Anton Rogachevski

I'm really excited to share this here, the best place on earth for this piece to be received. It started many years ago in a thread in this very forum, and since then was revised and added upon to make it the most comprehensive guide that addresses all the most important points about Non-Duality, and connects it to my new meta theory of epistemology: Post Non-Duality. If you are just beginning this journey you should check it out, as it collects all the most juicy insights and connects them beautifully. I hope you enjoy, It's quite the read, but it's really worth it I promise! I would love to hear the opinions of the masters here, to sharpen and revise this even further, I would be honored. You can read it here in my blog for a more updated, beautiful and organized view, and I will also post it here so you can reference and comment on the specific details. Bonus: In the blog your can also read the profound user comments that dive even deeper into the subject. --------- Deconstructing "Reality" - How to access Direct Experience I will try to show you step by step how an Illusion of “reality” may be formed within pure experience. We will start by defining and pointing towards Direct Experience, what I call the “The Basic Epistemic Ground” the foundation on which I think we should later lay all our Philosophical Framework. The focus here will be on Phenomenology, and the nature of experience as it relates to reality – after all Experience is presumably our only doorway through which we may eventually access and study the Physical Realm, so we better be sure of it’s ability and accuracy as we are trying to derive Ontological claims, if that’s even possible. How can we know after all what is real and what isn’t for sure? What really exists? What is “existence”? These are the big questions, and the most interesting questions in my opinion. You first need to be really interested in these questions, because if you don’t actually care about Truth or Ultimate Reality you won’t have the energy, patience and dedication required to focus and to be hyper aware of your direct experience in order to see it clearly. Prepare for adventure… This is a radical shift from regular perception, so just for the sake of this experiment, try to open your mind as much as you can. There will be some paradoxical notions, which will appear contradictory at times, and yet, they are the best way to point at something that you can’t really describe: “You can’t peg a nail into the sky.” Old zen quote Imagine with me a world which is completely blank, even from an observer, we then shall draw every aspect of “reality” from scratch. Let’s begin with a clean slate, and gently put all our notions about reality aside for a moment. When the experiment is over, you may take them all back, that is, if you would still consider them valid. It’s all metaphors that should point to direct experience, so don’t take anything literally here. Try to see where the sign points, and don’t try to over analyze the sign itself. A very important note before we begin This text is not meant to be empty theory! It’s a guided live contemplation exercise, so look deeply into your experience as you go along. Pause from time to time and look directly at your own experience. Ask yourself: is what I’m reading truly aligned with what I’m experiencing right now? Be radically honest. Don’t take my word for it—verify it for yourself. Otherwise, this inquiry risks becoming just another belief system, which would lead you away from what I’m pointing to, not towards it. The nature of The Void Important! Anything you assume “The Void” is – it’s not! So don’t form an “object” out of nothing. Don’t objectify the void. There is nothing at all—no one to see, no one to hear, no “aware entity” watching a “reality.” There is only The Void, aware of itself. In a strange loop, it turns inward, reflecting itself endlessly. And yet, it needs no knowledge of itself, for it already is what it seeks to know. The Void has these “channels of perception”: mind, sensations, hearing, sight, smell and taste. Even to call them “senses” already ruins what they truly are. The senses aren’t a separate feature of void, they are The Void! You could say that phenomenologically speaking there are only senses in existence, without an experiencer. It’s true—we generally assume, with high confidence, that something exists outside our experience. But this belief is rarely examined. It operates as a background assumption, taken for granted so automatically that we don’t even notice we’re making it. What I’m asking you to do is simple but radical: question that assumption. Look closely and see for yourself that it is, in fact, just that—an assumption, not a certainty. The senses are not located anywhere—not in space, nor in time. Phenomenologically, they appear omnipresent and eternal. Even the feeling of “here” is just another sensation, as is the impression of something being “out there.” These are not facts, but appearances within experience. The senses don’t observe a world from a distance—they are the unfolding of experience itself, the flow of pure energy taking shape, moving from formlessness into form. Through these silent marvels—the senses—the Void turns inward, beholding