I was born and raised in Victoria, Canada.
At the age of 17, I left home to study at the University of Toronto, and I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics, with favourite subjects Numerical Methods and Advanced Logic. At heart, I’m a philosopher, pondering life’s big questions.
At the age of 23, I married Hans, and shortly afterwards moved with him to The Netherlands. Hans passed away in 2022. We were together more than 36 years 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.
Ever since I was a very young child, I’ve pondered the questions, Who am I? and Where am I? I remember first asking those questions when I was about five years old, standing on the back 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 I 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.
“Do you believe in God?”
Not in the usual sense.
“What do you mean? Do you believe in God or not?”
I believe that ultimate reality is One.
I don’t believe in a personal God separate from the self or the world. I also don’t think reality is godless. I reject that whole divide.
“But if you don’t believe in a personal God, doesn’t that make you an atheist?”
I am not saying, “I believe in God.”
But I am also not saying, “There is no God.”
What I am saying is, the category itself is mistaken.
I’m neither theist nor atheist. I’m non-dualist.
The ‘official religion’ I’ve discovered most closely aligns to my beliefs, is that of Advaita, the earliest non-dualist strand of Hindu thought that is articulated in the later Vedic texts known as the Upanishads (c. 800–300 BCE). These writings reject ritualism and external sacrifice as ultimate and instead focus on direct insight into the nature of reality and the self. At the core is a radical claim: reality is fundamentally One. The apparent multiplicity of the world—objects, persons, gods, forces—is not ultimately real in itself but a manifestation of a single, underlying principle. This principle is Brahman: infinite, unchanging, beyond all categories. Crucially, the Upanishads assert that the true self (Atman) is not separate from this absolute reality. The famous formula tat tvam asi (“you are that”) expresses this identity: the deepest essence of the individual is identical to the essence of the cosmos.
Ignorance (avidya) is the failure to recognise this identity. It gives rise to the sense of individuality, desire, fear, and bondage to the cycle of birth and death (samsara). Liberation (moksha) is not achieved through moral improvement, ritual obedience, or divine favour, but through knowledge (jnana): a direct, experiential realisation that one is not a separate entity but Brahman itself.
This realisation dissolves suffering, not by changing the world, but by seeing through it. The world is not denied outright, but relativised: it has pragmatic reality, yet lacks ultimate independence. Non-duality here is not a metaphysical abstraction but a practical soteriology—freedom through insight. One reality, mistaken for many; liberation through knowing, not becoming.
Scott Owen
Scott@ScottOwen.org