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Two Views of Nonduality

It is all one!” has been the exclamation of mystics throughout the ages. It is a pinnacle, an ultimate revelation of spiritual aspiration. Yet spiritual oneness has been understood, expressed, and taught quite differently within different traditions. It has been understood as oneness with God, as an ecstatic merging with the vibrations of the universe, as a loss of self in the other, and as a gaining of Self that encompasses all otherness. It has been taught as a stopping of one’s thought and emotions, even as the disappearance of all perception of form, and it has been taught as the most fluid freedom of thought and feeling, as the sharpest perception of objects and events. All of these perspectives and more have been offered by different teachers, spiritual texts, and traditions as nonduality.

As I will describe in this chapter, most of the teachings on nonduality can be divided into two main categories: those that recognize an essence or ground of being that is the basis of the experience of oneness and those that claim that there is no ground, only the constantly changing flux of experience. Tibetan Buddhist scholars have neatly classified the first as “empty of other” (Tibetan: shentong) and the second as “empty of itself” (Tibetan: rangtong).1 These two points of view also appear in both ancient Greek and contemporary Western philosophy, but it is the Tibetan Buddhists who have produced a neat and explicit division between the two. Although the main divisions within Hindu philosophies concern the relationship of ultimate reality to our material world, there too we can find a distinction in the teachings about whether or not there is a knowable, fundamental ground.

I am not presenting these two views in order to be argumentative. Within Tibetan Buddhism this is a complex subject, at times involving political and doctrinal concerns and also giving rise to attempts to integrate the two views, saying that they are really the same or that they go to the same endpoint. But of greater interest to me and, I believe, of relevance to the contemporary spiritual seeker, is that these are really two distinct perspectives. They each offer a different understanding of our essential nature and how to uncover it. However, especially among New Age teachers in the West today, one or the other view is often taught simply as nonduality. This means that the spiritual seeker has no options and can only accept their teacher’s particular view. But given the choice, some people will naturally be drawn to go more deeply into the experience of a world that is empty except for the constantly changing flux of experience, and others will be drawn, as I have been, to explore more fully a unifying ground that pervades and encompasses this constant change.

The differences between traditional conceptions of nonduality are important for the spiritual student. They have significant bearing on the direction and goals of our spiritual realization, such as whether nonduality means that we still have emotions, whether we can embody nonduality, whether we can have relationships in nonduality, and even whether we continue to exist as distinct human beings.

It may be easy for us, with all the world’s traditions at our fingertips, to get lost in a labyrinth of spiritual teachings, riddled with conflicting signposts. I have included a description of these two categories of nonduality in this book partly to help guide the reader in the direction they wish to go and also to explain why the Realization Process is aligned with the shentong “empty of other” perspective. The purpose of the practices presented here is to uncover fundamental consciousness as the foundational ground of our being. This ground can be called the essence of our being because it is experienced as unchanging and unmoving. Unlike all of the changing content of our experience, it is not constructed or imagined—it is revealed as we refine and deepen our attunement to ourselves.

As the most subtle potential of our own being, nondual realization can be nurtured within a religious structure, cultivated without a traditional structure, or even discovered spontaneously. For most of us, even if we have had a spontaneous revelation of oneness, we need some sort of guidance, some sort of practice in order to experience nonduality as our stable, ongoing reality. Many of these practices can be found within religious traditions, especially within the structures of Buddhism and Hinduism. However, the understanding and method that I present in this book are not part of a religious tradition. They are based on my own realization and on the needs and discoveries of my students. However, many of my students have used the Realization Process practices to deepen their realization within their own religious tradition.

Like most contemporary Western nonduality teachers, I have spent many years in the study and practice of Asian spiritual traditions, mainly the Mahamudra and Dzogchen teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and the Hindu teachings of Advaita Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism. They have had a profound influence on me and, I believe, on much of the spiritually awakened elements of our society. What I found especially useful in these traditions was the confirmation and enrichment of the spiritual experience that I had privately treasured, in its nascent form, since my childhood. As a child, I glimpsed what appeared to be a numinous presence in the sky and trees in my backyard. As an adult, during the intense inward process of healing myself of a back injury that had stopped my career as a dancer in its tracks, I found this subtle consciousness again. I no longer experienced it as a presence separate from myself but as the foundation of my own being. But I felt that I recognized it from my childhood, as if it had always been there and was now more clearly revealed.

The experience of fundamental consciousness can seem very odd. It reveals one’s own being and one’s environment as both substantial and made of empty, luminous space at the same time. In the Buddhist and Hindu literature, I found descriptions of this odd experience that seemed to resemble my own, as well as guidance for deepening and stabilizing that realization. I felt assurance that an experience that seemed more subtle and more personal to me than my own breath has been known, described, and valued for thousands of years.

