Abiding in Nondual Awareness: exploring the further implications of living nonduality
Many people who’ve come to Self-realization have done so at a crucial developmental point in their life, catalyzed by a divorce, loss of job or savings, death of child, and so on. The evaporation of presumed security has often been the stimulant for reappraisal of mundane existence.  At a point in my own life after a divorce, I contemplated my options: I could remarry; I could continue to be a homeowner; I could continue in my business career. I knew that I had not penetrated through to the untroubled clarity that the mystics agreed was the substance of what they spoke of as enlightenment, or the clarity of Self-realization. The crux of the matter appeared to me to be that I could either spend the rest of my days living out a life of confusion and conflict—in “ignorance,” as Buddhists call it—or a life of operating out of established clarity from day to day. I had, in earlier times, dallied with this matter of enlightenment; but being materially secure and (I supposed) self-secure, I had not engaged the enlightenment teachings with a view to change my life in any significant way. In other words, what now rose to the top of my agenda was to unequivocally investigate Self-realization, wherever that lead. I relinquished my career and home, and likely prospects for remarriage. There is something about commitment, in burning your bridges behind you.  Many of the enlightened teachers, at one point or another, did just that. For some, discovering ultimate truth was a critical matter, even a life-or-death pursuit.    So, if you are at this crossroad and you are pondering what to do, it is not my place to give you advice. All I can tell you is that material security is not, in the long run, the highest value; in fact, security is fickle and deceptive. There is only one condition in which we can be absolutely secure, and we’re always given the hint that it has something to do with “death before you have died.” The word nirvana actually means “to snuff out.” Krishnamurti’s parting advice to his public, after sixty years of harangue, was simply “give up your attachment—to everything.” Does that include security of whatever kind?  (adapted from the opening letter of Nothing Matters, Really)