What is Nondualism?

“You cannot possibly say that you are what you think yourself to be! Your ideas about yourself change from day to day and from moment to moment. Your self-image is the most changeful thing you have.”—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That

“There is no difference between our own being and the knowing of our own being, just as there is no difference between the sun and its shining.”—Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware

The Secular Soul

Beliefs are often stubborn, regardless of whether they’re right or wrong. For millennia, religion has buttressed many bad beliefs against damning critiques. Abetted by religion, people have enthusiastically drowned “witches”, stoned adulterers, burned heretics, beheaded apostates, abhorred homosexuals and, more generally, despised progress. Because of this grim track-record, non-believers often scoff at religious beliefs, seeing them as not just ill-founded but downright dangerous. Thus, most non-believers view notions of God, Heaven, and the soul as defunct relics, to be discarded as we transition to a better future.

Atheists in open societies often wear their non-belief with pride. Religious people may live under the delusion that our universe is governed by a judgmental God who doles out eternities of pleasure or pain to immaterial souls, but the atheist knows better. By forgoing belief in such mass-sanctioned fairy tales, atheists feel that they’ve freed their minds to think more clearly. And to a large extent, they’re right. But if atheists think they’ve wholeheartedly abandoned all trace of religious belief, they’re mistaken. Though we in secular society seldom call it by name, we are still—religious person and non-believer alike—captivated by the religious idea of the soul.

This assertion may seem presumptuous. After all, who am I to say what people do or don’t believe? Therefore, let’s first ask the question: what, exactly, is a soul?

A soul is an ethereal entity, somehow encapsulated within the physical body, home to the essential nature of one’s being. Throughout life relationships change, knowledge accumulates, and bodies age and decay, but the soul remains constant, an irreducible, immaterial kernel at the core of human existence. The soul is who and what we are, both the source of free will and the locus of praise and punishment. Now, does this description sound at all familiar? It should, because for all practical purposes the religious soul and secular self are one and the same.

Soul and self both take the complex, indefinable aspects of personhood and reduce them to a singular, essentialized definition (while imagining that this immaterial thing is concentrated behind our faces and distributed, to a lesser extent, throughout our bodies). Both purport to account for the existence of free will and moral responsibility. And both are dualistic, presuming that people are one thing, and the body and material world another. By subscribing to the standard view of self, atheists are simply repackaging a version of the soul, albeit one that neither dies nor is privileged (burdened?) with a direct line to God.

When sufficiently indoctrinated, we struggle to spot the problems in our own belief systems. And in secular society, we are thoroughly indoctrinated into the soul-like view of self. Through education, advertisements, entertainment, socializing, and social media, we are constantly taught that we are atomistic individuals, whose inner lives—including thoughts, intentions, and emotions—exist on a separate plane from the outside world. Because of this indoctrination, we take it for granted that the world inside our skin is fundamentally different than that on the other side. We think that we exist behind our faces, while an alien world exists beyond. As a result, we fail to see how backwards our notion of self really is.

As I’ll explain, this dualistic view of self—in which an internal self is one thing and the external world another—cannot be right, either from a scientific or a first-person perspective. When thinking and seeing clearly, we can recognize that we never actually experience anything through a self. Rather, our thoughts and feelings of being a self are simply perceptions that repeatedly pass through our experience.

This inversion of common sense may seem disorienting, but it’s actually possible to pay attention to the comings and goings of self just as we might pay attention to anything, such as the sound of traffic or a fleeting breeze. And when we do so, it becomes obvious that our sense of self is constantly in flux, not the cornerstone of existence we once took it to be. This way of thinking and perceiving—in which the distinction between self, experience, and world breaks down—is known as nondualism.

Nondualism 101

Nondualism is a difficult concept to grasp, because by conceptualizing it we’ve already missed the mark. We tend to think that conceptual thoughts have the power to capture the world, rarely realizing that thought is merely a useful tool for navigating the world; when dealing with the many nuances of existence, thought often fails us.

