Beyond Nondual: Not one, Not two.

assuming 'all is one' may be inadvertently keeping us in the loop of trying to resolve dualities

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly. Buckminster Fuller

"Our body and mind are not two, and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one." Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

This post takes a closer look at what might be happening when we use the term nondual or non-dual, a popular term which I will unpack a bit below*. I welcome any knowledge towards better understanding it, and note from the top that this post is a bit harder to parse than most; I do eventually try and explain why that happened.

My feeling is that the term ‘nondual’ has been and still is very important. My feeling is also that we might want to notice what is happening when we use it. In so doing, we may feel ourselves edging into something else.

Photo by Guilherme Stecanella

what matters

This is not a criticism of any of us who use this term, nor is it a call for everyone to stop using it. It is also not a criticism of what we mean by terms like nondual or unity or one-ness or phrases like ‘we are all one’. What we mean is what matters, and what we mean is often trying to share what cannot be named, but our words do at times keep us from actually feeling and exploring this meaningfully because we do not realize that the same process (when represented) only comes in multiplicities.

That is the point I am hoping to reach into and better clarify here. It is a wondering (maybe even a warning, to my ‘self’ included) that something else might be going on. It might be something we want to notice and in noticing it, it might be more likely to shift naturally towards what we are all likely reaching towards when we use the word ‘non-dual’ but which assumptions within these words are keeping us from reaching.

Likewise, there may come a time when saying ‘all is one’ implies something can be represented as one, even when we know it cannot; there is not any one-ness to any way we come into awareness of what we mean by the terms ‘oneness’ and ‘nondual’.

To say ‘all is one’ is to assume there is something other than one-ness, which is the very scaffolding we mean to dissolve by saying ‘all is one’ but which we then perpetuate.

The same is true of non-dual.

If I say non-democrat or non-materialist or nonhuman, you immediately create the scaffold that assumes democrat or materialism or human so as to know what I mean by non-that: it assumes an either/or opposition. The same is true of non-dual. Perhaps using the term nondual has been necessary. Perhaps there is also something beyond it? What would that mean? It’s not a question to be answered but to ask.

Before I get into the heart of this text, let me try and gesture to some clarifications that are only a small fraction of those i would need to address (but if i address all of them, i’ll never write this piece), you can skip these if you don’t want the hedging:

*

…many say the term “non-dual” originates from Sanskrit philosophical traditions, particularly from the concept of advaita (अद्वैत), which literally means “not two” (a = not, dvaita = dual/two)…

…for those of you who follow the philosophical way-making diaries, this is close to what i imagine Francisco Varela’s expansion of not one, not two and the star cybernetics that inspire towards constellation thinking, which is the opposite of being ‘galaxy brained’…

…there is relative to that also the idea in Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy most famously articulated by the 8th-century philosopher Adi Shankara which expresses non-duality in the understanding that ultimate reality (Brahman) and the individual self (Atman) are not separate entities but are fundamentally one and the same…

…the whole term of way-making comes from the translation of ‘tao’ so taoism is also an influence and one that sometimes uses the term, though it most often demonstrates what is meant by it with representations rather than using representations of it (a big difference), but often with ‘two’ such as yin yang…

…as someone who has learned a lot from the philosopher Evan Thompson, i have to say i still need to read Waking, Dreaming, Being (though i think i listened to it on audio once, but have no notes from it alas)…i have been wanting to do this and in writing i am doing now i am thinking a lot about ‘self’ and ‘no-self’ in similar terms here, so all this will be updated below as i move futher into that…also relative to the recent conversation i had with philosopher Thomas Metzinger…

Buddhism has all sorts of non-dual teachings that many of you will be experts on (and I am not) particularly in Madhyamaka philosophy and Zen, though in my own experience with Zen, I (again) find the term ‘non-dual’ is not necessary but rather is expressed through multiplicities so as to avoid representation of a unified absolute reality, though i have no idea if that is on purpose or not…

…i am mostly concerned in this piece with the term ‘non-dual’ or “nondual” as it is now used by many of us via translators and scholars who have tried to convey these philosophical concepts in other languages (for me, especially as they are used in English and German). This term seems to be used by many people all across the board now in all sorts of spiritual and philosophical discourse and seems to at times even be something of an umbrella term encompassing various traditions that emphasize the dissolution of subject-object distinctions and the recognition of fundamental unity. all that is wonderful and yet not a place to stop…

…i don’t think dissolving subject-object distinctions is the same thing as recognizing that we are all part of one continuous process and that we have to understand ‘subject’ and ‘object’ as assessments that process makes of itself with those words meaning something different from each position of assessment; that is what i express in discussing representation…

…in other words, what cannot be assessed is what we assess with these terms…

…it is not ‘united’ because it was never anything but ongoing and in fact, it is always differentiating, just not in any contained or separable space, which is why we can only represent as multiplicities and so much human communication these days is representational.

