21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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these ideas later in the work.

Desire is usually seen as an endless process of searching. It was Hegel who suggested that this process could only be brought to a satisfactory conclusion in belief. The nature of Western religion, philosophy and science in particular have frustrated this aim by making ‘God’ into an object, creating an image of a transcendent, fulfilled (that is, desire-satisfying) life beyond this one and reinforcing rather than solving the desire that is manifest in all of us. The satisfaction of desire by means of transcendent belief is a notion that needs to be challenged, and this will occupy us in later chapters.

There is no striving for nonduality — it is just recognised or it is not. Nonduality is just ordinary life; it’s not enlightenment, or nirvana or samadhi necessarily, although of course it contains all of these. So there is nothing to do, except to give up our search, to deny the ever-receding horizon of desire that is our inheritance as divided ‘subjects’ in the world. Or if you are not searching, then don’t begin. Either way, it might be said, we have all already arrived.

Katz goes on to explain that even describing this view as a ‘nondual perspective’ is itself contradictory:

‘The nondual perspective, because it is a perspective, a view of something, is dualistic. By considering the oxymoron “nondual perspective”, we get a better sense of how things remain distinct whilst being non-separate.’

Jerry Katz — Essential Writings on Nonduality

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