One reason that thoughts cannot encapsulate reality is because thoughts are, by their nature, dualistic. Thoughts hold power because they isolate certain aspects of the world, excising them from their surroundings so that we can hold them in our minds. However, without their surroundings, whatever we’re thinking of could not actually exist! Because of this blind spot, thoughts can never adequately convey reality.

For example, take a second to think about a tree. If you’re like most people, you’re probably imagining a woody plant that grows upwards from the earth, which breathes in carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. But this dualistic way of thinking obscures the nondualistic grandeur that permeates every commonplace tree. In reality, trees don’t just grow up from the earth—they also grow down from the sky and solar system above. A tree is an accumulation of air, sunlight, earth, water, microbes, and much, much more. Remove any of these conditions and you interrupt the cosmic process that resonates in the delightful form of a tree. Because a tree is an interrelated process and not a single definable “thing”, it cannot be captured in the discrete form of thought. (If it could, we would have no need for the countless specialists currently analyzing trees across a range of disciplines.) A tree is only a tree when it is part and parcel of the surrounding universe.[1] This perspective—which sees how the foreground depends on the background—is what is meant by nonduality.

By ignoring the backdrop of existence, conceptual thought erects a dualism that breaks a unified reality into discrete, self-contained entities. If readers are still confused by this slippery idea, take a moment to run through the following experiment.

Look at your fingers and ask yourself where they end. To most of us, it seems obvious that fingers end with our skin: the flesh, blood, and bones inside our skin are part of our fingers, and the world beyond is something else. But now, imagine what would happen if the space between your fingers were to disappear. They would be irrevocably altered, transformed into something less like fingers and more like a fleshy paddle. Previously, we’d considered our fingers and the space beyond to be entirely separate entities. But if, by removing the space between our fingers, we lose them, how can space and fingers be separate? In reality, space and fingers go together, but by remaining solely in the realm of dualistic thought we overlook this interdependency.

As human beings, we are therefore faced with a paradox. Although thought is an excellent tool for making sense of the world, it inevitably leads us astray. Thoughts make sense only by virtue of their dualism, but because the universe is seamless, all phenomena are, at base, interconnected and nondualistic.[2] For this reason, a wise person must be able to drop thoughts and view reality from another perspective. And when striving for the wisdom of self-knowledge, a nondualistic perspective is invaluable.

Lost in Self-Definitions

Everyone has, at one point or another, recognized the futility of defining themselves. Whether we’re in a job interview, on a first date, or even talking with intimate friends, no amount of words, no matter how skilfully employed, can convey the essence of what we are. We can tell others our relationship status, career history, interests, hobbies, dislikes and desires, but we can never fit ourselves into words.[3] Yet despite this recognition, we obsessively scrutinize our self-definition. In so doing, we become our own harshest critic, praising ourselves when we align with a favourable self-definition and chastising ourselves when we don’t.

How is it that words spoken to others clearly fail to convey our essence, but when rehearsed in our minds seem to capture it perfectly? Part of the answer lies in the structure of language, which works to convince us that a localized, definable self hides behind all that we do.

From the moment we wake to the time we fall asleep, we rarely cease thinking. And because our thoughts are often self-referential, they trick us into believing that an “I” or “me” exists as an independent thing, somehow a step removed from the flow of existence. For instance, by thinking “I like the colour red” or “I am a hard worker”, we come to believe that a subject called “I” is the cause of our likes, dislikes, virtues, and vices. This false belief blinds us to the vast expanse of causes that influence our thoughts, moods, and actions. Thus, most of us believe that felt experience consists of two fundamentally different parts, with a subjective self (“I”, “me”, “mine”, etc.) on one side and the objective world on the other.[4]

The belief that an anthropomorphic self resides within our heads, who pulls the levers of our actions and tweaks the dials on our emotions, is nonsensical. It’s akin to believing that a tree has an internal grower behind its growth, or a little leafer behind its leaves. Just as tree growth is part of a distributed, interrelated process stretching across time and space, so all of our behaviour results from myriad causes, none of which can be distilled down to an internal self. The self exists only in thought. And although our thoughts reify the self, we can reflect on their inconsistencies to appreciate how they do not, in fact, point to a coherent entity.

