Simplicity Itself
Just this, as it is
Life is messy. It can be seen in so many different ways. It has infinite faces. It can’t ever be pinned down. Whatever you say about it is never quite right. When I’m asked what this whole thing is or what I am, the first thing that happens is my mind goes blank. That is the truest answer. Open and empty, not knowing.
But then very quickly the thinking mind comes in with everything I’ve learned and discovered and experienced and absorbed, and thought begins spewing out answers, and then sometimes doubting and correcting them, and occasionally tying itself up in imaginary knots and getting more and more confused. In the center of all such doubt and confusion is the “me,” the mirage-like separate self, once again feeling on the spot, just like being called upon in school and not having the answer, feeling desperate, deficient and confused. Or maybe clinging to some answer with a kind of desperate certainty and defending it to the death—that’s also the little “me.”
But in that first instant of open empty presence, knowing nothing and not needing to know, there is no little “me,” no separation, no encapsulation, no confusion, no deficiency, no urgency, no certainty, no doubt. There is just open empty. Just the colors, shapes, textures, smells and sounds of this instant. Nothing more or less. And even those words are much too much. That first instant is wordless. Utterly simple and uncomplicated. Just this!
I’m always revising my website home page, as my ever-changing, inconsistent, infinitely variable and unresolvable mind changes direction again and again, and this is the present version:
Simply Being Alive — Just This!
Having been an explorer in nondual spirituality for many decades, I find that what I most deeply want is simply to be okay with life as it is, awake in this moment, not in some spectacular way, but very simply—hearing the birds or the traffic sounds, enjoying a cup of coffee, feeling the breathing, delighting in the visual world, feeling the pain that is mine to feel. Simply life as it is. Just this!
I cannot find any “self” at the center of experience who is calling the shots, although thought poses as “me” and claims to be the thinker-chooser-doer. But from careful observation, it seems clear that our urges, desires, impulses, interests, preferences, abilities, thoughts and actions all arise unbidden from we know not where.
All apparently formed things, including people, are like waves in the ocean—ever-changing and inseparable movements of a seamless and inseparable whole. We are both ocean and wave, no-thing and everything, with infinite facets, dimensions and subtleties. This one bottomless moment is ever-changing in appearance while never departing from the ever-present immediacy of right here, right now.
When we believe that we are small, separate and in control, feelings of deficiency, anxiety, guilt, blame and dissatisfaction inevitably follow. We struggle to improve, and we search for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense freedom.
What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. There is no finish-line, no method, no future goal, only this ever-fresh aliveness.
Radical Nonduality: What Is It?
What I call radical nonduality is one of the myriad perspectives with which I deeply resonate. Back in the early 2000s, I attended several events and a retreat with Tony Parsons (not to be confused with my main teacher, Toni Packer). Tony Parsons was my first encounter with what I call radical nonduality. Of course, this kind of radical message can be found in statements by the old Zen masters and in some of the mystics in other traditions, but these people were always embedded in a tradition and engaged in what was often a very rigorous practice and disciplined way of life. Whereas the contemporary version of radical nonduality is not identified with any tradition, often eschews teachers, traditions and practices entirely, and is much more uncompromising and absolute in its assertions.
Over the years, I have found many different expressions of radical nonduality profoundly liberating, although I’ve also seen it adopted conceptually as new kind of facile fundamentalist dogma. But when truly grokked, it is perhaps the most liberating realization there is.
Radical nonduality always emphasizes that this is it, right here, right now; that there is no self at the center of experiencing and no duality of any kind, not even any unchanging awareness beholding the ever-changing appearance. There is no separate individual with free will and choice. Nothing needs to happen (or could happen) other than exactly what is (apparently) happening. There is no “spiritually correct” or “spiritually incorrect” experience—everything is included in the immediacy and indivisability of what is. There is no such thing as any actual obstacle to this—even the apparent obstacles are simply this showing up as apparent obstacles. There is no actual solidity, continuity or separation in reality, even if it appears otherwise. There is only THIS, right here, right now. And this cannot be pinned down or resolved into anything graspable. It simply IS.
Radical nonduality is descriptive but rarely prescriptive, although some radical nondualists, myself included, do suggest or invite an on-going exploration of present experiencing or a simple “acknowledgment of the moment.” But basically, radical nonduality offers nothing, no path, no method, nowhere to go. It never aims at self-improvement or future attainment. Any notion of an enlightened person is seen to be an absurd oxymoron. There is no persisting, separate someone to be permanently “enlightened” or “unenlightened.”
