The Final Non-Duality 5 – Why Every Path Is Necessary and Yet Must Be Surpassed

The Longing for Being and the Inevitability of Its Recognition

To one who has deeply entered the history of spiritual traditions, it may seem impossible that so many sincere seekers, mystics, and teachers — across millennia, cultures, and languages — could be mistaken. And in fact, they are not. Each tradition, from the earliest shamanic rites to the most refined expressions of non-dual awareness, bears witness to a necessary movement in the history of truth. They are not accidental, nor contingent wanderings of the human mind, but essential stages in the gradual unfolding of Being.

What has become increasingly clear through our examination of Buddhism, Christian mysticism, Advaita, and modern non-duality is this: each path intuits something profoundly true — that there is no separate self, that God is beyond name and form, that awareness is not an object among others. And yet, each of these paths also falls back into contradiction, presupposing a passage from ignorance to knowledge, from absence to presence, from becoming to Being.

In this sense, the history of spirituality is not false, but governed — as all things in the West and East have been — by what Emanuele Severino calls contraddizione C: the fundamental belief that what-is can at one moment be nothing and at another something; that Being can come to be and cease to be. This is the unspoken axiom of virtually every path: that there is a movement, a transformation, an awakening, a purification, a dissolution, a realization.

But Being does not become. It does not move from darkness to light, nor from bondage to freedom. If it truly is, it cannot not be. And if what we are is Being, then we have never been other than free. The longing that fuels every tradition — the yearning for God, for peace, for wholeness, for unity — is not a desire for something that is not, but the echo of what eternally is. The spiritual paths are necessary gestures of memory, attempts to remember what has never been absent, to return to a home that was never truly left.

Their value is immense. They carry the world forward in the only way it can be carried — through contradiction. Not because contradiction is true, but because it is the necessary condition for the recognition of its impossibility. In this sense, every path must be walked. Every desire must burn. Every question must be asked. And yet, none of these can fulfill what they seek, for they are themselves born of the mistaken belief that something has been lost.

This is why no practice, no realization, no state of consciousness can bring liberation. Liberation is not an event — it is not a moment in time, nor the reward of effort. It is the recognition that what is sought has never been absent, that the very seeking is grounded in Being, and that Being does not lack, cannot lack, and has never lacked.

When one truly sees this, the spiritual path does not disappear — it transfigures. One no longer walks it to reach an end, but sees in every step the eternal presence of what already is. The idea of “surpassing” the paths is not a dismissal, but a fulfillment — just as the bud must open to reveal the flower, so too must every tradition eventually unfold into the recognition that it is not the cause of liberation, but its expression.

In this light, every teaching, every ritual, every moment of silence, and even every confusion and contradiction are already part of the eternal appearing of Being. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is outside this structure. And yet, the final contradiction must still fall: the belief that what we are is in need of becoming what we are.

This is the truth toward which every tradition leans, and the contradiction by which every tradition must one day be surpassed.