The Space Where You Used To Be.

Nonduality is so simple, but it can never be understood by an individual, which is only a sense of being someone and therefore doesn’t understand anything at all. A sense of self can’t do anything because it’s not actually a thing with its own existence. Instead, understanding belongs to awareness, consciousness, being, or whatever you’d like to name it—literally, whatever seems to stand under all appearance of phenomena. And this “pure consciousness” is the best candidate for being our Self—not the bundle of thoughts and sensations we normally take ourselves to be.

Direct pointing can sound obtuse, like you’re holding back the punchline, asserting claims without proof, or making word salad. But direct pointing is pointing to what is always immediate, always here, always available—the you in which “you” appear and which precedes all concepts.

Conceptual thought can only produce a conceptual facsimile of understanding. Look directly. You are not and never were the self you have always believed yourself to be (or have at least believed since around the time you were two years old).

Awareness can see that it’s not the mind, not the body, and not the person. And yet the sense of being a person seems to stick around and still seems to be real even after the initial recognition of its unreality. That’s just how it seems to work.

(Sorry to use “seems” so much, but much is only seemingly so.)

But if a person persists in being exposed to concepts that point beyond the conceptual, then it seems like there’s the potential for the “body-mind system” to do something different. I.e., when the conditions are right, the mind gradually stops layering the sense of doership/ownership on everything that seems to happen.

Eventually the recognition of non-doership/non-ownership can “stabilize” and become the default mode of living for what seems to be an individual. And eventually for everyone, the person dies for good—either when the body dies or allegedly, in the case of enlightenment, before the body dies.

Nonduality is the most liberating shit on offer. Continue to go back to it and when you’re ripe for awakening, the person will be exposed as being empty and the emptiness will be exposed as being you. And that will change everything without changing a thing.

Or don’t think about nonduality at all. That’s fine too. Whatever happens, this is just this, exactly as it is.

Julian Fałat (Polish, 1853–1929)

'holiday on the hudson,' oil on canvas, george luks, united states c. 1912.

cherry blossoms in central park

'mammoth mountain,' patty van dolson, c. 1980-90.

only the winds.

His Three Daughters (2023) dir. Azazel Jacobs.

 Clausse Fernand 

rock formation pictured in the kodak pocket guide to nature photography, 1985.

Holiday Magazine Autumn/Winter 2017

Freja Beha Erichsen by Lachlan Bailey

Styled by Clare Richardson