Non-duality, Zen, Advaita, Enlightenment, Awakening – What's it all about?

It is the dissolution of every answer to that question.

Waking up to what is utterly immediate, completely unavoidable and impossible to doubt – this ever-present, ever-changing Here / Now that remains when every belief falls away – the simplicity of what is: the sounds of traffic, the smell of rain, a tingling in the feet, the hum of a vacuum cleaner, the cheeping of a bird, rain splashing in the street – colors, shapes, sensations – appearing, disappearing – breathing-seeing-hearing-sensing-thinking-awaring – dreaming, waking – this seamless and boundless unicity that never comes, never goes, and never stays the same.

Thought divides this boundlessness up into mind and body, form and emptiness, awareness and content, relative and absolute, spiritual and mundane, enlightenment and delusion, self and other. The dividing lines are always conceptual and imaginary. Reality is seamless, undivided and nondual. There is diversity and variation in reality, but not separation. Opposites are inseparable aspects of one whole. You cannot have up without down.

In the story of my life as a person, something always seems to be lacking. This phantom "me" feels separate and incomplete and tries desperately to get somewhere and become somebody. Finally, this "self" may seek enlightenment, striving for its own disappearance. But what exactly is this self? Was it ever here to begin with?

Is there really somebody at the center of this present experiencing Here / Now, somebody who is authoring "my" thoughts, making "my" choices and calling the shots in "my" life, or does every thought, intention, impulse, action and reaction appear here in the same way that the brain, the breath, the wind, the clouds, the trees, and the galaxies appear here?

Is clarity or confusion personal, does it have an owner, or is there simply weather appearing and disappearing, sometimes clear and sometimes cloudy? Can a mirage wake up from a mirage? Is there somebody to liberate, or is liberation simply the realization that boundlessness includes and is absolutely everything – the light and the dark, the contracted experiences and the expanded ones?

This boundless emptiness or unicity cannot be grasped or possessed, but it is always already fully present, for it is all there is. There is nothing else. Reality is completely inescapable and thus completely unattainable, for there is nothing apart from it to find it or lose it. It is what you cannot not be. If you are searching for it, the very searching is already it.