Radical Nondualism

I’m obsessed with nondualism. I see it as the peak of philosophy. Occasionally I hear about western philosophers debating reality or reason, and I’m like, Wow these people don’t know how far behind they are. Thousands of years ago, all this shit was figured out by rishis in India debating and challenging each other under the sponsorship of kings in Iron Age India. By the time the Roman Empire was Christianized, Buddhists and Hindus finished the game. They found the Truth and the Truth is nondualism.

Nondualism is not an easy concept to understand. It’s grounded in logic yet it is paradoxical. The classic thought exercise neti-neti asks you to negate what you are. I am not my name. I am not my identity. I am not my body. I am not a mind. Et cetera. What are you left with? Something that always is, is always on, can never be turned off. What am I but existence itself, awareness itself, existence-awareness-bliss, satchitananda. This is everything, everywhere, all at once. My perception is bound to a region of awareness but awareness itself is unbound. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, do we just ignore the tree’s awareness or the forest’s awareness? 

This is merely a taste of nondualism. It’s such a tough concept to understand that people like myself need to spend at least an entire lifetime thinking about it to understand. Nondualism is just a word, a label. The concept is known by many names, from Brahman of Hindus to Sunyatta of Buddhists to Tao to the Taoists to the Perennial Philosophy of Huxley. I mean, he called it “perennial” for a reason: this Truth remains true across culture, language, experience, probably even species and the nonliving. It’s a fundamental property of the universe. 

I started watching a video about heretical Christian groups out of curiosity and I stopped the video after hearing the creator say, “Everything can’t be Christian because if everything is Christian, then nothing is Christian.” I took exception to that. Why? To generalize, “if everything is X, then nothing is X” is a statement that is inherently dualistic. A more truthful statement would be, “Everything is X and nothing is X.” I know, it sounds insane if you’re not already following me. How can opposites be the same? Well, they’re two opposite sides of the same thing. In fact, the opposites themselves don’t exist but are appearances. Heads and tails aren’t real, only the coin exists. The creator might argue, “‘Everything is Christian and nothing is Christian’ is a heretical statement.” I have to pause to correct myself after I looked up the actual quote by the creator: “If ‘Christian’ can mean anything, then it means nothing.” Close enough. Still heretical in his view for me to change the if-then to an and, so my point remains. Christian can mean anything because it means nothing. Drawing a line between Christian and non-Christian (or, in this case, heretical Christian) is an expression of ignorance.

Anything, everything, and nothing are all the same in nondualism. Understandably, this is still confusing to occidentals. After all, language is dualistic, and reasoning is dualistic. Hegel’s dialectic is built on dualistic reasoning but it wants to be nondualism. Another video I saw recently suggested that, instead of the typical right-left debate discourse that happens around the holidays in America, people should bring back the Hegelian-Kierkegaard debate. Kierkegaard rejected Hegel’s dialectic because of the existence of paradoxes, nonrationality, the Absurd. He advocated for a leap of faith to overcome what he considered to be the failure of Hegel’s reason. The video creator (@dan_doug) humorously said that his uncle responded, “Why do we have to choose, can’t it be a bit of both?” to which he attacked his uncle as a “filthy no-good rotten Hegelian,” the two had a fistfight, and hugged it out, demonstrating an ironic synthesis between the thesis of Hegel and the antithesis of Kierkegaard.

As a nondualist this was also funny to me because it reminded me of how far behind the times Europe was in terms of philosophy. Except for Spinoza, who was ahead of his time and place. Such a shame that Hegel dismissed Indian philosophy as primitive. Dumbass, LOL! You know who did not dismiss the Indians, namely the Upanishads? Schopenhauer, another Hegel-hater. Where he and Kierkegaard differed was their approach to life and the solution to suffering: asceticism versus faith, a concept familiar to anyone who studied the Bhagavad Gita. I knew that by their time, more and more Europeans were learning about eastern philosophy, so I looked up where Nietzsche falls into the picture. He did study Buddhism to an extent, Hinduism to a much lesser extent. Nietzsche was a more active rebel against Reason, arguing that we are free to create our own values through Will to Power; it’s not “I have to” but “I get to.” My issue with Nietzsche is his dismissal of Buddhism as nihilistic, which more than anything points to the occident’s history of incompletely understanding Indian philosophy. 

