Non-Duality and the Problems of Western Idealism – Part 1: Non-Dual Spirituality

In my previous post on the “Ultimate Insight” I argued that the central aim of virtually all Eastern spirituality – namely, the Enlightenment experience of non-dual consciousness – is not just supremely practical (the liberation from suffering) but also supremely theoretical: it is the experience that ultimately grounds the worldview of Absolute Idealism. The central tenet of the latter is that reality-as-a-whole consists of a single, all-encompassing Absolute Consciousness. The Enlightenment experience, as it figures in much of Eastern spirituality – notably Advaita Vedanta, certain traditions within Mahayana Buddhism, the Classical Yoga of Patanjali, and Shaivite Tantra – is basically the experience of this all-encompassing Consciousness. It is the experience that frees one from the suffering inherent in finite human existence and at the same time grounds the insight into Consciousness as the ultimate nature of reality. In this post I want to focus on the theoretical aspect of the Enlightenment experience, in particular on the way this typically Eastern experience enables us to solve certain theoretical difficulties in Western forms of Idealism. For the idea that reality consists of a single all-encompassing Consciousness is not just of Eastern provenance, it also plays an important – if controversial – role in Western philosophy, where it came to prominence at the end of the 18th and much of the 19th century in German and Anglo-American Idealism. There is, however, an important difference between Western and Eastern forms of Idealism, and that – basically – is the difference between theory and practice. Whereas the Western forms are primarily theoretical, aimed at a purely intellectual understanding of reality as Consciousness, the point of virtually all Eastern spirituality is primarily practical, aimed at a radical existential transformation of human life through the lived experience of Enlightenment. This transformative experience of Enlightenment, i.e. the experience of the all-encompassing Consciousness as the essence of one’s being, is virtually lacking in Western Idealism. Hence the terminological distinction I draw between Western philosophy and Eastern spirituality. But, as said above, the Enlightenment experience is not just practical, it has a highly theoretical value as well, being the experience that ultimately grounds the Idealist worldview. This theoretical lesson, that is to be learned from the Enlightenment experience, is lacking in Western forms of Idealism. As I hope to show in this post, it is this lack that accounts for several unsolved problems within Western Idealism, problems that have made it vulnerable for sceptical counter-attack (hence the controversial status of Idealism in Western philosophy). It is here, therefore, that Eastern spirituality – with its practical focus on Enlightenment – can come to the aid of Idealist theory in Western philosophy. In this post, I will discuss how non-dual consciousness is viewed in Eastern spirituality (Part 1). In my next two posts, I will discuss how the Eastern view of non-dual consciousness helps us to see exactly where Western Idealist thinkers went wrong, namely in their habitual view of consciousness as individual and thus as tied to the subject-object duality of individual and world. In Part 2 I will do this for Berkeley and especially Kant, who exerted the most influence on later Western Idealists. In Part 3 I will do this for Kant’s successor Fichte, who represents the transition from Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, which still reckoned with a “thing-in-itself” outside of consciousness, to Absolute Idealism where the assumption of any reality outside of consciousness is rejected. I will show that despite Fichte’s rejection of the Kantian thing-in-itself and his consequent espousal of the unlimited nature of “Absolute Consciousness”, he kept falling back in the habitual assumption that consciousness is individual and thus tied to subject-object duality – and that this accounts for the often noted paradoxes in his thinking that prevented him from ever finishing his philosophy into a completed whole.

The non-individual nature of non-dual consciousness
So what is the theoretical lesson that Western Idealism can learn from the Enlightenment experience? Basically, it is the non-individual nature of non-dual Consciousness. Non-duality, of course, is central to Eastern spirituality, where it indicates the insight that there is no real opposition between the conscious individual (the “subject”) and the surrounding world of which he/she is conscious (the “object”). Non-duality signifies the experience of cosmic unity, the integral wholeness of reality, a whole that includes the individual subject and his object. Non-duality, then, means that there is no true opposition – no duality – between subject and object.

More properly speaking, non-duality signifies the realization that consciousness is never individual to begin with. It is the realization that the true subject of consciousness is not the individual, not the person who, in everyday experience, appears to be the one who senses the world, who thinks about and acts on the world. For that is exactly the point: this individual person, that we normally take ourselves to be, is itself an appearance within experience – that is to say: the person is really one of the many objects appearing within consciousness and, therefore, not the true subject of consciousness. Normally, in the “dualistic mode” so to speak, we think: “It is me, this person of flesh and blood, who experiences this world existing outside of me…” What we then forget, however, is that ‘we’ experience not just the world but also ourselves (our individual selves) as intrinsic parts of that world. Thus, we, as these individual persons, belong to the object of experience, i.e. we are not its true subject.

