Nonduality and the Oneness of Being

Josh Landy
What does it mean to say everything is one?

Ray Briggs
Doesn’t it seem like there are many things?

Josh Landy
Is separateness just an illusion?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything,

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs, we’re coming to you from our respective living rooms via the studios at KALW San Francisco,

Josh Landy
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about nonduality and the oneness of being.

Josh Landy
Lots of philosophers believe in the oneness of being in traditions from all around the world. But today, we’re going to focus mostly on Indian philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, it seems like even within Hinduism, there are a lot of different schools of thought. And they all understand oneness in what seemed like slightly different ways. So I find it kind of confusing.

Josh Landy
Well, the school I’m most familiar with, and I’m guessing the one our listeners might be most familiar with is called Advaita Vedanta, and I think that view is at least relatively straightforward.

Ray Briggs
Okay, well, I know that Advaita means “not to” in Sanskrit, so that much is pretty clear. But the rest does not seem straightforward at all to me.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s a good start, actually. I mean, think about Descartes, he was a big dualist, right. He thought that the physical and spiritual worlds were fundamentally different.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah. For Descartes, there were two kinds of substance, there was consciousness and there was matter. And humans have a conscious mind and a material body. But how does any of that help me understand Advaita?

Josh Landy
Well, as you said, Advaita means “not to” so Advaita is a denial of dualism. There are two kinds of substance like Descartes thought, matter and consciousness, is that everything is pure consciousness.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so physical objects aren’t real. They’re just projections of our consciousness too?

Josh Landy
Bingo.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so that’s just what European philosophers would call idealism. But wait, but that doesn’t mean that everything is one. I mean, that’s the part of Advaita philosophy I really don’t get.

Josh Landy
Yeah, you got it, right. It’s not just there’s one kind of thing. It’s, there’s only one thing it might look like there are many things, but ultimately, that’s just an illusion.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so I’m sitting here on a chair, looking at you on my computer screen. But if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that you, me, the chair and the computer are actually all just one thing?

Josh Landy
Well, sort of, if any of those things actually existed, then they would all be one thing, but they’re not real, so…

Ray Briggs
What? You see why I’m confused by Advaita. So okay, so you and I are not real, or we are real, but we’re not two different things.

Josh Landy
Yes.

Ray Briggs
Yes, which one? Look, we’re either real or not. And if we’re not real, then who am I arguing with?

Josh Landy
Well, in Hindu philosophy, some branches, at least you and I are both souls, or Atman. And Brahman is the ultimate reality behind all the different objects we see. In Advaita Philosophy, these two things, I’m in Brahman, they’re not really two. They’re really one.

Ray Briggs
Okay, I think I’m starting to get it now. So we don’t exist as separate souls or like distinct egos. So you and I are not named for anything real?

Josh Landy
Exactly. I mean, there’s this perception we have that we’re, we’re separate from one another, and also separate from everything else in the world. But that’s just an illusion. Ultimately, the end of the day, we are all one thing, or at least that’s what my very rudimentary understanding of Advaita tells me.

Ray Briggs
Okay, I can see why that might be an appealing view from one perspective.

Josh Landy
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you accept that we’re all really part of this ultimate, all pervading unity, well, you’re gonna be more compassionate, you’re going to be less selfish.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. Or you can just be really bored. Like, isn’t variety the spice of life? Plus, what would make anyone believe that in the first place? I mean, doesn’t the fact that you and I disagree show that we’re not the same if we were just a single thing, when we just have the same beliefs?

Josh Landy
Real or not, Ray, you sure know how to ask the tough questions. And I bet our guests Elisa Freschi from the University of Toronto will definitely be able to answer them. She knows a heck of a lot more about all this stuff that I do.

Ray Briggs
Nice dodge there. Elisa is actually an expert on a different Hindu school of nondual philosophy called the Shisha Advaita but she also knows a lot about Advaita so I’m really looking forward to learning more from her.

Josh Landy
Me too. But first we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede on a mission to find out what some practitioners of nonduality have to say. She files this report.

Holly McDede
The idea of oneness can seem so complicated, it’s easy to joke about, but that doesn’t always go over so well. Like in this segment of Australia’s version of The Today Show, where the anchor tries to crack a joke with the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop and says, can you make me one with everything? What’s that? That’s what? Oh, yes. You know what I mean?

Knowing the definition of non duality is a lot different than explaining it or understanding it.

John Bernie
Honestly, this is really about not knowing, it’s not about knowing.

Holly McDede
John Bernie is a modern spiritual teacher and former Zen monk. When he was 16 years old, he had a spiritual awakening. The year was 1969.

John Bernie
I was a teenager I was, you know, as screwed up as any other 16 year old, if not more, and I had a lot of growing and evolving to do before I had a perspective about what had happened to me and what was happening to me.

