My route through the many shapes and sizes of dualism does away with the many shapes and sizes of soul. Today I begin with Hindu Gitas one of which was written by a man called Ashtavakra, who offered a dialogue between a king and a sage, that suggests we should not try to be free, we are already free, it's an equivalent to the ego that wants to be something else and this something else causes misery, so why not ignore it.
In another way, the king had an ambitious scared little shit inside him and that little shit needed to be bound and gagged and locked in a cupboard, rather than given an IPod, paraded around the Grocery Store, the Bookshop, the Grand Parade of adoring crowds.
Ashtavakra's song wasn't about a stiff upper lip, grin and bear it, be brave you drip, it was about awareness and the illusion of separation. Truth was to be aware of the real which wasn't the body, or anything senses of mind could produce, it was an infinite, formless, awareness.
This dive over the cliff for the sage was a claim that evidence from the senses were illusions, our reaction to the illusions would always be ill-informed, they'd always result in storm and stress, always result in the emptiness of misconception.
Between the sage and the king was the debate like the debate Tagore had with Einstein about the possibility of Objective Knowledge existing outside of our minds. Well worth the effort to point out that Ashtavakra had his being on earth something like four and half or five thousand years ago, and not a hundred years ago.
My own grasp of this objective/subjective thingy was first comfortably addressed in my mind by Bishop Berkeley. It was in a short book called Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. The Anglican Bishop Berkeley explored his esse est percipi - to be is to be perceived - physical matter does not exist independently from the mind. Berkeley died in 1753. For a religious man he was the enlightenment personified, he was blessed by God, adored by the American Episcopalians and admired by Kant.
In my view knowledge is useful, vital, essential for a state of mind if that state of mind is to manage a moment, find food and shelter, see a way to make it through yet another winter - as the Buddhist might have it, it's a raft to carry me across a river and once on the other side I should leave the raft on the river bank, not carry it with me. And, you better have your sums right if your ego demands you do something absurd like go to the moon. Good luck to you finding solace up there, because answerlessness is the reality.