Here is an example to illustrate this point. Suppose I have to go to the dentist for a root canal treatment. Then ‘I’ experience not just the ‘objective’ situation in the dental office (the clinically white walls, the fake smile of the receptionist, the chair in which I lie down, the sound of the drill, the dentist going to work in my mouth), there is also an emphatically ‘subjective’ side to my experience, since ‘I’ also experience myself in that situation. ‘I’ feel myself lying in that chair with my mouth wide open, my body cramped, my fingers gripping the seat, my heart beating, thoughts rushing through my head (“I hope this anesthesia works”)... Of course, this is not an everyday experience (thank God!), but in its poignancy it does bring out something that is really always the case, even if we don’t notice it, namely: we ourselves are always part of the situation ‘we’ are experiencing.

Thus, we – as these individual persons – belong to the object of experience; we are not its true subject (hence the scare quotes I put around ‘I’ and ‘we’). The Enlightenment experience in Eastern spirituality is essentially this (self-)realization of the non-dual consciousness in which the duality of subject and object appears. It is the realization: I, as the conscious observer of the world, am NOT this individual person with whom I normally identify, because this individual is itself also experienced: the individual is an integral part of the world observed by me. Hence, I – as observer – am non-individual consciousness. The duality of me and world, of subject and object, is a duality perceived by me, and so I – as observer – precede this duality, in short, I am non-dual consciousness... All the non-dual traditions within Eastern spirituality (Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, Classical Yoga, and Shaivite Tantra) are basically just variations on this theme. There are, of course, differences between them, but – in my estimation – these are really just superficial differences in detail, emphasis, terminology and practical approach. The fundamental underlying insight, the impersonal nature of non-dual consciousness, is shared by them all, as I hope to show in the following.

Non-dual consciousness in Dzogchen and Zen Buddhism
Coming from the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dutch teacher Jan Geurtz puts the point as follows: “Do you see that our complete reality consists not just of a subjective and an objective component, but that there is a third factor, namely, the capacity to observe this duality? This third factor is itself not an observable form or entity… [I]t is within this limitless and formless awareness that the illusion appears of an interior world and an external world separated from it.” (Geurtz 2013: 44-45) In Zen Buddhism, too, this realization of the impersonal consciousness prior to subject-object duality is the central aim of meditative practice, where this formless consciousness is indicated by such typical Zen phrases as “the original face before birth”, “the common person of no rank” and “the original person”. Influenced by the Zen experience of Enlightenment (“satori”), the Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida writes in his classic work An Inquiry into the Good: “Over time I came to realize that it is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience. I thus arrived at the idea that experience is more fundamental than individual differences, and in this way I was able to avoid solipsism… The individual’s experience is simply a small, distinctive sphere of limited experience within true experience.” (Nishida 1990 [1922]: xxx, 19.)

With his statement that the Zen experience of Enlightenment enabled him to “avoid solipsism”, Nisihida indicates the insight that consciousness is not ‘locked up’ inside the individual’s head or brain: “it is not that consciousness is within the body, but that the body is within consciousness”. (Idem: 43.) If consciousness resided in the brain, it would indeed be cut off from the world outside one’s skull, which would invite the solipsistic conclusion that all I can know is the phenomenal world appearing in my subjective consciousness, but not the real, objective world outside of it. The Zen realization that  consciousness is radically different, that it is rather the non-dual openness in which both individual and world appear, thus takes away the threat of solipsism. Nishida, of course, does not deny that brain activity is closely connected to individual mind activity, but for him this only means that one group of phenomena appearing in consciousness (mental processes) correlates with another such group (neural processes): “To say that phenomena of consciousness accompany stimulation to nerve centers means that one sort of phenomena of consciousness necessarily occurs together with another.” (Ibidem.) This already gives a glimpse of how Western Idealism can benefit from Eastern spirituality.

Non-dual liberation in Shaivite Tantra and Advaita Vedanta
As said above, the primary point of the Enlightenment experience in Eastern spirituality is not theoretical but rather the practical achievement of liberation from suffering. How does this work? How does the realization of the non-individual nature of consciousness lead to liberation? Here the basic point is that through this realization one ceases to be just a finite individual standing over against an outside world independent of one’s will. It is, after all, this perceived independence of the world that creates suffering, because this independence means that the individual must struggle to maintain and assert itself in a world that is a best indifferent and at worst hostile to its desires. Thus suffering ceases when one realizes one’s true nature as non-individual, non-dual consciousness. One can no longer be touched by the vicissitudes of the individual, because on the most fundamental level one no longer is that individual: one has realized one’s essence as the impersonal consciousness in which the individual and its world appear.