The apparent division between Buddhism and Hinduism is manufactured by foreign perspectives. Sure, there are superficial differences, but so there are between regional forms of Buddhism across Asia. Each religion is a collection of many philosophies, and one stands tallest as the Truth: nondualism. For Hindus, this is Advaita Vedanta, the nondual interpretation of the Upanishads captured in tat tvvam asi; for Buddhists, this is Madhyamaka, the doctrine of sunyatta. Occidental historians place these around the same time period as the Roman Empire, though the margin of error on Indian histories often exceed 100 years. Classical India, as often described from the Maurya period through the Gupta period, and the early medieval period saw a proliferation of philosophies, building on top of the ancient Vedic traditions or building around them. Buddhism and Jainism were nastika schools, meaning they did not recognize the authority of the Vedas but maintained virtually identical beliefs around Dharma, reincarnation, and freedom from the transient material world. The religious definition of Hindu (distinct from its political definition) comprises the various astika traditions that do recognize the authority of the Vedas. Notably, there is no record of holy wars in India between nastika and astika traditions (unless you choose to believe dubious accounts written centuries after any events happened). Instead, the many kings of the early medieval periods sponsored scholars and institutions like Nalanda University, the premier learning center for India and Southeast Asia during the medieval period, with discourse and debate much like that of the occidentals that followed a millennium later.

It comes down to this: there is a system with no beginnings and no ends–is it empty or full? If your brain works like mine, you imagine a circle. Empty or full? Is there a difference? What bounds the circle in your mind, emptiness or fullness? The real system is unbound but I find it provocative to ask nonetheless. Does the system have a creator or a maintainer? If it’s empty, then it always was and always will be without maintenance. If it’s full, then the fullness created it and the fullness maintains it. 

That’s all it is! So when people act like there is a difference between Buddhism and Hinduism… like I guess culturally, sure, as much there is a difference between India and Thailand and Vietnam and Tibet and Japan. Because Buddhism has a tendency to merge with local deities. This is because of another facet of Buddhism that occidentals don’t fully understand: Buddhism is a nontheistic religion–not atheistic. There is a cosmic order, and understanding the order is the key to breaking through to the other side (metaphorically). People who do so become Buddhas, and people who get pretty close but stay in the world with helpful intentions are Bodhisattvas. Deities (known as Devas) exist but they do not create the system or maintain the system; much like us, they exist and operate within the system. Only their position is worse than ours because we can attain enlightenment during a human lifetime but they can’t. This is identical to the Advaita Vedanta view: Devas cannot attain moksha but we can because we get the right mix of pain and pleasure to want to leave Samsara.

Buddhists recognize no creator and no requirement to worship in faith. An occidental philosopher hears this and says, this means they have no God. Well, sort of? No creator is a pretty significant departure from occidental theism. The Devas are more like personified forces of nature, like pagan gods but more indifferent. The Bodhisattvas are maybe like saints to the Catholics. Meanwhile Hindus have so many gods, everything is considered a god. So we get a misconception in the occidental worldview that Hinduism and Buddhism are different religions because one has a bajillion gods and the other has no gods. They’re pretty much the same, having many gods, an ultimate Truth, and no connection between gods and Truth. The real difference is that Hindus understand the system to be full and Buddhists understand the system to be empty. Where one sees an ultimate Reality indistinguishable from the unchanging Self (Atman is Brahman), the other sees an ultimate Reality indistinguishable from universal selflessness of phenomena (Sunyata is Anatta). 

Here is why nondualism is peak philosophy: both viewpoints are the same, only appearing different in a limited perspective. Emptiness is fullness. Fullness is emptiness. The synthesis is the paradox, and Truth is understood through a combination of Faith, Reason, and Will to Power. The Truth is you must become what you are: Free.

