How can one know whether it is possible through practice to transcend the sense of duality, to transcend language, to transcend experience mediated by concepts? The only way to know is to do it, and that is the challenge. The Buddha declared it is possible. You are not locked into your own personal history, your own conceptual and cultural framework. You have your own personal history but it’s not the whole story. There is also a transcendent element to your being that can be accessed experimentally, and it goes beyond all concepts. The experience is frequently described as pure awareness, but it’s not awareness as part of a duality, such as mind and matter. It does not fit into the Cartesian game plan. If you access that experience by delving into the nature of awareness, then, coming out of it, you might describe it as unborn, spontaneous, nondual, uncontrived, unfabricated awareness. Moreover, when people come out of this experience, they tend to speak of the entire world, with all of its myriad diversity, arising from this primordial awareness. Such nonduality is the ground of being.

Alan Wallace

from the book The Four Immeasurables: Practices to Open the Heart

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