versus inorganic, woke versus prehistoric, addictive versus recreational, legal versus illegal, feminist versus fourth wave feminist, socialist versus capitalist, conservative versus liberal, atheist versus theist, rich versus poor) that we can conveniently use to place individuals, groups, and ideas into boxes. The trouble with boxes is that while they create order and make things look neat, their job is to segregate, divide, and isolate. Boxes separate rather than unify, confine rather than liberate.
I’m reading a book called “The Naked Now: Learning to See As the Mystics See” by Franciscan priest and author Richard Rohr. In it, Rohr speaks a great deal about non-dualistic spirituality, and how non-dualistic, or non-binary perception is the equivalent of what the Eastern esoteric and mystery schools refer to as the Third Eye. Quite simply put, to open one’s Third Eye, or to “be enlightened” requires a shift from thinking in black-and-white to thinking in gray. The mystic’s call therefore, is to give up dualistic thinking and embrace non-dualism, or paradox.
When I was a troubled, emotionally, and mentally unstable youth, I felt like I was “all bad” and “all wrong”. As I found my footing in the world, and received an education — both formally and through the school of life — I started to think that I was “almost all good” or “right most of the time”. Then it occurred to me: this pulpit-style of thinking reminded me of the adults, who in my youth, I had seen as the cause of my troubles. Today, I realize that the times in my life when I had felt “all wrong” had served me as well, if not better, than the times in my life when I had felt “alright”. My sins had become my salvation.
I still engage in dualistic thinking, but am aware I’m doing so when I catch myself assuming I know better than the other person. Embracing paradox for me involves understanding that something or someone who appears disagreeable to me today might be agreeable to me tomorrow, so I can only hold my convictions lightly. This choosing of gray over black-and-white is difficult because it means I have to be OK with uncertainty, with the tension of doubt, and with unresolved internal conflict. Non-dualism requires that I let go of my instinctual need to control my environment, those around me, and my constructed reality. Not being able to say with absolute certainty that my way of life, my way of thinking is the best way (or even the best way for me), means that there just might be another way which I haven’t yet tried that could actually bring me more fulfillment than I am experiencing right now. And if I have to admit this, then the sense of self-satisfaction I experience from “being me” is threatened. I can no longer bask in the glory of this sense of self that I have spent a lifetime creating, I can no longer be reassured by the existence of my own personal identity, my unique “Michele-ness”. This loss of self feels so terrifying that it makes perfect sense why we would all want to just stick everyone and everything into boxes. Because it is only by creating those boxes and putting things in them that I can see “me” in my carefully crafted “Michele” box.
Mystics of all traditions speak of non-dualism because it is a necessary companion to ego-death — the process of the disintegration of personal identity, the destruction of the social and psychological constructs of “I”. This is scary stuff because it removes the ground from under our feet, and presents us with the proposition that what we think of as reality might not be real after all — how discombobulating!
As a teenager, a friend who did a lot of LSD used to talk about how he was afraid that if he had a bad trip, he might end up in “grayland”. I asked him to explain. “Grayland’s the nuthouse,” he said.
Looking back, I think it’s ironic that the word gray was used as a metaphor for insanity. Perhaps this is because both being insane and living paradoxically require the suspension of logic and established “truths”. But isn’t it so, that in order to dive into the extraordinary, to access heightened states of consciousness, one ought to surrender things like national, religious, political, vocational, racial, gender, cultural, ideological, and personal identity – substances not of the soul but merely the composite of its container?
Joseph Campbell once said, “The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight”. As I move from black-and-white to gray, I hope that I can journey through the second half of my life more like the latter.
Spirituality
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