The Ultimate Insight: On the Explanatory Power of Absolute Self-Awareness

A recurrent theme on this blog is the idea of Absolute Idealism 2.0, i.e. a contemporary, ‘mathematized’ version of the age-old philosophy of Absolute Idealism, which runs from the ancient Upanishads to the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus to German and Anglo-American Idealists such as Schelling, Hegel, Green and Royce. Absolute Idealism 2.0 takes over their central insights but develops them in a novel way consistent with modern science, in particular with the central role of mathematics in physics. The following post gives a broad overview of the central principles of Absolute Idealism 2.0. and how these principles enable us to make sense of reality-as-a-whole.
The self-creating power of Absolute Self-Awareness We can provisionally define Absolute Idealism as the philosophical theory that everything exists because it is thought and/or experienced by an Absolute Mind, which in turn exists because It thinks/experiences itself. Thus, on the Absolute-Idealist view, the Absolute Mind constitutes its own existence by thinking/experiencing itself, that is, by being self-aware. The Absolute Mind, then, should first and foremost be defined as Absolute Self-Awareness. The idea that (pre-reflective) self-awareness has a self-creating aspect is most often associated with the German Idealist Fichte and his case for the “self-positing of the I”, but roughly the same idea can be found with other Absolute Idealists as well:

• The Vedantic sages of the Upanishads: “In the beginning this world was only Brahman, and it knew only itself (Atman), thinking: ‘I am Brahman.’ As a result, it became the Whole.” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10) 

• The Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus: “The One [...] made itself by an act of looking at itself. This act of looking at itself is [...] its being.” (Ennead VI, 8, 16, 19-21)

• The German Idealist Schelling: “it is through the self's own knowledge of itself that that very self first comes into being” (Schelling 1800: 27).

• The American Idealist Royce: “if whatever exists, exists only as known, then the existence of knowledge itself must be a known existence, and can finally be known only to the final knower himself, who, like Aristotle's God, is so far defined in terms of absolute self-knowledge” (Royce 1899: 400).
   

By highlighting this self-creating aspect of Absolute Self-Awareness, Absolute Idealism is very attractive in that it offers a clear-cut and intuitively plausible answer to Leibniz’ famous question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” According to Absolute Idealism, there is something rather than nothing because Absolute Self-Awareness is self-creating. I call this answer to Leibniz’s question intuitively plausible mainly because of two reasons: (1) we are all self-aware and so we know – with Cartesian self-evidence – that self-awareness exists, indeed it is the only existence we are absolutely certain of, and (2) we have a glimpse of the self-creating power of Absolute Self-Awareness in the (self-)awareness we have of our own free will. This last point needs some elucidation.

Kant and the “unconditioned causality of freedom
Of course, when I talk of the self-creating power of self-awareness, I am not talking of individual human self-awareness. None of us has brought him- or herself and the universe into existence. As empirical individuals we are biologically conditioned, brought into existence by others, subject to time. So how then can I say that our own self-awareness gives a glimpse into the self-creating power of Absolute Self-Awareness?

In a way we do experience a degree of self-causation in ourselves, namely, insofar as we exercise positive freedom, i.e. autonomy. Positive freedom requires a capacity for what Kant called “spontaneity”, the “unconditioned causality of freedom” (Critique of Pure Reason, B561/A533), i.e. a capacity to initiate an entirely new course of action and/or thought ‘out of nothing’, unmotivated and/or uncaused by prior givens. But isn’t such a capacity for radical spontaneity – for initiating something out of nothing – precisely what is needed in order to answer Leibniz’s question, i.e. to explain how reality has lifted itself into existence preceded by nothing?

Insofar as our self-awareness reveals in us this ‘unconditioned causality of freedom’, then, we have all the more reason to take our self-awareness as the key to answering Leibniz's question. It is, moreover, the self-positing nature of self-awareness that explains this unconditioned causality of freedom in the first place. Obviously we aren't self-causing in any absolute sense (since, to repeat, we have not created ourselves), but we are relatively self-causing in that we can at least intervene in the causal order of reality by spontaneously initiating a completely new causal chain of events.

This underscores the difference between empirical, individual self-awareness and Absolute Self-Awareness: what the former has relatively and finitely, the latter has absolutely and infinitely. That is to say: Absolute Self-Awareness has (or is) absolute freedom. The self-evident experience of our own self-awareness gives us empirical access to the self-causation that can answer Leibniz's question, but to make full sense of this answer we have to generalize beyond ourselves. We have to project prereflective self-awareness to something that transcends us, the Absolute, the unconditioned 'thing' that conditions all of reality.

The mathematical unfolding of Absolute Self-Awareness
What then is the precise relation between Absolute Self-Awareness and individual self-awareness as it is found in you and me? To answer this question we have to move from Leibniz’ question to the next question: why is the universe the way it is? We do not just want to know why something exists, we also want to know why this something is the way it is, i.e. why reality has developed into this infinitely complex universe in which we find ourselves. It is especially here that I take the age-old philosophy of Absolute Idealism into a new direction, making it fit for the future by drawing on ideas from modern physics and mathematics. It is here that Absolute Idealism becomes Absolute Idealism 2.0.

Making creative use of some seminal ideas from the American Idealist Josiah Royce, I argue that the recursivity inherent in Absolute Self-Awareness – in short: its awareness of itself, its awareness of that awareness, its awareness of the awareness of that awareness, and so on – establishes an intrinsic connection between self-awareness and the recursively generated natural numbers and even the recursively generated set-theoretical universe of pure sets, which in a way contains the whole of mathematics (more about this here and here). Thus, from this perspective, the Absolute Mind comes out as a deeply mathematical being, generating – through the recursivity of its self-awareness – all of mathematics, and subsequently mirroring itself in those mathematical structures that best reflect its transcendent splendor.

The universe as the mathematical self-image of the Absolute
In my view, the resulting mathematical mirror image of the Absolute Mind is our physical universe (which, as modern physics shows, is indeed thoroughly mathematical in nature). Through mirroring and recognizing itself in this mathematical universe, and particularly in those mathematical structures that emulate intelligence (such as the algorithmic structure of the human brain), the Absolute Mind increases its own self-awareness and thus teleologically realizes its essence. In this way I explain the apparent fine-tuning of the universe, i.e. the fact that surprisingly many of nature’s fundamental constants – such as the ratio of the masses of electrons and protons, the energy density of the vacuum, even the three-dimensionality of space – are “just right” for the evolution of life. This bio-friendliness of the universe follows from the fact that the universe is the mathematical mirror image of the Absolute Mind.

It is, moreover, the self-recognition of the Absolute Mind in mathematical structures (such as the algorithmic structure of the human brain) that infuses these structures with phenomenal consciousness: it explains why the mathematical structure of the brain is “accompanied by an experienced inner life” (Chalmers 1996: xii). In this way I aim to solve the notorious “Hard Problem of Consciousness”. Moreover, as it is the mathematical structure of the universe as a whole in which the Absolute Mind mirrors itself, we must see the entire universe as infused with phenomenal consciousness, thus arriving at a panpsychist view of the cosmos.

This, then, answers the question we raised above about the relation between individual human self-awareness and Absolute Self-Awareness. Individual self-awareness, as experienced by individual organisms, is nothing but the self-reflection of the Absolute in specific mathematical structures, notably in those algorithms that “simulate” intelligent volitional agency, algorithms such as the ones that underlie the functioning of our brains. In this sense, Absolute Self-Awareness is the pre-reflective core of every finite individual form of self-awareness. One could say that each empirical instance of individual self-awareness (human or otherwise) is, as it were, a navel in the physical universe, connecting the latter through a transcendental umbilical cord with the Absolute Self-Awareness that grounds reality as a whole.

