Sunday Contemplation # 29 The Listening Heart - Devotional Nonduality

Be The Devotion We Are.

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

• This Week’s Quote

• This Sunday’s Contemplation

• A Guided Meditation

• Grateful For

• This Week’s Community Chat

• Upcoming Activities

This Week’s Quote

The Presence of God is the energy of life itself, shining forth in infinite expressions, awaiting recognition in the stillness of the heart.
Dr. David R. Hawkins

This Sunday’s Contemplation

Good Morning Everyone: I hope that you are travelling well.

I find that because I am focused in my life and work on how we might approach Living Our Wisdom, there is often this tension between the embrace of our inner wisdom and the embrace of living in this world. It is sometimes challenging to embrace both. The home of inner wisdom is a much quieter place than the messy and sometimes repulsive and pain filled world we live in. I appreciate your patience with me on this journey. I take hope from Parker J. Palmer’s words here…”Hope is holding a creative tension between what is and what could and should be, each day doing something to narrow the distance between the two”.*

Again, thank you for reading here. Today the focus is a bit more on the inner wisdom world, because, honestly I needed to look more inward today, after a week of outward looking that was challenging.

The Listening Heart And Devotional Nonduality

• The Perceived Tension Between Devotion and Nonduality

It is Dr. David R. Hawkins who coined the term “devotional nonduality” to describe a path of awakening he had experienced. He was always ready to point to the many other paths of awakening that humans have taken historically, so it is not a dogma, but a set of tools he felt could work well, particularly for Westerners.

For those of you who have studied what has been written or taught about nonduality, you may agree that the concept of devotion is not an easy fit with the transcendent, silent, spaceless, Pure Consciousness, Presence or God, that is sometimes described as “not personal” or a Pure Awareness inseparable from who we are…”not two” but One.

Here is where I landed on this tension…for your consideration.

I was raised a Christian. So the idea of devotion to God is integral to my upbringing. But in the Anglican tradition of my childhood, God was always described as separate. A fatherly creator presence of unconditional love, that I should worship and work to make myself worthy of via my devotion and worship. The rub was that no matter the intensity of devotion, worship and “goodness” I could never reach the level of worthiness. In fact, Jesus’ intervention was a crucial and absolute requirement, and it too occurred despite my unworthiness, not because my actions or even my faith reached the required levels.

The institutionalised theology supported the sense of separation and duality.

Please understand that I find no need to now go in and somehow tangle with Christian theology and try to discredit it. There are many mystics in the Christian tradition whose described experiences align with a nondual view evident in the Advaita nondual traditions. My sense is that institutional Christianity focused on certain elements of Jesus’ teaching, and not those that were more difficult to explain. We could take Jesus’ words in John 14:20… “In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you”… as hinting at a nondual view, but let’s not go there today.

• Devotion Dissolves The Ego.

I have come to the viewpoint that devotion is a very effective pathway for the dissolution of the ego, and is perfectly consistent with a nondual view of life. It is the ego, our illusory construction of a separate sense of self, that causes us not to “see” our pure awareness or experience our transcendent divinity. It prevents us from experiencing that we are not separate but One. As the illusion of a separate self dissolves, we are more able to see (experience) who we really are. Devotion is a doorway through which we can glimpse our infinite nature.

The qualities inherent in devotion…surrender, humility, gratitude, reverence, even worship, are powerful, and perhaps required, in turning our attention from the illusory sense of a separate self, towards the non-illusory, “not two”, Awareness/God.

Surrendering that which in our lives holds us to a small view of ourselves is not a worthiness exercise, it is form of dissolution the ego cannot survive. It is why surrender can be such a struggle. We are wise not to underestimate the hold illusions have in our lives.

Humility is a recognition of the Divinity within everyone and everything. It is a recognition that calls us to ourselves.

Gratitude is the realisation that though we are not the creator of all that is, we are intrinsically inseparable from that indescribable wonder! Our very life is a gift of immeasurable value. Gratitude reminds us.

Reverence is the recognition and holy awe drawn from us by the nature of life.

Worship does not require an “other” to exist. It is a bow to who we really are that the ego cannot bring itself to. The blasphemy is not in seeing the God in ourselves, it is in the preposterous idea that we can define ourselves separate from our divinity. Worship too is a dissolution practice.

• Embracing Both Devotion And Nonduality

There is no real tension between a life and attitude of devotion and embracing nonduality.

I see in other traditions wonderful practices of ego dissolution. So I am certainly not saying that devotion is the only practice or pathway.

It is more that I needed to disentangle my own experience of devotion from the framework of sin, worthiness and salvation. I now gratefully embrace the challenges of devotion as a pathway to being my essential self, sans the centrality of sin, or the bottomless pit of unworthiness.

Like so many seeming paradoxes in a nondual model of life, I can walk the path of devotion, give all glory to God, surrender everything to God, bow in humility to God, stand in awe of all creation, and still recognise that I am the very awareness from which I arise. I am That. For me the experience of devotion seems to open the doors of my heart to hear the silence that responds to my bended knee. The silence filled with unspeakable peace, and tears.**

Rumi of course was right…..“I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God”.

Thank you for reading this. See you next week I hope.

I wish you peace.

* I have been moved in my life by Parker J. Palmer’s life and writing. I highly recommend you take time to read his books and listen to his heart.

** Here is a short clip of Dr Hawkins speaking of this Silence. It is about 4 minutes long. Dr Hawkins is described on his own blog site like this…”His lecture style uses a seamless blend of intellect, wisdom, and humor, which has been described as a mixture of Einstein, the Buddha, and Mr. Magoo”. Should you like to read or listen to more of his works please go to Veritas Publishing. (For those too young to remember Mr Magoo…please google it…and forgive me that I used to watch him with my afternoon hot milk as a kid).

A Guided Meditation

I have received quite a bit of feedback that a guided meditation connected to the topic of these contemplations has been appreciated. When appropriate I will provide one each week. This week’s guided meditation is called The Heart Of Devotion.

Grateful For

I include this section because I found that when I read or hear about what others are grateful for, I tend to think more about what I am grateful for. Feel free to share what you are grateful for in the comments. I think it is a beautiful service to others.

I am grateful for the nature of the Substack community. Of course, like most platforms it has some shortcomings, but I feel it is a genuine effort to build a new kind of social media that rests the power from algorithms and gives us a chance to build community. As an example, I have “met” EricR whose site is The Lone Pilgrim. In the spirit of making relationship with the essential Silence beneath all that is, I highly highly recommend you take four minutes to sit with this beautiful video created by EricR. He also composed the music in this video. It is called Mystic Nature.

This Week’s Community Chat

The theme in the chat this week is:

Your thoughts on nonduality and the power of devotion greatly appreciated. Your thoughts on either one, or the possible connection between the two are most welcome.

As always feel free to share anything else that you are present to.

Thank you.

Upcoming Activities

My friend Sally Avison and I have be hosting Wise Hearts Circle zoom meeting. We are on a break right now and contemplating some new formats. We will keep you posted. Thank you for being patient.

Should you want to message me directly, please feel free to do so.