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A Quick Note on Religious Separation and Dualism

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Let me write a somewhat rhapsodic note on the issue, which I hope we will cover in more detail and depth in understanding non-duality in the second chapter of "Path of Beauty".

During the Christian Middle Ages the separation follows the principle of Ratio et Auctoritas. Communication with God is mediated by authority. Auctoritas is founded on Ratio, the priestly knowledge of the proportions that relate the two worlds: authority is the authority of ratio, of reason. It is evident that the practical result is a definitive ecclesiastical control over religious experience that prevents any spiritual flight not sanctioned by its principles.

The continuity of the principle of Speech, of the Logos, which united the poet and the Human in general with Nature - the same that the Pythagoreans saw between the natural world and that of the gods via ideal proportions - is now broken in terms of proportions and unbridgeable distances that alienate Humans in the Universe.

With the words of Thomas Aquinas:

The similarity that is encrypted in the fact that two beings participate in something, or that one has an aptitude for the other, by virtue of which the understanding can come to know one by the other, reduces the distance, but not the similarity that It is based on the convenience of proportions or relationships, since this type of similarity is found in those that are far apart as well as in those that are little far apart: the similarity between two and one, and six and three, is no greater than which is between two and one, and one hundred and fifty. Therefore, the infinite distance that exists between the creature and God does not prevent the aforementioned similarity. (Thomas Aquinas. On Truth. Questions 2. Art.11)

The discussion on this matter can also be brought to the difference between the so-called "external religion" and "internal religion." The first is a form of rational organization of life, practical in relation to the world of experience, necessarily dual. I did an analysis of this in "Mythopoetics". The second, "internal religion," is the liminal experience of the mystic, the encounter with the Numinous, and is not limited by duality or non-duality.

It is interesting to note the great similarities between all forms of "internal religion", whether they be Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or even the religious forms of Anima Mundi. These similarities are what have led to the postulates of a Perennial Philosophy. It is inevitable that the images of the Numen, of the Divine Liminal, are limitations. If we are talking about an infinite Being, any representation made by any religion, philosophy, creed, thought, is incomplete. In more direct words from the great Andalusian Sufi Ibn Arabi: God Almighty is too great and too immense to be enclosed in one creed to the exclusion of others. He who remains fixed on a "divinity", he draws it only from himself.


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