Latest / Council of Kings / What is non-duality?

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What is non-duality? · Council of Kings

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, what's up, everybody?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Jordan here, creator of Non-Duality Memes subreddit,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: and just want to give a shout out to all of you, peace and love,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: having a lot of fun with our memetic adventures
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: and shenanigans here in this subreddit.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's really fun to just be silly and,
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: yeah, play with this stuff, so just...
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Sending love to everybody, big hugs.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to address a very basic question that's kind of arising
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: in different forms here, which is what is non-duality?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: What are you guys pointing at?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: What are we talking about here?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, is this just metaphysical reality?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Masturbation or is there something
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: of value that is being pointed to here?
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, non-duality is a notoriously slippery topic.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of the ultimate challenge
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: in a way to talk about this topic.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: As someone who's a writer and a poet,
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  SPEAKER_00: I enjoy the challenge of trying to talk about this topic
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  SPEAKER_00: because it is fundamentally unspeakable,
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  SPEAKER_00: but it's really a fun challenge to try to use language
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  SPEAKER_00: as a bridge to point at it.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the key reasons why it's
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: so unspeakable is Which is a great koan to sit
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: with, by the way, this question of why is now unspeakable?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Just asking yourself, why is this now moment completely unspeakable?
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  SPEAKER_00: What is this now moment without reference to speech, without reference to words,
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  SPEAKER_00: without reference to thought?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons why non -duality is
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: so unspeakable is because one
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: of its most essential and foundational insights is
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  SPEAKER_00: that Words are fake
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: in a deep sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: Words do not actually do what they purport to do.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: We often use words in ways
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  SPEAKER_00: where we act as if they are actually able
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  SPEAKER_00: to Accurately describe and pin down life and reality in a conventional sense.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: We're just like, oh, yeah, here's me. Here I am.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Ho hum.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm a dude walking through the world, got this long to do list.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't realize how deeply we've been conditioned to.
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  SPEAKER_00: Place this.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Conceptual symbolic overlay of words
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  SPEAKER_00: over top of the naked experience of life,
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  SPEAKER_00: the actual raw experiential data of what is happening in any given moment.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we're actually walking around with this kind of lattice work of symbols,
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: concepts, and conceptual beliefs
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: that is acting as a kind of Set
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: of perceptual filters that's filtering our experience
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  SPEAKER_00: and shaping our experience
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  SPEAKER_00: in ways that we often don't notice.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And in ways that can create a lot of suffering oftentimes.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: So non-duality is a lot about just starting to see
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: through and strip away these many layers of perception.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Concretized concepts that we've come
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  SPEAKER_00: to apply to this radiant,
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  SPEAKER_00: ungraspable nowness.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: And as we start to see through every concept, because spoiler alert,
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: what you come to see is that literally every word, every concept,
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  SPEAKER_00: Every idea that you can articulate in any way,
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  SPEAKER_00: everything that you think you've got a handle on, you think like,
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  SPEAKER_00: I know what this is in some kind of graspable, categorizable sense.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: You don't. You don't actually know what that is.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's not to say that words cannot be useful. Words are beautiful.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: I love words in many ways.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can create beautiful words.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maps with words that can be useful tools.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, words are a beautiful servant and a terrible master.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, thought is a beautiful servant and a terrible master.
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  SPEAKER_00: Our culture has placed thought and thinking mind kind
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  SPEAKER_00: of on this glorified pedestal
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  SPEAKER_00: as like, oh, this is the pinnacle of intelligence in the universe.
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  SPEAKER_00: When really...
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Compared to what's actually here and just the luminosity,
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  SPEAKER_00: the intelligence of life itself,
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  SPEAKER_00: thought and words are rather more like
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: a paltry shadow or like child's play compared
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  SPEAKER_00: to what is experienced as a field of infinite intelligence here and now.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Which you don't have to pin down into a belief system.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can just allow it to be an experiential reality.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: So anywho,
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  SPEAKER_00: non-duality essentially is
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: a bunch of different practices and techniques
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  SPEAKER_00: and tricks for finding your own personal access points.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is very personal.
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  SPEAKER_00: What works for one person won't work for another.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's got to kind of find the tricks and access points that allow them to leap
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  SPEAKER_00: in a way, leap out of their normalcy,
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  SPEAKER_00: out of their living inside their maps and leap into reality.
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  SPEAKER_00: Leap into pure openness, leap into just naked experience as it is,
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  SPEAKER_00: minus all of these concepts and perceptual filters.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's not to say that words and thoughts ever have to entirely go away.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's very unlikely to happen.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's okay for the mind to be Generating what seemed to be thoughts.
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  SPEAKER_00: But over time, you just stopped taking thoughts so seriously.
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  SPEAKER_00: You stopped looking to thought for the answers
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  SPEAKER_00: to your life
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  SPEAKER_00: and the foundational questions of existence and your deepest sense of who you are
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  SPEAKER_00: and what your life's about.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thought becomes more like The song of birds or like the floating
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  SPEAKER_00: by of a cloud becomes a much less personal phenomenon, you could say.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what can happen
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  SPEAKER_00: through a kind of exploration of non-duality,
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  SPEAKER_00: which one of the most foundational ways to engage that exploration is
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  SPEAKER_00: to just Playfully explore your immediate experience.
