I've become a big fan of Joan Tollifson. I can't get enough of her take on Zen, Buddhism in general, Advaita, nonduality, and a bunch of other subjects that she talks about in her writings and speaks about in her talks.
I sort of feel like a Grateful Dead groupie back in the days when people would travel around the country attending their performances wherever they played. Except, I don't need to go anywhere to get my Tollifson fix.
Her books are delivered to me by Amazon. Her web site has a vast amount of material in the Outpourings section. And I've signed up to get regular posts from her emailed to me.
Below is the most recent post, which I like a lot. There's a great deal of wisdom here. Plus some excellent writing. Tollifson is deeply familiar with so many spiritual/philosophical teachings, it's a joy to read her sensitive, sophisticated views on some subject.
Like, thinking and nonduality. You'll see that she favorably mentions David Loy's book, Nonduality, in the post below. I enjoyed the book also. These are the blog posts I wrote about it.
Pink Panther and Alan Watts on nonduality
Cutting out the bullshit from nonduality
Why an experience of "pure consciousness" says little about reality
"Nonduality" is a great book about a fascinating subject
Nonduality says nothing about how the world really is
Experience is all there is for us. Praise be to nonduality!
Here's Tollifson's post about thinking. Enjoy. I sure did, in part because I've been told many times by commenters on my blog posts, "Brian, you think too much." When I'd read that, I'd think (not surprisingly), "Um, didn't you have to think to write Brian, you think too much? And who gets to decide what too much is? Shouldn't that be up to me?"
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A few thoughts about thinking
by Joan Tollifson
Thinking is something the universe is doing in the form of human beings. Like everything else, it is an activity of the whole, inseparable from everything it apparently is not. Thinking has given humans great advantages and also significant disadvantages.
The bare activity itself—the pulsation of a thought—is amazingly ephemeral, impermanent, fleeting and without substance. A thought appears and instantly evaporates like an invisible and ungraspable little burst of invisible energy.
But the content of thinking—the headlines it asserts, the stories it tells, the beliefs and ideas it promotes, the maps of reality it generates—these can seem very solid and real. They are sometimes functional and necessary, sometimes creative, sometimes relatively harmless, but very often, thinking—and believing what thought tells us—is the source of immense human suffering and confusion. The problematic type of thought (e.g., “I’m a hopeless failure” or “So-and-so is the devil and should be killed"), when believed, can cause enormous pain.
Because thoughts can be so powerful and so easily mistaken for objective reports on reality, being aware of them, being able to see them as thoughts, and being able to discern the difference between the pictures they paint and reality itself is a vital part of both spiritual awakening and good psychotherapy. It may sound obvious, but it can be very subtle, recognizing again and again that a map is never the territory it describes, that a concept is always an abstraction, and that “I’m a hopeless failure” is just a conditioned thought, not an objective report on reality.
There are many relative truths that can be discovered through thinking, reasoning, logic and scientific exploration. These are wonderful human abilities. But what we might call the heart of things, the source of happiness or unconditional love cannot be found in this way. It is beyond the thinking mind, beyond reasoning and logic, beyond what science can discover. And because of this, there is a common misunderstanding in the spiritual world that the goal of meditation is to be thought-free, that awakening entails having a permanently and completely empty mind, devoid of all thinking, and that thinking is basically the enemy that must be vanquished.
I’ve never heard any teacher suggesting we should or could eliminate all thinking, and I’m certainly never suggesting that. That would be a fool’s errand. It may sound as if this is being suggested sometimes, usually when a sentence is taken out of context and/or misunderstood. But no one I know is suggesting this. Creative thinking and reasoning have done incredibly wonderful things, and we wouldn’t survive without functional thinking. Moreover, thinking is something that happens uncontrollably. There is no thinker authoring the thoughts. They bubble up automatically. Anyone who takes up meditation discovers this very quickly.
Because thoughts pop up and instantly dissolve, they can easily zip by so quickly that we don’t even see them. As a result, we are often completely unaware of habitual thought patterns. This is where meditation can be helpful. It allows us to slow down, be still, and do nothing else other than simply being, present and aware. And in this way, we begin to see more and more clearly what the mind is doing, and the more it is seen, the less believable it becomes and the more these habitual thoughts lose their grip and fall away.
