Non-duality tweets by David Chapman

Hey, Twitter certainly can be philosophical. In 140 characters or less.

Here's a series of recent tweets from David Chapman that I enjoyed.

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David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since All is One, seeming differences are illusion. Illusion is bad, so Oneness is better than differences. [The duality of #nonduality.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

In Oneness, all is equal. Equality is better than difference, so we who know Oneness are more equal than you. [Authoritarian #nonduality.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since your self is an illusion, doing what you want is meaningless—there's no "you" to want it—so stop now. [Renunciation in #nonduality.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since individuals are illusory, your individual desires and peculiarities should be ignored by the state. [Isn't #nonduality great?]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since All is One, everything is already perfect. You think otherwise because you are spiritually defective. [#Nonduality enjoys paradox.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

I have realized the Divine Oneness of #Nonduality, so I can teach you everything you need to know about Reality. Follow me! [On twitter.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

[In the mean time, here's the best thing I've read on what's wrong with Oneness: http://www.joeldiana.com/downloads/guru_papers/gp_oneness_chapter.pdf …]

 

Comments

[laura]

Thanks for the paper linked above.

[cc]

the concept of Oneness is used by spiritual authorities to make their pronouncements unchallengeable, and therefore authoritarian

excerpt from the Guru Papers

[tucson]

The use of the "Oneness" concept by some enthusiasts of non-duality or advaita is misleading, imo. So, I think David Chapman's satire of the philosophy is appropriate.

Non-dualists say that 'self' and 'other' must be seen as 'one' in order for reality to be seen. But they never were two. Nor one either.

What is seen as two when conceptualised in objectivity is, when unconceptualised, an absence whose opposing elements are no longer different but also are not 'one'.

As appearance 'we-you-me' are mutually 'self' and 'other' but in actuality are not different although not one being either. This is because 'self' and 'other' combined do not constitute a third self. Any self or being is merely conceptual.

Non-objective relation, recognized in a flash, does not indicate unity nor diversity and cannot be held or retained as some kind of 'thing' to be possessed because non-objective relation is transcendent of time or duration. So, as long as polarized-divided mind attempts to make a positive, a oneness, a unity of a duality it will fail to do so.

In order to 'hold' non-difference you must cease to be as 'you' but remain as 'I'. Then you are our non-difference. As 'I' you hold non-difference eternally because as 'I' there is no time.

The thing is you can't know yourself as 'I' because 'I' is not a thing that can be known. As 'I' you know it, but not as your self.

So, even though we can't grasp, hold or know it as some sort of objective thing, still we all know it.

We are already awake because no sentient being (frog, man, horse, tree or bug) has ever been 'asleep'. Actually, 'who' would be either awake or asleep?.. Not 'I'.

[Elizabeth W]

Tuscon:
I really don't understand what you are saying. Could you or would you put it into simpler language?
I always enjoy your blogs but this one is somewhat more complex or incomprehensible to me, at least.

[iz rieza]

The concept of oneness may not be real as this may sound physic's...in other level it is believed as existence..the core life seen at the top not down going up...its just it...existing and existence not express in number..but yet it is one in our concept..the myriads are the leaves and flowers and bark of the tree which is just one...as express by the other Masters if we let their comments..there is only One...it is all God...

[Willie R]

Hey tucson - you are laying on the Terence Gray pretty heavy in the above comment. It is nearly impossible to disguise the originality of thought of the man whose nom de plume was Wei Wu Wei. And, whose message was, essentially, his pen name.

Mr. Gray was quite fond of endlessly reminding those who would read his books of the Hui Neng quote: "From the beginning not a thing is."

[tucson]

Willie R, I remember you stating one time that you enjoyed Wei Wu Wei (Gray). I think Brian has referred to him a time or two. I like him also because he sort of puts the mind against the wall, in a corner where there is no more wiggle room. It is sort of like struggling to loosen the tight lid on a jar and then suddenly it just releases. In those moments there can be a flash of intuition of the undifferentiated ground of being which is, I think, what we really are... no-thing at all, the noumenon of which Gray often speaks. Others have called it "void". So, maybe I have sort of absorbed some of his perspective and therefore his vernacular sometimes.

Elizabeth W, I don't think I can say it any differently that would serve to clarify what I wrote. What I seek to elicit from the reader (really myself) is an apperception that transcends the words. Don't take it too seriously. If you get something from it, fine. If not, that's OK too. Keep in mind that some on this blog have thought I am full of horse feathers. They may be right.

