Solving Duality with Non-Duality

Supernatural, Religion, or Supersense?

April 6, 2023

By Jennifer Finch, LPC, NCC, SEP

If you have ever seen the Pixar film “Inside Out,” you might have contemplated that decision-making is a deep problem. In the film there is a control room inside the head of the female lead character, Riley Anderson, voiced by Kaitlyn Dias. Using a heuristic model of five primary color emotions, Joy (Amy Poehler), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader) and Anger (Lewis Black), Riley navigates through life encounters from the perspective of her internal emotional workforce who all live inside her head.

We aren’t shown the whole army that it would require to run a brain-body, just the main rainbow of emotions. For example, who is controlling Riley’s stomach when they see her reserves are getting low, which would register a request for more food? We are only seeing life through an emotional context, which might be fairly accurate as most people are swayed and being dictated to, living their whole lives by the strong currents of punctuating emotions; dancing like puppets on strings without a sense of rational responsibility.

But what lies underneath this poignant animated film is the profound philosophical conundrum about free will. Were the creators presenting us a case against conscious free will?

If the main character Riley believes she is the one doing the doing, yet we, as the audience, know that the factory operators living inside her head are controlling her brain and body, the reality of Riley’s experience of free will becomes very doubtful.

So, who is actually doing the doing?

Bruce Hood, in his granular book, Supersense tells us, “Our daily experience constantly tells us that our minds work independently and in advance of our bodies. Every waking moment, we make decisions that precede our actions. It seems that our bodies are controlled by our thoughts.” This gives strong conviction that we feel the authorship of free will. We are the choice-makers, we can do what we want, when we want to. Ask any three-year-old. Ahem, or any adult, operating from a child-self.

If I ask you to get up and walk across the room whenever you feel ready, you will eventually decide to either get up and do this exercise in some obedient fashion, or perhaps out of curiosity you will decide to put up your middle finger and refuse to act on the suggestion. Either way, this is what conscious free will feels like. This is how we experience it. We eventually decide what we are going to do, and then follow through out of compliance or defiance. But it feels like us making the decision.

However, cognitive scientists have disproven this exact chain of events. When neuroscientists measure your “brain activity while you’re sitting there waiting to decide that the point when you thought you had reached a decision to move your finger (or walk across the room) actually occurred AFTER your brain had already begun to take action. (B. Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will on Voluntary Action,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8 (1985): 529–66).

In other words, “the point in time when we think we have made a choice occurs after the event.” (B. Hood, Supersense p.138.)

Consciousness moves at the speed of light before action occurs. The same goes with pain receptors. Our body doesn’t actually feel pain until pain receptors in the brain get alarmed and tell the body that pain should be there. There is an abundant quantity of efficacy-based research on phantom limb syndrome that stuns us with this reality.

So, you see, we arrive at a conundrum. If the decision is being made BEFORE the consciousness arrives in our brain-body-mind that we have made the decision, WHO is making the decisions and at what point are they making them? If we do have a panel of emotional operators and an army of autonomic nervous system soldiers, can we meet them? Say hello? Get to know them? Can we fire them? Hire them? Disobey them?

Where is the “me” inside my head considering the options to either walk across the room or put up my middle finger and lock my heels to the floor? How is the “decider” inside my head making the decisions? It can hardly be free will because I cannot get behind it and see who is arriving at a decision. Whoever it is, is undetectable. It feels like “me” but that is after the fact. Who is “me” anyway?

I once had a client who had a habit of drinking too much on weekends and she came to me in the hopes to curb this behavior. I asked her when she decided to take the first drink on Friday or Saturday, when had she actually made that decision. In slowing the whole process down and using a mindfulness approach, she had come to the astounding conclusion that her body had made that decision on the Tuesday prior after having a stressful day with work, kids, husband, home-work-life out of balance stuff. Interestingly she felt it was her body that had notified her first, not her thoughts or brain, as it was unconscious until brought into awareness; but her body had small “tells” that became easily detectable to the human eye. The F*** It Button, I can’t wait ’til Friday to have a cocktail, had already been set in motion long before it was even conscious in her mind.

