The Illusion Of Separateness

What is usually called knowing is thought’s habit of laying conceptual meaning over the undefinable beingness. Beingness is whole and undefinable, yet thought arises and appears to split it into subject and object, me and world. Thought calls the process knowing, and the danger is that we mistake the abstraction for reality itself. In doing so it hardens into what Idries Shah, the Sufi writer and teacher, poetically called the Commanding Self.

This illusory self is built from habits and impulses that parade as me, seizing upon thought and turning it into ego, creating roles, defending positions, even mimicking spirituality to maintain its hold. Emotional reactivity is at its core, rising quickly to defend the illusion of self and to keep its story intact. Even the experience of mental clarity about spiritual ideas is not liberation. It is only thought taking pleasure in believing it knows. Thought truly believes it knows. It takes the miracle of perceiving and recognising patterns and says, “I know that is a tree.” From there it leaps to, “I know I am a person,” “I know the path to enlightenment,” or even, “I know I Am.” Yet in truth thought does not and cannot know if any of these claims are real.

At the same time, the wholeness of beingness itself cannot be known in the way thought defines knowing, as if there were a separate person who knows. Thought has no means of grasping it and cannot claim anything about it. In particular, thought does not and cannot know whether beingness is the product of the brain or not. When this knowing subsides, what is revealed is the liberation of simply being, the pure openness of not knowing, which is simply the end of trying to define beingness at all. In this not knowing of being is revealed aliveness, love, beauty and the inexhaustible source of all creativity.

The sense of a separate self is only a fundamental illusion. Awakening is nothing other than the end of this illusion. Thought hears them as events belonging to someone, as if a person awakens or a person recognises. In truth there is no such someone. What those words point to is simply the end of the claim that there ever was.

In minds imbued with the belief of being separate, and interpreting non dual teachings only intellectually, there is a danger of falling into nihilism. By nihilism is meant the sense that life is meaningless, that nothing matters. Here the health and well-being of the mind, body and world can be negated.
Nevertheless, there is no separate person, and non duality is clear that clinging to this idea is the very cause of the suffering that is experienced. However, personality can be spoken of without implying a person. It is simply a patterning of thought, emotion, and behaviour, shaped by conditioning and circumstance. These patterns appear and function, but they do not require a separate identity at their core. This points to the lived truth that non duality is not about being removed or remote, but about being fully alive amidst the flow of daily life.
With love,
Freyja