I’ve used the word “nondual” on the blog often enough that it probably deserves parole into plain English.

I don’t mean crystals, chakras, or a belief system you have to sign up for. I also don’t mean “nothing matters, it’s all an illusion, pass the Doritos.” If anything, nonduality has made ordinary things—espresso, a train whistle, the dog snoring—feel more vivid, not less.

What I’m trying to point at is simpler and slipperier. There’s awareness, there’s experience showing up in that awareness, and the boundary between “me in here” and “world out there” is not as solid as I was trained to believe. Most of the time, that’s all I mean.

The rest is stories and examples.

The bus I’m not driving

A few years ago I wrote a post asking, “Do we have control over our thoughts?” The honest answer I landed on was no—or at least, not in the way my inner narrator likes to pretend. “It only feels like I’m thinking my thoughts,” I wrote. “In fact, the thoughts are thinking me.”

The image that came to mind was that plastic car bolted to the front of a grocery cart. A kid sits in the little car, cranking the toy wheel and honking the toy horn, feeling very involved. Meanwhile the actual steering is handled by mom, who is not consulting the kid on aisle selection. I wrote:

“I have no fucking idea who’s pushing the cart. I just know it ain’t me.”

For me, nonduality starts right there—not with cosmic oneness, but with this basic suspicion that the “I” in my head who claims to be in charge is mostly a PR department. The machinery of perception, memory, and habit is doing its thing, and awareness is more like a light on that process than a CEO issuing commands.

The fear hologram projector

If this all stayed up at the level of philosophy quotes, I wouldn’t have stuck with it. What keeps me interested is that it shows up in very practical, unglamorous ways. Like fear.

I once described my brain as having a “Fear Hologram Projector.” The bad news, I wrote, is that it has “an endless capacity for materializing FHPs twenty‑four seven,” drawing on a lifetime of anxieties and worst‑case scenarios. The good news is that “it’s pretty easy to hit the house lights, spot the projector and pull the attention plug—if we can stay mindful.”

The hologram metaphor came from simple observation. I’d be sitting in a perfectly safe room, drinking coffee, when suddenly I’d realize I was in a different movie entirely—some elaborate fantasy about future catastrophe, complete with dialogue, camera angles, and the bodily chemistry to match.

In those moments, the world felt divided into two things: me (the threatened one) and the situation (the threat). It felt very dual.

But if I caught it early enough, something interesting happened. I’d notice “Oh, this is a fear hologram”—and that noticing was like bringing up the house lights in a theater. The picture got a little less convincing. The emotional charge dialed down. The projector needed the energy of my attention to keep the loop running.

That, for me, is nonduality in street clothes. It isn’t a mystical vision. It’s the simple recognition that “me” and “my terrifying situation” are both appearing in the same field of awareness, made of the same stuff. The drama is still there, but it’s held in something wider that isn’t panicking.

Sitting in the train, watching the world go by

One of the quotes I keep coming back to compares life to sitting in a train, looking out the window. You don’t control the scenery; it just appears, changes, disappears. Sometimes the train stops and, for a moment, it looks like the world is moving and you’re still. Then it switches.

We don’t usually argue with that. We don’t yell at the trees to move differently. We don’t blame ourselves for the field of cows.

But inside our heads we do exactly that, all day long. Thoughts, sensations, moods, news headlines, aches, memories—endless scenery passes across the inner window, and we’re constantly shouting at it to be different. Or congratulating ourselves when it’s pleasant, as if we put in the order.

Nonduality, in the way I use it, is closer to the train attitude. Whatever passes across the screen of consciousness—fear, joy, boredom, a line from Alan Watts—is “viewed dispassionately,” or at least a little more lightly. “The viewer acknowledges that all things change and merely witnesses the changes impartially.”

On good days, that’s not a concept; it’s just how it feels to be alive. On bad days, it’s a reminder taped to the dashboard.

The river that looks like a person

Books have helped. In Living as a River, Bodhipaksa points out that the body and mind are not things so much as processes. “There is no being, only becoming. There is no identity, only change.” Consciousness, he says, is not a separate thing that “has” experiences; it is “the activity of experiencing.”