When I used to teach mindfulness to teens, they would often practice watching their thoughts go by in their head. A typical mindfulness instruction is to watch thoughts as if they are clouds moving across a big blue sky, which is a metaphor for your open mind. Thoughts come and go and even change shape, just like clouds. After some moments of practice, the teens were generally able to accomplish this simple, but not easy, exercise. They could experience that they in fact, were not their thoughts because they could watch them enter and exit as if on a movie screen in their minds. Clouds certainly don’t dictate or demand what we do or don’t do, so why should thoughts? We learn how thoughts are not solid and often not even truthful, but oh how we try to concretize them, believe them, and obey them. But then I would approach the teens with the question, “who is the watcher?” And they were dumbfounded. “Who is the watcher that is able to witness and watch the thoughts?” The kids came up with all kinds of hypothetical conclusions. “It’s me….but maybe a different me.” “It’s someone who is still and calm in my mind.” “It’s consciousness, itself.” “It’s God.”

Going deeper, I would poke. How do we let that watcher know how we would like him/her/they/it to perceive our lives? How do we want “it” to see? Does it take our best interests at hand? Always?

In other words, do we really have free will? Or is this watcher perhaps pulling all the strings?

Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist researcher and author and professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University, (so a very intelligent guy), is a known critic of free will. We have overconfident expectations of what you are going to do, which lies across an ocean of what you actually end up doing. This isn’t a lapse of will, or will-power, or determination. It’s a stronger force we might be fighting against. Just ask anyone who is trying to lose a few pounds.

Steven Pinker says, “The conscious mind — the self or soul — is a spin doctor, not the commander-in-chief.” (S. Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking Adult, 2002), p. 43.; B. Hood, Supersense p. 139).

“The mind is constructing a story that fits with decisions after they have been made.” (B.Hood, Supersense p. 139.) Yes! We play Tetris with life and absolutely love it when all the pieces fit and go exactly to their home.

So, we arrive at perhaps the greatest conundrum of man-woman kind. Who is the watcher? Who is the decider? What is the mind? Where is the mind? Who is the mind? When is the mind (is it karmic and carried forth life to life to life)?

Well, it all hinges on what you believe, what you choose to believe, or in many cases what was indoctrinated into your belief system.

We cannot make sense of what is not sensical, so we fill in the blanks with something other than reason to help. We play Tetris. We turn to the supernatural, religion, and quantum depths of philosophical and theoretical science to make the pieces all fit. There is a story in the Bible that will explain away quite literally everything that we cannot make sense of. This can feel like relief to countless many, but religion is not science. Neither is the supernatural….yet. From this point on it all becomes a leap of faith. Hopefully science will eventually get to the bottom of it. Whatever/whomever you turn to, to make sense of this world, only must make sense to you. No one else. As an anti-guru, I am known to say, “Don’t take my word for it, you must try it all out and see for yourself.”

If we go backwards in time, great thinkers and philosophers like Rene Descartes, the OG dualist, attempted to explain this mind quandary by easily separating out the mind from the body. The mind is obviously not just contained within the perimeter of the material brain. We can align this with the gamut of research on “theory of mind.” Essentially, humans have an acute and keen ability to mind read. We can enhance and practice this skill by attempting to get into other people’s minds by predicting what they are going to do. Empathy can be a superpower. Go to any magic show where the entertainer pulls in a member of the audience. They can keenly scope out a susceptible mind that will play along and make the show a success.

We don’t have to be a magician to mind-read, however. We can use our retroactive reflection of past experiences, as well as social norms and contexts to help us advance our technique. For example, we have been watching and astutely studying our mother’s face since we were pre-verbal. Her face was the first almost round shape we saw in this world. My guess is that most kids, teens and even adults who are around mom, can predict what their mother is going to do and say, down pat even to how she is going to move. How is our mind “in” our mother’s mind? Because it is moveable. The mind is moveable. We have a moveable mind.

If we adhere to what Descartes is saying, that the mind is somehow separate and acting independently from our body, if we truly buy into this duality of separateness, then there would be no limit to what the mind might be capable of. The mind would be no longer constrained by the same laws that govern the physical world. Descartes “proposed that the mental world must control the physical one through the pineal gland deep in the middle of the brain, which he called the seat of the soul.” In his book, Supersense p.139 B. Hood lays this out in detail, “Descartes came to this conclusion because the pineal gland seemed to be one of the only structures in the brain that was not duplicated or organized in two halves. In fact, it is. V.A. Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (William Morrow, 1998.)

Descartes’ theory requires that there be a soul that might be synonymous with the mind, both separate from the body and yet somehow in control of the body. This is illogical, because we all know that nonmaterial things cannot control material things. This is a scientific violation and would only adhere to supernatural plausibility.

