The confusion of non-duality
Words are meaningless. Want to buy my book?
Among the many iterations of modern spirituality one that has become trendy in recent times is what is loosely called ‘non-duality’, a set of somewhat mixed beliefs that raids elements of Vedanta and introspective practices to come to the essential conclusion that consciousness is all there really is. Exactly how this is spelled out varies from teacher to teacher, and the result is a complex set of sometimes contradictory claims. For the most part they are making either verbal or written arguments to claim that consciousness is not thought but rather pure awareness that exists beyond all form and mind, a claim they apparently are not aware is contradicted by the act of their mind contemplating its own consciousness, suggesting at the very least some entanglement of consciousness and thought, since ‘I am’ is a verbal thought after all, whatever ‘I’ might mean. But however you might work out this claim the underlying focus of their spirituality is an important one — subject, or consciousness, is all there really is, hence ‘non-dual’.
Somewhat strangely this is the opposite side of the coin from a materialist, who would argue that matter, or ‘object’ is all that constitutes us, evidenced by the fact that our brain can be reduced to physical laws and interacting particles, and the fact physical acts such as an anaesthetic or a head injury can result in loss of consciousness. This is the view of modern scientism, and one that has somewhat saturated our own language — we use the word ‘objective’ to generally mean provably true, and ‘subjective’ to mean arbitrary and personal.
Clearly however there is merit to both sides of this view, and this leaves those of us who are not fully attracted to either system with the fundamental subject/object category problem. This is found in philosophy as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, the idea that the quantitive role of matter seemly cannot explicably produce the quantitive change of consciousness. This is also mirrored by the problematic fact that while consciousness is clearly a fundamental aspect of reality, it is entangled with your thought, and with the objects of this material world. Science works, it has a level of proof that exists operatively, we can change the world because we have come to understand it objectively. Most spiritualists, if diagnosed with illness, will still go and see a doctor expert in material science and healthcare.
As much as we can reel back into the apparent purity of conscious awareness the peculiar fact that both object and subject share is that they are contingent forms of reality. The remarkableness of your awareness is remarkable because it seems that it might not be so, or that it could cease to be so, and it is a precondition of science to begin with the a priori assumption that contingent matter justifies its own existence. Temporal cause might give us mechanistic explanation, but it does not and could never explain why anything exists at all in any given moment. Both require a kind of absolute non-temporal cause, both our subjective and objective reality is like moonlight that is merely the reflection of the causative brightness of the sun itself.
But philosophical speculation can likewise only take us so far. Descriptive language, especially that of the scientific that is designed to have a thing-for-thing symbolic representation of the world remains itself in the category of the objective. How can words help us mediate these poles of reality?
The mediation between object and subject exists in the self. The self is neither of these things, it is not an object, in that it can’t be said to exist in any objective sense beyond being a construct, but neither can it be said to be pure subject, because it exists within the world of formative things. It is the you by which you become able to represent yourself, by which consciousness becomes awake. But fundamentally, in terms of language, the self is a metaphor.
Let’s return to the earlier point about prominent ‘non-dual’ spiritual teachers cherry picking from religious texts. Often consisting of a watered down bungling of Advaita Vedanta, they will often also pick quotes from religious texts elsewhere, one well-known teacher suggesting Jesus statement “I and the Father are one” is just an unknowing statement of non-duality, a statement wilfully and entirely ignoring that such a statement might have a context. The question is, if these religious texts all happened to be hinting at something these teachers have decided they can just ‘say’ in fairly descriptive language, why did those religious writers not just ‘say’ it as well? Why is the bible not just a self-help book telling you what to do? The fact is, it is, it’s just not written in objective language.
The reason highlights the category confusion of teachers of non-duality — you can’t argue for subjectivity being the only kind of reality by using objective language. To do so, as every one of them does, is akin to filming a monologue about how cars can’t get you anywhere from your car, while driving to work. The problem here is the breakdown of metaphorical language in society, and the obsession with the literal or rhetorical categories of language, which ironically all of these teachers partake in. You are not objective, and you are not subjective, you are the meeting of the two that somehow is only expressed by the relational language of metaphor, the ground of myth, religion, poetry and art. The problem here is that many of these teachers may well have had profound experiences, just like throughout history many people have, but they are too lazy to engage in the disciplines of writing or creativity in a way that seeks a language structure by which to express the inexpressible.
A quote here from a footnote on a line in Dante’s profound poem the Divine Comedy, expresses the purpose of this language:
“At no point are we to suppose that the sights which Dante describes in this cantina are an exact representation of what he believe heaven will be like… all souls will be found in an eternity beyond all spacial and temporal hierarchies, in the Empyrean. The apparent dispossession of the souls of the blessed into ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ or ‘more’ and ‘less’ is nothing more than a scheme intended to accommodate the human mind, which necessarily functions according to the categories of space and time. In traversing the planetary spheres we are simply witnessing a series of metaphors. This is a familiar truth to all those who recognise that an infinite creator must always be infinitely in excess of finite creation. It is in the same spirit that the old testament speaks of the ‘hands’ and ‘feet’ of God. It would be idolatrous to suppose that such phrases were anything more than a metaphor. Our minds may be nourished by metaphor, but the point of this nourishment is to prepare us for that gymnastic leap of faith which carries us into the ‘no-thing-ness’ of divine existence. Indeed, the universe itself is nothing more or less than a metaphor, preparing us to recognise that, keen and serious as we must be in our pursuit of knowledge, existence in all its immediacy will be wholly different from anything we might anticipate.”
The non-dual teachers can either decide reality is indeed an illusion, and that knowledge of the subject is only subjective, and stop writing books full of objective symbols, or they can decide that the world is in-fact explicable within the actions of our minds, but that a non-objective language system is required to be actually mastered. What many of them are, right now, is sincerely mired in category errors. Their books might as well be called ‘I’m good at meditating and bad at writing’. Yes, confusion abounds.