Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

Oneness, duality and living from the heart

The “path” is quite complicated, is it not?  Looking and searching both without, in teachers, books, and teachings, as well as inwards in meditation, psychotherapy, and even drugs for something….  But what is it?  New “spiritual” experiences, finding love, either in receiving or giving it, finding a “nondual” state, either for a moment or permanently, or a sense of completion and coming home?  Confusion reigns.

But this is all in the mind, this sense of lacking, needing something more.  Even with a lover or guru, it is fixation on the other as an image in the mind attached to a feeling near the heart that we interpret as longing, needing, jealousy.

But, when we are in no mind, when the mind drops and we are in the heart itself rather than watching the heart-sense, life is effortless. Perfect, accepting.

But is it possible really to love another unless we allow dualism?  Without dualism the other is me or us, and from this position, we can only see ourselves and all emotions that arise are from our own limited me sense.  The One is no more than “me” enlarged to include everything, including our beloved. Our beloved, whatever or whomever, is me.

To truly love another, we must be able to see them as the “other,” with their separateness not dependent on “me,” with their own wants and emotional needs, their own life trajectory.  We have to be able to see them as they are and even better, to see them as they see themselves.  We need to feel this space between us even if only to see the “stuff” we each project into the other.

If we live only in the non-dual awareness, we really don’t accept the other as separate, but only part of us or me, and the danger is that my beloved’s actions may take part of me away from me.  I might lose my love of myself were she to go.  Thus the struggle to maintain self in relationship becomes a desperate clinging to I and all that is me.

It is a continuous learning process, this living in various identifications, whether it be unitary nondual consciousness with it continuing clarity and beauty, or a life of dualism, where only there can you have true relationships, or living from the heart where both come together.