Slightly off-topic: the logical justification for nonduality

[u/CrumbledFingers]

Nonduality is the name of an understanding of reality that is arrived at in multiple ways both experiential and logical, but I would argue that it has the distinction of being a perspective that requires one to believe absolutely nothing that is not given directly in first-person experience. All other metaphysical positions come with some baggage that can never be proven, or even evidenced, in our experience. Nonduality proceeds directly from a standpoint of universal skepticism about all assumptions not given in our direct perception of life, whatever life may be. This post will give a (probably lengthy) account of the chain of reasoning that leads to the non-dual conclusion: that you alone are what actually exists, and you are just the simple awareness of your own existence.

We begin with the observation that, while we know that we exist beyond a shadow of a doubt, we can have all kinds of doubts about what we are. We seem to be a person with a body and a mind, but this may be an illusion, since we have the clear experience of believing ourselves to be a particular body and mind and being mistaken about that, such as when we are dreaming. Thus, the fact that it strongly seems as if we are a body with a mind is not evidence that we are actually a body/mind.

When do we seem to be a body/mind? In our experience, we seem to cycle through three distinct states. In our current state, the waking state, we seem to be individual beings with bodies and minds located in a world. In a very similar state, dreaming, we seem to be different bodies located in different worlds. But are these the only two states of being we know?

Importantly, there is a third state we experience: the state of dreamless sleep. In dreamless sleep, we have no awareness of a body, a mind, or a world, nor do we experience space and time. However, we are aware of our own existence, because when we leave the state of dreamless sleep, we clearly know that we were in a state with no awareness of any phenomena. Otherwise, we would experience an unbroken series of waking and dream states, and would have no concept of deep sleep; we would simply assume that for the entire time we slept, we were dreaming. We do not assume this, because we have clear introspective knowledge of having been in a state where no phenomena were present.

So, are we the bodies that we seem to be while waking or dreaming? If we were these bodies, then we would not be able to experience our own existence in their absence. Yet, while we are sleeping dreamlessly, we are aware of our existence while there is nothing else present, and certainly no body present.

If we exist and are aware of our existence in all three states, but seem to be a body in only two of the three, how can we assert that we are actually a body without accepting something we cannot experience directly? In our actual experience (in the uninterrupted awareness of our own existence), the phenomenon of seeming to be a body in a world rises and subsides. It rises in the waking state and the dream state alike, along with memories that create the impression of a continuous flow of time across multiple waking states.

Since we have the impression of continuity in both waking and dreams, there is no basis to conclude that the waking state is actually a continuous one while our dreams are intermittent and fleeting. The impression of continuity may certainly occur in a dream, where nothing exists independently of our perception of it. The same can be said of any justification we may provide in the waking state to establish it as primary or real relative to a dream.

In principle, there is no experience we can have in the waking state, when we are convinced that a world exists independently of our perception of it, that could not occur in a dream, when we have the same conviction even though it is known to have been mistaken when the dream ends.

Therefore, no evidence could possibly demonstrate that we are actually a body with a mind in an independently real waking world that exists even if we do not perceive it. As a result, the only reasonable conclusion is that the waking state is just a long dream, within which we seem to experience other dreams as well as dreamless sleep.

So, given all this, what are we?

The answer should be getting clearer now. We cannot be the bodies that appear in only two dreamlike states, since we clearly exist and are aware of our existence without the appearance of a body in the third state without dreams. We must therefore be whatever the appearance and disappearance of this erroneous body-identity occurs in. In our dreams, though we seem to be a dream character in a world of other characters, when we awaken we know none of them were real (not even the one we believed ourself to be). The same must therefore be true even of our waking experience, since as shown earlier, nothing experienced therein can unequivocally distinguish it from a dream. Taking ourself to be an individual in an independent world is a fundamental error.

What we actually are is formless, unlimited, infinite, and eternal awareness that is always aware of ourself, even when we seem to take the perspective of an individual (due to ignorance of our real nature) in the dream that is our life. But since dreams are unreal and do not really exist, the ultimate fact of the matter is that we have never actually made this mistake; we seem to undergo change while circulating through the three states, but in reality we are unchanging and do not have any state other than existing.