"I am the hearing of whatever is heard.
The seeing of whatever is seen.
The feeling and knowing of whatever is felt and known.
For I am the dreaming of whatever is dreamed,
And there is no I but the dreaming,
For the 'I' in my dreaming is dreamed also.
I am everything because no-thing is what I am."

--Wei Wu Wei

[cc]

Tuscon:
I really don't understand what you are saying. Could you or would you put it into simpler language?

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” Einstein

[Willie R]

tucson - I thoroughly enjoy Wei Wu Wei. I have read all eight of his published works at least three times and I have no intention of stopping the habit until I can no longer read.
I have mentioned before (on this blog) that I agree with every opinion you express herein. (Your political viewpoints expressed on HinesSight are another matter [lol])

I was not being critical in my comment above - that would be the pot calling the kettle black.

[tucson]

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” Einstein

--Einstein, Schmeinstein. Take the smell of coffee or gasoline. We know what they smell like but we can't explain the smell even to a six year old.

[tucson]

Willie R, I also have read all eight several times. Not everyone enjoys his books because they are pretty abstruse, but there is something about them...

"There cannot be self or other,
for there is no self that is not other,
nor any other that is not self."
--W.W.W.

...and his final pen name was O.O.O.

[cc]

Take the smell of coffee or gasoline. We know what they smell like but we can't explain the smell even to a six year old.

Coffee smells "like" coffee, and gasoline, like gasoline. There's nothing to explain when you can recognize a smell, and I smell bullshit. What you're implying is that you've experienced something the reader has not, and that this experience cannot be described or explained to the inexperienced.

Why keep proving, by repeatedly publishing online, your inability to explain what you're talking about? Why not just abide with your very special understanding and sigh resignedly over the fact that you can't enlighten those who haven't undergone the experience?

[Willie R]

I, too, am just hooting in the Empyrean.

[tucson]

cc,
How would you explain what coffee smells like, to someone who has never smelled it or anything like it, in such a way that they completely, sensorially understand what coffee smells like to you? I think you are trying too hard to smell bullshit. We're just good 'ol boys having a chat, hooting in the Empyrean. Don't be so hard on yourself man. Yippeeiokiyay!

Over and out for a while.

[cc]

How would you explain what coffee smells like, to someone who has never smelled it or anything like it, in such a way that they completely, sensorially understand what coffee smells like to you?

Specialists, when talking to each other, use words and concepts that are alien to most people because specialists understand things most people know nothing about. But anyone who wants to understand what they're talking about can find out what those words and concepts mean.

If I say I've have had an experience that defies my ability to describe, leaves me at a loss for words, I'm confessing my inadequacy. But if I imply the inadequacy is yours for not having had the experience, I'm boasting.

[tucson]

I have not intended to imply inadequacy on anyone's part nor to elicit any frustration or irritation. I hope that at least to some readers my words have some value in stimulating their own intuition as they do mine..."fingers pointing towards the moon" as old W.W.W. would say. Not that I do anywhere near as good a job of it.

[moongoes]

Fingers pointing back to kakka

[moongoes]

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pRH807Zg8MQ

[cc]

as old W.W.W. would say.

Try to imagine who you would be, what your mind would be, without the influence of W.W.W., or anyone, for that matter.

We are all deeply influenced by the writings and warblings of those we believe are more enlightened, more awakened, and this is the problem. We seek guidance, direction. We want to be told - subtly or directly - what to do, how to think, what to believe, and it's because of this tendency that religion exists and thrives.

[tucson]

Religion "exists and thrives" because of fear of death and eternal oblivion. Writers such as W.W.W. explain why such (oblivion of self) is already the case. Nothing religious about it.

[cc]

Writers such as W.W.W. explain why such (oblivion of self) is already the case.

On July 1, Elizabeth W asked you to explain what you were talking about, and you said it can't be explained. Now you're saying that W.W.W. did explain it.

If you grasped his explanation, please share your understanding with those who find your pronouncements - which you admit are W.W.W. inspired - to be gibberish.

[tucson]

“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.”

--Alan Watts in "The Wisdom of Insecurity"

[cc]

Elizabeth and I really want to know what W.W.W. said when he explained, to your satisfaction, tucson, what he meant by the "oblivion of the self", and how said oblivion is, in your words, "already the case". Please quit weaselling and share this explanation. We're on tenterhooks.

[tucson]

"We're on tenterhooks."

--Your sarcasm does not inspire me to make any further explanation. Besides Watts is right.

[cc]

I'm very disappointed, tucson. I really wanted to hear from you what W.W.W. explained to your satisfaction, but for some reason, you're holding this precious jewel of sacred knowledge and profound understanding too closely to share. Pity.