I’ve often spoken about my first all-day silent meditation retreat at the San Francisco Zen Center, when it was suddenly seen that all my thoughts were about the future. I was sitting there imagining my next silent retreat, thinking about what to do on the break that was coming up and where I would park the car tomorrow when I went to work, and so on. I’d never noticed this before. Once it was seen, it was as if a light had been turned on in a previously darkened room.
From then on, whenever thoughts about the future happened, they would be noticed—sometimes instantly, sometimes after the attention had been occupied with them for quite a while. I began to see what was alluring about future fantasies, and also how it was a form of suffering. Gradually, over many years, this habitual pattern got weaker and weaker until it dissolved. Not that it never happens now, but it rarely happens, and never obsessively anymore.
Thought was powerless to remove this pattern. Having the thought, “I need to stop thinking about the future,” would only be another thought about the future—and about “me,” the imaginary thinker. Awareness was the transformative power.
The best teachings help us to discern the difference between the map and the territory in ever more subtle ways. They also recognize that mapping is something the territory is doing, and that language, imagination and thought are all vital and emergent activities of the universe, inseparable from the whole. These can all serve us beautifully, or they can get us into massive trouble, and it is profoundly liberating and helpful to discern what’s helpful and what isn’t, while also recognizing that, in the absolute sense, the apparently helpful and the apparently unhelpful are “not two” and can never actually be pulled apart.
A work of fiction, a poem, a beautiful painting, an evocative dance, a piece of sculpture, a great movie, beautiful music, a mathematical formula, a scientific theory— these certainly cannot and should not be dismissed as unreal or mere illusions. They are all quite real. And so is the spiritual dimension—boundless awareness, openness, presence, spirit.
Intelligent spirituality is operating on multiple levels, we might say—both conventional and absolute, sensory and imaginal, conceptual and actual—and these pairs can’t really be pulled apart. The boundary-lines are always themselves conceptual. Some teachings lean more one way, some more another—and certainly, in my writing, one paragraph, article or chapter may lean more one way, and another paragraph, article or chapter many lean more in another. Taking things out of context can be very misleading. We see this all the time in the political realm and in clickbait headlines.
Ultimately, ALL dividing lines between one thing and another are conceptual—they are like the lines on a map. Where exactly does the mountain become the valley? Where does heads turn into tails on a coin? Where does the body end and the environment begin? Where does inside become outside? Where is the boundary between awareness and content, or between the screen and the movie? We can’t say. We can’t deny difference and variation, but we can’t find actual separation. That recognition is what nonduality is all about.
In my experience, the most liberating forms of spirituality are those that pull the rug out from any place we want to land and from any impulse to plant a flag. Landing nowhere, freefalling, we can play freely in all realms, sticking to nothing and open to everything.
The Tao that can be spoken both is and isn’t the true Tao. Everything we say both is and isn’t the truth. Not one, not two. Or, as Dogen put it, leaping clear of the many and the one. Not fixating or getting stuck on one side of a conceptual divide.
A few words about nonduality
When people tell me they are into nonduality, I ask them what they mean, because the word has been used in so many different ways over the centuries. In recent years, nonduality has become a buzzword in certain subcultures, where it can refer to anything from Tony Parsons to Rupert Spira. There isn’t one definition upon which everyone agrees. Many people claim that their version is the One True Nonduality, but that, in my view, is dualistic nonsense.
If you want to explore the subject of nonduality in a comprehensive intellectual way, I highly recommend David Loy’s excellent book, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy. David Loy is a Zen teacher and a professor of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, so he brings both the discernment of a trained philospher as well as the experiencial understanding of a long-time Buddhist practitioner to the table. The book compares and contrasts the Advaita notion of Self (Immutable Reality) with the Buddhist understanding of no self (impermanence, thorough-going flux, no-thing-ness), and it explores concepts such as time and space, substance, causality, freedom, and spiritual path from a nondual perspective, drawing not only on Advaita and Buddhism, but also on Taoism and Western philosophy.
