Non-Dualism, the Advaita and Dvaita
This relation of duality to non-duality, diversity and unity, the many and the one, raises all the key question of how we ‘know’ the world (not to mention what we understand by ‘reality’).
First off, I’m more comfortable with Pythagoras than Hinduism.
unity, duality and harmony, from undifferentiated unity to unity with differentiation.
‘The abstract formula which is common to the early cosmogonies is as follows: (1) There is an undifferentiated unity. (2) From this unity two opposite powers are separated out to form the world order. (3) The two opposites unite again to generate life.’ (Cornford, "Science and Mysticism in the Pythagorean Tradition," part 2, 3). The Pythagorean view is that the kosmos is a "world-order" as an "ordered-world". The word kosmos means both order and ornament. To say that the world is ornamented with order is to say that the universe is beautifully ordered.
The schools of the Vedanta ask the question of the relation between the Atman (Inner Self or Soul) and Brahman and the relation between Brahman and the World.
At one end of Hinduism’s complex spectrum is monism, non-duality,
Advaita: states Brahman is the only reality and the world is illusory (Maya). Suffering is caused by ignorance of the reality, liberation can be obtained only by true knowledge of Brahman. It states that Atman and Brahman are one and the same. Advaita perceives a unity of God, soul and world.
At the other end is dualism,
Dvaita: considers Brahman and Atman to be two different entities, and Bhakti as the route to eternal salvation. Exemplified by Madhva and the early Pāśupatas—teaches two or more separate realities.
In between are views describing reality as one and yet not one, dvaita-advaita. Diversity is subsumed within a unified whole. (is it integrated or does it disappear? Can we have transcendence and immanence?)
Dvaitadvaita, developed by Nimbarka, states that Brahman is One independent ultimate entity (Advaita) with added dependent entities (Dwaita). It's a theory of dependent origin.
Vishitadwaita, developed by Ramanuja, states that there is the One Reality but with attributes and qualities (not without as in Shankara's Adwaita). The attributes and qualities of the world are Brahman's attributes and qualities. A qualified Monism (Adwaita).
Since Brahamn created the world, the entire world is its form. To worship to seek perfection you can accept Dwaita, the world is real and not an illusion. It is form of the formless. And we reach the formless through its form.
The western religions are dualistic, breaking up the unity with the creator. There is a distinction here between religion and spirituality, spirituality touching a person in the very depth of his or her being through experiencing unity with the source of life, religion giving us teachings, codes and rituals that only proximate this experience, leaving us insufficiently touched.
The problem lies in making it known and comprehensible that it is non-duality that we all seek. How can we do this without falling into limited dualistic forms of knowing and understanding? How can people come to realize their fundamental oneness with the Absolute (the source of life)?
Human beings are born with the urge to become ‘what we potentially are’., seeking happiness from the sense impressions that enter the mind to the extent we lack awareness of the true reason for our striving, clinging to impressions, particulars, visible manifestations, increasing our needs the more we proceed down the wrong path, rendering us all the more egoistic. We need to become aware that visible phenomena alone can never give us the happiness we seek, they give us hints, certain feelings of happiness but not the complete happiness found beyond concrete particular manifestations. It’s not an either/or. The one ‘reality’ is the Absolute, manifested in concrete particulars.
Knowing and understanding the Absolute, the primal cause of life (God, Allah, Brahman, Nirvana, whatever religious concept we use to name the unnamable, ineffable) is beyond the limitations of mind, language, concepts (these fall short, remain within some dualistic mode of understanding) but we can experience the Absolute.
How? When we see objects and living creatures, our normal consciousness is aware only of the material form from which they have been made, not the formless Absolute which these things are made from.
The point is that is in becoming aware of what we really are, and what reality really is, that the mind finds peace and fulfilment. This is the true happiness that can only be found in non-duality, the realization of oneness with the Absolute (the source of life).
