Intro Note: Literal Portals is a series in which I explore /words/ holding the potential to open portals to ‘other’ worlds, perspectives and ways of being. Words that may shake our ontological self and shift our horizons. Suggestions are, of course, more than welcome!
I am increasingly using ‘…’ around words when they are the words I have at hand, but I am aware they fall short, are limited, require more nuance, contain separating notions or are products of modernity. Unfortunately, I do not (yet) speak a non-separating, non-objectivying, non-colonial language.
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.
Thich Nhat Hanh
The word for world is forest is a confrontationally recognisable sci-fi novella by Ursula Le Guin. The people from Terra (Earth) colonise and log the fictional planet of Athshe and enslave the Athsheans (the only peoples that have ever ‘figured out’ how to establish a warless society). The Athsheans’ word for their world is “Forest”; there is no other word, no artificial separation. Le Guin explores in this book the dynamic relation between language, culture and right relationship. In writing this piece, Le Guin’s worlds kept surfacing. Without lecturing, dictating or convincing, her stories often capture the absurdity of dualism and separation.
“and yet even so he called the world-time ‘real’ and the dream-time ‘unreal,’ as if that were the difference between them.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
Perhaps the truest literal portals are not to be found in attempts to sense-make, convey or explain but in the realms of sci-fi, poetry, absurd realism, speculative fiction, myths and folklore. These realms may (one day) free me from the tension I feel in writing reflective prose whilst struggling to navigate the minefield of dualism, solutionism, saviourism, fragility and the long tentacles of cancel culture. Snappy headlines, algorithmic wars for our attention and the rest of the shebbang on which the binary pillars of the algorithmic economy are built have made us, among modernity, collectively less tolerant, more rigid and less perceptive to context, lived experience and multitudes of perspectives. And with that, less willing to perceive and accept nonduality as the fundamental reality of what we are, life, without any separation or division.
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.William Blake
Nonduality is rooted in the Sanskrit word advaita, meaning not-two or ‘one without a second,' and in the Buddhist term Advaya, which also translates as not-two. Non-duality can be one of those terms that either takes you a lifetime to grasp, or you accept it simply as is: life is not-two, meaning One. A fundamental unity of everything. Borders, separations, hard boundaries, they are all human constructs. Nonduality as a fundamental ontological understanding of life is found in cultures, religions and philosophies all among Earth. It’s the tapestry of many spiritual traditions and practices. Nonduality is life living her beautiful, entangled complexity. Life as a metabolic whole, without the illusion of separation by boundaries and borders.
In exploring what is written on nondualism, it struck me how many versions, ‘schools of thought’, and practices centre around the recognition the Human-self is not separate. I felt the urge to decenter humans for a moment; life is nondual; it was before humans walked the earth, and it will be long after. Humans came into being without a neat cut separating them from the non-humans they evolved from, and we will continue to evolve again without a neat cut separating us from our far-distant ‘successors’ who are no longer 'classified’ as human. (If anyone is still around then who cares about neatly classifying life…)
Modernity is drenched in dualistic notions; shaping our language, systems, education, cultures and stories. Dualism and the illusion of separation are ironically two sides of the same coin. And it’s a dangerous coin, fueling many (if not all) of the predicaments we are living.
Us/Them: Leading to saviourism, objectification, and populism
Humans/Animals: The “justification” for man to turn the earth and all her beings into natural resources and useful objects.
Good/Bad, Right/Wrong: Pulls discernment out of context and into binary logic
Subject/Objects: Grants the F*d-up “rights” to control & extract, justifying ecocide and genocide.
Day/Night: Erases the Liminal and simply forgets about the beauty of dawn, dusk, and all the swiftly passing plays of colour.
Mind/Heart: Implies an absurd separation, not even diving further into this one. Just
Male/Female: Diminishes a whole spectrum of being and forces beautiful complexity into simplistic binary ‘manageable’ logic.
ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models seem to love duality. They write texts and form answers following this not-that logic. With huge waves of AI-generated text washing over the internet, I am seriously concerned about us becoming increasingly used to dualistic this-not-that language. Together with algorithms’ tendency to prioritise extreme views and populist discourse, this is a potentially lethal cocktail to our collective ability to relate, engage, hold multitudes of truths and navigate life with a sense of context and nuance. AI is a slashhammer at our kaleidoscopic humaness.
Nonduality sees polarities such as up and down as inseparable aspects of one whole, polarities that only exist relative to each other and are therefore empty of any fixed position or inherent reality—e.g., the ceiling is up in relation to the floor and down in relation to the sky. Instead of opposites being at war, nonduality sees that everything goes together, and that we can never find any exact place where up turns into down—it’s a seamless unicity. - What is nonduality? Joan Tollifson
No perspective can hold the full truth. No angle captures the whole landscape. No story holds all beings. The map is not the territory. You are not your CV. The dictionary is not the language. Writing down a description of nonduality is not grasping nonduality. William Batson, who coined the term Genetics, once wrote in a letter to his sister, ‘My brain boils with evolution’. Nonduality is both absurdly simple to explain and so hard to grasp that it may collectively boil our modernity-infected brains for the rest of our lives.
Life sparkles among glittering kaleidoscopes
The fuzzy liminal gives birth to weaving wonders
The illusion of othering burned by sunrays,
bouncing off the infinite edges of entanglement
What are we missing when we quench our thirst with dualistic certainty?
My scope is limited to my learning journey, sources I encounter and my crumbling worldview. The Literal Portals are not intended as introductions; they are portals for you to step into /or not/ and continue seeking, reading and learning. Listed below are some of the sources that have informed and shaped this article.
Science and Nonduality: “At SAND, we explore who we are beyond ultimate truths, binary thinking, and individual awakening while acknowledging humanity as a mere part of the intricate web of life.”
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures - Exercise: Human Exceptionalism
Warm Data - Data with a nest of relations intact.
The Great Simplification - Frankly #144 on Non-Duality
Nonduality Without Apathy: How I Keep Non-Attachment from Turning Into Indifference “Life is attachment”.
Quantum Duality and Nondual Consciousness: The Forgotten Balance Behind Humanity’s Survival
The word for world is forest - Ursula Le Guin
What is Nonduality? Joan Tollifson
Online: Monthly Seismic Questions Gatherings
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