how to save the world

For seven years now, I have been watching/listening to radical non-duality speakers. Although I write about it a lot, I’m really not trying to convince anyone of anything — I’m just trying to sort it out in my own mind. I want to understand how a message that is so useless and so counter to everything I’ve been taught about the nature of reality, can be at the same time so resonant, so compelling.

There are quite a few scientists and science buffs who are starting to write about how this strange message — that there is no free will, no self, no time or space, no thing and no one ‘separate’, and nothing ‘really’ happening — is surprisingly aligned with the newest discoveries and theories in astrophysics, quantum science, and neuroscience.

But while the veracity of this message may be scientifically supportable, and somehow intuited, and even ‘glimpsed’ in ‘moments’ when the self seemingly ‘disappears’, there is no path to actually ‘seeing’ it. There is no way for this creature’s concoction I call my self, to realize the non-existence of itself. The self cannot get out of its own way.

Still, once you’ve been bitten by this message it can be impossible to shake. Somehow, I know it’s ‘right’. So although it’s futile, I keep on trying to make sense of everything that ‘I’ have always thought was true, all over again, on the premise that this message is correct. It’s a frustrating and exhausting process.

The first and easiest step in this process, I think, is the acknowledgement that there is no such thing as free will, and that all our (bodies’) beliefs and behaviours are biologically or culturally conditioned given the circumstances of the moment. We certainly seem to have free will, but there is lots of empirical and scientific evidence that we do not. I did not come to accept this easily, but when I did, it started to seem pretty obvious to me, and to explain a lot of previously seemingly paradoxical and incoherent human behaviours.

Accepting that was rather revolutionary in itself. Our systems of punishment and incarceration, for example, suddenly seemed ludicrous to me. Blaming people for their behaviour suddenly seemed unfair and even cruel. An enormous weight of self-imposed responsibility for my own actions was lifted from my shoulders (after the usual Doubting Thomas skepticism that I might just be using it as an excuse for ‘shirking’ my responsibilities and not taking responsibility for what this body had done).

The next and much more difficult step was acknowledging that there is no such thing as time. Scientifically this isn’t hard to justify — most scientists have acknowledged that time isn’t ‘fundamental’ to the nature of reality and many have conceded that it’s just a mental shorthand, the brain’s way of categorizing its observations. Many scientists are also willing to acknowledge that what we see as a continuity of ‘happenings’  ‘over’ time is also just a convincing illusion — that time is just an order that our brains place our perceptions into, to try to make sense of what appears to be happening. And that our entire sense of our lives, memories and plans has to be reinvented and re-placed in ‘time’ order in the brain, every time we awaken.

But the non-existence of time, for me at least, is much harder for me to rationalize than our lack of free will. Some very basic concepts, like the ‘big bang’, evolution, causality, memory, and our sense of, and preoccupation with, the trajectory of our lives, and our death, all have to be re-thought if we acknowledge the un-reality of time.

My way of doing this is to suggest that perhaps all of these apparent happenings, if they are not ‘real’, are so apparently so that perhaps their ‘actual’ reality is not worth quibbling about. We don’t argue that a film showing us pictures at 50fps is fraudulent because the appearance of movement in it is essentially an optical illusion. When I talk with radical non-duality speakers they don’t seem to care very much whether time is an ‘appearance’ or an ‘illusion’; they just assert that it’s not real. So I kind of put my reservations about this on hold, and go onto the next step.

The third step is a doozy — it’s the acknowledgement that there is no ‘self’, no ‘you’ no ‘one’, no ‘thing’ apart. Everything is nothing appearing as everything. Not only is there no free will, there is no ‘one’ to have free will. Not only is there no time, there is nothing really happening.

Neuroscientists have largely given up looking for evidence of a ‘self’ anywhere(s) in the brain or body; there is simply no physical evidence one exists. And they have also demonstrated that the body kinetically acts on what are its apparent decisions before the ‘decision’ shows up in the brain’s neural pathways, suggesting that the brain is rationalizing the decision as being ‘its’ decision after the fact, rather than making decisions at all. Just ‘making sense of it’ for ‘next time’.

Whether or not you believe neuroscience (which is still mostly quackery, as studies debunking fMRI theories continue to demonstrate), the most compelling evidence for the non-existence of the self is when it apparently completely disappears, with no apparent consequences on the body that that self presumed to occupy.

There are quite a few apparent individuals with no axe to grind who give quite compelling accounts of how their sense of self vanished (for no reason) and how that has not affected their capacity to function at all. They still do the same things and have the same preferences. They just no see that ‘obviously’ there is no self there, or anywhere else, doing anything. It’s all just appearances.

