The Perennial Path: Non-Duality

"You cannot wander anywhere that will not aid you. Anything you can touch - God brought it into the classroom of your mind. Differences exist, but not in the city of love. Thus my vows and yours, I know they are the same." - Daniel Ladinsky

Perennial wisdom is a school of thought that hears a similar echo in the voices of various religious and philosophical traditions. While not discounting the obvious differences in ritual and cultural particulars, perennial wisdom seeks to unveil the core truth behind these various expressions of faith and belief systems.

One of the themes that emerges from poets and mystics of these various traditions is the idea of a transcendent unity that pervades all of reality. Though we experience reality as segmented and attach names to seemingly separate objects and persons, there exists beneath and within all things a common Spirit that pours out from one Source - the uncreated originator of all life that some call God. However we might define God or understand that which is revealed about God - perennial wisdom reminds us that God is ultimately beyond our understanding and that all of our labels, doctrines, and descriptions inevitably fall short of capturing the ineffable nature of the One in which "we live and move and have our being."

As all religions and philosophies tend to do, we spend much time attempting to order the world into good/bad, safe/dangerous, helpful/harmful categories - which is a necessary starting point as we find our own place among a world that appears segmented and hostile. But these traditions, at their best, lift us beyond those distinctions to see that nothing truly exists apart - that in some ultimate sense everything belongs in this cosmic dance of life, death, and rebirth. Nothing is wasted.

Like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, or the Hindu Trimurti, or the poetic refrain of Sufis and other mystics through history tell us, there is a Unity expressed as diversity. We are one body with many parts. Reality is in pieces, yet One. Scattered, yet whole. Like yeast spread through dough, or a wind with no clear boundary, or light that is nowhere and everywhere at once - reality is unified in ways we cannot easily perceive until our awareness begins to shift beyond the boundaries of our own body. When we can love another as ourselves, or feel empathy for an experience not our own, or see new life birthed from our own genetic material which itself was given to us - our categories of us verses them, and I verses it, start to break down and our minds are liberated to imagine a unified reality that both includes and transcends our categories. Once we truly see the other, and ourselves in the other, the names no longer matter. The divisions, distinctions, and boundaries that we cling to are exposed as little more than an illusion.