How do we achieve such awareness? Explore reality and become awareness of its interconnectedness, the unity in diversity. In contemplating how life is meant to be, in coming to live together, treat each other and the planet we live on well, we abandon egoism and achieve spirituality. We become aware of those aspects of life where personal self-interest contradicts the laws sustaining life and permitting spiritual growth. We change our ways in order to live in harmony with Reality, the life sustaining primal cause. Going deeper than ecological laws (? Or is this a spiritual or moral ecology? Beyond physical causality), we understand the spiritual laws which sustain life (the love inherent in the world) and start to realize and live by these laws in personal life. Doing what is right, in right relations, means leaving the ego behind and its chaining to particular impressions and phenomena. Abandoning the ego to live by reality as an interconnected whole. At this point comes the realization of oneness. This means realizing that we are all part of an infinite ‘presence’ (Absolute) that supports us, allowing us to shed the load the ego once carried alone.
Realizing reality is about becoming (self) aware. It is the realization that the Self and the Infinite (Absolute) are one. This is the non-duality of Advaita.
Is this religion and/or spirituality? Religion (Latin re-ligare, to tie, bind fast, re-connect). The dualistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) disconnected from the Absolute (Reality) and made (organised) religion the object of primary devotion. The result is a loss of awareness and knowledge of non-duality, entailing devaluation and destruction of the planet etc.
And the loss of the most important (spiritual) questions, who are we, what is life, what is reality, what is our place in the bigger picture.
The answers to these questions – becoming (self) aware, realising that life is an expression of fundamental unity with the Absolute – are, ultimately, experiences beyond the limitations of reason, concepts etc. In symbolic terms, it is to live in accordance with the will of God. Experientially, it is to affirm the possibility of expressing the Absolute in the world. At some point, our conceptual apparatus cannot give the right, understandable answers anymore.
The influential Advaita Vedanta teaches the philosophy of non-dualism. The famous statement from the Upanishads 'That thou art' also points to monism. There is, therefore, a tendency to equate Indian philosophy with monism. But the bulk of Indian philosophical schools, Vedic as well as non-Vedic, have a pluralist conception of the world.
What is meant by non-duality? Non-duality is the translation of the Sanskrit word Advaita (a-dvaita). In the ancient Hindu philosophy Advaita Vedanta creation and creator are one, not two. This could be read as saying that non-duality simply affirms the fundamental unity of all existence. But that understates the depth of the spiritual message, which refers not merely to oneness but the realisation of this unity of ‘man’ (‘the world’) and origin. That emphasises the incentive for individuals to realize oneness with origin. Remove that incentive and we have a lack of awareness of oneness and the parlous situation the world is in today, a world in which we neither know who we are or where we are.
Living without awareness of the Absolute (as the source of life) induces the mind and ego to identify with visible phenomena only, producing a selfish behaviour that renders our civilisation brittle. Living from the ego means unconsciously following the impressions that continually enter the mind. Most human beings live in forgetfulness, their consciousness lost in the sense impressions of the mind. But with the process of awakening, there is a returning back to the source of life. But the one who returns home is not the same one who began the journey. It is a new being, a mature, intelligent being who has realized his/her pure nature.
The impression is often given that the world of plurality, the world which we know through sense-experience and influence, is illusory, unreal, a world of mere appearance. This needs qualifying. Samkara does not deny that the Many are real enough when it comes to our everyday purposes. The world of the Many is a public world in which both things and persons are inter-related, a real world and not a world of private dreams. In the world of waking consciousness, we can distinguish between appearance and reality. As Samkara himself points out, a coiled rope may appear to someone to be a snake, but that would be an error that can be corrected. The rope is a datum, a perceived object, and not the unreal projection of a subject. Samkara is therefore a realist who accepts the world of plurality as a datum. He goes on to argue that all members of the Many must have a source, which can neither be a material body nor a human soul. The existence of an ordered world is evidence of the existence of an intelligent, omniscient creator, Isvara, the Lord, also named Vishnu and Narayana, the cosmic creator and sustainer of the world. To back this up, Samkara can appeal to the Taittiriya Upanishad which asserts the existence of a being from which all other beings have come, by which they all live, and to which they all return. The Vedas proclaim: “As a thousand sparks from a fire well blazing spring forth, each one like the rest, so from the Imperishable all kinds of beings come forth, my dear, and to Him return.” This portrays a reality from which all finite things – the Many - issue and into which they are periodically reabsorbed.