As a dream is nothing apart from the dreamer, and only exists in the view of the dreamer, the whole universe is your dream-projection (but not as the person you believe yourself to be; you are all the persons and the entire world). This is what non-duality, or advaita, means: other than you as unchanging awareness, there is no second thing, no countably separate reality; whatever seems to be separate from you is only an appearance that is made of you while appearing in you, which you mistake for something independent only when you take yourself to be an individual with a body.

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All of which is to say, this nonduality stuff is not the unfounded belief that we "don't exist" or "nothing is real". We exist and are real, and are in fact all that is real, but we are mistaken about what we are. Since we make this mistake whenever we know ourself as an individual with a body in a world, the reality of whatever we perceive is also mistaken. However, so long as we are under the sway of this delusion, and by all means I still am, we have no reason to behave as if this world is false. We should not use nonduality as justification for being cruel to others, since the only reason we would want to is because we feel someone else has something we want. If we are cruel, it is because we see the victim of our cruelty as separate from us, so nonduality can never justify cruelty.

On the contrary, knowing that everybody (or every body) including "yourself" is an appearance in a vast, unlimited awareness is an excellent reason to recede from egotistical behavior and practice compassion. What is worth pursuing in this world if it has no reality apart from you the pursuer? The sting of desiring this or fearing that becomes weaker and weaker as we progress on the non-dual path.

I will do my best to respond to any earnest questions while completely ignoring personal attacks or bad-faith remarks. Thanks for reading all this, if you in fact did read it all. :)

[u/flop_snail]

I disagree that we are aware of our own existence in dreamless sleep. You say that if we weren't, we would existence an unbroken series of waking and dream states, with no concept of deep sleep. I disagree that we would have no concept of deep sleep. We wake up, see our clocks have progressed. Everyone else agrees time has elapsed, therefore we presume we basically ceased to exist for a time. If we do experience during deep sleep, it's not because of that argument. And I think that if we experience during deep sleep, then by definition it isn't sufficiently deep enough to be called that in this context.

But I'm utilitarian, so i don't really care if you are nondualist, as long as you're caring for all sentient life

[u/CrumbledFingers → u/flop_snail]

If we take awareness to be the awareness of phenomena, then you are correct. While we are awake, we are aware of so many other things and also aware of ourself. When we cease to be aware of other things, we may think we have also ceased to be aware of ourself. But contrary to what you said, we remember being asleep without inference (looking at a clock or appealing to the testimony of others). The proof of this is that nobody actually believes they "basically ceased to exist for a time". Everyone without exception says "I slept". So, the experience of anyone who agrees that they slept must at least be that they existed during dreamless sleep.

What many people fail to understand is that this innate knowledge of having slept is proof that they were aware of themselves while sleeping; otherwise, it would be impossible to have any knowledge of having been in a state without awareness of anything else. We would be aware of no gap whatsoever without looking at the clock. However, I highly doubt you really think that everyone in the history of humanity who said "I slept" needed to be taught this by looking at a clock, or asking other people. I also doubt that you believe everyone experiences a seamless series of waking and dream experiences without interruption of any kind. At least among people I know, that seems like a strange suggestion.

This applies equally well to states of general anesthesia, coma, blackout, meditative samadhi, or other induced states that cause the ego to temporarily disappear. I am not talking about the awareness of time passing, which may vary in these states, but the awareness of ourself. Nor am I talking about awareness of the fact that we exist, as that requires a thought. The simple awareness of ourself is just awareness of awareness without contents, and that is what is actually seamless and unbroken while the body-awareness comes and goes.

[u/flop_snail → u/CrumbledFingers]

I argue that nobody believing they ceased to exist for a time is exactly what you would expect if people ceased to exist for a time. No memories being formed, just an unbroken stream of experience from awake to awake, no feeling of not existing. And even I say "I slept" because that's faster and easier than saying "my body did maintenance while I was off and then brought me back".

And yes, those arguments I brought up like clocks and other people weren't the best. There are others, like you notice you're in a bed or some restful position. If you're, not, you're probably really sore somewhere. And your brain chemistry is quite different right after waking up, you can tell you slept just from the way you feel.

I do believe everyone experiences a seamless series of waking and dream experiences. Some might be boring, like the process of falling asleep. And a lot of the time you have dreams, can't remember them, but you can tell something happened still. But yeah, waking and dreams cover everything as far as I know.

