There is no "your" or "my" in it.

Sure. In speaking of experience itself, we can use physical terms, but we'll never have the classic relationship of accuracy. The notion of accuracy is used in situations like comparing a sketch of your best friend to your best friend. You look back and forth between the representation and the person; you make a comparison. But in speaking about experience or the world, you have no side-by-side relationship like this. You can't go back and forth between globality and a representation of globality - because they are not independent or separable like your friend and the sketch.

Hah! OK, so how about a physicalist lie!

Let's begin with a few stories.

Yes, it is conceptual. The kind of knowledge expressed by this conclusion takes the form "X is Y" -- it's mediated by the concept of an "X" and the concept of a "Y", and by the notion of what it takes for an "X" to also be a "Y". That's a lot of concepts! Not only that, but this conceptual knowledge is conditioned by the subject/object distinction -- it's a proposition known by a knower. That's a lot dualities!

It's the mystical traditions that speak of this kind of knowledge. In the West it's called gnosis. In the East it's said that you know it by being it. In both cases, it's not propositional, not inferential -- it doesn't make a claim such as "X is Y" or "There is an X." Gnosis is not a statement or proposition. It's not the kind of thing that emerges from reasoning. This is why mystics express themselves with poetry, song, dance, emotion. Yes, the this direct experience is transformational, but it doesn't provide anything that can be used in a logical proof. That's why mystics are often sometimes called mad by those who haven't had the same experiences!

You can call upon philosophy to assist in the investigation. Philosophy doesn't try to replicate the path of mysticism. Instead, it generalizes from the gnostic experience. Philosophy examines the presuppositions that make your everyday experience seem dual and divided. When these presuppositions are seen to make no sense, they fall away. The result is that you don't feel cut off from the world, and experience doesn't seem divided.

"Objectless." "Self-knowing." Both are metaphors of slightly different flavors. They aren't meant to be taken literally. In fact, once experience doesn't seem divided and once it doesn't seem like there is anything other than consciousness, then the notion of consciousness itself will gently and peacefully dissolve.

The notion of objects isn't a block. And dealing with objects in straightforward ways like putting on clothes in the morning and driving a car to work -- these aren't blocks. But it is a block to take these objects literally as external, independent, solid chunks of reality separated from yourself.

If you regard objects as separate, then you regard yourself as separate.

This sense of separation is based on these unwarranted object-beliefs, and gains a false sense of proof from kinesthetic experiences and the feelings of bodily muscular contractions. In truth, however, the body is not separate. It is unlimited and infinitely light, as awareness. The body is not in space, it is infinitely more subtle than space.

But it is the spatial concept of physical separation that serves as the paradigm for all our notions of separation and difference. We tend to experience "difference" as spatial. This makes us think of two aspects existing on opposite sides of unbridgeable spatial gaps. Sooner or later, all personal differences may come to be thought of as spatial. Examples include feeling cut off from reality (it's out there, we're in here), feeling cut off from other people, Feeling separated from our goals and the objects of our desires, and feeling ourselves to be divided - heart from mind, mind from body, conscious from subconscious, worldly from spiritual, etc. We almost feel as though these things occupy different places.

And all of these feelings make us experience ourselves as all alone, vulnerable, and perishable.

No. You never experience spatial externality or independence. Instead, you merely accept a story about it. This can be demonstrated. Try this: Shut your eyes. Take a deep breath .... now let it out. Now try to just listen .... air-conditioning-sounds .... car sounds .... building creaking-sounds. There is no car, no building appearing as such. In fact, the sound is your only evidence of anything like an "air-conditioner" or a "car." In this moment, outside the sound, you don't have access to an air-conditioner or car. But where is the sound itself located? The sound is not on the outside or inside. It's not on the left, right, north or south. There is no dividing line between the sound and you. Of course there might be a storyline that follows the sound, a storyline that says that the car is physically located "outside." But notice that this "outside" is not evident in the sound itself.

This is the same for all the senses. Try this with vision. Place two similar coffee cups on your desk. Now, attend to the visual evidence alone. Two cylindrical patches of white, with brown between them .... No line between the colors and you .... No evidence in the colors of being "out there" .... There is no evidence of ourself being an observer "in here." Nevertheless, based on these colors and their change over time, we conclude that there are objects external to us. We accept a story that these objects are separated from us. But there's no support for this story in the visual evidence itself.

Not independent from you there aren't. It just doesn't make sense to think of things as existing apart from experience. There's no experience of something existing apart from experience. So this whole notion of independent existence can be dropped as incoherent and productive of feelings of separation.

Experience, which is always whole and non-separate.

