What is non-duality? - Fourth Way Transformational Work Group of Los Angeles What is non-duality?

The Fourth Way, Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta and Non-Dual Cognition

What is non-dualism?

The author of dozens of books about Gurdjieff, longtime student of the Gurdjieff Foundation, and founder of the Gurdjieff Legacy Foundation, William Patrick Patterson said this (1):

“ People would say, “What is the difference between Advaita Vedanta and the Work [the practice of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way]?” My reply to them was, “The basic teaching of the Work is self-remembering. What is the self? If you can answer that question, you will understand Advaita. There isn’t really a differentiation between the Fourth Way teaching and Advaita, there only seems to be.”

What does this mean, and is it correct?

Spiritual schools have aims they can call conscious evolution, spiritual awakening, enlightenment, liberation, realizing ultimate truth, or just spiritual growth. A simple way to divide them into two groups are schools that view enlightenment as some from of non-dual cognition, and those that consider it to be some kind of dualistic cognition.

What is dualistic cognition, the alternative to non-dual cognition? It is how we ordinarily consider ourselves to perceive and know things. We are the knower. What we perceive, see, hear, touch, smell, or know as true, is the known. The known is something that exists apart from us, the knower. We also have some means of knowing this thing, such as our eyes or physical senses, or faculty of reason and deduction, or a communication in words from someone we believe to be a trustworthy source of information.

In Gurdjieff’s terminology, this kind of interaction is said to work by the law of three. There is an active force, the knower, a passive force, that which is known, and a reconciling force that connects them, which is the means of knowing.

I see a dog and I know that a dog is there and what kind of a dog, and what the dog is doing. I am the knower. The dog is the known. My eyes and the sunlight are the means of knowing.

This is called dualistic cognition because the knower and the known are two, two different things. Dual just means having two parts. Cognition just means knowing, or, to be more technical, a mental action of acquiring knowledge or understanding.

But in the world of the Absolute there is no law of three. Gurdjieff says (2):

"In the Absolute there is only one force and only one law—the single and independent will of the Absolute. In the next world there are three forces or three orders of laws."

It seems that to know something is there we have to see it with our eyes, using the law of three. How else could we possibly know it is there? What could non-dual cognition be?

It is a very different kind of knowing, sometimes called gnosis to distinguish it from ordinary knowing , a word borrowed from ancient Greek. In this kind of knowing, the three forces are merged into one. They are identical. The knower, the known and the means of knowing are all the same thing. Franklin Merryll-Wolff called this “knowing through identity”. Buddhists also call it primordial awareness or pure awareness free of conceptual projection, termed “rigpa” in Tibetan.

In Buddhism, enlightenment is the absence of the knower, which we also call the self. An awakened person continues to perceive and know as well as before or better, but now on the basis of this new, non-dual cognition.

The ancient Hellenic Plotinus, first writer on the path known as Neoplatonism, based his mystical system on the same idea. He writes (3):

"And this is the true end set before the Soul, to take that light, to see the Supreme by the Supreme and not by the light of any other
principle — to see the Supreme which is also the means to the vision;"

Plotinus also calls the Supreme the All, the One, the Absolute, terms also used by Gurdjieff. Here we see that in enlightenment (the end set before the soul) that which is seen (known) is the Supreme. The Supreme is also the knower, as this is known by the Supreme. And the means of knowing is also the Supreme. The knower, the known and the means of knowing are all the same thing. When Gurdjieff says, many times in "In Search of the Miraculous", that the three forces form "an indivisible whole" in the Absolute, which has only one law, that corresponds to this passage of Plotinus.

The early Christian mystic writer Pseudo-Dionysius, influenced by this school, also describes a different kind of knowledge that doesn’t depend on separate things. This same idea runs through many famous Christian mystics.

Non-dual cognition, or non-dual knowledge, cannot be captured in words, because words are based on dividing the world into pieces. But non-dual knowing is based on unity, the identity of the knower and the known and the means of knowing. All concepts, all thinking, all words, are necessarily dualistic and so cannot bring knowledge of the non-dual Absolute or First Principle. Plotinus expresses this well (4):

The main part of the difficulty is that awareness of this Principle comes neither by knowing
nor by the Intellection that discovers the Intellectual Beings but by a presence overpassing all
knowledge. In knowing, soul or mind abandons its unity; it cannot remain a simplex: knowing is
taking account of things; that accounting is multiple; the mind, thus plunging into number and
multiplicity, departs from unity.

