'Nonduality' is not a concept? It's beyond a concept? And it's something that can be realised?
"Nonduality" is a concept that stands in for something beyond a concept, while its name reminds you to not mistake the concept for what the concept is trying to represent. If you think about "everything that exists" and "the universe", and realise that our brains and our senses are limited to our mammalian nature, our ability to see and hear only certain frequencies of energy, our lifespans are a certain length, we experience time from the perspective of four dimensions, rather than five or more (so we see time as running in one direction only), then it makes sense that our language and attempts to describe it, will be "not the thing". Because "reality" or "the universe" or whatever you want to call it, must actually be much larger and vaster than anything we can imagine. And at the same time, the distinctions and concepts that we use to divide up reality, are constructs of our minds.
It's been said of "God" (which you can substitute for the word "the universe" or "ultimate reality" or "the whole truth" or whatever you want) that any concept or any being perceived by a human as God, would not actually be God but something within God, or a manifestation of God. And so many spiritual people try and describe God/Ultimate Reality/The Universe in negatives then. "God is NOT love. God is NOT the universe. God is NOT consciousness. Etc etc."
That's something that Buddhism does too. With the concept of "not-self" being at the core of everything. And the idea of "void" and "nirvana". The point is that there is "no-thing" (no separate individual thing that you can point to and define within a concept) behind reality. At the same time there is a cohesiveness to reality, and that's what they refer to as "void". But then they say "don't cling to the void" either. Because the concept of "void" is itself a concept and not the thing it's referring to. It's the best we can do for now though.
Releasing "attachment" from a Buddhist standpoint isn't just attachment to earthly things, but attachment from concepts themselves, words and models of understanding reality. I don't see "letting go of attachment" to mean "don't feel love for anything" or don't find usefulness in any concept. Alan Watts described Buddhist understanding of "attachment" as being "hang-up" or "blockage". If you cling too hard to anything in this permanently shifting and transient universe, it will hold you back. That is a profoundly non-dogmatic perspective on life, because it means that you can lightly pick up concepts and words and models and philosophies and use them, but you're always aware that they are not "the thing" they are meant to be describing or measuring. So you're always open to new information and new perspectives, you're not "stuck" to a particular perspective.
And the word "nonduality" (although itself a concept) is trying to refer to the "everything beyond all concepts while also cohesive and undivided" nature of reality. It's an imperfect tool and an imperfect word, just like all words.
How do you do that, exactly? Do you clear your mind of all concepts, and then everything falls into place? Which part of you do you use to clear your mind of all concepts? Not your mind obviously. Is there something which transcends mind? I'm not disputing the possibility, but I want someone to point to it - somehow - and identify it.
Well that's the real difficulty isn't it? That's what meditation tries to do, tries to detach the mind from concepts and thoughts, by observing their fleeting nature. If you can observe your thoughts with detachment, then "observation" and "the thoughts themselves" are not the same thing. The idea is that the person meditating can suddenly feel their awareness beyond concepts. But this is very difficult and as soon as you try to articulate it you fall back into concepts to try and do so. So it's something that can only be experienced to really understand.
But there are more interesting questions: what's wrong with concepts? Why do we have them? And how exactly - other than as a piece of New Age dogma - are they limiting? Take a concept like 'everything'? Is that limiting? Where does the limiting bit come in?
They're not "wrong". They're tools that we use to try and understand reality. They're functions of our left brain. They obviously are evolutionarily helpful to humanity because they allow for ease of communication between individuals and across time. We didn't always have concepts, they arose over time such as the invention of language and are still evolving.
But they are limiting in that if you see the world as being broken up into parts only, and you try to understand "ultimate reality" as best you can by cutting further and further into "matter", first into atoms, then electrons, then quarks, then strings, it's not ever going to give you the full picture. Because cutting up the cohesive reality into "concepts" and writing down relationships between "objects" in a linear fashion will always be more simplistic than reality and leave out important information. That doesn't mean that it's not a way to get some information. I'm not advocating completely suppressing logical thought forever and never using concepts again. If I was I wouldn't be speaking, I would just live like an animal or a baby.
I believe that the spiritual answers are found beyond concepts, but that we have to try and use concepts as best we can to articulate them. That's why I like having mystical experiences, because then I can try and integrate those experiences with my conceptual "understanding" and find new creative "metaphors" to communicate them.
Well let's go all out nondual then. Everything, including limiting concepts, and duality, and dual awareness, is divine. What has been achieved? Is this a better state to be in, than being just 'ordinary'? And isn't poor old 'ordinary' divine too?
Well I can only speak for myself and for people who have had the experience of feeling everything to be divine. I feel a sense of freedom and relief. I feel peace. I lose fear.
When I realised that my ego was a construct that I created, and felt myself to be harmonious and continuous with everything that exists my anxiety and my eating disorder that had plagued me for over ten years, disappeared and has not returned. I also lost my fear of death because I realised that my ego's death would not actually be the death of consciousness itself, and that the harmonious conscious process of everything that is, would continue in many different forms forever. And that I would never experience my own death.
(I write about this in my article Death, Amnesia and the Nature of Subjective Aliveness https://ladyreverie.medium.com/death-amnesia-and-the-nature-of-subjective-aliveness-7d19c254f5f)
I felt that my "purpose" in life is no-purpose, other than that which I create for myself. The purpose in life is to experience. And it's up to me what I experience. There is no external pressure to achieve anything. There is no FOMO because all possible experiences are being had by other "beings" that are in a sense, one with me. So just because "Reverie" doesn't have a certain experience doesn't mean that this experience isn't had by someone, and if we're all one, then in a sense the consciousness manifesting through me had that experience even if my ego did not. There is no suffering, because suffering is a construct of my mind, a story I tell myself about the experiences I have.
I lost that sense of "there is something fundamentally wrong with my life" that you write about as being your motivation for metaphysical experience. I am happy. I still am fascinated by the nature of consciousness and reality, I still go to work, I still make art, I still "achieve" things, but I do so in the understanding that the value of what I do is in the experience for me. There is nothing I could do or not do, that would change my fundamental nature. Because I am cohesive with everything. I am as an integral part of the fabric of reality, as a star, as a black hole, as a speck of dust, as Shakespeare, as Hitler, as you, as a microbe in the ocean, as Marie Curie, as Nikola Tesla, as a baby that dies in the womb. Everything.
That realisation takes a lot of pressure off me. I used to be a perfectionist. I used to believe that before I could feel happy I needed to "earn" my place in the world. I needed other people's approval. This was a limiting belief of mine, a story I told myself. In reality every moment I have an equal capacity to experience life to the full, as much as when I'm doing the dishes and taking out the trash, as when I'm painting a beautiful artwork or earning a high salary, or jumping out of a plane, or visiting Rome or having sex.
And that takes me to the final question you have. Isn't ordinary divine too?
Yes it is. That's the realisation. If everything is divine, then so is the ordinary. As Alan Watts said "nirvana and samsara are the same thing". They're just seen from a different perspective.
(BTW I'm not saying I'm always in this enlightened "free from suffering" mindset but the more I pursue these experiences of nonduality the more common they become).