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  SPEAKER_00: Whenever you think to do so,
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  SPEAKER_00: just try to set aside all your definitions and preconceptions
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  SPEAKER_00: and just look very nakedly at what is here.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Just ask yourself, like, what is color?
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  SPEAKER_00: What is sound?
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  SPEAKER_00: Where is this coming from?
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  SPEAKER_00: What is this resting upon?
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  SPEAKER_00: How is any of this here?
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  SPEAKER_00: What is I?
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  SPEAKER_00: What is this that I'm calling myself?
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  SPEAKER_00: What is this moment without reference to thought?
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  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything missing in this moment?
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  SPEAKER_00: If I don't reference thought, if I don't reference a story,
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: can I really say that there's anything missing in this moment?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So those are some examples of little kind of pointers or koans or questions
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: that you can work with For example, or what can also be powerful is just to.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, for example.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Close your eyes and just notice that luminous dancing light information behind the eyelids.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's basically an infinity of light information presenting itself in a kind
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  SPEAKER_00: of unpatterned patternness, and it's just continuously.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fluxing and buzzing and shifting.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about something very subtle here,
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  SPEAKER_00: something we would usually just dismiss as kind of like noise in the machine or like
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  SPEAKER_00: a fuzz in my optic nerve or something.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: But if you drop all conceptions and you really just look at that buzzingness,
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: you look at that ever dancing, ever shifting buzz.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Unpatterned patternness of light information in the space you would usually think
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  SPEAKER_00: of as immediately behind your eyelids.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: You can start to just notice that you have no idea what that is.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: You can start to notice that words could never say what that is.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, if you like really stay with the taste of a delicious meal you're eating,
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: like say you're eating some delicious rice and curry,
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: You really like stay with the moment to moment sensations of taste.
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  SPEAKER_00: You'll discover an infinite dimensional tapestry
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  SPEAKER_00: of sensation undulating,
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  SPEAKER_00: percolating in your mouth that's shape shifting and changing in every moment.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll realize like, wow, wow.
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  SPEAKER_00: I could never in a million years say what that is.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: How would you communicate the taste of chocolate to someone
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  SPEAKER_00: who had never tasted chocolate before?
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  SPEAKER_00: Clearly just saying, you know, oh, yeah, it tastes like chocolate.
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  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's kind of sweet.
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  SPEAKER_00: It tastes kind of like candy or something.
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  SPEAKER_00: Clearly that completely, completely misses the very rich,
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  SPEAKER_00: actual tactile experience of Tasting chocolate.
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  SPEAKER_00: And what you notice, too, is that the experience of tasting chocolate or curry
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: or this light information behind the eyelids, it's all very slippery.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's always totally now.
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  SPEAKER_00: The past is nowhere to be found.
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  SPEAKER_00: The future is nowhere to be found.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you actually look at your immediate experience,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's always this kind of razor's edge of nowness immediately slipping away.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when you go to aspects of your experience that are kind
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: of outside your usual story or seem kind of irrelevant to your story,
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  SPEAKER_00: like light information behind the eyes or staring up at the sky at the clouds
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  SPEAKER_00: or zooming in on the taste of your meal,
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  SPEAKER_00: that can make it more readily apparent that What I'm talking about,
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: because you don't really have emotional investment in that being a certain way.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it's easier perhaps to use that as an access point to discover that all
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  SPEAKER_00: that you are ever experiencing is this kind
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  SPEAKER_00: of immediacy of radiant presence,
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  SPEAKER_00: radiant slipperiness that cannot be pinned down in any way whatsoever
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  SPEAKER_00: and is continuously just kind of slip sliding away.
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  SPEAKER_00: Through your fingers slip sliding away from itself,
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  SPEAKER_00: instantaneously vanishing and appearing, you could say.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when you start to notice that in one dimension of your experience,
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  SPEAKER_00: you can start to see it in all dimensions of your experience.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can start to realize your whole life is this kind
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  SPEAKER_00: of razor's edge of nowness vanishing.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the moment it appears, the beginning of the sentence is totally gone.
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  SPEAKER_00: The future is nowhere to be found.
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  SPEAKER_00: The end of the sentence is nowhere to be found until right now. And then it's gone.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like there's just this razor's edge of nowness slip sliding away from itself.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's astounding when you let go of the usual words about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's completely, completely astounding.
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  SPEAKER_00: And there can be a deep sense of returning to a sense of freedom, a sense of home,
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  SPEAKER_00: a sense of peace, a sense of unconditional allowing,
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  SPEAKER_00: unconditional love as you deeply open to this beyond all your concepts,
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  SPEAKER_00: including your self-concept of me over here.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really good one to look into.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway,
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm coming up to about the I think 15 minute limit on a Reddit video.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to wrap up there for now. There's more I could say.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Feel welcome to ask any follow up questions.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: But essentially, non-duality points to your experience right now, just as it is.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it suggests that there's something quite profound
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  SPEAKER_00: about starting to look into that.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there can be great liberation found there.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So Thank you for considering.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Peace and love to you.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And be well, my friends.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Be well.