Advaita & Democracy: The One is the Other, the Other is the One

Advaita, the essential non-duality of Consciousness, is the great perceptual discovery of early thought, grounded in ordinary experience on the South Asian subcontinent.

Advaita is a discovery. It exists before it is found. Therefore Advaita is not an invention, or even a construction. It is an accessible perception of the Self as indivisible from the Other, potentially available to all.

To say that it is a perceptual discovery on the South Asian subcontinent, is not to say that that which is Advaita did not and could not exist elsewhere and everywhere.
Advaita could, did and does exist anywhere and everywhere, wherever the Self is receptive and contemplative, critical and rigorous.

Advaita is a state of Awe, before the insufficient but plausible appearance of Faith, before the sedimented formation of Belief.

In fact, Advaita is not a natural precursor of Faith or Belief.
Advaita is the cursor of Self as Other, Self as none other than Other.

Advaita is not at its core and in its essence, a religious or belief-based concept though Religion, Ideology and Belief are generally its garment. Advaita is and always will be appropriated by religion or ideology or belief to serve the ends of its hierarchies, designed by a few, whose objective, (frequently intentional or unintentional and therefore not necessarily intended to cause harm or cause it), is the exclusion of the Other, the many.

Advaita is reasoned, deliberative perception of Oneness, in a state of Awe.

Advaita is dynamic reasoning in a state of Awe.
Advaita in itself is Oneness, Advaita claims no Other.

To be receptive, contemplative, rigorous and critical is a universal human inclination. As is its indivisible, seamless Other -- to be prescriptive and coercive.
No force can limit, except temporarily, the inclination to be receptive, contemplative, critical, rigorous -- and their seamless opposites -- in living things.

None can claim advaita was the perceptual discovery of any one man or woman, in isolation from others.

Advaita can be called a collective representation, in the Durkheimian sense, of social Selves, to the Self.

Therefore experiences and thoughts about an nondual, indivisible, seamless Consciousness must belong to a collective entity, a shared sociality, that pondered and still does ponder, on Self and Selves, in contexts within and beyond the Universe.

This was earlier done in a time and space, when and where, the Self stood in direct relation to the observable natural world in which earth and universe could be seen to be indivisible and seamless.
To be in direct relation is to be present with no mediating objects and instruments between Self and Universe.
Where the forest existed but no garden.
Where nothing stood, nothing that was built, to obscure the view of Self active and perceptive,contemplative, rigorous and critical, within and Beyond Universe.

At the very core of Advaita is the naive, not primitive, concrete tangible observation that all beings share Breath -- the Breath Eternal.

This Breath has as its seamless Other, the ceasing of Breath and the beginning of the Mystery of Death.
Breath and Death were and are therefore One, inseparable from One (an)Other.

In the discovery of Advaita -- Nonduality -- are to be found the roots of democracy. How? Democracy's prerequisite is the perceptual, discoverable recognition of Nonduality -- that the One is the Other and the Other is the One.

Today is September 11, in the year 2011, a day as pertinent as any other, no more, no less, the assertion of the nonduality of Self and Other, living and dead, killers and killed, destroyers and destroyed.