Free, light, weightless, uncrowded, unburdened, sweet and peacefully present.

Ah! No, I don't mean like Dustin Hoffman demonstrated with his white towel in I Heart Huckabees -- "Everything's connected!!" It's closer than that, way closer. There's neither a feeling of connection or disconnection with the chair and pencil. It's all present, here, now. There's not an impression of the pencil as something on the other side of some spatial relation.

In fact, I ride a bike with no brakes, on city streets. This lightness and freedom I'm sure made it much easier. By the way, there are many others who ride the same kind of brakeless bikes. Even though they have no interest in these spiritual kinds of inquiries, they still come to experience the same lightness, in which the so-called external physical world ceases to exist as such.

Same! I've had accidents, especially rollerblading in the city, also without brakes. I have been hit by cars, other cyclists and skaters. I've crashed and had bleeding injuries. I've had sprains, damage to the ligaments, and was once not able to ride for 6 months. This is all lightness itself, having zero weight and zero external existence, just like ideas. Injury, damage to the body, pain - they're all lightness.

No, because without an outside, how can there be an inside? What I'm saying is that there's no border.

By coming to see that all experience is whole as it is, and not disconnected from you. Experience doesn't indicate objects outside of experience, so there's no gap. One key to this is not to associate unpleasantness or pain with disconnection. Allow these to be as they are without making symbols or metaphors out of them.

I experience no edges or borders or limits. I cannot experience a difference bewteen "me" and "you." Your inquiry will confirm this as "your" experience as well. It is not personal, but global, unlimited. It is already that.

That is, inquiry will reveal the lack of difference between a "you" and an "other." Ironically, the desire to attain this as a personal experience is as close to separation as you'll ever get - and even then it is not truly separate. The desire to experience what another experiences is based on unsubstantiated beliefs, all of which lead to suffering. Wanting to experience what we project "an enlightened person" experiences is the very feeling of suffering; it's not the path to the ending of suffering.

When this desire arises, do you feel more together, or more separate?

OK, let's look into it. You say don't think you are a physical object. Yet you'd like to experience what I experience. This is because you haven't fully let go of the idea that you are a physical object. You see us as two separate places where experience happens. But if there are no physical objects, then how can there be separate experiencers? You see, there's no way to make this distinction between experiencers without distinguishing them by physical characteristics.

This distinction between experiencers depends on a sense that experiencing is rooted, centered, located. And how can you localize something without treating it as a physical object? Other than the concepts of shape, boundary, extension, left/right, here/there, how can one center be marked off from another? You might not have the explicit belief that you are a physical object like a body, but in a subtle way you are still granting independent existence to physical objects.

You say that you would like to experience what I experience, correct?

But you see, any characteristic you come up with that seems to distinguish one "center of experience" from another will be a physical characteristic. Here/there, right/left, this side of the room/that side of the room. Any dividing line is based on physical properties such as line, extension, shape, contiguity to other shapes.

Yet any shape or line is merely the interface between two colors, which are nothing more than ideas. This is the same for any characteristic. Shapes are nothing other than ideas. Not just visually but even felt shapes like the shape of an arm or coffee cup are ideas. The shape is not apart from the feeling of the shape, and the feeling is not apart from awareness of the feeling. It's all awareness, all the time. This is how there are no separate physical objects. So how can there be separate experiencers?

You aren't in any shoes, even now. The shoes are in you, which is awareness.

The desire to have the same thing someone else seems to have makes people think they're missing something. They'd like to have the same kinds of experiences that they believe an "enlightened one" has. And yet enlightenment is the very lack of separateness in the first place. It's across the board. As they would say in Zen, it's just as much in the North as in the South. So it cannot be bottled up in one person, leaving the other person without. It can't be owned.

Is it like you are thinking of us in a kind of abstract way as different centers of experience, but not really located anywhere?

And in some way, you are there and I am here?

You asked how to understand this. Well, it's not a matter of taking up a new theory, but there is a conceptual structure at play here, making you think you are separate and walled off. Without this structure in the mix, there would be no presumption or experience of separation.

It's the structure underlying the notion of separate centers of experience. We can dismantle the structure by looking at the very notion of "center."

OK, let's look into just what you think this center is.

How are you thinking of a center? What divides one from another? Does it seem like there's a "here" and a "there"?

But if there is no body, how are you finding the "here"?

Can something be to the left of an idea? In front of an idea?

So if you have deconstructed your body in that you see it as nothing other than ideas, then how can ideas be close to other ideas or far from them? How can there be ideas over here or over there? How can ideas surround a center? Can you make any sense of that?

