1. All is One
‘Before the world was
And the sky was filled with stars…
There was a strange unfathomable Body.
This being, this Body is silent
And beyond substance and sensing.
It stretches beyond everything spanning the empyrean.
It has always been here and it always will be.
Everything comes from it, and then it is the Mother of Everything.
I do not know its name. So I call it TAO.’
In the classic Seventies book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig said that a lot can be learnt from where people choose to make the first ‘split’ in the world. Religion for instance might take the split to be between light and darkness, or perhaps heaven and Earth. In philosophy and in science the most obvious split is between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’.
Our increasingly science-based, technology-driven, industrialised culture recognises only objects in its world view and discounts the reality of subjective experience. Hence, morals and aesthetics, both considered subjective, are given less and less prominence. There is no ‘quality’ recognised as real, only ‘quantity’. Hence, the ‘Disqualified Universe’ (Max Weber). In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig essentially sets out a metaphysics of quality. The book is subtitled An Enquiry into Values — it puts quality in the place of truth as the ultimate reality. We will return to this idea in a later chapter, but for now let’s look at what it means for there to be a split in the world.
David Bohm, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order looks at the sentence, ‘It is raining’. What, he asks, is the ‘it’ that is doing the raining? Why do we not just say: ‘Rain is going on’? Clearly, language has created a subject and an object, even where there is not strictly speaking the need to make such a distinction. The point is to illustrate how deeply embedded in our culture and thinking such splits in the world really are. Even language is framed to assume such divisions in the world, so we often adopt them unconsciously and simply as a part of growing up and learning our mother tongue.
Ourselves and others, theism and atheism, future and past, transcendence and immanence — all of these are further splits embedded in our culture. So too is the manner in which words are regarded either as simple signifiers or set within a context. Transcendence and imminence is a further polarity that has a particular bearing on the development of the argument within this work. We will consider each of these dualities below. Two really big splits take a bit more investigation: the difference between something and nothing and what we might call our innate ideas about the world contrasted with our actual experience. From Kant, and other philosophers, I use the terms noumenon and phenomenon for this split. The split between something and nothing will form the basis of Chapter 2, whilst the noumenon phenomenon division of reality is the subject of Chapter 3. I have of course introduced deliberately two other major splits — that between Eros and Agapé and that between ascendancy and descendancy. The manner in which these terms are employed in this work is discussed in the Introduction. The reader is reminded that I do not regard any of these splits as real. I am employing them with the deliberate intent of drawing out an understanding of the issues raised within the text. I am also looking to challenge those splits which explicitly or implicitly are embedded in our culture and to see how this has often been a cause of harm.
To some extent, we have been forced into these kinds of dualisms simply in order to survive in the world. We make a distinction first of all about ourselves as subjects, distinct from the world around us. In other words, we ‘objectify’ the world, including, to some extent, other people. Science merely formalises this notion of the ‘detached observer’, which is implicit in so much of our language and thinking — whilst philosophy describes this as ‘the view from nowhere’ (Thomas Nagel). It is a remarkably successful strategy for surviving in the world, but we have come to believe of course that this split is real – that consciousness and matter really are separate substances. Much of western philosophy has been about trying to reconcile the two apparently distinct substances and has tied itself in knots in the process. This is the so-called ‘mind body problem’ — res cogita, res extensa — most usually associated with Descartes.
The subject object split, as was said, leads us into ‘objectifying’ others — treating them to an extent as commodities rather than as individual persons. We will be examining this in more detail throughout the work. Also, there has been an assumption that considering ourselves as subjects is just a simple notion. Psychoanalysis has shown however that becoming a subject is actually a very fraught process, involving by definition, the suppression of desire. (The denial of Eros — hence very pertinent to our discussion.) It is also a process that as currently described, is deeply related to death and is heavily misogynistic, both in its conception and in its consequences. Again, this will be considered more in later chapters.
