This is an update for The Non-Duality Trap which I have put at the
end of that article but include here as well.
This piece is by far the most viewed of all the
posts on this blog. Perhaps that reflects a feeling a lot of people have that
non-duality, as it stands, leaves out too much to be a completely coherent
doctrine of existence. As this is also my feeling I have developed ideas only implied here in
further articles which may interest those who feel the non-dualistic point of
view to be too reductive/exclusive/limited, and these can be found by clicking on the non-duality label under Topics on the right. But, briefly, these articles approach the question of non-duality from the position that, yes,
of course, God is One and there is nothing but God, but this unity includes
multiplicity as well as the creative energies which do not belong to a degree
of reality any less real than the undifferentiated, inactive, transcendent
Divine Essence. Thus God’s essential being and His active powers are
ontologically inseparable, and the latter do not belong to an inferior or
somehow illusionary state of being as they tend to be seen to do in advaita.
There is never one without the other and that means that reality is not
dualistic but it is what you might call dyadic. Such a point of view has
implications both for correct spiritual practice and for a proper appreciation
of the reality of individual identity which is not negated in enlightenment, as
it is in advaita, but seen for what it is; a unique and necessary
vehicle through which universal oneness can manifest, know and be known. The
fact that we have an uncreated aspect in pure spirit does not mean that our
created aspect or soul is not real.
So where I take issue with rigid non-dualists is in
their failure to see that individuality is real, and not only real but the very
purpose of manifested existence. You are a true individual. Enlightenment comes when you
go beyond the separate self and know your being to be one and the same as
divine being, but this does not mean that your individual identity is lost.
Post-enlightenment there remains a unique individual with its unique quality,
and that is the locus in which realisation has occurred and without which it
could not have occurred. For realising that you are the Self does not eliminate
the self. Rather it subsumes it, on the one hand, and transforms it, on
the other.
So from this perspective the goal is not for
the individual self to disappear into undifferentiated oneness, as a strict
non-duality would demand, but for it to become transformed into a completely
integrated synthesis of the part with the whole. To be divinized, you might say. And this, I believe, is what is meant when Jesus is described as both God and man. As for him, so for us. It is also the point and purpose of creation, and why there is something rather than nothing.
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