It can be argued, if we are to believe occidental histories of India, that Buddhism evolved from within a Hindu society, overtook Hinduism in popularity, and gradually became reabsorbed into Hinduism within India while spreading across Asia. I think this is somewhat tenuous due to the aforementioned similarities. While there were certainly influential Buddhist kings in India, the pluralistic and itinerant nature of classical and medieval scholarship meant that Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and other nastika ideas were constantly circulating among Indian peoples. Labels of religious identity did not exist (other than nastika which was thrown around by Brahmins talking shit). It’s really amazing to look at an occidental map of historic India’s religions, as you see a Mauryan India that is painted Buddhist and later a Gupta India that is painted Hindu. The truth is you would never be able to tell the difference between a Buddhist and Hindu back then. We must reject the occidental history as it was fabricated to maintain an occidentalist view.

It’s important to note the succession of ideas. Nagarjuna’s concept of Sunyatta (emptiness) likely influenced Gaudapada’s commentaries on the Upanishads, which inspired Shankara’s commentaries on both the Upanishads and Gaudapada’s commentaries. Shankara gets the credit for synthesizing it all into a complex open-source religion with infinite ways to practice the seeking of one universal Truth. Nondualism, peak philosophy. 

The Bhagavad Gita condenses many of the Upanishads into an episode within the Mahabharata, and in it, Krishna describes multiple paths to Yoga: karma, bhakti, and gnyan. This means you don’t need to be an ascetic and you don’t need faith (though a bit of both helps). Shankara took this and went hard on nondualism: either way leads to the realization of Truth that there is only Brahman, and multiplicity is an illusion because we are ignorant of the Truth. Okay, so what is the world we live in? A dream, and we are dreamers within the dream… but who is the Dreamer? Fun fact: David Lynch was totally a Vedantin. 

Most of what came after Shankara wasn’t as peak, a lot of dualistic stuff because people needed to externalize and personify the Truth to feel meaning in their suffering. One exception, perhaps the peak of peak philosophy, built upon Shankara up in the Himalayas. Abhinavagupta synthesized every fucking thing and it’s awesome. Hegel ain’t shit! Notably, Abhinavagupta took Shankara’s concept of maya (the world is illusory because nondualism is the only thing that’s real) and made it fun: the world is real because nondualism has an inherent dynamism. In other words, Kashmir Shaiva is a tantric tradition that says, yes, the system is full, and it’s full of birthday parties and funerals. The fact that it’s all real makes it a lot more accessible than Advaita Vedanta, at least from the perspective of someone actually trying to live a life in the world. Hence, I consider Kashmir Shaiva as a refinement of Advaita Vedanta. It is a bit more theistic, in that the system is God’s creative instrument as depicted by the drum and dance of Shiva.

There is only one substance: satchitananda, existence-consciousness-bliss. One appears as many, not by a bug due to your ignorance but a feature due to divine creativity.

Now, the Vedantins might hand-wave and say, look, it's all the same just from different angles. And I would agree: after all, it's all nondualism, whether you choose to believe in emptiness or fullness or creativity. Whether you choose no God or God without form or God with form. Even the question of whether God exists disintegrates under the light of nondualism because it spans the entire spectrum of what God can be.

This brings me to my critique of occidental reason, atheism, and bastardization of Indian philosophy. It boils down to this: the fallacy of European exceptionalism. 

Colonization, scientific advances, and religious wars created conditions for philosophers to trend away from theism, supporting a mechanical view of the universe. Though many scientists were still men of the cloth, the view of rational science triumphing over faith in miracles grew popular among philosophers like Voltaire and Hume. Around the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Romantic Period, we see the first wave of orientalism. Secularism challenged the veracity of the Christian worldview, and the sophisticated Indian philosophies offered an alternative to European rationalism, a basis for pantheism, and an argument for a universal religion. After the Napoleonic Wars, we see a second wave of orientalism with the intent of invalidating the first wave and restoring Christian Europe at the top of the philosophical hierarchy. The colonization of thought followed a similar pattern as the colonization of industry.

This blew my fucking mind to learn: Hinduism and Buddhism were invented by 19th century Europeans, who aimed to understand what they were reading–not seeing or hearing–from the lens of Christianity and the Enlightenment, and then sold back to Asians as Hinduism and Buddhism. 

