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.

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Astronaut in spaceThis doesn't seem a very spiritual question: How heavy are you? Neither may these: What is your size? What is your age? These all seems like questions it can be considered rude to ask. But explore them from a spiritual angle, not a personal one, and they can point to the true nature of our being.

Weight, size and age are relative to the human perspective in the human world. But look deeper to who you are. Look to where you are looking from. I don't mean the eyes. We experience seeing, yes. We perceive other senses as well: hearing, taste, touch, smell, balance etc. We experience these senses from a central point. In the Non Dual understanding we are Awareness itself, that unchanging state wherein all change is perceived. Let's look there. Or rather, let's look Here. It is the closest point of being you. Closer than the arms and legs. Closer than the eyes and ears. Closer than thoughts even. Let's look here, where even thoughts are perceived.

How heavy are you here? There is no weight. What is your size here? There is no size. What is your age here? There is no age. The real you is formless intelligent awareness. You are as you are. There is no ageing here, no being born or dying. There is no time or space. Just formless awareness perceiving the play of time and space. Being formless, you have no depth or change. You cannot be weighed down. You are neither large nor small. We could say your size is infinite, but even the concept of infinity is not accurate enough, as you have no size.

No qualities stick to you. You are perfect, in that you have no faults. Perfect from the human perspective, but just as you are in truth. You have no lack or need. In that sense you are complete, but beyond the concepts of complete and incomplete. These are human concepts, similar to weight, size and age.

Being formless you are not limited by the appearance of the world, by descriptions about you, or by the appearance of forms that are perceived. Here you are, the basic component of all life. That which is. That without which the world does not appear. You are I Am, the basic quality of being, without attachment or identity. There is no attachment or identity because there are no limits to divide you and separate you from something else. There is no something else. You are as you are. I am that I am.

Underneath the clothing of human identityFollowing 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.

Pure Peace and StillnessTrue Peace and Stillness has nothing to do with the body or the mind. The body and the mind vibrate and flow with energy. Trying to still the mind or body is impossible, like trying to still the turning of the planet. It's possible to slow or calm the mind and the body, but they will continue to flow.

In meditation we may still the body somewhat and settle the mind's agitation. But the True Peace and Stillness we seek is beyond the world of time and space. It is the core of our being, the core of Aware Being that perceives the movements of the world through the senses and through the mind.

So do not be concerned by the body or the mind's agitation. It is not you. Pure Peace and Stillness is the heart of your being. It is your unchangeable nature, within which the world of change is perceived. Let the world change, and be as you are.

Practise just being awarePractise just being aware, without attachment, judgement, action or identification. There's no need to stop thoughts. Be aware of thinking also. Although effort seems to be needed at first, really the mind is being drawn to your natural core effortless state of being aware.

Let go of seeking or avoiding, liking or disliking, partaking or abstaining, and be as you are. Let the world unfold as you witness it. You are, and you are aware. You perceive the thinking, the human form and the world. You are not the thinking, the human form or the world.

Practise just being aware throughout the day. When it occurs to do this, let go of holding on, let go of judging, let go of identifying with form, thought and action. Rest in the peaceful state of just being aware. It is your nature. Identifying with form (as a human) and thinking, leads to the sense and belief of the ego. It is the phantom ego that attaches to identity and ownership. It is the ego that judges what it likes and doesn't like, what is right and wrong. It is the ego that identifies as the doer of actions.

All the while you are the peaceful aware beingness. So let go of attachments and rest as the simple clear Awareness that you are, without form, without identity, without otherness.

You are naturally aware. No effort is needed to be aware. It is the nature of your being. You can perceive the efforts of the mind trying to just be. It cannot succeed in becoming just aware. You are the awareness within which the mind and it's efforts are perceived.

It is you, Awareness, in whom the mind dissolves when it seeks the true effortless nature of being.

An infinite singularity cannot be dividedMost people know of the Big Bang Theory, where the universe that we see now, this multiplicity, was once a singularity. It's postulated that the singularity exploded, creating the universe from the interaction of forces that created the elements that make up the matter of the universe. Planet Earth and all creatures are formed from the stuff of stars, and all can be traced back to the singularity. It has been observed that the universe continues to expand from the force of the Big Bang.