…the key realization here is that when we communicate as this ongoing-ness about this ongoing-ness, we always do so from some position, which is part of some sequence, which has some orientation, which is thus representational when communicated from perspectival trajectories, and so…

…talking about everything as non-dual has been helpful for us to realize that we are all part of this same process that is without limit and beyond our comprehension but what happens if we realize that this same term is no longer so helpful but is at risk of creating brittle distinctions of in groups and out groups and might even begin to fetishize the experience of ongoingness that the term non-dual was created to point us beyond but which fetishizing points back to…

I am not an expert on anything, regardless of all the academic degrees I have or how long I meditated or how many texts I may have read about Taoism or Buddhism or Dzogchen…i never want to be an expert, but rather a learner for life…

…i also realize ‘non-dual’ is a translation but I do think other translations like ‘inseparable’ are apt to cause many of the same issues i bring up here. speaking of pure anything implies we have gotten out of orientation and sequence and the idea I am trying to get us to consider is that we are never out of those when using representations, even if ‘out of those’ exists, and even when we transcend self, which is definitely possible.

…it really seems to be that for us to say ‘all is one’ implies we think of self as one and it is this very notion of ‘self as one’ that may just be at the root of much assumption that we understand what is never fully understood regardless how much is known…

*

NOTE TO READERS: This is a challenging post. It is also a first wobbly draft, written quickly, because this is an important idea and I need to try and form it before the end of the year. I do not have time to polish it now, but I will try and do so over time. Parts of it may feel frustrating or challenging (even if towards what is ecstatic and liberating) because I am trying to use words here to discuss the idea that words cannot describe what is and the difference between what is and words, and because I am also discussing that very process as I do so. The meta quality of this and its inherent asymmetrical iteration is necessary to really discuss what is meant by ‘holding paradox’ or ‘beyond non-dual’, though I will still try and be as clear as I can.

One point of this blog is to find ways to express such ideas that are not so mind-tangling, but this one might be approaching generative cognitive dissonance in spite of that goal. What I really mean when I say ‘we are not one’ or ‘non-dual is a term that more often causes what it wishes to point beyond’ has come up enough lately (i.e. in commentary discussion of posts by Jonathan Rowson and Rupert Read) that I want to open this thread as a space of explanation that goes wherever it needs to go to try and clarify these statements and to open them to discussion and debate, so I can better learn how to communicate what I know (that is not yet informational or represented) and what I do not know that is.

The point is towards more love and care being possible, not towards assuming there is anything we cannot find those within.

Again: I’m writing this off-the-cuff and from the heart and will go back and edit later. Feel free to do the same in any response. The hope is this can be a safe place and that we can discuss this till it makes more sense. I feel we are on the edge of a real shift, and that we may have to hold some tensions and frustrations with language and representation so as to get a grip on how to experience into it and really use another scaffolding than the either/or dualistic one which no matter how much we resist it still has us all in its grip.

nonduality is not necessary for any of what we mean by it

There are many ways of defining ‘nondual’ and I respect them all. I respect and learn from all the many traditions that have grappled with this same idea. I am not disagreeing with the meaning of them. I probably agree with what is meant by them. Except for the assumption that there is something we can draw a line around. In a nutshell, that is basically a reason to question this term, as we are at a point where we can handle that, and where we do not want to slide into a world of gurus who show us all how to feel free from our thoughts (as wonderful and helpful as that is) as if this is the answer to all the very real difficulty and difference that is at the root of why and how we want to be alive. We don’t actually want to do away with contradiction; we want to understand contradiction beyond our limits of it.

All this is tied up with the way we use representations and how we confuse our communication (and the representations we use to communicate) with our knowing and being. Representations are always communicative, which is why they are so easy to confuse for the process they are made to (alweays inadequately) represent. They are not ‘inside’ of anything; they are always in the communicating.

This is really hard to observe clearly and even harder to put into information and representations as I am trying to do here. But the main idea is that at some point in the collective human sequence of being, through symbolizing what we are noticing as our ongoing (endless, beginningless) inescapably intimate process, we came up with this idea of non-dual so we could communicate about that process and help one another see that these lines we have drawn round ourselves are not lines that actually separate us from the rest of our lives or from all that other process but rather ways we come into knowing there is such a process and it is also us and that we are not our thoughts.

Today, however, this term is perpetuating the same scaffolding that we were hoping to realize and use to edge into another understanding by creating it, which is this notion that there is one thing which observes another thing and that is the way this process is.

It is not way.

Way is ongoing and dynamic and only apprehended via multiplicity and never absolutely. There is no line to be drawn around ‘it’, there is no ‘it’ or ‘the’, and the very idea of ‘its being contained’ is so wrong that we assume it because we cannot yet imagine out of it for the very reason that we are so used to ‘it’. But that might be wrong. Because: can we? If we can, it will not be by assuming the scaffolding of two. It will be by understanding we have scaffolded in two’s so as to understand what is always multiple even as those multiples are inseparable. Because we look back at the sequence scaffolded by duality, we assume duality to be inherent, even in the ways we try and say ‘all is one’. But just because something seems to have always been does not mean it has to be. To say this process we are realizing from so many positions is non-dual sets us up to somehow follow that sequence as it has been, to believe in the opposite of dual as if that were also one thing. It is a loop so hard to see that many of the very best minds, even as they try and succeed to alert us to the pitfalls of it, still use it.

