Holiday Depression: A Call to Nonduality?

If the season has you hurting, longing, or otherwise feeling out of sorts, I urge you toward nonduality. It’s the only path to truth, because it is not a path at all and has no place for all the concepts I just mentioned. It has no room for anything, including self, time, or the universe itself.

In my teens the path was drugs – pot, particularly, an escape from my pain. By my early 20s it was exercise and self-help and occasional forays into religion. The 30s brought a big dose of life in the form of a troublesome marriage, children, career. My early 40s brought drips and drabs of Eckhart Tolle, but like most I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about – I skimmed the surface, felt a peculiar relief, then went right on hurting.

Then the existential crash and burn at 43 and a whole slew of woo-woo – alternative approaches to spirituality that, if nothing else, helped me to shed the obsessive self-control through which I’d for so long protected myself. You can’t wave eagle feathers and sage smoke around your chakras, clamber mostly naked into sweat lodges, gag down jungle-bred hallucinogenics and keep up any pretense of being ‘normal.’

But as with every preceding path, the woo-woo had to be left behind. Why? Because the same guy kept emerging from the path. The same common denominator (me) that was at last recognized as the source of all those problems and sent me spiraling into a crisis was the very same common denominator forever picturing the next path as ‘the one’ through which I’d at last be healed.

Yet aside from the superficial, nothing ever really changed. I was no different than a teenager, mistakenly believing a new haircut or set of clothes was making me different, or an adult picturing the new diet, job, house making me different. Look around you and see if you and those you know aren’t doing the same thing.

And now comes New Year’s and all the silly little resolutions through which we once again play the charade of ‘change.’ Endless paths all leading nowhere.

Hence the great beauty and simplicity of nonduality, which stands alone in its demands that we find that common denominator and drag him or her kicking and screaming out into the open where we can look him in the eye and ask why he’s made such a mess of things. Every other path points outward with a self at its center – ‘someone’ walking the ‘pathless path’ of the Tao (hint: it is pathless precisely because there is no one to walk it).

Very, very few will embrace nonduality precisely because it threatens the self’s sense of, well, itself. The very nature of mind is threat-avoidance: We fret over war, disease, accident, etc., because of what such threats can do to ‘me.’ Nonduality suggests that that which erects such defenses is itself an illusion.

Thus out of fear we cling to the self, we tell ourselves that we are enjoying life or making the most of life or that life is good, even as our words and actions betray us in ways large and small. How can that which emanates from a place of separation and fear ever truly be happy? And is not happiness itself just another mental concept, the happiness predicated on that which we find enjoyable? And if happiness, love, and all those other goodies are so transient, so ephemeral, what is real? Where does truth exist? (Because can truth be conditional?)

Nonduality says push on through all such concepts, dump all of it and see what is left when the dust settles. Seek the Truth (not the flimsy, conceptual stuff) because it alone will set you free. Can the mind, subject as it is to the predations of time, conditioning, organic decomposition, even recognize a Truth? If not, then who or what can? THAT is what we are encouraged to see, Tolle’s ‘silent watcher,’ the Knower, that which is living us.

So on this New Year’s maybe we drop the same tired resolutions, the ones that once again re-emphasize the body or bank account or mind, and instead resolve to start digging within to see what lies beneath?

Happy New Year’s 🙂