When I hear clichés like teamwork makes the dream work, we're all in this together, and that we must come together as one, a strange thing happens. On some level, I know that these statements are true and morally good. We are one.
And yet, on another level, they feel empty—even a little stupid—to say. Hiding in the back of my mind, a voice pushes back: we aren't one, we are many discrete individuals.
It seems, as a culture, we're unclear on connection. Like there's a schism in our thought, two stories vying for supremacy, undermining one another.
In the political realm, reaching across the aisle and rejecting partisanship is touted as the key to overcoming culture wars, global warming, and just about every other polarising issue you can think of. And yet, the divides only deepen.
On an individual level, we thirst for connection too. Loneliness epidemics are declared all over the Western world. Young people are having less sex, less real-life friendships, and are seemingly less mentally healthy as a result.
If I know the slogans, if I too recognise my need for deep connection in my life, why do I cringe when my manager looks around the meeting room and says we're not just co-workers here—we're a family? Why don't I join community gardens or rub shoulders with my next-door neighbours like my grandparents used to? What is in the way of connection?
"Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilisation. Do you know what the message of Western Civilisation is? I am alone."
Eileen Myles
"...If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government."
Robert Pirsig
The systems of thought we inherit often go unseen and therefore unquestioned. We're all immersed in a cultural current, surrounded by assumptions and conceptual distinctions that reinforce stories about who we are, what the world is, and what we're here to do. The story I'd like to highlight today confidently asserts that we are fundamentally separate selves, moving through a world of other separate selves and objects.
Perhaps the materialist in you is shrugging its shoulders and announcing "yeah, duh. So what?" Well, there's a more than a few nasty consequences of this story that I'll explore in a minute, so hold your horses. Plus, it's become so ubiquitous that it doesn't merely match up with how we think about our lives day to day. Our assumption of separateness has given rise to entire fields of knowledge, widening its explanatory breadth—and drowning out conceptual alternatives.
In neoliberal economics our separateness and self-interest are taken as basic assumptions. Each of us is understood as a single rational actor, always in it for ourselves, to maximise profit and minimise costs.
Every relationship therefore becomes a negotiation centred around satisfying desires and maximising self-interest. Friendship is a mutually beneficial relationship. So is a social basketball team and a knitting group. Even our relationships with objects become personal success strategies: walking in the woods, studying philosophy or reading poetry—all become instruments for the satisfaction of our wills.
Many interpretations of Darwin take a similar stance, only on the biological level. Like mosquitos, viruses, and crocodiles, we're told that we're here to grow fit enough to spread our genes. Whether we peacock to potential mates via a loud muffler and neck tattoo, fake tan and 10,000 IG followers, or first-class emotional awareness brought on by extensive therapy, it doesn't really matter. It's all about attracting a mate, keeping them, and populating the earth with little versions of ourselves. This notion, too, casts us as isolated actors. I'm here, you're out there, and connection becomes a strategy—just necessary foreplay for my DNA's five-year plan.
Finally, the hedonism through which the marketplace thrives is built on the same assumptions again. Products exist to serve us. We exist to gain pleasure from products. Not 100% satisfied? Your money back!
This notion doesn't stop at toothpaste and ornamental rugs but creeps into our relationships and even our spiritual lives. If meditation becomes difficult, we should try breathwork instead. If a friendship is toxic, we should cut them out. If a better match on tinder arrives, we can ghost the loser and pursue the winner. Why shouldn't I seek what serves me? Why shouldn't I avoid what I don't like?
From the soil of separateness grew these trees of thought. In their shade, we are taught that connection to our workmates, family, products, homes, food, and landscapes are means to our own self-satisfaction. Connection is not an end—something valued in itself—and so we are left to commodify the world as subjects, essentially separate.
Connection, in this view, is to build a bridge from our subjectivity—if we want to, and only after first crunching the appropriate cost-benefit analysis—rather than a fundamental truth about our place in the world.
These assumptions, ironically, aren't without significant cost. Our separateness says that we're inherently and unavoidably lonely, trapped in our unique and indescribable subjectivity. It also undermines trust by assuming the same problem of access to other people's internal worlds.
The cruelty continues. Under this system of thought, gifts turn paradoxically into social burdens in need of reciprocation. Marriage takes "the form of a divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided," as Wendell Berry wrote in Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.1
Nature becomes raw material—mountains are natural resources. Berry, too, wrote, “The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.” Our trees and mountains and riverbeds are all able to be fed into the matrix of cost-benefit analysis, instrumentalised, commodified, and sold into bondage.
The belief in separateness produces a culture of extraction, suspicion and a crisis of belonging. We feel alone not because we are alone, but because we've been taught that we are alone, that subject-object dualism is the most fundamental truth of our existence.
But what if the separateness of self isn't the truth of the world, but a mistake of perception?
World-class smarty-pants Albert Einstein described the experience of our separateness as "a kind of optical delusion"—a perceptual mistake that becomes a "kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us."
If we take up Einstein's task to "free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty," how are we to do this with the concepts we're steeped in?
Luckily for us, concepts aren't something we uncover or absorb from objective reality. They aren't fixed or eternal. In the words of Darius Epps from the TV show Atlanta: Thursday's made up... Everything is made up. Stay woke.
Just as simply as some French guy called Descartes expressed the dualism from which our separateness grew, others have created monisms to take its place. Spinoza's substance monism replied that there was no fundamental division between subjects and objects but rather that everything is an expression of a single substance—God or Nature.
