Duality & Non-duality

I came to the realisation a while back that it is fundamentally impossible to separate duality from non-duality in everyday life. They both need each other to exist. Hopefully that can help you remove your experience from the academic philosophical inquiry, because trying to limit yourself to behaving as though we exist in either a dual or a non-dual world is a sure pathway to madness!

I’m afraid I’ve been there. And there is no sudden great enlightenment at the end of it. Many a recovering non-dualist will tell you, sticking rigidly to Advaita Vedanta is more like an addiction to drugs than a pathway to god.

Best keep your husband & son (insert other family members here) out of it! You might need them grounded in conventional reality to help you not feel dizzy when you bring your head up out of the Advaita Vedanta wormhole!

Ok, so, in a nutshell, Patanjali was a dualist. His writing emphasises viveka or discernment. If we are discerning differences between things, we are seeing them as separate from other things. This is the basic principle of duality. Think traditional anatomy, where we were taught that there were distinct muscles, ligaments & tendons helping us move our bones.

Patanjali is describing a dualistic pathway towards non duality or oneness, where subject and object merge. Where seer & seen become indistinct. Where we realise the essential interconnectedness of everything & boundaries dissolve into boundarylessness. Think contemporary anatomy. Where there is a continuum of tissue throughout the body. In reality, those distinct muscles tendons & ligaments are not separate to each other. They are indistinguishable from each other, only distinct in their function & name.

Does it help us to understand anatomy if we dive straight into the continuum tissue model? Is it helpful to think of bone as connective tissue that is indistinguishable from fascia? Is there a functional advantage in being able to distinguish the existence of tendon? Do we need to know a little about the different functions of different parts of the tissue continuum? If we get too bogged down by the minute of detail, do we lose sight of the big picture? Do we need to know the names of all the muscles involved in walking to be able to walk? But if you break your leg, you are still going to get it fixed.

So, do you need to know the names of all these different philosophical theories to have an experience of them? No. You’ve had moments more easily described by non dual Advaita Vedanta. Moments where you pause to appreciate the interconnectedness and essential boundarylessness of everything. Moments when everything appears to be exactly where it should be, and you are exactly as you should be, everything in harmony with everything else.

You’ve also had moments more easily described by dualism. Where you feel out of step with the world around you. Where nothing seems to be flowing as it should. Where all you can see is division.

But when you have those moments of wholeness, that division between trump supporters & everyone else still exists! Our experience of reality is coloured by what we pay attention to.

Does mind stop when we have those experiences of oneness? Does time really slow down when you watch the snow fall? Depends how much attention you pay the falling snow.