How Do We Embody Non-dual Reality?

Last Saturday, I came across an article – “Nondual Realization and the Personal Self,” by Judith Blackstone (2010) – that I had bookmarked some time ago. At the time, I was deeply impressed with the short, two-page description of the experience of embodied nonduality. It described the realization in language that reflected my own experiences. She writes,

“Fundamental consciousness is experienced as luminous stillness, or emptiness. For example, if we have realized this dimension and we look at a table, we will see the table with all of its weight, color and texture, and at the same time, we will be aware that the table is 'transparent.' It appears to be pervaded by-or made of–luminous space.”

I still remember my first experience of this many years ago, and taking it to Adya for confirmation. Then, when I complained that I don't experience people I have issues with this way, he responded, “That's why it starts with a table. Tables are easy.”

I don't remember the exact year of that experience, but I'd guess around 2006. And all the teachers, including Adya and Blackstone, say something to the effect that “Eventually the patterns of personality that are in the way fall away.”

In the fourteen ensuing years, there has been a gradual deepening of the realization, but still, that sense of unease when confronting certain people has not dissipated. What is in the way? Sometimes I think about this rationally; sometimes I just try to feel into it. When I do the latter, I suspect that the “personal self” that seems to get in the way is just, as Adya used to say, this luminous emptiness “in drag.” No, I know that. But in the midst of an argument, or fear that something I need will be taken from me, I never remember.

So this is what I thought Blackstone might help me with. I searched for her website – and found she was giving an on-line workshop the very next day. I signed up.

There were only 16 of us in the workshop, so she had time to observe everyone. I noticed that she was very perceptive – that she could sense people's subtle energies even through the internet connection.

She exercises she led us through were about exploring our experience of nondual reality in our bodies. When it came time to ask questions, I asked how this experience and the “personal self” fit together. She said she didn't use the term “personal self.” But, I objected, you wrote a paper about this! She didn't argue but she also didn't remember, which made explaining where my question was coming from pretty much impossible. I tried asking the question in different ways two other times and the final time, she asked what I meant by the “personal self.” I was caught up short – I realized I didn't know.

It goes without saying that it's pretty much impossible to solve a problem when you don't define it accurately. When I awoke the next morning, I pondered my confusion about just what the “personal self” is. According to Adya's teaching, as I understand it, it is the illusory self constructed out of thought. But “personal self” in Blackstone's article seemed to be something different. I re-read the article and my attention focused on this paragraph:

“At the very center of one’s body there is a subtle vertical channel, running from the base of the torso to the top of the head. This channel (called the central channel in Tibetan Buddhism and sushumna in Hinduism) is our entranceway into fundamental consciousness. This means that we can realize nonduality through deep inward contact with our own individual form.”

So this seems to be the key. It is, I think, also what Tolle meant when he said spoke of the “inner-body” as the “doorway into the unmanifested.” It's probably also the energy channel that I contacted when I was doing neo-Reichian work back in the 1970s and awoke to nondual reality for the first time.

So, given that we all must have this subtle vertical channel, what gets in the way of living as nondual reality 24/7? I think it is that that channel gets blocked, or bound up maybe is more accurate, in order to protect our form when we are children. So doing Reichian energy work would to liberate this channel.

But then the energy gets blocked again by habitual patterns of holding fear or other emotions. Clearing this channel, allowing feeling to flow through and not get stuck, seems to be the key to fully and consciously living the nondual reality that has been realized.