Explaining mind-body dualism
This explanation of what individual consciousness is – namely, the self-reflection of Absolute Self-Awareness in the complex algorithm that simulates brain functioning – also allows us to make sense of the apparent duality of mind and matter and, notably, the apparent supervenience of the former on the latter. This is one of the major difficulties faced by any kind of Idealism: if matter is just an appearance in consciousness, why and how then can it seem that matter exists apart from consciousness and, indeed, that (individual) consciousness appears to depend on matter?

From the perspective of Absolute Idealism 2.0, this duality between mind and body comes down to the distinction between, on the one hand, the mathematical structure of the recursive self-unfolding of Absolute Self-Awareness, and the latter’s self-recognition in certain privileged parts of that structure on the other. The mathematical structure in which the Absolute reflects itself is the structure of matter, i.e. the structure discovered by physics. But it is the self-reflection of the Absolute in this structure, the fact that it recognizes itself in it, that – so to speak – infuses the structure with phenomenal awareness. It is this act of self-recognition that explains why the mathematical structure of matter is – as Chalmers put it – “accompanied by an experienced inner life”. This holds in particular for the structure of the brain (human or otherwise), which is the kind of mathematical structure in which the Absolute recognizes most of itself (intelligent and volitional agency); hence the infusion of this structure with individual consciousness.

Hence the duality of brain and consciousness, and the apparent dependence of the latter on the former. The brain as a physical object is simply the underlying mathematical structure as experienced from the outside by another conscious organism (i.e. another brain / individual consciousness), whereas individual consciousness is that very same mathematical structure as experienced ‘from within’, i.e. as an object for the Absolute’s self-recognition. We can call these, respectively, the first-person and the third-person experiences of the mathematical structure of the brain. The fact that individual consciousness appears to be causally dependent on the brain is due to the fact that individual consciousness is ontologically dependent on the mathematical structure in which the Absolute recognizes itself.

The funny thing here is that we, human beings, are in principle capable of both a first-person and a third-person perspective on the mathematical structures of our own brains; for example – to take a rather drastic example – when we open up our skull and use a mirror to look at our own brain. We then experience its underlying mathematical structure in two ways simultaneously: from the inside as the object of the Absolute’s self-recognition, which gives us our individual consciousness, and from the outside, i.e. from a third-person perspective, which gives us this strange lump of grey matter that is supposed to be us. Something similar happens, though less drastically, when we look at a CT scan of our own brain. 

Morality as self-recognition in the other
To repeat: Absolute Self-Awareness is the pre-reflective core of every finite individual consciousness, insofar as the latter is nothing but the self-recognition of the Absolute in the mathematical structure of the brain. Thus, as the Vedanta philosophy based on the Upanishads puts it, we are all in principle capable of discovering the same Self (Atman) as the innermost core of our individual self-awareness. This Universal Self, this core in each of us, is the Absolute Self-Awareness as it reflects itself empirically in the self-awareness of finite organisms in the universe. Thus, the “unconditioned causality of freedom” we detect in our self-awareness really is the unconditioned causality of the self-causing Absolute as the ground of all reality. In that sense the (self-)awareness we have of our own free will does give us a glimpse into the endlessly creative source of the universe.

Insofar as we are capable of this glimpse, i.e. of ‘seeing’ the Absolute as the prereflective core of our own self-awareness, we start to appreciate that the same holds for all living beings. We start to realize that all organisms are essentially nothing but different manifestations of one and the same creative essence, the Absolute, the Universal Self, which senses, thinks and acts through all these organisms. This gives an enormous feeling of connection and love for others. Suddenly you can empathize with others and take their perspective much more easily, because you know they are not fundamentally different from you. You start to experience other beings as different versions of yourself, i.e. of your innermost Self, the creative essence of the universe. It is this empathy with others, through the non-dual sense of cosmic unity, that is the foundation of all sincere morality.

