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In late 2021 and 2022, my entire perspective on myself, others, and the world took a monumental shift from perceiving everything and everyone as solid and separate to understanding that all beings and objects in the phenomenal world are essentially vibrating energy that emanate from the same one Source.
At the time, this change in perspective meant the difference between a sense of aliveness and relative peace, and a soul-shattering depression that clutched me with a death grip. Prior to this new way of seeing, I was often sad, lonely, and filled to the brim with a subtle existential malaise that kept me unhappily ruminating about my life, a lack of meaning and purpose, and a feeling of not belonging—although you’d never really know it just by looking at me.
In fact, it went deeper than that: not only did I believe that everything was a fragment or expression of the one Source, but I also believed there is no “self.” To me, the idea that a character by the name of “Sarah” existed independently of thought and perception was absurd. How could I, or anything else, exist other than as a concept? After all, my sense of “self” is derived from ideas, and an idea is relative, transient, qualified, and conditioned.
Furthermore, “I” had no localization. Where, exactly, was “I”? Even the most renowned thinkers of the modern age debate whether thoughts originate in the physical brain. In addition, the classic question regarding where consciousness resides is also under intense debate, and a vast majority of scientists and philosophers disagree that consciousness is a mechanical process. So, where was “I” and where did “I” come from?
Over the course of the next two to three years, I attended copious non-dual meetings, often referred to as satsangs, and practised self-inquiry. The whole time I did this, however, I was waiting for that massive and irreversible moment of clarity: that moment when it finally and irrefutably dawned on me that no concept really mattered and that “I” didn’t really exist. And here’s the thing: even though I intellectually agreed with all of that, it made little to no difference in how I actually lived my life. At the end of the day, I still had bills to pay, work to do, appointments to attend. Whenever I interacted with others—something I largely couldn’t avoid—I still had to put on a kind of performance and wear a social mask in order to relate with them. After all, everyone else believed they are a “self” that exists and, in turn, they believe that I too must be a “self” as well.
Furthermore, this broad intellectual understanding did not seem to shelter me from pain and suffering—the only difference was that I could now successfully gaslight myself into believing that there was nothing personal about it, and that “pain” was just another empty concept.
But no matter how many “satsangs” I attended, after the initial wave of peace wore off and I interacted with the “world” (including other people) again, I felt like a small, separate self in a society where non-dual understanding didn’t matter. People claimed to know me, remember me, or call me by name, and by necessity, I did the same things. “Emptiness” seemed to have consequences. All phenomena and events, I was told, were empty, but the bank still called me when my bill was late and threatened interest. I knew that seemingly “empty” phenomena could severely impact my credit score.
I still strolled through the “empty phenomena” of what we call a busy urban street and saw other “empty beings” begging for food and cash because they were literally sitting on their last penny and had nowhere to go. The “empty thing” we call the planet we inhabit seemed to be in a state of crisis: hurricanes, wildfires, violent storms, massive heat waves, dangerously cold winters, microplastics in our bodies and in the ocean, and the threat of extinction for an entire species.
Living beings, including myself, still felt incredible pain, still suffered, and investors and shareholders still sat on top of the human food chain and hoarded the bulk of the “empty phenomena” we call money, which seemed to have horribly punitive consequences for the majority of people who were, by consequence, forced to work themselves to absolute depletion just to pay rent and keep food on the table due to rising cost of simply being alive on planet Earth.
By and large, when confronted about these issues, many non-dual teachers had little to nothing to say about any of this that I felt carried any real weight or substance. In fact, some of them even seemed to be in a state of passive acceptance, framing me as the “problem” because I was well-aware of societal inequities and felt genuine despair over them. Over time, I gradually became a bit disillusioned with the teachers and the practices. Surely, I thought to myself, there must be more to “ultimate reality” than this.
So, once again, in my disillusioned state, hungry for answers to some of life’s biggest hurdles, I began to read the works of Albert Camus, Friedrich Neitzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other philosophers. Sometimes I even started reading and rereading memoirs about the specific experiences people had—something I stopped doing altogether when first introduced to radical non-dual teachings, because I thought reading these kinds of books would pull me back into a limited “story” and a “self” again.
After all, I thought, although I know better, I am not so sure I will ever entirely escape the feeling of having a “self” who feels anxiety, dread, injustice, and pain ever so deeply,
And with that, I gradually stopped reaching for this elusive thing called “enlightenment.” Life seemed banal and flat once again.
At the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, I lost several friends on the “non-dual” path. We no longer saw eye-to-eye on the meaning and purpose of life. To them, nothing really mattered—consequences be damned. To me, nothing mattered only in theory but not necessarily in practice, and the consequences of the “nothing matters” philosophy seemed to me to carry some gravity.
