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You think you’re a part of the picture because the body is in the picture, and you think You are inside the body. But the entire picture is an illusion, You are outside the body, and you’re actually everything in the illusory picture, not a mere part. We’re all really dead, and that’s precisely how and why we’re alive. Or: we’re all really nothing, and that’s precisely how and why we’re something. You cannot be something without also being nothing, and you cannot be nothing without also being something. This is the only way Existence can function. The existence of a finite self necessarily implies the existence of an infinite Self, just as the existence of a left necessarily implies the existence of a right. You cannot have a left without a right or a back without a front or a crest without a trough. Birth requires no-birth/self requires Self. The Brahman is self-luminous, like the sun. The Atman reflects light from the Brahman, like the moon.
I’m arguing that the truth - and I do believe there is a truth - is a very, very simple one, and it’s difficult to argue for this simple truth in a prickly way, goo works better.
P1 Anything that exists without a Creator must be self-existing/existing of itself
P2 Anything that is self-existing must be Void
P3 Separateness is not possible within anything Void
P4 Reality has no Creator
C Separateness is not possible in reality
If it is sensible to speak of a Prime Mover, then I see it is a sort of timeless primordial awareness of no content that necessarily inhabits its creation. In the same way a potter cannot form a pot without clay, Being itself, Divine Nothingness, cannot form anything truly solid or truly “real” in the ordinary ways we conceive of things as being solid and “real”. Divine Nothingness, in other words, cannot create anything non-Divine. So you think you understand the Cosmological Argument? ; Cosmological Argument Roundup ; Anselm’s Ontological Argument
If correct, we all have to be IT, universal Consciousness having a mere experience as an illusory and transitory and insubstantial body, in disguise. You can’t leave reality. This is reality. You can’t have ups without downs; all things with a beginning must have an end; Consciousness, the eternal, gets a chance to breathe by manifesting as the finite. I think that in order for reality to exist at all it must be like God.
QM suggests reality is indeed void or insubstantial, and that consciousness is the fundamental ground of reality.; and Non-Duality; Quantum Mechanics and Reality
If your mother married a different man, would you exist? This is a very puzzling question to answer given a separatist view of the world, but it’s easy and sensible to answer if reality is non-dual: Yes, each of us exists because reality/god exists as everything.
Non-duality ends the philosophy of mind stalemate between Dennett/others and Searle/others, it solves the hard problem of consciousness. If universal consciousness did not turn on and manifest in every being, we’d all have to be philosophical zombies (Dennett, who minimizes consciousness, has some good points, but a false and limited overall view because he operates and thinks within the separatist materialist paradigm). But we’re clearly not zombies, we’re clearly conscious (Searle, who maximizes consciousness, also has some good points). Therefore, we must all be manifestations of Consciousness. Searle and Dennett argue well past and over each other in debate, effectively working as a kind of koan for separatists who find both of their rough views compelling.
Schopenhauer seems right about the implication of Kant’s notion of a thing in itself: there can be no separate things in themselves, space-time must be a delusion of the animal ego. (Immortality by Schopenhauer.) Albert Einstein on the death of his friend Michele Besso: "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."; "Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.” - Eckhart Tolle
The implication is that there’s no birth and there’s no death, a fairly neutral truth. God has to experience all lives, both good and bad. Oughtn’t the truth of reality be a pretty neutral one? It seems rather excessively cruel to bring some separate material being into existence without choice who greatly fears death and becoming nothing forever only to soon annihilate it.
We’re programmed to fundamentally trust the current culture’s paradigm of duality and separateness and otherness, but there’s nothing crazy or implausible or unbelievable about non-duality, instead the opposite. We’re the products of the arbitrary process of evolution. How we happen to be programmed to perceive and understand reality given the evolution of life on this planet is completely arbitrary with respect to the actual workings of reality. The infinite cannot know the finite, nor the finite the infinite. Therefore the ego cannot tell by experience whether universal consciousness manifests in disguise in just the same way we cannot bite our own teeth or taste our own tongue or see our own eyes without a mirror. The real us is either infinite or finite: outside the body or inside. Both possibilities are equally consistent with the reality we experience, so how things happen to feel and seem and appear doesn’t tell us anything about what is true and real. Reality certainly feels solid to us, but QM tells us it’s void of real substance. The implication is that, as Bill Hicks] used to say, “All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.”
It’s just really taboo to believe we’re all the same because society programs us to believe we’re separate because our society is made up of organisms guided in design by evolution, which produces organisms which very greatly fear death and very greatly desire to spread their genes, which leads to societies founded upon fear and division. In other words, societies of organisms convinced their lives are real, not dreams. And because confident belief in non-duality is so obscure in most of human society given our programming given by our evolutionary heritage, and because non-duality is so thoroughly paradigm-shifting, its implication being that most of us are very deeply insane, living in a madhouse, perceiving reality upside down, it’s ridiculed by reflex by most people. It’s especially ridiculed by reflex by those who desire to think of themselves as “tough” and “realistic” people who are capable of “facing the facts” and so on. I see nothing noble about being “tough” and “strong” by not needing a belief in immortality.