Our self-definitions constantly shift. We might be an overbearing father at home, a timid employee in the workplace, and a loving son with our parents. We generally assume that a self appropriates each of our roles in life, swapping them out as contexts change. Viewed this way, it makes perfect sense to think about the self that wears each role, just as we can think about the same body wearing different clothing. But there is no separate self that appropriates roles; rather, the roles themselves are who and what we are! There is no self in addition to what we do, just as there is no grower in addition to tree growth, or clencher in addition to a clenched fist. Yet because we repeatedly cycle thoughts of self through our minds, we hallucinate such a self into existence untold times each day.[5] In this fashion, we are like the religious person who mistakes their own thoughts for the constant presence of God, never realizing that just because it feels true does not make it so.

We think of the self as a noun, which remains constant as conditions continually change. But human experience is more like a verb, a continual process of becoming, wholly dependent on circumstance. The Verve framed this insight well in their hit Bitter Sweet Symphony when they wrote, “I’m a million different people from one day to the next.” They understood that we are not concrete selves undergoing surface-level changes, but are inseparable from the fluid, changing process of experience itself. And while we may occasionally feel like we are not ourselves—due to illness, awkwardness, or otherwise—what we really mean is that our current mental state is out of line with our expectations or ideals. No separate self need ever enter the equation.

In this light, the age-old question “Who am I?” takes on new meaning. If there is no place in experience for a separate self to take hold, what could it possibly mean to ask who we are? Perhaps instead of asking who we are, we should seek out what we are, as the former framing implies an isolated self whereas the latter is open to the full range of felt experience.

Waking from Dreams of Self

In spiritual circles, the process of seeing through the illusion of self is commonly referred to as waking up. Most people think of this as a cute analogy for meditation practice, whereby awareness wakes us up from the dream world of thought. But the metaphor of waking up refers to more than simply heightened awareness; it highlights the existential import of nonduality itself, in which the division between self and other, subject and object, and experience and experiencer breaks down.

When dreaming, our minds weave whole worlds. Regardless of the content of our dreams, every iota of a dream—from cities to mountains to alien landscapes—is projected by the workings of our own minds. Anything that a dream self can see, hear, or feel is simply the inside of the mind of the dreamer. In other words, when dreaming, wherever we turn we can’t help but see ourselves. We are the entire realm of experience, including both the first-person perspective of the dreamer and whatever we happen to be aware of.

So, what happens when we wake up? Most people assume that as we return to waking life, our real self comes back online and realigns itself with objective, external reality. But upon waking, the world never actually leaves our minds—how could it, when the world can only be known through changes in our nervous systems and subjective experience? Everything that we perceive while awake is just as much a part of ourselves as when we were dreaming. When awake, we are still the entire realm of experience, including sights, sounds, thoughts, and sensations. This is what the Hindu guru Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj meant when he said, “You create the world in your imagination like a dream. As you cannot separate the dream from yourself, so you cannot have an outer world independent of yourself.”[6]

If we are the same as whatever we are aware of, we cannot hope to divide experience into self and not-self. Either we must take everything within awareness as ourselves, or we must take nothing. The sound of birdcall, the smell of fresh coffee, and the sight of a lover are all you in the moments that you are aware of them. To identify with only a narrow slice of experience (typically the feeling behind one’s face), while renouncing the rest as something alien, makes little sense given that the only place we can know anything at all is within our own awareness.

