





The Three Simultaneously True Levels of Nondual Reality

(one Absolutely True, the other two “relatively true”)

3 - Conventional level

2 - Psychic-Soul level

1 - ONLY GOD



© Copyright 2008 by Timothy Conway



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[UPDATE, Feb. 6, 2012: See bottom of page for a newly uploaded CHART of this three-fold model.]

[UPDATE: Dec. 14, 2017: After the interview excerpt, I added some extra commentary about pain/suffering and the three truth levels or aspects.]

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Most humans view their situation in a conventional, non-mystical way, treating whatever happens as concretely real, and to be judged as "good" and "bad," etc. By contrast, a growing number of spiritual teachers and disciples in the New Thought and Neo-Advaita (nonduality) movements of our era have become boxed into a viewpoint which constrains them to see whatever happens only as "the perfect manifestation of Divine Will," or else as "nothing really happening." Such persons abandon all capacity for evaluating phenomena in any constructive or meaningful way.

Yet our situation is not so one-dimensional as these positions would hold, and an expansive, truly liberated way of talking about Reality will involve more dimensions. A three-fold model of nondual Reality I've suggested has been found by many people to be quite helpful in accounting for all levels of our experience.

This three-fold model is an elaboration of the old two-fold distinction between the "Absolute-truth" level (paramarthika-satya) and the mundane "conventional-truth" level (samvriti-satya or vyavaharika-satya) articulated by India's most illustrious ancient sages— the Buddha, Nagarjuna, Sankara, et al. In the model I suggest, based on additional revelations from the Great Traditions of India and mystical traditions of the West, another level is inserted between the "conventional" mundane level and the "Absolute-Truth" level.

Thus, we can identify the "Three Levels of Nondual Reality" as:

Level 3: the pragmatic level of mundane reality and conventional experience, involving the "appropriate and inappropriate," "helpful and harmful," "skillful and unskillful," "right and wrong," "justice and injustice," "pleasant and painful" and so forth;

Level 2: the psychic or "heavenly soul" level of Reality, which yields the realization or epiphany that whatever happens is ultimately "perfect," because whatever occurs is the "exquisite manifestation of Divine Will" for the sake of ALL souls eventually coming Home to God-realization. And, further, here it is realized that all souls have essentially always been immortal, innocent, free and radiant with Divine bliss-love (prior to and beyond their karmic entanglements on earth and in any lower subtle realms); and

Level 1: the Absolute "level" of Reality, wherein it is realized that whatever happens in the play of manifestation is a dream, so nothing is really happening, there is no fundamental multiplicity, only the nondual singularity of GOD or Pure Infinite Awareness is truly HERE. This Divine Self is absolutely Real as the sole Identity (prior to or beyond all worlds, souls, events, experiences).

These "truth-levels" are all simultaneously true. Level 1 ("only God, only the One Reality") is ABSOLUTELY TRUE, whereas Level 2 and Level 3, both pertaining to the realms of multiplicity, are "relatively true." (Level 3 pertains to the situation for sentient beings here on earth and lower subtle realms, whereas level 2 pertains to the "highest heaven realms.")

When we don't honor together all three of these "levels" or "aspects" or "dimensions" of Reality as being simultaneously true, we tend to get caught in a constricted viewpoint. So, for instance, if we ignore the conventional level (level 3 in this model), preferring to ONLY see that "everything is perfect" (level 2) or that "nothing is really happening, only God is Real" (level 1), we can easily fail in morality, compassion and empathy, falling into an insensitive apathy, ignoring the rampant forms of injustice that inflict pain on sentient beings. Furthermore, denying level 3 may lead us to mistakenly believe that being discerning or critical—i.e., critiquing any form of thinking or behavior in the field of politics, spirituality, etc.—is "being negative" or "deluded" or "coming from the head, not the heart." (Actually, a true sage utilizes both head and heart in the context of Awareness.) Yet this is, itself, a negative judgment or a critique. It is a limited position that violates true freedom by constraining us to always only view whatever happens as "perfect" and beyond reproach, or as "nothing really happening." Again, to hold onto such a position is to constrain ourselves to a uni-level or one-dimensional and limited view of the Totality of Reality.