This could appear to be portraying Samkara's non-dualism too much in the direction of theism, involving a supreme Lord as the material as well as the efficient cause of the world. Is it not the case that Brahman, as ultimate reality, was supra-personal and that the human spirit was identical with Brahman?
There is, however, no real contradiction. For Samkara, Isvara, the idea of a personal creator, is the form in which the Absolute appears conceptually within discursive thought, operating within a subject-object dualism. The Absolute is non-duality, but when we try to think of it, we cannot avoid objectifying it as something distinct from ourselves and the things of the world around. This objectified Absolute becomes for us the object of religious devotion, endowed-with attributes or qualities. That’s ‘God’, Saguna-Brahman. It would be incorrect to say that God does not exist; God is Brahman, appearing to or conceived by us within the realm of discursive thought.
The Bhakti movement, the tradition of religious devotion, (Bhakti to partake in, leading to love, surrender and devotion to…..), involves the subject-object dualism. But Samkara had a role for such devotional religion. The worshipper is not worshipping nothing but an illusion.
To start to unpack this: ‘God’, (Isvara, Vishnu, Siva or any other name), is the Absolute as it appears to the religious consciousness. But this ‘God’ is the highest reality as it appears to the mind operating within the subject-object dualism.
In Samkara’s interpretation, however, The Upanishads, teach that the inner self (atman) of the human being is one with Brahman. The oneness of the human spirit with the Absolute is expressed throughout. The phrase 'That thou art' is repeated several times in the Chandogya Upanishad. Brahman is thus Nirguna-Brahman, the suprapersonal Absolute, the one true reality which transcends all distinctions.
For the philosophically minded, the truth of a doctrine requires independent proof, not the authority of sacred texts. This is not possible, however, since philosophical proof is the work of the discursive reason, and since the Absolute is beyond the reach of discursive and conceptual reason. There is no way of ‘proving’ the existence and nature of Brahman without objectification. And in becoming objectified, Brahman gives only an appearance of the Absolute, not the Absolute itself. Hence there are many rival theories about this appearance of ‘God’, none of which can withstand criticism. The approach generates insoluble antinomies. does indeed argue that rival theories, theories, that is to say, which are incompatible with non-dualism, cannot stand up to criticism and give rise to insoluble antimonies.
The conclusion is that the human spirit is one with the Absolute can only be ‘known’ by the testimony of the sacred texts and by a suprasensory intuitive experience.
Is there are similarity here between Samkara and the western philosopher Spinoza, whose writings I am much more familiar with?
Spinoza writes of the ‘intellectual love of God’ as the highest form of philosophic wisdom. Whilst the ‘intellectual love of God’ implies a purely spiritual, other-worldly contemplation quite detached from the material world, there is a need to remember that by God Spinoza also means ‘Nature’. To gain further sense of Spinoza’s meaning one needs also to write the phrase as the ‘intellectual love of Nature’.
And this is very far from the personal God. Spinoza’s God is without emotion and can experience neither passion nor pleasure nor pain (E 5, 17). God neither loves the good nor hates the wicked (C XXIII): indeed God loves and hates no one (E 5, 17, Corollary). Hence ‘he who loves God cannot endeavour to bring it about that God should love him in return’ (E 5, 19). The intellectual love of God or Nature is wholly disinterested, and ‘cannot be polluted by an emotion either of envy or jealousy, but is cherished the more, the more we imagine men to be bound to God by this bond of love’ (E 5, 20). Indeed, the intellectual love of God ‘is the very love of God with which God loves himself’ (E 5, 36). Through this love of God human beings participate in the impersonal, universal love that reigns in the divine intellect: for God loves human beings as a self-love in and through men and this eternal love constitutes our ‘salvation, blessedness or liberty’.
Samkara did not believe that the oneness of the human spirit with Brahman was something to be brought about or achieved in an ontological sense through intellectual love or appreciation. Whether we are aware of this fact or not, Atman is one with Brahman. Intellectual love in this sense marks an advance from ignorance to knowledge of an already existing fact, what for Spinoza is an already existing ontological fact. Samkara's intuitive experience of oneness with Brahman is not, however, the same thing as knowledge in Spinoza’s amor intellectualis Dei
Spinoza’s strength of mind is quite distinct from the Stoic exercise of will in being the intellectual recognition of facts without the intrusion of subjective fears and hopes, impassively, without sentiment; it is the intellectual virtue of attaining acquiescence, objectivity, in face of rationally ascertained truth. This is to achieve eternal life through the intellectual love of God or Nature: ‘he who understands himself and his emotions loves God, and the more so the more he understands himself and his emotions’ (E 5, 15). Arising necessarily from the pursuit of knowledge, this delineates an intellectual love (amor intellectualis Dei) through activity of mind.
