Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#2155 -
Gabriel Rosenstock pays a
brief visit.
An article on nonduality is
rarely found via Google News, but this is as good as they get: Duality
and non-duality in science and religion.
suddenly Basho
becomes the horse
the horse Basho
--Gabriel Rosenstock
Duality and non-duality in science and
religion
A major problem in modern cosmology is related to the issue
of duality and non-duality.
http://www.stnews.org/articles.php?article_id=548&category=commentary
By Mark MacDowell and Paul Utukuru
(
A bad workman blames his tools, but what if
the tools are just not sharp enough for the job?
A major problem in modern cosmology is related to the issue of
duality and non-duality, which is directly related to the only
tool available to us: mathematics. With math, we try to trace
back the origins of our universe to the point when space and time
did not exist. All goes well until we get to just a moment after
the big bang. Beyond that, our mathematics breaks down and
refuses to go back any further to the exact moment of the event,
usually referred to as the space-time singularity.
This breakdown occurs for two reasons. One is that our
cosmological mathematics is either time-dependent, meaning that
there is no change in space without some reference to a change in
time, or space-dependent, meaning that there is no time without
some reference to a change in space. That being the case, how can
we ever describe mathematically the space-time singularity that
doesn’t exist in space-time?
This problem boils down to our inability to establish a
connected relationship between the singularity at the moment of
the big bang and the multiplicity after the big bang. What seems
to be necessary is a mathematical formalism which is space-time
independent. Obviously, no such thing exists.
The other reason for our inability to reach the space-time
singularity with our mathematics is our inability to derive
duality or multiplicity from none or the One. In other words, how
did the two and the many come from the One or none if there was
only one or none to begin with?
In this context, the major religions prevailing in the world
today can be divided into two broad categories, theistic and
non-theistic. The theistic ones can be further divided into a
monotheistic group and a polytheistic group. Among the strictly
monotheistic ones are all three Abrahamic religions and
Sikhism. The polytheistic group includes such religions as
Shinto, the Native American Toltec tradition and the new
neo-paganism emerging in some parts of
Contrary to popular belief, there is indeed a common
metaphysical thread that runs through all the religions listed
above. And that is the notion of oneness of name and form that
permeates our world. It is described as the “Great One”
in the Dead Sea Scrolls and as God the Father in Christianity. It
is referred to as Sunyata in Buddhism and as Brahman
in Hindu Vedanta. Although this concept of oneness occurs in so
many different locations in the holy books and verbal
transmissions of all the religions of the world, the way it is
addressed in Buddhism and Vedanta can be subjectively realized
and experimentally validated.
These traditions recognize that all our perceptions and our
conceptions, including our languages and our mathematical tools,
involve duality and multiplicity. Buddhism at its most austere is
expressed in its “Middle Path.” Using the dialectic as
a cathartic device, it takes a strong logical position that all
language is dualistic because in order to define a term one must
define its “anti-term” — its opposite. One cannot
speak of any concept without at the same time giving equal
credence to the existence of its opposite. For example, there
would be no “left” without “right,” no “up”
without “down,” no “athlete” without “couch
potato,” no “blue” without “non-blue.”
Even a concept as simple as “tree” is dependent on
“non-tree ” for its definition.
What does this mean? In general, it means one cannot create a
term in a vacuum. With nothing against which it can be
contrasted, a term is meaningless. Therefore, to describe “The
Great One” using language that is dualistic or multiplistic
is meaningless.
To experience the Great One, the recognized pathway among the
theistic religions is prayer and revelation. But if trying to
describe what is essentially ineffable is a misdirected effort,
what might work is something that enables you to transcend you
own mind and take it out of space-time. This is where yogic
practices such as meditation, repetitive chanting and reflective
Zen come into the picture.
Thus, all the seemingly independent concepts in our vocabulary
are actually a giant compendium with intersecting origins. This
“dependent origination” also applies to the real world
we live in. For example, we would not exist if it weren’t
for the plants that just happen to exhale exactly the same
mixture of gases that we couldn’t exist without. Likewise,
we exhale exactly the same mixture that they need.
What about our planet? Isn’t it an independent entity?
Hardly! Our own planet came from somewhere and is sustained by
something. Without the sun, we would freeze quicker than you
could read about it. Comets of a non-earthly origin are thought
to have brought water to earth and actually seeded the potential
for life here. Our own sun is dependent on its own “birth
galaxy” and our galaxy is dependent upon its own “birth
cluster,” and so it goes. Therefore, nothing in our universe
has any real independent existence.
The Buddhist sees our whole world as full of hints or arrows
pointing to non-duality, and it is interesting that modern
science is also slowly picking up on non-duality. Quantum
teleportation as well as the Bose-Einstein condensate are two
shining examples. In both cases, what appear to be separate
particles or entities act as a unit not separated in time. The
Buddhist would take these facts as an intellectual starting
point, the furthest outpost of rationality, from which to make
the leap from the four dimensions of here and now, to that which
lies beyond the four dimension of space-time: the non-dual.
Sufism and other mystical disciplines involve the same sort of
techniques.
Religion can encourage the student to contemplate dependent
origination exhibited by nature as well as dependent origination
in language as a springboard to a “higher truth” of
intuitional insight. This insight, called prajnaparamita
in Buddhism, goes beyond where language and conceptualization
function into a non-dual higher reality: that “Great One”
from which we all come and to which we all shall return.
Mark MacDowell is a professor of
philosophy at Lourdes College in Sylvania,