NON-DUALITY
***Start with Oneness overview
Key 2 approaches to Nonduality
1) Light/Consciousness/Self
2) Darkness/Void/Emptiness/ Shunya/ No Self -
Key 2 approaches to Nonduality
1) Light/Consciousness/Self
2) Darkness/Void/Emptiness/ Shunya/ No Self -
The Below Religions and Views constitutes 92% of the World's Population!
Note the large percentage of Secular/Agnostic/Atheistic/ Non-Religious
Non-Religious is sometimes referred to as Spiritual but Not Religious.
God, Spirit, Lord, Allah, Brahman, Tao Cover most popular names....
Note the large percentage of Secular/Agnostic/Atheistic/ Non-Religious
Non-Religious is sometimes referred to as Spiritual but Not Religious.
God, Spirit, Lord, Allah, Brahman, Tao Cover most popular names....
Names of God - Need to Include Secular/NonReligions/Agnostic
Christianity
God
The Lord
The Alpha and Omega, First and the last, the beginning and the end (God as process)
Jesus, Yeshua, Joshua = Yahweh saves
Trinity - Father, Son Holy spirit (like solid liquid gas).
Hebrew
YHWH - Proper name of god
YHVH, JHVH - Yahweh (favored Hebrew Scholars) /Jehovah (used in some translations of the bible.
I AM THAT I AM
Adonai - The Lord (ad-don-ay-eye)
Elohim in Hebrew Bible
Almost all Orthodox Jews avoid using either Yahweh or Jehovah altogether on the basis that the actual pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton has been lost in antiquity. Many use the term HaShem (The Name) as a euphemism, or they use "God" or "The Lord" instead.
Islam
Allah - Also there are many many names for Allah, like Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim, Al-Quddus, Al-Malik, etc
In Sufism - Hu from Allahu, … Hu means "Just He" or "Revealed"
Hinduism
Brahman/Parambrahma
Atman/ Paramatman
Sat-Chit-Ananda
Om-Tat-Sat
Ishvara
Shiva
Vishnu
Krishna, Rama, and other incarnations of Vishnu
Advaita Hinduism - Formless god, Atman realized within
Buddhism –Brahma, Tao,
New Age/Agnostic** - Source, Universe, Consciousness, Universal Logos, Self,
Christianity
God
The Lord
The Alpha and Omega, First and the last, the beginning and the end (God as process)
Jesus, Yeshua, Joshua = Yahweh saves
Trinity - Father, Son Holy spirit (like solid liquid gas).
Hebrew
YHWH - Proper name of god
YHVH, JHVH - Yahweh (favored Hebrew Scholars) /Jehovah (used in some translations of the bible.
I AM THAT I AM
Adonai - The Lord (ad-don-ay-eye)
Elohim in Hebrew Bible
Almost all Orthodox Jews avoid using either Yahweh or Jehovah altogether on the basis that the actual pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton has been lost in antiquity. Many use the term HaShem (The Name) as a euphemism, or they use "God" or "The Lord" instead.
Islam
Allah - Also there are many many names for Allah, like Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim, Al-Quddus, Al-Malik, etc
In Sufism - Hu from Allahu, … Hu means "Just He" or "Revealed"
Hinduism
Brahman/Parambrahma
Atman/ Paramatman
Sat-Chit-Ananda
Om-Tat-Sat
Ishvara
Shiva
Vishnu
Krishna, Rama, and other incarnations of Vishnu
Advaita Hinduism - Formless god, Atman realized within
Buddhism –Brahma, Tao,
New Age/Agnostic** - Source, Universe, Consciousness, Universal Logos, Self,
New Views on God - Need to Include Agnostic, Non-religious.
Brahman, True Self, Tao, God, Allah, Source, Spirit
Meister Eckhart illustrates the height of western non-dualism. This is why he is largely impossible to understand with our usual dualistic mind. When Eckhart says, “I pray God to rid me of God,” our logical mind would see this as nonsense! It takes unitive consciousness to discover what Eckhart means. There is no concept of God that can contain God. Your present notion of God is never it. [1]
As Augustine said, “If you comprehend it, it is not God.” We can only come to know God as we let go of our ideas about God, and as what is not God is stripped away."
Yet the human mind and the human heart is not satisfied, at least until genuine unitive consciousness is reached. Ultimately I think we are all unique and as such can all approach God in a unique way following our own path.
Ancient Buddhist texts claim that "God has a million faces." This perspective is just one of many among different religions and cultures that describe a diverse array of names given to God.
Fourteenth-century mystic and activist Meister Eckhart says “all the names we give to God come from an understanding of ourselves.” If he is correct, then as humanity’s self-understanding and understanding of the cosmos evolve, then clearly our God-names will evolve in response.
