I found this rather complete post on Dualism that is definitely worth a share. It was written by Julian Walker, a contributor to www.yogabrains.org.
http://www.yogabrains.org/philosophy/metaphysical-mayhem-the-4-kinds-of-dualism/
In spiritual circles, it is common to use the words “dualist” and “non-dual.” Often the actual meaning implied is quite vague because these terms have multiple reference points. Unfortunately, under the popularity of extreme relativism, when someone says you are being a “dualist” it is often an indication of nothing more than perhaps having suggested that some things/beliefs/experiences are better or worse than others, which they clearly are.
By this popular definition, then, being a “non-dualist” usually means something along the lines of having made the untenable decision that all judgments are illusory, all intellectual distinctions are empty and the ultimate purpose of life is to see absolutely everything as perfect and divine. This then becomes a core feature of one’s worldview; science and reason are called dualistic—and therefore facts, evidence and reasoned arguments get us no closer to the ultimate truth, or political affiliations are dualistic, or talking about victims and perpetrators is dualistic, because of the ultimate spiritual trump card of “oneness.”
This usually is accompanied with a gleam in the eye as if some powerful and profound ultimate truth has been uttered.
But there is so much more to discuss with regard to these fascinating terms.
When we speak of dualism vs non-dualism, it is crucial that we identify the context we are indicating. There are at least four different dynamic relationships we could be gesturing towards.
Religious Dualism
Dualism in the domain of religion refers to a common feature of most conventional religious conceptions of reality: there is a god or a divine realm that is other than the world, or there is a spirit within us that is other than the body. Dual means two—specifically, the two are set up in opposition and separate in some essential, irrevocable way.
The appeal of dualism is obvious: if there is a spirit or soul distinct from the body, we can imagine it surviving the death of the body. If there is a second world beyond this world, why, that is where this surviving soul will go after the body dies. Simple. The meat and potatoes of the religious impulse.
In religious terms, dualism implies that one has to overcome the desires of the flesh in order to awaken to the life of the spirit. In the same way, one has to reject or disinvest from the world in order to find God. Thus the ideal of the nun, monk, priest, sadhu, sanyassin, etc as a deeply committed spiritual seeker is most commonly associated with being celibate, renouncing possessions, not having children, not making money or being “in the world” or indeed “in the body.”
Sure, we can be laypeople who do not go all the way into this monastic ideal, but the general idea is that the world is tainted, we have fallen from grace, and overcoming our animal bodies and human nature is required in order to be worthy of God’s love and to have our immortal souls go somewhere good when our bodies die.
Conventional religion is dualistic across the board. At the core of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and even Hinduism and Buddhism to some extent, is this central dualism that defines their cosmology and concept of what the goal of spiritual life is—namely, transcending the body and world so as to either know God and live on after death, or to awaken to one’s identity as God.
The Classical Yoga philosophy of Patanjali is by definition dualist simply because of the central emphasis on the hard distinction between Purusha and Prakriti or Consciousness and Matter, Spirit and Flesh, etc. Thish comes directly from the earlier Samkhya conception that also influenced the Buddha. For Patanjali, the purpose of yoga (which for him meant largely concentration meditation (and not what we in the West cnow call "yoga)" was to become disentangled from the world of material appearances and identify with a kind of transcendent spiritual essence that is not of the world, body or even mind.
He encourages us to be disgusted by our bodies and by the desire to have physical contact with other bodies—in this he has much in common with a Catholic or Muslim attitude toward sexuality as being an impure distraction from the true purpose of religious life. This is understandable, given that Patanjali’s cultural context is the ascetic search for purity and transcendence most exemplified in India by the austerities,sexual negation, hashish trances, and mortification of the flesh practiced by the yogi sadhus.
Religious Non-Dualism
The mystical and tantric variations on conventional religion tend to be more non-dual to varying degrees.
Non-duality means “not-two.” So, where above we had a dualistic conception of God vs World, Purusha vs Prakriti, Spirit vs Flesh, the non-dual stance would be that God IS the world, or at the very least can be discovered through deep engagement with the world.
Likewise the spirit is manifest as flesh or at the very least can be actualized through the life of the body. From this perspective there is no need for asceticism, austerities or transcending the body or world as the Divine is immanent.
