Summary

This article is derived from a completed Master’s thesis entitled: “The Nondual Experience: A Phenomenological-Hermeneutics Investigation of the Seeker’s Journey Towards Wholeness”. It examines the psycho-spiritual transformations encountered on the journey towards nondual living with a particular emphasis on the end of spiritual seeking. This research study set out to interpret and understand the lived experiences of spiritual seekers who, through their own searches, came to understand the futility and utter failure of personal seeking which, in turn, facilitated new awakening experiences of the nondual nature of existence. A transpersonal phenomenological hermeneutic research approach was used in this study. Six of nine core themes are presented in this article. They include: 1) seeking is suffering 2) nowhere to go 3) the illusionary seeker 4) the collapse of time 5) beyond knowledge, and 6) gracefully extinguished.

Brian Theriault, MEd. is a transpersonal-nondual therapist. He has co-facilitated nondual groups with Gary Nixon and currently works in an addictions counseling agency in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He embraces the paradoxical truths of awakening in his work with clients, particularly with those “on the spiritual quest,” suffering from addictions, and trauma resolution work.

Nondual Wisdom

        We live in a world today where the marriage between Western conventional thought and Eastern contemplative wisdom traditions is alive and thriving. A growing body of transpersonal and integrally informed theorists recognizes human developmental consciousness as extending beyond normal ego identity awareness to levels of the transpersonal with nondual awareness as the transcendental ground of existence (Assagioli, 1971; Aurobindo, n.d.; Combs, 2002; Grof, 1985; Welwood, 2002; Wilber, 1999; 2000). Through a radical process of experiential inquiry what is normally assumed as the sense of individual separate existence and external reality is exposed to reveal the nondual ground of existence. In seeing beyond personal thoughts, self-images and psychic structures a radical experience can take place:

Passing fully through the state of cessation or unmanifest casual absorption, consciousness is said finally to reawaken to its prior and eternal abode as nondual Spirit, radiant and all pervading, one and many, only and all---the complete integration and identity of manifest form with the unmanifest Formless... Strictly speaking, the ultimate is not one level among others, but the reality, condition, or suchness of all levels. (Wilber, 1999, p. 88)

        This pinnacle of consciousness is so incredibly vast and infinite that it transcends and includes the boundaries and attachments of independent existence and the external world. It is pure unconditional awareness in which the apparent formation of personal identification rises and falls.  In the words of the sage, Nisargadatta Maharj (1999): “All the objects of consciousness form the universe. What is beyond both, supporting both, is the supreme state, a state of utter stillness and silence. Whoever goes there disappears” (p.35). It is here, in the depths of silence and absolute awareness, that the whole structure of subject-object dualism collapses revealing reality as it is before the infringement of mental conceptualization. The wisdom found in nondual realization is the freedom from separateness; the constricted self, which perpetuates endless suffering. There is no independent entity separate from the external world. They are all one and the same, co-emerging in the timeless eternal moment. And yet, there appears to be this sense of independent existence. It is the attachment and identification with this appearance -- with any and all form for that matter -- that gives birth to the self-existing “me” and thus, severs the spontaneous connection and ease of being and nondual living.Nondual realization is the sudden awakening out of the dream world of individuality to life as it presents itself moment to moment:

It is the very ordinary life, this simple life that surrounds you. But when you are not struggling, this ordinary life becomes extraordinarily beautiful. Then trees are more green, then birds sing in richer tones, then everything that is happening around is precious, then ordinary pebbles are diamonds. Accept this simple ordinary life. Just drop the doer. And when I say drop the doer, don’t become a dropper! Seeing into the reality of it, it disappears. (Rajneesh, 1977, p. 49)

        Awakening is a shift from identifying with the illusionary self to unconditional presence as such. One cannot bring it about through effort and yet, it is through the complete exhaustion of all efforts that realization is experienced. It is a direct, spontaneous seeing beyond all personal and impersonal points of view, subtle or gross, high and low.

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