KWL: Nonduality

Sounds like an ambitious project to synthesize east and west ideas about nonduality, reading David Loy's Nonduality (1984).

"In my opinion, the nihilism of present western culture means that we cannot afford to ignore what the greatest philosophical tradition of India and China may have to teach us." (p. xxix)

I ranted about the nihilism I was witnessing in America yesterday.

"Nagarjuna's argument is that attempting to live a pure life involves preoccupation with impurity."

I'd say this kind of thinking is used in psychoanalysis. When someone says, "I'm not a diddler," there somewhere lurking is a diddler. (My favorite episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the Danny Devito character is running a child beauty pageant, and him being small, walking around saying, "I'm not a diddler," leads to the, "me think he doth protest too much" thinking.

When I think about spiritual, I think spiritual is everything, in the mundane, and therefore everything is spiritual, nothing is not spiritual, and therefore there is no such thing as profanity. For me though profane is a way of being that isn't empathetic and doesn't understand nonduality, how we're all connected and possibly only one thing in separate parts. 

The us/them or us/other duality is particularly upsetting when I begin to think about immigrant children separated from their family. I can't imagine any justification for that aside from: Let's make things really shitty so people don't come to this country. Forget that they're fleeing violence and economic injustice. Who doesn't want to improve their lives. 

Immigrants are the lifeblood of America. Supposedly California hasn't replaced it's population, it's on a downward trend. People in poverty have lots of children. Affluent countries don't have children and their population is going down. I'm not saying we need to keep our population steady. I think the environment could stand a little population decrease. People get anxious about the trends, while others on non-natalists, think it's unethical to have children given the crisis the world is in. There's a say, "the wrong kind of people are having children." I think that captures a rancid kind of thinking in America, that fancies itself as European in ancestry, instead of drawing from all over the world. A bit snooty if you ask me. People were fleeing there for another world, lest you forget that.

I just saw a video that the biggest factor of counties that sent people to the violent coup attempt on January 1st 2021, was that they came from counties where the white population was decreasing. And that there are about 10 million people in similar counties that aren't prepared to do something violent, but feel similarly.