This page gives others a voice on experience, nonduality and the ways we understand the world. Their contributions offer perspectives of their own and invite further reflection, including where they raise questions or differ from Dioramics.
Miranda Warren — The Instant Nonduality Guru
How does someone who speaks about nonduality suddenly come to be treated as a teacher or an authority? Miranda Warren describes how quickly this role takes shape, even when someone has not asked for it. She argues for continuing to question speakers critically, especially when their descriptions of their own experience turn into claims about what reality is supposedly like for everyone.
This distinction touches on a question that also arises within Dioramics: what justifies the move from a compelling experience to a general truth?
The Instant Nonduality Guru
or, if you see the nonduality teacher on the road... you know what to do!
reflections from Miranda Warren:
Though I have been banished from that bastion of higher human knowledge that is Facebook, it seems I still retain over three dozen regular followers who engage me in conversations about this arcane subject called nonduality. Every so often there is a new email from a referral or someone who has read the book, and a few old-timers may appear after months with a new insight to examine. It is interesting, considering I have only given one public talk. And while I scribble reflections here and there, I have never encouraged anyone to see me as some kind of “guru” or write to me with their imponderable questions about identity, reality, and the dimensions of human experience.
Yet this seems to be a phenomena that happens whenever anyone speaks or writes about this topic that falls under the broad heading of “nonduality.” I notice that when someone posts their first nonduality video on YouTube, clearly a sign of true enlightenment, that soon afterwards they are answering questions and even being interviewed. The fascination for this subject has long gone beyond the traditional approach of finding an accepted spiritual master with the proper credentials, testimonials from their students, and of course one who wears the correct spiritual garb. In fact, the contemporary audience eschews such acknowledged teachers in favor of the everyman or woman who just happens to suddenly lose their sense of self and now seems to inhabit a separate reality in which they claim to see only beauty and perfection and feel a sense of unending peace the seeker desperately desires. That they make it sound so ordinary and natural, rather the being the culmination of years of meditating and studying arcane literature, makes it far easier to relate to, even if the language they use to describe it is often obscure and laden with abstractions.
Though followers of nonduality tend to imagine they are above the trends that define the rest of society, this actually follows the general cultural movement of people following social media influencers rather than experts. Whether fitness, health, fashion, or what have you, people have grown suspicious of acknowledged experts and find it easier to relate to someone who seems just like them, only with a little more experience and knowledge in the field they wish to learn about. Hence, the instant nonduality speaker, the apparent YouTube or Facebook “guru” (although the G-word is too old school for anyone to use these days).
That is not to say this is a bad thing, as this view of life is hardly restricted to acknowledged spiritual masters, and some might say it is not even “spiritual” at all. It is a perspective on living that happens when the deeply conditioned sense of a personal, separate identity seems to “fall away” and can no longer be believed. It is not an intellectual realization or a religious conversion, but more like a shift in consciousness. This may make it sound special, so let me just add it is a shift in consciousness the same way as schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder. In other words, the brain apparently reinterprets its perceptual input. In this case, rather than hearing voices or splitting into separate personalities, there is no longer a feeling of being a separate individual self inside a body, apart from all that appears.
Some of us believe this is not anything remarkable, but in fact the way most human beings who ever lived saw the world. Anthropology and a familiarity with indigenous cultures seems to support this, and one could even say that if humans had evolved to believe they were separate from each other and their environment, they would not have survived very long.
But leaving that theory aside, let’s get back to the point of this post. There is a small, but devoted, group of humans that tend to be labeled “seekers.” What they are seeking is insight into this view of life we call nonduality. They search, sometimes frantically, for those who seem to have lost their sense of a separate self in hopes of gaining information that may help them on their own imagined journey to losing the feeling of separation. The seeking seems to be rather undisciplined. In the absence of any actual criteria to determine who actually speaks from a position of no separation (to call it something other than needlessly grandiose terms like liberation and enlightenment), seekers seem to gravitate to anyone who appears in a public forum. As social media has made everyone a public figure, anyone can become the guru du jour.
Again, this is not necessarily negative. Having to go through spiritual organizations or be part of a lineage, receive an endorsement from an acknowledged guru, or simply have the wherewithal and resources to set up enough meetings to attract a following should not determine who gets to share this message as it has in the past. I am simply pointing out that just because someone shows up on social media, and perhaps says all the right words, that does not mean they are more than any convert to a new belief system.
How quickly and eagerly seekers latch on to anyone speaking of this is somewhat remarkable. Long time readers may recall my account of my one and only Satsang. Simply because I was up on a stage in front of a room, the air of expertise was present. The fact that virtually no one there had ever heard of me, or even read a word I had written, did not matter. I was on stage, and was treated as the one with the answers. When I said something a questioner did not agree with, other attendees tried to shut them down. I had rabid followers in the space of a few minutes!
Perhaps this is human nature, or a product of our current cultural gestalt. Either way, all I am saying is to deeply question what anyone who speaks of this tells you. Especially when they veer from describing their own apparent experience. As soon as they try to tell you the implications of what they claim to see, the story of how life “truly is” and describe how the world actually appears, rather than just how it seems to them, that is a red flag. Ask questions. Give them a hard time. Don’t just accept what they say because you believe they have reached some more expansive realm of perception. And if they start offering suggestions on how you, too, can see as they do, then bring out the big guns; really make them prove what they are trying to sell you. Show no mercy to the ones who start to sound like experts, (and yes, of course, that includes the one writing these words, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?)
The days when there were probing interviews and Q’s and A’s on YouTube where nonduality speakers were challenged and pressed to deeply explain their views sadly seem to be over. Today, most nonduality interviews seem like celebrity PR pieces; promotional videos, not challenging conversations. But that doesn’t mean you have to roll over and accept whatever you hear. My favorite correspondents are the ones who give me the hardest time, and always challenge what I say.
Remember, if you see the Buddha on the road…..
---Miranda Warren