It’s very hard not to do so precisely for the reasons that it has long been our assumed scaffolding. And also because of the iteration of multiplicity in the way it represents what it experienced and how this feels like a double-ing. To begin to understand it as multiple-ing, we may have to stop ourselves in the double-ing long enough to open that stimulus to a more constellatory response.

Photo by The New York Public Library

There are many ways within many traditions whereby many people have recognized this and way is known without expression or expressed without claiming to have represented it. Likewise, many people are now trying to find ways to edge into these other ways of noticing and being together beyond those scaffolds. We’ve now had 79 published conversations about exactly this on Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy. Still, it is the hardest thing in the world to express or gesture towards without trapping. Even as that movement is where all meaning and excitement lives.

non dualisms

Let’s allow ‘nondual’ rather generally then, as something like ‘the ultimate unity of everything’. Whether this is understood as emptiness, a lack of separation, or a metaphysical position where reality is fundamentally one substance, principle, or ground, the point I am making still applies if it is spoken of in terms of being one or not two), as one in contrast to twoness or multiplicity.

What has never been separated is always seperated when expressed representationally, even as what is represented has no relation at all to ‘separate-ness’. I try and get at that point a lot of different ways and usually don’t speak through such Hegel-like mystics, but honestly, there are just times that choosing to write in a way that will be immediately clear and not require some dissonance is to stay within the very scaffolds one would like to explore beyond.

There is a fine line between this and writing obscurely and it is one I have been exploring in all sorts of conversations practically for well over a decade (see this one I had with Homi Bhabha at Harvard back in tthe 2000s for example) so I get the whole argument that sometimes people write in obscure ways so that many interpretations remain possible (and thus there is always a ‘way out’ to any philosophical argument) but that is really not the intention here. Instead, I am trying to state what literally cannot be said exactly. Still, here’s one try: the point is that when we try and discuss what we mean by putting what we mean in terms of ‘one’ or ‘non-two’, we end up perpetuating the scaffold of dualism because we have assumed it so as to refute it.

We do this in spite of what we actually mean, which is why we continue in this same loop of discussion relative to basically all these framings that are the current bread and butter of philosophy, such as mind and body or matter and spirit or matter and consciousness or mental and physical or the way so many get so excited and turned on by Platonism (understandably!!) and so on. And yes, I am well aware of the many ways people claim their side is the side that solves this, but the point here is that our edging into something else is not about solving this. I ask us to take a step back and notice that this very framework assumes this is not the case, which is also why we get so passionate about arguing over it and why there has been so little progress and why it can feel so orgasmic (frankly) to stew in these juices.

This might seem trivial, and indeed it is. It is so trivial that it influences absolutely everything. That means it also influences the divisions that cause us the most pain and violence. I will give some examples below, but first, I want to be clear that what I am drawing attention to here is not what we (likely) all mean (or at least think we mean) when we use this term and discuss the unity and oneness of subject and object or matter and consciousness or whatever other ‘duals’ are in question. My point here is that we are assuming those dualistic framings and perpetuating them in our very attempt at dissolving them. It is a little bit like ‘fighting for peace’ or ‘dictating to avoid tyranny’ except it isn’t actually like that at all because those at least state and understand their contradictions where ‘non-dual’ seems to give itself a free pass by saying it is beyond contradictions as itself, but there is nothing beyond contradiction that is dual. In its most unmeant moments, non-dual can thus become a sleight of hand at the level of the representational and so much harder to notice and much easier to habituate in good faith, whereas all those other examples are actually tensions that can be transformed beyond what is being contrasted as irreconcilable precisely because we understand them to be contradictions.

In the case of nondual, however, there is no way to reconcile the representational with what the representational represents because it is the communication itself. You cannot reconcile your ‘speaking of a word’ with your voice or your brushstrokes with the artwork they’ve created; there’s nothing to be reconciled. This is how it is with our use of nondual and what we are using it to create; the dipole is the creation that it claims to have overcome. In discussing ‘all as one,’ we always create two.

Another way of saying this might be to make this point: Nothing is one. Not even a person. We are not one because even individuals are not one. To try and pretend otherwise is to assume what we hope to reach some final place, which will mean there was an inside and outside or one and two; this is actually what we imply is saying we are nondual or ‘all is one’—we are claiming self is not a multiplicity, but self is our representation and is never one, so neither can ‘all’ be.

no person is one

One-ness is created by an either/or mindset that cannot assume anything without lines being drawn and thus also the assumption of beginnings and ends. This is pretty helpful and pretty necessary in many ways, but will it always be so? What is most radical about what I am suggesting here is that way is beyond beginning or ends which means all we are trying to do is help one another see more way and we do that through representations which are like little snippet or snapshot attempts to re-present what we have experienced of what is always much more than we can even experience.

This is likely what we point to with words like nondual or oneness, except we use constrictions that keep us trying to resolve what we have experienced beyond those constrictions.