Likewise, if we ONLY focus on level 3 and, for instance, the countless injustices and forms of cruelty to living beings, we can become angry political fanatics, vindictive zealots always finding evil-doers somewhere and throwing them out of our heart with the constricted mind of scornful anger and venomous disgust over what "those evil persons" are doing. This can be healed by allowing level 2 and level 1 perspectives to be realized along with a level 3 sensibility.

A more in-depth presentation of this "Three Levels of Nondual Reality" occurred in an interview several years ago in the Sun magazine, a national journal of politics, spirituality, psychology, poetry, etc. The relevant excerpt is reproduced immediately below....

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Excerpt from April 2003 Sun magazine cover-story interview with Timothy Conway, Ph.D.

© Copyright 2003 by Timothy Conway

(The full text of this interview can be downloaded at this link and at the “Engaged Spirituality” section of this website.)

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Arnie Cooper: Many people feel a tension between the more contemplative life on the one hand, and the more engaged activist life on the other.

Timothy Conway: To heal this conflict, I think it helps to see our situation on three levels—all equally true and valid.

I’ll start with the most familiar level, level three, the conventional level of our ordinary experience in the world. This is a realm of opposites, of pleasure and pain. In mystical spiritual literature, you hear a lot about going beyond the opposites, beyond all duality, but let’s stop at this level three and acknowledge the loss and gain, the beauty and ugliness. This is the level of right and wrong and good and evil, skillful and unskillful. It’s humans doing despicable things to each other and to our ecosystems. It’s also all the good and beauty and joy in the world.

Look at 9/11 and the horrific damage the terrorists caused: not just the nearly three thousand dead, but also those who were scarred for life, the economic dislocation, the massive layoffs and monetary losses. But there was also the great heroism shown by the firefighters and police officers and rescue workers and all those who donated their blood and time and energy. The events of September 11 showed both the best and worst of humanity.

This is level three: the amazing play of what is traditionally called good and evil. At this level, one must look evil in the face and see it for what it is. And one must be willing to step up with an engaged spirituality and do what needs to be done for the public good. I do not mean mere charity, but getting involved in enacting justice. There’s a big difference between charity and justice. Bill Moyers said, “Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.” He wrote that in the preface to a book by another hero of mine, Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical Christian, editor of the spiritual-political journal Sojourners and cofounder of the Sojourners community of those who live and work in solidarity with the poor. In his book, Wallis says, “We need to do more than pull people out of the river before they drown; someone needs to go upstream to see who or what is throwing them in.” For example, government policies that punish poor and middle-class Americans, or corrupt foreign-aid practices that destroy habitat and displace thousands or millions of people from their ancestral lands. So level three, the realm of good and evil, is where engaged spirituality shines.

Cooper: What about level two?

Conway: On this level, we realize that, whatever happens, it’s all perfect. The great fourteenth-century Christian saint Juliana of Norwich was immensely troubled by the misery around her, the sinfulness of people, and the traditional idea that sinners would go to eternal hell. Then she experienced a dazzling revelation: Jesus appeared to her and, among many other lovely utterances, said to her, “All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” And this beautiful secret from God was revealed to Juliana—that all beings would somehow be brought Home. No one would have to permanently suffer in hell, for God is our deepest truth, our real condition of eternal love and bliss.