Can you put it another way? Can you give sense to the idea of a center without treating it like something related to a physical object?

So part of what I'm saying is that without buying into these physicalist words and taking them literally, there is simply no way to conceive of separate centers of experience. Hence the supposed difference between "you" and "me" dissolves.

This is why it is so important to deconstruct the experience of physical objects as objective things, independent of awareness. Our notions of differentiation tend to be based on physical characteristics, such as position or location. Let me ask - to you right now, what is the difference between you and me?

And this couldn't make any sense unless you thought of yourself, as well as me, as bodies with awareness inside them. The great advaitin Krishna Menon said that "what we take ourselves to be is what we seem to see." If you take yourself to be a body, then the world seems to be made up of physical objects. If you take yourself to be a mind, then the world seems to be made of subtle essences including minds. And if you take yourself to be awareness, then the world is experienced as nothing but awareness.

Yet you feel like you are "inside" the body?

Do you feel like you are in any specific location inside the body?

Do you feel that you are above the waist or below the waist?

OK, do you feel you are above the neck or below the neck?

OK, above the nose or below?

Can you narrow it down any more?

How big are you? What shape?

Behind the forehead? On the left, right, or in the center?

How far back from the eyes?

OK, we've found you!! A marble-sized ball about an inch behind the center of the forehead!

Now - what is it that this marble appears to?

Well, as we talk about this, does the little marble seem to appear as an image?

So if this image is appearing, what is it appearing to? That is, it doesn't seem like the marble is doing the seeing - it seems like the marble is being seen.

Yes, based on a few habitual things, such as the prominence of the visual sense over hearing, taste and smell. Also based on the association that arises over time between thinking of one's self and the subtle muscular contractions in the forehead region. It makes us think that this is where we are.

But now, think of the marble image, and that which is aware of the marble image. If you had to place your true self on one side or the other, would you be on the side that is seeing? Or the side that is being seen?

OK, the seeing of the marble - think about this seeing. As the seeing arises, does the seeing have a location?

That's it! Nothing else has a location either. And that awareness in which these arise is your Self. It is the non-separate Self of all.

That's it! Nothing else has a location either. And that awareness in which these arise is your Self. It is the non-separate Self of all.

Sometimes it's confusing to encounter nondual teachings. Many varieties of nondual teachings seem to imply that there is simply no free will, no mind, no people, and no objects. We often just don't know what to say.

If the teachings are then taken at face value, what about those mundane things like paying taxes, raising children, eating dinner and getting a haircut? Do we somehow stop doing these things now that we've ingested a convincing teaching that they don't exist? An acquaintance of mine was recently puzzling over the question of freedom of choice. He was left thinking, "If there's no choice, then lots of everyday stuff doesn't make very much sense."

Talk normally! As one becomes attracted to nondual teachings, one's relationship to them deepens. The teachings can begin as an idealization, or as an article of faith based on the words of a beloved teacher. The teachings might then grow to become a confidently-held belief not depending on another person, then later a matter of inference or demonstration, or even a spontaneous, noninferential experience. And then at some point it is unshakably realized that experience (which cannot be "your experience" or "my experience") was never characterized by duality or separation in the first place.

This is because virtually every word you have ingested from these teachers was recorded, carefully selected, and extracted from teaching contexts. The result is the projection of an image. It's not so common to chatter about one's hygiene, or ashram food-stocks while surrounded by people and conversing about nonduality.... But it happens at other times that aren't recorded in those same books.

It becomes a matter of language and context. Multi-lingual people don't speak the same language or dialect all the time in every situation. A physicist might devote his life to scientific research, but you can be sure he doesn't tell the traffic cop,

"I didn't run a red light, because
subatomic particles are all there is."

There's no conflict, no "backsliding" no falling into anything by using everyday language instead of "borderless space" language. But imagine the social conflicts if you somehow ended up talking "borderless space" in all situations.

There is simply no need to use one rigid vocabulary for every situation. It depends on how you're speaking at that moment. In the Jewish, Advaitin, and Buddhist teachings, there is a profound insight:

Not believing in things, yet
speaking the language of things.

"Thing-talk" is a kind of conceptual and social shorthand that makes life much smoother. Refusing to use thing-talk leads to foolishness. And not crazy-wisdom, sagelike foolishness, but Beavis 'n' Butthead slacker-foolishness:

"Pay my restaurant check? No way - that would require spatial separation, and there isn't any separation."

This almost sounds as if you're trying to impress upon others that you have a deep realization. There's a name for that kind of talk - the Lucknow Disease.

