Is 'Brahman' Non-Dualistic, Dualistic, Elastic or Plastic?

Brahman is the be-all and end-all of Vedanta and most Hindus believe that it is the highest, greatest and the best that Vedanta and Hinduism has ever come up with!.

It is supposed to be the highest, greatest and ultimate spiritual truth!!!.

But what is it supposed to look, walk, feel, sound and smell like?. If one were to read and make any sense of the principal Upanishads, the Brahman sounds like a rambling nonsensical riddle.

Lets see how the Brahman is 'portrayed' by Upanishads. 

'It is the one without a second. It is neither this nor that. It is beyond this and that. It is above everything, yet it is in everything. It is neither still nor moving. It is neither subject nor object, neither the know-er nor the known. It is neither knowledge nor ignorance nor both. It is the speech of the speaking, hearing of the heard, vision of the seeing and the seen, thought of the thinker and the mind of the mind'.

These are not my understanding of the Brahman, but a recapitulation of the rude, primitive, rambling and immature imagery of the Brahman set out in the principal Upanishads. The amount of negative qualifiers that these Upanishads use for characterizing Brahman is so much, that it appears that it is sought to be described by what it is not than by what it is, which for all practical purposes turns it  into a nothing and null and a void.

This abstracted nothingness and emptiness instead of being rejected and dismissed as the result of an inane and incoherent  jumble and scramble of vague, vaporous and messy ideas and opinions has been elevated by superstitious reverence to be the essence of some grand vision and philosophy of life called non-dualism, aided and abetted by the zealots of Vedanta.

To a religious and spiritualist zealot of the Hindu stripe, life and phenomenon is to be reduced to a black or white option of dualism or non-dualism. So any truth can have only the black and white contrasts of dualism or non-dualism and nothing else. So if a dogmatist of the Advaita Vedanta were to have his way, the ultimate reality is non-dual and everything else is false or an illusion. The Advaita dogmatist fails to see the irony of the negative attribution of the term 'non-dual' or 'non-dualism'. A negation of dualism need not imply something sole, single, unitary or eternal. It could very well be multiple or many.

In spite of all the sophistry and ambiguity with which religious language is couched, the religious and superstitious persuasion is yet unable to rid itself of need of expressing everything as a dichotomy of divinity and humanity. Even the attempted unification of this dichotomy needs the negative attribution of non-dualism and ignorance/illusion/avidya as the fuzzy dividing line.

Unfortunately for the non-dualists, the duel was far from over, when other armies of dualists and non-dualists joined the fray of Vedantic interpretation. So the pure non-dualists of the Adi Sankara lineage had contend with the following competition:

• Qualified Dualism of Ramanuja
• Dualism of Madhava
• Dualist Non-Dualism of Nimbarka
• Pure Non-Dualism of Vallabha

I am not re-producing the gist of these variants as that would only confound the already enormous confusion about the anatomy of Brahman. In spite of their popularity, the dualist variants only serve to place the gloss of apologetic acrobatics meant to appease or alleviate the discomfiture of general religious persuasion with the drab and dreary absolutist finality with which the identity and phenomenon of Brahman is clothed by Non-dualist dogma.

One may feel that the end result of this non-dualist and dualist wrangling over the Brahman, makes the Brahman very elastic by nature. But the fact that the Brahman remains and continues to be lifelessly inscrutable, it may as well be termed as dull and drab as plastic. 

Truly in that sense, Brahman represents the bland and lifeless plasticity of stagnant Hindu thought and philosophy.