Looking for Non-Duality...

Perhaps the best place to begin one's search for non-duality is in the random advice in the above photo: be weird... Non-duality, along with mindfulness are "big news" these days: you might overhear a conversation about non-duality in a Starbucks coffee shop... or of mindfulness in a yoga conference... Meanwhile, the farmer who's praying for rain before she loses her crop or the kindergarten teacher trying to figure out how to help a single mom, struggling with three jobs, get her kid to school on time might not have the where-with-all to seek either answers or hope in ideas of non-duality or of mindfulness... 

​However, the "advice" of the sidewalk just might be capable of nudging us into something different: like a change of perspective... after all, perspective is durn-near everything. For starters, let's pretend that for both the farmer and the single mom, as for the conversationalists in Starbucks and the kindergarten teacher, they each have a basic "Christian" orientation: so it might not then be a radical leap into, "Christ is all-in-all". Now right there, you have it: the summary principal of both non-duality and of mindfulness: a mystic unity underlies everyone and everything...

​Both non-duality and mindfulness teach be weird: in every instance, one plus one does not equal two, but only one: every separation is a perspective: perspective is what allows us to differentiate, to navigate, life in this world; perspective is an essential life-skill. However, again, perspective is always relative. And always, the Real Reality is one plus one equals one... always... "Split a piece of wood -- I am there. Lift the stone, and you will find me there." (Gospel of Thomas 77: 2 - 3) And, "The wise seek refuge in me, seeing me everywhere and in everything." (Bhagavad Gita 7: 19) 

​The poet T. S. Eliot wrote, "In order to arrive at what you do not know you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance."  This is, of course, just another weird way of affirming with Leonardo da Vinci, "This is the real miracle, that all shapes, all colors, all images of every part of the universe are concentrated in a single point." One plus one equals one... Be weird is the crucial stimuli for a change of perspective: unknowing opens the door to wisdom (which is different from "knowing")... The wise relax into the weird: Christ is all-in-all: the single point of Unity, of (shall I write it?) a Divine Oneness...

​You can call this Divine Oneness the Quantum Consciousness, the Goddess, the Christ, the Tao, Mother, Buddha Nature, Krishna, Allah... but what you cannot do (though we all know that many religionists try) is to have it only your way!  Perhaps the great clarifying gift of Islam is the simple profundity of "There is Nothing other than the One, and the One alone is Real." (One plus one equals one!)

So, now we have to take the last step in the lessons of Be Weird... in order to remember Only One: we must separate from ourselves everything (idea, opinion, habit, perspective, religion, politics, etc.) that separates us from any and every other! If you need it simpler still: there is the Gospel, the Tao of Unity: practice loving... or as Ram Dass says, "Be Love Now"... Non-duality and mindfulness both are the honest choice of loving... moment-by-moment... because that is all there is... or as St. Teresa of Avila said, "All the way to heaven is heaven"...