Sure! There's no philosophical conflict. You don't lose any insights or realizations. You won't lose points. No one is keeping score.

Contexts have different vocabularies. In the lab, you might use the "everything- is-energy" vocabulary. In court testifying as a witness you might use everyday observational terms. While discussing meditation and relaxing into space, you'll perhaps use some yogic, advaitic, spiritual, and geometric terms. In psychology class you might use the language that allows for choice, cognition, and willed action.

In a Philosophy 101 class, you can argue about the existence of choice, but in an Ethics 101 class, the notions of morals and ethics have their own internal consistency, and those terms tend to get used in that context.

All of these different language-groupings have their consistency and coherence. Only if you imperialize your own deep-insight-language on other situations is there a "doesn't-make-sense" conflict.

A deep insight, even an intellectual, inferential insight, can free you from a heavy attachment to views as well as to things. It makes you flexible and non-resistant to contextual shadings. Spontaneity and acceptance operate freely.

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NOTE: The Lucknow Disease
Linguistic malady befalling seekers at neo-advaita satsangs, from a manner of speech first observed in Lucknow, India in the early 1990's. It is characterized by never using the word "I." Avoidance of the "I-word" is to demonstrate to one's self but mostly to others that there is no longer any ego or sense of self here. Instead of using the word "I" in sentences, Lucknow Disease sufferers say things like "This form is going to the bathroom." The irony of the Lucknow Disease is that it only strikes when the person's sense of self is present and poorly integrated. It has never been observed in those whose sense of self is well-integrated - or absent.    (Back to How Should I Talk?)

What is it that you'd like to be "done" with?

How do you visualize this non-suffering?

Life without death? Health without disease? They contain each other. You can't hold a one-ended stick.

The famous stories we read are not about life without birth, illness, death, or unpleasantness. How can there be life without its ups and downs? Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ramakrishna, Suzuki Roshi were all struck with cancer. Many teachers and expositors of profound nondual teachings have had family problems, financial problems, health problems, emotional problems.

Good point! Depends upon where you, the interpreter, place the "I".   If you place the "I" at Nisargadatta, then there was a body, with cancer and pain. If Nisargadatta (or any person) is the center of that world, then there is a lot wrong in it.

But if you place the "I" at That which witnesses what occurs, then there is nothing wrong. Nothing happening at all. And nothing missing. It isn't personal. This "I" is the being of Nisargadatta, you, me, all else. This is where the "I" has always been. It is pure and untouched, and always available.

You can't see it - it sees you. Awareness sees you. Just like you see your arm, Awareness sees the body/mind you take as yourself. Just like your own seeming passage from waking to deep sleep and back to waking. In deep sleep, there is no evidence that the world or the body is present. That is, the body can't be said to be there. Yet there's no sense that "you" are ever missing. Your true "I" does not depend on phenomenal activity to be present. Actually, your true I is not really "present" as in the opposite of "absent." Rather, it is Presence itself.

There's no need for this to be known by a person. There is actually no possibility that this can be comprehended or held by a person. Personal grokking is just another coming-and-going experience, like a mood or a runny nose.

If you seek this experience, then do what many others have done -- inquire deeply into the supposed makeup of a person. Into the makeup of of life, death, of that which you consider yourself. Of that which would supposedly benefit by "knowing." Be as intensely motivated to look into these matters as you would be to gasp for air after being held under water. Look everywhere, don't stop if it gets rough. The search is sweet, but it is not comfortable or reassuring to the assembly labeled as the person. Be unafraid of what might come up.

But be aware that there's nothing in it for "you." You won't have a feeling of pride or accomplishment. And to refer back to our earlier conversation about IT being comprehended by a person - there's no need, and no possibility that this happen. If it seems like you "got it," then you haven't got it.

Kind of like wanting to be a member of an elite club? If you look closely at your reasons for desiring this, does it have to do with wanting recognition or wanting to be treated in a certain way?

This has to do with the marketing and the social construction of these teachings. Have you noticed the contexts where these stories are trotted out? If in a book or website, it is most often in the "advertising" part of the presentation, and not in the actual teaching itself. If there is understanding, why does it matter if it came in one large piece or many small pieces? You can get just as wet in a long mist as you can in a short storm. But storms sell better. Many of them are manufactured for that very reason, just like in movie studios.

I know, and it's in the advertising part of the website, not in any of the serious teachings. It's another case of social construction. The events in that story took place many years before they gelled as a "set-piece" narrative. The gelling happened only in a social context, which is how "nothing" becomes "something." When I was doing inquiry, it was on my own. None of my friends at the time were into anything like that. My only companions were books. The carrie dalmost nothing along these lines. I wasn't part of a spiritual social context in which a premium is placed on certain stories, and where there is lots of comparison of people and states.