Tony Parsons was irreverent and funny. He poked fun at every sacred cow. I found him very accessible, generous, unpretentious, open-hearted and full of love. He said, “All there is, is what is… reading these words, sitting on a seat, trees growing, sounds, feelings, clouds or thoughts passing by… oneness appearing as twoness, the absolute being relative.” He said everything is the Beloved, whether it appears as a flower garden, as dog shit, or as war and torture: "Everything about you is totally absolutely perfectly appropriate,” he said. “All the things you think are wrong with you are absolutely right." Perhaps because it is all-inclusive and there is no obstacle to it, he called it unconditional love.
Tony saw the awakened life not as one of transcendent detachment, but rather as a love affair, unfiltered full-on aliveness. "There’s no destiny, there’s no God, there’s no plan, there’s no script, there’s nowhere to go because there is only timeless being... and it is alive and fleshy and sexy and juicy and immediately this.” He described this wholeness as “wonderfully floating, effervescent and ungraspable.” His message wasn’t about mindfulness, trying to "be here now," or identifying as awareness, detached from what appears. In fact, Tony said, “Awareness is once removed. It’s still subtly dual.”
He emphasized that, “There is no person that becomes enlightened. No one awakens. Awakening is the absence of the illusion of individuality. Already there is only awakeness, oneness, timeless being, radical aliveness. When the dream seeker is no more, it is seen (by no one) that there is nothing to seek and no one to become liberated." Or as he put it elsewhere: "There is absolutely nothing to attain except the realisation that there is absolutely nothing to attain."
Around the same time that I was connecting with Tony Parsons, I also developed friendships with Nathan Gill, Leo Hartong, Chuck Hillig and Sailor Bob—all of whom had a similar perspective. I was very much taken with this radical form of nonduality.
My own writings and meetings in the early 2000s were coming largely from this perspective, as reflected in my 2nd book, Awake in the Heartland, and in the talks and dialogs from my Chicago meetings recorded in my 3rd book, Painting the Sidewalk with Water. I was never as absolutely uncompromising about all of it as Tony Parsons and some of the others were. I continued to resonate with Toni Packer, several Buddhist teachers and various Advaita satsang teachers; I continued to appreciate and offer meditation; I still sometimes talked about and pointed to awareness as the transformative power or the ground of being; and I didn’t dismiss relative reality, or our human beingness, or the issues and complexities of everyday life in the way that some radical nondualists seemed to do.
Soon after I moved to Oregon in 2008, someone sent me Darryl Bailey’s books, which I found to be perhaps the clearest, cleanest, most stripped down expression of radical nonduality I’d yet encountered. Darryl had been a Buddhist monk, had also spent time with Robert Adams, and had been touched by Ramesh Balsekar, Alan Watts, and both JD and UG Krishnamurti. He still offered an informal kind of meditation that he described simply as “acknowledging the moment.” He and I immediately became friends, and I’ve been a huge fan of his work ever since. (His books are now available for download from his website).
As the years rolled by, more and more radical nondualists sprang up on YouTube, many of them closely aligned with Tony Parsons (thus often jokingly called the parsnips). Others emerged from elsewhere. Sailor Bob had been with Nisargadatta. Peter Brown, John Astin, and Rob Matthews emphasize the ungraspable, unpindownable and indivisible nature of what they call “radiant presence.” Karl Renz pulls the rug out from under any place you try to land. Robert Saltzman rejects all the ways of turning everyday life into something transcendent or any claims of knowing the fundamental or essential nature of reality, and he offers no path or practice of any kind. Zen teacher Barty Magid offers an approach that he describes as “fundamentally nondualistic, anti-essentialist, and anti-transcendent,” in which we discover that, “This very moment is our true self.” Barry challenges what he calls our "curative fantasies" of transcendence or depth, in which we endeavor to find some kind of unchanging ground of being either below the surface or above it all. Instead, he points to being just this moment, being aware of our thoughts and all the ways we imagine separation and resist what is, discovering the impermanence and interdependence of life, and living an ordinary human life of "engaged, whole-hearted functioning." For Barry, Zen is not about detaching from life, purifying oneself, or being some kind of unchanging awareness impervious to the vulnerability and messiness of life. He speaks of Zen as a religious practice, and to him, religious means “moment to moment reverence and awe, and the kind of attention that treats ordinary things as extraordinary and worthy of that kind of attention.” That all sounds like radical nonduality to me, but Barry still recommends a strict form of Zen practice, although it isn’t about getting anywhere or fixing ourselves. Another person coming from a Buddhist background who boils everything down to simply what appears is Kevin Schanilec: Simply the Seen.