Thus the ‘intellectual love of God’ would signify both a knowledge arrived at through the contemplation of adequate ideas conceived sub specie aeternitatis, and also that form of rational investigation that overcomes the ignorance, prejudice or commonsense that limit thought and block knowledge. Whereas true philosophy (spirituality?) consists in the intellectual love of God, religion is based on a more passionate and temporal love in seeing God sub specie durationis, presented through the medium of inadequate and imaginative ideas.
For Samkara, the empirical self, the self which can be made the object of introspection, the changing self which is bound up with a particular body, belongs to the sphere of appearance. That would be Spinoza’s realm of inadequate and imaginative ideas.
Similarly, in a prayer to Vishnu, Samkara asserted that 'the wave belongs to the ocean, and not the ocean to the wave.' The wave can be said to be not different from the ocean, but the wave would be mistaken if it thought that it was the whole ocean. In relating the Many and the One, we shouldn’t commit the local-global fallacy. When we go beyond appearance to appreciate the whole reality, it is the wave which is absorbed in the ocean, not the ocean into the wave.
In being absorbed, do the diverse parts disappear?
It would seem that in mystical experience, the transcendence of the subject-object dualism implies that all consciousness of plurality disappears, and the consciousness of a world of plurality also disappears. With the final absorption of all things in Brahman, there is no consciousness of Brahman as a distinct entity or of the world of finite objects.
From the mountain top, non-dualists perceive a one reality in all things. From the foothills, dualists see God, souls and world as eternally separate. Monistic theism is the reconciliation of these two views.
Picture a mountain as both summit and foothills. The climber sees the meadows, the ledges, the rocks, ridges on the path. We can liken the foothills to a dualism in which parts and whole are different. Reaching the summit, the climber sees that the many parts are actually the one mountain. The danger is that ‘one mountain’ perception leads to a denial of the foothills that are necessary to climb on the way. The top and the bottom are part of the one whole.
It may be objected that these philosophical problems are non-problems, arising only within the realm of concepts, language, discourse, the world of appearance, in which no answers are possible. I’m thinking back here to Spinoza’s inadequate and imaginative ideas. These belong in the empirical world, the world of sense experience. This is the world of the many selves, and we can talk about them. But they are empirical selves, not the inner self which is one with Brahman. With this conception of Brahman, we cannot talk meaningfully about 'other selves', there are no distinct selves in this sense. And any problem to this effect are pseudo-problems caused by our conceptual inability to leave the discursive realm, the world of appearance. Philosophical problems as pseudo-problems?
How much reality can we entertain, be open to, giving up the pretensions of knowledge, power and control? I wonder whether we have the nerve to abandon our Promethean quest to become gods in our own self-made heaven on earth. Do we have the nerve to put down our tools and end our ceaseless activism to acquire knowledge by not-knowing? 'No one therefore must try to get from me what I know that I do not know, unless, it may be, in order to learn not to know what must be known to be incapable of being known! For, of course, when we know things not by perception but by its absence, we know them, in a sense, but not-knowing, so that they are not-known by being known – if that is a possible or intelligible statement! For when with our bodily eyes, our glance travels over material forms, as they are presented to perception, we never see darkness except when we stop seeing. And we can only perceive silence by means of our ears, and through no other sense, and yet silence can only be perceived by not hearing. In the same way, the “ideas” presented to the intellect are observed by our mind in understanding them. And yet when these “ideas” are absent, the mind acquires knowledge by not-knowing. For “who can observe things that are lacking”’) (St. Augustine 1977:480).
