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I’ve been teaching spirituality since 2017, but I used to screw up a lot when talking about it.
Not so much with students but with family, friends, and anyone else who showed interest. It felt impossible to justify to them this obsession of mine that was destroying my career as a musician, destroying my relationship with my girlfriend of 7 years and, honestly, just making me seem really weird to everyone.
And as I tried, hundreds of times to give people a sense of what spirituality is, what dharma is, what awakening is, I came to realize a difficult truth: it’s actually impossible.
Now, if you’re working with a mainstream meditation app, or you’re involved in a traditional community, you might have an easier time than I did. But from the beginning of my journey I was engaging with dozens of teaching and practices, and I was only interested in the deepest ones (that is, the ones that are hardest to explain). More and more practitioners are like this in the 21st century: stood at the ‘spiritual buffet’ that I’ve illustrated before on this channel. You take a Buddhist bun, drop in a Hindu hot dog and take a side of psychology salad. Explaining just one of these to your mate at the bar is hard enough, but trying to give a sense of how all 3 are informing your fledgling understanding just makes people look at you like you have mustard on your chin.
Even among fellow practitioners, this kind of conversation takes great care. (The best of these conversations can be found on Daniel Ingram’s ‘dharma overground’ forum and the ‘stream entry’ Subreddit.) But all of this points to an even deeper problem. Forget explaining your understanding to someone else—even relying on words yourself is a trap!
I decided early in my journey that I was only interested in irreducible, inarguable truth; truth that would be equally true on an alien planet, where no-one spoke my language.
And the only truth that fulfils these criteria is what we call nonduality. Every other teaching is conditional. For example, if you want to call yourself a Buddhist you must engage in the ritual of taking refuge. This has enormous benefit, but what if you have no access to a Buddhist community?
Now, there’s no shortage of people who will tell you that you can’t even approach Awakening without joining a specific community, doing a specific practice, reading a specific book—the list goes on…
But the more of those demands I heard, the more obvious it became that they couldn’t all be right. It seemed unlikely that genuine Awakening was only occurring in Zen, for example, and not in other traditions who don’t happen to face the wall when they meditate.
It became clearer and clearer to me that the truth I’m interested in is that which is true at all times, for all people, in all circumstances. And I really mean all circumstances.
What, I asked, is equally true for both the Japanese-speaking Zen monk and the English-speaking Christian and the Swahili-speaking atheist and my nephew with autism who struggles with language?
How can words adequately describe this truth? It must have been true long before the 7,000 languages of this world were created; before we ever gave labels to the things we encounter. What was equally true for early humans as it is for us?
What’s true for us all—no matter what’s going on—is that awareness is the basis of all experience.
Awareness knows everything just as it is—prior to our interpreting it, judging it, labelling it, describing it. Awareness is, regardless of what appears or does not appear within it, and is beyond being harmed by those appearances. And this includes the appearance of what you take to be ‘yourself’. The experience of your body comes and goes; the experience of your memories comes and goes; the experience of a personal mind comes and goes. Awareness remains throughout and between those experiences—the ultimate context that subsumes them all—not separate from them but, rather, the common essence of them all.
Words are mere labels for what appears spontaneously within this uncreated space. When you rely on them too much, all you see is clouds. You neglect to recognize that the sun shines through even the thickest of them, and so feel like you might be rained on for the rest of your life.
Even to say that things appear due to past causes is speculation. To conceive of the past, you must employ memory, and memory is a mental process you are running in the present.
Awakening is nothing other than the realization that this aware basic space is your true identity.
Any teaching that says you must purify or develop yourself is a concession because it proposes that there is a self that can be purified or developed, when no such self exists in an absolute sense. Even science is beginning to recognize this truth.
Teachings of purification and development are given provisionally to those who insist that they must do something. But for Awakening to occur these provisional recommendations must lead back to non-doing. As long as you try to do or change anything at all, you are reifying the illusory, relative self, which is imaginary. All boundaries are imaginary. ‘Things’ cannot exist without boundaries. The dissolving of those boundaries by the cessation of the mental processes that create them is nonduality; is Awakening. Suffering; dissatisfaction; stress is impossible in this recognition.
Now, if you’re able to explain all of that to your colleagues at your work Christmas party, I’ll be the first to give you a standing ovation! No joke—I’d really love to hear about your attempts, even if you fall flat on your face!
Here’s the thing: I’ve been practising explaining this stuff since 2017. And I’ve been practising explaining other complex ideas since 2000. And still, I wouldn’t be able to explain Awakening to your colleagues—because they’re not interested.
Adyashanti said that, when it comes to explaining Awakening, his job is to ‘fail well’. He was demonstrating the inadequacy of words. Words are inherently dualistic: they are about making distinctions. How could they explain what is nondual?
Following even the best attempt by the teacher, the student must follow where the teacher is pointing and investigate for themselves. And that student must avoid the trap of speculation—of trying to understand intellectually what the teacher is saying. And the best way to avoid this trap is to stop talking and thinking about it altogether. Look instead to your direct experience, which is far more rich and vibrant than words could ever describe.
It shocks my students when I tell them that I don’t even try to explain this stuff to old friends or new acquaintances of mine. Someone has to demonstrate enormous curiosity for an attempt to be appropriate. The interaction between student and teacher is a dance. The teacher leads, but if the student doesn’t follow, then there’s nothing the teacher can do. And though it may be possible to explain the choreography, the explanation is not the dance. In the same way, understanding a spiritual teaching intellectually is not Awakening. Awakening transcends intellect. So stop speculating; stop trying to understand. Just rest as the uncreated nature that knows all experience, just as it is—just for a brief moment. Then another… then another… then another…
With love from my desk,
dg💙
P.S. If you want to know where you're at in this whole picture, take my 1-minute quiz.
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