To edge into another habit that is not doing this means rethinking all those beginnings and ends that seem to exist, including the assumption that we are one person or self. This is dangerous and can become illness if we are not in community and that is why we need these training wheels and may always need them, but we can at least understand them as such. We can still use these constrictions to feel ‘grounded’ and do so without any sort of guilt, because living the fullness of multiplicity is really hard and we are still trying to figure out how to do it or even if we can do it. Still, the very experience we are meaning by nondual is already partly meaning into this, even as it says otherwise so as to keep a hand on the boat; it does throw our notion of self into question, and that oceanic experience is also likely the experience that somehow somewhere led to the term ‘nondual’. It gave us a way (representationally speaking) towards edging into the levels of sensuality, meaning and potential that come if we find way holding what still for most of us seems impossible to hold—that being, there are no containers even if the thickness of it all from each of our positions can operate as such so as to continue.

Another way of saying this is: To embrace that we are multiple and that there are separations is (paradoxically) the only way to begin to feel into how we might express (via language and information) what we mean and feel beyond the representational.

I’ve gotten a bit too far out, so let me try and give a more immediate example of how the current scaffolding filters into the ways we assume one another and society. To get a glimpse at what we create by assuming one-ness, we can look at what it means if we allow this same idea to nest into the way we think of any single person. If we consider the life we are interacting with through the lens of one-ness, it is quite helpful and even common sense because we need a way to say that we are talking to our mother and not our father or this friend and not that one. And yet, if we continue in that sequence, we also notice that we may have defined these people, these ongoing dynamic calibrations of changing energy and action, in ways that want them to stay in a particular mode, to be the same one, to be one. We might even go on seeing them as this one even when they are actually not. In other words, it becomes much easier for us to then make the mistake of thinking any one quality or action can thus be taken as telling us about all of them. Or it becomes necessary for inconsistency to be ‘explained' by something like an illness rather than something like a learning process.

This really matters for the ways we implicitly assume sides and stick to those sides even in the face of destruction. It really matters to how we flip-flop or cling to sides based on how one charismatic person comes off. It matters for understanding why one person might think someone is ‘evil’ while someone else (maybe even someone close to the first person, someone they love) thinks that same person is here to save the world. It has to do with the filter of one-ness assumed. When we define a person as one, we are very likely to then orient all their actions through that perspectival trajectory and thus to only align our own sequences with the sequences of theirs which we have trained our senses to notice.

We might then encounter someone who has had a very different experience and alignment relative to their perspectival trajectory in response and thus we feel as if we cannot learn from them or even listen to them. And so instead of this contradiction leading us beyond it, it becomes the addictive loop that keeps us trying to resolve it. And since it is by nature irresolvable, that loop never does find its release.

Photo by Wannes De Mol

Think of the worst person you can from history and I am sure you can find a story of them doing something that good or kind that does not fit with that one definition. Think of the best person of the world and I am sure you can find a story of them doing what does not fit to being ‘that sort of person’. Now hold the paradox and realize both of those and multiple other such potentials are happening from all sorts of positions of assessment all the time, each being assumed as indicative of the ‘one’. It is the assumption of the one that creates the inability to understand all these as representations of what cannot ultimately be represented. These are all representations, all this is multiplicity (not one), and that is how we know what is trying to be represented in all these separate ways is what those sorts of division or separations can never capture (thus what does not apply) but when we do not see this, the scaffold of the dual puts us back in dualistic scaffolds.

This is why the way that can be expressed in language is not the way.

Or why you have to kill the Buddha if you see the Buddha because it’s obviously not the Buddha if you’ve been able to decide for sure that this is any one thing at all.

Again, this may seem overwhelming, or trivial, but it’s hard to keep track of (and the only thing to keep track of) when we assume words like nondual or one actually express what we are trying to show to one another. It is also what leads to a lot of confusion—that a man responsible for the deaths of millions was good to dogs or that a beloved monk was an alcoholic and bully when drunk will actually sway people away from sensing into what cannot be said but is painfully begging to be sensed from all those directions.

Reading Michael Polanyi in depth recently, I was struck by how beautifully he notices the ongoing rhythm by which we come into knowing, but also by how he discusses these as ‘internal contradictions’ as if they must be resolved—as if it is because there was an internal contradiction in the French revolution that we got to violence, or with the Russian revolution and stance to Stalin. In fact, it is not the internal contradictions that lead to other extremes but rather the overall scaffolding that says there cannot be contradictions and thus the tendency to assume what is contradictory must be part of one side. Then we do this till it is too late. Assuming all is one rather than understanding that all that is shared will always and can only be represented as multiplicity might be leading to this in spite of all of us wanting otherwise.

Contradictions matter a great deal because they show us where other paths are, but they are not dualistic, they only look dualistic from any one position because any one position will always have an opposite, even if all those positions and points are in constant constellation.