Think about all the names you have besides your given name. Father, Mother, son, daughter, cousin, grandfather, grandmother etc.
Names in relationships, and lovers husband, wife,
Nicknames and names with friends - fraternity, friends, nicknames, etc
Names in workplace
Names with your hobbies - poet, writer, singer
Mr Meyers, Professor Meyers, Doctor Meyers
Names about your qualities - man of integrity, funny guy, humble, nice, selfish, greedy, giving, etc.
Names evolve… for example you grow up and become a doctor.
Some names stick , some you outgrow.
I bet no too people have the same SET of names {x1, x2, x3…}
Collectively and Individually our names for God evolve….
God as the Universe.. Hubble deep space
The beauty science has revealed.
We have to understand our Old names of God were before Hubble, before Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Heisenberg, Schrondinger, Bohr, etc.
Our universal worldview has MUCH grown and matured since the time of Jesus.
New Philosophies / Names for God That are fresh for our time
1) God as transcendent spirit - monotheism - quantum field all possibilities (wave) - unmanifest - FATHER
2) God as imminent creation - seems like polytheism - quantum particle of manifestation - MOTHER
3) Nondual Nameless
----
1) The Divine Feminine - Earth / Creation / Imminent
To name and image God as Gaia, Goddess, Kuan Yin, Shechinah, Ochun, Tara, the Black Madonna, or Kali puts the Divine into a whole larger context. Anthropologist Marija Gimbutas says of the Goddess: She is “in all her manifestations a symbol of the unity of all life in Nature. The Goddess calls us back to the sacredness of creation all about us.
“In feminist theology therefore, the issue is not about exchanging pronouns, but about another way of thinking of transcendence … as being bound up in the web of life…. We move from God-above-us to God-within-us and overcome false transcendence hierarchically conceived.”
------
Names of God drawn from Science
Science has exploded into human consciousness in a special way within the last 100 years, during which so much of our view of the world and our knowledge of the history of our planet and the universe, its age and scope, has emerged. Science’s new creation story tells us that our universe began 13.8 billion years ago with the “big bang” (which was in fact utterly silent)
Thomas Aquinas says, “A mistake about creation results in a mistake about God.” Mistaken science of the past has surely distorted our God talk and God imaging. But let us turn Aquinas’s words around: insight about creation results in insight about Divinity.
2) Organism - Evolving - Self Organizing
One new name—offered by physicist Erich Jantsch in The Self-Organizing Universe—describes God as “the mind of the universe.” Jantsch defines “mind” as “self-organization dynamics at many levels, as a dynamics which itself evolves.” He compares the paradigm of self-organization in science with the experience of the mystics over the ages, writing, “This connectedness of our own life processes with the dynamics of an all embracing universe has so far been accessible only to mystic experience.” He goes on to describe natural history as the evolution of consciousness.
In other words, God evolves and “God is evolution.”
Astrophysicist Arne A. Wyller takes a similar approach to science and God, describing God as a “Planetary Mind Field” that “is itself evolving in its creativity” and is restrained to conform to existing physical laws in its biological creations. Wyller also argues that there is a biological aspect of evil in human behavior and that this evil derives from the imperfect coupling between the rational part of the human brain and the emotive and reptilian parts. The Mind Field itself is all about love. In his book The Planetary Mind he writes:
The idea that humans create evil by their imperfect mastery of the evolutionary gifts of the Mind Field, the rational brains, the emotive brain, and the reptilian brain, one on top of the other, in no way needs to reflect on the attributes of the Mind Field. In contrast, Nature around us bespeaks of its love.
Wyller predicts that our evolution will move us toward a community based wholly on the principle of love in a new unstructured religion that is “more global, less ritualistic, and less dogmatic.”
3) GOD is Light - Source, Central Sun
Billion:1 photons to baryons/matter
10^89 to 10^80
A third area in which contemporary God-talk is flourishing is in the area of light. As I pointed out in my study One River, Many Wells, I find that light is the most universal image of God among the known religions of the planet. Whether one considers African or Celtic religions, or the Buddha saying “become a light unto yourself,” or Christ saying “I am the light of the world,” or Judaism teaching about Shechinah, the name of God as Light is found most everywhere. It is also found in contemporary science. Light is far more present than matter in the universe. As Wyller points out, “No matter what scenario we envision for the details of the creation of the Universe, we are left with the incontrovertible observations that a flood of light dominates our Universe…. For every particle of matter there are 1 billion particles of light.”
With the discovery that, in David Bohm’s words, “matter is frozen light,” science allows us to put to rest the horrific dualisms of spirit vs. matter that have haunted western consciousness at least since Plato. More accurately QM puts this dualism to rest.
