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Non-Dualism, the Advaita and Dvaita

October 19, 2016

Peter Critchley

Non-Dualism, the Advaita and Dvaita


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

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