This goes back to the old, widespread but largely forgotten Christian idea of apokatastasis, or universal salvation taught by Origen and Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and earlier suggested by Paul of Tarsus: God’s love is so powerful that no creature can exile itself from this Love forever. It may take eons, but at some point God will redeem all souls. Even Satan will be reconciled in God’s love. The beauty of universal redemption is that, no matter what’s happening on level three—the oppression, exploitation, and terrorism—it’s all perfect, for this Divine Comedy has a happy ending. Moments, or periods, or even eons of suffering are ultimately “outshined” by reconciliation in God. This idea is not found just in Christianity. It is also known to mystical Sufis and Hasidic Jews, and it is openly acknowledged in the Eastern traditions. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna promises universal salvation for all beings. So, too, does the Buddha, when he says that all beings will come to nirvana, that none of the conditioned states are permanent. India’s ancient Brahma Sutras say, “All beings will eventually become Brahman,” or Divine Reality, “because there is only Brahman.”

So, with this blissful outcome for all, there’s a sense that it’s all perfect—truly, an amazing Divine Comedy. Yes, there are times of terrible tragedy and tribulation, but ultimately everything turns out well. All souls—really God in disguise—use their suffering as grist for the mill to produce sublime awakening to Spirit.

Sri Ramakrishna, the great Bengali master of the nineteenth century, when asked why we suffer, poignantly replied: “To add zest to the [Divine] play.” In classic works of comedy, from Shakespeare to the Marx Brothers, things get darkest before the dawn. And when that dawn comes, when the comedic climax happens, all those on stage awaken to an overwhelming sense of joy and happiness. In the highest form of comedy, even the villains are converted.

So here at level two, the deep, mystical part of us realizes that all is well in a superb Divine play of manifestation. Unlike our vulnerable human aspect, which fears things are going down the drain, this deep Self knows that, in the exquisite script authored by Divine Intelligence, it’s all perfect and everything happens for a reason. You can take this on faith, but mystics know it in the core of their being as the truth of every situation.

Cooper: Many people have trouble even taking it on faith. They want proof.

Conway: Well, in a way, modern physics supports this aspect of the mystical view. The basic parameters to get a physical cosmos had to be absolutely, utterly perfect—otherwise this nearly 14 billion-year-old universe just wouldn’t have happened. So many astounding fine-tunings underlie this world that it’s obvious to many scientists that divine intelligence and wisdom are active in the process.

What holds the cosmos together is a great mystery. Respected Princeton mathematician and physicist Elliott Lieb has worked for thirty years on the “foundational problem”—the question of why matter is stable. Why doesn’t the atom just implode and then explode? Another glaring anomaly is that, at the origin of the material universe, there happened to be a tiny bit more matter than antimatter. If there had been equal amounts, which is what one would expect, then everything would have just canceled out. But there just so happened to be a few more quarks than anti-quarks (by the ridiculously tiniest hairbreadth of a hairbreadth of a difference), in just the right proportion.

And let’s ponder that initial inflationary period of the physical universe: the infinitesimal Planck moment, the tiniest moment in physics, 10-43 second—a ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second! In this original moment in time, a “speck of nothing,” a quantum bubble of space-time, inflated out of the “vacuum” to the size of a soccer ball. Then the inflation somehow stopped and the Big Bang process took over to slowly unfold our universe through an energy radiation phase to the birth of matter, and then evolving galaxies, stars, and planets to their present proportions. Now, why did that original inflationary cosmic bubble expand to a certain point and then stop? If it hadn’t gone far enough or had gone too far, in that initial Planck moment, we wouldn’t have a universe today. And, in a fascinating development over the last two decades, superstring or M theory, accepted by over 90 percent of theoretical physicists, holds that our familiar, four dimensional space-time cosmos must be embedded within an eleven-dimensional hyperspace, a much subtler realm ultimately rooted in the immaterial.

In the realm of chemistry and biology, one great anomaly is water. A century ago, Lawrence Henderson of Harvard explained that water is, in many ways, a miracle substance. It has some highly unusual properties compared to other molecular compounds. And without water, you wouldn’t have any complex forms of life. The famous astronomer Fred Hoyle, after being an atheist for most of his life, found remarkable and inexplicable anomalies in the chemistry of stars that caused him to declare that “a super intellect has monkeyed with [the basic laws of] physics as well as chemistry and biology.”