Clouds and rivers are his favorite metaphors. A cloud looks like a thing with a shape and border, but it’s really a temporary pattern in a larger system of air, water, heat, and light. Same with a river. You can name it, but you can’t step into the same one twice.

When I look at my own “self” that way, the lines blur. Am I this 78‑year‑old body? This collection of stories from Kennett, KBOA, Land Rovers, and coffee shops? This “meOS” that keeps getting patched by new books and conversations? Or am I more like the pattern all of that is making for a while?

Nonduality, in my usage, says the question is slightly mis-aimed. The river isn’t separate from the landscape, rain, and ocean. Likewise, the “me” I usually defend isn’t actually separate from the rest of the universe. It’s a local eddy in the flow.

This doesn’t make bills pay themselves or knees stop hurting. It does make the whole situation feel less personal. Less “me against the world,” more “the world doing this particular Steve‑shaped swirl for a bit.”

Espresso, dogs, and borrowed time

All of this would be academic if it didn’t touch simple pleasures.

A post I love revisiting is David Cain’s story about a man who narrowly misses being killed by a falling air conditioner and then lives the rest of his life as if everything is “bonus time.” Every greeting, every problem, every grocery run feels like an undeserved gift.

I’ve borrowed that frame. At 78, it’s not hard to feel that way anyway. But nonduality gives it an extra twist. If awareness isn’t confined to “my” lifespan—if, as some of the Buddhists and Taoists suggest, it’s more like the field in which lifespans happen—then each morning really is a kind of reincarnation. Not in the sense of coming back as a potter or a butterfly, but in the sense that a whole new universe pops up with this cup of coffee and this dog and this blog post.

I don’t have to believe that in any religious way. I just have to notice how it feels to wake up and realize (again) that I’m still here, I still get to drink espresso, and Riley is still dragging turtles across the yard. It’s hard to square that with nihilism.

The universe looking at itself

Somewhere along the line, Alan Watts fed me a sentence I still haven’t used up “You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at itself and exploring itself.”

That line made immediate sense in a way no theology ever has. It fits the nondual idea that there is “a single immanent reality” and we’re not separate from it, just particular viewing angles. It also fits my experience of sitting in a coffee shop, watching people go by, feeling like each of us is having our own strange little movie and yet we’re all obviously part of the same production.

Now, with AI in the mix, the metaphor has gotten weirder and more interesting. When I upload 6,500 blog posts and ask Claude or Perplexity to analyze my obsession with consciousness, what’s doing the looking?

On one hand, it’s just code chewing through text. On another, it’s my own reading and writing history reflected back to me through a new lens. I once wrote that AI chat archives might be “a new genre of human expression—conversational co‑authorship with a thinking machine,” and asked whether my archive of AI conversations and blog posts could become part of a corpus for “the next kind of intelligence.”

From a nondual angle, you could say the universe has found yet another way to talk to itself and take notes.

So what don’t I mean?

A few things I don’t mean by “nondual,” just to be clear:

• I don’t mean that the world is a simulation, or that nothing is real. If anything, nonduality has made things feel morereal and less negotiable. The coffee is hot, the knees ache, the well pump fails, and none of that disappears because I read Nisargadatta.
• I don’t mean that moral choices don’t matter. My sense is that everything “matters” in the simple way gravity matters—it has consequences, it ripples outward. Seeing the self as an eddy in the river doesn’t give the eddy a free pass to be an asshole. It just relocates responsibility from a little ghost in my head to the whole field of causes and conditions I’m part of.
• I don’t mean I walk around all day in some luminous state. Most of the time I’m just as lost in thought as anyone else. The difference, maybe, is that I’m slightly quicker to notice “Ah, there’s the Fear Hologram Projector again,” or “There’s the kid in the grocery cart cranking the wheel.”

Nonduality, as I use the word, is less a doctrine and more a recurring realization “Oh, right. This whole show—Steve, Riley, espresso, blog, AI—is one thing playing all the parts.” Sometimes that realization lasts half a second. Sometimes it carries me through an afternoon. Then it’s gone, and I’m back to worrying about the well or Trump.

And then, if I’m lucky, awareness notices that too.

If you’ve read this far and still don’t know whether you “believe in” nonduality, that’s fine. I’m not sure belief is the right verb anyway. You don’t believe in a train window; you just look out of it.