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#3049 -
Nonduality
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The following is a
chapter from The Divine Universe, by Swami
Abhayananda. The book is available for free at http://www.swami-abhayananda.com/id34.html. Several of
Swami's highly regarded books are available for free at
http://www.swami-abhayananda.com/id1.html.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF
NONDUALISM
Spiritual Nondualism 1 is
the philosophy, substantiated by the vision of all the mystics
who ever lived, which holds that the soul or self of man is
identical with the transcendent Spirit that is God.
Spirit is a word which is not very much in favor these days, as
it has been sorely misused in the past; but it is a necessary
word, as there is a need for a non-sectarian verbal symbol to
represent the essence of our reality as experienced by the
visionaries of the subtle. Spirit represents the Divine in
both Its transcendent and Its immanent aspects. As the
transcendent Godhead, Spirit is incognizable and inconceivable by
the mind of man. It is neither mind nor matter, but a
subtler reality that is eternal, omniscient, and omnipresent; and
which experiences Itself as pure consciousness and bliss.
The transcendent Godhead manifests Itself as the Spirit immanent
in man and the universe, appearing as the consciousness of self
in man, as well as the Divine Energy that goes to make up all the
‘material’ forms of this universe. There is but
one Being, one Spirit, who constitutes both the Eternal and the
temporal reality. Just as the Sun’s rays are identical
with the Sun, all that emanates from the Spirit is identical with
the Spirit. In other words, our true identity is Spirit,
and nothing other than Spirit. This identity may be known
directly, by the grace of God, when the soul is drawn to that
unitive interior vision.
Nondualism means that
there is no difference between the source and the manifestation,
no difference between the essence of one thing and another, no
difference between you and God. No difference. The
Sanskrit word used by the Upanishadic sages to designate this
philosophy is advaita, which is made up of a, not, and dvaita,
two; meaning literally, “not two”. Spiritual
Nondualism is the philosophy that you are essentially identical
with the one Spirit—that One who has been called Brahman,
Shiva, Allah, Yahveh, Hari, Adonai, Karim, God, and innumerable
other names throughout history. The Upanishadic seers,
recognizing this identity in their visions, have called that one
Spirit the atman; the Self, as it is realized to be the one Self
of all. Now, this vision belongs to no one religion.
Though the philosophy of Nondualism was originally elucidated in
the Upanishads, today, it is universally recognized by the
mystics (the seers) of every religious tradition as the Perennial
Philosophy, because it arises again and again throughout history
as the one recurring view of mystical philosophers and seers from
widely divergent cultures and traditions. It has been and
continues to be repeatedly verified through direct experience by
all those who have made the ascent in consciousness to the
supreme Self.
Here are a few snippets
of quotations from some well known seers representing that
perennial philosophy:
He who is beyond all
predicates appears as the relative universe; He appears as all
sentient and insentient beings.
-- Rig Veda
Even by the mind this
truth is to be learned: there are not many, but only
One.
– Katha Upanishad
It is not what is thought
that we should wish to know; we should know the thinker.
“He is my Self!” This one should know.
“He is my Self!” This one should
know.
– Kaushitaki
Upanishad
The pure man sees the One
as one and the many as one. So long as he sees the Unity,
he is God; when he sees the distinctions, he is man.
-- Chuang Tze
He who knows that he is,
himself, the Lord of all, and is ever the same in all, immortal
though experiencing the field of mortality, he knows the truth of
existence.
--Bhagavad Gita
The best of men choose to
know the One above all else; it is the famous “Eternal”
within mortal man.
-- Heraclitus
What, then, is the heart
of the highest truth, the core of knowledge, the wisdom
supreme? It is “I am the Self, the formless One; by my
very nature, I am pervading all. That one God who shines
within everything, who is formless like the cloudless sky, is the
pure, stainless Self of all. Without any doubt, that is who
I am.”
-- Dattatreya
God is high above place
and time… He is contained by nothing, but transcends
all. But, though transcending what He has made,
nonetheless, He fills the universe with Himself.