Of course, nonduality is more than an intellectual philosophy. It is a living realization, a way of seeing life that brings forth a different way of being.
It seems to me that the common thread in all the different versions of nonduality is the sense of wholeness and the absence of separation. None of these different nondual perspectives are denying the appearance of diversity, differentiation, multiplicity, variety and polarity, but they are all seeing it as one inseparable whole that cannot be pulled apart. It is always a holistic perspective in which everything is included and nothing exists independently.
In Advaita, this wholeness or unicity is typically seen as the Self or the One Consciousness that underlies and is everything that appears—the ground of being. In Buddhism, it is more often understood as emptiness: impermanence, interdependence, groundlessness, and the absence of any persisting or separate self-nature in anything. Of course, within Buddhism there are many subdivisions, including the One Mind school that says, “All there is, is Mind.”
And nowadays we have expressions that don’t fit neatly into any of these pre-existing categories, or that draw from several of them—people such as Toni Packer, Adyashanti, Tony Parsons, Darryl Bailey, Peter Brown, John Astin, or myself. So there are many variations on the theme of nonduality, but in some way, all of them point to an indivisible unicity that is at once both seamless and infinitely varied.
I would also say that all the versions of nonduality that I’ve encountered point out the non-substantial nature of everything that appears. In Advaita, it is compared to a dream in which there seem to be mountains and people and events, but it’s all nothing other than the dreaming consciousness. It all vanishes upon waking up from sleep. Nothing that appeared to be there was really there in any substantial, observer-independent way. It was all a play of consciousness.
In Buddhism, it is more the understanding that no solid, discrete, independent, persisting, substantial things ever actually form, and yet, we can’t say this is nothing. But there is no-thing we can grasp that it is. The “it” is imaginary. There is only it-less-ness. As the great Buddhist sage Nagarjuna pointed out, no way that we try to conceptualize life holds up to careful scrutiny, and the true understanding of impermanence is that there is no impermanence, because impermanence is so thorough-going that no-thing ever actually forms to be impermanent.
Buddhism and Advaita are not the same, nor are Rupert Spira and Tony Parsons, and yet, they all point to a similar sense of wholeness, nonsubstantiality, and freedom from imaginary bondage. We can emphasize the differences, or we can see the commonality. I can appreciate both Buddhism and Advaita. I have enjoyed both Rupert Spira and Tony Parsons. At different times, I have found all of these expressions liberating. They might see each other as off-the-mark, but I don’t feel compelled to choose between any of them.
In my view, all the ways of conceptualizing, describing and mapping this living reality are in some way incomplete and inaccurate. This living reality can’t really be captured conceptually. The ultimate liberation, in my view, is in not landing anywhere, not concretizing any view (or non-view), not mistaking any map for The Truth.
Ultimately, we don’t know what this is or how it all works, and yet, here it is, clear and obvious—until we start thinking about it and trying to nail it down with words and concepts. Then suddenly, it seems very paradoxical and confusing.
And whatever this is, it keeps unfolding and revealing itself in ever-new ways. I feel less and less sure of anything I think, and this uncertainty only feels problematic when I think that it should be otherwise. What feels very real and undoubtable to me is the openness of Here-Now, aware presence, and this ungraspable present experiencing.
As I say on the current home page of my website:
We habitually search for special experiences, for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense openness and freedom.
Being awake as I mean it is simply an openness, a willingness to live without answers, to be here in all simplicity, to see through the stories and beliefs that create suffering and confusion or that provide false comfort, to not land in any fixed view.
Present experiencing is ever-changing while never departing from the immediacy of here-now. It is infinitely varied, yet cannot actually be divided up or pulled apart. A person is like a waving of the ocean—an ever-changing movement inseparable from the whole.
We tend to think that we are an independent entity with free will—the thinker of our thoughts, the maker of our choices—living in a world outside of us. But in looking closely, no substantial boundary between inside and outside, and no thinker apart from the thinking can be found.
What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. There is no finish-line, no formula, no method, only this ever-fresh aliveness, this one bottomless moment, right here, right now, just as it is.