Holly McDede
He was a concert violinist and would practice two to four hours a day. He remembers looking down at his hands

John Bernie
And going, how is it doing that? Yes, I’ve learned but there was a deeper questioning of how does life work.

Holly McDede
Decades later, Bernie now supports people all over the world who are, as he puts it, looking to learn how to facilitate the natural emergence of consciousness.

John Bernie
When we learn how to tune in deeply without a bunch of preconceived ideas, agendas, expectations, and so forth, naturally, what happens is the kind of balancing of the nervous system kind of healing.

Holly McDede
Over the last few decades, researchers have scanned the brains of Buddhist monks and meditation studies hoping to learn more. Bernie likes new experiences. So he signed up to have his brain scanned at UC San Diego years ago. He says the scanner was quite a contraption.

John Bernie
Like draconian [unintelligible]. And I’d wish they did invited me the day before just to get used to this incredibly uncomfortable position. I said, you know, I’m not sure I can really relax in this thing.

Holly McDede
And more young people seem to be reaching out to him to learn about oneness. The internet and social media make it easy to find a practitioner focused on this work.

Josie Valderrama
We used to say, oh, don’t talk to yourself. You’re crazy. And now we’re like, no, please talk to yourself. Talk yourself a whole bunch of dialogue.

Holly McDede
Dr. Josie Valderrama is a clinical psychologist in San Francisco. She works with people of color, LGBTQ plus people, activists and artists and helps them reach states that are less polarized. People close their eyes, and she uses sounds and movements to guide them.

Josie Valderrama
So maybe we’ll be doing some drumming or some playing of the different sound bowls, you know, with your crystal balls and the Tibetan bowls.

Holly McDede
She says non duality is especially meaningful at a time when the world can feel split into two sides.

Josie Valderrama
The more that we embody non duality, the more I think that we can sort of transcend this divide and conquer programming that’s out there. And that we can really connect and empower from sort of the ground up.

Holly McDede
If you’re still confused about oneness, now’s a good time to turn to “Pax,” a novel about a friendship between a boy Peter and his fox Pax. In the book, Peter goes on a journey to rescue his friend, Peter describes a feeling of merging with Pax the fox, a character named Vola tells Peter he’s experienced the Buddhist concept of too, but not too. Vola picks up a wooden fox and says,

Vola
This is not just a piece of wood. There’s also the clouds that brought the rain that watered the tree, and the birds that nested in it, and the squirrels that fed on his nuts. It is also the food that my grandparents fed me, that made me strong enough to cut the tree. And it’s the steel on the X sites. And it’s how you know your fox, which allowed you to carve him yesterday.

Holly McDede
And Vola says, it’s the story you will tell your children when you give this to them. All these things are separate, but also one. When you put it that way, it doesn’t seem so hard to comprehend. And while the idea may not be about knowing, a basic understanding is not a bad place to begin. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me as my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about nonduality and the oneness of being.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Elisa Freschi. She’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and author of “Duty, Language and Exegesis in Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā.” Elisa, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Elisa Freschi
Thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
Elisa, you’re an Italian who’s now teaching in Canada. How did you end up becoming an expert in Sanskrit philosophy?

Elisa Freschi
Okay, so there is an Indian poem called Padmavat where a prince falls in love with a girl just because he heard a parrot speaking about her. He leaves everything, including his kingdom, just in order to reach her. And ultimately, they marry. And my story is somehow similar because I heard my ancient Greek teacher at high school, so I was 15 at that point, mentioning Sanskrit roots, and I just fell in love. I bought a book, which was called Teachers of Sanskrit, but through which I guess no one has ever been able to learn Sanskrit on their own. So after spending a summer on that, I just realized it was a failure. And I started attending Sanskrit classes at a local university, much to the disappointment of all my other teachers at high school, who would have preferred me to come to school instead.

Ray Briggs
So at least earlier, I was having a really hard time understanding nonduality. And needless to say, I blame Josh for that, but can you explain it to me better than he did?

Elisa Freschi
That’s a challenge, but I’ll try my best. So the basic point is that the only thing that ultimately exists and ultimately is real is Brahman. Now, that’s fine, and this applies to all Vedantic schools. So if you supply the Vedanta as well as Advaita Vedanta, the tricky part is what does it ultimately mean when we say that the only thing that ultimately is real is Brahman? So for Advaita Vedanta, it means that only Brahman exists. And everything else is illusionary including the trials and everything else you mentioned. For Vishesh Advaita Vedanta, because it means that nothing exists independently of the Brahman.

Josh Landy
So and could you say just quickly, I mean, maybe this is a crazy question, could you at least characterize Brahman a little bit briefly?

Elisa Freschi
Again, it depends a lot on whether we are in Advaita Vedanta or Vishesh Advaita, Vedanta.

