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title: Stages of nonduality

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# Stages of nonduality

## Stage one: I AM

Summary: I am pure awareness; the witness of all phenomena, and forever untouched by them.

Thai Forest patriarch [Ajahn Chah](
(https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai/chah/the_teachings_of_ajahn_chah_web.pdf)):

> This is what we call separating the mind from the feeling. If we are clever we don’t attach, we leave things be. **We become the ‘one who knows’**. The mind and feeling are just like oil and water; they are in the same bottle but **they don’t mix**. Even if we are sick or in pain, we still know the feeling as feeling, the mind as mind. We know the painful or comfortable states but we don’t identify with them. We stay only with peace: the peace beyond both comfort and pain.
> ...
> We say that we separate mind and feeling in this way but in fact **they are by nature already separate**. Our realization is simply to know this **natural separateness** according to reality. When we say they are not separated it’s because we’re clinging to them through ignorance of the truth.

Jack Kornfield:

> What’s left is enlightenment, always found here and now, a release of identification with the changing conditions of the world, a resting in awareness. This involves a simple yet profound shift of identity from the myriad, ever-changing conditioned states **to the unconditioned consciousness — the awareness which knows them all**.

## Stage 2: I AM everything

Summary: I am the ever-present background that also manifests as the foreground. When the foreground disappears, I will remain.

During this phase, the Buddhist term *emptiness* is understood to mean something like an empty container in which all experience appears and vanishes.

Author Sam Harris:

> [T]he duality collapses when you recognize that **the contents are, in some basic sense, made of consciousness**. ... [T]he claim [...] is often made that consciousness in some sense transcends its content... it does; it's the **prior condition** of anything that's appearing, but anything that does in fact appear is also of a piece with whatever consciousness is in itself.

Harris again:
> If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the “dharmakaya of **emptiness” in which all apparent things manifest**.

Nonduality teacher Judith Blackstone:
> Fundamental consciousness is experienced as luminous **stillness**, or **emptiness**. ... **Within this luminous, all-pervasive stillness** moves the constantly changing dance of our thoughts, emotions, sensations and perceptions. The more fully we come to **know ourselves as the stillness**, the more effortlessly, deeply and vividly the movement of life occurs and flows.

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup:
> [I]n order to directly experience the nature of reality for himself; he might then find out that that **'emptiness' is** mind at rest, **a subject without objects**, pregnant with the potential for every conceivable internal relationship.

Nonduality teacher Ken Wilber:
> ... realizing your True Nature—which you can call God, Allah, Jahweh, Brahman, Tao, Ein Sof—it doesn’t really matter, because the core of the Big Mind Process is **Emptiness itself, which, having no specific content** at all, can and does embrace anything that arises, integrating it all.

But *emptiness* actually means something quite different. Buddhist practitioner-scholar Karl Brunnholzl:

> Emptiness means that things do not exist as they seem, but are like illusions and like dreams.


Similarly, at this stage the Buddhist term *anatta* (no-self) is misunderstood to mean that there is no *individual* self; only a universal, eternal Self.

Harris:

> Consciousness [...] does not feel like a self. ... If I were a Hindu, I might talk about “Brahman,” the **eternal Self**.

[Blackstone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tyb5_kqNXB8):
> So instead of "I am Judith" and "I am a teacher" [...] we have this experience, this nonverbal experience, which we can say is no-self because it's not that [...] autobiographical self. But there is this **underlying experience** and **we could call it Self**, we can call it no-self, I don't think it matters.

Kastrup (emphasis his):
> People think that in Buddhism there is no self, but actually what is really meant is that there is no *individual*, stand-alone self.

And: 
> Literally everything can be reduced to the **ultimate subject** of experience.

Wilber:
> When we realize that there is always no self (and this is happening right now) we realize that **our true identity** is always the **Supreme Identity**.

The error in this stage is subtle, but is explained clearly by practitioner Soh Wei Yu:

> Such a person may have realized that their consciousness was never divided from manifestations, that all manifestations are none other than consciousness itself. However the karmic (deep conditioning) tendency to conceive of consciousness as an inherently existing, unchanging source and substratum of phenomena, remains — except consciousness is now seen to be undivided from its manifestation, so one subsumes everything to be modulations of Pure Consciousness.

The error lies in a subtle elevating of the subject over objects:

> Awareness is still understood to be a one-way dependency: transient forms are none other than (expressions of) changeless awareness but changeless awareness is not equivalent to transient forms.

## Stage 3: Anatta (no-self)

Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh (*[The Buddhist Understanding of Reality](https://www.mindfulnessbell.org/archive/2015/01/dharma-talk-the-buddhist-understanding-of-reality-2)*):
> Without subject, there is no object; **without object, there is no subject**. They manifest at the same time. ... **[T]he notion of a permanent consciousness is illusion, not reality**.

Buddha, in the Bahiya Sutta:

> Then, Bāhiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bāhiya, there is **no you** in connection with that. When there is **no you** in connection with that, **there is no you there**. When there is no you there, **you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two**. This, just this, is the end of stress.