Experiments With Non Dual Meditation

I’ve been trying out different kinds of meditative practices of late, with a particular focus on non-dual mediation. This is very much an early report, as I’ve had some initial success, but it’s not yet transformed into a full-time perception of non-duality.

So your first question is probably: What the heck is this “non-dual meditation”? Great question! Unfortunately, there’s not a simple answer - or at least, there is a simple answer, it’s just radically incomplete.

The simple answer goes something like this: we tend to go about our lives imagining there’s a hard boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world. There is “us”, and there is “all the other stuff”. At one level, this is true, of course: there are things inside our skin - and maybe including the skin itself as part of us, in this view - and there is everything else, outside our skin.¹

Non-dual meditation is about coming to see the world in a different way - in a way that says this boundary is very fuzzy, or maybe even not there at all. It’s a way of intentionally bringing about this kind of felt experience, and maybe even one day having it be your default way of being in the world.

The reason you’d want to do this is that this self/other distinction is by far from the only duality that we impose upon the world. For example, we often impose a view of “good” and “bad” on emotions, people, and things. We’re trying to break that down as well. And we’re not trying to do this just in an intellectual way - feeling the truth in a bad experience, or the sacred in the mundanity of everyday. We take the intellectual route when we say “oh I can see how that horrible thing that happened has made me a better person”. This is perhaps true, but there’s another way of viewing it: seeing that there are not two things mixed in there at all, just one unblended unity.

You remember raspberry ripple ice cream? Was vanilla with raspberry swirled through it, or raspberry with vanilla swirled in? Non duality says you can see it more usefully as just one thing.

If you’re on the verge of giving up on this by now, then we are back to “there is no simple answer”! It’s famously hard to articulate, but you may have had glimpses of it when you’ve been looking at a beautiful sunset, or when you’ve been freshly in love, or when you’ve been dancing in a crowd with others at a gig. It’s a unity of yourself with the world, in its purest form. Hard to grapple down into words, but beautiful when you feel it.