Non-duality Of Raking Leaves (or Raking Water).
When non-duality is another survivability.
We do not go to work because we are overflowing with existential affirmation. We go because the anticipated future threat of hunger outweighs the immediate desire not to go. Likewise with the leaves. Social mammals are deeply sensitive to exclusion, humiliation, and reputation because historically these carried survival consequences. The neighbor’s opinion may seem trivial rationally, but the nervous system often treats social ostracism as danger.
So when spiritual systems speak as though all suffering comes merely from believing in separation, people sometimes experience this as absurd because internal fragmentation clearly remains. One may intellectually repeat “I am one with everything” while internally experiencing fear, resentment, shame, boredom, exhaustion, envy, and coercion all at once. The slogan of non-duality and unity with the universe does not dissolve the operational complexity of the organism.
This is where thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer become relevant. For Schopenhauer, the human being is not fundamentally a rational unity but an expression of striving forces that often conflict with themselves. Likewise Friedrich Nietzsche frequently describes the psyche less as a unified self and more as a multiplicity of drives competing for dominance. Even contemporary neuroscience often portrays cognition as distributed negotiation rather than centralized command.
And this is why some modern non-dual movements feel psychologically thin. They sometimes jump from metaphysical claims about the universe directly to promises of inner peace, bypassing the actual machinery of embodied life. A person still has bills, social pressure, biological drives, status anxieties, trauma patterns, fatigue, and dependence structures. Saying “there is no separation” does not automatically reorganize these systems.
At the same time, it is worth distinguishing between a philosophical claim and the commercial use of that claim. Some traditions originally tried to point toward loosening rigid identification with thought and ego structures. But once translated into modern wellness culture, these ideas are often packaged as emotional anesthesia, certainty, or spiritual superiority. Then the language becomes detached from lived psychological complexity. The irony is sharp. A person may claim cosmic unity while spending all day defending an identity, monetizing enlightenment, competing for attention, fearing criticism, and maintaining social hierarchy. The organism speaks non-duality while operating pure survival logic underneath.
Perhaps the more sobering insight is not that humans are unified or divided, but that they are adaptive systems trying to maintain continuity under pressure. Much of what is called morality, discipline, spirituality, or identity may simply be different ways the organism negotiates survival inside a social world. Even transcendence often wears the mask of adaptation.
