Nonduality
The student of mysticism (me) is astonished that a certain kind of mystical experience is found throughout history and all over the world, almost as if it were somehow universal…? Aldous Huxley was likewise astonished and called these weird symmetries the perennial philosophy, and wrote a whole book about it, a kind of compendium of mysticism from the Dao to Meister Eckhart. The perennialists have become their own wing in mysticism studies: as founding member Romain Rolland says, “mysticism is always and everywhere the same.” What Rolland finds the same is oceanic feeling.
While I am hesitant to decide upon some ultimate truth of the universe—such as, for example, cosmic mind (found in ancient Shaivism no less than Spinoza, or Philip K. Dick for that matter)—it is difficult not to read into the similarities of these various trip reports and their subsequent literature, (from Zen Buddhism, to Plotinus, to Laruelle) and intuit a common structure in the human mind, at the very least, and so to speculate, as Rolland does, less a perennial philosophy than a perennial psychology: a little flower of the psyche that blooms everywhere, all through the year, in any era.
The ancient Hindu name for this flower is Advaita, literally “non-secondness,” but now known as nonduality. Nonduality is at once a philosophy, a practice indifferent to all philosophy and a radically altered mental state. The basic structure of nonduality is like the plot of The Matrix; our day-to-day leather-clad, cybergoth reality is false or illusory, hiding an ultimate reality that is, in fact, a catastrophe, but one that is more true and more real. As everyone knows the matrix is applied to everything all the time these days and there are a variety of pills one may take online to exit your current illusion: orange pills, red pills, black pills and bread pills. As it turns out, true reality is like real-estate: everyone wants to own it—especially if you are a lonely dude, terminally online in the manosphere.
But the non in nonduality is one of non-separation. It is important to note that there are not two worlds in nonduality, rather there is only one: there is the everyday phenomenal world of discrete objects verified by science and discoursed upon by polite society and there is this same world but with the ground removed out from under it; the experience of this same phenomena but without the organization provided by identity, distinctions, or dualities—in which case it may cease being “phenomena” or a “world” altogether.
Imagine that our ego is built, over time, out of a series of provisional dualities or binaries—pleasure/unpleasure, me/not me, male/female, good/bad, real/imaginary. The investment by the ego in these pairs are what the psychoanalyst calls binding, or cathexis. These binaries organize our world to the point where they seem de facto, or given, so obvious as never to be questioned. Subject/object is one such arbitrary binary without which science-world falls apart—the certainty of the scientist (and the ego) is the certainty of me/not me; and yet the difference between scientist and particle is precisely what is problematic in quantum physics.
Composed as it is from these dualities, our psyche forms a natural limit: within the limit run the illusions of our mundane workaday life, beyond the limit is a particular kind of experience, what the psychoanalyst might call unmentalized experience; an impossible experience, to be sure, but one that is more true and more real. It is one of the weirder claims made by the long tradition of nonduality, that we are, in fact, having this impossible experience all the time.
For the practice of Nonduality is less an abolition of duality than an indifference to it in the face of this other experience. As to why such experience can often be so blissed out and profound—or, as it has been said, noetic*—is past my reckoning at this time. If we use dualities to think, and if the One is indifferent to all dualities, then the One is literally unthinkable—as Laruelle says, “foreclosed to thought;” (but not, perhaps, foreclosed to experience). Try to imagine a reality that is both real and imaginary, both subject and object at the same time and you will encounter some of the intractable antinomies of our subject matter.
Nevertheless, we were all born there. While it is commonly assumed that the mystic has a special status, is extraordinary, or removed from society through a long and arduous discipline, or by special revelation, or by psychosis, it must also be true that mystical nonduality is ordinary and fundamental to all human experience; namely the experience of any child under the age of five.
*William James: ”Noetic quality. —Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.” In other words the noetic is a kind of inspiration without cause or origin; what the greeks attributed to the muse, or the daemon, and what the psychoanalyst attributes to the unconscious.
