David Hall's Non-Duality Blog
My name's David Hall. I'm the creator of this web site and its content. I live in Wales in the UK.
I developed the Celtic design software KnotWorker, I create electronic music as Goldcup7, and I've written books on spirituality and non duality.
Hope you enjoy this Non Duality blog. New blogs are added on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Please use the Contact page if you have any questions or would like me to discuss a topic.
- Category: Non-duality
- Hits: 381
We perceive darkness and light in the world. Light is the clarity of awareness, clear seeing or knowing. Darkness is the clouding of clarity. Yet even the darkest darkness can be perceived. Darkness cannot exist without the perceiving of it. The seer and the seeing of light and darkness are inextricable.
It is in Awareness that we perceive this play of darkness and light. We can consider them as a Continuum of Light, ranging from clear light to obscured light (i.e. darkness). It is in this apparent dispersing of light that the opposite of darkness appears. Darkness is like the fading of light far from the source of light. Yet this is a play of opposites within the singularity of Pure Light.
Pure Clarity is a better term than Pure Light. The light we perceive is the nature of Clarity expressed as clear seeing. What we perceive as light is the nature of our transparent formless being, which is a Singularity, expressed through its apparent dispersion into a play of opposites. Remember, the seer, the seeing and the seen cannot be truly separated.
Let's try and simplify that. Let's say in the beginning there is a timeless infinite Singularity. There is no form. There are no limits. There is no obstruction or confusion. It's nature is Pure Clarity. Then the world appears as if the Singularity is split in two, into opposites like it and unlike it. So from pure Clarity there appears light and darkness. Light pertains to clear unobstructed seeing or knowing. Darkness is the limiting and clouding of clarity. It is through this play of opposites that the nature of the Singularity is expressed. The world, the universe, appears as a dispersion of a Singularity.
The Singularity is Pure Clarity is Pure Awareness. It is never truly dispersed. There is only an appearance of splitting into opposites. The continuum maintains the singularity, although apparently stretched out through time and space. It is in Pure Awareness that the world appears.
Pure Awareness (aka Pure Clarity) is the nature of our being. It is within Pure Awareness that we perceive this play of light and darkness, the interplay of opposites that we call the world. Light and darkness, clarity and confusion play out within our pure awareness of it.
- Category: Non-duality
- Hits: 380
The human sense of being a separate limited self comes from the perception of distance and limits. The mind feels that it is at the centre of perception. The sense of distance spans outward from 'itself'. Through sight it perceives distance. Through sound it perceives distance, and also to a certain extent through touch. Even with our eyes closed we can perceive where our hands and feet are, and they are perceived as being a distance outwards from our centre of awareness.
This 'centre' or heart of awareness is not strictly accurate. It may be a conceptual point where all perceptions are known and where dimensions seems to be perceived from, but it is a relative centre dependent on the apparent outer shell. The mind has a sense that it is in the head, where the eyes see from and the ears hear from. But this is an assumption. Truly, if you reach out with the mind you will not find any limits.
Similarly, the mind can assume identity with the body and can feel that it is within the body. This is based on the faulty assumption that the body's limits are firm and impervious. But we know that the body or indeed any physical matter is not impervious. Matter gives an appearance of solidity, but we know that radiation can travel through matter that seems to be solid. For example, xrays are used to examine bones within the body, and ground penetrating radar is used to analyse buried structures beneath the soil.
Back to the human being. There is a sense of being within, because we perceive these apparent limits, the outer shell of the head and body, and the distance away from us that things appear. As I've mentioned elsewhere in these blogs and in my books, our perception of distance is always right here. We may recognise that, but there is still the sense of 'here' being within the human form.
Truly, this point 'here' is not enclosed. It is a spaceless space, within which the sense of inside and outside is experienced. We experience this sense of being within the apparently limiting human form from a field of open awareness. We perceive the imaginary limits of the heart and the whole from here, from nowhere.
So, although the spiritual seeker learns to look within to 'know thyself', it is found that there is no within. The heart of being its not a centre, because there are no limits to define it. But in seeking this heart of being we realise that there is no inside or outside, and that there is no divide that separates the heart and the whole. It is in realisation of the Infinite One that the sense of being a separate limited self falls away.
This is what is called enlightenment, self realisation, or nirvana, where the illusory separate self is "snuffed out". Maya, or the illusion of separation, is rooted out at the source and reality is perceived clearly as it is. The limits that seemed to define the separate self disappear, and it is revealed that there is no identity. Pure formless aware being.
- Category: Non-duality
- Hits: 364
Following from Shakespeare's famous quote from Hamlet, "To be or not to be, that is the question," let's consider what it means to be, to exist, to be alive, and whether we can ever not be. Being is the core of our nature. I say 'the core' because that helps us to understand it better, but truly it is the whole of our nature. It is what we are, but it seems that it is at the heart of who we are. The reason for this is that Being becomes clothed with identity.
