What About Survival?
1.The human body-mind-world is a self-governing survival system.
The body-mind-world, defined here as the entire universe of living and non-living appearances, is a bio-psycho-social and ecological process that we can conceive of as an inextricably linked organism innately programmed to find a healthy, balanced position. The various teachings of Non-duality proposes that the universe of all phenomena is a form of a single conscious reality that has no form. This form is recognised by the mind, which can delineate contrasts in the underlying conscious reality as recognisable patterns it calls a body, mind and world. Though the specifics of the wording may change, the fundamental premise of nondualistic teaching is to return to, or reveal, our innate nature which is one single reality and not separate.
2. The elements of its self-governing survival system are:
a. Hardware: Instinctual drives or needs and capacities to heal, learn, and protect are built into each body-mind. These needs can be divided into three groups, encompassing gross and subtle needs
i. Physiological needs – safety, autonomy, competency, rest, integration and rejuvenation, healthy diet, exercise
ii. Social needs - physical and emotional intimacy, community participation, respect, and attention exchange.
iii. Contextual needs - meaningful context
b. Firmware: The emotional states experienced by each body-mind, resulting from a combination of individual and social factors, produce the overall emotional environment.
c. Software: Learned responses by each body-mind resulting from psychological traumatic injury; avoidant, suppressive, and unregulated emotionally ingrained individual habits based on the entrancement of the separate self-concept.
The teachings of Non-duality in their various forms suggests that creating a separate self-concept creates the illusion that the universe, including all body-minds, are separate entities and there is a division between the subject and object. This is the root of all distorted thinking that personalizes existence triggering personal neuroticism which blocks the natural flow of survival.
3. When emotions arise in our awareness, they will be attributable to:
a. Hardware (Body) – the general state of individual physiology and neurology.
b. Firmware (Mind) – the general state of the emotional and social environment.
c. Software (Conditioning) – Individual learning factors, e.g., trauma or separate self-conditioning.
4. Individuated responses will depend on a combination of wisdom arising from three levels:
a. Body - Physiological awareness about the primary state of individual physiology and neurology.
b. Mind - Social-psychological awareness about the state of the emotional environment.
c. Consciousness - Understanding that our true nature is not a separate personal object but the never-changing and ever-present singular source reality.
5. This combination results in two possibilities for survival:
a. Personalised reaction—based on the belief of a separate personal agent—can be used to address specific moments of emotional arousal progressively as the need arises and reprogram specific conditioning. The fundamental sense of existential lack, however, is not eradicated, and this tends to confuse needs with lack, compounding and reproducing psychological suffering.
b. Impersonal flow – based on liberation from the belief of a separate personal agent, the fundamental sense of existential lack is eradicated, dissolving psychological suffering and action governed by a personal desire to seek external happiness. Here mind and body and self and environment are one. Here, we experience our life as a natural flow that can be trusted as a matter of course, for afterall, we never actually know the next thought before it happens and we have no idea where the universe came from, or how its is possible that the 37 trillion cells functioning in our human body right now are working. Recognising and experiencing the peace of mind of relinquishing the belief to be a personal self identified with the body, our desires naturally and constructively turn to survival and playful innocent creativity and away from self defeating neuroticism.
Love
Freyja