Some nondualists claim that their particular expression of nonduality is the One True Nonduality, but as I see it, there are many different expressions with different nuances and flavors, and they all have their validity.
Several months ago, a dear friend sent me a link to a new voice on the radical nondual scene, someone I hadn’t heard of that he liked very much—Alexis Knight, another “parsnip” apparently. I’d grown rather tired of the endless proliferation on YouTube of Tony Parsons clones and other nondual absolutists—it all felt rather facile and overly simplistic and too absolutist to me, but because it was my dear friend recommending her, I somewhat reluctantly gave Alexis a listen.
To my surprise, I’ve found myself quite taken with this person’s joyful and celebratory expression of radical nonduality. In the story, Alexis has a history of Buddhism, meditation, yoga, breathwork, Qi Gong, identifying as awareness, and so on, and then, after years of such practices and teachings, Alexis met Tony Parsons, there was the recognition that everything is whole and complete, that all there is, is the immediacy of this, that there is no center, no time, no space, except as an appearance. Nothing is missing, nothing needs to happen or not happen, everything is included. Alexis says, “There is nothing right or wrong with practices, paths, traditions, rites, or rituals, but it is shared here that all efforts to attain liberation, freedom, unity, awakening, or enlightenment are simply attempts to get somewhere else.”
Together with her friend Tobias Ricardo, who is also quite wonderful, Alexis puts on The No-Show!, which involves online meetings, writings, private meetings, and in-person gatherings in various places, sometimes both of them together and sometimes each of them by themselves. In the story, Tobias spent 15 years as a Hindu monk, and after a serious accident, broke his vows as a monk, spent time with some of the descendants of Nisargadatta and Ramana Maharshi and other awareness teachers, and then encountered radical nonduality, first in the words of Jim Newman, then eventually Tony Parsons, and finally with his good friend, Alexis. [Since this article was published, Tobias has been scrubbed from the No-Show! website and YouTube page, so apparently he is no longer involved.—jt 4/20/26]
Together, they embody and offer a kind of celebratory, free, fun loving, playful, enthusiastic, androgynous expression that I find quite delightful and liberating.
Like Tony Parsons, Alexis rejects the popular idea that we are the awareness in which everything is appearing. This is something I’ve talked about on occasion as well, although I can still resonate with both the sense of awareness as the transformative power in life and also with unbound awareness as the ground of being. But I have experienced how either of these formulations can easily involve a subtle kind of efforting, trying to “be aware” or “take one’s stand as awareness,” or “be awareness,” or “identify as awareness” or remain continuously “aware of awareness,” and it can also seemingly create a subtle dualistic divide between awareness and the content of awareness, and also between in-touchness with the felt-sense of this and the absence of that experiential in-touchness, and it can then reinforce the phantom “me” who is either in-touch or out-of-touch.
Maybe we don’t need to land on any one way of formulating this inconceivable actuality that can never really be grasped or formulated. Maybe we can appreciate all the variations on offer. I was thus very happy when the friend who recommended Alexis and Tobias to me reported that Tobias had announced during a recent meeting that he planned to attend midnight mass on Easter. Like me, he apparently saw no problem with that. That’s true nonduality! Everything is included.
A few gems that might be called radical nonduality:
People desperately want to describe existence and, historically, they speak of matter, energy, consciousness, spirit, oneness, and mystery. But descriptions are merely limited interpretations. All of them. They can never tell us what life actually is… Even the sense of existing disappears every night, only to reappear. It’s like a light blinking off and on. When it’s on, our so-called life appears in its flow. Bodies, needs, interests, concerns, urges, and actions—family situations, national events, international events—all of these arise and fade as passing appearances in a formless event… These forms don’t actually exist; they’re like ripples in flowing water… Our appearance, direction, and actions simply happen. This realization is freedom… Spiritual liberation frees you from the misery-inducing fantasy of perfecting yourself. In this moment, I am what I am; you are what you are; we’re both the dance of the cosmos. Liberation isn’t the act of breaking free of this. Liberation is knowing it can’t be otherwise.
Consider love, not as a particular feeling or sentiment, but as the mystery that allows all feelings and sentiments to be, the... very life that you are and that everything is—a great incomprehensible indivisibility, a mystery that welcomes all moments, without question or reason, because it is all moments.
I am the divine expression exactly as I am, right here, right now. You are the divine expression exactly as you are, right here, right now. It is the divine expression, exactly as it is, right here, right now. Nothing, absolutely nothing, needs to be added or taken away. Nothing is more valid or sacred than anything else. No conditions need to be fulfilled. The infinite is not somewhere else waiting for us to become worthy.