[tucson]

cc,
People like Watts, w.w.w. and many others over the centuries have written volumes trying to explain this. w.w.w. has eight books although it boils down to a basic premise...nothing objective exists...there is no such thing as a phenomenal object....we objectify what is functioning and call it "me".

In other words we make a noun out of a verb. You have no objective existence as 'you'. You have no subjective existence as 'you'. This is because existence as a subject would make said subject an object and this it could never be. You exist only as existence itself which is no 'thing' at all.

"Identified with non-being you can only be a mirror. One must become identified with non-being and mirror the whole, for the truth is one and final."
---some Chinese dude from the 5th century

[cc]

If, as W.W.W. says, "nothing objective exists"...there is no such thing as a phenomenal object", why is he (a phenomenal object) credited with saying it? Why was it said, if not to entertain other phenomenal objects?

Your mind exists. It's an ongoing, developing process that is characeristically and distinctly tucson. It is a "thing", however ephemeral and alterable, that demonstrates its existence by insisting it doesn't exist.

[tucson]

As long as we think as we have been conditioned to think and perceive we will never see what it is they have been attempting to explain since probably thousands of years before Buddha. The mind must come to a full stop, sort of jump the rails of relative conditioned thought processes, and in that instant we may see what they mean about the way things really are. We have to drop the arrogance that the way we think, the way we perceive is the only way or the correct way and be receptive/open to something outside the box of relative conditioned belief. Words, being relative symbols of concepts, will never capture the non-relative undifferentiated state.

When we objectify what we are as subjective beings we are making 'selves' of what we are. When this concept becomes automatic and reflexive we are stuck in that pattern of conceptualization... "I-me" here, the world of objects there. Somehow this reflex will just drop away. Then we may see that we are simultaneously individuated as well as being everything, and also neither, because what we really are is no 'thing' at all. Not nothing. Rather no-thing.

At this point more questions and comments will arise in a circular pattern endlessly until we jump off the bus and leave our baggage behind.

[Brian Hines]

tucson, Alan Watts says much the same thing in The Wisdom of Insecurity:
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If you look at it carefully, you will see that consciousness -- the thing you call "I" -- is really a stream of experiences, of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion. But because these experiences include memories, we have the impression that "I" is something solid and still, like a tablet upon which life is writing a record.

...We have thus made a problem for ourselves in confusing the intelligible with the fixed. We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms.

To be meaningful, life must be understandable in terms of fixed ideas and laws, and these in turn must correspond to unchanging and eternal realities behind the shifting scene.

...Conscious thinking has gone ahead and created its own world, and when this is found to conflict with the real world, we have the sense of a profound discord between "I," the conscious thinker, and nature.

[cc]

...consciousness -- the thing you call "I" -- is really a stream of experiences, of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion.

Yes, consciousness is an ongoing process, but a "thing", nonetheless. It exists, it is happening, be it a verb or noun. Consciousness isn't "no-thing"; it is very much something. One doesn't need Alan Watts, W.W.W., or any supposed authority to validate this observation.

"We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms", said Watts, and then he went on to create his more flexible framework of forms to explain what he meant.

As long as we're using the same language and references, we're communicating within a framework of forms. To say that there is no framework, no forms, is to speak falsely because without framework and form you couldn't speak at all.

There is no consciousness without content, and when this content says it is no-thing, it is denying its own existence.

[tucson]

cc,
Here is an example of where we will get misunderstandings.

You wrote: "Yes, consciousness is an ongoing process, but a "thing", nonetheless. It exists, it is happening, be it a verb or noun. Consciousness isn't "no-thing"; it is very much something."

--I did not refer to 'consciousness' in my last comment above and Brian (Watts) did not use the term 'no-thing'. So you were conflating two concepts as you understood them out of context.

Rigid forms, words, as you point out, are necessary to communicate on a blank web page or the page of a book. But the intent is to point towards something else that is not in the realm of 'rigid form' for which there are no words.

In the seemingly unlikely event we all get on the same page, then the page can well be left blank. In the meantime we are left with our only tool, the jungle of words.

Now I will conflate 'consciousness and no-thing'. There may be a moment when it is realized that the source of the universe or phenomenal appearance is 'consciousness' only. This primordial consciousness, prior to the spontaneous manifestation of appearance, is formless and timeless, unaware of itself. It is no-thing at all because there is no 'other' to know it as an object, an appearance. This thingless thing, this 'no-thing' or undifferentiated consciousness is what fundamentally we are. It is what we were before our appearance, what we really are right now, and what we will be after death, I think.