-----
4) Universe is 95% dark matter and dark energy.
God is Darkness - Void, Nothing, Emptiness, Shunyata.
sunyata — “fullness,” “spaciousness,” “connectedness,” and “boundlessness” — but as Ari Goldfield points out, “emptiness” is the most exact translation.
But it is not voidness or nihilism (life is meaningless).
The darkness that characterizes dark energy, dark matter, and black holes finds its human counterpart in the mystery of the unconscious. Eckhart tells us God is “a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being” and “the ground of our souls is dark.” Ours are a time for learning to dwell in that nothingness and that beyondness—a time for silent receptivity in “the cave of our hearts.” In meditation we discover these truths.
The Heart Sutra says, “all phenomena in their own-being are empty.” It doesn’t say “all phenomena are empty.” This distinction is vital. “Own-being” means separate independent existence. The passage means that nothing we see or hear (or are) stands alone; everything is a tentative expression of one seamless, ever-changing landscape.
Making Ego Transparent to Transcendance
Ari Goldfield- The first meaning of emptiness is called “emptiness of essence,” which means that phenomena [that we experience] have no inherent nature by themselves.” The second is called “emptiness in the context of Buddha Nature,” which sees emptiness as endowed with qualities of awakened mind like wisdom, bliss, compassion, clarity, and courage. Ultimate reality is the union of both emptinesses.
Misunderstandings - Emotional - I feel empty, lonely, sad or depressed
Ethical -
Meditative - Actually emptiness is not a state of mind at all; it is, as the Dalai Lama says, simply “the true nature of things and events.” This includes the mind. Whether the mind of the meditator is full of thoughts or empty of them, this true nature holds.
Ultimately we suffer because we grasp after things thinking they are fixed, substantial, real and capable of being possessed by ego. It is only when we can see through this illusion and open ourselves
Brahman, True Self, Tao, God, Allah, Source, Spirit
Meister Eckhart illustrates the height of western non-dualism. This is why he is largely impossible to understand with our usual dualistic mind. When Eckhart says, “I pray God to rid me of God,” our logical mind would see this as nonsense! It takes unitive consciousness to discover what Eckhart means. There is no concept of God that can contain God. Your present notion of God is never it. [1]
As Augustine said, “If you comprehend it, it is not God.” We can only come to know God as we let go of our ideas about God, and as what is not God is stripped away."
Yet the human mind and the human heart is not satisfied, at least until genuine unitive consciousness is reached. Ultimately I think we are all unique and as such can all approach God in a unique way following our own path.
Ancient Buddhist texts claim that "God has a million faces." This perspective is just one of many among different religions and cultures that describe a diverse array of names given to God.
Fourteenth-century mystic and activist Meister Eckhart says “all the names we give to God come from an understanding of ourselves.” If he is correct, then as humanity’s self-understanding and understanding of the cosmos evolve, then clearly our God-names will evolve in response.
Think about all the names you have besides your given name. Father, Mother, son, daughter, cousin, grandfather, grandmother etc.
Names in relationships, and lovers husband, wife,
Nicknames and names with friends - fraternity, friends, nicknames, etc
Names in workplace
Names with your hobbies - poet, writer, singer
Mr Meyers, Professor Meyers, Doctor Meyers
Names about your qualities - man of integrity, funny guy, humble, nice, selfish, greedy, giving, etc.
Names evolve… for example you grow up and become a doctor.
Some names stick , some you outgrow.
I bet no too people have the same SET of names {x1, x2, x3…}
Collectively and Individually our names for God evolve….
God as the Universe.. Hubble deep space
The beauty science has revealed.
We have to understand our Old names of God were before Hubble, before Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Heisenberg, Schrondinger, Bohr, etc.
Our universal worldview has MUCH grown and matured since the time of Jesus.
New Philosophies / Names for God That are fresh for our time
1) God as transcendent spirit - monotheism - quantum field all possibilities (wave) - unmanifest - FATHER
2) God as imminent creation - seems like polytheism - quantum particle of manifestation - MOTHER
3) Nondual Nameless
----
1) The Divine Feminine - Earth / Creation / Imminent
To name and image God as Gaia, Goddess, Kuan Yin, Shechinah, Ochun, Tara, the Black Madonna, or Kali puts the Divine into a whole larger context. Anthropologist Marija Gimbutas says of the Goddess: She is “in all her manifestations a symbol of the unity of all life in Nature. The Goddess calls us back to the sacredness of creation all about us.
“In feminist theology therefore, the issue is not about exchanging pronouns, but about another way of thinking of transcendence … as being bound up in the web of life…. We move from God-above-us to God-within-us and overcome false transcendence hierarchically conceived.”