St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. By Henry Bettenson, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977
Words, concepts, etc fail us yet, paradoxically, must be employed. Awareness is realized only through practice and transmission
Unity in Diversity
All things, all beings and activities, from the great to the small, are equal expressions of the Infinite. There is no higher or lower, only unity and interdependence. Attempts to grasp the parts in abstraction Therefore, all attempts to either find or hold onto the Infinite conceptually are based in illusion. And yet we need to use concepts as we make the journey to awareness. Ideas, words, philosophies, concepts, constructive models are necessary supports for our journey to awareness and experience. Our reason allows us to form more and more abstract concepts. At the point at which realization of reality is reached, the concepts etc. have done their work and are to be left behind. Our experience and awareness of the true nature of reality means that the mind goes beyond the egoism of sense impressions to apprehend reality in a non-conceptual way.
To employ the analogy of the Buddha, concepts etc are like a raft. We use the raft to get to the other shore, once we are there, we leave it behind. If we don’t leave it, we can journey no further into the other shore, the real world, the true reality.
‘What I meant to write, then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have NOT written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.’ (Wittgenstein letter to Ludwig von Ficker).
These words should be considered alongside Wittgenstein’s argument in the Tractatus:
‘What is sayable at all, lets itself be said clearly; and what you cannot speak of, of that one should remain silent... The border is only possible to draw in language, and what lays outside the border, is simply madness.’
‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent’.
This half of the summation expresses the Tractarian ethos. Fronda describes this as an ethos of articulation. In the activity of articulation, keeping silent before that which cannot be spoken of is the ethical thing to do. (Fronda 1992: 16). It is a view which is quite distinct from that of the logical positivists who claimed his as one of their own. Moritz Schlick persuaded Wittgenstein to attend their meetings. Often, Wittgenstein would turn his back on them and read poetry, as if to emphasize to them that what he had not said in the Tractatus was more important that what he had. Wittgenstein read them the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, whose mystical outlook diametrically opposed to that of the members of Schlick’s circle.
How do you speak of silence? You cannot. But that doesn’t make the second part of Wittgenstein’s work any the less important. The more so, Wittgenstein thought.
‘A whole generation of disciples was able to take Wittgenstein as a positivist because he has something of enormous importance in common with the positivists: he draws the line beyond what we can speak about and what we must be silent about, just as they do. The difference only is that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds — and this is its essence — that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about.’ (Engelmann 1967: 96-97).
‘He who understands me’, writes Wittgenstein on the final page of the Tractatus, ‘finally recognizes [my propositions] as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it) . . . . then he sees the world rightly’ (T #6.54). But no sooner do we see the world ‘rightly’ than we are confronted by new obstacles requiring new ladders. Is Wittgenstein showing us the limitations of philosophical reason? ‘Forcing my thoughts into an ordered sequence is a torment for me. Is it even worth attempting now?’ (CV 28).
Wittgenstein never ceased to philosophise, and refused the temptation to accept this or that truth statement or totalizing system as ‘the answer’. ‘Language sets everyone the same traps . . . . What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings so as to help people past the danger points’ (CV 18). ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (T #5.6). Is there another world? The world of the true, the good and the beautiful.
Wittgenstein is a sceptic. ‘The results of philosophy [and hence by analogy of poetry] are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language.’ ‘These bumps make us see the value of the discovery’ (PI #119).
‘Wittgenstein did not argue; he merely thought himself into subtler and deeper problems.’ (15 Guy Davenport). Philosophically, Wittgenstein was a skeptic who thought it impossible to define the ‘beautiful’ or to say what the ‘essence’ of art or anything might be. Is that the end of the true, the good and the beautiful? Or is it the limitations of philosophy being exposed here?
Awakening to non-duality is not a path 'to' awakening but a process 'of' awakening.
This awakening, founded on the awakening to the inner state of the I am, is the goal. But non-duality is not a path so much as a vision of awakening, the realization of unity, the reality of awakening. Behind this vision is the co-existence of the already present reality of ‘I Am’ and the complex, even paradoxical, process of reaching it. Where the dual path sees only the apparently exclusive elements of reaching a future realisation, the non-dual philosophy sees their unity in the immediate presence of that which should be reached, reflecting the reality of human awakening.