Love to all…
Joan T. writes, Reflection on current events in Israel-Palestine. (While I'm still numbed out from the neo advaistist lit I read in the 1990s and have concluded that sitting zazen is more fruitful than reading, I'm in agreement with T's sentiments here.)
Finally, I’m going to stick my neck out here and probably upset a number of my readers. But I am moved to express my thoughts about several things, primarily the on-going situation in Palestine-Israel.
I feel profound sorrow over what is happening there, including both what Hamas did to Israeli civilians in their recent attack on Israel, and now the horrifying bombing by Israel of Gaza, killing and maiming hundreds of children as well as adults, and also the Israeli attacks on the West Bank, along with the escalating ground invasion in Gaza.
This conflict has been going on all my life—Israel and I were born in the same year. Many well-meaning and intelligent people view the situation in widely different ways, often with great emotional charge and strong identification with one side or the other. I’ve been through many different phases in my own understanding of it. It’s a long and complicated conflict with many differing narratives.
Both Israelis and Palestinians are deeply traumatized people. The Jewish people have long faced persecution, including one of the worst genocides in history, and anti-Semitism continues to exist and seems to be on the rise. It’s not hard to understand why many Jewish people wanted and felt they needed a Jewish state, or what brought many Jewish settlers to Palestine. They consider it their ancestral homeland from Biblical times, and most of the early Jewish settlers who came there after the creation of Israel came as refugees.
It’s true that Palestine was not a state at the time, but it wasn’t “a land without a people” either, and most of the Arab majority who had been living there for generations were, often brutally, pushed out of their homes and farms, off their lands, and into exile, many into what is now Gaza and the West Bank. In the years that followed, Jewish people from anywhere in the world could come and live in Israel, while the Arabs who had lived there for generations were not allowed to return to what had been their homeland.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the “two state solutions” on offer were ever a fair deal for the Palestinians. Israel has taken more and more land over the years, and the conditions under which Palestinians live are truly oppressive. Although both sides have engaged in violence, the Palestinians have clearly been the hardest hit. So while I do not support armed attacks on civilians or anti-Semitism, it’s not hard to understand what ignites so-called terrorism against Israel.
I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to see your children or your parents or your neighbors and friends killed or maimed or buried alive under rubble, your house destroyed and your neighborhood flattened. It’s not hard to understand the rage and despair that many Palestinians feel. I’m sure most of the people on both sides want to live in peace, and many on both sides have worked tirelessly for peace, and some have given their lives for it. As tempting as it is to fall into blame and judgement, seeing that no one on either side is operating out of free will can be profoundly helpful.
My heart goes out to all these people. I honestly don’t know what can realistically be done to resolve this situation, but these cycles of endless violence clearly only give rise to more traumatized people, more hate, more fear and more terrorism (on all sides).
I oppose anti-Semitism, and I certainly do not support terrorism, but the word terrorism surely applies equally, if not even more so, to what Israel is doing and has done over these many decades. (It also applies to much of what the US has done and is doing in the world as well. After all, what country has invaded, bombed and ravaged more countries in my lifetime than the US?) So-called terrorists see themselves as freedom fighters, fighting against injustice, as do those who fight against them. Maybe it’s time to look at the roots of all this warfare in our own human minds, instead of always “out there” at some designated “other” who is supposedly “evil.” (And that’s not to say that we shouldn’t also deal with things out there in the world, nor is it to imply that all actors or actions are equally justified or morally equivalent).
I feel we are closer now than we have ever been in my lifetime to WWIII and to either a deliberate or accidental nuclear war. Some people profit from war, and many political agendas can be served by having an external enemy. We would be wise to reflect on this. As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
And let us not forget that the CIA apparently played a role in creating Al-Qaeda by covertly financing and arming Islamic fundamentalist Afghan factions, and possibly Bin Laden as well, as part of our attempt to weaken Russia during their war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And some in the Israeli government apparently helped to promote the rise of Hamas decades ago by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists in order to hopefully divide and rule. So who exactly are the terrorists?