For example, in Advaita Vedanta, a form of sophisticated Indian spiritual philosophy that has become increasingly popular in the West, the point of departure is very literally away from a more traditional Hindu/Yogic conception of the search or struggle to become enlightened or god-realized via having to engage in years of practicing yoga and meditation so as to transcend the world and body.
Adveita literally means not-two or non-dual. For the Advaitin, it is not so much that we need to overcome the world to find God; rather we have been fooled by the veil of illusion or “maya” cast over the world and can awaken effortlessly and spontaneously to the reality that the world itself and everything in it is divine as it is. At the same time there is also a subtle dualism regarding the difference between consciousness that is captivated by the illusion or even the mistaken impulse to seek to wake up, and the truly awakened consciousness that is free of the entanglements of taking the illusory drama of life as real.
Many Neo-Advaitins suggest that the whole material world is merely a dream and that enlightenment is a kind of waking up from it into the pure consciousness in which nothing actually ever has happened. In philosophical terms, Advaita is in alignment with the category of philosophical idealists, who hold that minds (or consciousness) and ideas are considered the ultimate reality of which material existence is a mere degraded facsimile.
The non-dualism of Tantra goes one step further than Adveita, by saying that even what they would call the veil of illusion is itself divine. We are most familiar with Tantra in the West as a practice of sacred sexuality.. As with all forms of Eastern practice adopted in the West, we have largely repurposed and redefined Tantra to our own needs, within our own context. This is inevitable, but of course has both drawbacks and advantages.
Essentially, Tantra refutes the dualism of a thinker like Patanjali by saying that the world of appearances (including what Adveita would call illusory) is in fact the unfolding play of the divine pouring itself into the world. All of it is sacred; no separation, no illusion or dualism at the level of anything being dualistically identified as either sacred or profane.
This idea, though initially quite pleasing and life-affirming, can also be taken to extremes. Consider the Aqhori sadhus, a Tantric sect who eat and drink only from a human skull, consume mind-altering drugs, eat rotting human flesh and feces and drink urine, all as part of their demonstration of deep faith that everything is in fact literally divine.
Within our more mild Western context, these ideas are often used to claim the oddly rationalized position that torture, rape, violence etc should not be “judged” as they are all somehow part of a divine plan, or because both victim and perpetrator are ultimately one consciousness. Here the doctrine of karma/past lives is often also evoked as a way to deal with the problem of evil.
In one sense though, if we see Nature and the body as being sacred, then abuses and crimes against these can represent something profane without violating the non-dual principle at play here in the slightest. Saying that all life is sacred is not the same as saying there is no difference between Charles Manson and Gandhi, or between destroying the environment and taking care of it.
We should mention that there are also Christian mystics and non-dual sects in Islam (Sufism), and Judaism (Kabbalists) as well, and we can even see the Paganism and Taoism that prefigure these other religions as non-dual in essence.
Dualism in Philosophy
The most pertinent area in which the concept of dualism arises here is the subject of “philosophy of mind.”
Rene Descartes is most famous for formulating the dualist notion that mind and body are two distinct substances or phenomena in the 17th century. For Descartes, as for all thinkers in his time, the words “mind” and “soul” were essentially interchangeable. Of course this idea of soul and body as distinct, with the body being mortal and the soul immortal is indeed the central dualism of most religion, but Descartes engaged the question as a philosopher and through his process of extreme skepticism regarding what was truly knowable about reality, came to his famous observation that the only thing he could know for sure was his own existence as a mind—”I think, therefore I am.”
Descartes believed the mind existed on an immaterial plane and interacted with the body via the pineal gland. Gilbert Ryle famously called Descartes dualism the"ghost in the machine."
His position is often referred to as “Cartesian Dualism,” and the vast majority of working philosophers and scientists no longer subscribe to it.
Non-Dualism in Philosophy
In terms of Philosophy Of Mind (POM), most working philosophers and scientists now subscribe to some variation of the mind being what the brain does. In other words, the brain is part of the body and it is the objectiveNeurobioloical processes of the brain (and embodied endocrine and nervous systems, as well as interactions with the environment) that produces the subjective experience of mind.
However, the non-dual stance here is that all the evidence suggests that mind is not distinct from, transcendent of, or in a realm separate from the physical body. Mind is an expression of biology, even though it has its own unique and awesome set of experiential features. With the progress of neuroscience, the similarities between the definitions of mind and an old world religious notion of an immaterial soul have becoming increasingly divergent.
