Buber & Non-duality

[Guest guest]

>>>> Dan: "It is expressed in the acknowledgement of being that

seeing

someone as a living you is, and not simply as an it to be experienced

and used, or an image to be talked at, but never listened to deeply,

as if they were as real as you."

 

Dennis: "This is rather more difficult. I'm not sure whether or not

there is an implied criticism here for my previous failing to respond

(or perhaps I am just being paranoid!). But the phrase 'as if they

were as real as you' is somewhat loaded in the context of advaita

since neither you nor I exists as an individual yet it is only as an

individual that we could take offence, not listen to someone or talk

at someone." Dennis <<<<<

 

 

No criticism whatsoever was implied. My response was on the level of

idea. There was no personal comment to it, nor any loaded response in

what I communicated.

 

I am referring to one of the central ideas of Buber's work. You often

see (not you, but a generic use of the term you) people through an

image, through your conditioning, rather than directly. Desires and

cravings often approach others with the primary idea of getting

experiences and of having desired feelings as a result of contact,

and

of using others to get them. This is the I-It attitude Buber terms

"experience and use" and which is the ego's point of view on reality.

The ego references itself as the consciousness of residual feelings

and experiences upon which it thinks , grouping and making decisions

about them. The feeling and identification of being-this-way, "my

way"

of being, doing and feeling, contrasted with "their way" of being and

doing, is the personality's concept of what identity means. But

relation, which is when someone IS real to you, and I AM (their

Being,

not their being-this-way) fills your awareness, and you are open,

centered in being, not in being-my-way, with all your intellective

and

emotional screens on, is Communion. The thread of Union as it appears

on earth. Such is your only real contact with the Ground of Being as

it manifests in others until and unless you have personal knowledge

and experience to fill in what are merely concepts the intellect has

of non-duality. Not to recognize the reality as it reveals itself in

time, is to fabricate inferences for words that you have only

dictionary definitions for, even if they are Sanscrit words, and to

replace realization, as Shankara terms it, and actual experience,

with

those words, and reasonings from them. This is, to quote Ramana

Maharshi, "practice without knowledge" and is inferior to even

"knowledge without practice".

 

Without knowledge of the reality non-duality refers to, thinking

feeds

on an endless loop of words that lack any real content. The Supreme

reality is not accessible when the enquiry process is itself

supplanted by concepts, by what Krishnamurti calls "conclusions."

Only

the communication of itself through relation is available to you, but

the view expressed by you would make relation itself impossible by

frustrating its dynamic with a conceptual suppression of experience,

of contact, and of being itself (how can one have meaningful contact

with another, if others are illusions?) therefore making knowlege of

the reality of non-duality also impossible. Non-duality IS relation.

That is what it means to say "Since there is naught other than I,

what

do I fear? Then, verily his fear departed, for what should he have

feared? It is from a second, verily, that fear arises." There is no

actual way to understand this saying except you act upon it in the

give and take of daily life, and take it into your living contact

with

others. Every other meaning you can invent for this is false. This is

real, and acting upon it will instantly clear all the differences

inserted like peas between all the mattresses you have protecting you

(a generic you) from others.

 

I do not mean one is to imagine that others are you. No amount of

home

movies by an ego, and no assemblage of Lego blocks by the intellect

can construct even a mental picture of that without some direct

experience of union on various levels. That is a specific reality

which as knowledge is earned by open hearted contact with others,

having seen in them the same reality as you, and having risked

opening

to, and union inwardly with them. Instead I mean to imagine others

are

real like you, equal to you, significant like you. Then you see them

"as" you. It is in this area that Buber's knowledge demonstrates a

profound genius. As Yogananda describing Ramana described it,

non-duality is the silent, immensely powerful presence of Love, not a

solipsistic egoism. There is no actual difference, not

experientially,

between the statement about fear above, and the commandment to Love

your neighbor as yourself. But to simply say at the start that

relation is not possible because individuals are unreal... well, and

I

dont mean to be offensive here, I just dont believe that

understanding

has anything to do with non-duality. I AM is real... as you too. And

can only be met, and known, and not theoried away.

 

The way to meet God is to imagine that in which you live and move and

have your being... is conscious. Really. Now.

 

But God's primary concern and teaching methodology is your neighbor.

Undoing all your belief in your need for inserting fear into your

relations is what He attempts to teach. And fear is a product of

division from others in very practical ways. Non-duality is the

ultimate fruit of this.

 

Dan

 

 

 

"So his designation is the Real of the real. The lives, verily, are

the real. Of them, this is the Real." - Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad

 

 

 

 

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