In the theism-atheism duality, the question: ‘Is there a God?’ is too simplistic. The kind of separate, fully transcendent being that is normally implied by the question can be seen as just another way in which we choose to split reality. The distinction then between ‘God’ and ‘not God’ and so between ‘believer’ and ‘unbeliever’ is arbitrary. In fact, the way this polarity is contested simply reinforces the underlying assumptions on which both theism and atheism are built. The God who is rejected by atheists is the same God who is embraced (or feared) by believers. The understanding of what or who ‘God’ might be is never really contested. We may contrast this with the kind of Pantheism advocated by Spinoza, in which there is only one substance, which is God, and mind and matter are seen as twin attributes of this single underlying reality. Alternative ways of viewing all dualities are clearly possible, and the theism atheism duality illustrates this particularly well because the two ‘sides’ of the duality are so fiercely contested.
Past, present and future are likewise just convenient ways of carving up reality. In a sense, time does not exist. We divide ourselves up by thinking about what we would like to be in the future, or things that we would like to achieve. Again, whilst this is helpful in terms of making plans, it is actually a false split. There is no future me, or past me. We are all that we ever will be just in this moment! So, regretting the past or worrying over the future are pointless abstractions. Planning for the future in a reasonable manner however is to make proper use of this artificial split in the world.
There is also a split in the world with any kind of description — in fact any word causes such a split. As soon as we use a word to describe something, we automatically assign all other things as being something else. Hence, calling something a table immediately creates a split between things that belong to the description as tables and things that don’t. However, this is no more than just a convenient way to carve up the world. Many things could serve as ‘tables’ for instance, so the description is not really an accurate one — it is just a useful designation that fits our purposes. In fact it is a little more difficult than this. To describe something as a ‘table’ is to use a word as a simple signifier and it might be assumed that all words, if used clearly enough and with correct construction of sentences, would act in the same way (much in the manner of Bertrand Russell attempting to formulate logic by means of language). Context however creates a worldview in which individual words sit. As such, the meaning of individual words is at least partly dependant on context and an individual’s familiarity or otherwise with that context. A worldview — perhaps all world views — are therefore ‘constructed’. In this work, the context of our discussion is given by defining boundaries and ‘economies’.
In a similar vein, we distinguish between ‘transcendent’ ideals such as truth, goodness and beauty and their representations (or immanence) in the world. Values then come to be seen as having some kind of ghostly existence of their own — even sometimes for people who have no religious belief. The Platonic forms — perhaps the most familiar example of transcendent ideals — are now widely rejected, but covertly still applied. Consider for instance the writings of physicists about mathematical truths. Scientism thus has an insidious grip — science claims to speak from a position of neutrality, but in fact has underlying assumptions that go unchallenged. There is for instance an underlying desire in science (and western culture generally) that is denied — perhaps we could call it power over nature. This in turn is derived from the culture’s repressed obsession with death that expresses itself as ‘power over’ and ‘power under’ dynamics (sadomasochism). Western politics has followed suit. Religion, at least in the west, actually reinforces this approach rather than contesting it. There is a reaching for an objective ‘hook’ on which to hang subjective notions of spirituality. Perhaps we want to believe in some kind of real ‘transcendence’, something more than just transcendence of value, as spoken of above. In doing so, we may fail to see that this is just one more way of conveniently carving up reality. Jean Paul Sartre describes people like this as ‘the serious’ — that is, they take seriously the reality of transcendent values. A constant theme of this work is the tendency to try to make so many things transcendent. We will return to this several times as the argument progresses and seek to rediscover the immanence of value that has been marginalised or overlooked.
There is a quality of discernment that we can bring to questions and situations that respects all of the notions mentioned above. Perhaps the best way to describe it is to contrast dualist or polemic with dialectic. Or, to put it more simply — ‘both /and’ rather than ‘either/or’. A restriction of knowledge is recognised and the two oppositions are weighed against one another. The result is not necessarily a mixture of both sides, nor necessarily a ‘third way’, as both these options suggest some kind of final outcome. The discernment is instead a ‘conversation’ between the various options — and this conversation may continue indefinitely.
