NON DUALITY • by Rupert Spira
In this dream analogy, Rupert Spira distills the essence of non duality (Advaita Vedanta).
This is taken from the following interview (skip to 10′)
Reality appears to us as a multiplicity and diversity of discrete and independently existing objects and selves. In reality, it is one, indivisible whole – whose nature is Being, or Consciousness, or Love.
To make this relatable to us in our everyday lives, here is an analogy.
😴
Mary falls asleep in London.
She dreams that she’s Jane on the streets of Paris.
The entire dream — the streets of Paris and Jane — are all an appearance of Mary’s mind: a homogeneous, indivisible whole.
But it doesn’t appear like that from Jane’s point of view.
Mary has localized herself within her own dream as an apparently separate subject of experience.
FROM JANE’S PERSPECTIVE 🤩
From Jane’s perspective, the streets of Paris comprise separate people, objects, trees, houses, cars…
From Jane’s point of view, her experience takes place in subject-object relationship, in duality: ‘I’, the subject, looking out from the window of my senses, at the world out there – which seems to be separate and independent from me.
For Jane, her consciousness is located in and limited to her own body. Everything she looks at is outside her consciousness. The name we give to stuff outside our consciousness is ‘matter.’
So, Jane believes that mind exists on the inside and matter exists on the outside.
FROM MARY’S PERSPECTIVE 😴
When Mary wakes up in London, she realizes that it’s not like that at all. The whole thing was the activity of her own mind.
The dreamed world can’t be viewed directly from her bed, asleep in London. Mary needs to forget that she’s asleep in London. She has to overlook the nature of her own mind and seem to become a separate subject of experience within her own dream.
But that comes at a price: to view the dreamed world, she has to forget the real nature of her experience.
THE ANALOGY
We are all numerous Janes.
The difference is that Mary dreams that she is one person (Jane on the streets of Paris). Whereas Infinite Consciousness localizes itself as innumerable, apparently separate, subjects of experience within its own dream, the Universe.
When Mary wakes up, she realizes ‘No, there is no separate individual self. There is no world made up of matter. The entire thing is the activity of my mind.’
The world is just how the activity of the mind appears from Jane’s localized point of view.
It’s the same when we look out of our senses at the world: what we really see is the activity of Infinite Consciousness.
It appears as a material world because we view it from the localized perspectives (our finite minds).