The Non-Duality Song

Whoever thought I would volunteer to write and give a sermon? I swore off church decades ago. I just happened to join a Unitarian church to make some friends. We’re lay-led at the moment and here we are…

It turns out you don’t have to be a Unitarian to be a Unitarian. Deep down, searching for truth and meaning was always my mission, which is why I’m here on a Sunday instead of sleeping in like I did for 30-plus years.

When I read the 4^th Principle of Unitarianism, I was shocked to realize it was describing me. Young me would never believe it. It turns out I was a Unitarian in my heart all along.

My search for truth and meaning eventually led me here. Finally, a team that doesn’t make you pick a team. You just have to be kind.

I’ve traveled many paths searching for the Truth. Looking back, I held some seriously wrong views along the way. I looked to the people around me for answers.

I believed what I was supposed to believe, because I wanted to be “good.” It was hard to be the man I wanted to be, so I tried hard to do it their way.

But beliefs would fall apart when I examined them. I was never satisfied with clever slogans or answers people refused to explain. They had the right answers already and they didn’t want to think about it.

If they wouldn’t answer my questions, I had to find my own way. When I realized a belief was wrong, I had to let it go even if it was painful, which it was. I had to demolish world views I had worked so hard building.

It was bewildering and scary, but it was also exciting. I loved discovering new things. Sometimes I felt like the rug was being yanked out from under me, but I accepted it.

I’ve always wanted to know what it all means, what us humans are supposed to be doing here.

I read a lot, which made me think big thoughts and ask bigger questions. The more books, the more questions. My parents got me into that habit. They read constantly we discussed what we read.

The first Unitarian I met in the wild was a college classmate. He gave me a ride once. People who weren’t Baptists or Catholics were a novelty for me. He explained Unitarianism when I asked, but it didn’t really click.

My second year of college I read a book called The Faiths that Men Live By, which gave me my first ever fair descriptions of other religions’ actual beliefs.

Before that I had only been taught all the ways they were wrong. They weren’t as foolish and ill-intentioned as I’d been taught. I still had a long way to go, but suddenly the truth wasn’t so obvious anymore.

Coincidentally, I found out later that it was written by Unitarian minister and theologian, Charles Francis Potter.

Eventually I quit looking for the only path and chose a path that said to keep looking. I look for signposts that will point the way if I pay attention. Seeing a Yin and Yang sign out front when I’d just been reading about Eastern religions seemed like too big a coincidence. I felt, “It was meant to be.”

I had a rough time during the lockdown even though I never got covid. The pandemic and the isolation were hard enough, but watching the madness happening in the country was way worse.

I began to lose faith in humanity. How could supposedly decent people do and say such terrible things? And yet they thought they were on the right side.

I did what a lot of people did during the lockdown, I tried to learn Yoga and consumed a lot of videos and books about Zen, mindfulness and Taoism, traditions I had never examined before. And they began to make sense.

One concept that really resonated with me was Non-dualism. Non-dualism was common to most of them, and it was hard to wrap my head around at first.

There are many definitions for Non-Duality and they can get pretty involved. The Wikipedia article alone is a challenge to get through. I’m still trying to wrap my head around “non-difference of subject and object.”

I stole this definition from a website called Non-Duality for Dummies: “Non-duality is an ancient Eastern philosophy that means ‘not two.’ It refers to the nature of existence consisting of one interconnected whole, rather than many separate things cobbled together.”

That’s the simplest explanation I’ve found so far.

I used to think opposites had nothing to do with one another, but it turns out they’re intimately connected. A magnet must have a negative and a positive pole. You can’t have tall without short, up without down.

Thinking about Non-Duality also shows how relative everything is. Is it a big rock or a small boulder? How many is “some”? Some arbitrary place between all and nothing.

I’m a giant eyeball to whatever looks at me through a microscope, but I’m a speck compared to the earth. And the earth is a speck compared to everything else.

Even for a lifelong science fiction fan, that was a lot, but I’ve started to grasp the basics. How everything is connected, and there isn’t really a “pure” version of anything.

I thought I knew what black looked like, but then they invented a pigment called Vanta black that will make a ball look like a spot. Everyone and everything are on a scale. That clicked.

The reason non-dualism resonated so hard is it gave me better way to look at good and evil. I needed that. Growing up, I was taught there were good people and bad people. You needed to stick with the good ones and avoid the bad. And the bad ones couldn’t be us.

The last few years were making me question: Is the human race worth saving? Is it inherently bad? Does that include me? Do the bad things I’ve done and thought in the past make me a bad person? Are bad people redeemable?  

We all think we’re the good guy in the story, even if we aren’t. I’ve decided the way you really become the good guy is to just try to be better than the day before. Which made me feel better about myself and humanity.

Now I understand one shades into the other. Good and evil are on a scale. You can choose to move up or down on that scale. Redemption doesn’t just happen all at once. It’s a process.

I also discovered psychologist Carl Jung  during the lockdown and his theories were also in line with those ideas. It’s hard to know where you stand on the good and bad scale.

Your unconscious knows the real story, but your ego will try to make you the hero every time. If somebody got hurt, they deserved it “because,” you “had to do it,” or whatever explanation makes you feel better.

English writer and lecturer Alan Watts explained it beautifully. “I think this is the most important thing in Jung, that he was able to point out: to the degree you condemn others and find evil in others, you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself.”

Everyone is at least a little bad, but that’s just part of being human. Understanding that helps you to be kind to yourself, which makes it easier to be kind to others.

I used to think being a good person meant fighting and repressing your dark side. Now I understand that side of you is something you have to accept and forgive.

It turns out the most important part of being good is kindness. Toward other people and toward yourself.

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