You are Your Neighbor

On the first page of meta-Reality: Volume 1 we find a section entitled "Manifesto" containing the following statement:

The world that humankind has made and which we currently inhabit is a world of duality: of unhappiness, oppression and strife--more especially, it is a world in which we are alienated from ourselves, each other, the activities in which we engage and the natural world we inhabit, currently hurtling into crisis and self-destruction.

I think it would be helpful to those of us who haven't been trained in the philosophy of science to look at what Bhaskar means when he uses the word duality. Dualism's entry in Wikipedia offer's a wide range of definitions, but I think the two which are most relevant are:

Within Eastern mysticism:

Dualism can mean the tendency of humans to perceive and understand the world as being divided into two overarching categories... In this sense, it is dualistic when one perceives a tree as a thing separate from everything surrounding it, or when one perceives a "self" that is distinct from the rest of the world.

And within the philosophy of science, which is "the dichotomy between the 'subject' (the observer) and the 'object' (the observed)."

Bhaskar maintains that CR is the best description we have of the dual world. Meta-Reality, however, insists that

most of the categorical errors, those deep fundamental errors constitutive of our misunderstanding of being... turn on misidentifications. This parallels the critiques of the misidentifications [revealed by] the Buddha when he talked about our craving for transitory things as being the root cause of human unhappiness; or when Marx isolated the fundamental categorical errors of capitalism which [are the] extraction of surplus value [and the] exploitation of unpaid labor. (xv-xvi)

In other words, humanity's greatest problem is one of misidentification, and according to Bhaskar, we have misidentified ourselves and our world as separate entities. By re-identifying ourselves as interconnected such that we are a highly differentiated, stratified One, we begin to understand why the Golden Rule is so golden: treat your neighbor as yourself because, at some deep level of being, you are your neighbor.