Experience Of Silence
Oneness is the experience of silence.
Awareness cannot exist with duality, and mind cannot exist without duality. Awareness is non-dual, and the mind is dual.
If you go outwards you will move into the world of duality. If you go inwards you will move into the world of non-duality; you will become non-polar.
Enlightenment is the realization of the non-dual.
When there is I, it creates thou. When there is I it creates duality, and all is lost in duality. When there is no I, then there is non-duality. Then you are one with existence, utterly one. Then you are nothing but a pulsation of existence itself, just a ripple in the lake of this infinite consciousness.
If you are divided in two, into man and woman, negative/positive, darkness/light, mind/heart, thought/feeling — if you are divided in two, your energy will be going downward. Division is the way of the downward. When you are undivided, one, you start moving upward. To be one is to move upward, to be two is to move downward. Duality is the way to hell, non-duality is the way to heaven.
These are the two planes of humanity: duality, the plane of duality, what Hindus call DWAITA, the plane of two; and non-duality, the plane of one, the plane of the non-dual. When you are divided you are in this world; when you are undivided, you have transcended — you are no longer here, you have penetrated into the Beyond. Then boundaries meet and the boundaries meet in you. So the whole effort is how to become undivided, how to become one.
This has to be the criterion whether you have reached the goal or not. If there is still something as its polar opposite, you have not reached; you are still in the duality. One can move from one duality to another duality; it does not make any change. One has to move from duality to non-duality, because non-duality is the ultimate. The ultimate has no opposite to it. It is the final synthesis where all opposites have melted into one, when male and female have melted into one.
REMEMBER, when we use the word ‘oneness’, that too is part of duality. If there is no duality how can there be oneness? That’s why Hindus never use ‘oneness’. If you ask Shankara, “What is the nature of existence?” he says, “Non-dual, ADWAITA, not two.” He will never say one, because how can you say one? If there is only one, how can you say one? One needs two to be meaningful. If there is no possibility of the second, of the two, then what is the use of saying that it is one? Shankara says, “At the most, I can say not two, but I cannot say positively one. I can say what the reality is not: it is not two. I cannot say what it is, because meaning, words, all become useless.”
Enlightenment simply means you disappear, you become the whole. There is no question of separation or no separation. There is no question of oneness, because even the word ‘oneness’ hides behind it twoness. What do you mean when you say oneness? – You mean twoness. The mystics have avoided using the word ‘oneness,’ but you cannot. In the very nature of intellectual understanding you can go a little roundabout – and that’s what people like Shankara have done. They talk about non-duality, no-twoness; they don’t talk about oneness. They want to indicate oneness, but they don’t want to use the word ‘oneness’ because oneness points towards twoness.
Enlightenment means the point from where you take a jump into the non-dual. Before that point is duality. Everything is divided.
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