Hello, I feel that a more appropriate guest would be a Swami or Swamini, an ordained monk who's life is dedicated to realizing the state of advaita. I am a practicing Hindu & for me, we all call ourselves "I". That "I" is the same in each and every being. A simple example is the ocean is made up of countless drops of water, yet the ocean is one body of water. We are all drops of the Ocean of Brahman. Right now, due to Maya & our identification with the body, we don't realize that we are not a mere drop & each drop is separate, but we are in fact one and the same as the infinite ocean of Brahman and therefore all one.

Philosophy has struggled with these questions, nearly as much as those who first posed them. Philosophers and holy people agree on some answers and are at odds with others. Both schools base much of their of positions on things like logic, ethics, belief, faith and the like. Davidson called these, and a number of others, propositional attitudes. Whether one agrees with his assessment is itself a propositional attitude. Whether someone believes in a supreme creator---much the same. Maybe this is nothing more than over thinking the matter. But, don't present that to a devout believer.
Certainly, there are larger problems to solve. Most of those truly importanr ones are insoluable as well. Seems to me.

Very gratified to find this item on nonduality here at Philosophy Talk. Just joined Philosophy Talk as a result. After making two recent posts about pure being and philosophy of spirituality and not receiving much response, I thought there was not enough interest here in ideas such as nonduality.
Last year I published a book called "One Being: Spiritual Path of Adi Shankara." I followed it up by another book called "Self and World: Major Aspects of Indian Philosophy." Both books are concerned with nonduality, particularly the former. Adi Shankara is the foremost proponent of nonduality in the history of Vedanta philosophy. His philosophy is called Advaita Vedanta. More correctly, what goes by nonduality in English-speaking world is Shankara's view which is properly called Kevaladvaita or sole nondualism for the reason that there are two other Advaita philosophies: Vishishta Advaita or qualified nondualism of Ramanuja and Shuddha Advaita or pure nondualism of Vallabha.
The comparison, or rather contrast, with the Cartesian mind-body duality is what may come to the mind in the context of Western philosophy in relation to the Advaita concept of nonduality. But a good way to get into it is through Brentano-inspired notion of Husserl called intentionality. The latter holds that consciousness by its nature intends an object. This is the duality that Shankara's nonduality denies. According to it, the core of consciousness is without the subject-object duality.
One argument of Shankara may make this clear.
Any subject having consciousness normally is at a time conscious of something, either inside the mind or outside. Shankara says in his book called Drig-drishya-viveka, that what is experienced can be analyzed as existence plus something else. If I am conscious of a red tomato on my dining table, what I am facing is existence plus the tomato's actual appearance. If I close my eyes and think of this, I have existence plus the idea of tomato's appearance. Now, Shankara says that we can never get out of experiencing existence plus something else in any case any time anywhere. So, in all the cases all the time everywhere there is existence and something else. That something else is merely name and form in ceaseless flux and by itself devoid of existence. But existence in its pure form is the only thing that there ever is or can be. This is nondual existence and the core of Advaita which is the philosophy of oneness. I do not want to take up more time here. My book "One Being" explores Shankara's philosophy in greater detail, while the book "Self and World" would introduce the reader to all major philosophies in India's history. Click for details: www.amazon.com/author/rameshpatel. Of course, I will be happy to respond to any thoughts or comments to what I said about nonduality above.

Modern teachers who have actually experienced radical nondualism (Advaita Vedanta) can be found on You Tube, explaining without Sanskrit terms. Check out Lisa Cairns and Eckhart Tolle.

YouTube has a lot of popularizing and simplifying stuff for people wanting instant gratification handouts. There are simplifiers of philosophy too. As there are of science and other subjects that need time and energy to get one's teeth into. True, some of this may even have merit. If you dig around a lot, you may find such. But discrimination is good part of wisdom. Fake gurus are aplenty. Caveat emptor!
Advaita Vedanta itself is a Sanskrit term. When nondualism is conflated with monism, as in this thread, you see the result of half-baked and hasty attempts at surmising something which is backed by thousands of years of intense thinking and disciplined practice.
Advaita is also a sophisticated philosophical system, not just a feel-good mystical recipe. It has been cultivated in Sanskrit for thousands of years. It has a rich and diverse array of thinkers who make subtle distinctions which they have debated intensively. But all of them reject the idea of substance and simple-minded monism. That is why it is called a-dvaita or non-dual and not one or oneness. Its "one" is one without a second or ekam eva advitiyam. To equate it with "All is One" simplicity is a category error.
Sanskrit has crystal clear diction too and is not always amenable to precise translation without loss of clarity. That is why all serious students of Indian philosophy, of which nondualism is a part, get acquainted with Sanskrit. Both my books, "One Being" and "Self and World" that I referred to above have a glossary of Sanskrit terms at the end, to facilitate readers not conversant with Sanskrit, to clarify without losing rigor. I take care to not use a Sanskrit term without introducing an English equivalent. When asked, I am glad to explain any Sanskrit or philosophical terms I use. Thank you!

