IMAGINE MAGAZINE FALL 2016 Peace and the Environment | Page 20

first person

NO EXIT ?

By Andrew Scott

The other day I was sitting in a restaurant , working on an article about nondualism and pondering the ancient Chinese philosophy of Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu . I glanced up at a television perched behind the bar when a commercial came on for a new video game called “ Deux Ex : Mankind Divided .” I ’ m not a video game player , nor a fan of the ultra-violent , digital war scenes of death and destruction that were playing out on the screen , but for me it perfectly illustrated how dualistic thought pervades our media , culture , and society . Trying to bring about an awareness of what might seem like a natural sense of separation between ourselves and everything around us , is a bit like being a fish trying to gain an awareness of the water it ’ s been swimming in its entire life .

A non-dualistic way of thinking is not standard in our society , so in trying to get a grasp on this alternative way of perceiving experience we may find that these ideas seem opposed to our day-to-day ways of looking at things . Due to our mental conditioning , we see , measure , and discriminate everything as being separate from everything else . But what if nothing was separate from anything else ? What if everything in the entire realm of existence was inseparable from everything else ? What if everything was part of the same unified fabric of reality , as quantum physics seems to be telling us it is ?
Before trying to understand how this alternative worldview might lead to a different socially constructed reality , let ’ s look at dualism as if it were the form of consciousness that has produced our modern world . Dualistic thought divides the cosmos between this part and that , me and you , good and bad , up and down , in here and out there . From the way we understand an atom , to the borders we ’ ve drawn on maps , nations , political parties , capitalism , we can look at all of these aspects of our reality and see how intricately they are linked to a particular set of dualistic beliefs .
Take , for example , the scientific creation narrative we teach children in school . The Big Bang theoretically explains creation as a unified singularity that explodes out into an infinite void we call space creating everything including all the invisible particles that our bodies are supposedly made of . We call these atoms , and we are told that they themselves are made of even tinier particles made of mostly empty space , all separate from each other , running into and bouncing off each other , attracting and repelling one another in an endless interaction of molecules . And , of course , planets orbit stars , moons orbit planets , and we have nice , neat explanations for how all the separate parts work . You ’ d be hard pressed , however , to find a respectable astronomy professor who would tell you that big bang cosmology is anything close to how the universe actually works , and they might tell you that the idea that the universe “ has a beginning ” in the big bang sense is beyond problematic for the field of astronomy , as well as for the field of quantum physics .
When mankind and the world around us are seen as separate as a fundamental tenet of our psyche , we end up believing that existence is a constant competition between opposing forces , between life and death , man and nature , or good and evil . Life becomes a battle , a struggle to survive . We ’ ve been continually conditioned by this tension , and with it , we seem to have inherited a consuming obsession with changing something or doing something to overcome our situation . It is so much a part of our consciousness that it ’ s nearly invisible . Which begs the question : is this present reality the one we were hoping for when we were taught the standard operating procedure for civilized life ? Could the way we understand our reality have something to do with the reality we end up creating , with its social injustices , environmental degradation , and suffering of every kind ?
What would an alternative story with a different fundamental premise look like ? In chapter one of the Tao Te Ching , a 2,600 year-old piece of
20 IMAGINE l FALL 2016