What to read after Nectar #13?

Divine Reality is all-encompassing, ever-present, and all-pervasive — that is the testament of the enlightened beings throughout countless ages and seems to be the consensus of the writers featured in this issue of Nectar of Nondual Truth. And not only are the seemingly varied perspectives of philosophy brought together in such a profound and unilateral insight, the assumed divisions between man and man, man and woman, nation and nation, religion and religion, and even heaven and earth are also harmoniously conjoined therein. Further, the very concepts of transcendence and immanence, something beyond and something present, also get a thorough revamping in our minds, particularly if we imagine that they represent a contrasting dichotomy, when in truth they do not. As the Indian poet/sage, Ramaprasad, is wont to sing repeatedly: “Mother’s Reality escapes every mind that imagines sets of dualities to be real.”

In the pages of this bold and well-intentioned journal, as well as in the hoary leaves comprising the revered scriptures of the world, the idea of Nonduality, Advaita, persists. Regardless, there are always and predominantly two things on the minds of living beings, whether they are awakened or unawakened: those are Reality and relativity. The unawakened either do not know about Reality, do not think of It, attempt to escape it in themselves, or remain antagonistic to It. If they accept it at all, in what the seers call the beginnings of spiritual awakening, there is still the considerable problem of overcoming procrastination, prevarication and compromise and swiftly approaching It. As for relativity, the world of name and form perceived via the five senses as being ultimately real, those unawakened to the Divine Verity mistake it to be the Reality, “bartering the infinite wealth at the center of their being for a world of mere colored glass,” as the poet sings. Thus, through lack of natural realization, and unconscious of the underlying presence of Brahman, they default to what the senses report and dictate, and remain satisfied — even through persistent suffering and obvious limitation — with relative existence and what it has to offer.