Just This!

Introduction

The root of the deepening crises now threatening civilization is the the worldview of separation, dualism. This view, deeply embedded in consciousness, has brought us to the precipice we call the meta-crisis. A counter-narrative of a world in profound relational order is rising in response to the binaried prison of Anglo-European modernity.¹ ‘Order’ is perhaps not the most appropriate word to put next to ‘relational’ because the relational view is unconditional. It is non-dual. The non-dual order is relational in disordered fashion. Its process is not so easily captured by what we mean when we use the word order because its ‘stability’ is paradoxical, a coherence of incoherence, uncertain, impermanent, and dependably so. 
I will walk through the exhausted narratives of dualism and engage with the transformative openness of the non-dual response. As the global zeitgeist shifts away from capital’s harms, modernity remains incapable of taking a serious look at itself. Instead, the news is full of its increasingly invasive and controlling gestures, grasping for continuity. The hyper-rational vision of technocratic competency, financial hegemony and cultural dominance sustain the modern dream, as if governance believes it can lock in the social order as if it can all be contained on a microchip. This is the vision of AI, to quantify, manage and control all interactions through networks of hardware. Meanwhile, America’s willful blindness to planetary crises combined with militaristic threats, economic abuse and diplomatic overreach follow the identical ideology, repeating past errors while continuing to claim innocence. Its unshakeable faith in human exceptionalism and its denial of Earth’s limits remain its prime directives. 

The Western order is the most extreme expression of dualism as it anchors the world-as-object and the illusion of human control. It lives in a polar universe populated by dichotomies within a construct of linear time. It depends on the infrastructure of certainty, mastery, and control. Above all, the image of humanity’s ultimate ascent beyond complexity and conflict is so deeply planted in consciousness and language that not much else can grow. No alternative penetrates. The economic system pursues yield in ever more aggressive, intrusive and extractive ways to achieve growth at the deepening expense of equality, human relations, health and ecological homeostasis. Material commitments to future generations find no footing here. Living systems either approach irreversible tipping points or are already past them. The drumbeat of collapse meets increasingly rigid, shrill, aggressive and authoritarian denial. 

Where is sanctuary to be found? Countering the violence of the self-terminating worldview is a radically different perspective, one that lives in  the indeterminacy of relational flux, in a fluid field of discovery and resilience, where boundaries are fluid and certainty is a non-condition. The relational flux steps outside linear time, beyond the categorizations of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and even species. In this domain, we are woven together in intra-active evolutionary emergence, a subtle interpenetration in a field of mutuality. Just this! is the call of the moment. Conventional boundaries will become permeable membranes in which personal, ethnic and national identities are temporary categorizations that serve but do not separate. The most significant property of this novel emergence is the tangible sense that love is its origin and its infrastructure, an invisible but deeply felt connective tissue inherent to all experience. Will such a vision revitalize a world so removed from nature, from its own nature? Who must we become to live the fluid and seamless nature of existence? 

Non-duality is a meta-view, an elusive sensation of Earth-time collapsing out of linearity, separability and conceptuality, in which ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ find reunion. Non-duality is a practice, a remembrance of being as a relational field where ‘self’ becomes known as a handrail instead of a handcuff, a temporary convenience we can let go of at any time and will surely let go of at death. We may fall along the way, but where we fall the rules of zero-sum do not operate. Worlds are born and worlds dissolve in every instant.² In quiet moments, the cycle of life, the hum of aliveness,  is deeply felt. There is no fixed division between me and you or between inside and out. Every moment is a phenomenal co-arising and intermingling of innumerable agencies. We do not exist independently of each other or from Earth. In this intrinsically relational condition, binaries collapse before non-discriminating acceptance. The whole Earth speaks of intimate relations in continuous gestation, nurturing, digesting and composting in realms beyond prime directives or human concerns. The self is not the only one making decisions.

