A Word I Can't Seem to Understand: Non-Duality and Our Living World | Frankly 144
5/29/202614 min
In this week's Frankly, Nate discusses his long-running attempt to understand non-duality, and why this concept has remained just out of his grasp despite years of conversations with teachers, thinkers, and podcast guests. He begins with a personal reflection on the possibility that his difficulty understanding non-duality does not stem from lack of intelligence or a short attention span, but from the particular cultural operating system that Westerners seem to inherit from birth. This operating system – which appears everywhere from language to economics to institutions – reinforces separation between the subject and the object, the observer and the observed, the self and the world. It trains us to experience ourselves as isolated individuals standing apart from the living systems that sustain us.
The latter part of this episode turns toward identifying moments where this separation starts to soften: experiences with music, grief, nature, and deep presence, to name a few. Nate connects these insights to the metacrisis as a whole, suggesting that humanity's treatment of the biosphere might be rooted in the same underlying assumption of separateness. Rather than arriving at an outright definition of non-duality, Nate closes with the possibility that loosening our grip on certainty may itself be a large part of the work.
Have there been moments in your own life when the boundary between yourself and the world briefly dissolved? Why does non-duality seem so difficult to define within modern Western culture? And what does it mean to consider separation from nature to be the foundation beneath many of today's global crises?
(Recorded May 28th, 2026)
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First 90 secondsNate Hagens· Host0:00
[on-hold music] Greetings. Today I wanted to talk about something that I don't understand. Um, for a while now, I've been asking people who come on the program and others, uh, to define non-duality for me. I think at least seven podcast guests, most recently this week with Andrew Holecek. Um, they're all thoughtful people. Some of them have spent decades, uh, inside that paradigm. And it dawned on me this morning, um, on a bike ride, which is usually where I get these, uh, realizations, that every time I ask for that definition, I listen closely, I nod, I feel like I'm right at the cusp of understanding it, and then it's gone, and I walk away [laughs] with, with my hands, uh, empty, which is, I guess why I've repeated the question at least seven times, uh, to guests and others. I've assumed that the problem was me. I'm not still enough, I have too many ADHD tendencies,