In this way, a kind of self-recognition in others – a seeing of yourself in others – takes place, but the self that is recognized here is not primarily the individual self but rather the Self, the Universal Self, the Atman, the Absolute. One could say that in this way the universe as the mathematical self-image of the Absolute is all the more true to its archetype: just as the Absolute recognizes itself in the otherness of the physical universe, so the universe mirrors this Divine Self-Recognition by evolving organisms that recognize themselves (i.e. their Self) in each other. Through the evolution of this self-recognition among organisms, this “mutual recognition” as Hegel calls it, the universe evolves into an ever improving mirror of the Absolute, thereby contributing to the latter’s essence as self-awareness.       Relation to Enlightenment in Eastern spirituality As the above reference to the Vedanta indicates, this (self-)realization of the Absolute as the prereflective core of our own individual self-awareness has a deep connection to what in Eastern spirituality is known by such terms as "Enlightenment", "Awakening", "(Self-)Realization", and "Liberation". This marks an important difference between Western and Eastern forms of Absolute Idealism. Whereas the Western forms are mostly theoretically oriented, aimed at a purely intellectual understanding of reality, the point of virtually all Eastern spirituality is primarily practical, aimed at a radical existential transformation of human life. Hence the terminological distinction I draw between Western philosophy and Eastern spirituality. It is certainly not the case that philosophical theorizing is entirely absent in the East – quite the contrary, Eastern spirituality contains some of the deepest philosophical thinking ever done. It is just that in Eastern spirituality all theorizing is ultimately subordinated and subservient to the spiritual goal of Liberation: theory for the sake of theory is rejected, because it stands in the way of the spiritual goal. The notion of Absolute Self-Awareness, then, signifies in the Eastern context not just the ultimate nature of reality, it also signifies the individual’s realization of the Absolute as his / her own innermost Self and as such the final Liberation from the suffering inherent in finite human existence. In Eastern spirituality, then, Absolute Self-Awareness is first of all not a theoretical concept (as it is in Western Absolute Idealism) but an experience or intuition, the experience of Enlightenment, the awakening to or realization of one’s true nature, the intuition of the Absolute as the core of one’s being. This is the experience that accomplishes the longed for Liberation from suffering. Here the Vedanta of the Upanishads provided the original template for all later Eastern spiritual traditions aimed at Enlightenment (even if these traditions criticized certain aspects of the Vedanta). For the Upanishadic sages, the key insight “Brahman is Atman” is not just a theoretical insight into the ultimate ground of reality, it is also the liberatory insight into the ultimate core of one’s own self, the realization “I am Brahman”, freeing one from the suffering inherent in finite human life. This comes out clearly in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which we quoted earlier as clearly pronouncing the basic realization of the self-causing nature of Absolute Self-Awareness: “In the beginning this world was only Brahman, and it knew only itself (Atman), thinking: ‘I am Brahman.’ As a result, it became the Whole.” (1.4.9) This remarkable passage doesn’t stop here: it goes on pronouncing with equal clarity the spiritual significance of this realization: “If a man knows ‘I am Brahman’ in this way, he becomes this whole world. Not even the gods are able to prevent it, for he becomes their very Self (Atman)... He is the one who is beyond hunger and third, sorrow and delusion, old age and death.” (1.4.10, 3.4.2) Here the spiritual significance of Absolute Self-Awareness, the Liberation from the suffering inherent in finite existence, is clearly announced. The ultimate insight that explains everything? What all this makes clear is that the Enlightenment experience has both a theoretical and a practical value, indeed it is the ultimate accomplishment both philosophically and spiritually. Enlightenment is not just the insight that liberates from the confines of finite existence, it is also the insight that provides the ultimate epistemological foundation for the Absolute-Idealist worldview. This implies an extreme form of rationalism, such that in principle everything is explainable for us, finite human beings, because insofar as we are self-conscious beings we have a prereflective intuition of the nature of Absolute Self-Awareness as the self-causing cause of reality-as-a-whole. Looked at from the theoretical perspective, Enlightenment is the insight into the essential core of our own self-awareness as the absolutely free (i.e. self-causing) source of all reality, as the recursive fountainhead of all mathematics and thus of the physical universe as our own innermost mathematical self-image, and as the source of all morality qua self-recognition in others. Enlightenment, in short, is the ultimate insight that allows us to explain everything. But, so a critic might ask, does it even make sense to attempt an explanation of ‘everything’? Isn’t such an all-encompassing notion logically incoherent? I want to finish this post by taking a closer look at this objection and how Absolute Idealism can deal with it. Leibniz’s question, paradox, and self-awareness This objection has in particular been raised by analytic philosophers such as Alfred Ayer and Bertrand Russell: they argue that all-encompassing concepts like “everything” and “reality as a whole” lead to paradoxes of self-reference, akin to the paradoxes of the early ("naive") set theory developed by Cantor, Dedekind and Frege. In my view, however, this self-reference ceases to be paradoxical once we realize that Absolute Self-Awareness is the self-causing cause of reality and that self-reference belongs to the essence of self-awareness. Naive set theory is so-called because it allowed sets that are deemed "too big", such as the universal set: the set containing all sets, including itself. Thus the universal set is self-membered, and this leads – directly or indirectly – to paradoxes, such as Cantor's paradox, the Burali-Forti paradox and Russell's paradox. One could argue that Leibniz's question produces similar paradoxes because, in a way, it totalizes existence. By posing the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?", Leibniz invites us to look at reality as a whole, the totality of what exists, in order to find the cause or reason explaining this totality. But in conceiving this totality, aren't we relapsing into the naiveté of early set theory? Aren't we allowing a set that is "too big"? This was indeed the main objection raised by logical positivism against Leibniz’s question: it is meaningless because it leads to paradoxes of self-inclusion. Thus Alfred Ayer: "Supposing you asked a question like 'Where do all things come from?' Now that's a perfectly meaningful question as regards any given event. Asking where it came from is asking for a description of some event prior to it. But if you generalize that question, it becomes meaningless. You're then asking what event is prior to all events. Clearly no event can be prior to all events. Because it's a member of the class of all events it must be included in it, and therefore can't be prior to it." (Ayer quoted in Holt 2013: 24) Bertrand Russell too noted the paradoxical self-referentiality of the philosophical concept of reality-as-a-whole: “The comprehensive class we are considering, which is to embrace everything, must embrace itself as one of its members. In other words, if there is such a thing as “everything,” then “everything” is something, and is a member of the class of “everything”.” (Russell 1919: 136) Thus Russell was suspicious of all-embracing philosophical concepts such as reality-as-a-whole: “The difficulty arises whenever we try to deal with the class of all entities absolutely [...]; but for the difficulty of such a view, one would be tempted to say that the conception of the totality of things, or of the whole universe of entities and existents, is in some way illegitimate and inherently contrary to logic.” (Russell 1903: 362) With the concept of reality-as-a-whole out of the window, however, Leibniz's question can no longer be posed. If the concept of reality-as-whole is logically incoherent, then the question why that whole exists must be illogical as well. In response to this criticism we only have to point out that the set-theoretical paradoxes are defused by the phenomenon of self-awareness. For what appears as paradoxical in the foundations of mathematics – namely, self-reference – actually is a living reality in the phenomenon of self-awareness. Why then should we reject self-reference as paradoxical, and banish it from the foundations of mathematics, when self-reference is a clearly a bona fide aspect of reality, an aspect of which the existence is attested – with Cartesian self-evidence – by the undeniable phenomenon of self-awareness? Thus it becomes clear how the Absolute-Idealist view of reality as essentially a form of self-awareness – namely, Absolute Self-Awareness – saves Leibniz’s question from Russell's criticism. If we take reality as such to be self-awareness, then the self-inclusion of the totality of what exists ceases to be paradoxical, because such self-inclusion is to be expected of self-awareness. This self-inclusion is the inherent recursivity of self-awareness, which necessarily involves awareness of self-awareness, and awareness of awareness of self-awareness, and so on without end. In other words, self-awareness must include itself as one of the objects of which it is aware. Thus we can compare self-awareness to a ‘magical matryoshka’, a Russian nesting doll that somehow contains itself: if one opens up the doll, one finds the same doll inside… In short, then, the Absolute Idealist conception of self-awareness does not just enable us to answer Leibniz's question, it also enables us to pose that question in a meaningful way. It shows that the self-inclusion of the totality of what exists – a totality presupposed by Leibniz's question – is not a senseless violation of logic, because it belongs to the living essence of reality qua Absolute Self-Awareness. References -Chalmers, D. J. (1996), The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford University Press.   -Holt, J. (2013), Why does the world exist?, Profile Books. -Kant, I. (1781/’87 [2009]), Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge University Press. -Plotinus, Enneads, translation by A.H. Armstrong, Loeb edition. -Royce, J. (1899 [1959]), The World and The Individual, First Series: The Four Historical Conceptions of Being, Dover Publications. -Russell, B. (1903 [1964]), The Principles of Mathematics, George Allen & Unwin. -Russell, B. (1919 [1970]), Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, George Allen and Unwin. -Schelling, F.W.J. (1800 [2001]), System of Transcendental Idealism, translated by Peter Heath, University Press of Virginia. -Upanishads, translation by Patrick Olivelle, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Melting the Ego: Cosmic Non-Dualism and Climate Change

“We melt. We just melt and melt and melt. The heart has to melt and when it does, an indescribable flow of love reveals itself. And we experience something mysterious, this incredible warmth and light and fire and opening that is real, that is not just a temporary emotion, but is a true breakthrough into our deeper self…”
(Paul Muller-Ortega)

In the summer of 2018 something weird happened to me: I had an experience of melting, of becoming fluid, as if the icy bulwarks of my ego melted and dissolved into something like a warm, sticky liquid that flowed into everything and everyone around me. Ok, it sounds a bit gross when I put it like that, but really it was a very uplifting experience: I sort of fused with the world, became ‘one with the universe’ in a feeling of all-encompassing love. In other words: I felt the truth of Non-Dualism, the spiritual philosophy that says we are all manifestations of the same cosmic force, the one creative essence of the universe. Non-Dualism, however, is not just a question of feeling. It is also a question of clear-headed, rational thought. For the factual truth of some form of Non-Dualism is strongly suggested by what contemporary physicists and philosophers tell us about the holistic unity of the universe and the place of consciousness in it. 

