Thich Naht Hanh gives a talk on non-duality. Non-duality is not something I’ve talked about. It’s related to concepts of emptiness and non-self. What non-duality is saying is that we are all connected - TNH calls it interbeing. We inter-are. He uses the metaphor of the ocean and the wave. We are both individual waves and we are also ocean - as in physics, a tiny piece of matter can be both a wave and a particle. This interconnectedness of non-duality in meditation is the understanding that there is no subject separate from the object of meditation. There are not two. There is one event - the meditator and the object of meditation are one. Logically this makes sense because the object doesn’t exist in our experience if we aren’t experiencing it. The object and the experience of the object are a single event.
Although non-duality is not ever mentioned in the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program (MBSR) - and you perhaps can see why, it is at the heart of it. Jon Kabat-Zinn developed this program with the deepest intentions for participants to develop a life-long practice that could be transformative in freeing them from suffering. And non-duality is a key concept in that transformation.
Thich Naht Hanh continues then to talk about suffering. If someone has made us suffer, we suffer. And that’s not all bad. Suffering is useful.
I know. I know. Wait a minute here. But remember TNH lived through the Viet Nam war leading a monastery of monks and nuns to go out into the villages to help ease the suffering of many people in many different ways. He knows trauma. He knows the worst of war and the worst of humanity. And yet he says suffering can be useful.
Here’s how. When we suffer and we can be with and look deeply at our suffering, it opens our hearts. We can begin to feel compassion for ourselves. And when our hearts open, we can look deeply at those who made us suffer and our hearts perceive the suffering in that person as well. He points out we are only the second victim. The perpetrator is the first victim. This looking deeply gives rise to compassion for that person as well. We access compassion through our own suffering and then we can see with compassion the suffering of that other.
And here we circle back to non-duality. The reason we can see the suffering of that other is because that other is not other. That other and ourselves - we are one fabric. We inter-are with each other. We are not two separate anything except in our own mental constructs - in the small “I” of identification. Thus, when we begin to see non-self, we begin to see interbeing in a deeper, visceral way. We have all seen this. And we also continually get caught in our own separateness.
This applies to all people, all animals, all trees and plants, to our earth. We inter-are with our earth and, yes, with the vastness of our universe. And we watch in deep compassion as we allow ourselves to see our earth and all its beings suffer.
It has been said the universe is one consciousness manifesting in different ways. And our understanding of this starts with the simple breath.