I was leafing through this book I bought for my father,
"Waking Up - a guide to spirituality without religion". (I have not read even most of it, I thought my father and I could discuss it.) It seemed to relate to what I have been studying in the last year. One bit that caught my thinking was the investigation of how
there can be multiple "consciousnesses" or points of view in the mind, and one is the one we identify with at the moment. The simplest view of that is the well-known split-brain research. But you can research this all by yourself right now by closing one eye. Look through a railing or past a nearby object at a more distant one. Close or cover one eye, then the other. In one case the nearby object will seem to move, and the opposite side of your brain is the one that is "me" at that moment. Usually the left side of the brain is in charge of daily thought. But what if you could get the other side to be the leader? What sorts of things does it consider important? Doing less linear and verbal things will get the right side going, like painting, dance, sports, relationships, and most of what we do most of the time. Which of these two people is "really you"? Yes.
The book suggests that there can be several small centers of awareness going on at once, but they are silent to the main thread of consciousness, usually. I am familiar with this feeling from my work with personality facets. Most people resist the idea that internally they have several points of view and that they could differ markedly. So here is another experiment: find your blind spots. Look at a wall or something about 10 feet away where there are two small clearly visible objects on a horizontal line. Cover your right eye, look at the object to the left, then slowly move your gaze a bit to the right until the left object vanishes. The blind spot is inward on your eyeball from the center of view. Normally, your two eyes work together to have the blind spots covered by at least one eye, so that you see everything. But how many times have you turned while driving to look and then next thing you knew, someone was there that you had not seen before? If when you looked you could get only one eye on the scene, then unknown to you a substantial part of reality was simply not visible for a moment, and you missed the pedestrian, motorcycle or car that was nearby. It is called a blind spot because we are entirely unaware of it. If the brain would not try to hide the lack of information from us, it might be better, but also more uncomfortable. Try it with your other eye also. Is one blind spot larger, or more confusing or hard to deal with? Remember, when you are driving, you really need both eyes when you look, because part of your view is lying to you.
If the brain can lie to us about two halves of visual awareness, then it can certainly suppress multiple points of view in our "unconscious" minds. I would say that there are parts of all of us active much of the time that are completely conscious of themselves, but not heard from in the main thought track. This has two drawbacks: we don't really know ourselves, and the more that we are split in to small factions the less useful we can be. Much energy is wasted reinforcing the illusion of a single view - dominant thought, blind spots and all (your ego) - that could go into being happy and effective. Nonduality is learning how to "recruit" larger and larger areas of the continual awareness (which you can think of as parts of the brain if it makes you happy) in to a single unitive state of consciousness. If this is not a new idea, it certainly has not been heard about enough.
To me, nonduality is no more mystical, religious, spiritual or otherwise non-ordinary than is walking. We are born to use our awareness for whatever we wish. They just forgot to include the owners manual. If you think there is more to realization than that, I am here to tell you: there is not.
