The Last Dualism – Intro: How Non-Duality Preserves the Root of Nihilism

Introduction

A growing chorus in contemporary spirituality and philosophy sings of non-duality, interconnection, and wholeness. Eastern traditions, modern mystics, and therapeutic modalities echo the same refrain: separation is an illusion, all things are ultimately one, and awakening lies in transcending dualistic thought. Terms like oneness, pure consciousness, and non-separation circulate freely, suggesting a new paradigm rising from the ruins of Western fragmentation.

Yet beneath this promising surface, something essential remains unchallenged. A deeper dualism lingers, often unnoticed even by the most radical non-dual teachers. It is the ancient belief that the world of appearances — bodies, time, form — is impermanent, illusory, or destined to vanish. While the eternal is affirmed, the temporal is dismissed. Unity is proclaimed, but the multiplicity of beings is rendered unreal.

This metaphysical division, subtle yet decisive, is not new. Its roots stretch back to Plato and echo throughout the entire history of Western and Eastern metaphysics. At its core lies the most enduring assumption of all: that beings come from nothing and return to nothing. This is the silent foundation of nihilism, the belief in the annihilability of what is.

Even within today’s so-called non-dual movements, this assumption remains. The apparent transcendence of dualism thus turns out to be its final disguise. If we are to overcome separation — not just psychologically but metaphysically — we must expose and dissolve this last dualism.

Plato and the Birth of the Eternal/Temporal Divide

Plato’s philosophy is often seen as the dawn of metaphysical thinking in the West. He posited a realm of eternal, unchanging Forms, perfect essences that constitute true Being. By contrast, the sensible world was seen as a shadow: a realm of flux, becoming, and decay.

The eternal Forms were real; the world of appearances — bodies, emotions, matter — was not. It was derivative, imperfect, and ultimately doomed to vanish. Though Plato revered the eternal, he did so by casting the temporal into ontological poverty.

This established a structure of thought that would dominate Western metaphysics: the conviction that true Being is unchanging, and that whatever changes cannot truly be. The world of sense and time, in this view, is not eternal. It arises from and returns to its opposite, non-being.

Thus, without denying God, soul, or immortality, Plato sowed the seeds of the most profound nihilism by denying Being to everything that changes.

The Inheritance of the West: Christianity, Modernity, and Materialism

This dualism did not remain confined to the Academy. Christianity absorbed and transformed it, introducing its own metaphysical hierarchy: eternal soul versus perishable body, heaven versus earth, the divine versus the fallen. Though Christianity affirmed the resurrection of the body, it maintained that the sensible world, in its current form, is passing away. Salvation meant escape or transformation into the eternal.

With Descartes, the soul/body split returned in new terms: res cogitans (thinking substance) versus res extensa (extended thing). The mind was conscious and free; the body was mechanical, passive, and inert. Once again, the division deepened.

Modern science, while rejecting the soul, did not escape the dualism. It simply reversed the valuation: only the material was real, yet it too was seen as temporary, contingent, and ultimately meaningless. Matter was no longer eternal; it was the product of chance, of explosive beginnings, and destined for heat death. In materialism, as in idealism, the world appears from nothing and disappears into nothing.

Across these systems, the same logic persists: the visible world is not eternal. It comes into being, it ceases to be, it is annihilable. This silent metaphysics haunts the entire trajectory of Western thought.

The Modern Non-Dual Turn: A Misleading Resolution

In recent decades, non-duality has re-emerged in popular consciousness, largely through Eastern traditions such as Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoism. These teachings offer an appealing exit from the West’s metaphysical fragmentation. They speak of unity, timelessness, the end of egoic separation, and liberation from suffering.

Yet here too, the last dualism often survives.

In Advaita Vedanta, Brahman — pure, eternal consciousness — is real. The world of name and form (nama-rupa) is maya: illusion, dream, appearance. The eternal is affirmed, but the world is dismissed. Similarly, much of Zen and Mahayana thought celebrates emptiness while treating distinctions as devoid of true existence.

