A stranger catches his hand in a closing door. Across the road, your own hand closes. Why?
Nowhere Absent begins with this small involuntary reaction and follows it into one of philosophy's oldest questions. Where does the self end, and where does another person begin?
Drawing on the Upanishads, moral philosophy, psychology, evolutionary thought, and cosmology, Dinesh Mittal explores the meaning of tat tvam asi, that thou art, and aham brahmasmi, I am the ground of being.
These ideas are not presented as beliefs to be accepted. They are tested against the hardest questions. Is pain always private? Does death prove that each person is finally alone? Can compassion be fully explained by evolution? Does nonduality risk making suffering seem unimportant? Can we speak of oneness without taking away the dignity and uniqueness of another person?
Nowhere Absent is not a spiritual manual, a collection of techniques, or an attempt to use physics as proof of mysticism. It is a careful and personal inquiry into the possibility that compassion may be more than kindness. It may be a moment of clear perception, before the familiar sense of separation returns.
Moving from an ordinary human flinch to ancient wisdom, modern thought, and the moral consequences of how we see one another, the book asks what might change if the distance between self and stranger is not the deepest truth.
If the gap between us is not final, by what anaesthesia did we ever stop feeling one another?