Josh Landy
Let’s start there.

Elisa Freschi
Okay, that’s going to be easy then, because the only characterization is that there are no characterizations.

Josh Landy
That’s why I thought it was a crazy question.

Elisa Freschi
Because as soon as we would have any characterization, we would break the nonduality. So if we were to say that the Brahman is I don’t know, omniscient, omnipotent, or whatever, we would have one thing separated from another one. So no way. So the only thing we can approach it is by thinking of it as pure contentless consciousness. So it’s not a consciousness which is thinking about stuff, because if it were thinking about stuff, then there would be stuff to think about, there would be content, and that would be duality again. By contrast, it’s just pure consciousness.

Josh Landy
So the ultimate reality underneath all of the stuff that we see that’s an illusion is pure contentless consciousness.

Ray Briggs
So I’m having a little bit of trouble understanding Brahman still. Because usually, when I want to understand something, I want to sort of list properties that it has. It seems like anything I can say about Brahman, if I distinguish it from another possible thing, counts as embracing duality, which I can’t do, is that right?

Elisa Freschi
That’s very much correct. And that’s fine. That also- Sanskrit philosophers of language pointed out, namely, all sentences about the Brahman need to be metaphorical. You can never describe it directly.

Ray Briggs
Can I get a metaphorical description?

Elisa Freschi
Yeah. So the standard one would be it is existent, consciousness and bliss. But of course, this cannot be real descriptions of the Brahman. They’re just sort of like via negativa ways of approaching it.

Ray Briggs
I mean, those sounds really nice. Actually, am I Am I allowed to say that Brahman is good, or is that is that dual too?

Elisa Freschi
It is dual, but, I hope we’ll have time to come to that. It’s important that Brahman is ultimately blessed when it’s something desirable to be in Brahman. Otherwise it would be as you said, in the form is very boring.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Indian theories of nonduality with Elisa Freschi from the University of Toronto.

Ray Briggs
Can we trust our senses? Or are the objects we perceive just an illusion? What would make someone think that there’s only one thing?

Josh Landy
Oneness, illusion and ultimate reality, along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

What more can we say about nonduality? Quite a lot, I suspect. I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about nonduality and the oneness of being with Elisa Freschi from the University of Toronto.

Josh Landy
No one wants to be one with COVID, so we’re still pre-recording the program from our respective homes. And unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls today, but you can always email us at comments@philosophytalk.org or you can come onto my website where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our archive of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Elisa, it sure seems like there are a lot of things around us. In light of that, can you help us understand nonduality? Why would somebody believe that there’s only one thing?

Elisa Freschi
Yeah, there are two sources for that. On the one hand, there are passages in the Upanishads. So in the sacred text of the Advaita Vedanta school, while accepted by all Vedantic schools, telling us that the only thing that exists is Brahman, and that Atman is ultimately identical with it. But philosophically more interesting is the second point. Namely, that naive realism, the one which dictates us, the existence of beds, desks, etc, etc, is really naive. And it’s really hard to maintain in a certain way that mid sized objects like the ones I mentioned, ultimately exist. And some good philosophers by the time Advaita Vedanta developed had already reached Atomists. And some Buddhist opponents had already shown that Atomists is also weak, because of some, sorry for the difficult word, mereological weaknesses, it’s really hard to imagine how atoms can connect to other things unless they have parts, but if they have parts, then they are no longer the smallest elements. So yes, candidates are either you go in the direction of emptiness or mind only, which are both for sure, into schools of Buddhism or Brahman only, and that would be Advaita Vedanta.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so there was a lot there, and I want to ask to unpack some of it. So it sounds like one of the good reasons for believing in nonduality is because all of the alternatives are bad. And reason can tell us that in addition to sort of Scripture telling us that nonduality is true. So the first alternative you mentioned was naive realism. Can you spell that out a little bit more?

Elisa Freschi
Yeah, I’m just imagining naive realism as the one we would all subscribe to as untrained people, namely, thinking that I know anchor tubes, books, desks, computers, beds, pictures, etc, etc. So all these mid sized objects ultimately exist. However, as soon as you start your philosophical journey or your scientific journey, these beliefs will be crushed by the fact that it’s really hard to maintain their existence, given the fact that they’re made of smaller parts.

Ray Briggs
Wait, wait, wait, so why can’t like that’s bats be made of like wings, and little bat faces and all these smaller parts? Like, isn’t that a consistent view?