Our way then takes us beyond knowing; there may be no wandering from unity; knowing and
knowable must all be left aside; every object of thought, even the highest, we must pass by, for all
that is good is later than This and derives from This as from the sun all the light of the day.

“Not to be told; not to be written”: in our writing and telling we are but urging towards it: out
of discussion we call to vision: to those desiring to see, we point the path; our teaching is of the
road and the travelling; the seeing must be the very act of one that has made this choice.

And so does Gurdjieff in "Views from the Real World" (5):

"We have come to the brink of the abyss which can never be
bridged by ordinary human reason. Do you feel how superfluous
and useless words have become? Do you feel how powerless
reason by itself is here? We have approached the principle behind
all principles."
...
As though divining my thoughts, Mr. Gurdjieff asked: "We started
with man, and where is he? But great, all-embracing is the law of
unity. Everything in the Universe is one, the difference is only of
scale; in the infinitely small we shall find the same laws as in the
infinitely great.
...
Again I repeat, all in the world is one; and since reason
is also one, human reason forms a powerful instrument for
investigation.

Gurdjieff also tells students to reduce thinking as much as possible in doing his spiritual exercises (G.I. Gurdjieff, "Paris Meetings 1943"). Words and ideas are not the way to awakening, but their reduction, in most non-dual schools.

Sometimes texts describe non-duality as the identity of the true self and the Absolute or God, as the identity of all phenomena (percepts, or samsara) and the Absolute, or as the lack of any attributes or qualities to the Absolute including existence or non-existence. Since non-dual cognition means all perception is the Absolute perceiving itself, with no other in true existence, and since the concept of existence depends on the illusion of a separate observer of the world, these are all other ways of describing the same thing. There are many subtle variations and varieties of formulating non-duality, but sometimes the differences are distinctions without a difference. Since the nature of the Absolute and realization cannot be captured in concepts, any formulation is only an attempt doomed to failure, as Gurdjieff pointed out in a number of places.

In some cases, though, non-duality is defined in a limited or compromised way so as to protect various illusions that people want to hang on to. One red flag of this is schools that try to avoid the inherent paradox in the notion of non-duality, and make everything understandable to the intellect.

What are examples of dualistic spiritual schools?

The Hari Krishnas, more properly called the International School of Krishna Consciousness, is a dualistic Vedanta school. The individual soul exists separately from God (Krishna) and seeks only to know and be with Krishna through dualistic perception.

Jung developed his own school of spiritual evolution, which aims at what he calls “individuation” by means of various practices. Jung did not believe in non-dual cognition. This is foundational to his system. Here is one example, from a 1938 letter (6):

"We know of no consciousness that is not the relation between images and an ego."

What are examples of non-dualistic spiritual schools?

Neither the aim nor the result of non-dual systems like those of ISKCON, Jung, or Steiner, can be the enlightenment of Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Neoplatonism, certain Sufi schools, or many Christian mystics like Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Bohme, St. John of the Cross, and Bernadette Roberts. Terms for non-dual realization include awakening, enlightenment, moksha, liberation, nirvana, self-realization, and union with God. In every case, this realization is the realization of consciousness without an ego, a subject or an object. This is opposed to the methods of dualistic schools that are designed to increase and solidify the sense of separation and build up the ego.

Adding non-dual traditions to Gurdjieff’s system is common in contemporary Gurdjieff schools. It is actually the standard practice in the many orthodox Gurdjieff groups today. Mme de Salzmann, first leader and organizer of the Gurdjieff Foundation, visited Japan to study with a Zen master, and Switzerland to learn from an Advaita teacher J. Krishnamurti. She has been criticized by some (e.g. Joseph Azize) for not keeping Gurdjieff's teaching limited to exactly his own teachings. William Patrick Patterson, a long term Foundation student and founder of the Gurdjieff Legacy Foundation, and the writer of many books about Gurdjieff and his ideas, includes Advaita Vedanta teachings as in important part of his curriculum. J.G. Bennett, another famous student of Gurdjieff that founded his own school, studied in Bapak's Subud school and with various Sufi teachers in the middle east after Gurdjieff died. He invited Buddhist teachers to teach in his own Gurdjieff school.

What about Ouspensky? He not only didn't mix in any other traditions, he also banned his students from visiting or studying with Gurdjieff, or doing any of the practices Gurdjieff taught after Ouspensky broke with him, such as the Gurdjieff (dance) movements. Ouspensky didn't even mix in Gurdjieff with Gurdjieff. On top of that, toward the end of his life he declared his own school a failure and tried to shut it down. On the whole, not a great exemplar.

