A Non-Definitive Guide to Non-Duality

The Headless Way is a really fun and funny set of pointing out instructions with an Alice in Wonderland aesthetic, which feel very different from traditional meditation stuff. There’s a great Headless Way course on the Waking Up app.

Instead of thinking of yourself as a separate object from the world, like a pinball in a machine, it’s maybe just more accurate to think of yourself as a drop in the ocean. This can be a scary idea, in the sense that it forces you to confront the arbitrariness and flux of existence. But it can also be a relaxing alternate frame—it’s a way of lookin

everything you are perceiving, right now, including that fabricated sense of a “center” of consciousness, is an output of your mind

In other words, there is a network in the brain devoted to inner experience, and a network devoted to exterior experience, and usually activation in one is associated with reduced activation in the other. Typically, being lost in your interiority means being less attuned to exterior experience, and vice versa. But during non-dual experience, when y

Non-dual experiences are experiences of feeling like the self/other boundary has thinned dramatically, or even dissolved. Non-dual practice is a way of intentionally bringing about this quality of experience, increasing its depth, and, eventually, perhaps, after some amount of practice, installing it as the default flavor of consciousness

If everything you’re perceiving is a cinematic production optimized for utility, then when you look at this page, you’re not really seeing a raw report of the light hitting your eyes, you are seeing what’s coming out of your mind. Therefore, everything you perceive as “the world” is a perception of your model of the world, which is to say, you.

it’s possible that you’ve already had a non-dual experience, and you just didn’t recognize it as such. Lots of people spontaneously have moments of mystical connection and then don’t systematically investigate it, or don’t return to it for one or another reason.

During non-dual experience, there tends to be a de-emphasis of that stressed-out inner monologue, and—as we all know—the stressed-out inner monologue can help you remind yourself of things like, “Fuck, fuck, I hope I don’t forget the milk, if I forget the milk again, I’m a fucking failure.”

Qualitative research has shown that people who have persist

Anecdotally, though, people experienced in non-dual states tend to report:

• Less emotional activation

• A greater sense of sacredness

• More absorption in surroundings

• A heightened sense of interconnectedness

• Less preoccupation with neurotic thoughts

• More available feelings of meaning and purpose