This takes me back what you had said earlier:
"as what one becomes open to and what one is merges".
I’ll try to approach this
“the dual can live along side the non dual” from another angle (other than your Kundalini angle).
I posted a new Avatar picture not to mean the 4 directions nor the Buddha Families Mandala (teaching tools), but to depict our life situation as a Cross where the
‘horizontal and vertical dimensions’ meet.
Totality of ourselves consisting of 2 realities – the Absolute and the Relative.
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The horizontal dimension is like our ordinary worldview. So the view is very dual. This and that. Focus is on form reality. Linear time.
To be a separate-self-identity one needs to emphasize this dualistic form-reality barrier, the gap between subject and object, the perceiver and the perceived.
Even though Buddhism teaches
Anatta, here is the general view (from a book
No Boundary by
Ken Wilber, free download)
http://www.ebook3000.com/Ken-Wilber-...wth_84604.html
Now imagining the perceived worldview, when the boundary line of one's BEING drawn between this and that i.e. what is you and not-you include your ego only:
e·go·cen·tric
1. Holding the view that the ego is the centre, and norm of all experience.
2.a. Confined in attitude or interest to one's own needs or affairs.
b. Caring only about oneself; selfish.
3. Philosophy
a. Viewed or perceived from one's own mind as a centre.
b. Taking one's own self as the starting point in a philosophical system.
Egocentricity is very 2 dimensional and horizontal. (People might call this as "individual freedom").
The only suggestion here towards vertical is that "I am taller/whiter, more learned in sutras (whatever) than that which is not me" therefore I must be better, head above others because "I" is the first and foremost reference point for our awareness.
Ego-centeredness creates such a powerful mind-screen that everything classified as not-me becomes a mere mental object, a concept. Therefore everything perceived, in effect, is a projection.
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But where is the centre for your BEING if you include the whole environment (All Forms and All Accommodating Space) into the size of “you” ….. your awareness?
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Quoting myself
"When ‘identification’ is more with the spacious and empty, neutral, unmanufactured, vaaaaast awareness-space - which is spacious stillness, spacious silence enabled openness ……… then we really start hollowing out, emptying out from within also. Emptying out from the ‘centre of the small separate self id’ we have been boxed in".
Surrendering and Letting go of the mind & going beyond the mind can start at this point where the horizontal meets the vertical …….. a sense of
presence or depth perception may start to develop ….
Just one idea, or suggestion to experiment with .....
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