A startling finding emerging from the groundbreaking Scientific History of Mindfulness is the failure of Western science to recognise the nondual nature of traditional forms of meditation. Experienced meditation practitioners may have been taught about the nondual view or nondual meditation methods, which are pivotal to many meditation traditions. However, most Westerners’ consciousness is dominated by explicitly dualistic frameworks. The ability of people rooted in a dualistic awareness, including scientists, to understand a nondual worldview is problematic, even if they have received instruction and training. One possible explanation for this problem is the concept of incommensurability found in Thomas Kuhn’s writings. A controversial term, incommensurability, describes how changing to alternative ways of knowing is problematic once we have been trained in a particular understanding of the world. Further, someone who is schooled in a specific understanding may not even know that they have been cognitively conditioned to see the world from one particular dualistic perspective.
A characteristic of the dualistic mind is that it believes its conscious experience is an objective reality. This misunderstanding is experienced by Western meditation scholars and scientists, even today. Many highly intelligent and well-intentioned academics make claims about the nature of traditional forms of meditation from a dualistic perspective without ever having recognised the role of nonduality in meditation methods. This problem is not restricted to modern materialistic societies but is present wherever people foster a ‘belief in self’ as an objective reality. Thus, many traditional meditation students train for years, or even decades, to appreciate that their consciousness can be either dual, nondual, or even an integration of the two.
Typically, humans flit between dual and nondual forms of consciousness without knowing or detecting the difference. In this brief introduction, the critical thing to remember is that we all have access to dual and nondual ways of knowing; both are integral to the human experience. However, it is highly problematic to recognise and then cultivate a consistent nondual view without training and guidance. It is not possible to provide a comprehensive explanation of dual or nondual consciousness in this article, but I have written about these issues elsewhere. So here, I will attempt to use simplified approximations to introduce this subject.
In a typical Western materialistic society like the UK today, most people spend significant time in dualistic consciousness. We could characterise the dualistic state in many ways; as a starting point, let us simply regard it as the point of view where one believes, as truth, the conscious and subconscious impulses generated by our brain.
We can all find examples of our irrational thoughts and baseless concerns that we recognise as meaningless. However, many of us accept unfounded opinions and erroneous perceptions as ‘reality’. While our thoughts and ideas often seem meaningful, the views of others can seem meaningless or even ridiculous. Without nondual awareness, our identity is partly made up of fabricated constructs with no reality other than what we attribute to them; I’d suggest this is the dominance of emotion over reasoning, although it is obviously an oversimplification. So, for example, thinking that others are responsible for your mental state (you make me angry) is usually an expression of dualism, as is the default belief that our wishes and goals are somehow more important than the wishes and goals of others.
By contrast, a nondual view distinguishes between reliable mental phenomena and transient, unreliable thoughts and feelings. Once a stable and systematic nondual view is achieved, we can establish relative freedom in thinking, speaking and acting. This freedom is often associated with the happiness and stability observed in nondual practitioners. So, from a nondual perspective, we make the presumption that the thoughts and feelings of others may be just as important and meaningful as ours. A note of caution; the nondual view is typically achieved by abandoning limiting concepts, an exercise that usually requires a significant amount of time, effort and training. I will stop the preliminary definitions here for now and briefly discuss what these concepts mean for meditation practice.
In traditional meditation, people often begin at the beginning; if they have a reliable teacher and methods and are diligent, they can progress. However, until a practitioner realises which mental phenomena arising in their consciousness are transient and meaningless, all meditation can be seen as relative. That means your practice is relative to your mental state and other causes and conditions. A practitioner with some modest experience of the nondual should be able to transcend belief in mundane phenomena, knowing their relative unimportance. That is not to say that a nondual practitioner may have arrived at a transcendent mental state; it is simply that they understand the limitations of their own worldview. That, in a nutshell, is my view of why the nondual is essential to progress beyond a preliminary stage in meditation practice. Without nondual awareness, the inner world of our consciousness remains uncertain. While much Buddhist meditation is not explicitly nondual, it all, by its very nature, increases the ability of the student to understand nonduality. Nonduality is a central pillar in many spiritual and philosophical traditions, but it is mainly invisible to the psychological sciences; I wonder why…?
The Science of Meditation and Mindfulness 