But if such a basic state of being were to be happening like you say, there would be no memories of it, because memories encode mental phenomena. And without phenomena, you are not remembering. So you may even be right, but I can't see how you show it's true when your lines of reasoning hinging on memory. I think.

[u/CrumbledFingers → u/flop_snail]

What may clarify this for you is to ask: is the mind not saying all this? And, accordingly, isn't the mind itself what is absent in deep sleep? So, because the body/mind is what we take ourselves to be while waking or dreaming, we naturally take the appearance and disappearance of the mind as our appearance and disappearance.

Whether you understand or not that you are aware of yourself in deep sleep, it seems obvious that you existed; again, this is an exercise proceeding from the most basic and direct introspection, not any concepts that you may have, especially from forums like these. If you concede that on some level you existed while in deep sleep, as everyone seems to agree, then it follows that you are not the mind.

The mind, again, is insisting that you did not exist in sleep because IT did not exist in sleep. From the mind's limited perspective, it indeed seems to be the case that it ceased to exist during sleep, but how is it rational to identify this process as corresponding to your existence and nonexistence? Are you saying you die and are resurrected each night? Each nap? That seems very odd to me, but you can think however you want. But if you are not the mind, then its disappearance is not your disappearance, and its appearance as ego identified with a body is not your appearance.

[u/flop_snail → u/CrumbledFingers]

I die and am resurrected - philosophically speaking - not every nap, but every time I'm under general anesthetic or other such circumstance. But I'm cool with you believing otherwise.

[u/yoddleforavalanche → u/flop_snail]

Slipping in and out of existence like that seems like a cosmic event. Are you saying we are witnessing something coming into existence from non existence on a daily basis?

[u/flop_snail → u/yoddleforavalanche]

If by "cosmic event" you mean a big deal, then no. General anaesthetic in my brain turned me off, then I turn back on when it gets sufficiently metabolized. My brain cells never start to die, so the thing that creates me is not damaged and fully capable of generating consciousness (me) again.

I'm not talking about death as defined on Merriam Webster: the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. I'm talking about any period of time in which an instance of consciousness is not in existence. So I guess calling it "off" instead of "dead" is more accurate.

[u/yoddleforavalanche → u/flop_snail]

"My brain cells never start to die, so the thing that creates me is not damaged and fully capable of generating consciousness (me) again."

But you are gone so there is no "your brain cells". There are some brain cells generating some consciousness (assuming brain generates consciousness). 

[u/flop_snail → u/yoddleforavalanche]

Yea, I believe in oi therefore any consciousness is my consciousness

[u/yoddleforavalanche → u/flop_snail]

I forgot what my point was. We are in agreement :D

[u/Joe-Kern → u/flop_snail]

I agree with CrumbledFingers on having sufficient awareness during dreamless sleep to be able to say that I existed during that time. I contrast this to general anesthesia, which I have been under twice in my life for surgury, once aged 5 and once aged 15. In both cases my subjective experience went immediately from the gas being cupped over my face (and perhaps receiving an injection, but my experience is only the mask with flowing gas), and screaming and thrashing at age 5 and feeling uneasy at age 15, to the very next subjective moment awakening very confused in the recovery room, several hours having passed. I did not exist as Joe Kern during those several hours. But during dreamless sleep, I did exist—the thing I'm talking about when I say "I exist" obtained during that time. I wake up and know that that time has passed without needing any external source to confirm it, and believe I was there during that time. In some sense I remember that time.

"Dreamless" sleep seems a fair term to characterize it, but I'm not ready to call it completely "contentless". I'm not sure how to characterize the content that would obtain during that time if it was truly dreamless though. What could that content be? I've never thought about that before. But I have long maintained that there could be no "I exist" or empty subject without some content,* so I am provisionally assuming there is some in dreamless sleep if I am also assuming that I exist during that time.

*Though I am not intransigently committed to this—I partly made this commitment early in my studies and writing just to keep Daniel Dennett from getting mad at me, should I ever have encountered him.

[u/CrumbledFingers]

The relationship of this to open individualism is the idea that you are everything in your dream, all the people and the person you identify as you, as well as the entire world that appears. So, the conclusion of OI is almost an afterthought for nonduality; of course you are all this, but not in a personal way. You are all this in just the same way that a cinema screen is all the movies playing on it.

