Program Abstracts  C12. Expressing the Inexpressible in the Every Day Life


Nonduality, Relationship and the Body, Judith Blackstone, Ph.D. (Center for Spiritual Psychotherapy and Embodiment, NYC, Faculty, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology)


T is presentation addresses two important aspects of nondual realization that are often ignored: the transformation of the body and the deepening of relationships with other people. Nondual realization is the revelation of one’s own nature as subtle, unbounded awareness, pervading one’s own body and one’s environment as a unifi ed whole. Because nondual awareness pervades our whole body, we experience ourselves as coherent, authentic individuals at the same time as we transcend self/object duality. Nondual awareness is also the basis of direct contact between human beings. When two people attune to nondual awareness together, they experience mutual transparency: a single expanse of awareness pervading them both as a unity. T ere will be a brief experiential component to the presentation.


He Who Is Afraid Of Freedom Cannot Die: Death As A Way To Authentic Being In Heidegger And Nisargadatta Maharaj, Mila Makal <makalm@yahoo.com> Is my death possible? Is it an empirical event that I can experience or verify for myself? “Death is hearsay,” says


Nisargadatta Maharaj, “Have you experienced death?” Martin Heidegger sees our being as limited by time and therefore shaped by death – a non-being. Our being has a twofold presence of both presence and absence in which the potential being is on its way to becoming something other than what it is. As long as our Being is a being, it never reaches its ‘wholeness’. “Death discloses what Dasein [our being] cannot have: All the possibilities.” Only being free for one’s own death gives Being its authenticity and the freedom from the inauthentic “the other.” In our everyday life, we cover up the possibility of death. Accepting our temporality as a way of life leads us to become authentic beings. “Your true home is in nothingness,” says Nisargadatta Maharaj. “Everything is afraid of the Noth- ing”. “Give attention and you will fi nd that birth and death are one, that life pulsates between being and non-being, and that each needs the other for completeness”. “Death gives freedom and power.” “To be free in the world, you must die to the world.” “You must die in order to live.” “Without death life cannot be”. For living is dying and to live fully, death is essential; every ending makes a new beginning. T e wise man who has died before his death; he saw that there was nothing to be afraid of. “T e happiness of being absolutely free is beyond description. On the other hand, he who is afraid of freedom cannot die.” “When life and death are seen as essential to each other, as two aspects of one being, that is immortality”.


Aadishakti - Dark Energy, Dark Mother?, Andrea Vecchione <andevec@yahoo.com> (PhD. Asian Comparative Studies) “A strange thing happened to the universe fi ve billion years ago,” writes Dennis Overbye, science reporter for the


New York Times, (November 17, 2006). “As if God had turned on an antigravity machine, the expansion of the cosmos speeded up, and galaxies began moving away from one another at an ever faster pace. Dark energy,” he con- tinues, “was there at the creation of the universe, at the big bang, and will continue until it overwhelms everything.” T e nature of this “Dark Energy” is still a mystery. While it holds an enormous intrigue for scientists and astrono- mers, there are compelling parallels to the visions and cosmology of the ancient world. As we learn more and more, will science and religion intersect? Are we telling in our own way, a story that has been told in cultures that never dreamed of the telescope? What are the parallels between what the Hindu texts describe as Aadishakti and Buddhist texts describe as “the void” and what contemporary scientists are discovering? In this paper, I explore myths, statues, idols, folklore, and scripture from some of our global ancestors that seem


to lead us down the ‘worm-hole’ of time into a vast luminous darkness. T rough this excavation we can compare our ancestral voices with contemporary discoveries and construct a bridge between them.


Circling Up the Hordes of Homunculi, Gregory Sipp <nam87501@aol.com> (Santa Fe Community College) T e biggest hole in Daniel Dennet’s argument that consciousness is created by hordes of unconscious robotic cells


in the brain is the fact that he off ers no explanation of how they can operate together in such a miraculously precise, orchestrated way. It is proposed that not only are these hordes of homunculi organized by standing waves, but so to are the Universe and consciousness itself. T e idea of attention centers (homunculi) operating in a loop, avoids the problem of infi nite regress.(Edelman, Llinas). Both the Universe and consciousness have been described as a loop or standing wave in science and mysticism. Mysticism can be described as the fi rst person experience of examining this bi-directional wave of consciousness, (and in the end being absorbed into it). As described in Kashmir Shaivism, consciousness can be thought of as being composed of a centrifugal wave balanced with centripetal wave. “T e two phases of pulsation of consciousness from the inner to outer and outer to inner are equivalent.” (T e Doctrine of


68 SCIENCE AND NONDUALITY CONFERENCE 2010 | OCTOBER 20–24, 2010


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