itself without eyes. What they reveal cannot be spoken, for they do not point to things, but shimmer as the very seeing. Their touch is enchantment, their song unspeakable. No language can capture the glory of the Void knowing itself through the miracle of presence. It can only be recognized when the mind is completely still—when all the senses turn inward and there is no interference or interpretation. In that state, the body is deeply relaxed, and a quiet clarity emerges. The usual boundaries dissolve: there is no separation between subject and object, between body and world. In this collapse of duality, the Void reveals its infinite nature as pure experience. As a dear friend Jinzo once wisely noted, calling it “The Void” can make it sound barren or empty—when in truth, it’s anything but. He prefers the term “The Source,” a name that better reflects its overflowing fullness, the wellspring from which all energy flows and to which all returns. In that light, “Void” may mislead; it isn’t a lack, but a silent abundance beyond form. Anything you can imagine it to be, it is not! The “void” is not the Void. How appearances are formed within The Source The Source can transform itself into seeming “objects” at will, but these are just hollow figures without substance, they can’t do anything but to simply appear and disappear. A castle built in the sand is, from one perspective, truly a castle. And yet, in essence, it’s just a shaped pile of sand—recognized as a ‘castle’ only by the mind. This doesn’t mean objects lack meaning. To the child who built it, the castle is deeply important. It brings joy, imagination, pride. And when a bully comes and knocks it down, the sorrow is just as real. Its emptiness is not lack, but infinite potential—the silent womb from which all appearances arise. These appearances are not separate from the Void; they are the Void, shaped into fleeting forms. You might say its nature is holographic: a self-generating display in which the formless becomes form, only to reflect itself back in awareness. Emptiness is unmanifested void, “objects” are manifested void. When many “objects” are manifested, and “interconnected”, “reality” is formed. “Reality” is the dream of the unawakened void. Inside the dream, many things might appear to “happen”, but it’s only due to the dream state, or Maya. This process is analogous to dreaming at night, many things appear to happen to you, but really you just lie there sleeping. Only when you wake up, you realise it was all just a dream. Maya is vast—so vast it holds galaxies, lifetimes, worlds, space and time within it. But don’t be fooled by the grandeur of these names. They are all just expressions of the Void, dream-figures moving within a dream. These appearances may interact with one another, but they cannot touch the Void itself. Like images on a screen, they flicker and fade—except here, there is no screen at all. It’s beyond any category, and so it’s neither big, nor small, it’s both and neither, since it contains all there is. It’s paradoxical, so logic can’t grasp it. The hypothesis of the formation of the idea of “Time” The idea of “Time” is generated by the movement of attention through memory. The Now is never experienced as a sequence, but always as immediacy. All “past” and “future” are appearances within now. Another aspect of The Void is that it’s timeless and ever-present. The nature of thought, and how to avoid delusion Talking about The Void can be highly confusing and dangerous, because in that instance, the low-consciousness mind will invent a concept about the void, and pretend it “knows” it. But we must do that so we can understand our way out this. Thoughts are like memory files—bundles of stored data containing images, sounds, words, and sensations from the past. As phenomena, thoughts are real in the sense that they can be noticed, even felt, when the mind is quiet. But the content they carry—the narratives they weave—is not reliable. These stories are not truth; they are fragments, shaped by perspective, partial and relative to context. Eventually, these stories become so dominant that they replace the direct “live feed” with an endless rerun of mental commentary. The brain begins to watch its own echo, rather than the world. And as the light of awareness dims—distracted, fragmented, entangled in narrative—the void forgets itself. It forgets that it was always playing with appearances, and it falls asleep in the dream it authored. What we are trying to do here is to use thought to describe itself, and later to cancel itself. “To use a thorn, to take out another thorn.” R. Maharishi To protect yourself from delusion, get really good at experiencing directly and seeing thoughts for what they are. The mechanism of Creation The creation of “reality” occurs when thoughts floating in the void are glued together into a story, then out of low consciousness, the imaginary story is believed to be true. It’s glue is “logic”, “rationality” and advanced ethereal terms. (which are all thoughts too.) For example: “I did this” = Subject Thought + Action Thought + Object Thought = “Reality” Idea = Maya Only when logic is applied to stick the story together, does reality “occur”, but in fact, from a phenomenological