Waking Up - A New Operating System for Your Mind

An analogy: most of the time you're not thinking about breathing. Breathing just happens automatically (analogy to "flow state"). If in that moment it occurs to you to think explicitly about and focus exclusively on your breathing, you can't help but feel like you are now partially controlling it (analogy to "snapping out of" the flow state). Nondu... See more

The sense of 'being aware' in mindfulness points to the fact that we generally tend to reify awareness as an inherently existing, separate thing, just as we do with the self, when, in actuality, sensations are awareness. When we see a colour, our sense of 'being aware' of it is a reification: the colour is already awareness itself. But it's importa... See more

With nondual recognition, this is not the case. You can directly observe and explicitly think about the fact that you don't feel like a self and don't have a self-based reference point precisely while you feel that way or are doing some activity. This is a key way in which flow state is not the same thing as nondual recognition. Both are situations... See more