And then, many years after the events, someone asked me on an internet list what I attended to as a practice. I said "nothing," and to make linguistic sense in a public context as to "why not," I related those events. To me they had nothing more to do with "things as is" than anything else did. But I had learned enough in the intervening years about these stories to see what made sense to people. So this is what I spoke. It soon became regarded as a fixed thing, as an "enlightenment event," and people began to regard me differently. I came to find out that people consume these stories with even more fascination than they consume nondual teachings!

But to desire a story like this for one's own is the result of a misunderstanding.

It constructs a subtle personal agenda, which pretty much precludes insight. It's like trying to become sexually aroused by comparing one's state with others' states. It just doesn't work like that. The same for "being done." In any of the great descriptions of enlightenment, your freedom is freedom from agendas. It's not about being a person who has a story to tell. That makes no sense. Rather, it's that you, as you truly are, are free from the assumptions and limitations of personhood. The person is never free of story. But you, as your true nature, are prior to story. This is freedom.

This freedom is now. It never becomes achieved, because from the get-go it is never unaccomplished. There is no need to "see" this or "know" this or "possess" this. Rather, it possesses you. Even now. No separate experience proves or establishes this. No separate experience can overturn it.

On the other hand, experiences themselves come and go. Any experience, no matter how much it's immortalized in books and spiritual stories, has no meaning apart from the reference point of a person. It has no more significance than the person has. And of course the person comes and goes as well. Not only in birth and death, but the coming and going is in each moment. Even in everyday terms, there's no evidence that "your" person is there at all. When you walk, you don't witness yourself walking, like seeing a DVD. And if you see a movie of "yourself" walking, it's not "you," it's a body on a screen. You never experience yourself doing anything. There's just walking, and sitting, and eating, and loving, etc., for all of experience.

Even to "know" this or to "realize" this is another experience. Enlightenment never pertains to a person in the first place. Enlightenment is not "in" the now. It is this now-ness, this freedom itself. It can't be bottled up and put on a shelf, confined to one person rather than another, or transmitted. It's already across the board. It's now wherever you point, un-interrupted, without gaps.

It's not that "everyone is already enlightened." Rather, people and things are appearances in light.

If you find yourself wanting some experience to confirm this, you are actually changing the subject. It is not this now-ness that you are addressing, but some ordinary human need. Human needs are addressed by human endeavors. Just like eating addresses hunger and community addresses loneliness. The needs that express themselves through a search for an "enlightenment experience" are not well addressed through nondual inquiry. But these needs are very efficiently satisfied if you gain clarity on the needs themselves and pursue the most direct route.

The "enlightenment" concept is socially constructed. No one imagines being enlightened on a desert island. No one imagines that other people would be totally oblivious, treating you the same old way as before. The way the term works, it functions like currency in social contexts, especially where comparative interpersonal assessments come into play. It is the ultimate "arriving" and being seen as arriving.

The term's vagueness allows it to be filled-in with whatever the heart desires, and most of the visualizations tend to be social. Of course this is largely due to social precedent. When you think of others to whom the "E" term has been applied, you notice that they well known personages surrounded by others. The social trappings tend to get internalized, buried into the very notion itself. So when we test the concept against ourselves, these social elements are already in the picture.

Even the classic "climbing the mountain" metaphor has its social elements. Enlightenment is cast as the ultimate ascent up Mount Everest. When "done," you set your flag on top, kick back and rest forever. The sub-zero cold doesn't bother you, and you no longer need food. But wait! You're not alone! You enjoy the view with other luminaries, everyone pumped up by the endorphin-rush of the climb. Often, part of the package is imagining being seen by others who haven't gotten so far up the mountain.

There certainly are teachings that construct an enlightenment package like this. But you can learn a lot by noticing the context. That is, take a close look at just where and when the enlightenment-talk occurs. If you're reading a book or website, it is most often in the "advertising" portion. But the more deeply you get into the teachings themselves, the less you hear about "enlightenment." Its socially-constructed nature is taken advantage of to interest you in the rest.

I have a friend who spent five years, six days a week with a famous American teacher. This teacher uses the "Enlightenment" term more often than anyone else on the planet. In public talks and popular books, that is! But in the teacher's school and communities, "enlightenment" is never heard in the day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year teachings. So one day after about five years, my friend asked the organization's second-in-command whether anyone had become enlightened while working with this teacher. The second-in-command answered "Enlightened? No. Only the Teacher Himself."

It's a sizzle used to sell a steak.