#50 - John Astin - From Conceptual Fantasy to Perpetual Actuality - Part 1

Paul Dobson speaks with nonduality author John Astin.  We have language and concepts to describe the myriad things we experience, including ourselves. But the inquiry in the exploration of nonduality is: let's start with present experience. What is life experientially? What is the actual experience of this moment? That's all we can actually investigate - what's actually here. After all, it can't be denied that something's present, actual and palpable. What is it that we're experiencing when we describe any element of life or existence?   There's really no answer to these questions, ultimately. But it's powerful to see that we don't arrive at a final conclusion when we feel our way into what's here, what's present. What's actually palpably here is just here, with no precedent. And so, in a sense, that which is present is without context. It's free of any prior knowledge framework to contextualise it; the starting point is 'This.'   It’s really fun and illuminating to come back to the barebones actuality of this instant, of this explosion of reality. It's a state of constant becoming and opening. But it actually never quite becomes anything definite because this emerging doesn't stop. And it's astonishing to just feel into the expressions of life this way, including what we take ourselves to be. Our beingness is alive and always flowing. So how could we define anything that we call ourselves? We can't grasp this self-sense because there's not something solid or fixed to hold. Just look and see: the ways we categorise people, places, and things is a nice fantasy, but it's not an actuality.  John Astin's site: https://www.johnastin.com/mediaOur site: http://nisargayoga.com/  Music: Scott Buckley - https://www.scottbuckley.com.au/library/