In fact, most recently, I was having a text-based conversation with a couple of acquaintances on a spiritual awakening path. At the time, I was feeling an intense wave of grief and lamenting over a certain facet of the human experience along with my own personal struggles. I shared my thoughts and experiences with them in three vulnerable voice notes that captured my voice cracking due to tears. Within the hour, one of these people replied with a link to an “Om mani padi hum” music video and asked me to listen to it. Then, she proceeded to comment on what we were talking about before I mentioned my own personal struggles. A sentence later, she wrote: remember only the ego suffers. It also causes the suffering. The soul just observes.” (This is something I’ve heard over and over again for the past four years on this path.) Then, we were off to the next topic like rapid-fire.
The ego causes suffering.
I couldn’t deny that she and others certainly have a point—I still believe that to this day—but in that precise moment, I was dealing with something long-standing that felt real to me and was hoping to be met with some other perspective I could easily sink my teeth into, or at the very least, some basic human empathy. Instead, I received a sentence that reeked of spiritual bypassing. With hardly anything said, I left the group chat, never to return.
In a short message before blocking her, I said: “If someone’s family member passed away, you wouldn’t tell the remaining family members that death isn’t real, would you? Or if someone had cancer, would you tell them it’s only the body and to just forget about the pain? Even if you know, deep down, that there is an essential part of us that is beyond pain and suffering, why would you frame it like this when someone is clearly distressed? Perhaps some basic emotional maturity and real-world social skills weren’t properly developed and you’re using non-dual concepts to bypass a felt sense of discomfort….”
Speaking of death, amid my reverence for radical non-dual teachings, I bypassed my own feelings about my beloved feline companion, Alice, after her death in late 2022. For a short time, my belief that “no one actually dies because there is no self” seemed to help me cope. In many ways, it genuinely did. However, I was still aware of the fact that what I thought was my beloved cat was no longer in sight; that consciousness had been lifted from her physical vessel and that the illusion would never return. I cried myself to sleep, at times, for eleven solid months. Even an understanding of death as illusory wasn’t enough to quell the pain of the illusion itself. In those raw and tender moments, I was once again reminded of how challenging it is to escape the human experience, no matter how many satsangs you attend or books you read.
I have also noticed that some of these so-called “friends” and acquaintances on the non-dual path often carry massive residual unhealed trauma at a cellular level, including attachment trauma, that sometimes, unbeknownst to them, oozes out of them while they either intentionally or unintentionally convince themselves and others that they’re just “filled to the brim with light, love, peace, and good vibes.” It’s all an appearance. Sometimes, in my opinion, it looks like these same people are performing a version of “look-at-me-I’ve-achieved-the-American-dream, except-I-am-in-lotus-pose-with-dreadlocks-and-eating-tofu.” They’re selling a hyper-capitalistic veneer of “health,” “prosperity,” and “success” and calling it “spiritual.”
I have met yoga teachers who didn’t practice their yamas at all: in fact, I have met some “nice, vegan” yoga instructors who deliberately violated satya (truthfulness) and lied through their teeth about other people, myself included. They also didn’t really display ahimsa (non-violence or compassion in thought, word, and action) when they proceeded to write cold reviews or messages to people who didn’t really do anything wrong—at least not deliberately—and actually needed some guidance. They enjoyed using their spiritual practices as a sort of accessory, but certainly didn’t seem to embody a state of true unconditional love and compassion for all beings. I began to see the hypocrisy in some “spiritual circles,” and once again, this slowly but surely turned me off.
What’s more, the same person who sent me a link to “om mani padme hum” video when I was in physical pain actually told me she feels she doesn’t need a job because “I can’t work when I am in ego death” and “we actually need very little, anyway…less really is more.”
“I believe that less is more too,” I said, “and I would love to live off-the-grid in a tiny cabin like Henry David Thoreau, but sh*t costs money. Food prices have risen 25 percent in the past couple of years, and not everyone is lucky enough to be able to grow their own food…Even so, we still need some things, and those things unfortunately cost money.”
She had absolutely nothing to say to this.
I rest my case.
To conclude, it isn’t that I do not believe in non-dual teachings anymore; I clearly still do. I also find it incredibly helpful to rewatch documentaries like the “Samadhi” series or read Ram Dass, Rupert Spira, Michael Singer, or Eckhart Tolle when I find myself going too far in the other direction and getting too caught up in the human experience.
However, my relationship to the teachings themselves has changed. I do not use the teachings to bypass my own or other people’s experiences like I once did. I also think they sometimes fall short in explaining documented phenomena like near-death experiences and downplay the importance of thoughts and beliefs in creating our experience, however illusory—especially the radical teachings on “no-self.” Clearly, radical non-dual teachings have their limitations, and we have to be aware of them.
In the words of the great William Shakespeare,
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
~
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