Having had some experience of fundamental consciousness emerge during my process of self-healing, I was more interested, from the start of my spiritual path, in accounts from those teachings that pointed to a fundamental ground of being than those that denied it. I searched the spiritual literature for any mention of this ground.

Although the rangtong “empty of itself” perspective is more widely known in the West than the shentong, we find references to a unified ground of consciousness in both the Advaita Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism philosophies of Hinduism and in some teachings, or some interpretations of the teachings, within Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and the Mahamudra and Dzogchen philosophies of Tibetan Buddhism. As you will see in the quotes below, this ground is called by a variety of names, including Buddha-nature, Self, pure consciousness, primordial mind, and the clear light of wisdom mind. The literature of these spiritual traditions also contains many firsthand accounts by spiritual sages expressing delight in knowing themselves as this spiritual foundation. Even though these accounts come from different traditions with different and even conflicting philosophical and metaphysical systems, the experience they depict appears to be recognizably the same.

Here, for example, are two quotes from the fourteenth-century Tibetan Buddhist teacher Longchen Rabjam, also known as Longchenpa. He wrote, “Within the spacious expanse, the spacious expanse, the spacious expanse, I Longchen Rabjam, for whom the lucid expanse of being is infinite, experience everything as embraced within a blissful expanse, a single nondual expanse”2 and “Mind itself—that is, the nature of awakened mind—is pure like space, and so is without birth or death . . . it is unchanging, without transition, spontaneously present, and uncompounded.”3

And this is from Shankara, the ninth-century teacher of Advaita Vedanta: “I am the Supreme Brahman which is pure consciousness, always clearly manifest, unborn, one only, imperishable, unattached, and all-pervading and non-dual.”4

This final quote is from a root text of the Kashmir Shaivism philosophy: “The individual mind intently entering into the universal light of foundational consciousness sees the entire universe as saturated with that consciousness.”5

For me, the similarity of these descriptions of a pervasive, luminous consciousness at the base of one’s own mind and identity, affirms that it is an experience available to all of us. We can each reach this subtle foundational ground of our being; it is our actual nature, our innate potential as human beings.

Choices

The complexity within Asian religion was first illustrated to me by an event in my early spiritual training. It was 1981 and I was living at a Zen monastery in upstate New York. The residents, around thirty of us, were huddled around a clunky small-screened television. We were watching videos of a series of lectures that had recently been given by the Dalai Lama on his first tour of the United States.

He was mesmerizing. Although he was speaking in Tibetan, a language unfamiliar to all of us there, we were pulled as one into the concentrated thought and powerful love that he conveyed in his voice and presence. Yet I found what he was saying, via his translator, to be less than compelling. It had a great deal to do with tables and how they were comprised of different parts that could themselves be divided into different parts, and it concluded finally that there was really no such thing as a table, beyond the meaning attributed to this assemblage of parts by human beings.

There was no essence of tableness within the table. I later heard this articulated as the “nonfindability of inherent reality in objects and persons from their own side.” This was not really breaking news to my postmodern sensibility. I had grown up knowing that all of our experience is filtered through our subjective templates and interpretations. That, as Gertrude Stein put it, “There is no there, there.” I also understood that as a method of spiritual practice, this was meant to help us achieve a sense of nongrasping and lead to a more direct, vivid experience of life, relatively unobscured by mental elaboration.

However, I felt instinctively that this deconstruction of the objective world had little bearing for my own spiritual path. It did not shed light for me on the experience of numinous presence that I had felt in the sky as a very young child or that I later felt in my body when I was a young dancer or that I was now beginning to experience pervading not only my body but the world around me.

After months of intensive meditation practice at the monastery, I was experiencing an intriguing sense of weightlessness, of transparency that seemed to coexist with the substance of the world. If we were going to talk about tables, I wanted to know why the table seemed to be made of empty luminous space while still being a table. It was my intimation of and my attraction to the mysterious transparency of the world that had brought me to live at a Zen monastery.

As the Dalai Lama ended his talk, I felt let down. I even thought, “Well, so much for Buddhism.” Then he said, “This that I have just explained to you is a very profound Buddhist philosophy. If it interests you, you should dedicate the remainder of your life to trying to understand it. But if it doesn’t interest you,” and here he looked straight at us with a mischievous smile, “Buddhism has many other philosophies that might interest you more.”

