Tastes, not Titles
A Useful Embarrassment
I’ve been listening to a friendly debate between Joseph Goldstein and Sam Harris about nonduality, which is exactly the kind of thing I love and exactly the kind of thing that makes me realize how under-equipped I am to talk about something I still intend to keep talking about.
The conversation circles around Vipassana, Dzogchen, non-clinging, awakening, gradual practice, direct recognition, and the strange possibility that the self may not be quite as centrally located as it claims. This is familiar ground to me in one sense. I practice. I’ve read. I’ve listened. I’ve had real moments where the usual sense of “me” loosened, went quiet, or briefly stepped out of the room.
Still, listening to people who actually know the terrain is clarifying in a slightly bruising way.
They’re talking about the suttas, the history of interpretation, the differences between traditions, and the terms that carry all this weight: anattā, dukkha, sati, samādhi, nibbāna, dependent origination. Some of these words are Pāli. Some of the traditions I’m drawn to are not. Zen, Dzogchen, Mahāmudrā, Advaita, and Sufi-inflected nondual language are not all interchangeable tokens at the same arcade.
I know this in theory.
In practice, I sometimes write like a man who has wandered into the library, opened three beautiful books, smelled the paper, and thought, yes, I am basically a librarian now.
Words That Do Not Belong To Me
The tricky thing is that I’m not writing from nowhere. I’ve had experiences in meditation that matter to me. There have been moments when the narrator dropped out and experience kept going just fine without him. No little clerk behind the eyes. No committee of “me” stamping each sound, sensation, and thought as personal property.
Those moments felt vivid, ordinary, and strangely merciful. They did not feel like an idea. They felt like a correction.
Maybe that was a taste of no-self. Maybe it was something adjacent to cessation. Maybe it was a temporary shift in attention that my ego, being a highly skilled publicist, would now like to rebrand as deep realization. That last possibility should remain very much on the table.
Because the ego is funny that way. It can hear a teaching about emptiness and immediately start admiring itself for being so empty. It can survive its own disappearance long enough to write a thoughtful paragraph about how impressive the disappearance was. It can borrow a robe, clear its throat, and begin speaking in a tone no one requested.
This is where the language gets dangerous. “Emptiness” can become a decoration. “Awareness” can become a vibe. “No-self” can become either a profound insight or, on a bad day, an excuse not to fold laundry because technically there is no folder.
The words are beautiful, but they are not mine just because I find them moving. They belong to long traditions of practice, argument, translation, interpretation, and correction. They have been held by people who spent their lives with these texts and methods, not just by people like me who can occasionally pronounce the terms with enough confidence to fool a room for maybe four seconds.
Tastes Are not Titles
That doesn’t mean I should stop mentioning nonduality in my writing. It would be dishonest to pretend it isn’t part of how I understand consciousness, suffering, disability, family, fear, attention, and the odd looseness of being a person at all.
The self has felt less solid to me for a long time, and practice has made that less of an abstract claim. It has shown me, in flashes, that experience does not always need to be organized around a hard center. It has shown me that some forms of suffering seem to depend on the mind gripping everything and saying mine, mine, mine until the whole room starts to shrink.
That much I can say.
What I can’t honestly say is that I understand the full doctrinal shape of what I’ve tasted. I don’t have Pāli in my bones. I haven’t studied the Nikāyas with scholarly discipline. I don’t know the commentarial traditions in any serious way. I can gesture toward Theravāda, Zen, Dzogchen, Mahāmudrā, Advaita, and Sufi thought because they’ve shaped my imagination and practice, but gesturing is not mastery.
There is a difference between saying, “This has helped me see something,” and saying, “I know what this tradition ultimately means.”
The first sentence feels true.
The second one should probably be taken away from me gently, maybe with a snack.
A Smaller Grammar
The adjustment I want is not silence. It’s proportion.
I want to keep writing about nonduality, no-self, attention, and the collapse of the little throne I usually sit on inside my own head. I want to keep describing the strange relief that can come when consciousness is not busy turning every passing experience into autobiography.
But, I want to write from the right altitude. Not as a teacher. Not as a scholar. Not as a man who briefly misplaced his ego and returned with a laminated credential.
I can say that practice has changed me. I can say that the self is less stable than it feels. I can say that attention, when it clears, can reveal a world less divided than the one I usually narrate. I can say that ancient traditions have given me better words than I would have found alone.
I can also say that I am still learning what those words cost.
Maybe that humility is not a retreat from the subject. Maybe it is the beginning of speaking about it more honestly. Tastes, not titles. Glimpses, not authority. A few real openings, a lot of unfinished understanding, and enough sense, I hope, to stop turning every candle into a sunrise.
Far from faking it
Not a scholar by any means
Close enough to talk
