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.
- Category: Spirituality
- Hits: 1344
Practise 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 its efforts are perceived.
It is you, Awareness, in whom the mind dissolves when it seeks the true effortless nature of being.
- Category: Non-duality
- Hits: 1337
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher who stated in 1637 in his Discourse on the Method, "Je pense, donc je suis." In Latin it is the concise, "Cogito ergo sum." The English translation is the famous, "I think, therefore I am."
In Non Duality we go a bit deeper than thinking. Thinking is known. We perceive thinking, as we also perceive the movements of the body. There may be an assumption that we are moving the body and that we are thinking the thoughts. But that is a thought assumption that we also perceive. To find our core nature we need to look deeper than what we can perceive. We need to look where we are perceiving from.
Essentially we can affirm that thinking is known, and thinking is secondary to knowing. Knowing is closer to the root of our being than thinking. All thinking, perceiving and feeling is known. Knowing is our core experience of the mind and the world. We could say, "I know, therefore I am."
How do I know I exist? Because I know. It should be clarified that this 'knowing' is equivalent to 'experiencing', and doesn't refer here to 'having knowledge'. Knowledge is something the mind acquires, whereas here we mean the pure knowing of experiencing. I can affirm that I am aware. It's useful to explore this awareness yourself. Are you aware?
Of course, the answer should be yes. You are aware that you are aware. You know that you know. This awareness or knowing is a core attribute of our being. It's difficult to go further back than being aware of being aware. But in Non Duality, our aim, for clear recognition, is to find that point where the world is experienced. Who is aware? Who knows knowing? Is there one who knows and a separate one who is aware of this?
Although we seem to have turned our attention inward to find who knows, we find that there is not a separate one knowing that we know. We are self aware. Our core nature is self aware. We are not really looking inward. Our self awareness is right here all along. But in searching for this core of our being, that part of us that seemed to be out there looking in is drawn inwards to the heart of being. The sense of being a separate self is drawn to the realisation of self awareness. This is the path of Self Enquiry that leads to what some call Enlightenment, Moksha, Nirvana, or Self Awareness.
This Self Enquiry leads to the dissolving of the false identity in the clear, unconfused, natural state of Self Awareness. I know, therefore I am.
- Category: Spirituality
- Hits: 1335
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.
- Category: Non-duality
- Hits: 1336
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 always appears 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: Non-duality
- Hits: 1333
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 seem 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, x-rays 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 is 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.