That’s literally what the British did to Indian industry: extract your resources, process them ourselves, sell the product back to you–no! you’re no longer allowed to process it yourself! 

I’m sure they initially tried to understand the foreign spiritual culture but simply could not overcome the biases of occidental culture. With enough force, everything fit into the Christian framework they were familiar with. The Vedas became the Old Testament, the Upanishads the New Testament. Scriptures like Manusmriti had to be more important than rituals, practices, and superstitions. Brahmins became clergy. Buddha was a radical reformer like Martin Luther. Despite Buddhists maintaining ritual worship, European secularists insisted that Buddhism was a purely reasoned system devoid of superstitious practices and supernatural beings alike. According to them, the everyday practicing Buddhist was corrupted by Hindu idolatry, relinquishing the rational, philosophical purity of the Buddha. Too bad they didn’t actually speak to Asian people before jumping to conclusions, or else they might have realized it’s their entrenched beliefs of white Christian supremacy that deluded them.

Not until the 1893 World Parliament of Religions did the occidentals hear from Jains, Hindus, and Buddhists. Granted, these were clever people including Swami Vivekananda, Anagarika Dharmapala, and D.T. Suzuki. They sold their religions to the occidentals by exploiting what the occidentals wanted: ancient spiritual philosophy compatible with science and reason in modern times as a counter to capitalism. It worked! A new wave of orientalism, catering once more to the rational occidental, swept the world while Boltzmann, Planck, and Einstein began to reinvent physics. The ideas of modern Hinduism and modern Buddhism converged with modern quantum physics in the 1920s with Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Pauli. Enlightenment exceptionalism be damned–Abrahamic religions had never attained such an easy and elegant synthesis with the bleeding edge scientific worldview. Hinduism and Buddhism, defined by occidentals after existing in Asia for millennia, became palatable to people all over the modern world. 

So did atheism in the years between then and now. Especially with the New Atheism movement during the start of this century, atheism has become pretty common in the occident. There is a spectrum ranging from “spiritual, not religious” to actively atheist, with apathy in the middle. The vocal activist atheists–antitheists, really–are the most annoying because they universally reject God in the narrow occidental sense. It’s like they take the Enlightenment European critique of Christianity to new heights, adding a post-9/11 critique of Islam to reject explicitly the God of Abraham. Mind you, rejection of a dualistic God is a dualistic rejection of God.

With an inexplicable audacity, the antitheists generalize their rejection across the full spectrum of what God can be. Armed with a broad brush in their crusade against all religions, they advocate secularism as the only dogma under which humanity can evolve. What ensues is a piecemeal perversion of source, stripping religiosity from religion, then commodifying and commercializing what remains. Instead of your superstitious ritual, download my meditation app. Forego reading religious texts and subscribe to my mindfulness podcast. Don’t follow a mystical guru, follow a branded influencer. Ironically, the scientific branding by Vivekananda and Suzuki lay the groundwork for these atheistic lies to sprout from truth. Capitalism excises Dharma out of Dharmic religions to bind us further in Samsara. We hold the key to freedom and instead use it to fabricate more locks; there is no profit in Truth.

The European Enlightenment motivated the Age of Revolutions, a tumultuous time when people wanted to turn the wheel of progress. Little progress resulted from the revolutions themselves, more from the evolution of capitalism in a new industrial age. Perhaps this is partly due to the shortcomings of occidental philosophy: their ideas were not strong enough. And yet we live with their vestigials in the status quo Establishment, from government to academia. The world today sometimes feels stagnant, devoid of real meaning in favor of mass consumption in service of the senses. What does it mean to be Enlightened today? The Enlightened carves a niche into the facade, a cultural crack through which Truth seeps. “Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence,” said Osho, one of the 20th century’s great nondualists (also famous for, “But the people are retarded”). Imagine the Revolution that is happening right now, driven not by the archaic enlightenment but by peak philosophy. Awaken to it!

Nondualism. It offers a way out from the system of endless cycles, birth and death, joy and suffering. No matter which perspective you choose–full, empty, vibrant–the nondual philosophy offers a tangible detachment from the trappings of transient nature. It is the only Universal Truth. Sue me for obsessing over it.