And there are many more, including me, who have had so-called ‘glimpses‘ when the self simply was not there, when an astonishingly different perception of the nature of reality was apparent… until the ‘self’ ‘came back’ and tried to make sense of it. It was absolutely obvious ‘during’ the glimpse that what was ‘seen’ then was how everything really was, and that what ‘I’ had always thought was real was not.

It’s been 6 1/2 years since the last ‘glimpse’. I’m not disheartened by that; as I wrote at the time:

There was no temptation to grasp onto it lest it be quickly lost again. It was clearly always here, everywhere, not ‘going’ anywhere, accessible always. My ‘self’ would have been anxious not to lose it, but my self was, in that moment, not present.

I am, somehow, absolutely confident that ‘this’ is just ‘waiting’ for ‘me’ to get out of the way, so it can be seen.

Still, science is of little help here. It does suggest that ‘self-consciousness’ is completely unnecessary to a full and vibrant (apparent) ‘life’, and that the more-than-human world ‘lives’ in a full, intense way that humans, living through the veil of self, cannot. Most living creatures clearly feel pain and pleasure, fear and anger, for example — you don’t have to have a ‘self’ and a sense of self-consciousness and separation to be sentient — but it seems only humans also feel ‘self-generated’ emotions like hatred, guilt and shame.

Yesterday, I was exercising on a treadmill in our apartment’s gym, listening to a recording of Tim Cliss on YouTube speaking at one of his meetings in Copenhagen as I did so. There were four other people in the gym at the time, all of us preoccupied with what we were doing, though the gym is surrounded by mirrors so you could always see who else was there.

Tim was talking about loneliness, and about the question he often gets about whether ‘without a self’ you feel more or less lonely. The point he made, which stunned me to the point I almost fell off the treadmill, was that the realization that there is ‘obviously’ no ‘you’ wasn’t what was important — in fact the absence of the ‘you’ is not even noticed until and unless there are memories of a time there was seemingly a ‘you’ and all of a sudden the absence of a ‘you’ is noticed.

What was important, however, was that, in addition to there being no ‘you’, it becomes obvious that there is no one else either. That kind of ‘loneliness’ must be shattering. The realization of utter aloneness.

That is not to say that there aren’t conversations and camaraderie (Tim remains somewhat obsessed with golf.) But these are simply conditioned behaviours and responses. There are conversations, laughter, anger perhaps, but they are seen as not being ‘anyone’s’ doing. They are just appearances, what the apparent conditioned body seems inclined to do, without any purpose or reason or meaning. And they are apparent happenings of no one. They entail no relationship with any ‘one’ else. Could anything be lonelier than that?

Tim has two young sons that he adores, but he describes his attentive behaviours with them as if he were describing an adult fox looking after its kits. Instinctive, fully alive, devoted and passionate, yet there is no ‘one’ there.

So now I look around the gym at the other apparent people working out. And I think: I have no problem with there being no ‘me’. But what am I to make of these other intense, sweating bodies not being real either? This gym is actually empty — there is no one here.

There is no one anywhere. There never has been anyone. This was obvious during the ‘glimpses’. I know there is no path to actually seeing this. It makes no sense — how can anything be seen with no seer? But for a brief moment in that gym it was obvious — the room was empty. There were only appearances, reflections in the mirrors.

I know of people who have had a similar moment of frisson — quite often they tell me (as my friend Djô did most recently) that it happens when they are looking in a mirror and suddenly see there is no one looking back — at no one. So I’m standing on the treadmill looking into a wall of mirrors that reflects back multiple times everyone and everything in the room — and for a brief second it is obvious there is no one in the room. No ‘me’, which is perfectly fine (at least so I tell myself), but no ‘one’ else, either. No, no, that can’t be.

And then they were back. And so was I.

This is a fairly deep dive into the message of radical non-duality, and some of the more exasperating and enduring questions it gives rise to. Definitely not easy going, or in any way useful. You’ve been warned!

cartoon by Michael Leunig

Everything our senses tell us is a constantly-evolving conjecture, a model that the body’s nervous system (which includes the brain) conjures up to ‘represent’ reality. It does this to try to protect the entire body and the complicity of cells, organs and tissues that our ‘selves’ call ‘us’. So when it ‘sees’ a tiger, it correlates the colours (the wavelengths of light reaching the eyes) and the speed (the apparent ‘movement’ of those wavelengths through time and space) with its memories of similar ‘occurrences’ in the ‘past’. (Time and space are also the nervous system’s inventions, place-holders or categories or features that it uses to make sense of things.) 

The senses are the means by which our nervous system converts quanta (bits of energy) into qualia (usefully distinguishable features) — what we call ‘perceiving’. There actually is no such thing as colour or speed — these are just qualia that our brains and nervous system ‘make’ of things. 