The medieval Kashmiri Tantra master Kshemaraja, in his classic work The Recognition Sutras, gives an inkling of this liberatory potential of realizing (“recognizing”) the non-dual nature of consciousness when he writes: “People who are constrained every moment by the bonds of identification with body, life, pleasure, pain, and so on, do not recognize what is right here – their own Divine Awareness, thick with the joy of perfect wholeness. But one who, through this teaching, sees the universe all around him as nothing more than a mass of foam on the surface of the nectarean ocean of Awareness – he alone is said to be Shiva made fully manifest.” (Kshemara in Wallis 2017: 451) The theme of seeing the entire universe as an appearance within non-dual consciousness can also be found in the modern Advaita master Nisargadatta, who adds the idea that liberation comes specifically from seeing one’s individual personality as an integral part of this phenomenal universe:

“Don’t look at the world as something outside of yourself. See the person you imagine yourself to be as part of the world – really a dream-world – which you perceive as an appearance in your consciousness, and look at the whole show from the outside… Once you realize that there is nothing in this world that you can or need call your own, you will look at it from the outside, as you look at a play on the stage or a movie on the screen, admiring and enjoying perhaps suffering, but deep down, quite unmoved.” (Nisargadatta quoted in Balsekar 1982: 8)

Phenomenal non-duality in Classical Yoga
The point stressed by Nisargadatta, that one must view one’s individual person as an integral part of the universe appearing in consciousness, is also central to Patanjali’s Classical Yoga as expounded in his Yoga Sutra. Like all of Eastern non-dual spirituality, the goal of Classical Yoga is to realize – through meditation – one’s true nature as the impersonal consciousness (the Purusha) to which both the individual person and his/her world appears. Normally, in the dualistic mode, we identify with the individual person standing over against the world. The point of Patanjali’s Yoga is to see that both individual and world belong to Prakriti, the Sanskrit term for material nature. So not just the individual’s physical body but also his/her mental states, such as feelings and thoughts, are to be seen as part of material nature.

For Classical Yoga, mental states are no less material than physical things, such as bodies, trees and stones – the only difference being that the materiality of the latter is “gross” whereas the materiality of mental states is more “subtle”. For Patanjali, the point of seeing that one’s individual nature is an integral part of material nature as a whole (the physical universe) is that one realizes one’s true nature as Purusha, the non-individual consciousness to which Prakriti appears. By seeing this integral unity of material nature as a whole – this “phenomenal nonduality” as Chip Hartranft calls it in his translation of and commentary on the Yoga Sutra (2003: 82) – one takes up a standpoint outside that whole, one observes it from the outside and thus realizes one’s Purusha nature.

The regress-of-observation argument for non-dual consciousness
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra is also important here because it gives an important theoretical argument for the existence of non-dual consciousness. Such an argument is precisely what is needed to convince the sceptical Westerner who is wary of Eastern stories of blissful and seemingly mystical Enlightenment experiences. A sceptical Westerner might object as follows to the idea of non-dual consciousness: You say that I as this individual cannot be the true subject of consciousness, because I as this individual am itself experienced, I am one of the objects appearing in consciousness. But why can’t I be both? Why can’t I be the subject of consciousness AND an object appearing within consciousness? Why can’t an experienced object, such as this person of flesh and blood that I am, be at the same the subject of that experience? Isn’t this how we normally experience ourselves?

For the practitioner of Eastern spirituality, this objection is essentially overcome by the practical realization of the Enlightenment experience, where the non-dual nature of consciousness is directly ‘seen’ or ‘felt’. It is the utterly compelling nature of the Enlightenment experience, with the serene joy (“ananda”) that goes along with the liberation from suffering, that eliminates all doubt and thus ‘refutes’ this objection through direct experience. But of course, for the sceptic this is insufficient, because it is precisely his sceptical attitude that prevents him from experiencing Enlightenment. It is important, therefore, to be able to meet the sceptical objector on his own turf, that is, to refute his theoretical objection by an equally theoretical counter-argument. This argument has emerged most clearly – though also in an extremely truncated form – in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. Here is what Patanjali has to say about the possibility of the individual’s mind being its own observer: "If the mind were perceived by itself instead of by consciousness, the chain of such perceptions would regress infinitely, exploding memory." (4.21)