My prayers are for peace and not an expanded war in the Middle East, and for negotiations and a peaceful settlement in Ukraine and not billions more dollars and deadly weapons being poured into both of these wars—killing, maiming, orphaning, and displacing ever-more humans and other animals and living organisms as well. But it seems that the forces in power in this country and Israel are moving full steam ahead in precisely the opposite direction.
I also want to say that the all too frequent censorship, serious harassment and/or condemnation of expressions of support for the Palestinians here and in Europe are deeply concerning to me. Yes, some of these expressions have lacked compassion for Israeli civilians and some have been overtly anti-Semitic and hateful toward Jewish people, and those I certainly condemn.
But when support for the Palestinians is automatically conflated with anti-Semitism, or when anti-Zionism is conflated with anti-Semitism, this is as erroneous as conflating all Jewish people with the state of Israel or all Palestinians with either the government of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Also, there are some people (including some Jews and Israelis) who question Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, but who would welcome a one-state solution that would create a secular democracy in all of Palestine-Israel in which Jews and Arabs would live together with equal rights for all. Of course, in such a state, Jews would be the minority, and they arguably have some credible reasons to fear what might happen to them as such, and speaking as a gender non-conforming lesbian woman, I can understand other reasons why an Arab-majority might not be something most Jewish Israelis would readily embrace. Still, it might be the only plausible road to peace. In my understanding, the slogan “from the river to the sea” can mean different things—it can mean this kind of one-state solution (a secular democracy where Arabs and Jews live together, one vote per person), or it can mean one Jewish state with no Arabs, or one Palestinian state with no Jews. But, in any case, there are nuances here in many of these views that too often get lost in the storms of fear and anger. Hopefully, reasonable, good-hearted, well-intended people can learn to disagree without having to demonize, mis-characterize, censor or dox one another.
For most of my life, I’ve taken free speech for granted, but that has been changing dramatically in the US, not just around this issue, but around other issues as well—and this censorship is coming from both the left and the right. I was born in the McCarthy Era. As a small child, I had a recurring nightmare in which my parents were jailed and burned in the electric chair—obviously it must have come from hearing the radio or the adults talking about the Rosenbergs (and if you don’t know who that is, google “Julius and Ethel Rosenberg”). Many people were black-listed and lost their jobs during this time, and the Rosenbergs were executed.
In this country in recent years, people have lost their jobs or been canceled, defunded, doxxed and attacked in various ways for criticizing Israel, expressing support for the Palestinians, questioning on-going financial and military support to Ukraine, or having different opinions about how best to address racial injustice, women’s and transgender rights, and other hot button issues. If you question funding the war in Ukraine, you get called pro-Putin. If you question Israel, you’re labeled anti-Semitic. If you express any sympathy or understanding at all for Hamas, you’re a terrorist. If you bring up the dangers of radical Islam, you’re Islamaphobic. If you question any aspect of the transgender agenda, you’re a transphobic bigot. If you’re critical of the BLM approach to racism, you’re a racist. And in each case, you may be subject to losing your job, having your events canceled or your funding cut off, getting doxxed, having your books censored or burned, or even being met with physical violence or even deportation.
Regardless of your political views on any of these issues, this kind of growing censorship as well as government influence on media should concern us all. As a lifelong progressive, I now feel politically homeless—appalled by much of what both the right and the left are advocating and doing in this country.
I am trying not to fall too deeply into the well of apocalyptic Doom and Gloom thinking. After all, who knows what might happen next—as they say, the darkest hour is right before the dawn, and what seems like a catastrophe might be the grit that creates the pearl—we never know. But then again, optimism based on ignorance and denial is simply illusion, and we can’t solve problems by looking the other way and pretending they don’t exist. And in the end, no matter what we do, nothing lasts forever, including planet earth, the sun, the human species, and each one of us.
If there was one small hopeful moment in the last few weeks, it was when eighty-five year old Yocheved Lifshitz, one of the Israeli hostages abducted and then freed by Hamas, was being released, and she turned to one of her captors and shook the person's hand, saying to them, “shalom,” the Hebrew salutation meaning “peace.” You can see the video here. Undoubtedly, many found this abhorrent and there are probably some cynical interpretations of it, but to me, it was a moment of tremendous heart-opening. These moments have been recorded in many wars, when the soldiers on opposite sides, or the guards and their prisoners, broke out of their roles and for a brief moment played or danced together before resuming the battle.