Contemporary neuroscience does have significant overlap with Buddhist intuitions about the insubstantial nature of self, and neuroscience in turn is finding much to study regarding the effects of Buddhist meditation practices on the brain.
The essentially agnostic core teachings of Buddhism which emphasize psychological awareness and require no supernatural faith are in many ways a good fit with modern science and psychology, though many point out that the still popular dualist and supernatural notion of reincarnation basically requires some version of an immaterial soul.
Buddhism has roots in Samkhya, an atheist cosmology which Patanjali deviated from in just one respect: he added God. For the Buddha, it is not so much that we are seeking to find God, but to end suffering, although many of the ideas about what causes suffering and how to be free of it are shared between these two thinkers.
The Philosophy Of Mind context for dualism vs non-dualism is focused on whether mind is distinct from, or an expression of, the body. This relates to the religious context above in that a non-dual stance in POM actually negates mind as soul and makes ideas of ghosts, evil spirits, angels, demons and even of an un-embodied super-mind or “god” seem impossible, given what all the evidence points to so far.
So at this point let’s be clear that there are significant overlaps between dualism in religion and dualism in POM: both propose mind or soul as other than and perhaps transcendent of the body. But once we embrace non-dualism in POM, even religious non-dualism is questionable.
It is possible. though, to conceive of a next iteration of integrated non-dual spirituality that maintains the body and world/nature as sacred without this implying that they are infused with something otherworldly/ghostly in order to make them so! Mind is what brain does, energy is what certain neuroendocrine states feels like from the inside, expansive states of consciousness are caused by shifts in neurochemistry, and compassion, creativity, inspiration and insight remain 100% as valuable and beautiful when understood as phenomena of the natural world.
Dualism vs. Non-Dualism with Regard to Science
Since the advent of quantum physics about 80 years ago, but more specifically the recent popularizing (and often distorting) of and speculation upon certain aspects of quantum physics, the subject/object distinction in science has become an interesting topic. Some propose specifically that the subject/object dualism has been rendered invalid by quantum physics. The much touteddouble-slit experiment discovered that electrons have a dual nature. That is, they behave both as particles and as waves, depending on how they are observed. This has created a popular meme in spiritual circles about there being no way to separate subject and object, which somehow is taken to mean that we all create our own reality via the power of our consciousness.
But this is not what the conundrums in quantum physics prove, nor is there much overlap between the actual science and the new age beliefs that movies like What The Bleep and The Secret have made so widespread as somehow being part of the “new paradigm” in science.
Those taken in by these ideas will assert that the “old paradigm” of mechanistic materialist science was dualist in that the man in a white coat (the subject) thought he could stand apart from the object of his scientific inquiry. The “new paradigm” is that because of quantum physics we now know that the subjective observer alters the outcome and can therefore never be separate from the experiment itself.
Kinda cool, huh? Yes, but here are the two points that debunk this over-the-top claim:
1) The observer effect is only true at the tiny level of subatomic particles. Which is why it is so amazing—subatomic particles do not behave like the larger particles at the macro level we inhabit. The reasons why are as yet undetermined, but we know that a lot of it has to do with their size and how incredibly fast they are moving. It is a massive leap to say that this makes magical thinking or paranormal claims suddenly more plausible or evidenced.
2) Even in the dual-slit experiment, it is not “consciousness” that affects the outcome, as it can equally well be a camera observing the process. Remember too that we are talking about extremely tiny particles and that even shining a light on them disturbs their trajectory because of the photons being emitted.
Bottom line: to take one fascinating experiment that deals with the tiniest phenomena in physics and assert that this means that all of science is fatally flawed and misguided, verges on the ludicrous. Quantum physics does not change the fact that the laws of classical physics still apply 100% of the time at the macro level and the standards of scientific evidence are still in full effect.
They put planes in the air, make computers function and are able to grow human organs from stem cells. They allowed the calculatinons that were able to sling shot Apollo 13 around the moon and have it land in a specific place in the ocean, and made it possible to build the Large Hadron Collider that experimentally recreated the conditions in the first few millionths of a second after the big bang! In so doing the LHC this year produced the long awaited Higgs Bosons—never before seen particles that had been postulated for 40 years, thus completing the standard model of physics.
