Beyond the Binary: Merlin, the Void, and the Non-Dual Operator.
By Paul Nyssen.
Every culture has a story about the court magician, the forest seer, or the sorcerer standing at the elbow of power. In Western mythology, he is Merlin (Myrddin). In early Christian narrative, he appears as Elymas confronting Saint Paul in Cyprus. Look closer at these figures, strip away the centuries of theatrical “fairy tales” and regional folklore, and a remarkably consistent archetype emerges—one that looks less like a stage magician and more like a practitioner who has pierced the veil of dualistic reality.
For thousands of years, disparate traditions separated by vast oceans and centuries of silence have arrived at the same metaphysical bedrock. Whether expressed through Zen philosophy, 14th-century Christian mysticism, modern theoretical physics, or classical martial strategy, the conclusion is identical: the universe is not a moral battleground between absolute Good and absolute Evil. It is a dynamic, non-dual field of polarities.
1. Affirmation, Negation, and the Void
Standard institutional frameworks slice existence cleanly into opposites: God versus Satan, Light versus Dark, Order versus Chaos. But as the scholar D.T. Suzuki observed regarding the Zen concept of the Void (Kū), ultimate reality is not an empty vacuum; it is the coincidence of affirmation and negation.
* Affirmation is the force of integration, form, creation, and building.
* Negation is the force of dissolution, unmaking, destruction, and entropy.
They are not warring deities; they are twin expressions of a single, underlying whole. Human psychology acts as a valve or medium for these currents. A person consumed by hatred, rage, or malice isn’t merely “sinning”—they open their agency wide to the force of negation, letting a tidal wave of unmaking enter the physical world through them until it ultimately consumes their identity.
The traditional “sorcerer” is simply an individual who perceives this machinery. They recognise that creation and dissolution are the same fundamental energy moving in opposite directions. By cultivating an inner emptiness—stepping back into the Void—they aim to stand at the zero-point, manoeuvring between these polarities without being destroyed by them.
2. The Universal Convergence: From Mystics to Quantum Physics
This insight isn’t local; it reflects human consciousness probing deeply into the nature of Being. Strip away the localised jargon, and the map remains constant.
Meister Eckhart & Dōgen: Eckhart’s non-dual assertion that “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me” mirrors Dōgen’s Zen concept of Shoho Jisso (the non-duality of self and nature). Both recognised that beneath religious dogma lies an unconditioned source before all division.
* David Bohm’s Quantum Order: In modern physics, Bohm posited the Implicate (Enfolded) Order—a holistic, non-local realm of undivided wholeness—from which the Explicate (Unfolded) Order of separate objects, individual events, and surface polarities emerges.
* Ibn ‘Arabi’s Insān al-Kāmil: In Sufi metaphysics, the “Perfect Human” acts as a Barzakh (a bridge or mirror) standing precisely between the absolute unconditioned Essence and the manifest world, balancing both Jalāl (Severity/Negation) and Jamāl (Mercy/Affirmation).
Even the core mysteries of Western religion can be re-read through this lens. The Crucifixion becomes the ultimate act of Fanā’—the deliberate execution and unmaking of the dualistic ego. The Resurrection is the emergence of BaQā’—the individual returning to the physical world, no longer as an isolated self, but as a transparent medium for the unconditioned source.
3. The Dangerous Edge: Musashi and the Abyss
Operating at this depth is inherently dangerous. In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi approaches the Void not as a comforting sanctuary, but as a razor-sharp, practical reality. Writing from the Reigandō cave, he warns that the Void “is not included in human knowledge.”
To analyse the Void as a mere intellectual idea is a trap. Stepping outside conventional dualistic moral frameworks before the mind is thoroughly tempered risks total psychological dissolution.
We see this risk in the Welsh legends of Myrddin Wyllt (the historical core of Merlin). After witnessing the horrific carnage at the Battle of Arfderydd, Myrddin’s perception of human moral order shatters. He goes mad, fleeing into the Caledonian Forest to live as a wild man. His madness was not merely trauma; it was the psychological shock of looking directly into the unadorned, chaotic machinery of creation and destruction, unshielded by human mythology.
4. Why the Non-Dual Operator Terrifies Systems of Control
It becomes obvious why institutional authorities—whether the medieval Church, political states, or orthodox priesthoods—react with existential panic to figures who speak this language.
In 1310, the French mystic Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in Paris for her work “ The Mirror of Simple Souls.” Her crime was declaring that an “annihilated soul” (l’âme anéantie) who has dissolved their individual will into the divine ground takes leave of Reason, Virtues, and the institutional Church.
When a human being realises that dogma, moral panic, and geopolitical rivalries are merely surface oscillations on the explicate plane:
* They cannot be governed by fear: Threatening them with excommunication, execution, or hellfire is meaningless; they have already died to the ego.
* They bypass the mediator: They require no institution, priest, or state apparatus to connect them to reality.
* They become ungovernable: They see through the binary traps of “Us vs Them” and “Good vs Evil.”
Conclusion: Stepping Off the Seesaws
The figures who inhabit our oldest legends—the seers, the court magi, the wilderness prophets—were not mythic anomalies. They were early explorers of a persistent human discovery.
They realised that the world’s institutional cages hold only those who still believe their individual ego is separate from the whole. By stepping off the moral seesaw of dualism and recognising the Void beneath, the non-dual operator ceases to be a pawn in the clash between affirmation and negation—and becomes the quiet centre through which the storm resolves itself.