------
Names of God drawn from Science
Science has exploded into human consciousness in a special way within the last 100 years, during which so much of our view of the world and our knowledge of the history of our planet and the universe, its age and scope, has emerged. Science’s new creation story tells us that our universe began 13.8 billion years ago with the “big bang” (which was in fact utterly silent)
Thomas Aquinas says, “A mistake about creation results in a mistake about God.” Mistaken science of the past has surely distorted our God talk and God imaging. But let us turn Aquinas’s words around: insight about creation results in insight about Divinity.
2) Organism - Evolving - Self Organizing
One new name—offered by physicist Erich Jantsch in The Self-Organizing Universe—describes God as “the mind of the universe.” Jantsch defines “mind” as “self-organization dynamics at many levels, as a dynamics which itself evolves.” He compares the paradigm of self-organization in science with the experience of the mystics over the ages, writing, “This connectedness of our own life processes with the dynamics of an all embracing universe has so far been accessible only to mystic experience.” He goes on to describe natural history as the evolution of consciousness.
In other words, God evolves and “God is evolution.”
Astrophysicist Arne A. Wyller takes a similar approach to science and God, describing God as a “Planetary Mind Field” that “is itself evolving in its creativity” and is restrained to conform to existing physical laws in its biological creations. Wyller also argues that there is a biological aspect of evil in human behavior and that this evil derives from the imperfect coupling between the rational part of the human brain and the emotive and reptilian parts. The Mind Field itself is all about love. In his book The Planetary Mind he writes:
The idea that humans create evil by their imperfect mastery of the evolutionary gifts of the Mind Field, the rational brains, the emotive brain, and the reptilian brain, one on top of the other, in no way needs to reflect on the attributes of the Mind Field. In contrast, Nature around us bespeaks of its love.
Wyller predicts that our evolution will move us toward a community based wholly on the principle of love in a new unstructured religion that is “more global, less ritualistic, and less dogmatic.”
3) GOD is Light - Source, Central Sun
Billion:1 photons to baryons/matter
10^89 to 10^80
A third area in which contemporary God-talk is flourishing is in the area of light. As I pointed out in my study One River, Many Wells, I find that light is the most universal image of God among the known religions of the planet. Whether one considers African or Celtic religions, or the Buddha saying “become a light unto yourself,” or Christ saying “I am the light of the world,” or Judaism teaching about Shechinah, the name of God as Light is found most everywhere. It is also found in contemporary science. Light is far more present than matter in the universe. As Wyller points out, “No matter what scenario we envision for the details of the creation of the Universe, we are left with the incontrovertible observations that a flood of light dominates our Universe…. For every particle of matter there are 1 billion particles of light.”
With the discovery that, in David Bohm’s words, “matter is frozen light,” science allows us to put to rest the horrific dualisms of spirit vs. matter that have haunted western consciousness at least since Plato. More accurately QM puts this dualism to rest.
-----
4) Universe is 95% dark matter and dark energy.
God is Darkness - Void, Nothing, Emptiness, Shunyata.
sunyata — “fullness,” “spaciousness,” “connectedness,” and “boundlessness” — but as Ari Goldfield points out, “emptiness” is the most exact translation.
But it is not voidness or nihilism (life is meaningless).
The darkness that characterizes dark energy, dark matter, and black holes finds its human counterpart in the mystery of the unconscious. Eckhart tells us God is “a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being” and “the ground of our souls is dark.” Ours are a time for learning to dwell in that nothingness and that beyondness—a time for silent receptivity in “the cave of our hearts.” In meditation we discover these truths.
The Heart Sutra says, “all phenomena in their own-being are empty.” It doesn’t say “all phenomena are empty.” This distinction is vital. “Own-being” means separate independent existence. The passage means that nothing we see or hear (or are) stands alone; everything is a tentative expression of one seamless, ever-changing landscape.
Making Ego Transparent to Transcendance
Ari Goldfield- The first meaning of emptiness is called “emptiness of essence,” which means that phenomena [that we experience] have no inherent nature by themselves.” The second is called “emptiness in the context of Buddha Nature,” which sees emptiness as endowed with qualities of awakened mind like wisdom, bliss, compassion, clarity, and courage. Ultimate reality is the union of both emptinesses.
Misunderstandings - Emotional - I feel empty, lonely, sad or depressed
Ethical -
Meditative - Actually emptiness is not a state of mind at all; it is, as the Dalai Lama says, simply “the true nature of things and events.” This includes the mind. Whether the mind of the meditator is full of thoughts or empty of them, this true nature holds.
Ultimately we suffer because we grasp after things thinking they are fixed, substantial, real and capable of being possessed by ego. It is only when we can see through this illusion and open ourselves