Feeling Nonduality

Nonduality makes for interesting philosophy, but philosophy alone can only do so much. Our minds were tuned by millions of years of selection pressures to feel like selves facing a foreign world. Had our ancestors felt, at the core of their being, that human experience is an impersonal emergent property arising from an interconnected universe, they might have been too carefree to survive and reproduce.

Many of the emotions responsible for the success of our species, like fear, jealousy, shame, and burning ambition, are inseparable from our sense of self. After all, how could we feel something like jealousy while also feeling that the catalyst behind that jealousy exists within our consciousness? Jealousy is a self-centred emotion, so by grasping that self and other are both merely transient appearances in consciousness, its bedrock crumbles. To bear witness to nonduality is therefore to lose many of the motivators of our Pleistocene-era ancestors.

Thankfully, we no longer live in the Pleistocene. While we must still eat, sleep, and socialize, we now have the luxury of curating a world in which self-centred feelings like greed, hate, and pride are less necessary. And even though the self is tenacious, it is not insuperable. If we pay attention properly, we can directly experience its absence. But to tap into a nondual perspective, we must do more than merely think about it.[7] Below are a couple ways of encouraging this perspective shift.

The meditation teacher Rupert Spira has many guided meditations that skilfully point out the fact of nonduality. In one such meditation, he instructs listeners to pay attention first to a perception associated with self (such as the voice in one’s head), then to one associated with not-self (such as the sound of traffic). He has the listener shift attention back and forth between inner and outer perceptions, all the while searching for the border between self and other. As one does this, it quickly becomes clear that no such border exists. This opens up a perspective in which there is no fundamental difference between ourselves and whatever we happen to be aware of. With this mindset, one can walk down the street and feel synonymous with the sights, sounds, and smells of whatever is encountered.

To experience nonduality, we might also inquire into sense perception. For instance, the next time you hear a sound, wonder whether the sound takes place inside or outside of you. Ask whether you need to do anything to hear sounds, or if they’re simply heard on their own. Does a self intervene? When touching something, check where the feeling of your skin ends and the feeling of the external object begins? Can you find a border? When thinking, question whether you exist within your inner monologue or whether it exists within you. Are you in your mind or is your mind in you? Can you even call it your mind, since there is no place from which to stand outside to own it?

Questions like these can short-circuit our conventional concept of self, clearing room for a new understanding of what it is to be a human being. From our point of view, we are not selves interacting with an external world through our faces and bodies. As a fact of experience, there is not an internal world of consciousness and an external world of matter. Rather, everything you experience is your own consciousness taking on different forms. Put another way, your experience does not exist within you; you exist within experience. To feel this truth is to be liberated from much of the self-concern that burdens modern civilization.

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The secret is getting out that we are the cosmos dancing with itself. More people are meditating, doing yoga, and reading Eastern philosophy than ever before. At the same time, modern science is putting the lie to the age-old myth that humans are somehow cordoned off from the natural world. Yet unless we give up the belief that we are selves who exert free will as we interact with a foreign world, we cannot fully assimilate such knowledge. By steeping our worldviews in nondualism, we can appreciate that we’ve never been confined to the walls of a self. This new perspective, unobstructed by anxieties about self and other, unites us with a more spacious spectrum of existence.

[1] And the surrounding universe is only itself when part and parcel of the rest of the universe. In this way, a tree is only a tree when part and parcel of all of existence.

[2] Many of the laws of the universe imply this nonduality, including the law of conservation of mass and energy, the 2^nd law of thermodynamics, and laws surrounding causality.

[3] This scene from Anger Management humorously gets the point across. (If you haven’t seen the movie, you probably shouldn’t.)

[4] This belief might be true as a fact of existence, but as a fact of experience it cannot be right.

[5]Alan Watts makes this point well here.

[6]For concerned readers, nonduality is not the same as solipsism. Although I suspect that many nondualists are solipsistic, one can still believe in objective reality even while appreciating that we cannot directly access it.

[7]Although thinking about it accurately certainly helps.