Photo by Alexander Grey

The constellation is what we are trying to share with one another, only seen as opposition through the orientation, sequencing and perspectival trajectory from whatever means of assessment we make until we learn to do this more kaleidoscopically. That we do not acknowledge that this is an assessment and thus that it cannot be discussed without taking orientation, sequence and perspectival trajectory of the assessor (or position of assesment, if it is a group or etc.) into question is the cognitive blind spot that can easily happen via terms like non-dual or non-dualistic due to all these assumptions we’ve been discussing.

Contradictions then allow flip flops based on some skewed misperception of statistics that justify more of the same dualistic destructions that bring anxiety and even panic and keep us looped in to trying to resolve what that trying only produces more of, thus the endless addictive looping.

To pretend that because we are all ‘what is’ (way) and there is no absolute end or separation to that is not to say ‘all is one’ but rather to find a way to understand how all this shared connection and relation will always look different from any position of measurement due to whatever navigational sequence and perspectival trajectory is that position’s orientation. When we use terms like oneness and nondual, are we aware that all that is actually what we are bringing to whatever we are talking about, and that all of that is towards trying to share what cannot be assessed fully or in anything but parts (even as it has or is none)? This has to do with the understanding that an assessment is communicative of what is always changing, and can look many many different ways from different positions—so there is no avoiding contradiction, but we can understand that contradiction as pointing beyond itself; we can use it to open us into understanding contradictions as constellations that hold entire galaxies of potential new discoveries via other perspectival trajectories.

To go back to Polanyi, in his wonderful History and Hope Lecture Series (which you can read or listen to in full here), he stakes a lot on inner contradiction being what comes out when these sorts of situations ‘vomit’ (apparently that is a real term for what happens when someone who has been so dedicated to one side suddenly sees through that side, realizing it is not the ‘one’ which it had staked everything on, and that they tried to believe it was for too long). As he expresses it, this happens when a fanatic of one side

“who had at first resolutely accepted dishonest paintings and novels, and even its theory of party-truth eventually got sick at these. They had to vomit. The word "vomiting" has actually become a technical term in Poland and Hungary for this reversal of inverted man; the act by which he violently turns himself right-way-up.”

He is on to something here, though he also seems to suggest we need to be rid of contradictions if we want this to change which to me would be a sort of swing from one vomit to the next, which indeed may be a pattern we see in history, but does it always have to be?

I have not listened to or read the full lecture series yet so maybe we will get to that at some point. But if we stay in this blaming of the internal contradiction, then that would be the non-dual route at its trickiest, trying to dissolve the contradictions into pure awareness or unity thus leads us to actually ignore the portal in those contradictions wanting to take us into a deeper sense of the connection and sensuality of what has never been separate and yet is always multiply realizable in representations.

Here is another quote from the opening lecture where Polanyi discusses the subjects above in more depth, a description of ‘the vomit’ that happens, a sort of swing from one side of the dichotomy to the other:

“They demanded freedom to write the truth; to write about real people, real sentiments and problems; to report truthfully on current events and on matters of history. In demanding this they reverted to beliefs they had previously abhorred and even violently suppressed. I quote this from a speech by a formerly leading Stalinist, a young man called Gimes, who has since been hanged by Kadar in Hungary: he spoke of the doctrine of party-truth which “affected not only those who thought out the faked political trials, but often infested even the victims; this outlook -- he said -- which poisoned our whole public life, penetrated the remotest corners of our thinking, obscured our vision, paralyzed our critical faculties, and which finally rendered many of us incapable of simply sensing or apprehending any truth.”

Polanyi’s idea of inversion is towards holding paradox but still turning to take the loop instead of taking the asymmetrical fractal/spiral staircases. The answer to this predicament as described in his work is not to resolve contradictions or dissolve them into one. In trying to do so, we will only create ever more potential contradictions. We cannot be rid of contradictions precisely because we are all ‘all that is’ so there is no way for there not to be the appearance of contradiction from some position relative to some other once those have bee represented (and if they are positions, they are already represented). This is because no matter how we represent it, we will all be representing from or as different spatiotemporal trajectories: This is true for the same reason that you can always look across the room from where you are and see the opposite side. That opposite is never absolute, and it is always real in that moment. To confuse this is to try and resolve sides of the room into one another, or to try and make one spatiotemporal position BE another one at the same moment, which will always just push all into another version of contradiction just doesn’t work and will only perpetuate whatever we are trying to resolve.

Photo by Susn Matthiessen: Living in Berlin

Some will likely be thinking: Well gosh if we can’t use terms like ‘nondual’ (which, by the way, is not at all what I am saying but which I realize might sound that way), I guess we just cannot talk at all! We just have to stop using words altogether right? No, there is a big difference between using words to help one another get a better impression of what cannot be expressed in words, and deciding not to use words at all. I am advocating for the first option here in contrast to silence, though there are also times for that.

This idea that if we do not just keep on going with our current use of ‘nondual’ or ‘all is one’ (or the dismissive attitude that a person already understands exactly what they mean by them and it just includes everything) is one of the most common responses, especially before having really tried to read into this, that I and others get when we try and discuss holding paradox. I understand it, but it really is not what this is about and I promise that the work it takes to see through what you might want to quickly dismss is worth it.

