(This is Part Four of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)
By Raphael Awen
I hope you’ve read what we’ve covered so far in this series. You may need it for where we’re going today.
In the previous blog, we started saying some things about the unknowable nature of the nondual. This of course is said to be the height of insanity and hubris both: using our dualistic minds to attempt to describe nonduality because the nondual ‘just is’ and cannot be known or described. The mind has this bent towards trying to grasp knowledge and, as we shall soon see, this approach doesn’t work so well with the nondual as it is not a thing to be grasped.
In today’s exploration, let’s see if we can get the mind to loosen up a bit from this attempt at capturing and possessing knowledge to be more in a place of childlike observation and wonder and letting the virgin unknown remain unmolested and wild. This would be a beautiful ‘letting in’ of our nondual nature – a nondual awakening of its own.
Sex is ever the great metaphor and teacher here. While sex is a great mystery that can be written about, described and portrayed – many hard-ons and orgasms later, it still isn’t any closer to being known. The more it’s explored, the farther away from being known it gets!
Today, with this childlike wonder, we’re going to do a side-by-side comparison of our Expression and our Essence, and begin to look at the oneness (inseparability) of these two. We’re going to attempt some technical description, but all in an effort to open out the childlike wonder further, and further, and still further.
Let’s start with what we mean by the two terms.
Expression is the magical and captivating awakening that birthed a ‘you’ into the world of duality, a world of ‘twoness’, many ‘twonesses’ in fact, from a world of one oneness. I call it a ‘dual awakening’, because it was just that. You and I were awakened into a state of the wide and wonderful world of the dual. It’s so captivating that most of us struggle to retain any awareness of the Essence we were sourced from and actually are.
Essence is your awakening into the nondual, which is actually more of a re-awakening as you were parented out of the nondual. You knew it as part of the consciousness of the All. So this awakening is a remembering of being – being re-‘membered’ back to source, to our essence of nondual oneness.
Let’s start now with the side-by-side comparisons. Fasten your seat belts. Don’t worry if some of it feels a bit hard to track. This stuff is meant to bend the mind. We’ll debrief at the end.
The doorway into Expression is a doorway of fulfillment. You were individuated out from the nondual when and where all the nondual knew was its own satiation point (if there is one in an infinite world) of full-up ful-fill-ment.
The doorway into Essence is boredom. Boredom is our experiential saturation point where wonder has been so reduced by the mind, that the magic of arising isness has fallen prey to being normal. Here, boredom fuels a yearning and return to essence.
Expression is about being one of the many, an individual. Shoes, cars, sex, having a personality, career, etc., whatever makes up your sense of self-awareness and individuality.
Essence is about being one of the one. It’s all ‘Allness’. All just is in un-individuated awareness and stillness. No cars, no shoes, no sex, no personality.
You hold both of these polarities in your being, and when you feel both of them as real, you are moving towards deeper self-realization.
Our reality as Expression is about knowing through defining and comparing. ‘This, not that’ is the captivating mantra of expression. In knowing, we seek efficiency and effectiveness.
Our reality as Essence is all about ‘not-knowing’. As Essence, we get to yield and surrender to ‘not-know-our-way-to-knowing.’ Efficiency and effectiveness are useless here in Essence. You’ve already arrived.
In Expression, we give and receive love. Here, relationship finds an ‘other’ to be able to have a relationship with. Here, also, love attempts to get its definition by comparative difference. ‘Love is kind, love is patient, love is not evil or hateful.’ Love, in expression is very much conditional. It is ‘conditioned’ upon me feeling loving towards an ‘other’, or an ‘other’ deeming me worthy of love. Also here in Expression, hatred and evil serve to magnify Infinite Love’s reality by way of comparative difference.
In Essence, all is love and only love. No hate or evil to contrast it with. Here love doesn’t transact or relate, for there is no ‘other’ to relate or transact with. Love ‘just is’ in stillness and fullness. Here is where we get our ideas about ‘unconditional’ love. There is no other to condition love with.
Expression ‘happens’ to make up a story. Essence has no such drama. All is infinite stillness. You are deep stillness expressing in story.
Where expression has quest, essence has rest. The unsettling questing questions of ‘Who am I?, Why am I here? What is God?’, etc. are the result of our self-birth-awareness into duality. Essence knows only the rest of ‘love is all’, and ‘love pervades all’. You are inseparable quest and rest. Only your perception of being separate makes for your illusory unrest.
While expression seeks containment, essence seeks escape. Expression is like a child seeking to be held, reassured, that all this energy and ‘outboundness’ can return to a resting place when needed.
Essence has no need or any place for reassurance. It is somehow a full-up-full infinity. It fills All with All. You can’t get any more in. Instead, Essence seeks to pop out of itself, to ‘blow a gasket’ if you will and find a mirror in which to see itself, to come to know itself.
You, as inseparable Expression and Essence, get to breathe in the magical best of both worlds. Maybe we could call this ‘Expressence.’
In Expression we are vulnerable. Attesting to our vulnerability is that we seek medications of all kinds, both pharmaceutical and behaviorally, including our essential need for an ego to manage life. Suicide, in the form of literally killing oneself, or in the form of closing ourselves off to life by shutting down desire; all attest to this vulnerability.
In Essence, we are invincible. Here there is nothing that is not us that can stand opposed. Essence is the presence of ‘Allness’, which bears the burden of fullness. Joy without end.
Expression’s Utopias are many. The Christian Heaven is a good example, where the basic idea is all needs are met, joy and love filled, absence of evil, etc.
Essence’s Utopia, on the other hand, is its desire to come to know itself. To do this though, it had to come outside of itself to enter duality, the domain of comparative difference.
Let’s pause on the comparisons for now and see what we can feel about it all.
In all of these comparisons, I’ve hinted strongly at the central feeling point. You are a distinct ‘twoness’ that can’t be separated. When you try to separate them, you become a neurosis factory, hopefully helping you fall back into what you already are. So, don’t go looking for a nondual awakening as if it’s something outside of yourself to be found. You’d be like the confused fish who went off in search of water. You’re swimming it! By the same token, don’t attempt any form of making your duality bad, something to be transcended. You’d be a fish making water the issue.
Popular teaching on the nondual does just this when it teaches that all suffering comes from the nasty fact that we seek and we want all the time. Were it not for our desires and constant seeking (including spiritual seeking), we would avoid all suffering. Identify instead with your nondual nature, they say, and you’re free.
But you as an ‘individual’ are an ‘in-divi-dual’, which by definition is two parts that can’t be divided. You cannot identify, not healthily at least, with only your nondual nature any more than you can your dual nature alone. I’d like to offer that the real cause of suffering is related to this very splitting of consciousness that they are advising. In other words, you get to be both on fire with your wants and desires and surrendered to having need of nothing. The freedom from suffering is found in having both, not suppressing one at the expense of the other. That’s an alive and prospering human being! ‘Whatever you do, don’t kill your wanter,’ I hear the universe crying out from every cell that contains life!
Though the universe has so much more going on than we may ever come to know, it hasn’t got this all figured out as much as you and I would like to think it does. That thinking is a child’s projection on a parent. We’re coming of age now and maturing in how we see life. It’s literally making this stuff up as it goes. It’s ‘not-knowing’ its way to knowing, and you and I are on the cutting edge of its experiment.
The universe needs you to know itself, and you need it to know yourself.
You are Infinite Love’s wild and untamed frontier.
Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can track him on twitter @raphaelawen. Subscribe to this blog to receive each new posting from Soulfullheart Sanctuary directly in your email.
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