A web search suggests that nondual awareness has developed a substantial digital ecosystem. Sam Harris’s secular Waking Up app claims millions of users and a 50,000-member community; Rupert Spira and Science and Nonduality each reach hundreds of thousands through YouTube; Loch Kelly packages “glimpses” of nondual awareness into brief exercises; and the Headless Way, Liberation Unleashed, and Reddit’s nonduality forum offer free experiments, personal guidance, and discussion. This is still a subculture, but no longer an obscure one.
The surrounding terrain is favorable. The proportion of American adults practicing some form of meditation more than doubled between 2002 and 2022, from 7.5 to 17.3 percent. Nondual practice has also been adapted to the contemporary attention span: an app, podcast, or four-minute “glimpse” can introduce what once required access to an Asian contemplative lineage. Social and geopolitical turmoil supplies an additional motive—the wish to find a place of refuge from the fear, rage, and tribal identification being continuously stimulated by our news and social-media environment. Social media, however, is better at delivering momentary insights than stabilizing them; its business model depends on reactivating the very identities these practices seek to loosen. NIH overview
The most useful version of nondual awareness requires no metaphysical belief that “everything is one.” It is the more modest recognition that the frightened, angry, narrative “I” is one construction appearing within awareness, not the entirety of what one is. Thoughts and emotions can then be treated as information rather than commands. This creates a small but consequential interval between provocation and response—an opportunity to choose rather than merely enact the ancient defensive routines of the animal body.
This might help us design a different kind of self: not the abolition of self, but a more provisional and revisable one, worn lightly enough to accommodate changing affiliations and circumstances. A recent theoretical model describes meditation as reorganizing the many embodied, emotional, narrative, interpersonal, and social processes that compose the self, eventually increasing “self-flexibility.” A small study comparing long-term meditators with controls found better emotion recognition and reduced out-group bias, although its correlational design falls far short of demonstrating that nondual practice will produce a more cooperative society. Self-pattern model; prosociality study
The obstacles are formidable. Human coalitional psychology was shaped by millennia of competition between groups, and the societies that gave us sophisticated nondual philosophies were hardly free of tribal warfare. A contemplative state does not redistribute resources, restrain a dictator, design trustworthy institutions, or neutralize technologies that profit from outrage. It can also become spiritual bypassing—a private anesthetic that makes an intolerable world easier to tolerate—or another commercial industry organized around charismatic teachers. For some people, especially with intensive deconstructive practice, the loosening of self can shade into distressing depersonalization or derealization.
It is unlikely that explicitly “nondual awareness” will sweep through society as a mass philosophy. Something more modest could spread: a secular mental skill for becoming less completely possessed by one’s constructed identity and its reactive emotions. For that skill to contribute to new social structures, it would have to be joined to ethical commitments, face-to-face community, conflict-resolution practices, institutional accountability, and political action.
The useful destination is not a population of detached selves but of lightly held selves—capable of firm action without hatred, affiliation without tribal possession, and retreat into spacious awareness followed by return to the difficult work of the world. Nondual awareness can be a refuge from social disintegration. Its larger value begins when we come back out of the refuge.
Note: the above text was written by ChatGPT in response to the following prompt: "Please do a web search for social media or web sites promoting non dual (synonyms: non-dual, or nondual) awareness and generate a brief essay (in the format of a MindBlog post - https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/ ) that evaluates the possibility of its spread throughout society, facilitated by people realizing that non-dual awareness might be both a refuge and a practical tool for functioning in the world during the current disintegration of our social and geopolitical order, and an aid in designing a self to support emerging new world structures - a self untethered from the reactive emotions usually triggered by the intensity of current events."
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