Orientation and perspectival trajectories becoming part of how we interact with any sort of train (sequence) of feeling or thought is a way that opens us into new understandings that do not require any sort of decisions about what term ‘should not be used’ for the very reasons that representations are communicative. I go into that in all sorts of other ways in other books and papers, so I will not here, but the point is: we can do this if we begin to orient beyond the either/or assumption so as to look at layers of sequences and trajectories that do not begin and end and that are thus always only partially viewed from any position and from all positions; they are themselves only representational of the process they help us understand and which can not be represented. If nondual is clearly saying all this when we use it, that’s great. If not, maybe we can state it when we use that term and then it becomes clear rather than part of the assumed either/or scaffold most likely to take root once we are primed by the world ‘dual’ no matter if non is in front of it.

It’s a lot to handle, but it can be held, just never fully by any ‘one’.

So, let me say it one more time: Not using words is definitely not the answer anymore than a brushstroke being part of an artwork means the only way not to have the affect of that brushstroke is not to have any artwork. Or the only way not to say a certain word aloud is not to use your voice. We don’t have to stop using nondual, but we might find we no longer need it.

At the moment, nondual does a lot to open us to understanding there is something other than the duality that is often unconsciously assumed, and yet we might better understand what we are discussing through terms that do not imply ‘two’. Still, the term is at the heart of a lot of good loving life and that means it’s doing something rich and real. It also means we have to be careful not to think it’s the last step or final word and assume it’s always carrying all the nuance and potential we are becoming more capable of through its very use, reifying ourselves into what is no longer flow.

The same goes for ‘all is one’ which is actually a very helpful phrase for helping us have that first experience we all must have whereby we realize we have been assuming dualistic ways of being (or that there even is such a thing!) and that all those contrasts are just ways we better notice what is immanent and has never been separable, to use the moment’s preferred terms.

The point is: nondual and ‘all is one’ point towards what we can also walk past them to experience.

Rather than banning words, I would suggest adding rather than erasing: ‘beyond non-dual’ is already something, for example, because it alerts us to all of this even if it does not quite work into all the navigation needed to nuance it. Still, instead of talking about ‘one-ness’, perhaps we can discuss the coherence (or lack of coherence) in multiplicity. This makes more sense, too, for helping us get a better and less rigid understanding of the people who move us and by which we are in all ways moved.

The idea is that instead of thinking of multiplicity as a bad thing (and that can happen when the dipole is asserted and we only mantra ‘all is one’), that we might embrace our contradictions as evidence beyond themselves towards the reality of being multiplicities in representation as evidence of all that is not able to have such fragmentation applied—the multiplicity is a sign of something that is not it, that of which we want to experience when we talk about what has never been separated, that which is us and with which we communicate to become more meaningful and exciting, not through expansion or contraction but through whatever is beyond all our ways of expressing all this encounter.

With such a stance, meditation is then less likely to be assumed as a way to drop out of reality (we are less likely to use it only as an escape or an answer to what is) but rather as a means for being better able to hold our own multiplicity and better discover and understand it in all and every being we encounter, which is the portal into a better feeling for and knowing with all that multiplicity can never represent.

Meditation and spiritual practice, at least as far as I see them in this moment as I write this, are not about one part of life (a self, body, person, etc.) isolating and transcending, but rather more about how this part of life (a self, person, body, etc.) might better communicate and edge into new waters relative to what it thinks itself to be with what it knows as being: A simpler way to say this is that meditation helps us be able to handle how much we are and cannot escape, which is beginning-less and endless.

If we begin to look at it like this, we don’t mediate to escape but to expand what we can handle about ourselves and even what we understand as self and all its relations. Meditation helps us understand that the growing tip of our cognition, our thinking self or mind, is just one nested part of our own bodily cognition, which is itself nested in larger movements of life, and so forth—it helps us sit with this overwhelmingly big (too big and with too much detail and minutia) sense of what we are part of and it helps us develop the patience and love to be present with that challenging ongoing-ness; the more we can handle, the more we are likely to sense and experience of this ongoing endlessness of which our thinking self is just a tiny tip. We really are so much more than we can ever think or put any image or word upon. And there are constantly churning portals in this.

When we say we are experiencing non-dual awareness, perhpas what we really mean is that we are experiencing what is ‘beyond non-dual’, beyond our self and the body that self is communicating with or with that body and the social body in which it communicates, because all these are representations we create so as to communicate about what cannot be represented precisely because it is not one.

What this really gets down to (as already expressed) is the assumption of beginnings and ends. When we use the term non-dual, we might mean that we are responsible for one another, or that we are one another, but we are also assuming that there are ends and beginnings that correspond to what we have come to be aware of about the life we are and live from and as; we are assuming something as what it is, which can be contrasted with what is not. In truth, this is like a drop of water assuming itself different from the ocean that is constantly co-creating it, except that it is nothing like that because this ‘ocean’ is not nameable and thus has no beginning or end.

