Beliefs about Shifting into Nonduality

There's been a shift lately in the way I move into nonduality.

In the beginning, it seemed that I needed someone else to, as it were, thrust me there. (This is commonly called "transmission.") And once I found a someone who did that, I became attached and assumed that I needed that person to "go there."

Later, I became able to do it myself, and could initiate others in the same way others had played that role for me. But, unlike most people -- who first find nondual space inside themselves while meditating -- for me I always needed to be looking outward to gauge when the shift happened. When I could I see the emptiness, I knew I was there. 

It's only more recently -- and I mean in the past weeks at most -- that I've been able to find that same emptiness inside. There's a shift and I notice that the bodily space is "empty" -- just as I have been used to noticing that the outer world is pervaded with emptiness. The way I move into that space is simply to notice that thoughts have been filling the space! Without thought, it's empty.

But what I want to talk about here is not this process but about how hard it seems for most of us to move from our beginning point to the point where we notice that the emptiness is omnipresent. For me, and for some others I've spoken with, there was a belief that the way I was first initiated was the way it had to work. In my case, because it came through people who were in the teacher role, I believed that that person -- whoever it was at the time -- had to be in that role for me or I couldn't find what I was looking for. In a friend's case, he has had the belief that he has to go through some kind of suffering and then move into the body to find the emptiness and therefore relief from the suffering. It's a very different process from mine but it's similar in that there is a belief that there is a "way to do it," and, more important, an implicit belief that it is the ONLY way to do it. 

Of course, the way we learn in the practical world is to find some practice that works and keep repeating it. The more urgent it is to get whatever it is right, the more likely we are to follow the path that has worked before. We might be willing to try a different way of making a pie, for example, but we are less likely to experiment with another way of crossing the street.  And moving into the awake energy is certainly as important as getting across the street safely, so it makes sense that we believe that whatever way we first discovered to do that seems, maybe for a long time, to be the ONLY way.

The Dangers of Shakti

I've written a bit before about transmission of shakti, or spiritual energy. What I want to focus on here are the dangers of transmission to the wrong person at the wrong time.

One way (and perhaps the only one) in which transmission is similar to hypnosis in that the recipient has to be open, has to have a welcoming attitude of trust. But sometimes, the recipient may not realize what s/he is opening to. In fact, the thought-wall that we use to protect our sense of a separate self is pierced in a transmission. The results can be blissful, startling, disruptive, confusing, or almost anything else. This is so because they depend on both the relationship already established with the transmitter and on the recipient's karma and how that karma reacts to being met with the pure, unmediated life energy.

It's not necessary, unfortunately, for a transmitter to be egoless. Some people learn to use this energy for power over others. I'm not going to discuss these situations here except to say that they happen. What I want to talk about is how transmission can cause confusion and pain even when the transmitter has the best of intentions.

Transmission can seem so easy for the transmitter. The transmitter knows that they intend to do – to open the other person to how the divine, unmediated by the mind, feels. But if the recipient has never known this before, the energy might not be interpreted this way. The result might be an extreme attachment to the transmitter in one form or another. It could come in the form of, you brought me bliss; no one else can do for me what you do, and now I love you forever. Or it can come in the form of some kind of repulsion or fear because the transmitter has upset the personality's balance of defenses. Sometimes, the chaos that ensues can last a long time. So one rule I think is important is, If you know how to transmit, don't do it unless you are willing to stay in the person's life to make sure it turns out the way you hope it will.

The life energy that gets transmitted can also be transmitted through other channels – through sex, for example. But sex requires physical touch, and generally people know it is coming and can decide whether they are up for it or not. There are also lots of societal rules about whom to have sex with. It's not like that with transmission. You can gaze at a person in a certain way – maybe even someone you have never seen before -- and suddenly they are in another dimension and it has happened so suddenly that they have no clue what happened to them.

Of course, that's part of the reason it is so effective: the defenses that are normally present aren't there because the transmission was unexpected. Suddenly, the connection between two people is more intimate than would ever happen in sex; sometimes the two people literally become one as boundaries disappear. How the mind interprets what happens can vary, but initially the mind actually can't get a good grip around it, and it is not until the mind learns to relax and let it happen that moving into deeper dimensions of consciousness starts to be truly fulfilling.

Uses of the Gaze

In nondual spirituality, as well as in some other traditions, an awake person may gaze into the eyes of another person, for various reasons. First of all, it is fun to see the deeper dimension of consciousness in another, beyond the physical appearance. Second, it can be a way of helping another awaken: when that deeper energy is displayed for another, it can help another access it in himself or herself. This is sometimes called transmission, but that is a bit of a misnomer, because really the other person, while s/he may not be conscious of the awake energy, just as surely possesses it as the awake person.

It is a third use of the gaze that I want to speak of here, however. That is to determine to what extent someone else is awake.

A person might say, “I had an awakening,” or “I'm still waiting for my first awakening,” or, “I have no clue what awakening is.” But people can mean different things by these words because the mind has various definitions and stories about awakening. For some, being awake means having reached perfection on all levels of existence. They will see proof of their lack of awakeness in every “selfish” thought they have. For others, of an opposite psychological bent, if they have even had a glimpse of transcendence, they seem themselves as fully awake. Still others may have experienced an awakening but, not having been able to “maintain” it – which generally means staying in the same bliss as occurred when the awakening occurred – will believe that awakeness was in their past but not a current reality.

Thus, because there are so many definitions of awakening held by so many people, it is impossible to know what someone means when s/he says, “I'm awake.” Here is where the gaze comes in – because it removes the mind from the equation. When the awake energy in one being consciously meets the awake energy in another, both are awake; if it fails to meet itself, then one of the two is not.