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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Non-Dual Non-Experience?

Continuing my previous project of advaitic dialectics, I have several new thoughts which came to me during a discussion with a friend.

The Totality is experienced as a model, and as a model only. When asked the meaning of a poem, one cannot quote the entire poem back to the asker, though this would be the most direct and truthful answer in some sense. Rather, one must provide something which points to the wholeness of the poem without exactly repeating it. One must, in other words, give a model of the poem. Similarly, the Totality cannot be directly experienced or talked about as Totality, because of the previously-mentioned impossibility of squaring the particularity of one's consciousness with the universality of everything. The individuality cannot make the leap to Totality as Totality, but only may commune with it in microcosm, in model.

This brings me to the point that non-dual experience is quite different from non-dual non-experience. A subjectivity experiencing non-duality is going to be quite different from the simple non-duality that lies "outside" subjective/socially-determined forms and names. The singularity/particularity of one's subjective experience is a component of the mystical experience that is quite clearly not present when there is no sufficiently advanced consciousness to have that experience. Owing no small debt to Marx and to Marxian philosophy, I do not believe that the nature of non-duality is in-itself consciousness, but rather that social conditions yada yada yada...

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