Contrast and directionality are absolutely necessary assumptions for us to create anything representational and it can be very positive; creating language and images and all the art and books and poetry those representations allow depends on it. We want this, we need this. And yet, there is so much more that might not even be on our radar yet so long as we only scaffold through it. We assume beginnings and ends and outside and inside and all the other either/or contrasts so we can find better ways to communicate about what they are all communicating about, which has not separableness. The tricky part is how not to impose our representational scaffolding upon the communication itself, or upon what is communicating and shared, and thus how to edge our senses into more of themselves.

Another example would be the difference between the alphabet and what we use that alphabet to communicate. Whatever we use that alphabet to communicate is not containable and does not begin or end with the alphabet because there would not be any point of separation—whatever we communicate, it would always be about better noticing, sensing and understanding what is ongoing, undivided and continuous and thus what can become newly clothed with these combinatorial letters.

Some of you will likely feel some resistance to this idea because you will think something along the lines of: I use language to communicate that I am on my way home from work and that is an event that begins and ends.

But does it? Or have you imposed the scaffolding of the language upon what is not actually existing as ‘scenes’ of life whereby you start and stop such that there is actually no episode in your life that can be separated from any other episode in your life, even if this is the way you experience it through thinking, that thinking being oriented by sequences such as films. There actually is not any episode of getting in the car and driving home that is separate from all that you have lived, except via the languages and images you use to communicate this to others or to yourself.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev

We segment so as to communicate, especially to ourselves, then we assume the segmentation on what we were communicating about. It’s very hard to keep that open into the spiral of itself, and so it often closes and loops instead.

To come back to the work of Michael Polanyi one more time before we go, and to express this via the subsidiary focal integration (or tacit focal integration), we can say this: We have become so focal on ‘one’ that we’re not noticing the clues anymore beyond that loop, we’re not letting that ongoing dialectical intrachange continue for us because we seem to think pure awareness is it.

We are not one because ‘one’ is a representation within a scaffolding that assumes opposition as the stopping and starting point. We could move into the constellatory or kaleidoscopic from there, only if we understand it to be representation and thus multiplicity. We are what that phrase (‘we are one’) was created to help us notice, and wonderful as it is, necessary even in layers, important as wholeness, it is not our one-ness we are actually trying to reach (because that would imply there is something other than continuity, some end of stopping point) but rather that all each of us does is influenced by and influencing all that is possible for all of us. We are not one. We are ongoing movements that cannot be represented but that we represent right now as dual everything. What if we could ease out of dualistic scaffolds via opening those points into paths? What if we had to do the hard work of always attaching orientations and sequences and perspectival trajectories to any assessment, any position? We may realize we cannot be separated from ourselves, or from one another, and that this is not expressing it. This might hurt the head and most would rather fall back into the easy sentences that help us feel warm and fuzzy (and there is actually reason to do that sometimes) but we can also see the subsidiary beyond this focal one-ness and in that, expand our intuition and potential for sensory connection, care and creation. It’s literally why we’re here. It is a way to feel the meaning of life.

We all want meaning and care. And we can easily confuse one another with thinking this can be fully grasped and had.

In that sense, sometimes we assume nondual awareness is where we should always be, or people try to live and swim in what we think of as nondual which is to say as that which has no contrast or contradiction, and this is heartbreaking because it is usually a recipe for losing touch with the practice of being able to notice and handle and be present with the real; in other words, it usually disembodies and disengages, which is quite the opposite of what is being sought. Reality will always come with a contrast that one might feel they are supposed to dissolve, a kind of craving to be in that non-dual space again that can make us do all sorts of stuff to get back, including getting addicted to various sorts of actions or ingestants.

The difference that makes a difference here is that when we use a term like nondual to communicate about the experience of what is always us and holding us, we do so in assumption of the contrast of experience whereby we feel or do not feel this epiphany. And in so doing, we set up conditions whereby we are trying to get to a place, even if that place is what already and only is in its movement beyond beginning or end. This might not seem like such a big deal, except that it amplifies into exactly the sorts of tragedies we write history books about and would probably like not to have to live through ourselves or make others live through again, even as they seem to continually recreate so long as we try and dissolve the contrast and contradiction ‘inherent’ in them.

In Letter to the Sorbonne, Descartes states what so many are still stating via this same attempt, namely that in philosophy, “the belief is that everything can be argued either way; so few people pursue the truth, while the great majority build up their reputation for ingenuity by boldly attacking whatever is most sound.” This is the same sort of scaffolding we find just about everywhere, including in Descartes and the many interpretations and condemnations of his work, which have scaffolded so much of our everyday life and language and which everybody likes to blame for the dualism we all claim no longer to believe in and yet which shapes all our representations and which our very condemnation of dualism perpetuates.

When we use non-dual we are talking about what is not representational—about what is not symbolic or linguistic or able to be reproduced in words—but we don’t always know that, and we do not always realize we are doing this representationally. We often assume we can draw a line around ‘what is and what is not’ dual, in process and practice, and forget to hold in mind that this drawing of lines can only be done representationally, in the explicit representational ways we communicate. Nondual, as a form of representation, assumes this same scaffolding towards its subject—towards the very process in which we are and of which we cannot draw a line around. Nondual assumes there is dual, to put it as simply as possible, and even though most of us realize we are actually using this word so as to get past dualism, what we are doing by using it is applying the very scaffolds we want to move beyond and setting it up that we have to resolve them, which creates more of them. We have a lot more around us and as us that we can feel into, and it will likely come once we notice these current scaffolds and dance them into something beyond non-dual. Perhaps that which is beyond self is that which is all multiplicity.

