Nonduality and the Daimon: Enemies or Allies?

On bridging the gap between absolute presence and relative purpose

Dear Living Dark reader,

Two of the most deeply felt fascinations that have gripped me over the years—and they’re honestly not just fascinations but full-blown obsessions, the chief orienting points of my life—are the matters of spiritual awakening and purpose or calling. You could also call them nonduality (finding out who I really am and what the world really is) and the daimon (understanding the specific energy that moves me, my reason for being, what I am supposed to be doing with the life experience that I have been handed). Obviously, these two are not unrelated. In fact, as I have cultivated a deepened understanding of them over time, it has become apparent that they are not two, but one. They are different aspects of the same thing.

Last week as I was doing some meditative early morning reading, I came across a line in a book that illuminates this matter as well as anything I have ever read. The book was Full Stop! The Gateway to Present Perfection by the nondual writer and teacher John Wheeler. The chapter was titled “Non-Duality and Social Reform.” It presented a dialogue between Wheeler and one of his readers/students. The latter expressed a fear of losing interest in the world and arriving at a state of total demotivation if the nondual understanding were really to sink in. On the one hand, the person said he/she felt a desire to work for increased personal and societal spiritual awareness, saying, “I want to write and create art that pushes the envelope, ruffles feathers or even simply offers simple truth in the service of cultural evolution.” On the other hand, this desire was accompanied by the fear that experiencing nondual awareness—the realization that the common notion of being a separate self in an objective world of multiplicity is just a kind of mirage or projection, and that your real identity is the awake spaciousness of absolute Being itself—would undercut the creative desire and produce a state of becalmed apathy and detachment.

This resonated deeply with me, as it echoed things that I myself have considered, mulled over, and written about. The question is compelling: What truly is the relationship between nonduality and the daimon? Is there an inherent antagonism between waking up and remaining active in the world, if waking up reveals the non-existence of the self that one has cherished and identified with? Does spiritual insight entail worldly quietism and relinquishment of creative drive, an automatic dampening of the daimon muse?