Bernadette Roberts quote
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Post by Bernadette Roberts quote on Feb 13, 2016 4:10:42 GMT
"'[N]onduality' was the Eastern term for what, in Christianity, we call a “Unitive State”- generally regarded as far as one can go this side of the grave. While this is an egoless state of being – really the state every mature person was intended to live out his earthly existence – this Unitive State is not, however, nondual. Man’s oneness with God does not make him God - for heaven’s sake!! While God is man’s true center of being (center of all being in fact), man is not God’s being! In truth, man’s Divine Center is empty of all self, God is literally no-self. God is no part of man nor is man part of God. Where man’s original self-center was “I exist, I am myself” (ego-self), God has taken its place so now “we exist, we are” is self’s abiding unitive experience of life with God. It is man’s oneness with God that is his “true self”, and until he comes to this state he is not free to be the “whole” human being God created him to be. Obviously, this unitive state is not God’s experience - God’s enlightenment, realization or whatever you want to call it. Anyone who thinks this is a nondual state-of-being has never experienced it."
I have never heard of her before your link to her. Curious about your history with and influence from her.
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Post by Sindder Streg on Feb 13, 2016 16:28:00 GMT
If in a nondual experience I say I am God, which I am I talking about? If I'm identifying as the nondual feeling then I very well think I am God. Because as Bernadette says God is nonduality. But further meditation will bear out I am not that either. Disembedding and destressing is the name of the game. The I is an enigma. A part of reality like a ripple in a pond. Seeing experience as process. Another reason it is called nonduality is because everything is connected. Reality is one big thing. Whether I identify as God or I identify as me is missing the point. Seeing experience as process is the point. This is enlightenment, by the grace of God.
I think it's very hard to come to a conclusion on God and all this. Dogen, founder of Soto Zen, wrote and rewrote his master work the Shobogenzo his entire life. Walt Whitman constantly rewrote and added to his magnum opus Leaves of Grass. I'd think you'd have to hammer home the same theory day after day to remain at a firm conclusion on any of this. Then it's just memorization, it's not fresh.
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Post by Admin on Feb 13, 2016 18:57:14 GMT
I appreciate your pointing out that the name we give "God" is not quite as relevant to meaningful participation with "It" as does approaching live with a certain attitude: namely that of, as you said, process.
[The following is an annoying, but fun (for me) hair-splitting session that just serves to exercise my own pleasure of deconstructing... forgive me.]
The primacy of process does point to something, though; namely that duality/non-duality eventually comes to be a moot point as well. If process occurs constantly, this means morphogenesis is occurring. If this is true, there was once something/some state of being, and then - through the process of arising-dwelling-passing experience - another something/state of being 'becomes' in its place. The non-dual is split to become process. Possible answer to this dilemma is to consider 'process' as something like a temporal web (the "one big thing"/a ball of web) or 'flow' or the Heraclitian never-the-same-river twice stepped in.
[Back to a - possibly - more genuine attempt to discover...]
Also, seeing God as something other that what we can become is a necessary part of my faith. Just like doubt and uncertainty plays an essential part of my religious filter, it should also play a role in the act of filtering my own experiential revelations. In other words, the non-dual experiences I may achieve in, say, a meditative state (esotericism) should be subject to the same bracketing or scrutiny as other doctrinal or macro-religious institutionalized maxims (exotericism). I am growing closer to the feeling that uncertainty/doubt is a core element of my faith in God.
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Post by Admin on Feb 14, 2016 4:44:17 GMT
"The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects."
Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty
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