Direct Experience of Reality

What is the chief concern of the non-dual philosophy? It is to awaken us to a life-experience that brings lasting fulfilment. This greatest gain is not the result of any worldly success or achievement. Rather, it is uncovered in the depth of our own being through developing a particular way of life and of thought. Within us is a hidden capacity which expands through purification and finally reveals the Truth of Self as eternal, infinite, one with the Self of all.

There is a tension caused by our awareness of the perfection of the ideal and the imperfection of how we feel ourself to be here and now. This tension will persist until we finally awaken to the perfect freedom of the non-dual wisdom. This is because the enquiry probes into the roots of our experience. What we take for granted is challenged and ultimately replaced by a higher understanding.

What then seems to us to be the nature of experience? Duality. For the unillumined mind, our experience can only be dualistic—a continual interplay of subject and object. In this mode of experience, the subject is the mind, and the object is whatever the mind is aware of at any given moment. Duality seems to be the necessary form of this mode of being, and any other account of experience goes against common sense.

The teachings of non-duality challenge the apparently certain truth of this dualistic interpretation of experience. Non-duality affirms that within and behind plurality, underlying both subject and object, there is an infinite Reality, which supports and makes possible the outer display, but in itself transcends it. For the teaching is:

The Infinite is that where one does not see anything else, does not hear anything else, and does not understand anything else. Hence the finite is that where one sees something else, hears something else, understands something else. That which indeed is the Infinite, is immortal... It is established in its own glory, or not even in its own glory! (Chandogya Up.7:24:1)