Modern spiritual teachers such as Eckhart Tolle, Rupert Spira, and the Neo-Advaita voices often present the body, form, and world as transient expressions of an underlying awareness. Liberation lies in realizing that we are not the body, not form, not the time-bound self, but the timeless awareness behind all appearances.

This is not non-duality. It is metaphysical hierarchy in disguise. It repeats the same ancient division between eternal and temporal, Being and becoming, but in gentler language. At its core lies the belief that appearances are not truly real, that they arise and vanish.

This is not the end of dualism. It is its final mask.

The Core Assumption: Becoming and the Return to Nothing

The unexamined core of these systems, ancient and modern alike, is the belief that what appears comes into being and eventually ceases to be. That Being is annihilable. That beings — forms, bodies, identities, worlds — are not eternal.

This belief is so deep and so ubiquitous that it goes unnoticed even among those who explicitly reject dualism. Yet it is the very heart of the fracture.

Emanuele Severino, one of the few thinkers to fully expose this assumption, calls it the essence of nihilism. Not moral despair or cultural decline, but the metaphysical belief that what is can become nothing.

This contradicts the principle of identity: that Being is Being and cannot become non-Being. Becoming — the idea that things arise from nothing and return to nothing — is the supreme contradiction. It is the hidden madness at the heart of Western and Eastern metaphysics alike.

As long as this belief endures, dualism endures. Not merely as a philosophical error, but as a fundamental misunderstanding of reality.

The True Overcoming: The Eternal Structure of All That Appears

What, then, is the true overcoming of dualism?

It is not the fusion of opposites or the transcendence of distinction. It is the recognition that everything that appears is eternal. What is does not come into being and does not pass away.

The body is eternal. The world is eternal. Every being — each tree, stone, moment of joy or sorrow — is eternally what it is. The appearing of difference is not illusion but the eternal unfolding of Being.

The eternal is not elsewhere. It is here, in the irreducible necessity of each being as it appears. And this appearing does not vanish into nothing. It may withdraw from visibility, yet it remains. Always.

This recognition dissolves the last dualism. The temporal is not less than the eternal; it is the eternal in its unique and necessary mode of appearing. The body is not a prison or a tool; it is an eternal light in the appearing of truth.

Only in this recognition does dualism truly end. Not by denying the world, but by unveiling its eternal ground.

Conclusion: Toward a New Foundation of Thought and Practice

The path beyond nihilism is not a flight into formlessness, not the denial of distinction, and not the merging of self into an abstract unity. It is the recognition of the eternity of all that is.

This changes everything. Ethics, love, memory, science, and art are all transformed when the world is no longer seen as perishing. We neither cling to appearances in fear nor reject them as illusions. We behold them as eternal presences in the unfolding of Being.

Contemporary non-duality has come far, but not far enough. It has glimpsed unity but not identity. It has intuited eternity but still feared time. It has named the end of dualism while carrying its ghost within.

To go further is to see that there is no nothingness, no annihilation, no becoming. There is only the eternal necessity of Being and the infinite joy of its appearing.

Introducing the Series: Beyond Conditioned Thought

The above sets the stage for the series What Is Truly Non-Dual? — a journey that begins not by rejecting the world, but by witnessing the structure in which it necessarily appears. We move from critique to clarity, from silence to recognition. And in that recognition, the true resolution of the last dualism begins.

1. What Is Truly Non-Dual?
   Exposing the quiet contradiction at the heart of many non-dual teachings and glimpsing the necessity of a true foundation.
2. The Myth of the Body’s Illusion
   Why denying the body is not liberation, but a subtle reaffirmation of the very split non-duality seeks to overcome.
3. Awakening Without Becoming
   Reclaiming the eternal self, not as something to achieve but as something already and necessarily present.
4. The Eternal Structure of Thought
   Thought does not obscure Being; it reveals it, but only if we see what thought already is.
5. Direct Cognition and the Necessity of Recognition
   Beyond silence and beyond the mind: how the direct seeing of Being is not a fleeting experience but a recognition that cannot be denied.

Let us begin, not by rejecting non-duality, but by allowing it to reveal what it has not yet fully seen.