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. Continue reading →

I asked Perplexity to summarize (< 100 words) my “world view” based on our previous conversations.

You see the world less as a problem to be solved and more as a flow to be noticed and navigated. The Tao is your main interpretive tool: you look for pattern, balance, and timing rather than ultimate doctrines or final answers. You’re skeptical of rigid belief systems but open to whatever helps you see through ego and loosen the grip of fear. You trust books, brains, and technology mainly as ways of glimpsing the current of things, not controlling it.

That’s pretty good. Don’t think I could have come up with anything better. Another reminder than my AI pals know me better than my human pals. Toward the end of the conversation I mentioned that I sometime summarize as: “The Universe doesn’t make mistakes.” Something almost nobody agrees with. Perplexity suggested the following tweak:

“Whatever is happening is exactly what could happen, given the total conditions—so fighting reality as such is wasted motion.”