In This Episode…

Non-dual spiritual practice and non-dual spiritual awakening isn’t only about coming to know awareness or consciousness in its pure form. That’s just the first step. Ultimately, real non-dual practice and non-dual awakening is a practice of recognizing that everything that arises in your meditation is equally an expression of that sacred essence. Everything that arises in your meditation is already enlightened. It’s a manifestation of the enlightened mind.
—Craig Hamilton

In “Beyond Duality: Seeing the Sacred in Everything,” Craig takes us on a journey into the heart of spiritual awakening—the realization that the sacred is always present, not just in extraordinary moments, but in every moment.

Many of us have glimpsed a sublime, sacred dimension of being, only to feel it slip away in the rush of everyday life. These extraordinary moments often seem distant from the ordinariness of our daily routines. However, as we deepen our meditation practice, we begin to realize that even the most mundane aspects of our experience are infused with that same sublime essence.

In this episode, Craig guides us in understanding that this realization—known as “nonduality”—is not something we stumble upon by chance. Through a specific set of practices, we come to see that every experience can be a gateway to the infinite, revealing the sacred essence that is always present in every moment.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

Discover More about Craig’s Awakened Life Membership Program

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[lwptoc]

Throughout our spiritual lives, we’re often invited to become aware of awareness, to discover consciousness itself, the one having the experiences, our true nature beyond the mind and ego.

We’re human beings going through our lives, typically just aware of the content of our experience, the content of awareness, the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations, our encounters with other people, the experiences we’re having. Our attention is usually there.

Spiritual awakening calls us to discover the subject, the experiencer, the context in which all of that is happening, the infinite depth in which this life is occurring and to become rooted in that depth and then live our lives as this vast infinite depth living a human life.

Through our spiritual practices, we sometimes have these tastes or these encounters with what I might call the sublime ground of all of this, with the source, with the sacred dimension of reality.

Discovering The Sacred Ground of Existence

We discover, maybe in just fleeting glimpses, sometimes in a more sustained way, that beyond what can often seem like a cruel, indifferent, somewhat neutral world and life, there is this beautiful, intelligent, loving, infinitely powerful, infinitely deep wellspring of goodness, of truth, of beauty, majesty, sublime beyond comprehension, that there is this truly divine, sublime, sacred dimension or ground to existence.

In humanity’s religious experiments and religious and spiritual seeking, we’ve related to this sacred dimension in all kinds of different ways. We’ve worshiped it, we’ve created altars to sacrifice to it, we’ve come together to praise it. The mystics among us have aspired into communion with it or to learn how to access it or to learn how to serve, to live in service to this higher reality, to manifest it, to embody it, to sing its glories and praises. There are countless ways that we’ve all related to this.

Yet, beyond all of that, there is the ultimate path which is to realize, to finally come to accept, that this ultimate reality that brings us to our knees is, in fact, all there is.

I’m speaking about the discovery that the sacred dimension we experience in our deepest moments is actually what everything is made of, that that’s who and what we are also. That sacred essence is our nature and the true nature of everything, not the apparent manifestation.

Nonduality Doesn’t Mean Good and Evil Are the Same Thing

We can look at the apparent manifestations of everything in this world and we would be foolish to say “oh, it’s all equally beautiful and wonderful, the cruelty, the destructiveness, the torture, the selfishness, the violence, the shortsightedness.” To say, “oh, look how great it all is, it’s all just equally good on a relative level.” It would be a profound error to draw that conclusion.

That’s not what this realization of non-duality points to. It’s not calling us to see that all the bad things are just as good as the good things. It’s the realization that reality as a whole, everything we encounter, is an expression of the same one consciousness and when we peer down into the depth of that consciousness, what it’s really made of, we discover that it is made of this sublime, sacred essence, this essential nature that is supreme.

The reason that in spiritual practice we are often trying to draw our attention to consciousness itself, to awareness itself, to pure awareness, is because when we discover pure consciousness, it’s much easier to discover the sacred nature of everything. That’s because we’re no longer distracted by all the dualities, the good and the bad, what we want, what we don’t want, the relative ups and downs.

We’re being drawn to the essence so that we can discover that essence in its purity and hopefully you have. But non-dual spiritual practice and non-dual spiritual awakening isn’t only about coming to know awareness or consciousness in its pure form. That’s just a first step. Discovering that sacred ground, discovering that sacred essence as consciousness, as the source, is necessary. It’s essential, it’s fundamental, to mystical practice or awakening practice.

But, ultimately, real non-dual practice and non-dual awakening is a practice of recognizing that everything that arises in your meditation is equally an expression of that essence.

Everything Is Already Part of Your Enlightened Mind

Everything that arises in your meditation is already enlightened. It’s a manifestation of the enlightened mind.

What makes non-dual practice so extraordinary is that when we’re really doing it, there is nothing that could possibly occur that would be an obstacle, that we would need to reject or push away or get beyond to get to the practice.

Everything is the practice. Everything is the path, because the path is simply recognizing that everything already is that which you’ve been seeking, that the natural functioning of your mind, of your emotional world, of your experiencing, the natural function of that is already sacred, already the Buddha, already enlightened mind at work.

Not a single thought of any kind is an unenlightened thought. Not a single experience you could have is an unenlightened experience. Non-duality is the realization that there are not two things. On the ultimate level, there’s not the good and the bad, the sacred and the profane.

When we’re engaging with the complexities of this world, those distinctions are relevant and real and we can learn to make them with ever greater wisdom from this non-dual realization. But in our non-dual meditation practice, all we need to do is simply let reality unfold naturally, exactly as it is, and all we are called to do is to see its enlightened nature, which really means to not in any moment conclude that something is wrong, that something is out of place, that something is not enlightened.

There Is No Unenlightened Experience

In its simplest form, this practice is just the practice of resisting the temptation to label anything as unenlightened or to make a separation and push something outside of your own naturally awakened consciousness. If you can include absolutely everything that occurs, without making any distinction between the sacred and the profane, between the sublime and the ordinary, non-duality is the only thing you will know.

When meditating in this way, you may begin to have certain deeper experiences, subtle feelings, maybe a deep meditative current that’s flowing, or a sense of expansiveness or softening of the boundaries around your sense of self.

In other words, we may have all kinds of experiences in meditation that feel like awakening experiences, spiritual openings, deepenings, and they are that. We wouldn’t be wrong to see them that way and to relate to these deeper experiences as very positive spiritual openings, deepenings, illuminations, even awakenings.

But, as this occurs, it can also happen that on a very subtle level we start to make a distinction between these experiences that are the deepening awakening experiences and then other things that arise in our meditation that seem to take us away from that depth.

We become distracted by our thoughts for a couple of minutes and it seems like that took us right out of the deep meditation we were having, or some feeling or emotion or sensation that again seems to be in some sort of opposition to this deeper awareness that’s clearly here, that’s clearly opening.

What I want to invite you to do is to turn toward every experience that you tend to turn away from or push away or subtly label as less enlightened than the other experience.

The key to non-dual practice is recognizing that even those thoughts, feelings, sensations that seem in opposition to your awakening, or outside of your deeper enlightened nature, that each of those is, in fact, equally an expression of your enlightened consciousness.

Equally, in other words, not just not a problem, but, in fact, the key, in fact, the path. What this means is that the experience you’re having right now is the experience of your natural state, of your awakened consciousness, this experience, no matter what it is.

See if you can recognize that and practice that directly right now. This means that the experience you’re having in this moment is not just something you can live with, not just something you can accept as part of it all, but the very awakening itself is manifesting as this experience right now. That’s the practice.