We turn now however to consider the essential oneness of reality. Of course, even saying that ultimate reality is one thing falls foul of the same problems described above. Jonathan Culler writes about the problem of describing reality in these terms:
‘We are on dangerous ground even with such “innocent” phrases as “All is One”. The Universe is not a whole, nor a collection of parts, but a “holarchy”. An ever-receding domain of wholes within parts within wholes. There is no boundary either “upwards” (to larger groupings of parts) or “downwards” (to increasing fine divisions of wholes).
‘Total context (final Wholeness) is unmasterable, both in principle and in practice. Meaning is context bound, but context is boundless’
Ken Wilber, in commenting on this passage, says this:
‘The mind’s omega point, for each theorist, is the context that they believe cannot be outcontexted, the context beyond which growth or expansion does not or should not proceed…
‘And a final Omega Point? That would imply a final Whole, and there is no such holon anywhere in manifest existence. But perhaps we can interpret it differently. Who knows, perhaps Telos, perhaps Eros, moves the entire Kosmos, and God may indeed be an all-embracing chaotic Attractor, acting…throughout the world by gentle persuasion toward love.’
Ken Wilber — Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
Again, our boundaries and economies are the means deployed in this work of setting contexts and therefore recognising parochial meaning. Such discussions therefore often use the term ‘nondual’, meaning simply, ‘not two’. This is really the closest that we can come in words to describing the indescribable. (Indeed, Wilber is one of the chief contemporary proponents of nonduality.)
Nonduality might seem at first a subject rather distant from our concerns of the self’s search for satisfaction of desire and meeting the needs of others. However, Jerry Katz, in his book Essential Writings on Nonduality, speaks about desire and the self being entwined:
‘Our heart’s desire and who, what and where we are, are not separate.
‘Our pursuit for truth is for the full recognition of non-separation, not-two-ness, or nonduality. The value of this quality of desire is confirmed in the first verse of the scripture from Hindu tradition known as the Avadhuta Ghita, or Song of the Free:
“Through the grace of God alone, the desire for nonduality arises in wise people to save them from fear.”
‘The need for knowing nonduality, or non-separation from truth, is grace, a profound gift arising from truth. The desire, the Avadhuta Ghita says, arises in wise people. We could say the hunger for nonduality is wisdom. Wisdom is allowing the desire for nonduality to unfold. That is the way to be saved from fear.’
Jerry Katz — Essential Writings on Nonduality
Katz goes on to explain the nature of the fear that nonduality saves us from. One fear is simply our own non-existence in death, the other fear is that we may be spending our lives desiring the wrong things. We will return to these ideas later in the work.
Desire is usually seen as an endless process of searching. It was Hegel who suggested that this process could only be brought to a satisfactory conclusion in belief. The nature of Western religion, philosophy and science in particular have frustrated this aim by making ‘God’ into an object, creating an image of a transcendent fulfilled (that is, desire-satisfying) life beyond this one and reinforcing rather than solving the desire that is manifest in all of us. The satisfaction of desire by means of transcendent belief is a notion that needs to be challenged, and this will occupy us in later chapters.
There is no striving for nonduality — it is just recognised or it is not. Nonduality is just ordinary life; it’s not enlightenment, or nirvana or samadhi necessarily, although of course it contains all of these. So there is nothing to do, except to give up our search, to deny the ever-receding horizon of desire that is our inheritance as divided ‘subjects’ in the world. Or if you are not searching, then don’t begin. Either way, we have all already arrived.
Katz goes on to explain that even describing this view as a ‘nondual perspective’ is itself contradictory:
‘The nondual perspective, because it is a perspective, a view of something, is dualistic. By considering the oxymoron “nondual perspective”, we get a better sense of how things remain distinct whilst being non-separate.’
Jerry Katz — Essential Writings on Nonduality
Perhaps we can just say, when I fully surrender to the moment, I am that moment — completely present. The ‘not-two’ or nonduality of reality is therefore central to this work. Already, the element of Eros is present — the hunger for desire to be satisfied, and a clue to the satisfaction of that hunger by the bringing together of self and nonduality. We will look at two further divisions in our view of reality — something and nothing, and phenomena and the noumenon — prior to developing the argument further.
