Journal : Awakening … Into The Truth

THE SANATAN WAY – II

“Let a man lift himself by his own Self alone. Let him not lower himself.

  For this self is the friend and this too is the enemy of oneself.”

 

Dualism, Qualified Monism and Monism ( or Pure Monism, to differentiate it from Qualified Monism ) are different rungs in the ladder of realisation of the ontological truth and its respect with our being. They are real perspectival positions that raise concommitant attitudes with which we interact, communicate and regard ourself and other beings in our respect. 

Dualism positions every individuated being as eternally different and separate from the ultimate reality. Deism is dualistic, whether in its pantheistic or monotheistic construct. There is no hope for dualist to ever unify with his or her ideal in truth. The involved belief also brings in terms of power, with the individual considering itself weaker or fallen compared to the deity. A belief in “sin” and “salvation” therefore is natural to dualistic perspective, of being in eternal error and condemned to perpetual imperfection. 

Interestingly, with the deemed inequality between the individual being and the universal one, the concommitant attitude can only admit supplication before the deity and not the love we feel in freedom and identity with the other. The psychological reaction then towards fellow individuals is limited to two natural stream : compassion for the sameness of error and imperfection in our dualistic being or power over the other before they have on ourself in our collective condemnation. And since compassion, both the emotion in our vitality and the empathy born of understanding, does not come naturally into our hounded lives, it is the power game that rules our human order. The world we have created takes its cues from that dualism seated in our awareness of ourself. Not all the religion we subscribe to will displace that primacy on our spirit. We will continue to lie, rob, kill and cheat and confess at the exalted alter, with error as our alibi and power of the deity to forgive as the law. 

The Sanatan way offers alternate relationship models to bridge the fathomless inequality between the individual and God through identity of kind and identity of stature : father and son, mother and child, teacher and disciple, paramour and lover, friend and friend. These relationships, any one, were to be invested to a fulness, completion and perfection, in thought and action, with every passage of breath, till the time its sweetness, innocence and ease settled informally in our heart and let in the waters of love for both the deity and our fellowmen for as long as it takes to inundate the formal dualism in our belief. The distance disappears in actual effect and leads to the rise of Qualified Monism. 

Broadly, qualified monism views this very universe, and the world, as the body of the deity. Each being is then perceived by it as its own and is as dear to it as our own limbs are to us. Love brings compassion in its wake, kindness and forgiveness in our attitude. Power is no longer the primary asset; rather, it is relegated to being very contrary to the love and unity we have already established in our heart and mind, for the deity and for the brotherhood we consequently feel exultant about. Peace and happiness, derivatives directly experienced, become proof of the truth thus realised. 

Panentheism naturally trails qualified monism. The sun, tree, stone or river worshipper actually offers oblations to the primal deity, whose “body” is adorned with the sun and the moon, the stars, the earth and all beings on and in it. It forms and pervades all, as the inscrtable “space.” Among evolved minds however, the forms constituting the “body” are redundant to their connect with One, supreme and universal, because they in any case appear and disappear in time and are rendered non-essential to the living, pervading deity. 

The formless being, void of all adornments, is singularly alone in the perspective of the pure monist. They still refer to it a Existence-Knowledge-Infinite or Existence-Consciousness-Bliss-Infinite, but only as a true descriptor to that impenetrable, fathomless being in terms of experience here and now, in forms all about and their own. This converging of the universal in our being – body, possessions, other bodies in our relationships, in our vitality, feelings and emotions, mind and thought, intellect, knowledge and bliss, and sans every trace of it all – is the summum bonum of true religion, the innate experience at the root of our spiritual being. 

Pure Monism is then where we are led up to … through fervent worshipful Dualism, which today is fast going out of vogue and increasingly becoming unacceptable to secular, materially grounded and critically aware minds. Relating with the formed immanence of the universe-being, of Qualified Monism, brings the deity within our touch, permitting us to love it in truth, embrace its “presence” in the diversity all around us, respect nature and the environment that envelops us, and actually sense the brotherhood we formally hear of. When the overwhelming love of truth settles, the ground is prepared while we wait on the being-with-void, of pure monism, to inundate the knowledge we have of our self.