In each instant, things are as they are and cannot be any different. Whatever one perceives, thinks, and feels in each moment is ‘myself.’ Except in memory or a fantasized future, there is no other myself. No ‘myself’ stands apart from events and phenomena as the ‘experiencer’ of those occurrences. That myself is an illusion. One is not having experiences. One is identical to the totality of experience, conscious and unconscious. That’s what ‘I’ am: experience, and experience is only this aliveness, right now, in this very moment.
If you want to find the treasure, like a pot of jewels at the end of the rainbow, look no further than your normal experience. That everyday experience is the rainbow itself.
This moment, just as it is, is all there is. This moment, just as it is, is exactly, perfectly, just what it is. This moment, just as it is, is not happening to me, or inside my mind; the whole world, of which I am an inseparable part, is what’s happening, right here, right now. There is no place to stand outside this moment, outside of myself, outside of the world. This moment, this self, this world, all one thing.
A Correction on my Article “The Hospital”:
I’m sure this correction is irrelevant to most (if not all) of you, but I feel compelled to share it nonetheless. After I wrote the article about my surgery and recovery, I saw the pathology lab report and learned that the roughly 4 inches of colon they removed during the surgery began with the stoma (i.e., with Otto, as I called him). The stoma is the end of the intestine that they bring through the belly muscle and out through the skin, through which stool empties into a bag that is attached to the belly with adhesive. Otto and I had a very close relationship these past 8 years, he was a true friend in a strange way, and as ridiculous as it might sound, I was sad to learn that he went to the pathology lab and is now deceased. I now know that I have a completely new stoma (located in the same place where Otto used to be), and this new one has not yet revealed its name or gender. The new one is round, which Otto was not. This means I can now order pre-cut ostomy bags and will no longer have to cut the irregularly-shaped hole in every bag myself as I’ve had to do for the last 8 years, and that is a real blessing. In any case, I have edited and revised my article online to reflect my corrected understanding of what happened during the surgery.
My Books (most recent first in descending order):
DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement
PAINTING THE SIDEWALK WITH WATER: Talks and Dialogues about Nonduality
AWAKE IN THE HEARTLAND: The Ecstasy of What Is
BARE-BONES MEDITATION: Waking Up from the Story of My Life
Love to all…
Thank a million for the excellent overview of Radical Non-duality. I especially resonated with: treating ordinary things as extraordinary, and "acknowledgment of the moment" as an alternate to more formal meditation practices (which have always felt to me too much like having to go to the gym, or dieting).
Here's a routine my little "me" sometimes runs when I get "called upon in school:"
Ultimate Reality is infinite and eternal. In this context, any transient event is utterly absolved of any notion of goodness or badness.
Thus, peace and contentment are attainable by transcending the little "me" to stand as the infinite and eternal wherein, as Queen sang, "nothing really matters."
Little "me" then thinks, "oh, how clever, I've transformed a bleak lyric into bliss, demonstrating how badness ultimately dissolves into good and vice versa" 🤣
But more holistically:
“Wisdom is knowing I am nothing,
Love is knowing I am everything,
and between the two my life moves.”
-Nisargadatta Maharaj
With love...
Simplicity Itself — Just this as it is
Reading that, I found myself thinking of an old line:
“There must be a pony in here somewhere.”
For a long time, that’s how this felt—like there was something hidden to find. Something more real, more profound, more “it.”
But lately it’s almost the opposite.
The “pony” isn’t hidden at all.
It’s just ordinary life. This as it is.
Last night I had a dream. I was there, family was there, things were happening. There was distance, movement, a whole world unfolding. And then I woke up… right where I started. Head on the pillow. Nothing had actually moved.
It makes you wonder.
Not that life is unreal or meaningless…
but that it has that same appearing, shifting quality.
It feels real while it’s happening—just like the dream.
And yet nothing can be held.
What’s been more striking isn’t finding something special…
but seeing that there’s nothing to grasp.
Sometimes this feels quietly profound.
Sometimes it feels completely flat.
But both are this.
There’s even an urge at times to say, “this is amazing.”
And that too is part of it.
But maybe what’s most freeing is simpler than that.
The sense that there must be something more—some better place, clearer state, deeper realization—starts to loosen.
And with that… there’s a kind of ease.
Not because everything feels amazing,
but because nothing needs to be different.
Life keeps moving. Things get done. Conversations happen.
But maybe there isn’t a separate “me” at the center managing it all.
Just this… appearing as everything.
The pony isn’t something hidden—it’s what’s left when nothing is missing.