Our true nature is formless and undiferrentiated divine Love, a love that includes, and is, everyone and everything.
Within our everyday lives, one way that this Love is emerging more clearly and expressing through us, is in our growing empathy for, and inclusion of, more and more beings on the planet.
Witness, for example, the world-wide increase in animal welfare legislation, regulations that are born out of the recognition that animals too are sentient creatures, with thoughts, preferences and emotions, and not mere objects for our use.
Our circle of empathy is steadily growing to embrace more of life.
As it does so the underlying Love that we are is gradually dissolving the illusion that we, and the world and it's contents, are separate.
On the journey of awakening into our true, transcendent, nondual nature, it can be easy to attempt to rest only in that which is beyond and before life.
However one important way that mature and embodied awakening reflects, and demonstrates, the growing empathy is with practical action in the world, such as the animal rights legistalation and action that addresses the many urgent issues we are now facing on a global scale.
These world wide challenges are born out of our long held misunderstanding of who, and what, we really are. They reflect the belief that we are separate individuals and not actually embodied expressions of the One undivided whole.
The traditional, and transcendent based, nondual teaching has been that to focus on action in the world is to miss the mark and risk wandering aimlessly, caught in the delusion that the material and tangible world is the only possible reality.
Work is love made visible
Khalil Gibran
We need now to take a overview and see that this teaching originated in a time when we were a younger race and empathy had not yet emerged as extensively as it is doing now.
What this transcendent only teaching also misses on emphasising is that the totality of who we really are includes the gift of form - the gift of life in this world.
There is however also the reality, well understood by nondual teachers, that it is generally much easier to focus on action in the world instead of Awakening, and sometimes there can be so much focus on action that it avoids Awakening completely.
Nowadays to not be taking action in the world to change and improve life globally can indicate both a misunderstanding, or worse - a dismissal, of the fullness of the gift of life as it lives through, and as us - together with a failure of empathy, and therefore - ultimately - a failure to open into the fullness of what the Love we are offers.