Yesterday I brought Nonduality as a subject in its own right into the Art + Psyche fold. It’s a new category in the blog. Now, here together are the three major areas I’m interested in, both personally and in my psychotherapy practice.
What’s Nonduality? There’s a lot on the subject around the web, for example, at Jerry Katz’s original Nonduality site. And it goes by many other terms in the many traditions of which it is spoken, such as presence, awareness, advaita, sunyata, and one term that I’ve constructed myself (an amalgam from Kant and Gestalt), the noumenal field.
Here’s Gangaji on the subject of the play of our lives of thought and suffering, and the underlying nondual dimension:
All the while, there is this simple, present stillness that is aware of the whole play. It experiences the play, experiences the suffering of the play, yet is ultimately untouched by the play. [Diamond in your Pocket, p113]
Gangaji’s spiritual lineage is the East (Papaji and Ramana Maharshi), and she has managed to fuse the understandings of contemporary Western psychology to this ancient spiritual tradition (advaita vedanta). Her teaching has been a strong influence on me, enabling me to bring the nondual dimension into my psychotherapy practice. I look forward to blogging more on this subject in the future.
