Exploring Non-Duality

Can you really separate the two? Where do you draw the line? Have you ever had a sensory experience without awareness? Have you ever experienced awareness without a sensory experience? There is no line, no way that we can separate sensory experience from awareness. We must therefore conclude that awareness and sensory experience are in fact the sam

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

One of the most widely respected non-dual teachers today is Adyashanti, who originally studied Zen formally but began to teach more direct path style after his awakening. Adyashanti recommends trying out the inquiry “what am I?”, which I found to land better than Ramana’s “who am I?”. The word “who” can tend to evoke dimensions of identity, which c

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

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.