You may accept that colour and other visual perceptions are just concoctions of the nervous system. But you may be less willing to accept that the apparent solidity of a wall is likewise an invention of the nervous system. After all, when we walk into a wall, we don’t just ‘perceive’ it to be solid and impenetrable, we know it is.

But in fact, this is a false distinction between our touch perceptions and perceptions of the other four senses. The feeling of impermeability of a wall is just another qualia — no less of an ‘illusion’ (or perhaps ‘allusion’) than what we see. 

We ascribe ‘reality’ to something we see when we confirm it through the sense of touch. A startlingly realistic hologram we cannot touch is not ‘real’, while anything we touch in a completely dark place is ‘real’. We even use the word ‘tangible’ (something that responds to touch) as synonymous with ‘real’. 

But if we look closely enough at anything we think of as ‘physically’ real (like a wall), we discover it is made almost entirely of nothing, and if we move in and look closer at what seems not to be nothing, we find that, too, is almost entirely nothing, and so on, ad infinitum, until we must conclude that nothing is real, and that our touch-perception of the wall as ‘real’ is no more validating than the sight-perception of colour. 

Everything we think of as ‘real’ is just a perception of the nervous system, a representation or map of what we then conceive of as ‘really real’. Nothing is ‘really real’. Everything is just nothing, appearing to the senses as quanta, which are converted by the senses into qualia, which the nervous system then uses in its totally fabricated model of ‘reality’. 

In short, we don’t ‘know’ the wall is solid and therefore ‘real’ — we ‘feel’ it to be so, and then define it as so accordingly.

We also think of thoughts, feelings, and our ‘selves’ as ‘real’ although we cannot touch them ‘physically’.  Thoughts and feelings are merely another form of electrochemical signal, more qualia, the only difference being that we distinguish them, completely arbitrarily, as being ‘inside’ ourselves. But this doesn’t bear scrutiny either. How is a sore wrist substantively different from a feeling of sadness or a thought about something being good or evil or correct or wrong? We distinguish them by ascribing our pains as being ‘our body’s’ while the thoughts and feelings are ‘ours’ — by which we ambiguously mean they ‘belong’ to our nervous system, our brain, or our ‘conscious self’. 

They are all sense-making, attempts to cram all the qualia into the model, the story of ‘us’, no matter how badly they may fit. They are all inventions, fictions. Unreal.

But rather than trying yet again to unravel the illusion of the self, let me try a different tack: Scientists like Stephen J Gould and Richard Lewontin have argued that nothing is actually separate from anything else, that not only are there no distinct, separate “things”, there is no border or real distinction between anything and its environment. Our environment is as much a part of us as we are part of it. All there is is this great flurry of energy, some of it appearing as matter, and any borders we conceive between some of it and the rest of it are just mental conventions, with no scientific basis in ‘reality’. 

What’s more, our conception (it is not a perception) of time, of there being continuity and consistency and predictability, is also just another kind of sense-making, categorizing, model-building. Our nervous system invents the ideas of past, present and future, because they seem to be useful representations of what seems to be happening, and then it tells a story about things happening ‘in’ and ‘over’ time. 

But even the most conservative scientists now agree that time is not fundamental to our understanding of the universe and ‘reality’. Science can explain things far more simply without reference to there being something ‘real’ called time, than they can when they do reference it. Einstein acknowledged this as well, while agreeing that time is just “a persistent and convincing illusion”. Things appear to happen ‘in’ and ‘over’ time, but that’s just a story, not based in reality. Like colour, it can seem to be a useful construct, but we do tend to mistake our constructs (the map) for reality (the territory). 

Without separate ‘things’ and without real ‘time’, the fiction of our ‘self’ becomes more apparent. Neuroscientists have concluded that the self is not identifiable with any parts of the brain, nervous system or body. It is merely another construct, an invention of the nervous system that serves conveniently as a centrepiece for the complicated model of reality that the nervous system has conjured up. 

We assess whether something is real or not based on what our senses tell us. In addition to the five perceptual senses, we (perhaps uniquely) have also evolved conceptual senses. These are ‘false senses’ that allow more of what the nervous system is trying to process to fit (though badly) within the model. We ‘sense’ thoughts and feelings, even though they have no perceptual foundation. Our thoughts and feelings are, therefore, false senses, conceptual senses. We take ownership of them as ‘ours’ just as we do ‘our’ perceptions. They are false in the sense that they are fictional senses, entirely made up and purely reactive, without any reference to perceptual signals. There’s a reason we use the word ‘sense’ to describe all these seemingly-different things.

Likewise, our sense of self is a false, conceptual sense. Like thoughts and feelings, the self is not a translation of our five senses’ signals from quanta to qualia. It is a total fabrication, a ‘figment of reality’, made up as a conjecture because it seems to fit with the very muddled and insanely complex model of reality that the nervous system has constructed to try to make sense of all the signals coming to it.

