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 Fridays.
Please use the Contact page if you have any questions or would like me to discuss a topic.
- Written by David Hall
- Category: The Human Experience
This article is similar to the 'How to Find Your Stillness' article but looks at it from the angle of finding freedom. Many people feel trapped in some way. We may feel trapped in our commitments, our life situation, a relationship, or job. We may feel trapped in the body. The body may feel sick or broken, as may the mind, and we may feel trapped in this. People end their lives because of this feeling of being trapped in a dark difficult situation. We want to be free. Freedom is the high goal that many would like to achieve.
How do we achieve freedom? Well, it can't be achieved because it's already here. You may recoil and say, "This is nonsense, I'm not free to do everything I want. I'm not free to fly into the air and take myself to somewhere peaceful away from my problems." But what I mean is that true freedom is here along, although overlooked. The mind believes, "I am this human and I am limited in what I can do. I am trapped in this." But that is just mind activity. You perceive this mind activity, but you are not limited by it.
The world appears to be a place of limited forms that have their own boundaries. There seems to be resistance and separation. The world can seem to be a hard place because of its restrictions, limitations, boundaries and resistance. These things are what hold the objects of the world together and prevent them from being merged into oneness. Without boundaries and resistance, the world would merge into a singularity. That's how it seems anyway, but let's look closer.
Consider a brick wall. It seems impervious. Humans can't walk through brick walls. If a human was surrounded in a closed room of brick walls, they would be unable to get out. But that's not the end of the story. If the human inside the closed room had a device that could send radio waves, then they could send a signal through the brick walls. Radio waves can travel through what seem to be impervious walls because of their long wavelengths. We know that what seems to be completely solid is only really relatively solid.
Now, the human in the closed room is relatively trapped because of the density of the body in relation to the density of the walls. The mind isn't trapped, but its identity with the body concludes it to think and feel that it is trapped. The mind then wants to be free. This is understandable in a room like this, but a similar thing happens with the mind in everyday life. The body may not be trapped in a room, but the mind can think and feel that it is trapped in a difficult life situation.
Really there is no true lack of freedom. The mind is always free, but it believes that it isn't. The mind takes on what it perceives as the restrictions and limitations of the world and assumes that it is trapped in these. This feeling and belief can intensify, causing the mind to continually worry about its situation, and become caught in its own mind-made web of restriction.
Let's get to the root of this, as that's the way to true freedom. The world can only appear as a world by aid of separation and restriction. The world appears as though a singularity split into opposite forces, where repulsion and attraction separate and unite, multiplying and spreading across the universe, before ultimately returning back to the singularity from which it came. As mentioned above, it is the restrictive force that keeps the universe from returning to a singularity. Or so it seems.
The reality is that the timeless, dimensionless Singularity that was before the universe is still here now. Really it is Here and Now, due to its dimensionless nature. So the Singularity doesn't really become two and spread out, multiplying. This is only a play of separation within the Singularity. As we saw with the brick wall, the restrictions that divide are only relative; they are not true restrictions. So the world of restrictions that appears is not truly restricted. There are not truly many objects in the universe. It is One Infinite Indivisible Singularity seeming to separate and divide itself, whilst remaining ever indivisible.
What this means to the human is that its freedom is in the dropping of imagined boundaries, because they are not real. The identity of the human is not its body, nor even its active mind. Its true identity is the endless Singularity. The body has no real limits and the mind has no real limits. The limits are only in the beliefs of the mental activity we call the mind. Dropping of these false beliefs brings about a clarity, an unhindered perspective of Life as Freedom itself, as One Infinite Indivisible Whole. Not a concept or idea of this, as that is still a mental picture that clouds the clarity of clear seeing. Just seeing without ideas or beliefs. Seeing Life as it is. Pure Awareness.
This isn't easy for the human, of course. But we can start by recognising the fact that the universe is endless and indivisible, and that we are not a being separate from others. At the very least, we can start living life that way and some clarity will come. We will recognise that we are not limited by the human form and the life situation. We will see that the life situation is a play of experiencing limitation. Life will seem to become freer and less serious than it was before. There is a further recognition that we are not limited by the mental activity that we perceive. This is all perceived in the Infinite Awareness that we are.
- Written by David Hall
- Category: The Human Experience
Life is full of activity, people busying about doing things, and if they're not doing things they're often sat watching other people on a screen busy doing things. We may take ourselves away from the busy world to somewhere tranquil, but still the mind can be busy thinking about things. Many people want to find some peace and stillness in their life.- Written by David Hall
- Category: Spiritual Symbols and Patterns
There are a variety of patterns in the world, that point to the underlying nature of reality. Three primary patterns include 'Many from One', Reflection, and the Hollow. Let's explore these and see how they connect and hint at the unseen reality behind them.- Written by David Hall
- Category: Non-duality
How to convey that the world is not made of many things? There is a general human assumption that there are many things in the universe and we can give them names, like stars, planets, mountains, buildings, plants, animals, people etc. These may be useful terms, and it may be useful to see and understand the world in this way, but it's not accurate.
The limits that we assume define these objects don't stand up to close scrutiny. For instance, we know the sun to be a star and we can understand the qualities of a star and the phases it will go through. We give stars different names dependent on their mass and evolutionary stage. Currently the sun is classed as a G2V type star, and in time it is expected to become a Red Giant, then later a White Dwarf, then a Black Dwarf. These are names given to different stages of stellar evolution.
But we can't give exact moments when the sun changes from one stage to another, because the change is gradual. All change is gradual. Even sudden change can be seen to be gradual if examined closely. There is no flip switch of change. Even a flip switch for a light involves time for the electric current to flow. It's not really Off-On, it's Off flowing to On. It's an important point. Reality may seem to be dualistic and based on opposites, but really there is a flow of change, a continuum. But that's for another article.
Let's focus back on what we define as the sun. We generally see the circular ball of fire in the sky and think, "That's the sun!" But the sun isn't wholly defined by its visible circular edges. In fact its circular edges are constantly flowing and changing, dipping and rising, and sometimes flaring out. From a distant it may seem perfectly round, but we know that this is not really the case. The sun is a flowing ball of energy. And not only that, it is an expulsion of energy. Animal and plant life on this planet are dependent on the energy from the sun. We can't say at what point the sun's rays are no longer the sun. They are a quality of the sun. A quality that interacts with all it reaches. Similarly, when we see a distant star at night, we see its light, which is its quality that stretches across the universe. Its light is not truly separate from it.
So you see, we imagine that we know things, but if we look closely we find that we cannot truly define them. The same applies to the human body. It is continually in a process of change and interaction with the environment. We can't define where the energy absorbed from the sun, from the air, from drinks and food, becomes the body. It is a continual process of change, structured temporarily as a seemingly finite form.
But the sun and the body are not finite forms. They have no limits. It is the same with all things. To use a less animated example, take a wooden chair. We know what it is, but when did it become a wooden chair? When the fourth leg was added? When its back was added? And at what point were they finally added? Is it when the final turn of a screw happens, that it is then a chair. No. And when does it cease to be a chair? Once some of its parts are removed or once all parts are removed? Once the final screw is released? No. Ultimately, our idea of what a wooden chair is is vague, and it is the same for all objects.
What we've done here is analyse our assumption that things are really what we think they are. We've examined the general human assumption that things are really separate defined things, and found that they are not. Our labelling of things is useful but not as accurate as believed to be. It's good to step back and recognise that assumptions are not necessarily accurate. Really what this all points to is infinity. Nothing can be define because the nature of reality is infinite.