Mystic Mantra: Drop Duality

Divisiveness seems to have quickly emerged as the disease of our times, the seed that bears the poisonous fruit of hate. As refugees, immigrants, social and religious minorities, political dissenters, and anyone who seems “different” faces an increasing hostility in our country and others, the tolerant and largely silent majority must ask itself how this has come to be. “Who sees the second?” asks Sri Ramana Maharshi, while explaining Advaita, the path of nonduality. “First, the ego arises and sees objects as external. If the ego does not rise, the Self alone exists and there is no second.”

In the very act of seeing a second, the oneness of the Universal Self is breached. But most of us don’t know any other way to be. Othering is the way in which we are conditioned to make sense of the world, a process that begins in infancy when we are taught to identify with a name, parents, family, an identity. “The sense of separateness is the root cause of misery,” explains Sri Anandamayi Ma, “because it is founded on error, on the conception of duality. This is why the world is called du-niya (based on duality).” To exist in separation, then, when our true nature is nondual, is why we suffer. “The whole world is yours, of your Self, your very own – but you perceive it as separate, just as you see ‘others,’” says Sri Anandamayi Ma.