Reality Is Totality – The Nonduality Podcast

In this episode of The Nonduality Podcast, Nic Higham and Paul Dobson speak with Cormac Doherty.

If this present moment isn’t reality, then what is? What else is there? Why is there the intimation that there’s something that we’re yet to obtain beyond here-and-now? Why is it that we look for something outside presence experiencing? After all, all we ever find is this moment. All we ever encounter is experiencing. No matter the mode or extent of our search, whether a nondual path or an everyday pursuit, we come right back to where we always are.

When we acknowledge that timeless existence is all there is, we can then look at the way it is. We find that this moment of reality is changing and dynamic. There’s an ever-shifting nature to the play of form. Yet, it is simultaneously a changeless ground of being.

“I take reality as totality,” says, Cormac, “I can’t find anything else but this. So, I don’t assume that this isn’t reality. What else can I find? I don’t know about origins or genesis, but there is this. There is this in its irrefutability, and there’s this in its dynamic.”

If we look, we see that we don’t have any existence independent or separate from the functioning of reality. We are looking for reality, but this is reality. We are realty intrinsically. We can’t avoid the fact of occurrence; we can’t refuse it.

In this episode of the nonduality podcast, we discuss the very simple acknowledgement of the immediacy of reality. We explore how we apparently overlook it when we’re looking to gain something. We might ignore it while on a spiritual path, in thinking that somebody else knows a higher truth or has access to some secret knowledge of the universe. The great spiritual teachers, however, will deflect back and point out, “Look, this is it! Maybe you do not appreciate it, but what you’re searching for is the extraordinarily ordinary fact of existence, and it’s here and now. It’s what you are.”