We’re not separate observers, we’re Observation. We’re not inside the body, we’re outside. We grow out of an Empty self-existing world, we’re not plopped into a material artifact. “Supposing this world is a tree, are we leaves on its branches, or are we a bunch of birds who settled on a dead old tree from somewhere else?” - Alan Watts. We’re not foreigners in the universe, but spiritual beings at genuine union with everything and everyone. “Looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking inside a radio for the announcer.” - Nassim Haramein. The ego is a verb, a process, not a thing; there are no separate things. The ego is real, and it is not real; we die, and we do not die. Everything is everything and everything is nothing; all is all, all is consciousness.
Atoms are not solid because they don’t create a solid world; we live in a Void.
I think the truth should be simple, elegant, and neutral.
deepfield67’s responses:
[i]You seem to want to go back and forth on this. You acknowledge the non-duality of the Void and then insist upon the validity of one side over the other. You’re creating a duality and negating one side of it, this is not non-duality. You see that there is no up without down, no good without bad, etc. But then go on to say that the answer is goo over prickles. When it is not one or the other, they are both the same, all duality has a root in the void, all opposites reconcile and imply one another. This is not evidence for God, as “God” and “no God” are a duality, and you’ve leaned towars one, forgetting the other, forgetting that they imply one another, you can’t have just one side of the coin. “Non-duality” itself is a dualism, contrasted by “Duality”. The entire point is, all concepts are dualities, all words, thoughts, ideas are dualities. The idea of the Void is a duality, as well.
Truth is also a duality. You will never find an “absolute” through duality. Only by the destruction of all dualities can you come to the absolute. But that is a duality, also. So, eat your food and wash your bowl.
Seperateness is also a dual concept. It is a dual stance to say “seperateness is illusory”, implying non-seperateness is the absolute state, when one implies the other. “Illusion” is also a dual concept, contrasted by a state of absolute truth. This is why the Buddha exercised the thunderous silence. Duality cannot be dissolved through conceptual thought. Duality only dissolves in complete awareness. But to stay in that state is to be a stone buddha, and its own duality. That’s the process, the coming and going, the being and non-being, the up and the down, the process is the only absolute. That’s why they say things like “the only thing that never changes is that everything changes”. But these are all words, they only create more dualities, more concepts, more stumbling blocks. The answer you seek is the seeking itself, you’re using binoculars to find your eyes. 
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I mostly agree with him. I was focused on establishing the Void intellectually because everyone is very familiar with the other half of the coin.
Take two waves in the ocean. It’s a dual stance to say the two waves are different or separate, and it’s also a dual stance to say the two waves are the same or one. The reality is that the two waves are connected within the ocean; in other words, the two waves are waves and the ocean at the same time. So to only say the two waves are different or to only say the two waves are the same is to speak of just one portion of the truth - but neither statement is untruth.
The truth - we are, at once, Nothing and Everything - is a logical contradiction, so ultimately all views are wrong views.
Responder from previous thread:
Non-dual means “not two”. To say it’s “one” is wrong.
My response:
All simple truths have an implicit up and down. 5 and -5. Black and White. It is and It is not. Back and Front. Buddhism’s non-dual ways of phrasing are the down ways, and Hinduism’s “all is one” ways of phrasing are the up ways. (The unity of everything is called Tao.) The full koan is that we’re all IT: the body, everything we see before the body, including whatever other beings we happen to see; everything is the real us. The real us is Reality, which is Non-Dual and Void. We are at once nothing and everything. Zero and infinity. Universal Consciousness having dreams and experiences in its interconnected Realm.
“Nirvana truly realized is Samsara properly understood.” - Nagarjuna
“Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.” - Shunryu Suzuki
"If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.” - Leonard Cohen
Awareness itself is primary to all phenomena; it lies before space and time. All phenomena are experienced within Awareness and by Awareness. Awareness is not something we have, it’s something we are. The ego, hardwired by evolution and conditioned by our culture, powerfully shifts Awareness’ attention to the egoic processes themselves, fooling Awareness into experiencing itself as the ego instead of as itself as itself. Zazen allows us to bring Awareness’ focus back to itself.
Life is built on dissatisfaction.
What a strange predicament.
The divine, dissatisfied with being divine, desired to become human.
And the human, dissatisfied with being human, desired to become divine.
Oh, seekers, your desire is there for the taking. Dissolve yourself into the radiance of your own divinity. Lose yourself in the freedom of non-existence. Wish to disappear, for the sake of the divine, and your wish will be granted.
But what of the wish of the divine? Is it of no consequence?
Would you be so selfish as to deny the desire that, in the beginning, created you?
Hollow yourself, become emptiness and nothingness (as divinity is emptiness and nothingness), and do not close it, but leave it open and unobstructed …
So the divine may play a human in your stead, unfettered, in joy.
While you sublime in the divine, radiantly neutral and non-existent.
Thus equanimity is achieved, and everyone is happy.
When emptiness dances, it is your feet that move.