Non-dualism and logic

What should one follow – a religion, belief system, spirituality, or ‘how-to’ guide? I don’t know the answer to that, and nobody does because the one you are following may also be following someone else, and the chain may be going on and on. So, who are you following in the end? Nobody knows, and neither do I. But I know one thing for sure – I am on a path to understanding the world around me, both physical and non-apparent. And this world holds a concept of non-duality, which is pretty complex but interesting because it answers a lot of questions.

I have written a lot about consciousness and existence:

It’s time to add another thought to this basket. This is not a spiritual or religious topic. It is another way of looking at the world around us. We normally perceive the world using our senses of sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, and other non-basic senses like the sense of space, sense of balance, cross-migration of senses, and so on. The only thing common with all these senses is that they are local to our body and controlled by our brain. But what about those senses that are not affected by our bodies?

Senses from the objective perspective

Firstly, we should understand this concept of looking at things objectively. When you sleep, for example, you have dreams. In your dreams, which could be absurd, you see another world from a perspective that may or may not be you. This dream world is created by your brain but doesn’t exist in reality. But the fact that you are living in that world in your dreams proves that it exists, but at the same time is not real. This is what the concept of non-duality entails. You live in a world that is real for sure but is not the reality, but just one figment of that reality.

When you wake up from a perfect dream, you are sad because it was not reality, but you felt good. And you can almost never go back to the same dream world after you have woken up because you will go into a different dream world. This other dream world can also be beautiful but will be interrupted by you waking up. Eventually, you made peace with the understanding that dreams are a false world constructed by the brain, and one must wake up to return to the real world.

Now ask yourself: Is the “real” world actually real, or is it also a fake world that we will leave to go back to actual reality? Will it then be the actual reality, or just another superior reality in this chain?

Introducing non-duality

This is where the idea of non-duality kicks in with answers. It shows a path without a promise of an end, but there is an ultimate destination. This concept explains the world we are living in as real but is not absolute. Everything we sense or detect here, whether using our senses or any instrumentation, is real and exists. But this reality is only one manifestation of absolute reality. To put this idea into perspective, we can consider the idea of dimensions. I explained the concept of 1D, 2D, 3D, and higher dimensions in an older article here -> Dimensions of reality. I’ll explain it in short again here.

You can do it yourselves at home and see it live. Take a torch, or use the flashlight of your phone and shine it on a wall. Now take a small ball and hold it in front of the light. If you don’t have a ball, take a piece of aluminum fall and make a ball, or just take anything small and round. You see the round shadow of the ball on the wall. The ball you are holding has three dimensions – length, breadth, and height. But the shadow has only two dimensions – length, and breadth. Move the ball front and back. This makes the shadow bigger and smaller. So, by making changes in the third dimension, you are making changes in the first two dimensions. If there are creatures that exist in 2D, it is magic for them. But for us living in 3D, it is just basic reality. Now imagine there are creatures living in 4D and they make changes in the fourth dimension. While for them it is the basic reality, for us it is magic because we do not know how to make changes to the fourth dimension. So, 2D is just one manifestation of 3D, 3D is just one manifestation of 4D, and so on.

Hence, if we extend this idea to a larger scale, our world is just a manifestation of a higher, bigger world. The universe as we know it can be seen by our eyes, but only a certain wavelength range is seen, known as the visible spectrum. We invented telescopes and detectors of different kinds to expand our vision to other wavelength ranges like infrared, ultraviolet, microwaves, neutrinos, and so on. Other than “seeing” things, we can also feel other forms of energy like heat, wind, etc., hear forms of energy like sounds, vibrations, etc., and also taste and smell chemical energy. Other than these, we also have gravitational waves, which are basically disturbances in the spacetime fabric (Easy explanation to gravitational waves here). Even if we include every form of energy we know about and can detect by some means, we only know about 4% of the universal energy. In fact, within the 4% that we know, it is a well-known fact that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can be converted from one form to another. So, everything we know is another form of everything else. This idea leads us to the concept of unified energy of the entire universe being manifested in different forms. Can all the energy in the universe be untified? Find out here -> Can we reach the unifying force of nature?

Cover image credits: Pablo Carlos Budassi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If your whole body, including your mind, “belongs” to you, then who exactly are you?

This is a weird question, but it makes sense. Let’s look at our bodies, for example. When we describe our body parts, we say my arms, my legs, my heart, my brain, and so on. If everything just “belongs” to you, then who are you exactly? How would you define yourself if your whole body, including your mind, belongs to you? Who are you? The answer is the same as that which applies to the universe. Everything holds its own identity, but is also a manifestation of the same bigger picture. Your body parts are what make you, but they are also holding their own identity. Everything boils down to energy. The energy that runs you was once part of a dying star. All of that has somehow reached a stage after several conversions to run your body. So, you weren’t born by chance, the power you hold has reached you at the end of a long chain of billions of years. And this is not even the end. After our bodies die, the energy that was running our body will run something else or travel elsewhere. Now the question arises whether we can control where this energy would travel while we are alive or after our death. The answer is yes, we can.

In our everyday lives, we can convert chemical energy into mechanical energy by eating food and processing it in our body to gain energy to do our tasks. This is because we understand the nature of food and we know the mechanism of converting that energy to use it to our advantage. In the same way, we must make efforts to understand the nature of energy that is running our body in order to use it in the way we want it. Even river water meets the sea and merges with it. Even though river and sea water may have different properties due to the nature of contaminants and salts in it, they are both H2O molecules. The ability of knowing that, merges the water from two different sources. So, knowledge of our nature and the nature of the unknown 96% in the universe will enable us to guide ourselves. This is the essence of non-duality, i.e. the idea of being the same, but also different at the same time.

Linking the chain to the beginning

When you realize the nature of dreams, you are able to merge it with yourself. In the way, realizing the nature of yourself will enable you to perceive the world that encompasses the world in which your body lives. Once you know the nature of everything in your world, the fear disappears because nothing here is new. It is the same energy manifested in different forms. This sense of familiarity will help you to find yourself one day in this web. That’s when you know your cosmic address.

Those who know and understand will also understand that I talked about Advaita Vedanta, but without using terms in Sanskrit. Irrespective of the words or language used, the idea will still prevail. But this isn’t the only idea to understand the universe around us. Even though energy is convertible from one form to another, the nature of all energies is still different. Not all energies can be converted into every other form of energy. As a common example in our everyday lives, heat energy cannot be converted into other forms completely. There will be loss of thermal energy. And this is one of the most common conversions we have been doing for millions of years. So, there are bound to be energies that are not convertible to other forms directly, and would then be superior to other forms in that sense. And there would be a certain chain of events or path that they must follow to reach there. Yet another theory is that there is an energy that is supreme, which gives all the other matter and energy its properties. This idea points towards the concept of the Higgs field.

All these theories coexist and neither of them are wrong. It’s just that we are too small to completely understand the bigger picture, and hence, argue about it. The best option we have is to learn, understand, listen, and grow. So, let’s do that. What do you think?

Be Priyafied!