After his long, passionate discourse on what I would later learn was the perspective of his own Gelugpa sect, I found his ending on this democratic note to be moving as well as instructive. It pointed out to me that people are instinctively drawn to particular philosophies, that we are each more compatible with some spiritual approaches than others. We need to follow our own lights to get to the path that feels right, and to do that, we need to understand the differences between the various paths and philosophies. This is especially true today when every possible point of view is available, and when spiritual teachings are often promoted with persuasive commercial skill.

Nonduality Perspectives

Nonduality has become a popular teaching in the contemporary spiritual field. Although there are varying, conflicting perspectives and practices now offered as nonduality, these teachings also have important elements in common. They all view human beings as intrinsically endowed with the means to understand or even to realize the primary nature of reality. For most nondualists, ultimate reality is accessible through a deepening and refining of our own experience. I once heard an Indian teacher say, “First you are in the light, then the light is in you, then you and the light are the same.” Nondual realization is this third stage of understanding.

The difference between the two main categories of nondual teachings is in what they consider to be ultimate reality. This distinction affects the types of practices employed to realize nonduality and the beliefs and values that the spiritual aspirant will cultivate in order to succeed on that path.

In the rangtong “empty-of-itself” view, the approach to realization is usually cognitive or analytical, like the Dalai Lama’s mental exercise of taking apart the table. It is the cultivation of an understanding of the impermanent, constructed nature of everything we experience. It emphasizes the principle of codependent origination—that everything we experience arises from previous causes. It also seeks to eliminate mental elaboration, such as the attribution of names and associations to objects, by understanding the arbitrary, subjective nature of this mental elaboration. Because of the impermanent, cause-dependent, compounded and subjectively interpreted nature of objects and people, it considers them to be illusory, as having no findable, true existence.

Cultivating this perspective can help us let go, to some extent, of our defensive grip on ourselves. If we do not really exist, what is there to protect? With this understanding, we can allow the river of life to flow and change. Stripped of mental elaboration, we can experience a bright, clear display of phenomena, an unclouded alertness to the present moment. One of the main goals of this practice is to overcome the suffering that comes from attachment, from trying to grasp on to what is essentially impermanent.

Here is a quote from the early Buddhist Bahiya Sutta that states this clearly:

This time the Buddha relented and said, “Well then Bahiya, you should train yourself like this: whenever you see a form, simply see; whenever you hear a sound, simply hear; whenever you smell an aroma, simply smell; whenever you taste a flavor, simply taste; whenever you feel a sensation, simply feel; whenever a thought arises, let it be just a thought. Then ‘you’ will not exist; whenever you do not exist, you will not be found in this world, another world, or in between. That is the end of suffering.”6

A common practice in Advaita Vedanta is a mental exercise called “not this, not this” or neti neti, in which the practitioner carefully recognizes, “I am not my sensations, not my emotions, not my thoughts.” For some teachers and their students, this practice leads to where the Buddhist cognitive practices lead, with nothing left, nothing real.

However, this same Advaita Vedantic practice is sometimes taught as leading to an understanding that there is a dimension that we really are, after eliminating our identity with our changing thoughts, feelings, and sensations. This is a ground of pure (unmodified) consciousness or Self that is not identified with the mentally constructed ideas of oneself or with the flux of emotions, sensations, and thoughts. It leads to the shentong “empty-of-other” view of an unmodified, unconstructed ground of identity. The shentong teachings, however, usually require meditation in order to reveal the actual experience, the actual realization, of this fundamental ground. We cannot reach this ground through our intellect alone. We need to open to it throughout our whole body and being.

One of my favorite descriptions of the shentong view comes from the contemporary Tibetan teacher Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche. He claims that although all of the content of our experience is conceptually constructed and can therefore be viewed as not truly existent, the essence of life is unconstructed and therefore does truly exist. He writes, “It is completely free from any conceptualizing process and knows in a way that is completely foreign to the conceptual mind. It is completely unimaginable in fact. That is why it can be said to truly exist.”

He also says, “The essence of the non-conceptual Wisdom mind cannot be grasped by the conceptual mind and so, from the point of view of the conceptual mind, it is without essence; from its own point of view it is absolute reality.”7

Both the rangtong and shentong paths teach that we are not who we think we are and that the world is not what we think it is. But they differ significantly in their view of what we actually are and what the world actually is.

There have been attempts over the centuries to reconcile the two views, to claim that they are really both getting to the same thing. But, in general, each of the two schools of thought just thinks the other is wrong. They each like to claim that the other is a preparation for getting to their own view. The rangtong adherents think that the teaching of Buddha-nature, or a ground consciousness, is just reassurance for people who are not yet ready to face that there is nothing there. And the shentong adherents feel that the no-ground teaching is for students who are still so identified with their constructed identity that they need to be told it is all an illusion, that there is really nothing there to grasp on to, before they can be open enough to realize the subtle ground of their being.

