One of the things that took me awhile to grasp is that the main object of spirituality—the base matter you’re working to transubstantiate—is your own sense of spiritual longing.
If you think about it, what was there before you encountered spiritual traditions and spiritual practices? There was the sense of something missing, something absent. There was a vague sense of dissatisfaction, not with one thing or another, but rather with conditioned existence itself. This is what drove us to seek spiritual traditions and practices. This is what made them appealing in the first place: that they seemed like solutions to this sense of disconnect from something higher.
Spiritual traditions and practices do not fulfill that desire for transcendence. For that matter, neither do peak spiritual experiences, no matter how profound, at least not for long. For every peak spiritual experience, the dryness returns like thunder following lightning. For each new spiritual plateau you hit, the sense of absence returns in a new, vaster form.
What happens for some people is that, after pursuing these spiritual experiences for a long time, they eventually turn around and bring their attention to the desire or sense of separateness itself. They manage to look at it a certain way. I don’t know exactly how to explain how to do this or even describe it. I just know it happens. And then there’s kind of a duck-rabbit flip that happens. The sense of separation itself is seen as presence.
That’s the moment of realization.
Imagine you’re aspiring fervently to union with your Holy Guardian Angel. You’ve experienced samadhi with your HGA on occasion, but there’s still something “missing”. There’s still the sense of a gulf between you and the divine. But then at some point, this “flip” occurs.
The “flip” is not suddenly thinking that your HGA is inside of you. That’s an extremely tempting interpretation, since we’re constantly told that God is inside of you. That’s not it. There’s something far more profound than that.
It’s more like the distance between you and God is God.
You realize that what you thought was God or your Angel is just a thought-form. It’s conditioned. It comes and it goes. But there’s something that doesn’t.
And then you look around the room or out your window and realize that God is everywhere and in everything. Basically wherever the sense of separateness is—me here, the object there—that’s oneness, unity, God. That’s the Vision of Pan.
But this is why if you don’t trigger a profound Dark Night of the Soul, it’s very difficult, maybe impossible, to achieve spiritual realization. Spiritual realization is the transformation of the sense of separateness—the darkness—into presence or gold.
But—and this is the part that’s difficult to grasp—it’s not overcome by replacing it with a presence. The Holy Guardian Angel isn’t going to show up and fill an HGA-shaped hole in your heart. If that happened, that would be just another experience. It would come, hang out for a bit, and then it would go. As profound as that experience might be, it would not be different in kind from eating a sandwich.
It’s more like the HGA-shaped hole in your heart will in and of itself be seen to be the presence of the divine. But that HGA-shaped hole is not special. It’s just a catalyst. Because every absence you look at after that will be seen as a type of presence.
This is another reason non-duality is a non-starter. Non-duality is the philosophical idea that separation (“duality”) is “just an illusion” and can be safely ignored.
Bullshit!
Yes, everything is an illusion. This world we think we exist in is about as thick and sturdy as a wet piece of toilet paper. You could put your little finger right through it if only your little finger weren’t also made of wet toilet paper.
And that’s the problem right there. “Non-duality” is just another thought-form. It’s just another concept. As such, it is made of the same flimsy material as everything else. The problem is that it surreptitiously sets itself up as something different, as being a concept which—unlike all those other concepts that posit dualisms—is somehow superior, somehow has a unique grasp on truth. As such, it establishes an even more insidious duality!
The proper response to the illusion of duality is not to reject the illusion of duality. It’s to respect the illusion of duality. To slowly draw close to it—closer than the overwhelming majority of human beings ever have—and to see it for what it truly is in and of itself.
The method of respecting the illusion in order to understand its true nature is magic.