-- Philo Judaeus
There is one Divine
Reality, divided as higher and lower; generating Itself,
nourishing Itself, seeking Itself, finding Itself. …It
is both Mother and Father, a Unity, being the Root of the entire
circle of existence.
-- Simon Magus
I and the Father are
one.
– Jesus
The one Divine Mind, in
Its mentation, thinks Itself; the object of Its thought is
nothing external; Thinker and thought are one, unchangeably the
same.
-- Plotinus
All that is He contains
within Himself like thoughts: the world, Himself, the All.
In the All there is nothing which is not God. Adore this
teaching, my child, and hold it sacred.
-- Hermes Trismegistus
The Reality is One;
though, owing to illusions It appears to be multiple names and
forms, attributes and changes, It always remains unchanged.
[It is] like gold, which while remaining one, is formed into
various ornaments. You are that One, that Brahman.
Meditate on that in your mind.
-- Shankara,
Vivekachudamani
Just as the light of the
Sun and the Sun are not absolutely different, … so also the
soul and the supreme Self are not different.
-- Shankara,
Vedanta Sutras
The entire universe is
truly the Self. There exists nothing at all other than the
Self. The enlightened person sees everything in the world
as his own Self, just as one views earthenware jars and pots as
nothing but clay.
-- Shankara, Atma
Bodha
When the mystery of the
oneness of the soul and the Divine is revealed to you, you will
understand that you are not other than God. …For when
you know yourself, your sense of a limited identity vanishes, and
you know that you and God are one and the same.
-- Ibn Arabi
My Me is God, nor do I
recognize any other Me except my God Himself.
-- Catherine of
As the soul becomes more
pure and bare and poor, and possesses less of created things, and
is emptied of all things that are not God, it receives God more
purely, and is more completely in Him; and it truly becomes one
with God, and it looks into God and God into it, face to face as
it were; two images transformed into one. …Some simple
people think that they will see God as if He were standing there
and they here. It is not so. God and I, we are one.
…By the living God, it is true that there is no distinction!
-- Meister Eckhart
When I clutched at His
skirt, I found His hand in my sleeve. …I am the one I
love; He whom I love is I.
-- Iraqi
He to whom all things are
One, and who draws all things into One, and sets all things in
One, and desires but One, may soon be stable in heart and be
fully pacified in God.
-- Thomas á Kempis
The world in which we
live is a play of Chiti Shakti, the self-luminous universal
Consciousness. For a man who sees this, the world is
nothing but a play of God’s energy. …Chiti plays
in the external world and yet stays ever the same. …
In Her unity, She is supreme Shiva, supreme Consciousness,
absolutely alone. In this mode, She is called the
transcendent supreme Shiva, the “formless, attributeless
Absolute” of the Vedantins. She has two aspects: the
supremely pure transcendent aspect, which is above the world, and
the immanent aspect, in which, by Her own desire, She becomes the
universe within Her own being.
-- Swami Muktananda
All of the above
statements were written by mystics who had directly experienced
the oneness of which they spoke. Nondualism is above all a
philosophy based on direct experience; without that direct
vision, the philosophy itself is of little value. That
direct experience confers on its recipient the blissful knowledge
of the Divine Self in its fullness. It is referred to as
“Self-realization”, “God-realization”,
“yoga”, or simply “enlightenment”. It
occurs only rarely, by the grace of the Spirit, and usually in
association with a regimen of introspective meditation or
contemplation. And, because that direct experience is
limited to a select few, the philosophy of Nondualism has never
been accepted as a major cultural worldview by the greater
populace, but continues to live on perennially as the spiritual
philosophy of an elite spiritual intelligentsia. The main
opposition to its broader aceptance comes from the blind
exponents of materialism and the unillumined partisans of various
sectarian religious faiths.
The Divine
Universe, by Swami Abhayananda. The
book is available for free at http://www.swami-abhayananda.com/id34.html.
Several of
Swami's highly regarded books are available for free at
http://www.swami-abhayananda.com/id1.html.