Over and above that, Non-Dualism also satisfies an urgent ethical and spiritual need that is felt worldwide. In that sense, Non-Dualism is a philosophy whose time has now definitely come. This becomes especially clear in light of the many global problems facing humanity, notably that of climate change. In this post I will argue that it is only by recognizing the truth of non-duality – i.e. by recognizing our fundamental unity with each other, with our planet, and with the cosmos at large – that we will be able to muster the global solidarity needed to deal with these global problems. And perhaps, just perhaps, this is the upside of climate change: that global warming will cause a ‘global melting of the ego’ and thus a global embrace of Non-Dualist modes of thinking and experiencing. In this way, perhaps, climate change will bring about its own solution…

My Long Hot Summer of Love
If you are expecting some raunchy story about erotic conquests on the beach, I have to disappoint you. Partly because I have no such stories to tell (I am a happily married father of a seven-year-old son). But also because I would like to tell you a different kind of story, one of spiritual awakening, or – as I put it above – the melting of my ego. Mind you, the summer of 2018 was exceedingly long and hot. In fact, it was one of the longest and hottest summers ever recorded in the Netherlands (and much of Europe besides), which is where I live. It was simply another bead on the string of meteorological records – heat waves, droughts, tropical storms, arctic ice melting, and so on – that have become so familiar the last couple of years, testifying to the worrisome reality of climate change. The long hot summer of 2018 meant there was a perfectly rational explanation behind my somewhat mystical experience: all those months of sunny weather just made me super relaxed, up to a state of ultimate ‘hippie-ness’ so to speak. Of course, I am very concerned about the potentially catastrophic threat of climate change, not least because of our son whose future is at stake. But the truth is that I also thoroughly enjoyed this amazing summer. I feel kind of guilty saying this, but it’s true.

We live close to the beach, so that’s where we would spend most of our free days: swimming, building sand castles, giving the old frisbee a throw, relaxing under the parasol, reading books on non-duality, meditating, eating ice creams… In short: living the good life! In the afternoon, we would cycle home languidly, take a shower to wash off the salt and sand on our sunburnt skins, and start up the barbecue for another easy diner in our garden. In the evening – my stomach filled with veggie burger, fries, salad and light beer – I would just sit there and look in wonder at the spotless blue vault over my head, with a hint of orange in the west, and watch the acrobatics of the swallows weaving their warp and woof in the warm evening air.

That’s when it would happen, during those days on the beach and evenings in our garden, this ‘melting of the ego’ experience, of becoming fluid and fusing with my environment. I would have glimpses of cosmic unity, of everything being one. I would look at the people around me and have the strange sensation that somehow ‘they are me’ or ‘I am them’. Whatever it was that looked out of my eyes at the world, it also looked out of their eyes. Whatever it was in me that enjoyed the heat of the sun, the coolness of the water, the taste of ice cream, it had the same enjoyment in the people around me. It felt as if the universe was enjoying itself on the beach, tasting itself, feeling itself, playing with itself, throwing frisbee at itself, basking in the light of its own sun, swimming in its own water... And this feeling of all-embracing love would rush up inside of me, engulfing me, engulfing everything around me.

Waking up from the dream of separation
Now, these thoughts – of everything being one – were certainly not new to me. Having a background in philosophy, I am particularly interested in the philosophical tradition of Absolute Idealism, which stretches roughly from the Upanishads in the East and Neoplatonism in the West to the German and Anglo-American Idealisms of figures such as Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, and Royce. Absolute Idealism can be summarized as the claim that everything exists because it is thought and/or experienced by an Absolute Self, which in turn exists because It thinks/experiences itself. Up till the summer of 2018, however, my interest in these ideas was purely intellectual and theoretical. The idea that the universe is one consciousness simply seemed (and still seems) plausible to me in the light of what physicists and philosophers tell us about the holistic unity of the universe and the place of consciousness in it (the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”). But now, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, it became an experiential reality for me as well. I started to feel its truth.

No doubt, this was in large measure due to the fact that I had taken up meditation, stimulated by my wife who was following a course in mindfulness. I am convinced, however, that the exceptionally long hot summer also played a crucial role here: in making me super relaxed, in almost literally ‘melting my ego’, it made me feel – rather than just intellectually understand – the truth of cosmic unity. The thing that finally did it for me, that made the penny drop, was reading Christopher Wallis’ wonderful book Tantra Illuminated on the philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism (which is not the thoroughly commercialized pseudo-spiritual sex therapy which is sold as Tantra in the West, though it certainly is true that sexuality plays a significant role in Tantrism). Reading this book on the beach, I came across the following passage:

“Thus all sentient beings […] are simply different forms of one divine Consciousness, which looks out at the universe that is its own body through uncountable pairs of eyes… This perspective brings a sense of meaning and presence to even the simplest acts. When you sit and contemplate a pebble, what is really happening is that the universe is contemplating itself in that form… When you see yourself clearly, there comes a flash of recognition: you are a microcosmic expression of precisely the same divine powers that create, maintain, and dissolve this whole universe. [T]here is a profound shift. Your fear and pettiness drop away as you harmoniously fall into the dance of life energy… An explosion of joy accompanies the realization that there is nothing to do, nothing to achieve, other than to fully embrace the divine powers that seek to manifest through you by expressing the entirety of your authentic being in the fullness of each moment, in an endless flow of such moments.” (Wallis 2013: 56, 62, 67)

When I read this, I literally felt the “flash of recognition” of which Wallis speaks. Bang! There it was: cosmic unity, cosmic love… Clearly, the Tantric philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism with its belief in “one divine Consciousness, which looks out at the universe that is its own body through uncountable pairs of eyes” is one particular instance of the broader tradition of Absolute Idealism. However, in the context of Eastern philosophy, this way of thinking (and experiencing) is usually called “Non-Dualism”. One could say that the Absolute Idealisms of philosophers like Plotinus, Schelling, Hegel, Royce and Bradley is simply the Western variety of Non-Dualism. This is not to say there are no significant differences between them. Whereas the Western approaches to non-duality are mostly theoretical, more focused on the epistemological, ontological, and theological aspects of non-duality, the Eastern approaches – though certainly not devoid of theory – focus more on the experience of non-duality as an existentially transformative experience, as the key to Enlightenment and the ultimate Liberation of Suffering.

That is, in Eastern philosophy the non-dual experience is usually seen to bring to an end the suffering inherent in being a (seemingly) separate individual, standing over against an independent world, in which the individual must struggle to maintain him-/herself. As the illusion of the separate ego falls away, its petty worries and ambitions, its bickering likes and dislikes, its fears and unfulfilled desires, all these obstacles to peace of mind fall away as well. And what remains is just peace of mind, a tranquil bliss, and a deep feeling of loving unity with everything and everyone. This enlightening aspect of non-duality is often illustrated by the comparison of the human mind with a lake that mirrors the sky above it. Normally, the water on the lake is rippled, as the ever-variable winds of our thoughts and emotions create smaller or greater waves, causing a distorted reflection of the sky in the water. But with the experience of non-duality, the waves on the lake calm down, as the storm of thoughts and emotions settles, and the water becomes as smooth as a mirror, finally reflecting the blue sky above it, with the radiant Sun at its centre. Here, of course, the ‘Sun’ is a metaphor for the creative essence of reality-as-a-whole, the source of all energy and life, which you now realize to be your true identity. 

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”
I guess that that’s what I experienced during the summer of 2018, an enlightenment experience. Not that I would say that I am permanently enlightened now (whatever that means). Not even close. For, as many spiritual seekers will testify, such “pink and fluffy” feelings of all-encompassing joy and love, which generally accompany the first glimpse of non-duality, are usually not permanent. They last for a while – from a couple of days or weeks for most people up to a year or even a few years for others – but then, ultimately, at one point or another, daily life kicks back in again. It’s a bit like what happens to mafia boss Michael Corleone (the character played by Al Pacino in The Godfather) who, realizing the senselessness of the mobster life style, wants to get out but finds to his dismay that the ties to his former personality aren’t cut that easily. The people around him – family, friends, enemies, the FBI – still see and treat him as the Capo di capi, forcing him to act accordingly, against his deepest wish. At one point in the film this makes him exclaim the famous line: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” (And the television series The Sopranos, where the same thing happens to mafia boss Tony Soprano, contains some great parody on this.)

