What is Nonduality? | Season 1: Part 1 of 1

A documentary by Paul Dobson and Nondual Therapist and author Nic Higham that asks the question: what is nonduality? Contributors: Rupert Spira, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Jeff Foster, John Astin, Peter Brown, Randall Friend, Joan Tollifson, and presenters of the Nonduality Podcast Nic Higham and Paul Dobson.
This film consists mostly of highlights from episodes of the Nonduality Podcast published in 2020.
nisargayoga.com
You’ve inherited the belief that everything beyond your skin is not you or yours, that you’re limited to, and by, your personal internal world and the body that imprisons it. You’ve claimed and lost certain objects and people as your own on your journey. Your “possessions” have become extensions of your sense of individuality, providing a distraction from your deeper existential separateness but not curing it. Your belief in a boundaried identity grew stronger as you matured and individuated, while those around you reinforced your distinctiveness. You were given a name and your parents or primary caregivers co-designed your personality. From a young age, you’ve believed that you must strive to establish and uphold your unique place in the world. That’s what you’ve been told. Our society considers these ideas to be the norm and stigmatises any contrary notions, avoiding and rejecting them for fear of losing oneself.
Experientially, your body and individuality set you apart from other people and objects. This happens in a paradigm of relating and interacting as a human, which you might have experienced as interpersonal isolation and loneliness. On a deeper level, it’s imagined duality which creates all manner of separateness; the sense that you’re identified with and alone in your body and your mind, to a persistent sense of incompleteness that no amount of social or material connection can resolve. Bearing and inquiring into this alternative domain is a doorway to meeting our oneness.
In a multitude of ways we seek an end to the brokenness we experience and with which we have wrongly but innocently identified. ‘Nonduality‘ simply means ‘not two’, or ‘one without a second’, and points to the fundamental wholeness of life.
Nondual wisdom refers to the direct experience of a fundamental awareness that is the ground beneath apparent distinction. The divide between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘this’ and ‘that’ is an essentially mental story.
This understanding is at the core of Hindu Vedanta, some schools of Buddhism, and Taoism, and mystical Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It’s not a progressive approach to attain something that is in a future, but to achieve and unfold what we already are. Nonduality is the nonideological, nonreligious, nondogmatic eternal truth already present.
“Nonduality” doesn’t mean “against duality”; it’s not meant to imply that duality is bad. Instead, nonduality is both the Deep Knowing of inseparability and an entire embrace of passing paradox. It’s the supreme balancing of the opposites. It’s authentic connection. It’s realisation. It’s unconditional love.
We rarely see that the parts of life we favour wouldn’t exist without their “complementary” aversions. This is the play of duality. It’s what gives life colour, texture, and meaning. Therefore, it’s not the diverse expressions of life that cause our suffering but our attempts to pursue one oppositional extreme-either yin or yang, not both. Yin and yang, however, are seamless counterparts and perfectly embodied by their context.
There is a life that lies beyond the laws of conditionality and linearity, beyond time and space, beyond the dualistic stories we tell ourselves. Sadly, we hide this life from view by guarding against the extinguishing of our individuality. We - you - are that very life.
Includes music by Scott Buckley - www.scottbuckl...
Includes video footage from Videzzy