The Final Non-Duality: Rereading Spiritual Traditions in Light of Being — Introduction

The Spiritual Quest and the Hidden Contradiction

Across the world’s spiritual traditions, from ancient Vedānta to contemporary non-dual teachers, we encounter the same longing: a desire to overcome division, to dissolve the sense of separation, to awaken into unity. Whether spoken of as enlightenment, liberation, realization, or union with God, this quest appears as humanity’s most radical impulse — to go beyond the ordinary perception of reality and rediscover a deeper truth.

Many of these paths present themselves as non-dual. They speak of a reality beyond opposites, a Self beyond self and other, a divine beyond all names. They promise the end of suffering, the dissolution of ego, the transcendence of ignorance. And yet, as we’ve begun to uncover in earlier reflections, something persists beneath even the highest teachings — something unexamined, unquestioned, and fatal to their intent.

That hidden element is becoming — the belief that what-is can become what-is-not, and that what-is-not can become what-is. It may appear in subtle forms: as the notion that truth must be realized, that ignorance must be overcome, that a state of union must be attained. But every such gesture rests on the idea that Being — what is — can be absent and then arise, or that a subject can move from a condition of separation to one of unity. In this gesture lies the contradiction: the assumption that Being can cease to be or come into being, which is to assume the reality of nothingness.

This is what Emanuele Severino has identified as the fundamental contradiction of Western — and indeed global — thought: contraddizione C, the belief that a being can pass into non-being. Even in the traditions that claim to go beyond duality, this contradiction reappears, often more subtly, more mystically, but no less essentially.

And this is not a marginal detail. If the structure of reality is eternal — if every being is, necessarily and eternally, what it is — then the very premise of spiritual progress collapses. There is no one to become liberated, no state to be attained, no truth to be realized. There is only the eternal appearing of all beings in their necessity — including what we call ignorance, longing, and even the paths of spiritual discipline.

This does not invalidate the religious traditions of humanity. On the contrary, it shows that they are necessary stages in the unfolding of truth. Their longing is not mistaken; it is the very movement of Being’s appearing. But until they recognize that nothing can become — that every being is eternally itself — they remain governed by the contradiction of nihilism, even in their attempts to overcome it.

This series begins here: with the recognition that even the highest spiritual teachings, when examined in light of the structure of Being, still rest on the very dualism they claim to transcend. In the coming articles, we will enter into dialogue with a range of traditions and teachers — Advaita Vedānta, Buddhism, Christian mysticism, modern non-dualism — not to dismiss their insights, but to reveal the eternal necessity they have intuited but not yet fully seen.

We will do so not from above, not as critics of spirituality, but as those who recognize that the desire for the truth is already part of truth’s appearing — and that what the mystics and sages have glimpsed finds its fulfillment not in the dissolution of self, nor in union with an Absolute beyond Being, but in the glorious necessity of what eternally is.