The only way that dualism vs non-dualism is at play in science has to do with the philosophy of mind discussion above on neuroscience and the relation of mind to brain. Science is non-dual in this regard as it says mind is what brain does. The double-slit experiment shows that electrons behave not either as particles or waves, but as both. Perhaps our concept “particle” and “wave” break down at the subatomic level and the instruments we use to measure electron activity play a part in what we see, but this does not translate into the everyday reality we inhabit. Likewise, Hesienberg’s uncertainty principle tells us that we cannot simultaneously measure the location and velocity of an electron, because to measure one is to affect the other at this super-microscopic level.
Trying to deny the subject/object distinction or calling science dualistic because it attempts to enact experimental observations free from bias is just tangential.
General Dualism vs. Non-Dualism
In a more general sense, dualism refers to the observation that everything has its opposite. We live in a world of good and evil, pleasure and pain, life and death etc..
One non-dual formulation of the same observation would be that each opposites is meaningless without the other, and so they exist as two sides of a single coin. This allows us to see the conceptual relationship without denying their experiential differences.
But take this one step further and we end up in the suspect territory of saying again that the distinction between the opposites is illusory and only appears thus to the unenlightened as all is oneness or god. All judgments are all totally relative and we become enlightened by seeing it as all one. This is the kind metaphysics that, while cool-sounding, is inadequate to the task of addressing the fullness of our human experience with respect and truthfulness.
CONCLUSION
So, next time someone brings up the term “non-dual” —ask them in which context they mean it: religion, philosophy of mind, adveita vedanta, tantra, the subject/object distinction, or just the general sense of life’s pairs if opposites…If they look perplexed, you might direct them to this article for clarity if you have found it provided some!
Personally, here’s what makes sense to me:
* With regard to good and evil, I am a dualist—bad things do happen in the world and they are different than good things.
* With regard to science and our ability to know reality through experimental observation and evidence, I am a dualist—we can in fact observe the vast majority of phenomena as subjects looking at objects.
* With regard to religion and spirituality I am a non-dualist—we live in one world, and the sacred is not other than nature and the body.
* With regard to philosophy of mind I am a non-dualist, the mind is what the brain does, and no extra spooky stuff is required.
Its complicated, huh? That’s why I wanted to break it down. The above positions, even though they contain both dualist and non-dual statements are all consistent with one another, given the different contexts they represent.
Knowing what you do now, if you pay attention you will often see this very common but misguided set of moves:
a) reject Descartes’ basically religious mind/body dualism, mistakenly thinking that
b) this leads to refuting the subject/object dualism in science (because of course Descartes was one of those stuffy old white guys) while
c)employing a misappropriated quantum physics principle (the observer effect) with an unfounded leap to
d) assert that consciousness creates reality and we are all more than our bodies—which unwittingly has brought us full circle to…. embracing Descartes’ religiously influenced mind/body dualism.
This is of course incoherent, but usually masquerades under the heading of being a “quantum non-dualism that goes beyond materialist science into the direct experience of oneness consciousness.” The tip off here is that this reasoning is often used to imply that something we would rather not face: death, trauma, injustice etc is not really real—and by now, that sort of thing should have an eyebrow raised half way up your forehead!
One final note: as one gets clearer about these different contexts for the topic of dualism vs non-dualism, it is natural to start to wonder how they reconcile with one another. This kind of integrative thinking is a passion of mine.
Notice this: very often those claiming a kind of religious non-dualism subscribe to an all-pervading consciousness that is transcendent of human biology. The tricky bit is that in philosophical terms, this is precisely the dualist position: mind is distinct from and can exist without body. So with regard to mind/body dualism a la neuroscience and philosophy of mind, this aspect of non-dual religion remains strictly dualist.
This is a central challenge for anyone who wants to reconcile our current knowledge with an ancient spiritual cosmology (whether of Western, Eastern or Middle Eastern origin)—it requires a central mind/body dualist belief to subscribe to ghosts, souls, and yes, an un-embodied god or spirit, yet this central belief has no evidence to support it, and instead all the evidence points to mind/consciousness as an expression of brain/biology/body. A free floating intentional mind-at-large without biological basis remains most likely a kind of wishful thinking on the part of us human beings who project an anthropocentric face onto the vast expanse of the cosmos and imagine ourselves as disembodied eternal souls who do not have to die.
Although great strides have been made with regard to understanding the brain and the where the various functions of mind reside in the brain and are diminished or erased by injury, the exact mechanism by which neurobiology becomes self-reflectively aware remains elusive at this point.