A survey done by the journal Nature revealed that 49 percent of scientists believe in a personal God. That number surely would have jumped to 70 or 80 percent had the question allowed for belief in a transpersonal God, such as the one that Einstein held dear.

The point is this: Atheistic materialists who claim the universe is just an accident have to appeal to the almighty “laws of physics” to account for how the cosmos got to be so stable and so conducive for the emergence of complex forms of life. But when we see how many absolute miracles of fine tuning were necessary for a universe and sentient beings to manifest, it becomes a semantic quibble whether you invoke “the laws of physics” or “God,” because they share the same divine powers of manifestation. Of course, the mystics would say that God actually has powers beyond the physical cosmos.

Cooper: We still haven’t gotten to level one.

Conway: Well, after level two—the realization that everything is the perfect design of Intelligent Spirit—you might ask, “What could level one possibly be?”

Level one is the deepest mystical truth, namely: Nothing is happening. The world is a dream. There’s only God here. It’s always only been God, changeless and full. A hymn repeatedly found in the ancient Upanishads declares, “Praise to the great Divine Fullness (Purnam),” which remains perfect and changeless despite all that is happening at levels two and three. Because at level one, nothing is happening. What appears to be happening at the other levels is a dream of Consciousness. Sufi saint Hakim Sana`i declared: “You think you are something, but that something is nothing.” La ilaha illah Llah. There is nothing but God.

Here again modern physics helps out, revealing that atoms are 99.99999999999% empty space. Shimmering fields of energy underlie the appearance of matter. And, as Richard Feynman and other leading physicists have declared, energy is a complete mystery. Thus, an increasing number of physicists are considering that consciousness may be the basic reality and source of all.

The finest nondual advaita scriptures of India use humor to explain this. Yoga Vasishtha, for example, playfully states, “The cosmos is like two sons born to a barren woman who did not really exist, and one day they went out and got on their horses that had never been born and traveled along a nonexistent path to an uncreated land to a town that existed only in the imagination.” These advaita scriptures all affirm that the world is a dream-play of the Supreme Consciousness. Yes, a world-appearance is happening that has a relative reality to it, rich with phenomenal experiences—colors, sounds, textures, tastes, smells, bodily pains and pleasures, emotional ups and downs. Yet it’s all a dream. And if you bring attentive awareness to it, and a strong urge to awaken, the dream’s apparent solidity is dissolved. And that’s true for the ego as well, the sense of me, my mind-body.

So here’s the paradox: in Spirit—wide open, vast, spacious, infinite Being-Awareness—the No-thing manifests as “something,” a world of phenomenal entities and processes. But, as the Mahayana and Zen Buddhist masters say, it’s all sunyata, empty-open fullness. It’s manifesting as Arnie, as Timothy, as the plants, the walls and all these beings within these walls and beyond, from the microscopic bacteria to fungi, to animals, to life on other planets. The entire play of all these souls is the One sitting where it always sits, spaceless, timeless, conjuring up a dream of multiplicity. Within the heart-mind of God appears this Cosmos-dream, manifesting on subtle levels of refined light, from the heavens all the way down to the denser, gross levels of the physical plane. Wondrous and poignant adventures are happening. God plays all the parts.

Cooper: But if, on level one, none of this is really happening, then why are we talking?

Conway: Why not? It’s part of the divine play at levels two and three. You see, all these levels are simultaneously true. Nothing is happening, and everything is happening. “Wisdom says I am nothing; love says I am everything” was how one of my mentors, Nisargadatta Maharaj, put it to those of us who sat with him. The completion of the journey Home is realizing one’s identity as both formlessness and form, nothing and everything, nobody and everybody. And that’s where engaged spirituality spontaneously manifests. When you know that there’s only God here, you’re motivated to do whatever it takes—peacefully protesting, serving, educating, praying—to alleviate suffering and remedy injustice.