Surely, he is not saying that the mind could leap to other faraway places, travel through walls, see through people like Superman, ride a DeLorean and jump through the time-space continuum. Can our mind traverse a wormhole?

The dualist view of a separate mind cannot be reasoned. We can exhaustingly preoccupy ourselves with this viewpoint, as philosophers have for millennia, but it becomes quite clear that it is disturbingly unscientific. It disturbs us to think that some “other” mind, separate from us is out there controlling our body. Who gave them/it/whomever permission to make me fall asleep in this movie? Many of us never even consider these questions because it leaves even the most skeptical atheist in a quandary, and even for the righteously religious it strips them from their own free will which becomes…..uncomfortable.

It forces us to stretch beyond our comfort zone. If the mind is separate from the body, I wouldn’t suspect that it would even want to be bothered with organizing the movements and digestion of this small potatoes body down here on the earthly bound ground. If our mind could truly venture out beyond the horizons, why wouldn’t we all be living a kind of VR enhanced life? I imagine a sea of bodies lying in a field, not deceased, but seemingly so, but inside their minds they are living in some exuberant Fantasia, without any repercussions. Wait…isn’t this what Zuckerberg sirens us to do in the Metaverse? We cannot think for a minute that Zuck is the conscious decider sitting at the captain’s chair in our brain? Wait…but is he? Is he trying to be?

So, at this point, I don’t have the answers, but my hope is to get us at least thinking about who is driving the show and dictating our path without being stuck in the labyrinth that duality causes. I would hope we wouldn’t just roll over, close our eyes and hope for the best. In a general contemplation about a moveable mind, I can begin to suspect that I am more than my body. But how much more?

In trauma research we have proven the miraculous capability humans have to dissociate. There is a wide spectrum on the dissociation scale. From slightly daydreaming to entirely leaving our body and looking back down upon it from somewhere up above. Near death experiences also create a spectrum of dissociative mechanisms. If you have ever experienced dissociation (I will say with some certainty we all have), even if it is a momentary time lapse while driving down the highway or standing in the shower questioning if we already washed our hair or not; we sense that we exist independently of our bodies. Our mental life, or mind, is living life somewhere out in front of our own eyes, not in our brain residing behind our eyes inside our heads. When this occurs are we really in control of our physical body? Or is the mind “still” in charge? Some other me? Consciousness, itself? God? But once again, how can a nonphysical me (or ethereal entity) control the physical body of me?

To give me solace, I have come to believe in something that holds all of me together, a complete whole package of mind-body-brain-soul-spirit-gut-heart-limbs-torso-envelope of skin. A whole me. Wholeness to me is extending belief to something known as non-dualism. I can get sucked into the vacuum of duality and it never solves a thing. In fact, it just probes more definitive conviction that dualism must be wrong. We can sit there stubbornly and kick a ball against a wall, or we can turn to something bigger. Much bigger. I can relinquish the problem of mind-body, a mystery of the ages, by succumbing to the revelation that non-dualism exists. We have already seen that there is no natural explanation of how something that has no physical dimensions (the mind), (or consciousness) can produce changes in the physical world (get the material body to move or do something) unless it requires a supernatural explanation to make sense of it all. A far-off God enacting telekinesis, moving us all around without physical interaction, and laughing at all of us with his/her abundant psychic ability. Unlikely right? As if we are all just walking around like voodoo dolls with some unseeable someone pushing tacks into our pain receptors. Super unlikely.

Unquestionably many people turn to religion to find comfort. It is a reasonable way to help make sense of an often very nonsensical and painful world. Many choose to believe that someone/something else has a grand plan and “everything happens for a reason,” and all that jazz. This is extraordinarily helpful. Faith is solid, strong and applies effort, routine, and discipline. Religion is a comforting way for many people to feel supported in this unpredictable world.

For the non-religious there can also be an alternative solution that doesn’t require “kneeling before Zod.” Embrace non-duality. To me it lies somewhere between religion, the supernatural, and a scientifically explainable supersense that we haven’t yet discovered. It’s not in one camp. It’s entirely in all of them, all at once. It doesn’t exclude anyone, because non-duality is all-encompassing, meaning there is room for all religions, all faiths, all belief systems, all the atheists, even the grandest of all skeptics. Non-duality means there is no separateness. No “other.”

Nonduality in a heuristic nutshell: mind is not separate from your brain, your body, or your soul. So, when the mind drifts outwardly, consciousness still exists in our body because consciousness is everywhere, all around us and within us simultaneously. It is entirely possible that our bodies generate our minds.

