Double Vision: Duality and Nonduality in Human Experience

[Luna Arjuna]

"Opening to the full play of human experience allows for the possibility of a sudden dawning of wakefulness, known in Tibet’s Mahamudra tradition as ‘coemergent wisdom’ or 'wisdom born within.’ This is a sudden dropping away of dualistic fixation, allowing a direct and often abrupt entry into nondual presence. It arises right on the razor’s edge where ignorance and clarity, appearance and emptiness, stuckness and freedom rub up against each other, and where their striking contrast triggers a moment of vivid awakeness right in the midst of worldly entanglement. When we recognize that unconditioned awareness can infuse each and every moment, regardless of how much we are suffering, then the play of being a person, being in relationship, facing our neurosis, and honoring the experiential process as it unfolds in time can all become vehicles for arousing a clarity of presence that is born right within the heart of duality.

Our alienation and neurosis itself, then, when fully met, are the seeds of wisdom. Trying to transcend our human shortcomings and imperfections, our 'sins and defilements,’ does not liberate them. Only entering into them and suffering them consciously allows us to exhaust their momentum, move through them, and be done with them. Swami Prajnanpad calls this process of full conscious experiencing, bhoga, stating: 'It is bhoga that liberates (in Prakash, 1986).’

The faith that is needed here is the recognition that whatever we are experiencing is truth, for the moment; it is all that we have to work with because at that moment, it is 'what is.’ Since the struggle and neurosis of the samsaric ego is also what is, experiencing it fully and directly is awakening. For wakefulness comes about through entering into what is, rather than moving away from it. So when we can remain open and present with the experience that is arising, neurotic as it may seem, we discover— either gradually, through psychological inquiry, or abruptly, through coemergent wisdom— that this experience is not solid, fixed, or definite in the way it first appeared to be. As it starts to flow, unfold, ripen, or release, it reveals its true nature as the play of original wakefulness, embodied in human form."

John Welwood, "Double Vision: Duality and Nonduality in Human Experience"