I Could Explain Nonduality Better Than Almost Anyone. That Was the Problem

You can understand something completely and still not have it. Most of us learn that about music or love. Almost nobody warns you that it can happen with awakening too.

By the time I arrived at nonduality, I had come the long way, through physics, the hard problem of consciousness, idealism and a great deal of philosophy. I could explain why there is only one consciousness appearing as many. I could handle the objections. I had watched the videos, then rewatched them. And in the middle of an ordinary bad day, none of it helped.

The understanding was complete. The suffering was unchanged. If anything it was more frustrating, because now I knew exactly what I was supposed to be seeing and still was not living it.

What follows is how that trap works, layer by layer, and the one distinction that finally loosened it. It is simpler than any of the concepts that came before it, which is partly why it took me so long to see.

Coming Close Without Arriving

Some teachers say you can come mightily close to truth through concepts and still never know it as truth, only as a concept. The idea stung, because it described me exactly.

My whole life I had relied on my intellect for everything. That is how I made it through the scientific labyrinth to begin with: question, test, dig, repeat. So naturally I tried to solve the "too conceptual" problem the same way. More reading. Sharper questions. Better arguments.

At one point I caught myself in the act. I was asking for a conceptual method to escape concepts. Even the asking was more of the same thing.

Who Is Doing the Seeking?

The trap goes deeper once you look at who is searching.

Who realizes nonduality? It cannot be the absolute, because the absolute is not missing anything. It looks as though it has to be the ego, the character, setting off to discover the Self. But then who is hiding the truth from the seeker? Something seems to be actively obscuring what is supposedly obvious.

Follow that and you get a strange picture: one part of the mind hiding, another part seeking, and both of them made of the very thing being sought. It is a game of hide-and-seek in which every player is the same player. No wonder thinking harder does not end it. Thinking is one of the players.

The Self-Doubt Paradox

Another version of the trap troubled me more.

If reality is radically nondual, whatever this consciousness experiences is the absolute itself. Every choice, every moment, is the only way it could have been. So why can I doubt myself? Why does it feel as though I am sometimes fighting the absolute from the inside?

I noticed how much human suffering comes from exactly that: second-guessing, replaying the past, rehearsing alternative futures. In the relative world it is a useful brain function. From the absolute view it makes no sense at all to doubt anything, because nothing could have been otherwise.

I know the sly philosophical answer, because I have used it myself. The doubt is also absolute. The contraction of ego under stress is also the only way it could have gone. It is all Good with a capital G. I find that compelling. But in the rawness of a hard moment, the clever answer does not loosen anything. It is just another very good concept.

A common answer is that the absolute can never really be trapped. I would flip it. In one sense the absolute is the one thing that is absolutely trapped. There is nowhere to run from reality, because there is nowhere that is not reality. Which is comforting in theory and claustrophobic on a bad afternoon.

What Finally Helped

What helped was not new information. It was a distinction so simple I had walked past it a hundred times.

"…realizing that the difference between absolute and relative is simply actual vs conceptual."

The absolute is not some faraway realm. It is what is actually here: this sensation, this sound, this moment, before any commentary. The relative is the commentary: the stories, the models, the theories about what is here. Including my theories about nonduality.

Once I saw that, the question "what's the point of all this understanding?" answered itself. The point of the understanding was to notice how much of my life I spend in the conceptual instead of the actual. The map had become so good I had started living in it.

Meditation Was Never About Thinking Better

That reframed meditation too. I used to treat it as a technique for producing special states. But at some point I wrote this down, almost laughing at how plain it was:

"Crazy how meditation is actually supposed to be just shutting up all the theorizing and be present of the fact that experience is absolute truth."

That is it. Not a performance. Not an achievement. Just dropping the commentary long enough to notice that experience is already here, already undeniable, already the most certain thing there is. Whatever else might be an illusion, the fact that something is being experienced is not.

I don't do this perfectly. The theorizing starts up again within seconds, and I am theorizing right now by writing this. But I know which direction is home.

If You're Stuck in the Same Place

If you have studied all of this and feel as though you are standing just outside it, here is what I would say, as one over-thinker to another.

You are probably not missing a concept. You likely have more than enough. What is missing is time spent not using them. Short moments of simple attention, without trying to understand the attention.

It is a little humbling for people like us. The intellect carried us right to the edge, and it cannot take the last step. But maybe that is fine. Maybe its job was always to bring us to the point where it can finally rest.

The map was worth making. The practice now is to spend some time each day paying attention to what is actually here, rather than to the map.