Gurdjieff and non-dualism

That Gurdjieff understood the non-dual nature of the Absolute is made absolutely clear in a number of places, including the Enneagram Lecture (found in the articles section of this website), in the first chapter of Views From the Real World, and in chapter 14 of “In Search of the Miraculous”.

Putting attention on the self is one of Gurdjieff’s most prominent exercises, is a keystone of such systems. "self-observation" and "self-remembering" are two of his foundational exercises, explained in detail in "In Search of the Miraculous". The great non-dual realizer from the Advaita Vedanta tradition, Ramana Maharshi, advised students to put attention on their sense of I, starting with its location in the body. He also said (6):

When other thoughts arise, one should not pursue them but should enquire, ‘To whom do they arise?’ It does not matter how many thoughts arise. As each thought arises one should enquire with diligence, ‘To whom has this thought arisen?’ The answer that would emerge would be ‘To me’. Thereupon if one enquires, ‘Who am I?’ the mind will go back to its source and the thought that arose will become quiescent. With repeated practice in this manner the mind will develop the skill to stay in its source.

Many people consider Gurdjieff’s teaching to be dualistic, because he speaks about attaining Real I, real will, and about the individual coating higher bodies. These are all dualistic ideas.

But even Buddhism, one of the premiere non-dual traditions, has a huge amount of dualistic content. So much so that later Buddhists tried to divide the material in between “provisional teachings”, that were expedient ways of communicating how to get started on the path, and “ultimate teachings”, that gave more true descriptions of the path for more advanced practitioners.

Gurdjieff told Mme de Salzmann in his dying instructions to her (8):

"So long as there is no responsible nucleus, the action of the ideas
will not go beyond a certain threshold."

Gurdjieff's students at his death had not reached a certain necessary level of understanding. Gurdjieff was eminently practical, and this fact explains why much of the body of his talks and writings are dualistic. They are not permeated by non-dual terminology for a good reason. Even the teachings in "Life is Real only then When I Am", the Third Series, were not intended by him to be published but reserved for students who had attained a sufficient level of understanding (9).

But in “Views From the Real World” Gurdjieff says (11):

"With the contents of the third series of books to share the possibilities which I had discovered of touching reality and, if so desired, even merging with it."

states that the aim of his work is to show a way to merge with reality. When two things merge they are no longer separate. This is the aim of merging with the unitary, non-dual because it transcends the law of three, Absolute.

Non-dualism is implicit in Gurdjieff's ray of creation. The top world, The Absolute, is the All, it is the unity of all things. This is the same idea and even the same term used in some Mahayana Buddhist texts. Even his ray of creation shares a likeness in structure and principle to the metaphysics of Plotinus, who taught the non-dual Neoplatonist spiritual path, which also ends in a non-dual top level called the Absolute and the One. For both Plotinus and Gurdjieff it is the ultimate reality and the source of all manifest things. It is the hidden underlying unity behind multiplicity which is the aim of all spiritual schools. In "The Enneagram Lecture", for example, Gurdjieff says:

Man's eyes are dazzled by the bright play of the colors of multiformity, and under the glittering surface he does not see the hidden kernel of the one-ness of all that exists.

The realities behind non-dual formulations cannot be communicated in words or ideas, but only pointed towards. Yet anyone can perceive them directly, where they are right now, as Gurdjieff states in "Views from the Real World". They can do it in a moment of complete cessation of conceptual projection, prapañca. This is what Buddhism, Ramana Maharshi, Jan Cox, and Franklin Merrell-Wolff all state clearly, to refer to some well-known non-dual teachers. In "Views from the Real World", Gurdjieff simply says this knowledge goes beyond any words. That means beyond any thoughts in symbols or images, because symbols and images are not the things themselves.

(Sidebar: Cognitive symbols and images, which includes words and may all be considered kinds of words or thoughts, are put in the place of the actual things they represent or describe, for mental manipulation and storage (memory). In ordinary perception, these symbols are embedded in, or tagged onto, the raw perceptions by our brain, in neural processing that takes before the percepts reach conscious awareness centers in the frontal lobes. The symbols appear to be real existent things in the external world- this is called conceptual projection. In fact, all our perceptions- the qualia – are symbols generated by our brains to stand for aspects of the external reality. There is much scientific knowledge of these processes in recent decades from research into perception, often demonstrated by optical illusions or study of the qualia, e.g. Donald Hoffman’s work.)