Cooper: But what about the realization that it’s all perfect? Why do anything at all?

Conway: Ram Dass related a wonderful story about this. Coming from a good, progressive Jewish family, he was much interested in tzedek, or justice. One day he was kvetching to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, about the suffering in God’s creation, and his guru finally cut him short, saying: “Look, Ram Dass, suffering is perfect.” And Ram Dass, shocked by this apparently callous statement, began to marshal his intellectual resources to argue with his guru. But Neem Karoli stopped him again and said: “And, Ram Dass, your attempt to end suffering is also perfect.”

There’s no airtight case for why we should pursue social or environmental justice, given the fact that everything’s perfect. But, paradoxically, God prefers good over evil, even though God is also playing the villains on the world stage, from Nero to Hitler to Stalin to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who said in 1996, regarding the 500,000 innocent children dead in Iraq because of U.S. sanctions, “We think the price is worth it.” Yet God is also the human-rights activists attempting to educate folks like Albright, and God manifests as all progressives rising up to protest and heal injustice.

[...]

[One can] speak critically of these asura or “demonic” characters [the disguises of the one God-Self who appear to be the perpetrators of evil], but they need our compassion. Though they appear immersed in very ungodly behavior, these folks are essentially God in disguise and will eventually, by Divine Grace, all come Home to God-Realization. Speaking from the radical context of the one Spirit, I am these people. There is only one Self here. May they and all beings be healed and liberated into full realization of this one Self, this pure, clear Absolute Awareness.







SOME EXTRA COMMENTARY ABOUT PAIN/SUFFERING and the THREE TRUTH-LEVELS:

On December 14, 2017, I've added here this set of comments i generated during correspondence with one of our readers (of East Indian ancestry). This reader was particularly struck by that brief line from Sri Ramakrishna that i quoted in the interview with Arnie Cooper of The Sun magazine, the line that reads, "suffering adds zest to the [Divine] play," and as a Buddhist and "spiritual humanist," was outraged by the notion of God playing as or with the universe and the lives of individual sentient beings. Here are my comments:

Namaste N_____

You have to read that entire section again about the 3 levels excerpted from that longer interview [in The Sun] to fully fathom what that extreme-sounding line from Ramakrishna means.

I would say that, on the level of the personal consciousness, the earthly level of right-wrong, pain-pleasure, etc., the intensity of physical and/or emotional pain does NOT in any way have a quality of “zest” or “play” or “divinity” about it! Pain is usually miserable and horrible! (Though it must also be said that certain very equanimous beings, from Holocaust survivors to extreme-sports athletes, have demonstrated remarkable endurance and transcendence of pain and the personal suffering of pain.)

The felt-sense of the terrible misery of pain is why that “level 3” truth-talk (as I distinguish these levels) is so very important. And this is why so many spiritual movements of the modern era (from various New Age/New Thought groups to neo-advaitins) that try to deny level 3 (by dismissing the personhood level) can lead to so much apathy and callous disregard of the actual experiencing of sentient beings.

The statement from Ramakrishna is a “level 2” perception: namely, that whatever happens in the realm of phenomena is “perfect.” But that perception entails a VERY clear, authentic realization that the personal consciousness actually precedes and surpasses this physical, earthly life, and does not die when the body dies. Two examples of experiences that give evidence for this are the NDE (Near-Death Experience) and the conscious remembrance of past lives. In each case, people clearly experience having lived through a previous situation — in many cases a horrific situation such as dying a violent, gruesome death — and then they clearly recall having “popped out of the body” and soared beyond it into a celestial realm of profound and almost unspeakable “Light” and “Love” and “Grace” and immediate, total relief from all pain. It is described as being a state of unbelievably “heaven-like” joy and ease and freedom.