So what do we end up with? For those who can experience the mystical experience of oneness with Brahman, the world of plurality ceases to exist as an object of consciousness, but does not cease to exist in a material sense. Ultimately, we have the awareness that Brahman is the all in all.
Non-duality does not commit us to the belief that the world does not exist. In the very least, as the self-manifestation of Brahman, it exists as appearance. It is also the effect of Brahman as its cause. In other words, Brahman comes to appear in the form of plurality. As for independent proof, no answer is possible other than by discursive reason in the world of appearance, for which Brahman appears as creator.
Only from a higher position than that of the everyday empirical world can the world of plurality can be seen as the appearance of the Absolute - sacred texts experientially confirmed by mystical experience for the Advaitin (alternatives for Spinoza, Plato, Pythagoras, intellectual appreciation of the rational universe?). But the philosophy of non-dualism does not contradict everyday experience of the world of plurality, it presents a higher level of knowledge. The world of plurality is an empirical reality, but from the transcendental vantage point, this reality is appearance.
So is this duality or non-duality. I think it is dvaita advaita, or ‘dual non-dualism’.
Reality is based on a non-linear logic that, from our conceptual approach, is not always logical.
Advaita is inattentive to details and doesn’t see the steps in the process between ignorance and awakening. Reality is more than human logic - it is paradoxical and surprising, forever subverting our limited concepts and fixed ideas. This implies that the concept of non-duality is itself not non-dual. Duality involves the development of our conceptual appreciation of reality in ignorant separation from that reality. At some point, duality meets non-duality, the universal space of being as something consciously realized. And this experience is beyond both duality and non-duality, hence ‘dvaita-advaita’ or ‘dual-non-duality’.
Non-duality is a practice and a path, but these can be paradoxical, limited, illogical, dualistic.
Monistic theism?
Monistic theism, Advaita Īśvaravāda, reconciles the dichotomy of being and becoming, the apparent contradiction of the temporal and the eternal, the impasse of the one and the many.
The Vedas affirm:
“He who knows this becomes a knower of the One and of duality, he who has attained to the oneness of the One, to the self-same nature.”
Monistic theism reconciles monism and dualism, transcendence and immanence, Creator and created. Neither monism nor dualism alone can encompass the whole truth.
Monistic theism is a Western term, embracing the oneness of God and soul (monism), and the reality of the Personal God (theism). But the idea can be found in the Vedas, where it is repeated “Aham Brahmāsmi,” “I am God,” and that God is both immanent and transcendent.
The Hindu scriptures alternate between monism, describing the oneness of the individual soul and God, and theism, describing the reality of the Personal God.
The Vedas wisely proclaim: “Higher and other than the world-tree, time and forms is He from whom this expanse proceeds —the bringer of dharma, the remover of evil, the lord of prosperity. Know Him as in one’s own Self, as the immortal abode of all.”
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It is the inexplicable duality that leads to the knowledge of non-duality. (Tayumanavar, 10.3. pt, 44).
In becoming spiritually awake, we are bonded in seeing the divine in and as everything and everyone. That’s the awareness of inter-connection, the fundamental unity. This is a complete awakening to the I Am, through which we can recognize the beloved. Then each and all are seen as a ‘person’, something ‘extraordinary’, as arising in divinity Itself. This state is transcendental rather than psychological or empirical, but includes the psychological and empirical.
The Supreme Reality is termed as ‘Shakti’ or ‘Self’ or ‘Person.’ Which is said to be “God seen as a Person”;
The creator, the beloved, the heart of the mystery: “The beloved is a unity of the absolute and the divine. The absolute is the being [of the beloved] and the divine is her heart.”
Inquiry is to take us experientially into the Unknown. Once inquiry has delivered you to its destination, be still. You have become visible to the divine.
St. Paul: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12
‘You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed.’ (Wittgenstein Z #717)
This is not non-dual since it is the state of consciousness, of the creation, where duality prevails. Non-dual consciousness is still in the realm of duality, of the created dimension! Awakening to a state beyond consciousness.
Who has ever known the unknowable and indescribable? Truth is beyond even our finest philosophy. Enlightenment is the recognition that non-duality is, has always been, and will always be the reality of our experience, that duality is an illusion, that consciousness is not private and personal, but impersonal, universal, and eternal.