A Personal Reflection
                                  Dissolving Duality 

            Many students ask me. "What difference has a long term meditation practice made in your my life?" Many responses arise however one particular awareness surfaces from the depths of my being.
            As a result of practice and study I now have a direct experience that there is no duality.  There is no difference between inner and outer, giving and receiving, loving and being loved, me and you, me and the world.  I am in the world and the world is in me.  We are one.  We are each a microcosm of the macrocosm; within each organism lies the secret of the whole. 
           The very nature of speaking about this topic is a challenge.  Moving into the verbal realm immediately moves me into a linear domain, out of the unconditioned, into the conditioned.

Conditioned vs. Unconditioned

           By conditioned I mean life as we know it.  Life lived within time and space.  Our week is divided into days, our calendar year into months.  We work x number of hours a day, x number of days per week.  We name periods of the day in relation to the earth's movement around
the sun: morning, afternoon, evening and night.  We live in particular areas of the world, which we label by direction: North, South, East and West. The description of our movement through life is chopped up into units of time and space.     
           By unconditioned I mean a state which is timeless, beyond form, fully spacious, with no separation between I and thou, in which no independent "I," solid sense of individual self exists. 
           Conditions can and do reflect natural laws, but more often than not we are caught up in the rhythms and patterns of culturally conditioned expectations and do not touch the truths of existence, which lie within, underneath and beyond our every day life. 
           Meditation, living mindfully, with awareness, brings us to a direct knowing of existence within conditions. 

Reflections on my past

            Healing the separation between the conditioned and unconditioned has been a theme for me in this lifetime.  I experienced this conflict through my adolescence and into my twenties as a painful division between  "me," and "the world."  "I" was a sensitive person, aware of subtle influences both visible and invisible. "The world" was a harsh place that devalued and vehemently worked against expression of the subtleties I experienced.  "I" was too open, too naive for the world.  It was extremely painful for me to be "in the world."  It hurt, on all levels.  My reality was not reflected back to me by the world at large. 
            I felt such a chasm between inner and outer.  In my teens I would meditate and be speechless for hours afterwards. I had no way to bridge that inner ocean of silence with words.  Now I am able to plumb the depths and carry that place within me, into my action. 
     
            How did I get to be "too open," "too sensitive"?  Coming from a middle class background, growing up in a small town in the fifties, I was sheltered, protected.  I was raised to be trusting, to trust the inherent goodness of life, of humanity.  Teachers, merchants, co-workers, my parents' friends, those with whom I had daily contact were honest, giving people.  They had my best interests at heart, or so I believed. I never gave it much thought at the time. Trust provided a firm foundation for my life upon which I counted.
           I was raised to be honest and tell the truth.  "Honesty is the best policy," was a favorite motto of my parents.  If we were given too much change at the grocery, or a clerk failed to charge for an item, we never said, "Oops, his mistake, our good fortune."  We returned the extra change, pointed out the forgotten item.
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          As is the way of all children, I believed the entire world functioned in the manner in which I was raised.  I experienced the world as a safe and trusting place.  It was a rude awakening to discover otherwise.
As I grew older and came to know the violence, fear, hatred, and anger in the world I was faced with a question that plagued me for years and caused severe pain in my heart.  How can sensitive people be in the world?  I bemoaned the fact.  "I am too sensitive!  The world is too harsh a place for me!"  My feelings were so easily hurt. I did not like the world that I was coming to know. I felt separated, divided from the world, better than the world, alienated. "I do not belong here.  Me and the world do not go together".
Over and over I suffered losses of innocence.  It happened in small ways.  I made a plan to get together with someone.  She didn't call, and didn't show up until well after the appointed hour. "Oh," I realized in my disappointment, "people don't always do what they say." How basic is this information. What painful news for me.
I thought "loss of innocence" was an event that happened only once in a lifetime, when a person hit a certain age, boom! A loss of innocence occurs and never happens again.  Not so.  I did not understand how people could be so cruel, act with volition to harm one another.     I witnessed this suffering, this dukkha, on a global level, through wars, racial, cultural and religious strife.  I could not fathom the ways of the world.

                                                                          Continued