The thought to me that humans are conscious automata is disconcerting. Meaning that we were designed to “follow automatically a predetermined sequence of operations or respond to encoded instructions.” To those that adhere to a belief of “it’s God’s plan,” I find it admirable and inspiring. It must feel so grounding to completely trust in something/some being like that. Strong faith requires a leap of faith. A surrendering into.

I was born into a non-religious situation, one that my mother blatantly stated countless times to my unending big life questions, “I do not have the answers.” She encouraged me to “try on” many faiths and religions, which I did throughout my teens and young adulthood. I was a curious kid (which often zippered in with TROUBLE). I came to the same conclusion wherever I went. As much as I wanted to, I found it incredibly difficult to surrender completely to some unknown force that prevailed outside of me. #trustissues

Although I admit that I can now feel this unseen force, most often when walking in nature. For me, it doesn’t require four walls and a steeple. I know “something” bigger is there, and I live my life in companionship with it. However, I tended to gravitate toward the belief systems that had a coherence with God is Love and Love is Me therefore I am Love and God is me, within me. Sufism, Christian Mystics, Vajrayana Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, etc. all hold fast to a oneness. Nothing must be separate. God, source, love, spirit, Brahman, supreme, divine, quantum field, whatever the language became, is not something separate from me. Somehow this felt more true and more trustworthy, tethered, and connected.

In non-duality the “force or space” isn’t unknown. Because it is understood to be me. It is not something separate from me. It is a vast expansion of me. The more I get to know it, this all-encompassing spaciousness, really know it and feel it, I am learning to trust it. Then I can surrender and let go into it with greater ease.

Nonduality doesn’t compete against or impede upon any religion, or non-theistic belief system, because it, by its own nature, includes all religions and forms of spirituality. Everything and everyone are unified in oneness. It is my hope that we are all heading to the same compassionate destination, we just might need to take different paths to get to the same Shangri-La meadow.

To reiterate, the idea of separateness, mind from body causes confusion. Equally muddled is the illusory impression that we have voluntary free will operating within our minds. If this were the case, why wouldn’t we all absolutely choose love? And we have seen above how this dualism leaves us empty handed.

What if there is another way? This is what I am proposing in this article. Is it a possibility to expand the view that the mind is not constrained by the same laws that govern the physical world, that it can absolutely travel great distances, across timelines, but it is undoubtedly NOT separate from the body or soul?

The space outside of me is the same as the space inside of me. Nothing is separate from me. There is one substance in which everything is connected. We are Fundamental Consciousness, which includes everything. (Fundamental Consciousness is a term coined by brilliant psychotherapist Dr. Judith Blackstone, whom I am mentoring under.)

What if I am the dreamer dreaming the dream? A nondual philosophy that there is a higher or true Self that is identical to the Absolute Reality. We are the beholder of the dream, and we are also, simultaneously, the world which we behold. Any belief system, secular or non-secular can be included in this wider and more expansive philosophy.

This outlook prepares a ground underneath my feet and motivates me to treat myself right, with respect and honor and grace. If I am Fundamental Consciousness (this vast spaciousness) and it is not something separate from me, why would I act harmfully toward it or within it? If I encounter someone that feels adversarial, can I look within and see what I must do to treat myself right? Whether it be to dissolve the relationship, or open more to it, can I inquire on what is required for me to grow and expand and learn. Nondualism keeps me accountable because everything and everyone I encounter can help me become more of who I actually am.

And in learning to be more of myself, I more gracefully and more confidently find I can directly and openly live my life. Rich, robust and bringing my fullest self to the table.

Nondualism can be the exact intersection between religion, supernaturalism, spirituality and my human supersense. In nonduality there is room for it all. It is the antidote to pigeonholing and believing that there is THE way, ONE way, an ABSOLUTE way, which we can all see as becoming more and more problematic as we witness self-proclaimed gurus and spiritual leaders being negatively exposed. In nonduality the fight against it all is no longer necessary, because eventually we discover that we are just fighting against ourselves. Instead, we can turn to that VR or high-definition, exuberant experience of living with our minds (no Oculus goggles necessary). While simultaneously also be 100% connected to and living IN OUR BODIES and souls. We are a mind-body-soul living in wholeness. Open, creative, free, and expansive.

Problem solved: The watcher is me. A whole and unfragmented me.

“We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in them. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.” — Upanishads