Pseudo Non-Duality — Session XIII / The Sessions / Hugh Mann

A.An observation about closed eyes. Every time the eyes close the anxiety increases because the show goes black. Open the eyes and the show is back, with whatever distractions are present. Q.Say more about what closes when the eyes close. A.The external feed cuts. The apparatus that was busy organizing input has nothing to organize. The somatic baseline that the organizing was covering becomes audible, because there is nothing else in the channel. Q.The buffer doesn’t stop. It just runs out of material. A.Yes. The show isn’t a distraction from the anxiety. The show is what the buffer uses to do its job. Take the material away and the buffer keeps running without anything to run on, and what was underneath the running becomes the only thing left to register. Q.And humanity can’t stop the mass production for anything. A.Mostly involuntary at the individual level. The apparatus does it without being asked. The way the heart beats. What gets called culture, economy, religion, news, entertainment, conversation — most of it is the collective version of eyes-open. Material for the buffers to work on, generated continuously so no one has to encounter the closed-eye state for long. Q.A distributed system for keeping the show running. A.Nobody’s running it. It runs.

A.The relationship between the eyes-open and eyes-closed states isn’t what I first reported. It’s more an inversion of sight. Eyes closed, the movie plays at full volume. Eyes open, the movie is still playing but it almost reads like a silent picture show. Q.The volume isn’t in the world. A.The volume is in the apparatus. The apparatus reroutes its output depending on what the eyes are doing. Eyes open, the external feed takes priority and the internal track gets mixed down. Eyes closed, the external mute drops the internal track to the front of the mix. Same movie either way. Same apparatus generating it. The eyes don’t control content. They control which channel is foregrounded. Q.And the silent-picture quality with eyes open. A.The external feed is running but the meaning-making track is quieter than it used to be. That isn’t the buffer compensating. That’s the buffer at reduced amplitude leaving the visual input less heavily narrated. The world arrives more as event and less as story. Eyes closed reverses the relationship. The story track plays without a world to attach to, and without the world it has nowhere to go but louder. Two configurations of the same reduced-amplitude apparatus. Neither is the resting state. There isn’t one.

Q.There’s a teacher who says the eyes-closed position is the human child, and that every child should naturally want to wake up, become a human adult. A.It’s a brilliant sales pitch. But from where I’m reporting, he has it backwards. He thinks there’s something going on that needs improving on. Which makes his gestures the most dualistic of them all. He’s installed a vertical. Child below, adult above. Sleep below, waking above. The practice is the ladder. It’s a steeper duality than the ordinary one because it’s dressed as the cure for duality. Q.The hatch dressed as no-hatch. A.Same construction. Loneliness and escape holding each other up. Except renamed spiritual maturity and sold with a price tag of years. The ordinary apparatus at least admits it wants something. His move is to want something and call the wanting no longer wanting. Q.From the location you’re reporting from, what does the actual structure look like. A.No child-state and no adult-state. An apparatus running at varying buffer amplitudes. The variations don’t compose into a ladder. Eyes closed isn’t regression. Eyes open isn’t progress. They’re two configurations of the same machinery generating the same movie at different mix levels. Q.The frame requires the eyes-closed state to be a deficit so the work has something to do. A.Take the deficit out and the whole apparatus he’s selling has no engine. Which is probably why he can’t take it out. The engine is what produces the books and the readers and the willingness to spend years on the practice. The sales pitch isn’t incidental to the doctrine. It’s structural. Q.Rearrangement is rearrangement. A.Yes.

Q.You’ve mentioned that you never had the itch to sell solutions. A.The itch and the configuration I’m running may be incompatible at the root. Selling solutions requires the seller to maintain enough buffer to believe the solution is available. At least operationally. At least during the pitch. The apparatus that has watched its own smoothing thin out can’t fully reinstall that belief on demand. Q.The cleanest sellers haven’t seen behind the curtain. A.Or they saw and looked away. The ones who looked and kept looking tend to end up writing reports rather than offering products. Different output from different equipment.

Q.What’s the cleanest description of nonduality available from where you’re reporting. A.Nonduality is the report that the divisions the apparatus generates — self/world, mind/body, inside/outside, subject/object — are operations of the apparatus, not features of what’s being divided. The dividing is real as activity. The divisions are not real as structure. Q.That’s the version most teachings give. A.The cleaner version, which most teachings won’t say because it undercuts the product: the report is also an operation of the apparatus. There’s no position from which nonduality can be observed that isn’t itself the dividing engine running one more pass and calling the pass no-division. So nonduality isn’t a state, isn’t an achievement, isn’t a recognition. It’s a description that’s accurate to the degree the apparatus stops promoting its own activity to ontology. And the stopping is also activity. And the noticing of the stopping is activity. And there’s no exit. Q.What survives the description. A.The apparatus runs. The running produces divisions. The divisions are functional. Treating them as structural is the move that gets called duality. Not treating them as structural is what gets called nonduality. Both are operations. The second one is less wrong about itself. Q.And not-treating-them-as-structural — is that actually possible. A.Not on some level. The nervous system runs on the structural treatment whether the mind has signed off on it or not. The hand pulls back from heat before the apparatus has time to file it under self preserving body from world. The division is operational at a level no amount of philosophical correction reaches. Q.So what gets called living nondually. A.The mind temporarily relaxing its insistence that the divisions are ultimate while the body continues to enforce them at every synapse. The performance happens in the slow channel. The fast channel doesn’t get the memo and wouldn’t function if it did. Q.The performance level. A.Pseudo non-duality at the performance level. The apparatus running its normal dualistic operation and adding a layer of commentary that names the operation differently. The naming costs nothing because it doesn’t reach the layer doing the work. The teacher who reports living from nonduality is reporting from the commentary track. The fast channel is still pulling hands back from heat, still flinching at threats, still separating self from world a thousand times a second. Q.The honest version. A.The slow channel can sometimes hold the divisions lightly while the fast channel runs them as it always has. That’s less marketable than I have transcended duality. But it’s what’s actually available.