The level 1 realization is that there is ONLY ONE SENTIENCE or AWARENESS or REALITY manifesting as each of the countless gazillion different viewpoints, the different personal consciousnesses or “souls” / jivas. (And yes [contrary to how many people misinterpret the Buddha's "not-self" teaching], the Buddha, when speaking on the pragmatic level of “conventional truth,” did quite clearly use the semantics of jiva and puggala, etc., to describe the personal consciousness or soul as it experienced different states, realms, and time-periods such as earthly lifetimes).

So Ramakrishna’s statement about “adding zest to the play” was a level-2 statement with level 1 implied — there is only one Reality or Awareness playing as each and every being. And because each soul is of the soul-realm and does not die when the earthly body or even celestial bodies die, and is not touched by pain at the deepest level of consciousness, then there is nothing to fear or feel heavy about. The Divine is “adventuring” or “sporting” or “playing” as each soul/jiva, undergoing all sorts of experiences, states and realms for the sake of a seemingly very very long, tedious process of soul-ular evolution and Divine transmutation to become a polished jewel, a Mahatma (Great Soul) in whom a large array of beautiful godly virtues and capacities are achieved. This is the entire purpose of the “Lila” [Divine Play] — to turn the raw material of unevolved souls into the “pure gold” of highly evolved souls, jivas or personal consciousnesses.

And finally, fundamentally it is realized that all these souls or individualized consciousnesses are like ripples on the vast ocean of universal Consciousness, which in turn is the dynamic, cosmic play of Absolute Divine Awareness. [What in many circles of India's spirituality is termed the "Divine Power/Mother/Creatrix" Sakti manifesting the play of forms out of the formlessness of the "Divine Father" Siva.] These distinctions between the personal consciousness, the Universal Cosmic Consciousness, and the undifferentiated Divine Absolute Isness-Awareness are what the various nondual sagely traditions are distinguishing for pragmatic purposes, using different terminology East and West.

Having said all that, it should also be stated that Sri Ramakrishna, like all true sages, was a deeply empathetic and compassionate man, and he knew only too well the intensity of the pain and suffering of pain experienced by sentient beings.

[A second email yielded this further commentary:]

Many of these points you raise speak to some very old debates in eastern and western traditions about the provenance, the “whence and why” of pain and the suffering of pain, and “how could an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God allow such horror?”

In the west, Christian theology actually engendered a sub-discipline called “theodicy” to “justify God”—i.e., to affirm that God was omnipotent, omniscient and also all-loving in spite of the rampant evil, pain, suffering, trauma, etc. Yet almost all the solutions were very dualistic and ultimately dis-satisfactory, in the opinion of myself and many others. Curiously, the modern era “solution” favored by many Christian theologians was to DENY that the Divine was truly omnipotent and/or omniscient, and in the Process Theology “solution” they accepted the stunningly mediocre idea that God was this limited kind of being who is “with you, alongside you in your suffering.” I find that an intolerable theology, yielding an out-of-control cosmos wherein you can’t fundamentally trust its Source or anyone or anything, you can merely strive on (like the French existentialists) trying to create meaning and value in a fundamentally meaningless, unfair, bizarre and bleakly painful universe. Uggggghhhhh.

In strong contrast to this, the nondual traditions radically assert that the pain, suffering, trauma and all horrors are actually only being experienced by the One Sentience, the One Awareness Reality, the One Divine or "God."

Which is to say that pain is "Reality's pain," "God’s pain," anyone’s pain is the supreme Divine simultaneously and paradoxically experiencing a modality of ItSelf as pain. In nondual spirituality, absolutely speaking (the “paramarthika satya” or absolute truth), there’s only God here, the one Reality, the Life of all lives, the Self of all selves, the One Actor playing all the “soul-roles.”

So if a being is in pain, this is the ever-free, unlimited infinite Divine Awareness temporarily experiencing life as a personal consciousness in an amazingly poignant DRAMA.