That said, both views are helpful in pointing out each other’s potential pitfalls. There is a danger, in the shentong view, that students will attempt to grasp on to, or to imagine, the pervasive space of fundamental consciousness, instead of opening to it. It can become an object of our awareness, like any other object, rather than realized as our own bare subjectivity. And there is a danger for adherents of the rangtong view that they will remain fixed in an intellectual stance that limits the perceptual immediacy that they seek. They also may never arrive at the actual experience of oneness that arises when we uncover the ground of our being.

In the West, the rangtong teaching of no ground is so much more prevalent than the shentong view that I have heard even many Buddhist teachers refer to it as the only view, as “what Buddhism says.” In the psychotherapy field, the dominant understanding of the human psyche has been that it is made of mental constructs and nothing else. We form templates, or schema, based on our earliest experiences, which continue to shape our experience of ourselves and our world for the rest of our lives. With just a few exceptions, contemporary psychotherapists have either denied or ignored the possibility of a unified ground of being beyond these constructs. This common view among psychotherapists meant that as Buddhism became popular in the West, many therapists readily embraced and integrated into their work the rangtong denial of a foundational, unified ground of being.

The popularity of mindfulness forms of meditation and their incorporation into Western psychotherapy modalities, even though they are focused on bodily experience, has in general supported Western psychotherapy’s rejection of an essence or ground of being. Mindfulness techniques cultivate the ability to observe even tiny shifts in one’s experience. However, the focus of these practices is specifically on the content of experience. With few exceptions, they do not provide instructions for accessing a unified ground of consciousness.

As an example of how fully the Buddhist “empty of itself” philosophy has been accepted in Western psychology, here is a quote from Peter Levine, one of the most influential contemporary psychotherapists:

Paradoxically, the only way that we can know ourselves is in learning to be mindfully aware of the moment-to-moment goings-on of our body and mind as they exist through various situations occurring in time. We have no experience of anything that is permanent or independent of this. Thus there is no ego or self, just a counterfeit construction. While counterintuitive to most of us, this is common “knowledge” to highly experienced meditators.8

However, this is not the knowledge or experience of all highly experienced meditators. Highly experienced meditators have been debating exactly this point for many centuries.

As a teacher of fundamental consciousness, I think that the rangtong view may be better known than the shentong because it is simply easier for many people to do the conceptual deconstructive work of disassembling a table into parts than the fine attunement work of actually experiencing the table as made of the same consciousness as their own being. To know ourselves and our environment as pervaded by fundamental consciousness requires us to thoroughly transform ourselves. It is not only a cognitive procedure but a process of deep inward contact, of subtle, precise attunement to the innermost core of our being. In general, as a culture, we are far more familiar with our cognitive processes than with deepening and refining our contact with ourselves. And in my work as a psychotherapist, I have seen that the suppression of thoughts and feelings, even of the sense of our own existence, is how many of us protected ourselves when we were vulnerable children and that we may utilize this same familiar ability in an attempt to follow the advice, quoted above, that was given to Bahiya.

It is undoubtedly true that life is constantly changing, that everything that occurs does so as a result of something occurring before it and that all things exist in an interrelated web of objects and meanings.

It is important and awe-inspiring to understand that we are part of this web of existence, that even our smallest action can have far-reaching repercussions. But for me, this intellectual recognition of our place in the universe is not as liberating as the actual experience of oneness that occurs when we open to the undivided ground of consciousness pervading everywhere. As I will describe later in this book, as fundamental consciousness we can discern even more clearly the changing flux of experience. But the foundation of our being, in my experience, is not just emptiness. It is experienced as a blend of emptiness and presence and some element that defies language and feels like existence itself.

Although my work as a nonduality teacher is aligned with the shentong view, I do not speak of fundamental consciousness as a metaphysical reality. I cannot claim to know what it is. Buddhists often speak of it as the nature of the mind, while many Hindu philosophers have asserted that it is the nature of the universe. Still others claim that we have imagined the universe into being and that therefore the base of the mind and the universe are the same.

In the Realization Process, I teach that fundamental consciousness is an experience, but an experience like no other. We uncover it rather than create it. The Buddhists say that it is “self-knowing.” It is not something that we are conscious of as an object; rather it occurs when consciousness becomes conscious of itself. The twentieth-century philosopher Nishitani called it our “primordial subjectivity.”9

But these are just words until you experience it yourself. That is why I almost never speak or write about fundamental consciousness without including practices for the reader to reach this inner depth within themselves, as I do in this book.

Blackstone, Judith, Ph.D. The Fullness of the Ground (Chapter One). Sounds True. Kindle Edition.