What Patanjali points to is the fact that an infinite regress of self-observations would ensue if the observer were itself also an observable entity (like the mind). For then the observer – in observing itself – would also observe this self-observation, and also this observation of self-observation, and also this observation of the earlier observation of self-observation, and so on without end. Hence Patanjali’s conclusion that “the chain of such perceptions would regress infinitely, exploding memory”. This, in a very truncated form (which is typical of the Yoga Sutra), is Patanjali’s theoretical counter-argument to the sceptic’s objection. It basically explains why the ultimate observer of the realm of material nature cannot itself be part of that realm. But because Patanjali’s argument is so truncated, it may need a bit more elaboration in order to be fully convincing.

Here we can turn to the aforementioned Dzogchen teacher Jan Geurtz who (quite independently of Patanjali, as Geurtz has communicated to me) has stumbled upon the same argument. With exceptional clarity, Geurtz develops the argument as follows: “As soon as an observing entity perceives itself, a loop is created. This happens, for example, when a camera is aimed at its own screen, when two mirrors are directly opposite to each other, or when a microphone comes too close to its own speaker… With such an observation loop we see the image disappear in an infinite series. If that fundamental reality in us which perceives were an entity, a “thing”, then we would have to observe an infinite series of them, a succession of “little selves” one perceiving the other. That, however, is not the case. Hence, that which perceives cannot itself be an observable entity.” (Geurtz 2013: p.244, n.23)

This, then, is the theoretical argument for the non-dual nature of consciousness: the ultimate observer of the subject-object duality (the individual person and his/her world) cannot be the individual subject, because – since this subject is part of the observed object of experience – such self-observation would produce an infinite regress of self-observations, thus “exploding memory”. The ultimate observing consciousness, then, is non-dual, a “third factor” that encompasses both individual subject and his/her object. This non-dual consciousness cannot itself be anything observable, thus it is essentially indeterminate and limitless. It bears repeating, however, that for Eastern non-dual spirituality this theoretical argument is not enough: it is only a stepping stone to a more experiential appreciation of the non-dual nature of consciousness. To remain at the level of theoretical argumentation would be to remain at the dualistic level of conceptual thought. So, to fully appreciate the non-dual nature of consciousness, we must not just think about it but experience it directly. Only in this way will the liberatory power of non-dual consciousness become fully apparent.

How Eastern spirituality can help Western Idealism
We are now in a position to see how the Enlightenment experience of non-dual consciousness in the various traditions of Eastern spirituality can help to solve certain outstanding problems in Western forms of Idealism. As I hope to show my following posts, these problems have a common root, namely, the persistent prejudice that consciousness is subjective or individual and thus necessarily limited by an “external world”. Even when Western philosophy progressed to the idea of a single, all-encompassing Universal or Absolute Consciousness – as it did in Absolute Idealism –, the old paradigm of subjective consciousness limited by external objects kept creeping in through the back door and thus kept creating problems that were deemed insoluble.

Two main problems stand out in this respect. Namely, (1) the problem of the external world: If reality is a single consciousness, then why does there nevertheless appear to be an external world outside of consciousness? And (2) the problem of the epistemological status of the idea that there is an Absolute Consciousness: If we can only know reality as it appears in consciousness, as Idealism says, how then can we postulate the existence of an Absolute Consciousness of which we as individuals have no experience? It was because of Western Idealism’s inability to answer these questions – questions which were often raised by Idealist thinkers themselves – that Idealism lost much of its appeal in Western philosophy around 1900 and gave way to philosophies such as logical positivism and existentialist phenomenology. But these theoretical problems are still premised on the merely subjective, individual nature of consciousness. Thus they are rendered moot by the theoretical argument for and (especially) the Enlightenment experience of the non-dual nature of consciousness in Eastern spirituality. 

References
-Balsekar, Ramesh (1982), Pointers from Nisargadatta Maharaj. Bombay, Chetana.
-Geurtz, Jan (2013), Verslaafd aan denken: De weg naar verlichting en levensgeluk. Amsterdam, Ambo/Anthos.
-Hartranft, Chip (2003), The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali: A New Translation with Commentary. Boulder, Shambhala.
-Kshemaraja, Rajanaka (2017), The Recognition Sutras. Translated and with commentary by Christopher Wallis. Boulder, Mattamayura Press.
-Nishida, Kitarō (1990 [1922]), An Inquiry into the Good. New Haven and London, Yale University Press.