Duality and Non-Duality

I – God – World — this triad exists only from the vantage point of one steeped in ignorance. In reality, there is nothing in existence but the One. Supreme knowledge is knowing who we really are—knowing our oneness with the Divine and, through it, our oneness with all things so that nothing remains but the One who is alone and without partner. Here we discover that all divisions are illusory, yet this does not entail the dissolution of conventional distinctions and hierarchies.

Let us clarify that nobody attains this non-dual experience without observing the servant–Lord duality and respecting this hierarchy. In Vedānta, devotion (bhakti) to the Lord is seen as the foundation upon which the highest knowledge (jñāna) is attained—the knowledge of the Self as one with the Absolute.

Moreover, the realisation of our supreme Self does not annul the authority and commandments of the Lord, which remain binding upon the servant. This truth is evident in the lives of the non-dual masters such as Śaṅkara in Hinduism, Ibn Arabi in Islam and Meister Eckhart in Christianity. Despite their realisation of oneness with the Divine, they continued to uphold the servant–Lord distinction with reverence. Ibn ʿArabī expressed this succinctly: “The servant remains the servant. The Lord remains the Lord.”

Classical non-dualists understood that as long as we remain in bodily form, separate from God, it is our duty to worship Him as “Other” and above. Ramakrishna explicitly said:

“…so long as anything exists outside myself, I ought to adore Brahma [God], within the limits of the mind, as something outside myself.”

— The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Frithjof Schuon, pp. 119–20

This insight challenges modern spiritual movements that attempt to flatten all traditional hierarchies and dualities in the name of non-duality and equality. Traditional non-dual teachings, however, maintain that true realisation embraces both unity and distinction—in a manner that transcends ordinary logic.