One thinks of the story in the Bhagavad Gita in which Arjuna has to fight against his own friends and family in a battle, and he is overcome with despair and doesn’t want to do it. Krishna tells Arjuna that he must fight, that everybody has already lived and died countless times, that forms break down but life itself is eternal, that it is Arjuna’s karma to fight and the karma of his family members to die—karma, as I see it, simply meaning the inevitable outcome of infinite causes and conditions.
Nisargadatta says much the same thing in several dialogs in I AM THAT when responding to questions about the war in what was then East Pakistan. He says, "In pure consciousness nothing ever happens." The questioner is quite upset by this response and questions how Nisargadatta can remain aloof, to which Nisargadatta replies: "I never talked of remaining aloof. You could as well see me jumping into the fray to save somebody and getting killed. Yet to me nothing happened. Imagine a big building collapsing... Nothing happened to the space itself... nothing happens to life when forms break down and names are wiped out."
I can go easily to this bigger picture—as I’ve offered in several recent posts—in which all of this is an unfathomable energetic movement or a dream-like appearance dissolving as soon as it appears. But that perspective can be used as a kind of false comfort or escape from being fully awake to the fact that life at the level of ordinary human reality includes tremendous suffering, much of which has no obvious resolution. Human beings like you and me are living through unimaginable horrors at this very moment, and turning away can’t be the answer. On the other hand, tuning in can lead to heartbreak, grief, anger, rage and very often words or actions that simply pour more fuel on the fire. What to do?
As the previous section on free will suggests, we will find out what life moves Israel and Hamas and Joe Biden and each one of us to do, and in every moment, it will be the only possible—and in some sense, it truly will be no more substantial than last night’s dream (or nightmare). But tell that to the Palestinian child undergoing surgery without anesthesia in a hospital that is being bombed after both her parents have been blown up in front of her. Can we face the raw actuality of what is happening without reaching for any spiritual opium? And can we find our way to love and not succumb to hate?
And what about that child? If she lives and survives the war, what will become of her? She may live with chronic pain and disability, not to mention psychic pain and trauma. Surely, it should surprise no one if a decade later she straps on a suicide belt and blows herself up in a crowd of Israelis. But the odds are, she won’t do this—she will probably live a quiet life, and miraculously might even find her way to love and forgiveness and be a voice for peace. It never ceases to amaze me what humans can survive.
I know that no matter how much we evolve and improve, utopian ideas are a fantasy. No two of us will agree about everything, and this manifestation by its very nature will always contain the polar opposites, which only exist relative to one another, in a never-ending dance without a dancer—and we each contain it all, the light and the dark.
And so, my friends, the eight billion multiplex movies of waking life continue to play, full of incomprehensible horrors and astonishing miracles, love affairs and horrific wars, hurricanes and erupting volcanoes, dramas and comedies, suspenseful thrills and chills, heartbreak and delight, with a cast of eight billion humans each playing our particular part perfectly. And ultimately, we don’t know what this is or where it’s all going.
Love and good wishes to all…
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Sm64: The question arises, where did T's moral stance on these issues arise? Did an advaitic outlook produce them, or are they the fruit of a moral sense that contradicts the philosophic position that "things just happen and are neither good or bad"? Would it have been less moral but more consistent for T, advaita advocate that she is, to have written an essay about how the Israel Hamas conflict didn't interest her in the slightest?
Posted by: sant64 | April 20, 2024 at 06:15 AM
I haven’t much to add to this post of Joan Tollifson, except to say that her writings stem from her humanity and life experiences and her teachings have a ring of truth about them. This piece seemed quite pertinent in regard to the whole spiritual ‘search’ phenomenon and thinking: “… there is a common misunderstanding in the spiritual world that the goal of meditation is to be thought-free, that awakening entails having a permanently and completely empty mind, devoid of all thinking, and that thinking is basically the enemy that must be vanquished.”
Posted by: Ron E. | April 20, 2024 at 08:40 AM