Someone asked me recently: "I've read so many books on non-duality. I understand the concepts—that there's no separate self, that awareness is all there is. But honestly? Nothing has really changed. Is this just philosophy, or is there something actually real here?"
I love this question. Because it's so honest. And because almost everyone who has spent time with these teachings arrives at exactly this place.
There's a way of approaching non-duality that treats it as a particularly elegant philosophy—a view about the nature of reality that we can understand, discuss, compare with other views, and eventually adopt as our own. We study Shankara's analysis of the three states. We appreciate the Diamond Sutra's deconstruction of all fixed positions. We follow the precise reasoning of the Upanishads. We gather concepts. We refine our understanding. We might even begin to explain these ideas quite fluently to others.
And none of this is wrong.
But here's what I want to ask: What is the difference between understanding that there is no separate self, and recognizing that there is no separate self? Between thinking about awareness, and being awareness—knowingly?
These are not the same thing. And the confusion between them is the source of so much frustration.
Think of water. You understand that it's hydrogen and oxygen. You can explain the molecular bonds, predict its freezing point. This understanding is complete as understanding. Now—drink a glass of water. The coolness on your tongue, the sensation of swallowing, the satisfaction of thirst quenched. Notice that drinking is not another, better piece of information about water. It's a different order of knowing entirely. Immediate. Non-conceptual. It requires no inference.
The recognition we're pointing to is closer to drinking than to chemistry.
When we approach non-duality purely as philosophy, we're adding furniture to the mind. We're collecting ideas—some of them quite beautiful—about the nature of self and reality. We imagine that if we accumulate enough of the right ideas, we will arrive at the truth.
But can you arrive at where you already are?
I'm not being clever. This is a genuine question. You are here, reading these words. You are aware. Before you have a single thought about awareness, before you form any concept of "being present," there is this—whatever this is. Already. The mind searches for non-dual experience as if it were something not yet present, something to be attained through sufficient understanding. But what is doing this searching? What is aware of the search itself?
I'm not saying study has no value. It does. Not by providing answers, but by removing obstacles—dissolving the misunderstandings that keep us looking in the wrong direction.
You're standing in a room, convinced you need to find the key. You search everywhere. A friend points out: there is no lock. The door is already open. You've been free this whole time.
The pointing doesn't give you anything new. It dissolves a false assumption. Good teaching uses concepts to dissolve concepts, uses thought to reveal what lies prior to thought. The words are fingers pointing at the moon. Necessary, maybe. But never the moon.
So what actually is non-dual experience?
Let's be careful here. The word "experience" suggests something happening to someone—a subject having an experience of an object. That structure already assumes separation. What we're really pointing to is not a special experience among other experiences, but the nature of all experience. What is always already the case, so intimate and obvious that it gets overlooked entirely.
Right now, something is aware.
Don't take this as another concept. Actually pause. There is awareness. There is seeing, reading, understanding happening. And there is something—we're calling it awareness, but the word doesn't matter—to which all of this appears.
Can you find the boundary between this awareness and what appears in it? Can you locate where awareness ends and experience begins? You might find thought jumping in with answers—"awareness is in the brain," "awareness is subject, thoughts are objects." But I'm not asking what you know intellectually. I'm asking what you find when you actually look.
Where does seeing happen?
Not philosophically. Right now.
When this is looked at directly—not thought about but looked at—something begins to reveal itself. The division we assumed between the one who is aware and what is witnessed starts to soften. It's not that we conclude "there is no separation" as a philosophical position. It's that the felt sense of being a separate observer begins to become transparent.
This isn't dramatic. It's not a special state with lights and angels. It's much simpler than that. The ordinary made extraordinary by attention—or rather, the extraordinary that was always ordinary, now recognized.
And here's the thing: this recognition cannot be stored. It cannot become another object of memory that the mind possesses. You cannot have this recognition and then think, "Good, now I have it. I am someone who has recognized non-duality." The moment you do that, you've turned presence back into concept, recognition back into philosophy, awakening into a story about awakening.
This is why the living reality of non-duality cannot be contained in any teaching, any tradition, any book—including everything I'm writing here. Words can point. They can dissolve obstacles. They can invite looking. But they cannot deliver recognition, because recognition is not a thing that can be delivered. It's not an object. It's what you are.
Meister Eckhart wrote of letting go of God for the sake of God. We might say: let go of the concept of awareness for the sake of awareness itself. Let go of the philosophy of non-duality for the sake of this—whatever this is—which is never absent, never coming or going, closer than close.
The question isn't whether non-duality is real.
The question is whether you will take these words as more information, or as an invitation to look.
What is it that is reading these words? What has been here through every experience of your life—every thought, sensation, emotion—yet is itself not an object that comes and goes?
Don't answer with what you know.
Look with what you are.