perspective all that happened was: three thoughts arose, one after another, no action, no doer, no object were actually present inside of experience. The Formation of an “Ego” out of fear, logic and language Out of deluded fear, the void is attaching it’s infinite identity to this little finite idea, and plays a “character” inside the dream of “reality” of low-consciousness. The “I” is not a subject, but a grammatical habit. The thought “I am” does not prove a self, only a linguistic echo that reflects itself within The Void. And so attachment that arises out of fear is one cause of the seeming trouble. Attachment sucks The Void into drama, and gets it fully involved in the story, it’s attached to “body, identity, property, thoughts, people, groups, life” – All these appearances are now referred to as “My reality”. And so the “ego” is simply a thought that was entangled in the “mind”, “body” and “sensations”. The thought “I” is no different than the thought “coffee table”, except it was attached to the “body” and the sensations, out of fear. Who’s afraid you ask? Who told you there has to be someone to have fear? Fear is another floating sensation in the void. It’s a product of low consciousness, an aspect of darkness. It occurs when the void has bought the story of “being a real entity” completely to the point where it believes it can die. This is how a low-self is being artificially created out of nothing. Now it fears death and other things that may “harm” it. The “laws” of logic suggest that “subjects” can do “actions” upon “objects”, but who said that was true? Why can’t action be made on it’s own, without a subject? What if object, subject, and action were all one undivided phenomenon, and only appeared as if they were separate. It’s important to remember here that the ego is a program inside the evolved biological brain out there that is meant to help the body survive better in actual danger, it’s an illusion phenomenologically speaking, but it has an actual function out there somewhere, so don’t just blame it for doing what it was meant to do. The myth of the nature of Darkness and The Void’s inherent mission This part is a bit more mysterious and mythological, but it can somehow try to explain the existence of certain phenomenon within experience. So take that into account and remember that it’s a metaphorical story and not actuality. “So what is ‘darkness’?” you might ask. It is the void’s unawakened side, many times it’s referred to as the “Devil”, and on the opposite side there is the light side of “God”, yet the void transcends and includes such categories, which are only present in the brain. All these seeming “actions” that I describe are automatic, and there’s no actual “doer” who’s creating them, no one to be angry at, or to blame, it’s just the way the void is, it’s nature is both the good and bad, but these judgments of the brain are only present in low consciousness. Without some degree of darkness there wouldn’t be any manifestations because the Void is pure light, and just like in a projector you need to filter that light through film that covers some light partly to project a picture. The void isn’t perfect as we idealize “perfect” to be, it has started from complete darkness, and it is now gradually gaining light through a process of awakening. It’s manifestations are evolving and transforming darkness into the light of Love. Its perfection is like that of a tree, the grain of wood, or the curve of a drifting cloud—not flawless by calculation, but whole by nature. There are no mistakes in it, only forms that flow with an effortless harmony, pleasing not because they follow a rule, but because they simply are. The void is exploring itself through its many manifestations, which then return to it, to be born again, and start a new better journey, to better love, until they wake up again, and merge with their source. It’s in a constant battle against the inner darkness, and so it must stay vigilant to keep the light from fading – This is the dramatic aspect of Maya. You are it, you are void, and all the appearances in it. Your job is to love all of it, including the darkness! Because that’s what gonna heal you, so that you could finally return to your true self and unite into your infinite nature, if it’s the right time for you to do so. Nothing is hidden. Can you see that now? A very important final note – How not to use this text It’s a big mistake to try to apply this material to objective reality – That is what most religions had done, and had created epistemic monsters like “creationism” and “literalism”. All of it true only from a phenomenological perspective, and that is only within experience. Outside of experience it doesn’t make any sense at all, and should not imply any ontology whatsoever. Also, the belief that “if nothing is concrete, then nothing matters, so why do anything at all?” is not insight—it’s dogma, ignorance, and a form of nihilism. Reality’s lack of fixed meaning is not a void to despair in, but an opening into infinite meaning. It’s so profoundly full that, when truly seen, it may bring you to your knees in joy. But to glimpse this, you must first awaken—let go of second-hand spiritual narratives, and meet reality without assumptions.

