first person
NO EXIT?
By Andrew Scott
The other day I was sitting in a restaurant, working on an article about nondualism and pondering the ancient Chinese philosophy of Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu. I glanced up at a television perched behind the bar when a commercial came on for a new video game called“ Deux Ex: Mankind Divided.” I’ m not a video game player, nor a fan of the ultra-violent, digital war scenes of death and destruction that were playing out on the screen, but for me it perfectly illustrated how dualistic thought pervades our media, culture, and society. Trying to bring about an awareness of what might seem like a natural sense of separation between ourselves and everything around us, is a bit like being a fish trying to gain an awareness of the water it’ s been swimming in its entire life.
A non-dualistic way of thinking is not standard in our society, so in trying to get a grasp on this alternative way of perceiving experience we may find that these ideas seem opposed to our day-to-day ways of looking at things. Due to our mental conditioning, we see, measure, and discriminate everything as being separate from everything else. But what if nothing was separate from anything else? What if everything in the entire realm of existence was inseparable from everything else? What if everything was part of the same unified fabric of reality, as quantum physics seems to be telling us it is?
Before trying to understand how this alternative worldview might lead to a different socially constructed reality, let’ s look at dualism as if it were the form of consciousness that has produced our modern world. Dualistic thought divides the cosmos between this part and that, me and you, good and bad, up and down, in here and out there. From the way we understand an atom, to the borders we’ ve drawn on maps, nations, political parties, capitalism, we can look at all of these aspects of our reality and see how intricately they are linked to a particular set of dualistic beliefs.
Take, for example, the scientific creation narrative we teach children in school. The Big Bang theoretically explains creation as a unified singularity that explodes out into an infinite void we call space creating everything including all the invisible particles that our bodies are supposedly made of. We call these atoms, and we are told that they themselves are made of even tinier particles made of mostly empty space, all separate from each other, running into and bouncing off each other, attracting and repelling one another in an endless interaction of molecules. And, of course, planets orbit stars, moons orbit planets, and we have nice, neat explanations for how all the separate parts work. You’ d be hard pressed, however, to find a respectable astronomy professor who would tell you that big bang cosmology is anything close to how the universe actually works, and they might tell you that the idea that the universe“ has a beginning” in the big bang sense is beyond problematic for the field of astronomy, as well as for the field of quantum physics.
When mankind and the world around us are seen as separate as a fundamental tenet of our psyche, we end up believing that existence is a constant competition between opposing forces, between life and death, man and nature, or good and evil. Life becomes a battle, a struggle to survive. We’ ve been continually conditioned by this tension, and with it, we seem to have inherited a consuming obsession with changing something or doing something to overcome our situation. It is so much a part of our consciousness that it’ s nearly invisible. Which begs the question: is this present reality the one we were hoping for when we were taught the standard operating procedure for civilized life? Could the way we understand our reality have something to do with the reality we end up creating, with its social injustices, environmental degradation, and suffering of every kind?
What would an alternative story with a different fundamental premise look like? In chapter one of the Tao Te Ching, a 2,600 year-old piece of
20 IMAGINE l FALL 2016