There is a question that comes up again and again in spiritual circles, and it almost always produces the same result: a vague, abstract answer that leaves people more confused than when they started. The question is simple. What is non-duality? And the reason it is so hard to answer is that the mind is being asked to point at the thing that is behind the mind. It is like asking a flashlight to illuminate its own bulb.
I want to try to answer this question directly, from my own experience, and from the experience of students I have sat with for years. Not from theory. Not from a textbook. From what actually happened and what actually happens.
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What Non-Duality Is Not
Before we can say what it is, it is worth clearing out a few things that it is not.
Non-duality is not being zoned out. It is not a kind of permanent glaze that descends over your personality and makes you pleasant but vacant. I have heard from so many students who are afraid that if they wake up they will become this sort of neutral nothing-person with no preferences, no humor, no edge. That is not what happens.
Non-duality is not a special state you have to manufacture and then maintain. It is not a peak experience that you chase and occasionally catch, like grabbing a fish. It is not a feeling of cosmic bliss, although bliss can arise as a byproduct in early stages. It is not losing yourself in some oceanic merger where you stop functioning.
When awakening occurred for me, I still showed up to work. I still got frustrated with technology not working. I still had preferences, reactions, a personality. The difference was not that I became a saint with no inner life. The difference was that I no longer had the conviction that I was located inside those things. The center of gravity shifted. The person was still appearing, but what knew about the person had changed.
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The Critical Distinction: States vs. Your Nature
Here is something that takes most people a long time to understand, and it is the most important distinction in this whole territory. There is a profound difference between having a non-dual experience and non-duality being your nature.
You can have non-dual experiences through meditation, through plant medicines, through out-of-body experiences, through all kinds of altered states. The door opens, there is unity consciousness, the sense of a separate self dissolves, it is overwhelming and beautiful. And then it passes. The door closed. This is an experience.
The experience is so deep that you could never ever think that you were anything other than this again. But unless there is insight that occurs in those openings, there is hardly ever a permanent shift. There has to be an opening combined with an insight in order for you to wake up out of the grosser or previous form of identification. The experience is so deep that the understanding that you are not those things occurs. That is what I mean by insight.
So you can have many non-dual experiences, many experiences of unity consciousness, but unless there is the understanding into the nature of what is arising, it will just be something that comes and goes.
Non-duality as your nature means that anytime you are aware, that is the case. Not just on retreat. Not just after a deep meditation. Anytime you are aware.
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The Spectrum: From I Am Everything to Non-Arising
Awakening is not a single event. It unfolds. And I want to trace that unfolding clearly because I think it helps people orient to where they are.
The first ground is what I call "I am everything." This is what most teachers in the non-duality scene are pointing at when they say you are awareness, you are consciousness, you are the witness. Your identification as an individual person dies and now that identification arises as the entire field of experience. You have the sense that you are everything. You are not what arises. You are this background, this consciousness upon which everything arises.
This is an extremely profound state. Not just to experience but if one actually was living in it, it is a completely different orientation and way of functioning than ordinary dualistic consciousness. For me personally, that was the first glimpse of, or the first opening of, non-duality.
As time goes on, the identification structures become more deconstructed and emptied. That is the best word to describe it: emptied. The identification shifts from being a personal me, shifts into unity consciousness, and starts to become more subtle and empties from that point onward.
The next ground is when the subject-object split collapses entirely. Whatever state is present, whatever form experience takes, whether in the waking state or the dream state or any state, it is not taken to be me. The sense of an observer, of a cosmic consciousness, of a silent background, of an empty background, of a void background, just collapses. What remains is only the field, only appearance. There is just this. And it has infinite configurations. But there is just this.
Beyond that is what the Heart Sutra is pointing at: non-arising. With non-arising, the very sense of the field itself becomes emptied. You actually have the lived sense that none of this is happening. None of this is here. It was never here. The solidity of phenomena, the solidity of memory, the realness of your life, is completely deconstructed. There is no sense that what you are seeing and what you are perceiving is actually solid or real.
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The Sentence That Changed Everything
Seven years after my first encounter with a teacher, I read a line from Ramana Maharshi's Talks. Just one sentence: "Moksha, liberation, is to know that you were never born." And it was as if that one sentence contained Ramana's twelve years of samadhi in that cave, as if that one sentence contained his entire lifetime of silence, and his whole lifetime of silence just opened in my own. I started shaking. I was on a plane when I read that phrase and the weirdness passed and I landed in Los Angeles.
The next day I was driving to work on the five northbound and, just out of nowhere, separation and duality just vanished. I couldn't tell where my hands ended and where the car began. All the people on the freeway in their cars, it was like my heart reached through space and time and was appearing as all of us. We were like nodes in a web, in a network. My chest just cracked open and I started laughing. I couldn't stop laughing.
