There's a moment in almost every conversation about non-duality when something goes wrong. You can watch it happen—the eyes glaze or narrow, and you realize the person has landed somewhere you didn't intend. Either they've decided you're claiming nothing is real (so why bother with anything?), or they've heard a kind of cosmic inflation, the ego swelling to universal proportions while pretending to dissolve.
Both misreadings make sense. The phrases that circulate—"everything is one," "there is no self," "you are the universe experiencing itself"—have been worn smooth by repetition, passed through so many hands that whatever meaning they once carried has rubbed away. What remains are words that sound profound but function more like obstacles than doorways.
The deepest confusion, I think, treats non-duality as a metaphysical claim—a statement about what the universe is ultimately made of. On this reading, the non-dualist asserts that beneath apparent diversity lies a single substance, consciousness or awareness, of which everything else is a modification. Believe this, and you've understood non-duality. But this already misses something essential. The great teachers in these traditions—Shankara, Huang Po, Meister Eckhart, the anonymous voices of the Upanishads—weren't primarily doing philosophy. They were pointing to something that can be recognized in experience, right now, rather than believed on authority or established through argument. The difference matters enormously. A metaphysical claim gives the mind a new object to grasp, defend, argue about. A pointer invites investigation. One adds furniture to the room; the other asks you to notice the space the furniture appears in.
"Nothing really exists" might be the most damaging misreading. It turns the teachings into nihilism, as if the non-dualist walks through life convinced the world is an elaborate hoax—other people mere phantoms, suffering an illusion to be dismissed. But this conflates two very different claims. One is that conventional reality is the full story. The other is that conventional reality exists. Non-dual teachings challenge the first, not the second.
The cup on your desk is real. It holds liquid. It can shatter. What the teachings question is whether it exists the way you habitually assume—as an independent, self-sufficient thing. Examined closely, the cup is more like a pattern than an object: a temporary convergence of clay and craft, culture and light, causes and conditions extending outward without clear boundary. It's real, but not separate. The same investigation applies to the self. Something is reading these words, processing meaning, perhaps feeling skeptical or curious. But does that something exist as a bounded entity, a small self inside the head looking out at an external world? When Ramana Maharshi asked visitors "Who am I?", he wasn't being coy. He was pointing to the possibility of examining this assumption directly, in experience rather than argument. Most people who take the question seriously report that while thoughts and sensations continue, the sense of being a discrete entity begins to feel less solid. Not nihilism—more like what a physicist might feel discovering that the solid table is mostly empty space and vibrating fields.
Then there's the opposite error, and it's everywhere now. "You are the universe experiencing itself." "We are all one consciousness." The formulation has colonized popular spirituality so completely that questioning it feels almost rude. The problem isn't the insight it gestures at but what the mind does with it. Correctly understood, recognizing that there's no fundamental boundary between self and world is humbling—it undermines the ego's imperial project rather than completing it. But stated as "I am everything," it becomes a grander identity claim, same structure as before. The self that feared its smallness now preens over its cosmic scope. Same ego, bigger costume.
I've watched this happen in myself. There's something intoxicating about the cosmic formulation, a kind of spiritual sugar rush. For a moment you feel vast, important, finally adequate. Then ordinary life reasserts itself—you're back to being someone who gets annoyed in traffic and worries about money—and the gap between the grand vision and the mundane reality becomes another source of suffering. Wei Wu Wei captured the real insight with characteristic sharpness: "Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn't one." The humor depends on holding both levels at once. The self that wants cosmic significance doesn't ultimately exist in the way it thinks it does, but there's still a pattern of grasping that generates suffering. Recognizing this doesn't inflate you. It's more like setting down something heavy.
A subtler misunderstanding treats non-duality as an experience to be attained. Seekers often describe moments—during meditation, in nature, sometimes in crisis—when the usual sense of separation falls away and they taste something they later call unity or oneness. Boundaries dissolve. Everything feels alive, connected. Then ordinary consciousness returns, and they spend years trying to get back there.
But non-dual recognition isn't a special state. This took me a long time to understand. States come and go—expanded, contracted, peaceful, agitated. What the teachings point to is what doesn't come and go, what's present in every state as its condition. The awareness in which the mystical experience appeared is the same awareness in which boredom appears, in which irritation appears, in which the desperate seeking for the special state appears. Chasing the peak experience is just more seeking wearing spiritual clothing. This is why so many teachers emphasize ordinariness. Joshu, asked about the essence of Buddhism, said: "Have you eaten your rice? Then wash your bowl." The Dzogchen tradition speaks of rigpa not as something to attain but as what's always already the case, hidden only by our constant looking elsewhere.
What ties all these misconceptions together is the assumption that non-duality is something to be understood—a concept to grasp, a position to adopt, a belief to hold. The mind wants to file these teachings alongside other things it knows, to wrap itself around them and say now I've got it. And the teachings refuse to be grasped in this way. Not because they're anti-intellectual—some of history's most rigorous philosophers worked within these traditions—but because they're pointing to what's prior to the grasping mind, to what the mind appears within rather than what appears within the mind.
The Advaita tradition distinguishes between paramarthika and vyavaharika—ultimate and conventional perspectives. From the ultimate perspective, there is only Brahman, no separation, no other. But this isn't a position you occupy while paying bills or choosing what to eat. It's a recognition that can't be captured in subject-object language at all. From the conventional perspective, you remain a person with a body and a history, preferences and fears. The confusion comes from mixing levels—from trying to live on the ultimate level, which is actually impossible since living inherently involves the conventional. You still tie your shoes. You still love particular people. The recognition doesn't erase the human; it sees through the sense of separation that made the human feel cut off from everything else.
Maybe the most honest thing I can say is that I don't have this figured out. I've read the books, sat the retreats, had experiences that seemed to confirm the teachings and dry spells that made them feel like wishful thinking. What I've come to trust isn't a metaphysical position but a direction of investigation—the possibility that the separation I assume between "me" and "everything else" might not be as solid as it feels.
The misconceptions all share a common structure: they turn an invitation into an assertion, a pointer into a belief. They make non-duality into another thing to know when its entire point is to illuminate the knowing itself.
What if, instead of trying to understand it, you simply asked: What is it that's looking out of my eyes right now? Not to arrive at an answer. Just to let the question do its work.