Reflections after an Angelo Dilullo retreat and reading Sam Harris’s excellent book ”Waking Up”
In therapy we try to integrate heart, head and body into a greater whole that is more able to “remember ourselves” and be a witness to ourselves. This supports us to separate ourselves from our functioning, see and face what is there, see how it all works, see the forces that are driving us to be the way we are, see our motivations, our woundedness with all its compulsiveness.
This awareness and understanding heals the self into being more “authentic” or “natural”, and less and less defensive and closed, which in turn enables us to live more satisfying lives, essentially because we can live with a more open mind, heart and body in the here and now. We are then more fluidly and easily able to meet our organic needs.
But, we do need to understand that the self is not a thing, it is a whole bunch of functions and processes that work together in a constantly unfolding (evolving or devolving) way. It is trauma that causes the whole system to function badly.
The perspective that arrives with Nonduality is, as I understand it, about seeing that really there is no “I” in the driving seat, that consciousness or awareness is primary, and there before any illusory sense of “I”. It is not though the “self” that is an illusion, it is the habitual sense of “I” that is the illusion.
Through therapy (or similar) we learn to disidentify from our functioning, (our thinking, feeling and sensation). It seems that there is then always the possibility of a further radical disidentification with the sense of “I” itself, even though this seems devilishly tricky for most people.
“It is the identification with thoughts (or feelings or sensations) – that is the failure to recognise them as spontaneously appearing in consciousness – that produces the feeling of “I”. One must pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between the thoughts (feelings or sensations) – that is, prior to the arising of the next thought (feeling or sensation). Consciousness does not feel like a self.” (Harris 2014 p.103) (my brackets)
This “shift” is the movement from seeing the world and ourselves through the lens of the ego, to seeing the world and the ego through the lens of a simple direct beingness. It can happen through getting so close to the here and now that we move into embodying the fundamental nature of awareness. This is about embracing how this possibility is, and always has been, right here in front of our noses, right now, before or behind our ego generated sense of “I”. It seems that for most people this realisation happens through the “attempt to invert consciousness upon itself – to look for that which is looking” (Harris 2014 p.141). This “self-enquiry” can enable our perspective to flip into a simply direct unfolding non-dual experience of this moment.
These are the “pointing’s” that I take away in my continuing, daft, and paradoxical, desire to somehow embody this shift into non-dual consciousness.
After such an awakening the “self process” must surely continue, it still exists after all. The person is still the same person (though it might take time to adjust to the new lens), it is simply that now awareness is fundamental and the self is something that is happening, but it is not attached to, or identified with.
It is clear however that people experience this flip of their lens at many different stages of self-development. The egotistical guru is the classic example. Also, as many have described, when this flip happens, and the person still has lots of unprocessed trauma, intense difficulties can arise that then need to be worked through. This is because there is nothing left to stop the trauma coming up and powerfully demanding attention. Obviously this is not always the case, as per the many examples of gurus who carry on blithely abusing their followers for years.
As I have long understood, we have these two streams within us, the Relative (our ordinary selves) and the Absolute (our direct embodiment of awareness, love and energy), and to fulfil our potential both need to unfold in relationship and connection to each other. It seems to me that we are stuck with this paradox of needing to take ever more responsibility for ourselves AND, or WHILST, remaining connected to the awareness that knows the absurdity of such a concept.
Jim Robinson (Aug 2025)