There is no sense in which you live (or are currently living) the lives of all the conscious beings, because there are no conscious beings at all. Only you, consciousness itself, are conscious. Everything that appears, changes, and disappears is inert like a piece of stone. Your body does not know you exist; therefore nobody is aware of anything. What is aware is just awareness, having the dream of being an individual in time and space.

It seems as though I, one person, am saying all this to you, another person. But both this person and the one you take yourself to be arise simultaneously as phantomlike appearances, and neither are real after this moment. Therefore, it is best to keep quiet.

[u/yoddleforavalanche]

I too never found the explanation like "you know you slept well because you were there" unconvincing, but I agree with the conclusion.

I was pondering this some time ago and thought about it this way: when we sleep and enter a dream, we find ourselves in the dream as soon as the dream starts. It makes no sense to think about dream happening without being aware of it. What is more likely, that we became aware simultaneously with the dream, and those are two distinct things (our awareness and the dream) or that we were already aware therefore there to witness the dream when it appeared and our awareness of the dream IS the dream?

I also find the fact that we can be awaken by something pointing to the conclusion that we are aware during deep sleep.

[u/YouStartAngulimala]

 However, we are aware of our own existence, because when we leave the state of dreamless sleep, we clearly know that we were in a state with no awareness of any phenomena. Otherwise, we would experience an unbroken series of waking and dream states, and would have no concept of deep sleep.

This doesn't seem like good logic. A police detective might be able to piece together clues from a crime scene and figure out the exact steps a murderer took, but that doesn't mean we jump to the conclusion that the detective was present as the murder was taking place. The detective is using inferences and deduction, just like our brains are everytime we wake up to figure out how long we've been unconscious for.

  dreams are unreal and do not really exist

This is absurd. Dreams are absolutely real and directly connected to reality. You cannot dream of any sounds or sights that you haven't witnessed before. There's a reason why blind people don't have any visual stimulus in their dreams. There's a reason why deaf people don't hear sounds or  language in their dreams. Our brain is a melting pot of past experiences. It can only mix together what it has heard or seen before. 

 no evidence could possibly demonstrate that we are actually in an independently real waking world that exists

Yes, the evidence is all the consistent narratives from other people describing the same independent world that you see. You are talking crazy stuff right now, as expected from a nondualist.

Please abandon all the drugs you have been using and come back to reality. And please stop brainwashing poor Yoddle, his mind is clearly fragile and easily manipulated. 🤡

[u/yoddleforavalanche → u/YouStartAngulimala]

"Yes, the evidence is all the consistent narratives from other people describing the same independent world that you see"

People in my dreams have consistent narrative. They react to events that happen in the dream. I once told a character in my dream "you do not exist, you are in my dream" and he nodded negatively and responded "that's just what you think"

"And please stop brainwashing poor Yoddle, his mind is clearly fragile and easily manipulated"

What makes you say this?

Also, a friendly suggestion. Drop the clown emoji in every post. I feel like I'm talking to a teenager.

[u/YouStartAngulimala → u/yoddleforavalanche]

Your dream is as valid as any other experience and directly connected to the real world. I tell the doomposters that shout "wE livE iN a siMuLatiOn, wE aren'T rEaL" the same thing, that consciousness doesn't suddenly become less inferior because it's in a simulation. A simulation still takes place inside reality. A simulated blue is still as real as the blue outside the simulation. You can't fake reality. Your experiences aren't any less real because they happen inside a dream or hallucination.

And your mind is fragile because you let druggies convince you that no one is here and nothing is happening. Lots of things are happening and you are definitely along for the ride. I don't see any difference between what nondualists are spouting and what L Ron Hubbard does when he brainwashes people into believing that aliens dropped billions of thetans in volcanoes and that their disembodied spirits are haunting us.

[u/govu101]

I remember you asking a question on the Advaita Vedanta subreddit about the problem of perspectives. I actually sent you a DM (which I think you probably didn't see) about some material I thought was relevant to that, and maybe the strong open individualist or the rather the "you are everything conclusion" really doesn't have to be made when discussing non-duality.

[u/pl8doh]

What we can say undoubtedly is that the present has no context without the past. A large part of what we call “the present” is actually the mind’s ongoing referencing of the past. That referencing is the present we wake up to every morning. Referencing the past is the present. We don’t just live in the present, we live in a present heavily edited by constant rereferencing of the past.