Most spiritual seekers who look upon the experience of non-duality as the ultimate Enlightenment, as the end point of the spiritual path, have at one point or another uttered just the same line – “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” – or something like it. They find that the unforeseen events of daily life keep ‘pulling them back into duality’, that is, keep addressing them as separate individuals, who must struggle to find their way through life. You may become sick, lose your job, lose a loved one, fall back into some nasty habit, or simply hit your head very hard against a kitchen cupboard – the trigger could be any negative experience, which suddenly bursts your pink bubble of non-duality. Hence the importance of spiritual practices, what in Indian philosophy is known as “sadhana”, such as yoga and meditation, which help you to stabilize your initial enlightenment experience and to integrate it into your daily life.

The global threat of climate change
In my case, what shook me out of my pink-and-fluffy dream of cosmic love was precisely the very same thing that had put me in it: the long hot summer of 2018. As elated as I was about the melting of my ego and becoming one with the universe, I knew in the back of my head that – from another perspective – this melting was a very bad thing. As if the polar caps themselves were melting inside of me! The looming threat of climate change gave this whole ‘enlightenment thing’ an eerie atmosphere, not least because much of the Netherlands lies several meters below sea level. This is especially the case where I live, in the province of Zeeland, where an intricate network of dikes is our last line of defence against the ocean thunderously bearing down upon us. Lying on the beach, immobilized by the oppressive heat, I would have nightmarish visions of polar caps melting and breaking up into huge chunks, causing tidal waves spilling over the dikes, engulfing our homes, drowning my loved ones…

Thus, by melting my ego, global warming had created my pink-and-fluffy bubble of cosmic peace, love and happiness. But almost simultaneously it also popped that bubble. After all, it has been scientifically proven now that man-made environmental pollution – and CO2 emission in particular – is the driving cause behind climate change. Even according to moderate scenarios, global warming will bring disastrous consequences within a hundred years, endangering the survival of the Earth’s flora and fauna, including human beings. Although it is true that the Earth has naturally warmed up and got colder again during other eras, such cycles have always been much slower, taking millions of years. But now, within a period of just 200 years, we are reaching levels that in the past brought about extinctions!

If we don’t drastically diminish our output of greenhouse gasses (such as CO2), the average global temperature will – according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization – most likely have risen with 3 to 5 degrees Celsius in the year 2100. (And some estimates put this rise even higher!) In the process, there will be accelerated melting of arctic ice, which in turn will cause a rising sea level, leading to mass flooding of coastal areas. Some small island states will probably disappear altogether. There will be an increase in violent weather phenomena, such as tropical storms, heat waves and droughts, which will endanger the food chain and economic resources, especially in developing countries. Glaciers will melt, resulting in dried up rivers. Vast areas of the Earth will be left uninhabitable, becoming literally too hot to live in. As a result, there will be many, many millions of climate refugees. Already Europe is struggling with a refugee crisis due to the war in Syria. But the number of climate refugees will dwarf those that have fled the Syrian conflict. The result will be increased political conflict, instability, war... 

But even as my pink-and-fluffy bubble was popped by the threat of climate change, this loving awareness of cosmic unity stayed with me. In fact, it became even more important, because I realized that Non-Dualism could just be the right spiritual stimulus triggering people into collective action. Not only to deal with climate change and to save the precious ecosystem of our planet, but also to eradicate poverty, war, racism, injustice, and the extreme wealth inequality that has become rampant after 40 years of neoliberal capitalism. For, in the light of such challenges, what could be more inspiring and motivating than to learn that you, a seemingly separate and isolated human being, are really not separate at all? That you and the other(s) are actually the same, the same suffering being which is suffering precisely because it hasn’t yet realized what it is, namely, a single being? What could be more conducive to global responsibility and solidarity than the knowledge that you and the world around you are one?

Cosmic versus Acosmic Non-Dualism
Here, however, we should note an important difference between two kinds of Non-Dualism: cosmic and acosmic. This distinction is especially relevant to the ethical value of Non-Dualism. In philosophy “acosmism” means the denial of reality to the empirical world of plurality. The universe we observe around us appears to consist of many different individual objects, from atoms and molecules up to trees, cars, people, planets, stars and galaxies. According to acosmism, this plurality of individual objects is ultimately unreal, non-existent, a mere appearance or illusion. Non-Dual philosophers are particularly prone to acosmism, given their overarching emphasis on the fundamental unity of reality: since reality is one Whole, the empirical world of plurality must be unreal – or so it is argued sometimes. Such acosmic forms of Non-Dualism often go hand in hand with a monastic ethics of renunciation: to achieve the final Enlightenment, the individual must renounce the empirical world of plurality – only then will she realize the liberating insight into “the One” that alone is truly real. Such renunciatory acosmism affects both Eastern and Western forms of Non-Dualism. In the East, acosmism is a dominant feature of classical Advaita Vedanta and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Buddhism. In the West, acosmic tendencies can be found in Parmenides, Spinoza, Schelling (at the time of his “Identity System”) and the British Idealist Bradley.

By contrast with “acosmism” we can define “Cosmic Non-Dualism” as a position that recognizes the fundamental oneness of reality yet does not deny the reality of the empirical world of plurality. The cosmos – the infinite universe with its countless stars, planets, living and non-living beings – is rather seen as somehow manifesting the One that alone truly is. For Cosmic Non-Dualism, the One appears as the world of plurality: reality is a unity-in-diversity, an integrated whole with inner complexity, rather than a featureless blob of undifferentiated oneness – which is the view to which acosmism tends. Consequently, Cosmic Non-Dualism does not tend to world renunciation but rather to the exact opposite, world affirmation, a celebration of empirical existence as the manifestation of divine reality, and an associated ethics of universal compassion and solidarity. Enlightenment is achieved not by rejecting the world, but by embracing it as your own Self. This leads to an ethics of active involvement in the world rather than aloofness from the world. In the East, such Cosmic Non-Dualism, with its celebration of empirical reality as manifesting the Divine and its ethics of universal solidarity, can be found in the original Vedanta of the Upanishads and especially in Shaivite Tantrism. In the West, Cosmic Non-Dualism is a prominent feature of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, who explicitly rejected the extreme world renunciation of Gnosticism, and the philosophy of Hegel, who developed his version of Absolute Idealism partly in criticism of Schelling’s acosmism.

The ethical value of Cosmic Non-Dualism
Clearly, if we want to utilize Non-Dualism as a means to foster global solidarity, we need the cosmic variety rather than the acosmic one, which tends to a nihilist indifference towards the world. This comes out forcefully in Robert Pirsig’s cult novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which is partly autobiographical), where the protagonist – the analytically minded Phaedrus – goes to India to find wisdom but ends up taking classes in Oriental philosophy taught by a professor with a predilection for classical Advaita Vedanta:

“But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange.” (Pirsig 1999, p. 144.)