Why would you want one?

@gettoefl I'm sorry, I can't quite understand that statement. If you don't exist, then who am I talking to? This seems like a confusion. (Just the kind of confusion I'm warning against in the text, which I assume you didn't read.)

@gettoefl The brain can unify all it's perceiving into one "whole" experience, but that's phenomenal and not noumenal. So "wholeness" along with "infinity" are both illusions caused by the inherent lack of ability to perceive the edge that stems from the apparent nature experience as seen from within. "Wholeness" is a nice idea, but it stops there. When you’re standing in a dense fog, it wraps around you like forever. The horizon dissolves. The silence is convincing. You cannot see where it ends, so it feels like it never does. Not infinite—only dressed like it. Experience is non-dual within itself, but from a meta-perspective, it includes the appearance of a duality between experience and a probable external world. This duality is epistemic, not ontological.

@Breakingthewall Everything is limited, there is not one thing that is limitless and I presume that it can't physically exist.

How do you define the "absolute"?

@samijiben You're illustrating exactly the kind of fallacy I'm trying so carefully to help people avoid. I truly wish you well, man. My suggestion: read the entire text again—slowly, word by word—and then look deeply and honestly at your own experience. Set aside everything you think you know. You can always pick it back up later if it still makes sense.

On the Illusion of Infinity and the Confusion of Realms It’s crucial to remember: experience only appears infinite. But reality itself—whatever that is—most likely is not. This is a common trap along the path: when someone awakens deeply into their inner world, they may feel as if they’ve touched something infinite, all-encompassing, eternal. And they have—but only within experience. Within the dream, not outside of it. Phenomenologically, the mind can’t find its edge. So it assumes there isn’t one. But this is not proof of actual infinity— only the shape of a perceptual illusion. When you’re standing in a dense fog, it wraps around you like forever. The horizon dissolves. The silence is convincing. You cannot see where it ends, so it feels like it never does. Not infinite—only dressed like it. This illusion arises because experience itself is inherently limited. It cannot perceive its own limits from within—so it interprets limitlessness. But what cannot be seen might still exist. Edges might be present just beyond the reach of awareness. To confuse this apparent infinity with the structure of the physical world is a mistake— a metaphysical leap that experience does not warrant. Many have made that leap, imagining their felt unity proves the universe is One, or boundless, or somehow “them.” But that’s not insight. That’s projection. Let this serve as a warning and a reminder: Do not draw ontological conclusions from phenomenological data. Do not turn the shape of your dream into the structure of the world. Experience is real. But it is not reality itself. And what reality truly is remains unspeakable—beyond certainty, beyond even this.

@samijiben Bravo. The Nobel Prize Ceremony invitation is on its way : )

This is a very radical and bold Ontological claim. What is it based on? Where is the humility? You are basically claiming to know The Truth itself directly. If that's the case then you have solved all of philosophy and science.

You aren't missing anything. I never claimed to have ontology, I'm very critical of those who do think they have it. I said it multiple times in the essay and in the comments. What's beyond the veil of perception that is the Ontology, we don't have true access to it, but we can use abstractions, intuition and logic to understand it better, and Einstein is the proof that it is possible. So I say like I've said a thousand times, Please leave Ontology alone, unless you are a theoretical physicist. This is an inescapable fact, everything we will ever do or try to will still be Human. So what are you saying? Are you Post Human? -------- Now, I’m speaking hypothetically, so bear that in mind. It may be that experience is made of the same “substance” as everything else — that we ourselves are the Ontology, the very fabric of what is. What we perceive may also be Ontology, but not in a physical sense. Rather, it’s made of the strange, elusive stuff of Experience — a substance we cannot grasp from within experience itself. To experience, experience is like a sea floating within a seemingly infinite sea.