To sustain its credibility, the nervous system now has to ascribe free will, responsibility and control over the body to this self, this complete fiction it has constructed. The only way it can possibly do so (since the body will do what it will do, based on its conditioning and completely indifferent to the self’s preferences and instructions), is to rationalize everything that the body does, and all the thoughts and feelings it arrogates to the self, as being the self’s volition. 

This is quite a preposterous and exhausting undertaking, since there is such a massive cognitive dissonance between what the self has figured out ‘should’ be done according to the model, and what the body goes ahead and does anyway. No wonder we are all swimming in guilt, shame, grief, and ‘self-doubt’!

But it’s the best the nervous system can do. Its hopelessly flawed model of reality is the only tool it has to do its job, which is to be what Stewart and Cohen call the ‘feature detector’ for the body. With the expanded brain, the human self has expanded its self-importance such that it sees its role as the protector and decision-maker for the body, when it is (and can be) nothing of the sort.

Other animals are not plagued with this disease of the sense of a separate self. They are, and sense themselves to be, from what we can understand, simply a part of everything-that-is. Their instincts, not abstract inventions of their nervous systems, protect and guide them, and have done so perfectly well for billions of years. They don’t suffer from the delusion of self-control, and have no need to try to rationalize (and beat themselves up over) the gap between what their self thinks ‘should’ have been done, and what their body did.

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In radical non-duality circles, a distinction is often made between what is apparent and what is illusory. Their observation is that nothing is ‘real’, or ‘unreal’ in the sense we usually use those terms. Everything is an appearance of nothing, and nothing is separate. Nothing can be known. It requires no ‘consciousness’, and no perceiver, for this to be obvious. This is of course unfathomable, unbelievable, to selves who perceive themselves and their bodies to be real and separate, and who perceive life and ‘consciousness’ to be prerequisite for anything to ‘appear’ at all. Hence our fear of the death of the body, for which, absurdly, the self feels responsible.

If everything is apparent, what then is illusory?

Radical non-duality says it’s obvious that only the self is illusory. And as the self is illusory, the idea that thoughts and feelings and anything else belong to the self is likewise illusory. Thoughts and feelings can apparently arise, but they are not ‘anyone’s. Things involving bodies can appear to happen in space and time, but they are not ‘really’ happening and there is no ‘real’ space or time in which they are actually happening. This cannot be known or understood, because there is no one, no thing separate, to know or understand anything. 

Evolution, and other happenings that seem to have patterns and causality and consequence may appear to be happening, but there is no real time in which they can happen, so they are all just appearances. Preferences and proclivities that seem persistent characteristics of some apparent bodies can also appear, but they are just appearances. They need no self to inculcate those preferences and proclivities, and no self is needed for their appearance to be obvious.

The conditioning, biological and cultural, that seems to be happening is, again, just an appearance, a story that needs no viewer or believer to be seen. It makes no more sense, and needs not make any more sense, than the growth of ice on a window in winter in gorgeous fractal patterns ‘needs’ to make sense, needs an explanation.

For me, the most dissatisfying part of the paradox of the self is the observation that when the illusory self apparently disappears in some apparent people (sorry, that’s a maddening phrase, but it’s necessary to make the point), the apparent person/character that is apparently ‘left’ seems to be, somehow, less neurotic, more relaxed, and less motivated than ‘before’. How can that be if the self is purely illusory?

Friends who have ‘lost’ their sense of self and separation seem unperturbed by this question, and though they offer no answer, they’re not being evasive. One of the things I’ve learned from listening to a million questions about radical non-duality is that there are no direct answers to any question about it, as it can’t be known. You can describe what “this” isn’t but not what it is.

So the standard questions about it are generally answered, earnestly and as carefully as possible, as follows:

• Who…? questions — There is no one.
• What…? questions — Nothing appearing as everything.
• When…? questions — There is no time.
• Where…? questions — There is no separateness, no separate places, no movement in space.
• Why…? questions — There is no reason, no meaning and no purpose for anything.
• How…? questions — There is no causation, just what’s apparently happening, for no reason.

So: How can a purely illusory self seemingly affect the apparent character that it presumes to inhabit? The question has neither meaning nor answer. It’s just what is apparently happening. Less neurosis seems to be what is happening, but since there is no real time in which there can be ‘more’ or ‘less’ of anything, it’s just an appearance, like evolution, or getting older and dying.

Without the self, the paradox simply disappears. There is no one, and nothing ‘really’ happening. And never has been. There is no need of any one, or of any thing to happen. And never has been. No further explanation is needed, but to the self, this explanation can never be satisfactory. It can never make sense. “No no no”, says my self, “that can’t possibly be right! It leaves me with nothing to do, and strips me of all my accomplishments and knowledge. Keep looking for a better answer!”

And of course, I am.