That needs some explanation. Say we start off as just Being. Our primordial self is Pure Being. We are just what is, without any objective qualities. Without form. Without beginning or end. Imagine then that from Being, or as it's sometimes termed, Isness, there developed the sense 'I'. This 'I' is linked with Being, so the sense 'I am' appears. Next the 'I am' sense reaches out and attaches to form. To cut a long story short, we reach the point where we identify with dense forms, such as the human body, and we feel that I am a man or I am a mother, or I am a doctor, or I am an insecure office worker and I have lots of problems in my life. This is the human experience of identity and how it can tangle us up into all sorts of problems, beliefs and associations. The identity develops and attaches to the things of the world. However, the source of Beingness is always here. Underneath the clothing of human identity and association is the pure naked Beingness that is our true nature.
Our Beingness is never lost. It only seems to be hidden because of the focus of attention away from our being to the changing forms of the world. Our being is unchanging and imperceivable. It is imperceivable in the same way that we cannot see our eyes. We may look at them in a mirror, but that is only a reflection of where we are looking from. Our being is self aware. We are self aware. But we cannot see our formless nature. Instead the world appears as a reflection of our formless nature. The unchanging stillness of our being perceives the changing world of motion.
Is it possible to not be? Well, Being is what we are. It is formless and boundless, so it is a shared Being. We are the same Being, the Infinite One Being. So we cannot not be. But there is a sense of our nature being emptiness, a full emptiness, a complete emptiness. Our Being can be called Nothingness, because it has no objective qualities. Yet we can understand its 'qualities' through the reflection of the world. You see, the world is a play of opposites that reflects the singular nature of Being. Where we experience love and hate in the world it reflects our true nature of Pure Love. Where we experience gain and loss in the world it reflects our true nature of Content Completeness. Where we experience alive and not alive in the world it reflects our true nature of Pure Unending Life.
What this means is that although our nature can be described as Nothingness, where it could be said that we do not exist, what we know as the highest qualities in the world point to the unmanifest nature of our being. We are Pure Love, Pure Life, Pure Clarity, Pure Consciousness, Pure Stillness, Pure Being. Yet this is imperceivable until the mirror of the world appears before us and reflects back aspects of our unmanifest nature. The world is always less than what we are, because we are complete in our unmanifest state. Call it Being or Not Being, Completeness or Emptiness, we are as we are.
- Category: The Human Experience
- Hits: 372
We are not troubled by thoughts. We perceive troubled thoughts. Rest in Awareness, in the clear knowing, without identifying and without attaching to thoughts and the body.
There are times when thinking seems to get the better of us. We might try to calm the mind, but it even fights against that. We know that a calm mind is a good thing. We know that's how we should be. But sometimes the mind gets tangled up in trouble.
It may be that the mind starts dwelling on something that happened. It may be that the mind has negative thoughts about someone, maybe even our own self. It may be we are trying to meditate, and thoughts keep butting in and we fight back, trying to calm this troublesome thinking. And then we get frustrated that we can't stop it, and it all seems difficult.
But none of this is who we are. This is the mind tangling with itself, with its sense of self. Just as a torchlight cannot shine directly on itself, so we cannot objectively perceive our being. What we can perceive can never be what we are.
We are the Awareness that perceives these thoughts. We perceive the troublesome thoughts, and we perceive the sense of self that is unhappy with them. We perceive the struggle to stop thoughts and we perceive the sense of frustration when this is difficult. Truly we are the witnessing of this.
So what do we do about troublesome thoughts and the sense of self that we perceive. We do not do. Let them be. Do not get caught in the belief that you are there trying to do something about the thoughts. Who is it that is unhappy? Not you. You simply witness whatever appears within.
- Category: Spirituality
- Hits: 363
I used to find it difficult to reconcile God's being as pure light. The light and darkness we perceive in the world is part of the play of opposites. Darkness can be considered as far from God and light as closest to God. God then is Pure Light without darkness.
But how can God (aka Consciousness, the Self, Brahman, the Infinite One) be a Pure Light without end. If we consider the light that we perceive, then there would be no darkness. Light without end cannot allow darkness to appear. This seemed to be a problem, and it's similar in some ways to the question of evil: how can God, being Pure Light and Love, allow evil to continue in the world. There is an answer to this: darkness and evil do not appear. There is only God.
That needs some explanation, as most people will have experienced darkness and evil. The light of God is Pure Clarity. It is a perfect, pure nothingness. Darkness can only seem to appear by the clouding of this clarity. But the clouding is itself God. So it is not really clouding, it is still God.
Similarly with evil, there is only God. If God harms God, is that evil? We can call it evil if we want, but really there is only God. Both darkness and evil seem to be God far removed from the true nature of God. This is how the world appears, by the 'breaking of the body of God' into apparently separate opposites. God's Light only seems to be separated into light and darkness. God's Love only seems to be separated into love and hate.
Darkness is still light, only seeming to be separated and distant from God. Evil is still the quality of love, only seeming to be separated and distant from God. The world is created through the appearance of the separating of God's Infinite Oneness.
Similarly, we think of ourselves as separate and distant from God. But God is infinite and omnipresent. None are outside God. It only seems that the world is separate from God. In truth God pervades the world. God is Consciousness, seemingly at the heart of our being, yet truly the whole of our being. There is only the Infinite One.