This is more than some European 17th century waffle. Sufi mystics have expressed the same notion over many centuries when they say "There is nothing but God." In fact, spiritual traditions across the world have rejected dualisms such as subject and object, self and other. The umbrella term we’ll use for these worldviews is nonduality.
When nonduality occurs in many of these traditions, it is not just conceptual philosophy. Instead, it's a way of being in the world, connecting to reality in a more fundamental way than concepts ever can—experientially.
From a nondual view, connection isn't something we build, it's what is left when we see through the concepts and stories that separate us and reconnect with the primacy of experience. There are a number of methods to do this; from fasting to whirling, but I'd like to focus on meditation for a moment.
Meditation in the West has become perversely but understandably—given the assumptions we've covered—commodified. It's peddled as a stress-relief tool, a practice to improve relationships or reduce bodily inflammation. Apps like Calm and Headspace frame meditation as an instrument to help us: "sleep more, stress less, and live better."
In the contemplative traditions, however, meditation isn't a tool to help us access nicer feelings. It's a way of seeing our experience clearly, and of noticing how the separate self is constructed through an amalgamation of thoughts, feeling tones, and sensations.
Through instructions like, look for the looker or turn your attention upon the seat of awareness, we can be momentarily knocked out of our habitual identification with the self and see, feel, that there is no little homunculus inside us. Instead, what we find when we look for our subject is simply sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts. No seer, no hearer, no feeler, and no thinker. Each time we think we find a self, upon further inspection it's just another thought or feeling tone.
Douglas Harding, the British architect and later spiritual teacher, described the felt sense of nonduality as "having no head." When we look out at the world and then up from our shoes to our chest, past our bodies—where we expect to find our head, a subject, we instead find something else. We find the world. We don't find it distant, either, as a viewer. It's directly, immediately there, it is what we are.
In these moments, nonduality isn't a belief but a glimpse—brief yet unforgettable—of reality before we named it. It feels deeply familiar, and wildly, vividly obvious. Open. Alive. And seamlessly connected with everything that appears.
If this all seems a bit too woo for your liking, I want to stress two things before we move forward. The first is that nonduality isn't meant to be understood conceptually. In conjunction with teachings and ideas, the practice of meditation exists to connect people to the experience of nonduality.
The concepts are here to describe and point at the moon. This can be helpful but is not sufficient to actually see it. Meditation is here so we can stop looking at the tip of the finger and actually see what is being pointed at. In other words, don't take my word for it. You can glimpse it yourself.
Secondly, nonduality isn't something that only exists in meditation. If you haven't meditated before, I have no doubt that you, too, have experienced feelings akin to nonduality. It's probably just that they've gone unlabelled as such.
Peak experiences, like skiing the first run of the day through fresh powder, eating a perfectly balanced meal, or becoming lost in a great film, can all dissolve the boundary between ourselves and the world. We can become the sparkling white slope, the embrace of a loved one, or the drawing that unfurls at the end of our pencil.
I'd go so far as to say that what we're seeking from products and experiences—from good first dates, crispy chicken fingers, and satisfying creative work—is exactly this. Flow. Pure connection with our experience without a self getting in the way with all its incessant chattering and judgement.
When we practice seeing the world from the perspective of nonduality, when the glimpses occur more and more frequently and become more easily accessible, the changes can be profound.
Just think, if we really believed that we weren't separate from the world, that all things are flowers blooming on the tree of life, or that there is nothing but God; the story of separateness and the resulting beliefs simply unravel.
Love sheds all strategy and agenda and regains its gentle and attentive intimacy. Without the self-concern of separateness we can offer ourselves and our attention fully, enacting "the rarest and purest form of generosity," as Simone Weil wrote. We can approach people not as a means to an end but as ends themselves. There is nothing to take from them because there's simply nowhere to put it. We're left to witness and love, in the words of Tolstoy, "the whole person, just as he or she is, not as you would like them to be."
The same shift redefines belonging and well-being from isolated and individual to embedded and communal. Wendell Berry writes, “the community … in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures … is the smallest unit of health”. Our well-being is no longer personal. It is coemergent, arising in connection with the well-being of all that surrounds us. The health of the rivers, mountains and the creatures that inhabit them becomes our health, not something to be sold or burned for profit and self-interest. Therefore, work for the health of the soil and our fellow creatures is not only self-enriching but beneficial for the whole community. A rising tide that lifts all boats.
Finally, service and giving are not revealed as sacrifice—as Libertarian author and forerunner of neoliberalism Ayn Rand insisted—but as joy. Hospitality, conviviality and kindness flow effortlessly from nondualism, not as an obligation, transaction, or reciprocation, but from the recognition that giving and receiving are inseparable, like smiles shared between strangers.
Connection, then, isn't something we must seek, build, or negotiate the terms of. It's what emerges when we clear the dualistic smudge from the lens of experience.
I don't wish to make it sound easy, like a switch we can flip and then that’s it. We're all immersed in the dualistic story. Our knowledge, marketplace, and relationships are saturated with it. Keeping a clean lens requires attention, work, and revision.
But ultimately, the practice of nonduality is one of gentle, almost effortless repetition. By returning to the present moment—the simplicity of the breath, sensations in the body, or the slow beauty of nature—we give ourselves permission to relax our thinking mind. We can drop the story of separateness and take a deep breath of reality, of ourselves, and of the whole whirling expanse of awareness.
We can regain the connection that was always there, arms outstretched, waiting for our return.
W.
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Berry’s full essay is available as a PDF here: https://religioustech.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Berry-Wendell-Feminism-the-Body-and-the-Machine.pdf