I'm certainly not going to say that this theory is completely wrong, although I would say that no theory is completely right. The reason that no theory can be completely right is that it is a theory, and a theory is an expression with words and concepts attempting to describe something that is not of words and concepts. The words and concepts are at best a step down from the reality of what the theory is attempting to describe. So I would say it should be accepted that no theory is perfect. There is a spectrum of accuracy, from near perfect to far from perfect. But the True Perfection is inexpressible.

So, as long as we accept theories as not being wholly true, they can still be very useful. Let's examine the Big Bang a little. It seems to make sense, and the evidence is there to show that there was outwards motion from a super event. If it is assumed that space and time appeared from the singularity, then it can be accepted that there was no 'before' the Big Bang, as the singularity was timeless. The splitting of the singularity created space and time. But we need to explore the nature of the singularity more.

We can imagine a singularity. There are no separate things. There is no space or distance. No past or future. No division or definition of form. Just one imperceivable substance that has no beginning or end. We know a singularity has no beginning or end because otherwise there would be something other than it by which it was limited, and then we're no longer talking about a singularity. We could even say that the substance of the singularity is no substance. We can imagine that the singularity contained the potential for the universe, the potential for when the Big Bang happened and the potential for all change that happens thereafter.

(It is perhaps for another article to consider how the seed of the singularity is scattered, and continues to scatter further seeds that develop from the potential stored in the seed. This, after all, is the pattern that nature on this planet continues to demonstrate.)

It's very difficult to imagine how this perfectly stable complete singularity split and exploded to become the multiplicity we see now. But there is a simple answer: the singularity did not split. An infinite singularity cannot be divided. At best it can only appear to be divided. This multiplicity that we see as the universe is the appearance of division within the singularity. Remember, the singularity is beyond time and space - it was before time began, it remains, and it will be as it is at the end of time. The singularity does not (and cannot) change.

You won't find the singularity here or there. It is beyond space. It has no dimension. The best we can say is that is just here and now. The singularity remains whilst the explosive expanding universe appears within its field of infinity. We can go a step further in understanding how this seems to happen. We can say that the universe that appears is like the stretching out of the singularity into a multiplicity. This stretching does not divide the singularity. It merely creates an illusory sense of distance and separation, whilst remaining undivided. Just as the rainbow appears as an undivided flow of colour variation from white light.

Opposing forces, balance, imbalance, and the interplay of opposites appear because the apparent multiplicity must total zero. That is, the singularity remains intact, so any force must have an equal but opposite force to counter the seeming imbalance. What goes out must come in. Where the universe expands it must contract, albeit across the span of time. It is the appearance of time and space that is the imbalance and rebalance of the universe.

There is a sense with the Big Bang Theory that there was a point where the Big Bang happened and the universe has expanded outwards from there. This may appear to be the case, but if one were to trace the origin of the universe one would arrive at the singularity. At the point of the singularity there would be no inside or outside. The singularity can only be considered from outside of it. But within the singularity there is no outside or inside. Hence the singularity remains 'everywhere' yet nowhere. It has no space, yet space appears within it.

Hopefully that helps to understand the nature of the Singularity a little. It's hugely important to humanity. We are not separate parts of the Singularity. There is only the Singularity appearing as a multiplicity. Not just the animals and humans, but in fact every 'thing'. There are no 'things' of course. There is only the Singularity.

From the human perspective the Singularity can be considered to be at the heart of our being. Consciousness is all that we know. All human experience is within Consciousness. The universe is only ever experienced within Consciousness. We can consider then that the Singularity is at the heart of our conscious being. It is that point in us that does not change. It is the very essence of life that produces the appearance of what is alive and what is not alive, whilst Pure Life remains throughout. We are that. There is only Pure Life. We are the Oneness of all that is. We are complete. It seems to be at the heart of our being, but when we find that core point there is no inside or outside. The illusory sense of division and separation will fall away. The clarity of the Infinite One will shine.

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