I was born and raised in Victoria, Canada. At the age of 17, I left home to study at the University of Toronto, where I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics, with favourite subjects Numerical Methods and Advanced Logic. At heart, though, I’ve always been a philosopher — someone who can’t leave the big questions alone.
Ever since I was a very young child, I’ve pondered the questions, Who am I? and Where am I? I remember first asking them when I was about five years old, standing on the lawn and looking up at the cloudy sky. I’ve always found ‘reality’ a bit, well, surreal; I have a strong sense of being an observer or, more accurately, as if my life is an ever more lucid dream. Those two questions have been a driving force in my life, and led me on a wonderful journey to some surprising answers and a very blessed life.
At the age of 23, I met Hans, and shortly afterwards moved with him to The Netherlands. We were together more than 36 years. Hans passed away in 2022, and the grieving process was at times brutal. But the sun finally came out again, and I’m embarking on life’s next big adventures.
I’ve spent most of my life trying to be what I thought others wanted me to be, to be accepted — the good son, the model immigrant, the perfect partner, the perfect couple — living by heteronormative standards that were never mine to begin with. It took decades and a great deal of loss before I began to discover who I actually am underneath all that. I’m still finding out. What I know so far: I’m someone who thinks too much, loves deeply, marvels at the night sky, and finds more joy in tinkering with home tech than most people would consider reasonable. I have a weakness for philosophical rabbit holes, and men who are smarter than me.
I grew up gay in a time and place and a family where that wasn’t safe, and it shaped everything — my relationships, my faith, my silence, and eventually my refusal to be silent any longer. I loved Hans deeply – more so than I loved myself – though I feel our scars sometimes kept us from fully reaching each other. I’ve emerged from the grief of loss, and the grief of missed opportunities, and I’m now learning what it means to be fully present with someone for the first time. Life has not gone the way I planned. It’s gone better — just not in the way I expected, and not without scars.
Those scars, and the questions they forced me to confront, eventually led me away from the christian church-going I’d performed for decades and toward something that had quietly been true for me all along. I don’t believe in a personal God separate from the self or the world, but I don’t think reality is godless either. I reject that whole divide. I’m neither theist nor atheist — I’m non-dualist. The position I’ve arrived at aligns, I’ve found, most closely with Advaita, the earliest non-dualist strand of Hindu thought, found in the Upanishads. Its core claim is simple and radical: reality is fundamentally One, and the deepest essence of the self is identical to the essence of the totality. The apparent multiplicity of the world — objects, persons, forces — is not ultimately real in itself, but a manifestation of a single, underlying principle. Liberation isn’t achieved through moral improvement, ritual, or divine favour. It comes through direct insight: seeing through the illusion of separateness. Not by changing the world, but by recognising what it actually is. One reality, mistaken for many. Freedom through knowing, not becoming.
That five-year-old standing on the lawn, looking up at the sky and wondering who am I? — he’s still here, still asking. The difference is that now I’m no longer afraid of what the answer might be.
Scott Owen
Scott@ScottOwen.org