I may come off as arrogant, authoritative or pedantic about this but it is not my intention. This is only my experience. I am just sharing, not imposing. Others can come to their own conclusions about life.

When we are in the grip of discursive intellect and identity with a body, we have difficulty understanding, seeing, what I am talking about in these discussions. When the sense of body/mind is transcended then things may be seen differently and in a new light. Maybe that new light will be different than the light I see or what Watts sees or w.w.w or whoever sees. Whatever. We all must see for ourselves what, if anything, there is to see or not see. No one can see it for us. Or, we can forget all this mumbo-jumbo and do something else. It doesn't matter, imo.

For now, keep in mind that what we see is what is perceived by the constraints of relative, conditioned, learned intellect. It may be of some help to accept the possibility of seeing differently, of seeing a new or refreshed reality.

We can rely on ourselves for this or we can use others as a springboard or catalyst for a new view. Study of modern and traditional writings may be of some use in this regard.

[cc]

What you've expressed here, tucson, is an exposition of your faith. You state as fact what can't be proved or demonstrated ("primordial consciousness"), and you say, "When the sense of body/mind is transcended then things may be seen differently and in a new light." Wow! Really?

Clearly, you've had a religious experience and are now convinced of things that can't be proved or demonstrated. You're speaking from that subjective experience as if it was a higher truth, a deeper insight, an awakening, enlightenment, etc. You've had a religious experience.

Once you've undergone a religious experience, you're converted, convinced, utterly certain you've been vouchsafed a view behind the veil of appearances...and it's not a bad thing when it enables you to carry on with your life, renewed and revived. But it is a bad thing when you mistake it for objective reality and talk about it as if its purpose was to ordain you to convey The Truth to those not yet as experienced as you.

Your religious experience is for you and you alone. It was the brain in the skull of tucson that brought it about, not some outside agency. Or at least that's what the evidence indicates.

[tucson]

cc,
How do you know what I have or have not experienced?

You seem bent on suppression of anything that does not conform to YOUR view of.. "objective reality and talk about it as if its purpose was to ordain you to convey The Truth to those not yet as experienced as you."

[cc]

I'm not speaking from an alleged transcendental experience or knowledge of "primordial consciousness", but from the fact that there is no evidence to support the actuality of such notions. I claim no exotic or esoteric knowledge or experience. I'm just looking at what can be verified as factual and what cannot.

[tucson]

From my post above on 7-17 at 1:23pm:

"This is only my experience. I am just sharing, not imposing. Others can come to their own conclusions about life."

OK? OK.
We're done.

[cc]

We're done.

Speak for yourself. I don't follow this blog to "share" my religiosity with others or to read about theirs, and I wonder why so many do. Is it something about the word "church" that draws you and your ilk?

I'll be "done" when I understand this phenomenon.

[Anja]

Hi Elisabeth W.,

let my try to explain what advaita-vedanta is all about. Also known as non-duality. The sanskrit term advaita means not-two (a = not, dvaita = two) and vedanta means: the end of the vedas (ved = the vedas, anta = end). It actually refers to the end of all rituals and prayers and attempts to please and praise the gods. You realize: there are no gods. Or you realize: all is god, including yourself.

So...non-duality is like this: You are the product of two people....who fooked. You are THAT. You and your lover making love = one fook, two people doing the fooking.

You and your friend talk. Two people talking = one dialog. You and your band playing a tune. Three people, one tune. THAT is non-duality.

Non-duality does NOT mean ONE or oneness. It means NOT-TWO. Big difference.

So...you are not me and I'm not you, but when we dance there is ONE dance, done by the both of us. (In case we dance tango or walz.) You dance alone and I dance alone to the same tune, two dancers dancing a dance. ONE dance, performed by two dancers.

The non-duality talking-heads are like someone who is masturbating infront of you instead of making love with you. One is wanking the onther one is watching it. THAT is the difference between those who merely talk the talk and the ones who dance the dance or fook the fook together.

Now what I'm driving at?

There are no shitty dancers in a dancing-class. There are only shitty dancing-teachers who have too high standarts. These teachers don't want to teach you how to dance. They only want to show you how good they can dance and then they charge a fee you have to pay for watching them dance. But that's not a dancing-class then. That's a show. Nothing wrong with a show, but don't sell a show for a dancing-class. THAT is the deception they all, those mere talking-heads, are dealing in. And in fact they are very shitty dancers themselfs. No need to pay for a ballet that is danced by cripples, unless you enjoy that instead of enjoying a real ballet-dance.

Non-duality teachers are pre-school. School begins when life itself is teaching you.

Kind regards and happy new year,
Anja