This is exactly why the difference between Cosmic and Acosmic Non-Dualism is so utterly crucial! An activist ethics of universal solidarity is precisely what our much suffering world needs today, torn as it is by ever widening divisions – between the haves and have-nots, between different ethnic groups, between secular society and religious fundamentalism, between mass society and the isolated individual, between the dangerous lure of populism and the aloofness of the political elite, between the interests of economic growth (necessary to feed an ever-growing world population) and the interests of a defenceless nature choking in the mind-numbing garbage heap produced by economic growth. These are global problems, affecting our whole planet and everyone on it, requiring a global solution and thus global solidarity. Hence the great ethical importance of Cosmic Non-Dualism. With the separation between self and other overcome, you can no longer remain indifferent to the suffering and injustice in the world. You have to act, simply because in helping others you are actually helping yourself – perhaps not, directly, your individual self, your empirical persona, but first and foremost your underlying Self, the creative essence of the universe, of which everything and everyone is an integral part. The Non-Dualist teacher and therapist Jeff Foster puts this wonderfully well:

“It’s myself in Burma, it’s myself in the earthquake. It’s myself starving in Africa. People sometimes hear the message of non-duality and they think that it’s about sitting back and doing nothing. They think it’s about arrogantly sitting back and saying, “Oh, it’s just a dream, it’s just a story, there’s nobody there suffering so what’s the point in doing anything at all?”… Oneness recognises itself in the face of that starving child and can move to help itself, not out of pity, not because it needs to be a good person, that’s nothing to do with it. It doesn’t come from a set morality. But in seeing that it’s all One – and this is the mystery of the universe – somehow it moves to help itself.” (Jeff Foster in Gilbert 2011, p.37.)

So let’s just hope that global warming will have at least this positive consequence, that it will lead to a global melting of the ego and thus to a global embrace of Non-Dualist modes of thinking and experiencing. At least then we have a fighting chance to deal with our problems together, as a single species, in harmony with each other and with our precious planet. That this 'melting of the ego' things is not wholly speculative can be seen from the fact that in non-dual spirituality it is often said that the ego is a 'contraction' of the Whole into a seemingly separate individual. It is also well-known that this separation is experienced physically as a contraction of the muscles: a tightening of the breath, of the muscles around the throat, around the eyes, etc. But isn't such a physical contraction not also stimulated by cold weather? When its cold, you sort of have to contract your body to stay warm. Now, as Tantra in particular stresses, mind and body are one 'thing', the body-mind. So it stands to reason that if the body becomes very relaxed (and thus loses its contraction) through warmth, the mind will relax along with it, and awakening will become easier. Hence, perhaps, the fact that non-duality originated with the Upanishads in the warmer parts of India?

Om & Peace!

You can join the discussion about Cosmic Non-Dualism at: 
www.facebook.com/groups/cosmicnondualism

References
Gilbert, Eleonora (2011), Conversations on Non-Duality: Twenty-Six Awakenings. Cherry Red Books.
Pirsig, Robert M. (1999 [1974]), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. London: Vintage.
Wallis, Christopher D. (2013), Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition. Boulder, CO: Mattamayura Press.

Non-Dualism in East and West: An Introduction

“You are a woman; you are a man; you are a boy or also a girl.

 As an old man, you totter along with a walking-stick.
As you are born, you turn your face in every direction.
You are the dark blue bird, the green one with red eyes,
the raincloud, the seasons, and the oceans.
You live as one without a beginning because of your pervasiveness,
you, from whom all beings have been born.”
(Svetasvatara Upanishad 4.3-4)

Non-Dualism is a type of spiritual philosophy based on a type of spiritual experience, that of non-duality, the complete absence of separation (duality) between you and the world you observe. In non-dual awareness, the subject experiences reality as one whole of which the subject itself forms an integral part. Thus, subject-object duality is overcome. As a type of philosophy, Non-Dualism tries to make sense of this non-dual experience, to interpret it, to explain it, to gauge its value, to place it in a broader world view. However, Non-Dualism is not just one philosophy but a family of different philosophies, mostly Eastern, though the West has produced some significant forms of Non-Dualism as well, but here it usually goes by the name “Monism” (more about this terminological difference below). In Eastern philosophy, non-duality is a central feature of Vedanta, Buddhism, Daoism, Sufism, and Shaivite Tantrism. In Western philosophy, elements of non-dual thinking can be found in Eleatic Monism, Neoplatonism, Spinozism, Absolute Idealism, and Schopenhauer´s metaphysics of the Will to Life.
 
Whereas the Western approaches to non-duality are mostly theoretical, more focused on the epistemological, ontological, political and theological aspects of non-duality, the Eastern approaches – though certainly not devoid of theory – focus more on the experience of non-duality as an existentially transformative experience, to be more precise, as the key to “Enlightenment” and the ultimate “Liberation of Suffering”. Here the non-dual experience brings to an end the suffering inherent in being a (seemingly) separate individual, standing over against an independent world, in which the individual must struggle to maintain him-/herself. As the illusion of the separate ego falls away, its petty worries and ambitions, its bickering likes and dislikes, its fears and unfulfilled desires – all these obstacles to peace of mind fall away as well. And what remains is just peace of mind, a tranquil bliss, and a deep feeling of loving unity with everything and everyone. In Eastern philosophy, this liberating aspect of non-dual awareness is traditionally theorized as bringing to an end the suffering of samsara, the karmic cycle of reincarnation.

In Eastern philosophy, the enlightening aspect of non-duality is often illustrated in terms of the comparison of the human mind with a lake that mirrors the sky above it. Normally, the water on the lake is rippled, as the ever-variable winds of our thoughts and emotions create smaller or greater waves, causing a distorted reflection of the sky in the water. But with the experience of non-duality, the waves on the lake calm down, as the storm of thoughts and emotions settles, and the water becomes as smooth as a mirror, finally reflecting the blue sky above it, with the radiant Sun at its centre. Here, of course, the ‘Sun’ is a metaphor for the creative essence of reality-as-a-whole, the source of all energy and life, which you now realize to be your true identity.

Origin of Non-Dualism in the Upanishads
The oldest texts that explicitly thematize non-duality, and its connection with Enlightenment and Liberation, are the Upanishads, the fountainhead of Indian philosophy. The earliest Upanishads, the Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya, date roughly from 800 BCE, although they are based on much older oral traditions. The philosophy expounded in the Upanishads is called “Vedanta” because these texts form the closing books of the sacred Hindu scriptures, the Veda. Thus, the Upanishads constitute the “end / culmination of the Veda” (“Veda-anta”). But this can also be read as the “highest knowledge” since in Sanskrit “veda” means “knowledge”. Vedanta in general, however, is not to be confused with Advaita Vedanta, which is a special case of Vedantic philosophy. Advaita Vedanta emerged much later as a recognizable school in Indian philosophy, around 800 CE, and develops just one of the many strands that can be found the Upanishads. Thus, Advaita Vedanta is certainly not representative of the entire range of Vedantic philosophy – a point that is often sadly ignored, not least by proponents of Advaita itself. I will say more about the difference between Advaita Vedanta and Vedanta in general below when I discuss the difference between Cosmic and Acosmic Non-Dualism.

The Upanishads develop concepts that proved to be fundamental to subsequent Indian philosophy and religion – concepts such as reincarnation, the law of karma that regulates rebirth, and the techniques for achieving liberation from the samsaric cycle of rebirth, such as Yoga, meditation, ascetism and world renunciation. In this way, the Upanishads prepared the way for new spiritual movements, notably Buddhism and Jainism, which emerged not long after the composition of the oldest Upanishads. With the concepts of reincarnation and karma, a profound pessimism creeped into Indian culture: earthly life was seen as a prison of suffering from which there is no escape, since due to the karmic effects of our actions we are reborn again and again into this ‘vale of tears’. The Upanishads, however, not only introduced this pessimism into Indian culture but at the same time presented a solution, a “Path to Liberation” by way of non-dual identification with the divine ground of reality-as-a-whole, the “Brahman” that underlies everything and everyone. By the non-dual awareness of Brahman as one’s innermost Self (“Atman”) – i.e. by realizing that “Atman is Brahman” – one breaks the power of karma and the cycle of reincarnation, becoming one with the Highest Bliss which is Brahman. This non-dual awareness of Brahman-Atman is the “highest knowledge” which, as we have noted, the term “Vedanta” indicates. More about the development of Vedantic thought in the Upanishads can be found here.