Elisa Freschi
Yeah, yeah, that’s true. But let us take an example we’ll be all familiar with coming from, say a scientific background. So a chair, a chair is made of a set of atoms. But of course, there is no clear definition, clear distinctions between the atoms, which are leaving the chair every second, and new atoms which are accruing to it due to chemical combinations. So the thing which looks solid for us and persistent for time is, in fact, not at all solid. It is dynamic and moving through time and becoming at every second something else. And this is something that would this opponents had already realized. And they had already challenged the naive realist within Sanskrit philosophies such as denial school and demands of school, telling them, Look, that’s not going to work, you have to use more basic elements, which Sanskrit, let us say Hindu schools also did by embracing atomists, but an atom is, also has its weaknesses, like the ones we were mentioning before. So it seems like no matter how far you go, you’ll never come to this solid reality, you can sort of like hold on and rely upon.

Josh Landy
So okay, let’s get back to it. So you’ve given us a really fascinating reason for for embracing this, this theory. But let’s, let’s flesh it out just a little bit more. So what we’ve got on the table for Advaita for nondualism is that there’s an illusion that we all seem to have, that we are, you know, we are real, and there’s multiplicity, there’s lots of us, and there’s lots of objects and animals and computers and all that kind of stuff. None of that’s real. The only real reality, the ultimate reality is Brahman, you can’t really say much about it. But what you can say is that it’s unitary, there’s no, there’s no plurality in it. So there’s, there are two things, right? The world of Brahman and our world, there’s only one thing Brahman, that’s the real reality. And there isn’t plurality, because plurality is just an illusion. I think I understand that so far. Now, the one thing I’m still a little confused about is Atman. Right? Somehow, we humans are more than just humans. We have something like a soul. And this soul is really Brahman, can you say a little bit more about that part of Advaita?

Elisa Freschi
Sure. The first thing you sort of like hinted at is also cool, namely, not just humans, so there is no privileged state in being a human being And we are talking about Atman as encompassing from Brahman so from deities up to a thread of grass. So everything, animals, all sorts of animals, etc, etc. This being said, You’re right, so basically we believe to be separated souls, the sort of like the nerdy part of me would like to say separate sites to translate Atman. But in fact, as soon as the Maya as soon as this illusion is destroyed, we will be revealed as part of Brahman only, in fact, that’s identical with Brahman.

Josh Landy
So who’s experiencing an illusion if I’m not real?

Elisa Freschi
That’s a very cool question. And the status of illusion is exactly the sort of like the main problem of Advaita Vedanta, because of course, Maya, so the word for illusion cannot be real, otherwise, we would no longer have duality, but it cannot be completely unreal, otherwise, we wouldn’t have illusion at all. So the answer is, it is [unintelligible], a nice Sanskrit word, which means, we don’t know. Literally, it means it is unexpressible. In the sense that its ontological status is ambiguous.

Ray Briggs
So if I understand right, the kind of Vedanta that you, you study, but Vishesh Advaita has a different answer to this question about the status of illusion than Advaita does. Is that right? And how does that work?

Elisa Freschi
It has a completely different answer. For Advaita Vedanta, the relation between Brahman and the world is completely illusory. So there is no relation and the only reality is Brahman, whereas for Vishesh Advaita Vedanta the world is ultimately real, only it is not independently real, it is real only as the characteristic as a specification of Brahman. So this is also the reason why it is called Vishesh Advaita. So qualified Advaita, insofar as it is an Advaita, plus qualifications, and you, me everything else is a qualification of the Brahman.

Ray Briggs
Okay, I see. So so I’m kind of familiar with other places in philosophy, where you might have things that are real, but not ultimately real. So if I’m watching a movie on a screen, you might think like the images of people running by are sort of real, I can point out where they are, but they’re kind of ultimately just like light shining through film. Is that a good metaphor?

Elisa Freschi
This looks like a better metaphor for Advaita Vedanta than it would be for Vishesh Advaita Vedanta, and in fact, Advaita Vedanta did use a similar metaphor to explain the relation between Brahman and Maya, namely, the dream case. So in a dream, we do experience plenty of stuff, we see objects, we have experiences, etc, etc. But all the things do not ultimately exist. They are supportless, baseless. And after a certain amount of time, we wake up and we will realize it was just a dream, none of that was real. Similarly, we will wake up at Brahman and realize that everything we had experienced that far was just an illusion.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about nonduality and the oneness of being with Elisa Freschi from the University of Toronto, and we have an email from Robert on our website. Robert asks, I’m interested in an analysis of what nonduality could possibly mean, in the context of knowledge about physical reality and the brain mind relationship. What is mind? How can things nontrivially be one? What does this really mean without vague hand waving kumbaya, and justifiable statements like we are all interconnected, or consciousness is everywhere? A feisty question from from Robert, what do you say to that Elisa?