This book claims that because the climate emergency plays no favorites, a conscious transition to the fact of unity, relational realism, irrevocable interdependence, impermanence and planetary coherence is required. Climate change is a human creation fueled by capital, separability, growth, dissociation, and managed control. The very fact that neoliberals regard climate change as a technical problem to be solved is testament to the inadequacy of market fundamentalism. The American outlook on the world remains insecure, fearful and paranoid. It is incapable of seeing how far we are removed not only from nature but from our nature. We yearn to live in confidence, community and trust, guided only by the sacred dimensions of life which is to say our shared vulnerability, impermanence and subordination to the multiverse far beyond any individual concern.

The response of culture has been to explore connection, seamless wholeness. The healing path is a rhythm of remembrance and recovery, a disruption of the zero-sum that looks beyond resource flows, supply chains, and bottom lines to a world awakening to its own heart, resonating beyond the audible range of modernity’s ear. But healing, like arrival, is never complete, because care and morality are under reconstruction. Dualism projects its morality of amorality, its profound human dissociation from the world that now seeds the motivation to heal the divide. A much wider view of our presence is now required, one that reweaves individualism and reorients anthropocentric dreams away from the trajectories of growth, fascist uprisings and claims of superiority and inevitability.

The definition of reality is the domain of philosophy and the neuroscience of cognition. The conversation within Mahayana Buddhism distinguishes between relative and absolute reality. Samsara is the relative domain of duality, discursive consciousness, the world of struggle, constant striving, inadequacy and suffering. Nirvana, non-duality, is the absolute domain, the nature of mind. Non-dual experience is the observer and observed discovering the sublime openness of reunion. The world, the universe, self, all that is known, become a single subject. Phenomena remain distinguishable, but all arises continuously, spontaneously, co-originating from a single source that is itself empty of all identity. What were once objects in our view are now a mesmerizing luminous display of dynamic process in seamless unity with water, soil and sky. 

Non-dual cognition recognizes no separation whatsoever. Becoming this version of reality, what Buddhists refer to as absolute, is a rare event. Those who traverse this path commonly overcome the mental pitfalls that obstruct non-dual revelation. Separability remains the default view in which all objects appear distinct from one another and from the observer without a thought as to whether this is the truth of reality because we are so habituated to it. Duality believes it is cognizing reality. But no, duality is mistaking its cognitive frame for reality. Language, at least the English language, facilitates, anchors and reinforces this illusion as it represents perception in dualistic terms. 

One might well ask if it is not also the case with non-dual perception—that it is merely a cognitive frame. Humberto Maturana proposed that life at the molecular level is an autopoietic process strictly concerning itself with the conservation of conditions supporting life to sustain sufficient adaptive capacity to guarantee survival.³ Autopoiesis is the sole occupation of life, the most immediate molecular conditions of change and the coordination of ongoing spontaneous responses to cellular conditions and environmental inputs without thought or plan. Because human observation and interpretation can only arise from within a specific organism defined by its own autopoietic process, cognition becomes the creation of representations rather than an observation of reality.⁴  Not only for Maturana, but for modern physics, we cannot claim to see the world as it is. We can only say that the human cognitive apparatus cannot discern the objective nature of existence, only what it assumes from information received by our senses. Nevertheless, the exceedingly rare, either dramatic or cultivated, revelation of non-dual perception, combined with the rigorous path to its realization also suggests that cognition is a malleable property of mind. This is the central principle of the Buddhist path, that you can literally cut through your mind to reveal truth beneath cognition. 

Dualism is the primary character of reality because it does not accept divergent experience as sufficient validation of any alternative. Non-duality claims to be the absolute nature of reality based on its embodied character and voluminous empirical elaborations of its nature. If we wish to claim that our cognitive apparatus is immutable, then we can claim non-duality is just another projection. The view I’m taking, consistent with Buddhist literature and empirical evidence, is that by framing non-duality as an absolute, duality becomes a subset. Duality and non-duality are co-existent and inseparable just as Buddhists claim samsara and nirvana are inseparable. Realizing their complete and irrevocable unity was the accomplishment of the historical Buddha. The essence of all perception, the ground layer, is therefore non-dual. Duality could not exist without it. I refer to duality and non-duality as relative and absolute for the sake of discourse, but that division does not exist. Those of us who are not Buddhas and live in a dualistic world do not routinely conceive of two domains or live in their absolute unity. If we did, the world would be a very different place. We are called to discover that unity in practice, perception and action.