Been reading a lot lately on the resurgent notions about panpsychism, including Goff and Strawson. Have discussed these things with my brother, who is also mentor in many ways. We still are puzzling over the framework which asserts and concludes that everything in the Universe is made of the 'same stuff'. While we agree that material things have atomic structure, we also recognize that,for example, gold atoms are far different from cephalopod atoms. Any of the many subparticles are inhabitants of the quantum world and, for most of us, ineffable. Now, some recent thinkers, such as Godfrey-Smith, have posited that there is Consciousness similar in some ways to our own.. I have no violent quarrel with that notion. In an evolutionary sense, it makes same. What we cannot quite get to is the proposition that consciousness everywhere, in everything. That, if true, would be miraculous. And, miracles are, uh, rare. So, if the nonduality thing is true, we have to situate it with panpsychism as alternately embraced and rejected, thoughout the ages, eastern mysticism, notwithstanding. Seems to me.

There are different types of idealistic monism besides, of course the recently proliferated versions of materialistic monism. Materialism has been facing a hard time coming up with a clear and cogent concept of matter. Equating mind with brain can take you so far in following a presumptive scientism. The problem of consciousness resists solution by scientific or philosophic methods. Some think time for idealistic monism is past, even as they have bypassed and shelved its reasoning rather than tackled and resolved it. Re-reading Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic in his first critique can easily disabuse one's thinking to the contrary, at least on idealism, if not on monism.

Most of the logical problems in the history of philosophy, East and West, have been maligned with a variety of clever dodges, but they are far from solved and probably they cannot be. This state of affairs demands an in-depth assault on the nature of logic and reason to detect why this is so. Does reality have a streak of illogic built into it somehow, or we need a radically transformed logic to deal with the age-old debate between descriptive and revisionary metaphysicians? Quantum mechanics has done its work too to raise serious questions about relating logic and reality, not to speak of Brouwer's strict intuitionism and its demands on principles like the excluded middle.

On the other hand, nonduality is not a straightforward form of monism, of the kind of substance, stuff or process variety. It is primarily conceived as absence of difference between the individual self and cosmic self in their ultimate nature. Vedanta, Sufism, Mahayana Buddhism espouse it in different shades and conceptual frameworks. One thing is clear: the time for conflating nonduality with Western hippiedom's All-is-one type of non-thinking utterances is past. Serious thinking needs to focus on the sophisticated epistemology of Vedanta and Mahayana rather than barking up the wrong tree of hippie-style bastardizations.

Nonduality also does not fit the notion of panpsychism with the latter's vague idea of mind or consciousness. What kind of consciousness are we talking about in a religious form of panpsychism as distinguished from Vedantic nonduality which does not rely on the much-maligned concept of substance and even on a similarly problematic notion of process? Vedanta's nondualism posits a sui generis notion of non-intentional consciousness merged with a distilled version of existence. This is at odds with either religious or psychological ideas of panpsychism.

In sum, much new ground needs to be explored in philosophy, in both East and West. What reasons do we have to be optimistic?

I have read some material from the University of Mainz where the psychologists researching consciousness have postulated that around 60% of human thought is not consciously generated. (So, for example, we experience the same sometimes welcome sometimes unwelcome thoughts over and over again without consciously conjuring them.) This leads me to think about how consciousness is not the sole entity which determines what humans think is real, though many would asserted our "reality" is illusion. Perhaps we are not entirely in control of thought, and so does that not suggest there are other physiological factors which contribute to our perceptions of reality?

That way speaking, what we think to be real is also an instance of thinking, regardless of whether it comes from brain physiology or whatever. And it is just one of the overt thoughts out of the stream of both conscious and non-conscious thinking. Then, thinking that physiology gives us reality is also a thought in the same way, just one from many other possible and rival thoughts. Ryle showed in his book "Dilemmas" that logical problems occur in believing science itself: we use commonsense perceptions to do science and then the resulting science wants to revise or even deny commonsense itself. To then persist on science dogmatically will lead only to scientism which is a religion of science and is itself not scientific. Revisionary metaphysics is forced by a line of logic. Descriptive metaphysics is forced by yet another line of logic. How far is logic a good solution when it itself leads to a problem like this? What are the alternatives? Of course philosophy is a congeries of such logical problems. We need to examine the nature of logic itself very deeply and thoroughly to see why this happens. We need to do logical meta-philosophy rather than uncritically presuppose science, non-duality, commonsense or whatever.

Thanks Laura,
The search to find my true self lead me to study Eastern and Western philosophy, and then onto physics. From the Eastern Masters who taught the truth cannot be spoke, to Socrates dialogs without answers, to Einstein and his unsolved problem of grand unification. Religion has faith, is that all there is?
It was Michelangelo who taught me to study nature when searching for truth. So down to the river I went and low and behold, the answer to the unspeakable, to Socrates questions, to the equation that unites all things was right there, and the beauty of the truth is it is also right here, just me.
Descartes found and then lost it again in his searching day in Ulm. Einstein came close as well, it was only the speed of light that stood in his way. As for the Eastern mystics, the truth can be spoken, but for many or most, it cannot be heard.
"Man is the measure of all things" Protagoras said.
There in lies the flaw in us all.
Be One,
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