Elisa Freschi
I guess you find more interesting stuff outside of Advaita Vedanta, but let me sort of like, gesture towards an answer. Well, first of all, in most Sanskrit philosophical schools, there is a denial of physicalism. So the brain is not the mind full stop, and even Buddhist schools where you would suspect physicalism to be an option, straightforwardly deny it. So plenty of material about it, brain is not our go to. If we go for Advaita Vedanta on top of that, well, in fact, even the mind is an illusion. So all our mental activities, cognitions of staff, etc. Volitions, cognitions, etc, etc. Those are also illusory, and in fact, the only thing which basically exists is this underlying consciousness. I hope we’ll have time to come to that at some point, but we do have one element, one experience in our lives, in which we do experience that so there is somehow an empirical proof for that as well.

Ray Briggs
Right so I wonder if Vishesh Advaita gives more opportunities for saying stuff about the relationship between the mind and the body than Advaita does. So it seems like if I believe in Advaita, I have to say, oh, they’re not real. Or maybe they’re the same thing. They’re both Brahman. But if they’re both derivative of Brahman, but still real in some sense, does that mean I can say that they’re different things? Like, is there more room to distinguish different things in Vishesh Advaita?

Elisa Freschi
Absolutely. So first of all, you’re right. There are conscious things and unconscious things that are both attributes of Brahman. So there are two kinds of attributes, but both of them are real. And you’re right, that embodiment is much more of a topic for Vishesh Advaita Vedanta, for obvious reasons, it couldn’t be a topic for Advaita Vedanta, and it is a topic both for epistemological purposes and for soteriological purposes. So as far as the epistemology goes, we experience through our body so that it’s really important to be embodied in order to have experience that’s also why we are set to be God’s body. So God can experience the world, but sorry, I should have said that God is the same as Brahman for this school. So God can experience the world via us, as his body.

Josh Landy
Okay, so assume that I’m a very ignorant person, which would be an excellent assumption. So we’re thinking now about the difference between Advaita Vedanta and Vishesh Advaita Vedanta so two sub schools right within Hindu philosophy, with so far have mostly been talking about Advaita Vedanta, now we’re shifting to the Vishesh Advaita Vedanta, where the world is still real. But it’s somehow just the body of God, and God is Brahman. But God is I take it also Vishnu? Help me out here, what’s going on? The world is real. And yet it’s sort of, there’s still a kind of nonduality, because it’s real in a special way. It’s real only as the body of Brahman.

Elisa Freschi
That’s very good. I mean, that’s some more than I would have expected from all of my students. No, you’re absolutely on the right track. So yes, I mean, an obvious similarity would be that with the pantheism. However, it’s not completely like pantheism. So let us start with pantheism. And we’ll go beyond that. So just like in pantheism, you can imagine the world as being God’s body. And you’re right. There is a dual assumption here. So God is on the one hand, a personal figure, and we’ll come to that later. And it is also the absolute Brahman as we encountered it in Advaita Vedanta. So that’s fine. And in this sense, I think we, if we think in terms of pantheism may make sense to imagine that, that God or the Brahman can experience via the word because the world is his body. It goes a little bit beyond that, because in most forms of pantheism, there is nothing beyond the world, which God could encompass, whereas to make stuff more difficult, [unintelligible], one of the main figures of Vishesh Advaita Vedenta speaks about Brahman as being in the world but also beyond it.

Ray Briggs
So actually, this this mention of pantheism brings me directly to one of our other listener questions. So Andrew in Oakland asks whether you’d be willing to discuss similarities and differences between Vishesh Advaita Vedanta and the modernist philosophy of Spinoza, who was a pantheist.

Elisa Freschi
Very good question. The only challenge will be to keep it short. So you’re right and both agree in not denying the reality of the world. And both agree insofar as they think that things that are usually identified as independent substances by [unintelligible] philosophers. So Descartes in the case of Spinoza and the school in the case of Vishesh Advaita Vedanta are instead equated to attributes. So models or [unintelligible] in Spinoza and [unintelligible] in Vishesh Advaita Vedenta, and whose attributes are there are they their attributes of God, which is the only ultimately independent substance. Consequently, Spinoza and Vishesh Advaita Vedanta explicitly also agree in the possibility of attributes of attributes, so I am an attribute of God, but I also have say, blonde hair. So it seems like an attribute of God can have attributes itself. And both Spinoza and Brahmananda agree that the single reality which is God has two sorts of attributes, namely, conscious and unconscious ones, so [unintelligible] in Spinoza. So, so far, so good. Give me one more second to, to say that there’s at least some differences. Well, first of all, Spinoza seems to uphold the existence of two orders of predication. So attributes and modes. The first ones would be the laws of nature and the other one, so being eternal necessary, etc, etc. This distinction doesn’t seem to be there in Vishesh Advaita Vedanta, just like the importance of necessity for Spinoza seems to be completely lacking. So the idea that all is necessary is not there in Vishesh Advaita Vedanta. And the second point is God and knowledge. So for Spinoza [unintelligible] are two alternative modes of God, this is not the case for Vishesh Advaita Vedanta.