In Gurdjieff’s ray of creation, a metaphysical model of existence, most people live in a world of 96 laws. As a person ascends the worlds, they are subject to less laws, but this also means they have to follow those laws more closely because there are fewer of them. The Absolute has one law, the will of the Absolute, which only manifests in world 3 (called All Worlds). As Gurdjieff says in his lecture in In Search of the Miraculous (chapter 4, pg. 86):

"the three forces constitute one whole in the Absolute"

There is one force in the Absolute, that is a beautiful description in his terminology of non-dual cognition. The three forces of the knower, the known, and the means of knowledge are one thing, not three. The one thing performs all three functions itself. The knower is identical to the known, and so the knower has no independent existence in ultimate reality - the exact same idea as the Buddhist idea of no-self.

Because Gurdjieff has said that the less laws, the less choice, since there are less laws to pick among, having only one law means it must be followed exactly:

Complete freedom = complete slavery

This is traditionally described in the non-dual traditions as "choiceless awareness". There are no choices to be made because there is exactly one law to follow.

It also follows that in the Absolute we don't have the law of three or seven, because there is only one law, the will of the Absolute. The Absolute itself is not triune, but the world 3 below it is.

This paradox is implicit in Gurdjieff's ray of creation. As a person ascends the worlds, they are subject to less laws, but this also means they have follow those laws more closely because there are fewer of them. The Absolute has one law, the will of the Absolute, which only manifests in world 3 (called All Worlds).

Because Gurdjieff has said that the less laws, the less choice, since there are less laws to pick among, having only one law means it must be followed exactly:

Complete freedom = complete slavery

This is traditionally described in the non-dual traditions as "choiceless awareness". There are no choices to be made because there is exactly one law to follow.

That Gurdjieff understood the error of dualistic approaches is made substantiated by his rejection of Carl Jung’s and Rudolph Steiner’s systems of spiritual growth. They based their work on a fully dualistic approach. Rudolph Steiner even described the spiritual search for unity as the result of a deceptive and dangerous “Unity-Demon”. His practices were intended to make people immune to this “Unity-Demon”.

At the same time, in “Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson”, Gurdjieff approves of Buddha (Shakyamuni) and the Lama (who must be Guru Rinpoche) and their teachings. Buddhism is entirely non-dualistic in its understanding of reality, from the earliest to the latest teachings in a 2400 year long history. Gurdjieff even says that at one point in history Lamaism (Tibetan Buddhism) was the greatest hope for humankind.

As a result of his practical teaching method, in which he taught ideas that students were at a place to understand and verify (10), and his avoidance of trying to describe the indescribable (The Enneagram Lecture), Gurdjieff did not write or teach a lot on the non-duality of the Absolute. But he taught enough so that there can be no doubt that Gurdjieff understood and advocated the aim of non-dual awakening to reality.

footnotes:

(1) William Patrick Patterson interview, retrieved from the internet 2023.01.25:

https://digitalseance.wordpress.com/all-posts/a-conversation-with-william-patrick-patterson/

(2) "In Search of the Miraculous", P.D Ouspensky, chapter 5, pg. 90.

(3) "The Enneads", Plotinus, V.3.17.

(4) "The Enneads", VI.9.4.

(5) "Views from the Real World", George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, chapter 1, pg. 21.

(6) "'Who Am I?' Sri Ramana Maharshi's teachings on how to realize the Self", webpage accessed 2023.01.28:

https://www.davidgodman.org/who-am-i-sri-ramana-maharshis-teachings-on-how-to-realise-the-self/

(7) "Collected Letters, vol. II", Carl Jung, letter dated December 1938.

(8) "Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am", George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Forward, pg. 7

(9) "Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am", Forward, pg. 5

"Why did he leave this Third Series unfinished and apparently give up his intention to publish it?"

...
"He let it be clearly understood, on the last page of 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, that the Third Series would be accessible only to those who would be selected as capable of understanding "the genuine objective truths which he will bring to light" in this Series."

Gurdjieff was always careful to only give teachings to people that they would be able to understand and apply. The Third Series, as far as they were completed, were used by him for practical instruction to his pupils. Put together these statements suggest that there may have been objective truths Gurdjieff would have taught, if there were students able to understand them, that are not in his written legacy.

(10) "Views from the Real World", Prologue, pg. 13.

(11) "Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am", Forward, pg. 6.

"I have seen him [Gurdjieff] at work, listening to the possibilities of understanding in each of his groups and also to the subjective difficulties of each pupil."