Religions seem to divide the believer from the unbeliever, us from them, and blood has been shed along those lines. Is non-duality then only a rare mystical experience? It is simpler and harder. Every division begins with the felt sense of a separate ‘I’, and religion begins not with belief but with honestly seeing the suffering this ‘I’ creates. Even the search for truth or liberation can become one more possession of the same ‘I’. Who is it that wants happiness, God and freedom?
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Originally published in The Pioneer on 10 October '26
Not long ago, on an American podcast, a thoughtful host put a proposition to me. Religions, he said, are by their nature dualistic and separatist. They divide the creator from the created, the believer from the infidel, us from them. Human beings have persecuted and killed one another along exactly these lines. So perhaps humanity must now evolve beyond religion altogether.
I understand how one arrives there. Look at the history of organised faith and the evidence seems overwhelming. Yet the conclusion is backwards. We do not have to go beyond religion; we have to go beneath what has passed for religion, to its buried core. And at the core of every religious stream worth the name lies not division but the ending of division. At the core lies non-duality.