“This finest essence here, son, that you can’t even see, look how
on account of that finest essence this huge banyan tree stands here.
Believe, my son: the finest essence here – that constitutes the Self
of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the Self.
And you are that, Svetaketu.” (Chan.Up. 6.12)

The Dialogue between Uddalaka and Svetaketu
A clear illustration of non-dual awareness in the Upanishads can be found in the famous dialogue between the sage Uddalaka Aruni and his son Svetaketu in the Chandogya Upanishad. Having told Svetaketu to cut open one of the tiny seeds of the fruit of the banyan tree, Uddalaka asks: “What do you see there?” “Nothing, sir,” Svetaketu replies. Then Uddalaka tells him: “This finest essence here, son, that you can’t even see – look how on account of that finest essence this huge banyan tree stands here. Believe, my son: the finest essence here – that constitutes the Self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the Self. And you are that, Svetaketu.” (Chan.Up. 6.12) Brahman, the “finest essence” of the whole world, cannot itself be seen or thought because it is the underlying unity of all the different beings in reality; as such, Brahman differs from nothing and thus cannot be conceptually determined in contrast to anything else. As Uddalaka explains to his son: just as a chunk of salt dissolved in water can no longer be seen but nevertheless pervades all of the water, so Brahman is the indescribable essence pervading everything, thereby giving everything reality (Chan.Up 6.13). With this ineffable essence of reality Svetaketu is declared to be identical by Uddalaka: “You are that” (“Tat tvam asi”) – which is one of the four “Great Sayings” (Mahavakyas) traditionally seen as expressing the core message of the Upanishads, the other three being “Atman is Brahman”, “Conscious is Brahman”, and “I am Brahman”. Each saying is a formulaic expression of the same non-dual insight: that the single and all-encompassing Brahman is in essence identical with the human Self – or, in other words, that the empirical plurality of individual human selves is really an illusion, because in reality there is only one Self, the Atman which is Brahman, the Absolute Subject underlying the universe.

Western Monism and Spinoza’s Supreme Joy
Earlier we noted that Non-Dualism is more usually known as “Monism” in the context of Western philosophy. This has to do with the difference between Western and Eastern forms of Non-Dualism: that the former are more theoretical, whereas the latter are primarily aimed at the practical-existential aim of Liberation. Monism means first of all the theoretical claim that all of reality is fundamentally a single ‘thing’, one seamless all-including Whole. Non-Dualism indicates this overarching unity of reality as well but focuses attention primarily on what this means for the subject: the falling away of its separation from the world in the liberating experience of non-duality. This is not to say that the liberating aspect of non-duality has gone totally unnoticed in Western philosophy, but the role it plays there is considerably less pronounced than in Eastern philosophy, where it is indeed the central interest.

Baruch Spinoza, 1632-77

Spinoza is probably the Western philosopher who comes closest to this Eastern appreciation of the liberating power of non-duality. Baruch Spinoza, born a Sephardic Jew in Amsterdam during the Dutch “Golden Century”, was excommunicated from the Jewish community at the age of 23 for proclaiming heretical opinions. Exactly what these opinions were is unknown, but – given his later monist philosophy of the single, all-including “Substance” which can be called “God or Nature” – these opinions probably involved a denial of the dualistic conception of God as standing apart from and above His creation (a conception common to the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam). No doubt, the excommunication made life extremely difficult for Spinoza, who was still a young man at the time, cut off from his family, having to fend for himself, since fellow Jews were explicitly forbidden to help or even to contact him. So when Spinoza – in his first piece of philosophical writing, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect – speaks of the vanity of mundane existence and his longing for a supreme joy independent of the vicissitudes of daily life, we know he is speaking from the heart: “After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life […], I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good […] whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.” (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, para.1)

The problem, as Spinoza goes on to diagnose, is that people normally desire “perishable things” which “can be reduced to these three headings: riches, honour, and sensual pleasure” (idem: para.3&9). As these things are “perishable”, they cannot afford lasting happiness; in fact, they worsen our existential situation, since their acquisition more often than not requires compromising behaviour and their consumptions makes us even more dependent on perishable goods. “But love towards a thing eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, unmixed with any sadness.” (Idem: para.10) Thus, in his mature masterpiece, the Ethics, Spinoza finds lasting happiness only in the “intellectual love of God”, which is the mystical, non-dual vision of the single “Substance” underlying everything and everyone. The non-dual nature of this vision is clearly announced by Spinoza when he says that “[t]he mind’s intellectual love of God is the very love of God by which God loves himself” (Ethics, Part 5, Prop. 36). Since, for Spinoza, God is the Whole that includes everything, it also includes your love for God, and thus God can be said to love Itself through you.

Non-Duality and the Problem of the Ego
As Non-Dualist therapists stress, the conviction of being a separate individual, who must assert him-/herself in the outside world, brings with it a sense of contraction and straining, experienced physically as contracted breathing and a tightening of the body, felt specifically in the solar plexus, the throat, the back of the head, and as a strain around the eyes. This feeling of contraction into a separate being sets in when we’re still very young and builds up as strain and stress throughout our lives. No wonder burn-out is reaching epidemic proportions in our hyper-individualized societies! In the experience of non-duality, this stress and straining falls away, as you experience yourself as basically one with the world. Hence the therapeutic value of Non-Dualism. In the non-dual experience, the sense of separation between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ disappears, and the restless drive to be a self-standing, self-asserting individual is given up. The separate ego is felt to dissolve in the cosmic Whole. This sense of letting go is experienced physically and emotionally as a great relaxation, a great sigh of relief, like the final breath of a dying man. With this difference, of course, that you do not die – on the contrary, you are in a sense reborn in a liberated state, born into freedom for the first time in your life.

Freud described the oceanic feeling as
the "feeling of oneness with the universe".

Or, rather, for the second time. For, in a way, what happens in the experience of non-duality is that you return to the state of oneness you experienced as a baby. That feeling of being absolutely one with your mother when still in the womb, and later, after birth, of being held in the arms, that feeling of total safety and surrender, of undivided unity and love, what Freud called the “oceanic feeling” which he described as a “feeling of oneness with the universe” – that primal feeling of undifferentiated bliss is what we lose when we grow up and are taught to see ourselves as separate beings, each with his/her own free will and moral responsibilities, having to live up to society’s expectations. We lose this bliss, but we never lose the memory of it, and that basically is why we suffer – in the sense of suffering that plays such an important role in Eastern philosophy. We suffer because we want, more than anything else, to return to that original state of blissful unity which we experienced as babies, and because – as separate individuals – we can never have it again. We want, therefore, the impossible – as long as we remain in the dualist mode of being.

From a Non-Dualist perspective, this is the secret of human desire. Seemingly separated from the Whole, we feel radically incomplete, radically insecure, and then we try to fill this inner lack by seeking something outside ourselves, something that will make us whole again. That’s why we never stop buying stuff, running desperately after wealth and success, love and sexual pleasure, physical health and beauty. We think: “If only I could buy that new car…”, or: “If only I could find the right partner…”, or: “If only I could finish my education…”, or:  “If only I could have that breast enlargement…” – in short: “If only I could get my hands on this elusive thing X, THEN I would be happy, THEN I would be complete, THEN I would be fulfilled.” But, as we all know – deep down, even if we don’t admit it – it simply doesn’t work that way. The ‘Inner Hole’ left by the ‘Original Whole’, which we lost when we became (or thought we became) separate beings, can never be filled by anything short of the Whole itself. Trying to fill it by external things – be it material objects, public success or loving partners – is like trying to fill a sieve with water. And that’s what suffering is: trying to retrieve the Whole while remaining separate.

