Transcription
So I've talked a lot about shadow work and emotion work this week. So today, um, we'll talk about non-duality. Not that shadow work is, uh, not part of the process. Of course it is.
But non-duality specifically, um, it's a funny thing to talk about because really there is no way to talk about it at all. So, uh, a lot of what comes up is pointing to the illusions. But if I define non-duality as the natural experience or the natural appearance, um, or reality unfiltered or unconditioned by mental processes or reality unconditioned by perceptual filters, um, it's not a bad starting place. It's also the totality of experience, the totality of your experience right now as it is.
So filtering, filtering itself is something that's, I, I suppose valuable to investigate this type of filtering. And I use the term a lot, especially, um, when I talk about like say the subtle self-sense that can remain after non-dual insight is clear. Uh, it really is just like a very basic filter. And the filter itself, interestingly, when applied, um, doesn't just distort perception, but it actually adds something that's not there. It adds a perceiver.
So it's even to call it a filter can be misleading in the sense that you might perceive, for instance, you looking out into a world, and then there's either a filter over that view or there's not. But it's not quite like that. When the filter is applied, that's when the sense of you shows up. That's when the sense of the observer shows up. The sense of the watcher shows up with the filter. So the filter is kind of like bidirectional. It has an effect on the experience of some kind of subject, and it has an effect on what we would just call the objective world.
The funny thing about this is after non-dual insight dawns, the subject-object construct is not really there, but it can still be, um, suggested by this fundamental filter. And so what often happens is we realize formlessness and boundlessness. It's clear, obvious. Uh, and then there's this sort of tendency that's remaining, a tendency to, let's say, believe the filter. But even then, it's strange because there's no one to whom that tendency applies. There's no one who has that tendency. It's not like there's someone there suffering from the tendency or falling under its spell. It's just there or it's not. The filter's there or it's not.
When the filter's there, it'll feel like a you looking through the filter in some sense, even in a very, very subtle sense. And from that position, uh, you're really face to face with the, maybe one of the most, if not the most fundamental, um, perceptions in relation to self, and that is volition. Like the sense that you can do anything about anything. The sense that there is anyone there that can do anything about anything. Um, and so it's a little tricky to do inquiry here, as I was mentioning to somebody yesterday in Q&A, because even doing the inquiry can assert to some degree the inquirer, assert the sense that there's an inquirer. There's someone there who wants things to be other than they are or wants the perceptual filter to drop. But that is the perceptual filter, right? That wanting or that belief or that sense that something could change or needs to change.
Uh, in some sense, it's a, it's kind of a miracle that it drops at all because, uh, the tendency to the tendency to like mess with our experience is strong. The tendency to want to fix something, the tendency to want to get out of something, the tendency to want to see more clearly, the tendency to want to relieve suffering. All these tendencies are rather strong. Uh, but but at this point, they do weaken. They do start to weaken. Uh, and more importantly, it becomes clear that those tendencies have never led you to anything.
The tendency to solidify, the tendency to contract, the tendency to sort out your experience, the tendency to form a watcher state, the tendency to resist, the tendency to fix, to heal. Like all these tendencies kind of one by one, we see through them and see like they're not really doing what they say they're doing. Uh, and again, that's because they arise from the dualistic filter. And what always, always arises from that same dualistic filter is the sense of the me or the one doing all that. The one who is backward extrapolated from all of those urges. Let's call them urges.
So you could almost say that that filter, when it's there, feels kind of like an urge of some kind. To put it in a simple cognitive structure, it would be the urge to make things as they're not. The urge to have things different than they are somehow, which is impossible. It's absurd. So yeah, it's probably less about inquiry at this point and more about seeing that the, um, the buying into that filtering and the volition that follows doesn't do what it says it does. Doesn't lead you to relief.
In fact, when it's solidified with a subject-object construct and a lot of thought and so forth, it actually does the opposite of what it seems to be trying to do. It leads to contraction. It leads to conceptualization. It leads to dissociation. It leads to resistance. It leads to reactivity. And this is why one of the reasons shadow work is so important here, because if you don't see through that, if you don't do the shadow work, then there's so much in shadow you can't even see clearly that all your, you know, crappy coping mechanisms aren't doing what they say they're doing. They're not giving you what they say they're giving you.
And once we see that in a really literal way or deliberate way through shadow work, then there's so much less buy-in. There's so much less, not just buy-in, but there's so much less fear of letting go of the coping mechanisms, psychological fear. So yeah, perhaps that's really the barrier is that we have a psychological fear of letting go of the coping mechanisms more than because we really believe they're giving us something. But I think both come into play, right? There's both a fear of letting go of those me, those coping mechanisms is what we've more grossly identified with. So we don't want to let go of our identity because it felt like that identity was giving us what we need, giving us what we want. And again, maybe as importantly or more importantly, keeping us away from what we think we don't want.
But with shadow work, it's interesting because a lot of times just going into what we think we don't want is the shadow work. That is the, that's the key. So this is again, this isn't pure the pure emotional experience of fear. It's psychological fear. It's based in misperception, based in delusion, based in, um, dualistic frameworks of mind.