Neither This Nor That
"The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it." — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I don't know why one lowly onion sprout, sprung from my paltry, soggy garden, should say anything at all — but it reminds me of the Zen story where the Buddha holds up an Udambara flower and says nothing. Only the monk Mahakashyapa understands, and responds simply by smiling.
Ritualized incoherence plays a large role in every religion. It is the stuff of Zen masters and the hidden teachings of Buddha and Christ. As an adherent, you are encouraged to accept paradoxical, conflicting, even irrational points of view. Here's one from Christianity the reader may have pondered: if Christ died for our sins, why is the world so filled with corruption? I would venture that if it were Jesus holding up the flower for the Apostles, it would have been Judas who smiled back.
Some basic terms, for the 99% of readers who did not have the pleasure of studying academic philosophy for six years. Dualism is the doctrine that the division of all things into two opposed aspects is the essential state of reality. Non-dualism — attributable to early Taoism, classical Brahmanism, and Japanese Zen, but present in all religious phenomenology — emphasizes the essential unity of all things.
Dualism is infinitely more accessible. You know where your bread is buttered and who the bad guys are. Life is them versus us, good versus evil. Everywhere you look, life seems dualistically engineered — even our conception of ourselves. I am not you, and not others, or so we think. And yet every spiritual teacher has said, time and again: there are no others. These others — be they rivals, strangers, or idiots — are us. But it takes work to understand that.
In Zen, one of the three primary spiritual traditions I have studied for two decades, the observation made in meditation is that every polarity is directly related to another polarity — connected, interdependent, relative to each other for being and meaning. You cannot know what good is without experiencing evil. A more complex framing: we cannot really know anything in a static way. Nothing is wholly one way or another.
Oneness — call it G-d — is not divisible. It pulses at the core of everything we do, who we are, and what we aspire to be. So we needn't shell out shekels or throw ourselves on the floor to prove anything. We needn't declare static allegiance or strive for unwavering faith. If we wish to be better, or more of some divine essence, or to match our behavior to Christ or Buddha, to be saved or enlightened — we can only do so by accepting and cultivating all sides of the coin together, in equanimity.
Grasping at solidarity, being pulled from one side of the ice rink of life to the other, is called upadana in Pali, shenpa by the Tibetans. The Buddha called this pendulation the tree from which the fruit of illusion grows. Desire for things to be other than they truly are is the basis of all suffering. That is dualism at work. Accepting things as they are, in spite of their duality — that is non-dual awareness.
Most people I have met in thirty years of traveling, seeking, studying, and writing find this hard to grasp. "Am I not allowed ambition? Am I not allowed to desire? Isn't that the point — to get what you want out of life?" I have no idea what is right for others. But here is another Zen story.
A monk climbs the side of a cliff to pluck a rare and beautiful flower. He slips and finds himself hanging from a tree branch for dear life. As the branch is about to break, he looks down and sees a tigress circling below, waiting to eat him when he falls. As the limb cracks, the monk notices a ripe strawberry growing on the branch. He plucks it, savors its taste — and falls to his death.
What would you have done?
