Applied Nonduality

The nondual view of reality has been close to me for years. At some point a practical question started to interest me more than the philosophy itself: if you accept this view fully — not as an idea to agree with, but as how things are — then what is the most effective way to look at yourself, at the world, and to live? The question gets sharpest exactly when life is hardest: in periods of difficulty and loss.

Start with the ordinary view. The world is physical, events are something like Brownian motion — random collisions, shaped by circumstance. If that’s true, then when a situation goes wrong, the fix is obvious: act on the physical world. Push the pieces around. And so we set about our corrections with full seriousness.

I’ve tried that approach many times, and it failed more often than it worked. At one point I was stuck in a job — a good job, on the whole, but I wasn’t satisfied. So I went looking for a new one. For a year I went to interviews, answered postings, dropped lines through everyone I knew. A full year of serious, competent effort in the physical world. The result was zero.

Now the nondual view. From here, the situation you’re in — the people, the places, the events — is all secondary. What’s primary is a kind of seed: an intention, a design, that doesn’t exist inside this world at all. The events form around it. The people and circumstances are cast to fit.

A small example. I’m flying somewhere; I get to the airport; my flight is delayed. In the physical-world view, some careless person did something wrong and I had the bad luck to be standing in the result. So I get angry at that person and I try to fix the situation. In the nondual view, the seed of this situation existed before the airport did anything. It could have unfolded through the plane, or on the road, or somewhere else entirely — it was going to unfold. The people involved are just playing their parts.

And here’s the practical consequence. If the situation grows from a seed, then attacking the situation itself — more calls, more pressure, more corrections in the physical world — most likely makes it worse. Every next action sinks you deeper into it, like pulling against a knot.

There’s an analogy I keep coming back to. The sun sets. For a man standing on the Earth, this simply means the day is over and the night is beginning. What can he do about it? He can’t stop the sun. He can only adapt — finish his work, light a lamp, get ready for the dark. In his manifest world, day follows night and night follows day, and that’s the whole of it. But behind that simple rhythm stand astronomical processes: he is living on an enormous stone ball that spins while it circles a ball of fire. He controls none of this. He can only adjust to it. And he may not suspect any of it — a man can live his whole life never learning what he’s standing on. For him, the day just ends.

The situations of a life work the same way. What we see is the daylight and the dark — the marriage ending, the flight delayed. What stands behind them is of a different order, and it takes our preferences into account exactly as much as the Earth’s rotation does.

Notice, by the way, that the same rhythm runs through consciousness itself, every day of our lives. We lie down, consciousness switches off, we drop into sleep. Then it switches on, and active life resumes. What stands behind that? Clearly something is happening in the world of consciousness — and we are no more in charge of it than we are of the sunset.

Applied nonduality does something else. First, see the situation whole — as the embodiment of a seed — and see your own role inside it. Hold that view from the meta-position, slightly above and outside. Then accept the situation, for a simple reason: the seed already exists, it has already ripened, and this situation is how it shows itself. It will not disappear on its own while the seed is there. So you look at the seed, at the intention working through the situation, you find your role in it — and you play that role impeccably.

That’s the whole shift. The goal moves from fixing the situation to playing my role impeccably. And it’s exactly this approach that lets the situation either resolve — or develop by its own internal logic, reach its peak, and dissolve.

For me the most important part is what happens to tension. When I focus on goals I’m trying to force through physical action, tension appears — and it only drains me, and leads nowhere. When I focus on playing my role impeccably and hold the meta-position, tension doesn’t arise. The very concept stops making sense. I accept what is, I move with the current, and I don’t obstruct it.

This is what I call applied nonduality. It’s very much like lucid dreaming: the moment you realize, inside a dream, that you’re dreaming, the situation stops weighing on you. You play with it. You enjoy the process. And by playing your role that way, you discharge the seed — and you plant the next one. A better one than this — not from my point of view, but from the point of view of the whole.

I think this is the most harmonious way there is to live.

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A practical note, because “hold the meta-position” sounds abstract until you know what it feels like from inside.

I notice I’ve fallen out of the meta-position by a particular pattern of tension in the body. It may well be different for different people. For me it’s two points: a tightening across the forehead — the brows drawing together — and a tension in the lower throat. When I return to the meta-position, both dissolve. I don’t relax them; they leave on their own.

And when I’m acting from the meta-position — when the perception stays wide enough to hold the whole of the situation, all the space of it, at once — there’s a sensation in the back, opposite the solar plexus. Tension is the wrong word; it’s closer to pleasant. A region of sensation, like a faint hum — the kind the body gives off when you hold attention on one part of it, or on all of it at once.

The nearest thing I can compare it to is the feeling of play. The state I knew in childhood games, or the one that comes when I improvise on an instrument. Apparently the body files the meta-position under play — which, if the lucid dream comparison holds, is exactly where it belongs.