Guest guest Posted September 5, 2008 Report Share Posted September 5, 2008 The Nonduality Highlights - NDhighlights In this issue three selections. An entry from Don Montano's blog in which is he says, "Nonduality may be a very important term for our times." More information on Peter Fenner's Nondual Training Course. Notice of two new DVDs from Non-duality Press, one featuring Jeff Foster and the other Dr. Jean Klein. There's a 9 minute sample of the Jean Klein video on YouTube (link below). In the video interview he speaks about his life, beginning from childhood. This video parts ways with the strict neo-advaita angle taken by Non-duality Press (and Jeff Foster), since Klein reveals that his teacher used the Upanishads and led him to seeing what he is not. That is a more traditional approach and Klein seems aligned with it, however that's only my impression from the video sample. I don't have the full view. This is from Don Montano's blog: http://multispective.wordpress.com/2007/05/28/nonduality-and-eitheror-thinking/ Nonduality and either/or thinking “Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought…The sense-experiences are the given subject-matter. But the theory that shall interpret them is manmande…hypothetical, never completely final, subject to question and doubt.” - Albert Einstein. “The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems we cannot solve at the same level at which we created them” - Albert Einstein “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” - Einstein Nonduality may be a very important term for our time. Since most of our logic systems and most of our knowledge are based on either/or binary thinking one way to move towards a balance may be to recognize the phenomena of nonduality in our systems. “The term nondual is a literal translation of the Sanskrit term advaita, (meaning not two). That is, things remain distinct while not being separate.”…”Nondualism may be viewed as the belief that dualism or dichotomy are illusory phenomena.” (from Wikipedia) The nonduality of matter and energy. Matter = energy = matter Einstein was well-versed in philosophy and I can’t help but to wonder if he was aware of this term. I am inclined to believe that he used nondual thinking in his theory of matter and energy. When Einstein came up with E=mc2 he basically explained that matter is energy in another state. Or more specifically, how matter reverts back to energy when you place it at the speed of light. In pedestrian terms, matter and energy are just two states of energy- just like water, has the states of liquid, solid and a gas. This may be hard to understand when you’re trained to think of everything through either/or thinking. Through either/or thinking you usually get stuck in arguments like: “Well, is it matter or is it energy?” Multiple states and process The belief that conceptual duality, nonduality, pluralism and holism are mirrors of the cycle of convergence-divergence. In other words, one process may be incomplete without the other. Together, these tendencies form a cycle. That cycle is just one of many others. Challenging thingness Everything is changing - but our human tendency is to attempt to trap everything into boxes, into words, into documents, into static states. Our tendency is to interpret processes as static, one or two-dimensional ‘things’. This is another form of reductionism. The same way we attempt to explain the entirety of life with a single frame of time. Or our tendency to explain the entirety of human experience with a few cells or genes. Of course, static thinking has functional value but it also has anti-functional value and degrees of value in between. Static thinking may help us in one way but it may hinder and ‘trap’ us in other ways. We need to be aware of this changing dynamic. All elements of life are part of ever-expanding and ever-changing processes - we can deny this - but we do it with high risk. “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” -Einstein Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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