Ray Briggs
So that’s a lot of differences. Um, I was curious about sort of modality, which is to talk about possibility and how that’s different. I know Spinoza thinks that God could not have been different than God is and nothing could have been different than it is. So does Vishesh Advaita Vedanta disagree with that or just not say much about it?

Elisa Freschi
I would say they disagree with that, but we have to consider in the background and important point namely that the whole board theory of possible worlds etc, etc, has not been developed in Sanskrit philosophy. So it’s a major theme in European philosophy. It is not such in Sanskrit philosophy. So it’s the emphasis on all is necessary and nothing is contingent, is a major step for Spinoza. Its denial is less major for Vishesh Advaita Vedanta. So that would be the first part of the answer. The second part of the answer is that God is also a personal God. So it’s not just Brahman, it’s also personal God, and therefore can act freely.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about nonduality and the oneness of being with Elisa Freschi from the University of Toronto.

Ray Briggs
If we’re all just one, then why is there so much inequality in the world? Shouldn’t salvation be for everyone? If we all embraced the oneness of being, would the world be a better place?

Josh Landy
All for oneness, and oneness for all, plus commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher when Philosophy Talk continues.

If it’s all just an illusion, do I really have to fold my laundry? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Elisa Freschi, from the University of Toronto, and we’re thinking about nonduality and the oneness of being.

Josh Landy
And we’ve got another email. It’s from Peter in West Yorkshire in the UK and I will not trying to do the accent even though it’s an accent I love. Peter asks about nondual philosophy beyond Hinduism. He says it’s explicitly endorsed by Nagarjuna middleweight Buddhism, by Lao Tzu, Meister Eckhart, and more generally, the perennial philosophy, it’s found in all traditions, and is the foundation of mysticism and explains it. So what do you think about that Elisa?

Elisa Freschi
In this case, I have to say that I disagree. But the questioner has, is in good company. I mean, my friend and colleague and co founder of the Indian philosophy blog, Ahmed, Leila thinks exactly in the same way that this is that non dual is, is should be real, because it’s part of a perennial philosophy, everyone has me thinking about it, etc, etc. So the questioner might want to check his blog posts about it. In my case, I tend to think that in order to see the similarities, you have to be so far away from the specific cases of each one of the thinkers they mentioned, that yeah, everything looks similar.

Josh Landy
So 30,000 feet, it looks the same, but when you get closer, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Ray Briggs
So Elisa, I’ve heard that if we want to have a direct experience of nonduality, we have to do all this preparatory work, like studying and meditating and so on. And it sort of sounds to me like that would only be available to relatively privileged people. But if we’re all part of the same ultimate reality, shouldn’t salvation be accessible to everyone?

Elisa Freschi
That’s a good question. And in fact, it is a problem because for Shankara, so the main thinker of Advaita Vedanta, it’s exactly as you say. So, ultimately, there is no way to reach nonduality apart from the Upanishadic path. So reciting the Upanishadic sentences, which will lead you to this immediate understanding of nonduality. But of course, this means that we are cutting off everyone who has no access to the Vedic learning to visitation of the Upanishads. But we are talking also about Vishesh Advaita Vedanta, who has a different answer to this problem, namely that of suggesting a different religious path called property, which literally means to surrender. And this path is open to everyone, including low-class people who can’t recite the Veda, women, etc, etc. And in order to surrender and surrender to God, you need to realize that you have no other shelter than God. So, somehow being of a high class, learned and conversant with the Vedas can even be an obstacle in your soteriological path, because you might overestimate yourself and your chances. So somehow property suggests to us epistemic and religious humility.

Josh Landy
That’s really nice. And one thing that leapt out at me in thinking about all this is that the three different sub schools of Vedanta seem to have a different approach to who can in fact, find liberation. And it seems to me if I understand correctly, that Advaita Vedanta, the dualist form, doesn’t hold that everyone can find liberation seems to hold that some people just, you know, for whatever reason, they’re they’re sort of marked out maybe predestined the, you know, some Protestants might say, not able to find liberation, whereas it sounds like within Vishesh Advaita Vedanta, it’s available to everybody. Is that about right?

Elisa Freschi
That’s very correct. Yes, exactly. For Advaita Vedanta, there are [unintelligible] people, so people who will remain in samsara forever. It’s in their nature, they will not be able to go beyond it. By contrast, within Vishesh Advaita Vedanta, the idea is that God’s mercy is endless, and he is not only open to help you, he’s, in fact, actively looking for a small excuse to help you. There are plenty of nice stories about God saving one, just because they by chance at usher them in.

Ray Briggs
So this, this idea that enlightenment is available to everybody, it sounds really nice. But I kind of struggle to reconcile it with the actual inequality we see in things like the caste system, and in fact, most of the rest of the world having its own versions of inequality. So for all really, equally aspects of Brahman, or like modes of Brahman, why do some of us have to suffer more than others? That doesn’t seem fair.