In this way we can make sense of the cycle of samsara without having to buy into the ancient metaphysics of reincarnation, which to modern eyes is bound to appear as unscientific superstition. The cycle of samsara can simply be understood as the cycle of desire: each attempt to satisfy the inner need to be whole again by means of some finite thing, a “perishable good” (Spinoza), is bound to fail and thus to reproduce the same desire again and again. Samsara is the ceaseless reproduction of dualist desire, because nothing finite and temporal can ultimately satisfy us. Only the Whole can do that, and thus it is only in non-dual awareness – when we realize our original oneness with the Whole – that the samsaric cycle of desire finally stops. This ending of dualist desire is Enlightenment, the Liberation from Suffering, or – as Buddhists say – nirvana. This does not mean we become totally desireless, without any need or want. Only a certain type of desire falls away, “Desire” writ large, the desire to “fix” ourselves, to become whole by chasing finite things in the world. That desire falls away, because we realize that we never left the Whole in the first place.

"The self continues in samsara only as long
as it retains attachment due to ignorance
or Maya. If it casts off the veil of Maya
through knowledge, it will realize its identity
with the Brahman and get merged into it."
(Shankara, the founder of Advaita Vedanta)

Cosmic versus Acosmic Non-Dualism
Earlier we noted an important distinction in Non-Dualist thinking between Eastern approaches, which focus above all on the liberating aspect of non-duality, and Western approaches, which focuses more on the theoretical side of non-dualism qua monism (with the significant exception of Spinoza). A second distinction, which runs across both Eastern and Western forms of Non-Dualism, is between ‘cosmic’ and ‘acosmic’ forms of Non-Dualism. In philosophy “acosmism” means the denial of reality to the empirical world of plurality. The universe we observe around us appears to consist of many different individual objects, from atoms and molecules up to trees, cars, people, planets, stars and galaxies. According to acosmism, this plurality of individual objects is ultimately unreal, non-existent, a mere appearance or illusion. Non-Dual philosophers are particularly prone to acosmism, given their overarching emphasis on the fundamental unity of reality: since reality is one Whole, the empirical world of plurality must be unreal – or so it is argued. Such acosmic forms of Non-Dualism often go hand in hand with a monkish ethics of renunciation: to achieve the final Liberation of Suffering, the individual must renounce the empirical world of plurality – only then will she realize the liberating insight into “the One” that alone is truly real. Since the individual, qua individual, is part and parcel of the world of plurality, this renunciation of the world is also a radical self-renunciation: even one’s own individual existence must be rejected as illusory! Such acosmism affects both Eastern and Western forms of Non-Dualism. In the East, acosmism is a dominant feature of Advaita Vedanta and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Buddhism. In the West, acosmic tendencies can be found in Parmenides, Spinoza, Schelling (at the time of his “Identity System”) and the British Idealist Bradley.

By contrast with “acosmism” we can define “Cosmic Non-Dualism” as a position that recognizes the fundamental oneness of reality yet does not deny the reality of the empirical world of plurality. The cosmos – the infinite universe with its countless stars, planets, living and non-living beings – is rather seen as somehow manifesting the One that alone truly is. For Cosmic Non-Dualism, the One somehow ‘appears’ as the world of plurality: reality is a unity-in-diversity, an integrated whole with inner complexity, rather than a featureless blob of undifferentiated Oneness – which is the view to which acosmism tends. Consequently, Cosmic Non-Dualism does not tend to world renunciation but rather to the exact opposite, world affirmation, a celebration of empirical existence as the manifestation of divine reality, and an associated ethics of universal compassion and solidarity. Enlightenment is achieved not by rejecting the world, but by embracing it as your own Self. This leads to an ethics of active involvement in the world rather than aloofness from the world. With the separation between Self and Other overcome, you can no longer remain indifferent to the suffering and injustice in the world. You have to act, simply because in helping others you are actually helping yourself – perhaps not, directly, your individual self, your empirical persona, but first and foremost your underlying Self, the creative essence of the universe, of which everything and everyone is an integral part. In the East, such Cosmic Non-Dualism, with its celebration of empirical reality as manifesting the Divine and its ethics of universal solidarity, can be found in Shaivite Tantrism and the Qualified Non-Dualism of the Vedantic philosopher Ramanuja. In the West, cosmic Non-Dualism is a prominent feature of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, who explicitly rejected the extreme world renunciation of Gnosticism, and the philosophy of Hegel, who developed his version of Absolute Idealism partly in criticism of Schelling’s acosmism.

The Superiority of Cosmic Non-Dualism
In my view, the spiritual philosophy of Cosmic Non-Dualism is exactly right for our time. Not only is the factual truth of some form of Cosmic Non-Dualism strongly suggested by what contemporary physicists and philosophers tell us about the holistic unity of the universe, and the place of consciousness in it, Cosmic Non-Dualism also satisfies an urgent ethical and spiritual need that is felt worldwide. As such, it is far superior to Acosmic Non-Dualism, which tends to a nihilist indifference towards the world. This comes out forcefully in Robert Pirsig’s cult novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which is partly autobiographical), where the protagonist – the analytically minded Phaedrus – goes to India to find wisdom but ends up taking classes in Oriental philosophy taught by a professor with a predilection for Advaita Vedanta:

“But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange.” (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Vintage 1999, p. 144)

This is why the difference between cosmic and acosmic forms of Non-Dualism is so utterly crucial! An activist ethics of universal solidarity is precisely what our suffering world needs, torn as it is by ever widening divisions – between the haves and have-nots, between different ethnic groups, between secular society and religious fundamentalism, between mass society and the isolated individual, between the dangerous lure of populism and the aloofness of the political elite, between the interests of economic growth (necessary to feed an ever-growing world population) and the interests of a defenseless nature choking in the mind-numbing garbage heap produced by economic growth. It is now, after all, generally acknowledged that environmental pollution is the driving cause behind catastrophic climate change and diminishment of biodiversity. This is a global problem, affecting our whole planet and everyone on it, requiring a global solution and thus global solidarity.

Here Cosmic Non-Dualism could just be the right stimulus triggering people into collective action, not only to save the precious ecosystem of our planet, but also to eradicate poverty, war, racism, injustice, and the extreme wealth inequality that has become rampant due to 40 years of neoliberal capitalism. What, in the light of these challenges, could be more inspiring and motivating than to learn that you, a seemingly separate and isolated human being, are really not separate at all, that you and the other(s) are actually the same, the same suffering being which is suffering precisely because it hasn’t yet realized what it is, namely, a single being? What could be more conducive to global responsibility and solidarity than the knowledge that you are non-different from the world around you? The Non-Dualist teacher and therapist Jeff Foster puts this wonderfully well:

“It’s myself in Burma, it’s myself in the earthquake. It’s myself starving in Africa. People sometimes hear the message of non-duality and they think that it’s about sitting back and doing nothing. They think it’s about arrogantly sitting back and saying, “Oh, it’s just a dream, it’s just a story, there’s nobody there suffering so what’s the point in doing anything at all?”… Oneness recognises itself in the face of that starving child and can move to help itself, not out of pity, not because it needs to be a good person, that’s nothing to do with it. It doesn’t come from a set morality. But in seeing that it’s all One – and this is the mystery of the universe – somehow it moves to help itself.” (Jeff Foster in Conversations on Non-Duality, p.37)

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