Here is an excellent article from Robert Masters's January newsletter (The Crucible of Awakening) on the need for boundaries as a part of life, even if you have somehow become enlightened. It also parses the meaning of absolute vs. relative reality.HAVING A NONDUAL PERSPECTIVE DOES NOT NEGATE THE NEED FOR BOUNDARIES!
Living from a nondual perspective — which is VERY different than just intellectually operating from such a perspective — does not mean that no boundaries are present, nor that there should not be any boundaries.
Awareness itself is without boundary, but in the world of form — in which everything exists through relationship — boundaries are both inevitable and necessary, from cellular to cosmic levels. Healthy boundaries safeguard and help maintain the integrity of our individuality, protecting what is being contained without crushing or atrophying it, making real intimacy possible (which requires not the shedding of boundaries, but rather the conscious expansion of them). In deep relational intimacy, we find freedom not from limitation, but through limitation, including the limitations inherent in boundary-formation. Just as good fences make good neighbors (as Robert Frost famously said), good boundaries make good connections.
We may, in the throes of embracing nondual philosophy, say that form is illusion (and therefore so are boundaries), etcetera after metaphysical etcetera, but getting caught up in such mentalizing simply keeps us from truly embodying ourselves. To the extent that form is illusion, so are we — but in the meantime we’ve got a lot of living and learning to do. Incarnation demands it.
Before we can consistently see through the apparent reality of form — nonconceptually recognizing its essential Emptiness — we need to get genuinely intimate with it and its structuring and evolution, resisting the temptation to mentally bypass or marginalize such undertakings. Making intellectual real estate out of nondual pronouncements does not constitute wisdom! Better to get out of our heads, and start really loving now instead of going on and on about unconditional love and other such should-infested ideals; better to fully manifest and deeply live our uniqueness instead of going on and on about our inherent inseparability.
Why let our recognition of our innate unity of Being separate us from our differences?
Honor the Absolute, and also honor the personal, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. Yes, they all are essentially the Ultimate in drag, but unless we are already living in and as That, approaching them only from a nondualistically-based belief system will obstruct our healing and awakening, depriving our uniqueness of the attention and energy it needs for its ripening.
Premature claims to nondual understanding are, unfortunately, quite common, especially among the cognocentrically inclined and the blindly compassionate. If we are insufficiently honoring the personal, intrapersonal, and interpersonal — which requires, among other things, developing and maintaining healthy boundaries — then we are also insufficiently honoring the Absolute.
So beware of employing or operating from behind — rather than just referring to — a nondual perspective when you’re not significantly living it. It is very easy to intellectually appropriate nondual teachings and use them to justify certain of our actions, such as disrespecting our or others’ boundaries — after all, if we are all one and everything is absolutely perfect just as it is, then what’s the harm in saying yes to everything? What a treacherously slippery slope this is, laden with mindfields, spiritual naiveté, and the detritus of regurgitated nondual teachings!
The Absolute is IT. And so is the Relative. If we truly are abiding in and as the Absolute, we cannot help but honor and take wise care of the Relative, understanding right to our core that just because — as the Buddha taught — Form is Emptiness (and vice versa), it still gets to be Form. It may be an illusion, but it’s a real illusion. And Form, in order to be Form, needs boundaries, whether they manifest as membranes, walls, immune system policing, or the capacity to say a clear and unequivocal no under certain conditions.
If you are only saying yes to your yes, in the name of unconditional love and other such concepts, you are far from home. Let yourself also say yes to your no, without meeking it down, unapologetically letting your boundaries be known, ferociously if necessary!
Our work is not to be without boundaries — which would dishonor and vastly dilute our individuality, leading to a kind of psychosocial homogenization, a pablum of differences — but to develop the capacity to both contain and de-contain ourselves. How can we open our borders if we don’t already clearly have them? Those who cannot contain their anger are a danger, but so too are those cannot express their anger.
So, yes, open the gates, but under the right conditions, realizing that opening them just because of some “nondual” notion of unboundedness or wholesale acceptance is far from a skillful practice!
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Thanks for this post. I couldn't have said it nearly as well and as clearly as you have. I just heard about a man named Tony Parsons who teaches what he calls "The Open Secret," which, by my initial impressions anyway, talks only about absolute reality. I found his one-sidedness to be potentially dangerous, especially with people who have no prior understanding of the views of absolute/relative realities and emptiness/not-self. His message goes straight to the point that since we don't really exist, life is a freefall and therefore there is no choice for us in the matter, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. When I heard this, red flags and alarm bells went off like fireworks in my head. That's why I believe Buddhism so intelligently lays out the balance between the absolute/relative - if not, the truth of absolute reality can, in misinformed hands, easily fall into nihilism, which was the end message I got from this fellow Parsons. He calls this absolute "being-ness" liberation, but if one is not genuinely at that level of consciousness, I think it will end up doing much more harm than good.
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