Elisa Freschi
It’s a very complex question, because you’re ranging from social issues to theodicy, so I’ll try to give a short answer to both. On the one hand, you’re right, these social issues are very much a problem. And in fact, within Vishesh Advaita Vedanta, there has been some dynamic evolution, about thinking about castes, and many Vishesh Advaita Vedantists think in a social reforming way that we are all loved by God and parts of God’s body so that caste shouldn’t matter at all. And in fact, one of the main thinkers of the Vishesh Advaita Vedanta school, Naumova, was himself a sutra, so a member of the lowest class, and everyone loves him, and we wrote him. So this possibility is very much part of the tradition, although it’s not the only approach. The other one being there are different paths. Property, surrender is the one for low class people. And reading the Veda is the one for high class people. So that’s one part. The other part is how is evil possible at all? How is suffering at all possible? That’s such a cool topic. And it’s going to be hard for me to keep it short. But let us say that we have at least two ingredients here. One is karma. So the karma you have been accumulating through your previous birth, and the other one is freedom. So somehow evil is the price that can be paid in order to be fully loved. So God accepts that evil will be part of the world because he wants a free given love from us.

Ray Briggs
Right, so is there anyone who says that suffering is okay, because it’s illusory? So, I just told us earlier that Advaita Vedanta thinks that lots of things that we think are real are in fact illusions. And I was wondering if that might extend to suffering?

Elisa Freschi
Absolutely, yes. If you are in Advaita Vedanta basically it depends on your experiencing now, including physical pain is just illusionary. Departments that you are identifying so much with your body with your current state, namely, I don’t know, being in a precarious job situation, in a difficult love relationship, etc, etc, that you’ll suffer a pain which, in fact, you’re just self inflicting to yourself, and it’s not there.

Josh Landy
To go back to the politics a little bit, I mean, you could imagine, on the one hand, you can imagine various forms of Advaita, leading to an impetus for social change. I mean, I know Adi Shankara says that, you know, caste and class are just errors. And so you could imagine that leading to some kind of movement for progress, or on the other hand, you could imagine it being quietest, right? Well, look, everything’s an illusion, even suffering is an illusion. So, turn inward and focus on your life so to speak. Of course that’s not entirely yours. Right it’s the universe’s but, um, so where do you think we end up? Do you think we end up within Advaita Vedanta in a more kind of politically, you know progressive, so to speak, position or more kind of quietist, just get on with it and try to reach liberation as opposed to changing society.

Elisa Freschi
But historically both paths have been followed. So we have had both Advaita Vedanta and claiming that Vedic learning is the path and there is no other way. Why so? Because all our instruments of knowledge, all our other sources of knowledge, are so much ingrained in illusion, that there is no way to go beyond this illusion unless we have a completely different sorce. And this completely different source is the Upanishads. Everything else we might think about is based on illusion and will not get us out of illusion. However, as you rightly said, social reformers have also used Advaita Vedanta as a way to say that, in fact, tests are illusory and therefore should be overcome. And I’m not entering into the whole discussion of whether we should translate jati as caste, let us just take it as it is.

Ray Briggs
So I am not going to go read Vedic scriptures, because I’m not going to go read any scriptures. I’m also not going to suffer the way that somebody in a worse position would would suffer. Is there any hope for me? Or am I just never going to achieve the kind of enlightenment and nonduality that defenders of Vishesh Advaita Vedanta or Advaita Vedanta or any other kind of Vedanta think that I should achieve?

Elisa Freschi
Oh, well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I was reading with students on Friday, [unintelligible] commentary on the essence of Vedanta, and he has within the preliminary steps, there are some very clearly marked steps such as having learned the Veda by heart, but that’s not the main point. The main point is having recognized that something is permanent and something is impermanent, and having developed a distaste for everything which is impermanent. So people like me, who are still very much interested into reading new books, experiencing new stuff, traveling and seeing new things, I’m really low in this scenario.

Ray Briggs
So it was really hard. I like so many impermanent things, I love food.

Elisa Freschi
And, I mean, that’s one thing we were mentioning, I sort of hinted at before, and that didn’t develop enough, but which could be useful here. Namely, we do have all of us, each single person among has, has had an experience of Brahman in deep sleep. So when we are in dreamless sleep, the nice feeling of well, bliss, allegedly, which makes us say, after once we wake up, oh, I slept well, that was the experience of Brahman. So we could develop a taste for that and start from there.

