Non-dualism in ancient Greece? Dionysus as infinite, eternal conscious life

Non-dualism in ancient Greece? Dionysus as infinite, eternal conscious life

Michael Asher, BA, FRSL

Could the mythological figure of Dionysus, in ancient Greece, represent the non-dual ground of reality, instead of the god of chaos portraid by Nietzsche? in Ancient Greek there are two words for life: bios and zoe. While bios (as in biology) means finite or individual life, zoe (as in zoology) means life itself. Bios applies to the life of an individual being, while zoe is infinite and eternal—in other words, the ontological primitive. If, as Michael Asher argues, Dionysus represents zoe—conscious life as the reality that underlies all nature—then the inception of non-dual idealism in the West arches back to the very origins of Western civilization.

In his book Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, published years later, Karenyi points out that, although in Latin there is only one word for life—vita—in Ancient Greek there are two: bios and zoe. While bios (as in biology) means finite or individual life, zoe (as in zoology) means infinite or indestructible life. Bios applies to the characterized life of an individual being, which may be summed up in biography, but zoe, being infinite and eternal, cannot be described or summarized: it is, in other words, the ontological primitive. “Since the basis of every individuation is represented by zoe,” Kristof Fenyesi has written, “the core of experience concerning zoe cannot embrace the experience of evanescence or ceasing. Death always happens on the level of bios, individual life, and not on the level of zoe, which serves as a basis for all individual bios.” Death (thanatos) is, in a spiritual sense, zoe’s opposite, so zoe might be referred to as non-death. This is why, as Fenyesi puts it, “the notion of soul, that is psyche, is not associated with bios, but zoe” [5]. To use a familiar analogy from nondualism, zoe is the ocean and bios the waves. The waves are transitory modes of the ocean, distinguishable from it but not separate. Thanatos is a transformation that occurs when the wave dissolves and merges back into the ocean, from which it was never actually separate in the first place.