The thing about non-duality for someone like me, is that the idea that the world is an illusion actually started working against me.

I'd spent 30 years or so passionately exploring consciousness, what life is, who I actually am beneath the roles and reactions. That search led me deep into teachings that emphasized one central idea: the world is an illusion and the individual self is something to be dissolved.

The realization that everything is connected is truth and has been shared by many over the centuries. However, the conclusion that individuality is an illusion and disposable is not. 

In my case, I hit this ceiling where I felt like I needed to completely dissolve any attachment to “ego” in order to really reach the fruition of all the work and practice I’d done. After feeling like I was surrendering as much as I truly could, and being willing to do so, I noticed a different movement within myself that was silent, but powerful. 

It had been there all along quietly protesting that this was not the way. As I paid more attention to that movement, I realized that life in the world does matter. The world is not an illusion, and that without me or other individuals how could anything truly matter? How could meaning be actualized? How could love be actualized?

I started to discern the difference between my individuality and my ego shell. I sensed that as much as my individuality is one with the Absolute, it is also its own individual unit of identity or being-ness. I came to a profound realization of the difference between my ego and the individual stream of dynamic awareness and process and aliveness that is my true self. Paradoxically one with the One, but its own holographic and localized awareness being as close as words can point. 

It Wasn't Ego Resistance

One of the main tenets of many of these approaches was that this world is an illusion and that nothing ultimately matters. When you die, you will dissolve back into the “ocean of One-ness.” 

I accepted this on the surface as I wanted to see how far I could take this. Several people who teach this approach seemed very confident about being “enlightened.”

I had suffered enough. Shattered dreams, financial hardship, years of uncertainty, the kind of instability that makes the promise of ego dissolution sound less like a spiritual ideal and more like genuine relief. I wasn't dabbling. I wanted out of the contraction.

I had a full desire and intention to dissolve any attachment to my ego and achieve the “highest state” of enlightenment. But something always seemed off. I didn’t realize it at first because I assumed it was just my ego’s resistance. So I framed it that way. But more and more time went on and I finally understood.

It wasn’t my ego’s resistance. It was my soul’s voice.

That intuitive spark that life does matter, always within me, grew in strength. That choices and love do matter. Free will is real and can be strengthened. Without an individual, how could the Universal know itself? Life needs individuals in order to actualize meaning and love.

There is an illusion here, but it’s not the world. The actual illusion is thinking that the world is the source of consciousness when in fact, in my experience, as well as many others, Consciousness is the source of the experience of the world. Mistaking the world for the source of Consciousness. That is the illusion.

The world is real. It’s a mirror of our souls in a way. Without this mirror, how could we see ourselves for what we are?

And then something interesting happened in that I started reading deeply into my copy of Meditations on the Tarot by Valentin Tomberg, a Christian Hermeticist and mystic. Around the same time, I also discovered the teachings of Lama Anagarika Govinda, a European expatriate who was one of the very first to bridge esoteric Tibetan Buddhism with western minds. And both of them confirmed my own realization about the polarity of individual and universal.

The individual doesn’t dissolve into the universal but carries back the love and wisdom earned.

Individuality and the Mystical Marriage

One of the things that never sat right with me was the idea that the individual is simply annihilated. Something in me quietly revolted against this idea and it wasn’t ego resistance. It was something subtle beneath the radar so to speak. But I could sense it on the periphery.

The message was clear. Rather than being erased, individuality is sacrificed in service of the whole. In some traditions, this is called the mystical marriage. I had heard this term before but didn’t really understand it. But now that I’d come to the realization in my own questioning and contemplation, it made complete sense.

Lama Govinda came at the same truth from a different direction. Because I'd already felt these impulses from within, reading his books felt like recognition rather than discovery.

The individual is one pole and the universal is the other. The tension between the two is called Life. I see it like a battery. Both poles are necessary for the energy to move.

The universal awakens within the local field of awareness expressing holographically as the individual expression of the Totality.

Is the World An Illusion?

 I often hear people say the world is an illusion. This is a fallacy even from a simple logical framework.

If the world is an illusion, who is it that is calling the world an illusion? Who is this “me?” Wouldn’t the one calling the world an illusion be an illusion? And if not, isn’t that then duality? A separate “me?”

The illusion isn’t that you exist. It’s that you exist independently. You are. Otherwise, who is reading these words right now?

The world is only an illusion in the sense that it is not the source of Being. Consciousness is and the world is an expression of That.

Why Individuality Matters

If individuality is real and not disposable, then what you do with it matters. Love needs the other to love. Meaning requires someone to actualize it. Courage needs challenges to face and deal with. Compassion can’t be revealed without someone to feel the connection to all of life. 

Abstract principles cannot do this alone. They need you. They need me. They need all of us.

The Buddha implored his students to make their lives worthwhile. Not in the sense of achievement or recognition. But of not squandering this rare opportunity of being a particular someone, awake, in a world that needs what only you can bring.

So What?

Ok. You’ve read this far. All of this. So what? How does that help you pay your bills or deal with a loss? How does it help you face the practical challenges you face every day?

I have experienced many intense non-dual experiences where the difference between me and what I’m perceiving disappears. The veil lifts so to speak. They have mostly been spontaneous and have happened in activities like shopping at Costco, taking a shower, walking into the kitchen in my home, on a walk, etc.

Again. So what? Many people have had random awakening experiences. Then what?

Because now it’s about chopping wood and carrying water as they say.

Now it’s up to me and my free will to choose love over fear in situations that challenge me. It’s up to me to be patient with feelings of irritation and frustration that may arise because I’m tired or hungry. It’s up to me to bring the meaning that I feel in my heart - I AM - to life. 

And I do this by washing dishes, going shopping, doing my work, petting my cat, doing my best to be a good husband, standing in line somewhere, driving somewhere.

I say this because I know first hand, since my first mystical experiences as a teenager, it took many years for me to integrate the realizations and bring them down into my being. And I’m still in the dynamic process of that each and every moment whether I’m “asleep at the wheel” or awake.

Always the question arises of itself: am I present? Am I actually here? The answer “yes” is always quiet and beyond words.

Why Tarot Matters Here

This is where Tarot comes in. Not as some obscure superstitious pastime but as a living map of the very territory we've been exploring. Most cards carry a dual meaning simultaneously. They reflect an outer situation and an inner state of consciousness. What's happening around you and what's happening within you, reflected in the same image.

Because of this, the universal experiences of disappointment, joy, loss, material life, endings and new beginnings are made uniquely individual. A good Tarot reading creates an internal recognition that is unique and personal.

This is the paradox Tarot has always understood. That the universal and individual need each other to come to life. Without the individual, Tarot is just a deck of cardboard cards with no actual meaning. There is potential meaning in the universal themes of the images, but they still need the individual to be brought to life.

In that sense every reading is the same thing: the universal becoming conscious of itself through a unique individual life. Which is what we've been talking about all along.

What is surrendered is not individuality but the seeming reality of separateness. What remains is not an isolated self nor an abstract void, but a unique participation in the Whole.

When this is recognized, you return to “chopping wood and carrying water” but now you’re not just an isolated fragment battling forces larger than you. You are part of the Totality that contains everything, including all time, in a loving embrace and in a sense, you are that Totality even though it can only be realized as you.

If this territory interests you, Presence Sessions are exactly for that.