Josh Landy
I’ve got to agree I should maybe I should put a card on the table, which is, you know, I’m not just fascinated by this, but I do sometimes feel this is just the reality. But let me get clear, before we let you go, and what that reality is, if I understand correctly, the picture of Vishesh Advaita, something like let’s look, look, Elisa Freschi is one thing made up of a soul of the body. And so too, God is one thing made up of Brahman, and then the physical world and both of those are real, but they’re really part of the same thing. And God gets experience through us through everything that that is also sort of real. But okay, so then what is God experiencing in this picture?

Elisa Freschi
Oh, we are in the world of [unintelligible] if I can use Aristotle, so plurality is devoid, is manifold and [unintelligible] is real. So Brahman, and by the way, Brahman is encompasses both the [unintelligible] side as far as the consciousness side. So it’s not that the Brahman has a body — it is its own body.

Josh Landy
So it’s sort of experiencing itself, in essence.

Elisa Freschi
All of its manifold attributes, so it’s just like, I mean, imagine you having a body which continuously transforms itself, and you can sort of like blissfully look at it while it’s changing every time.

Josh Landy
Sounds pretty great. Elisa, it’s been real, I think? Thank you so much for joining us today.

Elisa Freschi
Thank you very much for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Elisa Freschi, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and author of “Duty, Language and Exegesis in Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I decided to channel the ancient sage John Perry and write a limerick. You might think we see a plurality of objects but that’s not reality. The raindrops, the sun, my left foot, they’re all one and unreal. So embrace nonduality.

Josh Landy
I say I like your mentality, I don’t know. I’m gonna have to work on my Perry-isms. We will put links to everything we’ve mentioned today and to Ray’s limerick, on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now Brahman is speed, speed is Brahman, it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. I picked up a copy of David Lynch’s biography. And of course, it’s a bit of strangeness to it. Christina McKenna, his longtime interviewer. So the book jacket tells me, wrote the biography, the chapters of which are interspersed with David Lynch, interrogating the biography, as they say these days, correcting impressions, expanding on details, much has been said and much made in the book about Lynch and transcendental meditation. He used and uses TM as a way to get rid of anger, which makes a lot of sense. Hard to be angry when you have a mantra going on. He blames dualism for all the anger in the world. This might even be true that getting rid of dualism would be frustrating, which itself could lead to anger. I know that it took two people to write this book about one person and just really seem to be embodiments of worlds utterly lacking peace and tranquility depicting I would say the perils terrorism delights of the dualist’s universe…on your right, Dennis Hopper on your left, milkshakes and martinis, saw cops and Heineken, amnesia and painful memory, severed ears and waving firemen under one umbrella. And that sense movies are quite realistic. It’s hard to think of a world without dualism, male female, right left eye ear up down like dark and more abstractly in concepts like the King’s Two Bodies. There’s the man and the office. You see the presidency goes forward and changing through time, even as presidents drop by the wayside, or issue bizarre statements from Florida there are many dualisms the mind body thing now, never was not was here, not here. All of this is illusion, which is either a scientific opinion, or a mystical epiphany, depending on your bent. Can’t be proven really only experienced. It seems weird though, that with TM, meditation requires a mantra, in the dualist world that would be called a tool. The mantra is given to you by your guru, like getting the tool from the hardware store, the plan seems to be the meditate yourself into a dreamless state, where you’re conscious and the brightness of now, comatose, but aware, dreaming the world gazing at everything which has been revealed to be nothing. Well, I’ve never gone down that road. But I have gone on the opposite, trying to be aware of as much as I can to become one with everything. As the joke goes, once you know the alphabet, for example, you know, all the rest of now the words are right there, you just have to dig them out. So I’m not sure I’m the kind of guy you can bust out of the prison of the self. Frankly, I can’t be truly free because the jail never existed. It’s just an illusion. But I know what a jail is. Even though it’s not real, somebody can still escape through a subtle shift in nomenclature, or can I? Blind in one eye, I can still see what other people are seeing unless it’s a 3d movie, and those movies are a waste of money anyway, use your own mantra, don’t judge if you’re wrong. Don’t think about it, not your fault. We are now not that thing or that other thing. We are all things which is nothing. Of course you’re still that which is knowing that which can’t be known. So maybe only exists in your own mind, which may be all that exists and this is part of the thing and which is looking which could perhaps confer thingness upon things which are not that thing. The point is you never know. It’s considered a flaw to not realize we are part of nature, but we’re not part of all nature, are we? We can’t live in the ocean. Mollusks can’t go to college, and tonight duality seems to prove it exists or dead, doesn’t it? You need legs to have a limb. Breaking our arm doesn’t mean you’re left handed, consciousnesses is our blessing and our curse or pine coffee again, depending on whether there’s a seat next stage in Cooper at Bob’s Big Boy, I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2021.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
The views expressed or mis-expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Josh Landy
not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website philosophytalk.org where you can subscribe to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs
and I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
and thank you for thinking.

David Lynch
I’m wearing dark glasses today because I’m seeing the future and it’s looking very bright.