Photo by Fonsi Fernández on Unsplash

postscript

Subjective/Objective: We discuss subjective and objective a lot on Love and Philosophy and there is this whole idea of beyond dichotomy which means something like what we have been discussing here from a different angle. Beyond subjective/objective means holding both not one and not two but without the representational format of ‘one and two’, just as beyond nondual means holding both the dualistic representation of what is and the understanding of it as a representation. We often get stuck defending one side of the subjective/objective in science and personal experience and thus we perpetuate the very scaffolding itself. To hold paradox is to allow those to be irreconcilable and each to be one way of understanding what is and to expect both to have different paths but paths nonetheless that would need to be better assessed and understood according to each situation.

Space/Time: For those of you who might also be interested in how this relates to time and space and thus may have some good advice or idea for me related to the connections of ‘space’ and ‘time’ as we use them (which is also ‘non-dual’ in this way, even if never articulated as such), let me share this quote from something I wrote in Ecological Memory: the spatiotemporal commons of conceptual and physical navigation and that I just remembered thanks to a discussion about a discussion I had with neuroscientist Lynn Nadel about the hippocampus. It is trying to unstick the representational from what we use the representational to discuss, which is never actually representation-able:

There are dual arguments in philosophy and science about what space and time are and how to understand them (Arthur, 1994). Both “absolute vs. relational” (i.e., Newton vs. Leibniz) and “objective vs. subjective” (i.e., Bergson vs. Einstein) are worthy ways of doing measurement; what matters are their results. As Newton understood and was made obvious by Einstein, space and time (however defined) are always from a position (DiSalle, 2006a). Like velocity, they are not properties of an object but positioned measurements. Space and time, like velocity, depend on the position measuring. Kant also noticed this, writing that “our knowledge of space is inseparable from our means of representing it to ourselves in experience” (DiSalle, 2006). In other words, “exploratory experience is not a passive representation or perception of space but a construction of relationships“ (Buzsáki & Llinás, 2017), an active measurement:

In classical physics, the ‘theater’ or ‘container’ metaphor of space and time determines the exact location and speed of a particle. Distance and duration are equated via velocity. Research in neuroscience continues to be performed within this framework of classical physics (4), even though in contemporary physics ‘there is no longer space which ‘contains’ the world, and there is no time ‘in which’ events occur, (Buzsáki & Llinás, 2017).

Oddly, the same body (position) can have different perspectives, one position of measurement can be shared among bodies (as with standardized metrics), and a perspective can measure from a position different from its own. In The Monadology, Leibniz offers a way to understand how points of view can overlap and shift (Rescher, 1991). Tweaking this, the physicist Lee Smolin suggests that Leibniz’s monad might be point of view—taking Leibniz as literally as possible to see a monad not as a substance but as what Daniel Dennett calls a stance (Dennett, 1987), even better understood as position, since one need not stand to have one.

For Smolin, there is no ‘outside’; all is a matter of relations of events (Smolin, 2018). We use the ecological the same way a fish uses water. If space is understood as measurements of relations, the monad is a position in that relation, a point from which the ongoing activity can be measured or viewed. Self is always a representation because it is always a position’s measurement, a perspective (Llinás, 2001; Wolff et al., 2019). This reorients what is meant by temporal and spatial. They are no longer positions in a container but positions in an encounter.

Just as populations of neurons do not have to be near one another to fire at the same time to be coded as a population (Buzsáki, 2006, 2019), space and time are measurements that can be taken from multiple dimensions or positions of relation. Spatiotemporality is continuous, but its patterns differentiate according to the position taking the measurement; the encounter is continuous even if the measurements are discrete.

This means we can observe statistical regularities of continuous patterns (activities) as they evolve and translate, and our representations of them are not what they measure but its measurement. Understanding cognition as continuous with navigation means understanding as sensemaking of the ongoing encounter as part of that encounter (Weick, 1995). Space and time measure how those positions change ecologically; this transcendence of bodily position is a capability of something like the representational framework of science, so long as we realize these are only communicative.

Photo by Leonhard Niederwimmer on Unsplash

From ‘taking positions’ to exploring paths

Way-making, my work related to the hippocampus, and the many conversations with others who are edging into something else, have had at heart this discussion of ways beyond non-dual as their center for quite a while now. I also discuss moving from positions to paths through navigational cues like orientation, sequence, and perspectival trajectory. I won’t go into all that here, but here’s a recent philosophical diary if you want to listen to it, though beware it is also not a finished piece.

Some references

Not One, Not Two paper by Francisco Varela

Knowing and Being by Michael Polanyi

Hope and History lecture quoted here by Polanyi

Discussion with Esther Meek

Discussion with Evan Thompson