There is a concept from certain schools of Buddhist meditation which is totally alien to Western thinking called “non-duality”. It is a translation of the Sanskrit word “advaita” (अद्वैत) meaning “without two-ness”. At first blush to Western ears the term ‘non-dual’ evokes its opposite - ‘unity’, but this would be to miss the point entirely. Rather, non-dual means something more like “neither many, nor one - both many, and one.” It is the simultaneous affirmation and negation of both unity and duality.
What is the context of this seemingly paradoxical idea? Non-dualism has its roots in meditative experience. In the Dzogchen tradition of meditation, practitioners recognize the non-dual characteristic of consciousness itself. I have been fortunate to learn this type of meditation through Sam Harris’ Waking Up app. When I am practicing non-dualistically, I am no longer a meditator meditating on an object of meditation such as the breath or the visual field - I recognize as a matter of experience in that moment that I am the whole shebang. I am both meditator and object, and I am neither meditator nor object. In fact, I am prior to the very concept of self and other. And this is known as a matter of experience, and not as a concept, as it is experience prior to any concept.
Non-duality refers to the the nature of self and world. It also refers to the manifestation of all phenomenon (the many) in the universe (the one). The appearance of discrete objects in the world is counterpoised by the inter-relatedness in time and space of all things. The Buddhist term for this is “inter-being.” This is especially easy to see in the context of biological organisms embedded in their ecosphere. No organism is an island, the barrier of its skin is a permeable membrane exchanging nutrients, gasses, and liquids with its environment. It does not exist for or as itself - it is connected to its greater eco-system. “Inter-being” is a readily understandable concept and stepping stone on the way to the non-conceptual vision of non-duality.
The philosophical and religious1 canon of western thought, however, is decidedly dualistic in virtually every aspect. There is the Creator God and the creation, the Cartesian duality of mind and matter, and in Newtonian physics, there are innumerable separate particles.
The separation of self and other, and especially of self and God, is the manifestation of dualism par excellence in the psychology of Western culture. After all, Jesus was crucified for saying that “I and my Father are one”.
Despite its insistence on a dualistic world-view, Western science has stumbled onto an amazing analog for non-duality. One of the strange effects of Quantum Mechanics is Superposition - when a particle (or molecule, or anything) exists in all possible states simultaneously until a measurement is made. For example, in the famous double-slit experiment, it is shown that individual particles (or even large molecules) exist in the superposition state of having gone through both slits. However, upon observation (also called measurement in quantum parlance) the superposition collapses and the object then goes through one slit or the other.
Erwin Schrödinger extrapolated this weirdness to the macroscopic scale of everyday objects to point out just how absurd it actually is. His famous, eponymous cat is placed it a box with a radioactive sample and a Geiger counter connected to a gun. If a particle is detected gun fires and kills the cat. However, if the cat remains unobserved it will be in a state of superposition - both alive and dead at the same time. In real life this experiment doesn’t work because interactions with the environment cause the superposition state to “de-cohere” and thus not to remain in superposition. But in theory it is possible, and scientists have have put a sapphire crystal big enough to be seen with the naked eye, containing quadrillions of atoms into a superposition of quantum states.
Circling back to meditation: I would like to propose superposition as a powerful metaphor for the recognition of non-duality. I want to highlight that non-dualism is something that is recognized, and is not a mental state. It is prior to any mental state. It is prior to normal “selfing” and “othering” - the decoherence into dualism - that is the normal way of viewing the world as a result of thought.
In fact, I think Superposition is perhaps a better way to translate “advaita” for us Westerners who are so steeped in dualistic assumptions. Non-dualism just sounds too much like “oneness”. “Superposition Meditation” (did I just coin a phrase?!) is meditation prior to the collapse into any mental state. It is the recognition of reality prior to its de-coherence into self and other, mind and matter, consciousness and its contents.
I will end with just one final question and thought: what if superposition was more than just an analogy for the conscious recognition of advaita?
An esoteric exception is the Orthodox Christian tradition which is the religious midpoint between East and West. In the Orthodox mystical tradition there is the experience of ‘deification’ - literally becoming God - but Orthodox theologians are always careful to say the deified mystic becomes “god within God” - maintaining a separation, and yet insisting on a unity. They are in effect, expressing advaita, non-duality.