Much of the NDE literature and reincarnational literature would appear to confirm this hypothesis about life (and everyone’s individual lives) being some kind of stupendous drama. In NDEs and conscious recall of prior lives—it is realized with great exhilaration that the personal consciousness is never really confined or trapped by these temporary situations of terrible pain, horror, trauma, but is a free soul somehow being sourced in LOVE, made of LOVE, always only destined for LOVE, and yet temporarily undergoing these “wild, wacky, sometimes woeful, ultimately wonderful” adventures (as I have often stated it).

For instance, the progressive Hasidic Jewish rabbi and author Yonassan Gershom has engaged in a lot of hypno-therapeutic clinical work with people who opened up to consciously recall lives under the Nazi terror. Their existence was nightmarish under those demonic Nazis, absolutely nightmarish and horrific. But, in their psychic recall of these traumatic events, as soon as they remembered “dropping the body” in the physical death that ended that particular lifetime, the consciousness immediately felt TOTAL RELIEF and an exhilarating freedom.

Along this line, we really do have to look at the phenomenon of why people like to see MOVIES of the adventure genre, the action-thriller genre, or even horror films. And, similarly, why many people like going to amusement parks and experiencing a series of “thrilling” rides that can temporarily put them into extreme states of panic, fear, and stress....

Why would people choose to spend 90-150 minutes or more to have their nervous systems frequently go into states of severe stress and fright, when they could otherwise just spend the time in some relaxing or enjoyable activity or rest? There are different possible explanations for this phenomenon, but on a deeper level, it seems that consciousness relishes its thrills, adventures, and lilas.

But this lila-doctrine is only acceptable or tolerable if ...1) the experiencer of pain and suffering is only the single Divine Sentience -- otherwise, if there is really a separate personal consciousness who is being “made” or “required” or “forced” to undergo pain and suffering then it is NOTHING OTHER THAN A SADISTIC, INTOLERABLE SITUATION, as you rightly affirm.

... and only acceptable/tolerable if 2) the entire cosmic manifestation is happening spontaneously (as classic advaita texts like Yoga Vasishtha and Mahayana Buddhist texts like the Avatamsaka affirm) – otherwise, if there is any “Divine needy-ness” that needs to be filled or “Divine lack” that needs to be compensated, then the Cosmos becomes quite the drudgery and not divine at all.

The last part of your email reads as a potent manifesto for freedom, though one also has to inquire as to the nature of the Vital Power (as advaita sage Nisargadatta Maharaj termed THIS) without which no personal consciousness with mind/body apparatus could feel, think, move, or function in any way. (It’s always something of a paradox when the personal consciousness tries to state or affirm anything, since its very power to be be conscious is not self-originated, but from the Single Divine Self of all selves.)

The Buddha asserted that he had authentically awakened to THIS true Reality which is prior to and beyond all phenomena, all persons, beyond the heavens, beyond the divine Brahmas (the phenomenal, cosmic god-function) overseeing the realms, beyond all.

Yet he compassionately kept a certain amount of attention within the realm of phenomenal experiencing so as to be of help and inspiration to personal consciousnesses / jivas, and he encouraged boundless metta (loving-kindness), karuna (empathetic compassion), mudita (sympathetic joy) and upekkha (peaceful equanimity) for all beings.

Let us likewise fully realize such transcendent-yet-engaged freedom and clarity and compassion.

Stay free (dear friend), stay free. As Nisargadatta might say, “Abide as the Absolute and, with regard to the phenomenon of a cosmic manifestation, ‘see what happens’!”

A Summary Chart for this 3-Level Model

The Three Simultaneously True Levels of Reality

(one Absolutely True, the other two “relatively true”)

© Copyright 2011 by Timothy Conway



Thanks to Bob Doering of the progressive mystical Christian group "Word & Life" (Santa Barbara, CA) for initiating a table format based on my original 3-fold notion and initially filling in some of the items based on materials at this website, including the interview for The Sun magazine.

NOTE: Read items from left to right within the same row.