Ahh, where to begin? I already did most of it in the past comments. I just hate repeating myself. The fact that perception is limited it can't perceive limits and so it seems to it that everything is "limitless", like in the fog where you don't see the edge of the fog from within and so you think it's "endless". You are building castles in the sky here, I'm afraid you are disconnected from direct experience and you can't see its inherent limits. In other words, you still don't know just how much you don't know. Logic is a neat little ruler that is the grammar of how our brain understands things using abstractions, it's not that reality is logical, but that logic is built to make it easier for your brain to understand basic survival things better, and so it seems very coherent.

From my conversation with GPT, we shaped the essay like a dialog between a Zen master and a student: Student: But logic says there are subjects doing actions to objects. Isn’t that real? Master: Logic is the child's net cast into the ocean. It catches a few fish, but not the sea. Subject, object, action—clever words, But the doing is never separate from the doer. And the doer? A flicker in the doing. They are not three, but one unfolding. Student: So what is the purpose of it all? Master: To awaken. To remember. To love. The Source forgets itself in form, And finds itself again in beauty. Every heartache is a lantern. Every joy a mirror. The infinite learning to sing in finite voices. Student: And me? Master: You are the whole thing, dreaming you are small. Your task is not to escape it, But to embrace all of it— Yes, even the fear, even the doubt. Especially the parts you wish would go away. To love without condition is to return home. Student: Is anything hidden? Master: Only by your own refusal to look.

Couldn't agree more. This is the fallacy of believing in it like an ideology.

A beautiful analogy! In the highest degrees (which I don't have personal experience with) they say that you see through it completely. But to reach such a state would take an incredible shift in the neurochemistry, and isn't by any means regular or normal, or "sane" for that matter.

@Breakingthewall I agree that most non dual teachers make that fallacy of applying phenomenological insights onto the ontology of reality. That's what my essay is all about. I'm also trying to not dismiss non-duality but to situate it within a physical framework where both truths can coexist.

What do you mean by that? First you might need to clarify what is meant by such a bold term. The wikipedia definition is not good enough? Ontology isn't about promoting a specific view — it's a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being itself. It seeks to clarify what actually exists, what reality is made of at the most fundamental level, and what it means for something to be real.

What is your bold statement based on? How have you reached that unfortunate conclusion?

@samijiben Show me. Ontology is the study of being — of what fundamentally is. There’s nothing deeper than that. Just to clarify, I haven’t made any ontological claims myself, as I’ve mentioned several times in the essay. If physics were mere fantasy, the device you're using right now wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t see anything — because photons wouldn’t reach your eyes. You wouldn’t hear anything — because no air vibrations would touch your eardrums. You wouldn’t even be alive — since there’d be no electrical activity in your nervous system. Science and physics have built everything around you. They’ve sent people to the moon and back. They’ve repeatedly proven themselves in practice. Now ask yourself: what has spirituality really delivered? Aside from cults, religions, dogma, and centuries of conflict?

@samijiben What can there be more fundamental than physics & ontology? "Beyond" where? There is no beyond, it's reality's most basic ground.

@Breakingthewall I'm afraid your epistemology is a bit confused and disorganized. It's hard to understand what you are trying to convey. What are you even talking about? Physics? ontology? I'd recommend sitting and writing it out in an essay form to organize your view and to see things more clearly. What is your priority of values? Is truth important? What is true? What exists? Non duality is not an ideology, it's the most basic nature of experience, it's how it's built and its very essence. It's all verifiable directly in experience, but you need to look with honesty and humility at what's right in front of you.

Nobody does. At least not yet and not completely.

@Breakingthewall "Change" is an idea within experience. I'm afraid you are a bit lost in concepts. There is change in the physical realm I presume, but that I leave for physicists to study.

We didn't yet find a way for a computer to even have experience, or to even understand how the brain is doing it. It's the hard problem essentially.