Confrontation is also a support for discrimination. When we don’t confront our positions, our experience will often remain vague, unclear, and indeterminate, and we won’t get the significance of what’s happening. Confrontation means that we are committed to seeing things exactly as they are, to calling a spade a spade. So challenge, confrontation, and discrimination go together; they operate as a unified functioning of the Red Essence in inquiry. We tend to think of confrontation and challenge in terms of standing up to other people, but you can confront yourself, you can challenge yourself and your assumptions.

As we become comfortable exercising the view of totality, we can consider all kinds of other questions from its perspective. One of the central issues that we deal with in this book is the relationship between duality and nonduality. Discerning the implications inherent in the nondual view opens up whole new possibilities of experience. We will spend some time exploring these new frontiers by examining the nature of time and space, the role of the particular individual, the paradox of nondoing, and the various mysteries of emptiness—all from the perspective of totality. What is revealed as we do this is that reality is far more indeterminate, far more mysterious than anything we can conceive of. No single view—whether dual, nondual, unilocal, or something else entirely—can capture the dynamism of reality. Freedom is the freedom of reality to reveal its dynamism, to express itself as form, as formlessness, as both, or as neither. No single feature and no combination of features can exhaust the potential of reality. It is a mystery without end. Reality is always revealing itself by knowing itself; and knowing reality and living it becomes the fulfillment of our life. The purity of reality expresses itself to us, through us, and as us, all at once. Our life becomes the life of true nature—the purity at the heart of reality—living consciously and expressing itself as us, using us by being us. This is the miraculous heart of human freedom.

So the individual and Living Being are not two things and, at the same time, they are not one thing. Reality is more mysterious than simply saying that everything is one. Seeing this opens up a new appreciation of the individual. Not only is the individual necessary for any form of realization—including the nondual, which says that the individual is a delusion or an ephemeral form—but also the individual has an intrinsic significance that is fundamentally mysterious. There is a dialectic interaction between the individual—the practitioner or the experiencer—and Being, in its manifestation and in its wholeness. Understanding this dynamic interaction—between individual and whole, between practice and grace, between dual and nondual—begins to reveal a deeper understanding of how things really happen. Reality is far more nonlinear and indeterminate than the boundlessness or the nonduality that true nature reveals. The indeterminacy of true nature allows realization to behold reality in many ways. Yet that perception always happens through the individual consciousness—a consciousness that is always present, whether explicitly or implicitly, in any condition of realization. 

When I say that we are Total Being, many of us will start searching our experience and our memory to uncover what that is. You won’t find it, but it is right there. Recognizing that we are Total Being is actually a maturation of realization—of attaining realization and of having attained realization that is a living realization. A living realization moves from one condition of realization to another without going toward any particular realization. A living realization does not reach an end point where it stops, because reality is inherently dynamic and changeable, and its nature is ultimately indeterminate. When we know that we are Total Being, we recognize that we are everything and also that we are nothing. We are everything and we are nothing and we can experience those separately, or we can experience that we are everything and that we are nothing at the same time. When I say that we are everything, I don’t simply mean nondual experience. Nondual experience is only one kind of experience. When I say that we are everything, I mean the dual and the nondual and everything else that is neither dual nor nondual. I am sure many of you are scratching your heads right now; and you might be scratching your head for a long time.  

The absolute is indeterminate intimacy, the essence of Being. The sense of intimacy comes from the transparency coemergent with centerless knowingness: I am totally in touch with myself at each point of my presence, with no veils. In this complete in-touchness there is a sense of privacy, of interiority. This delicate interiority is the essence of intimacy. There is no subject being intimate with an object; in fact there is nothing to be intimate with. Intimacy is merely the condition of total in-touchness. The absolute is definitely Being, but it cannot be said to be existence, or even presence. It is Being in that there is an actuality that we do encounter. In fact, it is the only certain being; everything else arises out of it, and is transitory. However, this beingness of the absolute is devoid of the concept or feeling of existence, empty of the concept or sense of presence. There is an immediacy of self-awareness, but there is nothing to say about what the awareness is aware of. I sometimes call it absolute Being.

But even then, you realize that you have not reached the end, for the glimmer of another star system is beyond this one. Furthermore, you begin to understand that holding on to any of these discoveries will disconnect you from the inexhaustibility of Being—its very essence. You also might realize that you are attached to there being an end to your understanding. So this is a slightly different approach to understanding the mystery than the concept of indeterminacy. The mystery is indeterminate, but not in the sense that it is impossible to make determinations about it. It is possible to make an infinite number of determinations, but these determinations fall short of capturing the essence of the mystery. Furthermore, these infinite determinations are actually the content of our consciousness. What else is there to experience? We can say that the mystery is unknowable and forget about it, but if we do that, we remain limited to the fact of its unknowability. But it is also knowable, much more knowable than anything else—in fact, infinitely knowable. But it cannot be known totally and finally, so we can never say we have finished our exploration. My understanding of the mystery is that it is an inexhaustible richness, and this richness is inseparable from the mystery. The richness is nothing but the revelation of the mystery, and that revelation is completely inexhaustible. This perspective gives us some basis for appreciating the way of inquiry. 

We usually don’t understand that it is Total Being that manifests all views until we are in a condition of realization of deeper dimensions. But the realization itself is not sufficient; we have to discern the implications of those deeper dimensions, using our intelligence, our creative discrimination. Within each degree of freedom, there are grades in the sense of progression in one direction or another. But it is also possible to open into an entirely new degree of freedom by exercising this capacity of creative discrimination. As we discover these other dimensions, the new degrees of freedom reveal different views of reality. And there are infinite degrees of freedom because Total Being is indeterminate. This means that Total Being cannot be finally pinned down to this or that realization, because the moment we do that, we deny other degrees of freedom. But there is no end to the degrees of freedom, no end of possible views, no end to the potential of experience, and no end to the ways in which we can be free. Another way we can experience the unfolding degrees of freedom is as runaway realization. In the inner journey, at some point our experience can shift to realization, which means that we can be the unfolding of presence and true nature. In this experience, there is no duality between how we recognize ourselves and how Total Being is manifesting as who and what we are. Freedom here becomes a runaway realization, in the sense that realization lives by moving from one kind of realization to another kind of realization. The arising of duality, ego identification, and even reactivity become Total Being realizing itself in those forms. Life becomes realization realizing further realization, full of discovery, expansion, subtlety, refinement, and beauty.  

We will see as we go on that Total Being is a liberating and mysterious and subtle perspective of reality. As I said, in being anything and in not being anything, we are Total Being, because whatever we are, whatever we are experiencing, is the expression of Total Being. But it’s actually much more than simply being the expression of Total Being because anything—any particular thing, any experience—is Total Being in its entirety without our necessarily having to perceive Total Being. In other words, we experience Total Being completely no matter what we are experiencing. If we are simply experiencing our body and have the illumination of Total Being, we realize that our body is Total Being and does not exclude anything. We realize our body as Total Being that is everything that is, was, will be, and can be—all potential and actuality, in all times and spaces. This is one of the subtle, paradoxical mysteries of the realization of Total Being. Every experience that we have is an expression of Total Being, but Total Being remains always elusive and indeterminate—neither a thing nor a being, but rather a liberating indeterminacy.