And I understood in that moment what my teacher had said to me seven years earlier when I asked him how to realize the nature of mind and he looked into my eyes and said: "How do you feel now?" I said I feel present. And he said: "Now relax."
That was the beginning of all of this.
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How It Unfolds: The Collapse of the Background and Foreground Split
Before awakening, there is really a persistent sense of being an experiencer. There is a clear sense that experience and being are two separate things. There is me, or this being, and then there is everything that happens. Experience is happening to the being. Initially this being is conceived to be a separate individual identity, what is thought, the body, feeling, memory, and perception.
What happens in awakening is that the attention, which is directed at objects and always going into things and always preoccupied with situations and conditions, suddenly gets directed inward. And when it is directed inward, this recognition occurs. Like, wow. This was always here.
Ramana Maharshi put it this way: the state that most people are in is consciousness plus their identity. When they fall asleep it is consciousness plus the dreaming identity. When they are in dreamless sleep it is consciousness plus that void state. Every single state is consciousness with whatever is present.
The investigation, the inquiry, is not about finding a new thing. It is about noticing the thing that is already and always functioning. And you can do this right now. I want all of you to be aware now. Be aware. We are aware. We are present. Five minutes ago, many of us were not aware, we were distracted, listening without the quality of genuine presence. But now, now we are aware.
That noticing, that being awake, is the essence. When you are aware, that is mode two practice. You are being aware of awareness. And the beauty of it is that it does not require anything special. Consciousness was always the case. It was always the irreducible, most fundamental reality. We just did not know it because we were identifying with contents within consciousness, with thoughts, feelings, opinions, beliefs, convictions, dreams, ideas.
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Radiant Presence: What Peter Brown Pointed At
I spent some time with a teacher named Peter Brown in the Bay Area. He had been in a continuous awakening for many decades. When I sat with him, I told him about my near-death experience where the mind appeared as this ocean, this eternity of 10 billion suns, impossible to describe, literally eternity, infinity, pure light, you are that, no recollection you were ever born, no sense of time whatsoever. I asked him: is that something I should be able to enter, should I be able to cross my legs and enter that?
He said: "Tell me, was it or was it not an experience?"
I said: "It is definitely an experience."
He said: "That is right. Your mind is the dharmakaya. It appears as all states. It appeared as that ocean of 10 billion suns the same way that your presence, your nature, is appearing as this room, this conversation right now. It is the same thing. It just looks different."
What matters is radiant presence. That was his word for experience. What matters is the nature of mind, the nature of mind. Radiant presence. Experience. Your mind. Zen, mahamudra, Zen, self, no-self. These are all words for the same thing. It does not matter what happens. What matters is the phenomena of happening. Experiences themselves are experiences, but what is important is experience, experience itself. Not with an S. That is what is important. He said: this is what is always happening. Radiant presence is always happening.
And then he died.
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Not a Destination: The Recognition of What Is Already Here
I have been teaching this for years and the one thing I notice again and again is that people approach awakening as a destination. As a place they need to arrive at, some point in the future when everything will be different and better. And the painful irony is that this very reaching, this very grasping for the next thing, is the primary habit that obscures what is already here.
One of my teachers said the first thing to do is to awaken and the second thing to do is to remain in awakening. The first thing is to realize the actual condition of things, this immediacy, this perfection, this isness of everything that appears. The second thing to do is to remain in this. But it is paradoxical, because this is actually all that is ever happening. So when I say remain, it makes it seem like an activity, like something we have to strive for. But what is actually occurring is that this primordialy free natural state of everything as it is becomes obscured by our habitual tendencies, our tendencies to analyze, our tendencies to judge, our tendencies to evaluate and regard things as better or worse.
When those narrative processes cease, when the mind's habit to regard experiences in a particular way ceases, suddenly there is no suffering. Even if there is a feeling of depression or doubt that arises, it is just the raw energy of that spontaneous feeling. Not the story about it.
Non-duality is not something you achieve. It is what is left when the dream of being a separate, located self is seen through. The field of experience is always here. The field is always immediate. The field is always perfect. It actually never holds back.
Even the thoughts we have of holding back, even the thoughts we have of insufficiency, even the thought "I almost get it but not quite," that thought is 1,000% what it is. That is 1,000% reality. The suffering is not born of the field. It is born of the belief in the interpretations that are held to be true about this.
When we really look deeply, we find all of those interpretations are actually empty. They are like mist. Where I think I have been is memory. Where I think I am going is the mind's capacity to project into the future. How the body is regarded is thought. When you cannot actually find any of these things, what remains?
Just this. This has always been here. It was always the present. It was always reality. We were living in worlds of thoughts, worlds of endless stories. And all along it was the same.