It isn’t that often these days that I get to have a real honest-to-goodness experience of the nondual nature of reality, but for some reason it came in the middle of the night. In the wake of that timeless, spaceless “moment,” the mind came roaring in for several hours with its attempts to describe, explain, return to, claim ownership of, categorize, and so on, this inexplicable “experience.” This amazing thing shows up and the mind just desperately wants to understand it, and is utterly incapable of doing so, not for lack of trying!
The “experience” itself, which is more of a non-experience, is simply the two-fold sense that the self is an utter illusion, and that reality is absolutely undivided. There really is only one thing, one being, one entity, which encompasses everything. The strange thing about being the only thing in existence is that there is no “other.” All-one-ness is absolute aloneness. The beauty of things appearing as separate is that they get to experience reunion. They get to experience love. In the all-one there can be no “experience” of anything, and certainly not of love.
So maybe love is what this whole thing is here for. Maybe everything, all these seemingly separate things, are here to fall in love. The one appears as two so there can be a me and a you and we can fall in love and revel in the mystery of our other-ness.
But underneath and within all of that, there really is only one. There is no other. So there is nothing to lose and nothing to gain, and all the conflict based on fear of loss and striving to gain is utterly unnecessary, born of the illusion of the “self,” but still there is only one and even all of that illusion is an expression of the one.
Strange stuff. There really is no me and no you. Not really. But there is, of course the vivid appearance of a me and a you. And that is as it should be, because all-one-ness is pretty flat without the dance of “me” and “you” that takes place within it.
But without knowing that the me and the you are really illusions, love becomes struggle and conflict and fear. So it seems like the very nicest thing is to be fully involved in the dance of other-ness, without the fear that comes from believing that other-ness is the final and ultimate reality.
Knowing the essential unity of everything makes separateness a dance instead of a battle. Experiencing our other-ness makes unity a dance instead of a flat and featureless field of nothingness.