Letting Go of Seeking: My Unexpected Shift into Nonduality
/What started as a chance encounter with a philosophy poster in an underground station completely transformed my understanding of reality, identity, and the very nature of seeking itself. This is the story of how I moved from being a Chemical Engineering student with conventional goals to discovering the profound simplicity of nonduality.
The Unexpected Beginning
I was deep into my engineering studies at university, focused on building a successful career, when I stumbled upon a poster advertising a philosophy class.
Something drew me to attend, and I found myself in a room exploring Eastern philosophy for the first time. The teacher introduced us to Advaita Vedanta - a Sanskrit term meaning "not two" - the philosophy that there is no real division between us and others, between me and the world.
This ancient teaching suggested that all suffering stems from our failure to recognise our true nature - that we are not separate individuals but expressions of one unified consciousness.
The promise was clear: enlightenment awaited those who realized this oneness in every moment.
The Seeker's Path: Years of Dedicated Practice
That single class planted a seed that would redirect my entire life trajectory. My goal shifted from becoming a successful engineer to becoming a successful spiritual seeker.
I embraced the belief that if I just sought hard enough, long enough, I would eventually find what I was looking for - eternal happiness and peace of mind. This was exciting!
I threw myself into the prescribed practices with the same dedication I had once applied to my engineering studies:
- Daily meditation sessions following traditional techniques
- Spiritual retreats to deepen my practice
- Service work within the spiritual community
- Scripture study of recommended texts
- Group participation and eventually leadership roles
The path seemed to be working. I experienced moments of oneness and connection, as did others in our groups. We shared these glimpses during our gatherings, reinforcing our belief that we were making progress - not there yet, but definitely getting closer through our dedicated efforts.
Challenging the Foundation: New Teachers, New Questions
After several years of intensive seeking, I encountered teachings that began to challenge my fundamental assumptions. Anthony de Mello's book "Awareness" questioned whether all this hard work toward a future state of enlightenment was actually necessary.
Then Nisargadatta Maharaj's "I Am That" introduced the practice of self-inquiry - repeatedly asking "Who am I?" - though it still implied that realization would come through sustained effort.
The bigger disruption came when I discovered Jiddu Krishnamurti's teachings. His teachings made intellectual sense but challenged everything I thought I knew about spiritual practice.
He spoke of the spiritual ego and questioned the very idea that meditation and effort could lead to enlightenment. This created a delicious crisis in my understanding - if practice wasn't the path, then what was?
Here was a teacher who seemed to embody an enlightened state, yet he was dismantling the very foundations of seeking itself. It was like having the rug pulled out from under my spiritual feet, and somehow it felt liberating and deeply confusing at the same time.
The Radical Shift: Discovering A Direct Path to Nonduality
Everything changed when I encountered what some call radical nonduality or neo-Advaita - I like to call it simply nonduality.
This teaching pointed to something completely different from what I had been pursuing. Instead of suggesting that "all will be one in the future through practice," it declared that all is already one right now! How can you try to be one, when all is already one?!
The separate self that I thought needed to be trained and developed through years of spiritual practice was revealed to be illusory from the start. There was nothing to achieve, nowhere to go, no one to become enlightened. This wasn't a future state to attain - it was the present reality that had never been otherwise.
It was like discovering I'd been searching for my glasses while wearing them all along - except infinitely more profound and slightly embarrassing.
The Final Pieces: Questioning Free Will
The most profound shift came when I began questioning the existence of free will itself. Influenced by thinkers like Sam Harris and through my own logical investigation, I realized that the very notion of ‘me’ making 'choice might be an illusion.
This insight was deeply revolutionary: if there's no such thing as free and independent choices, then there's no independent one thinking thoughts or performing actions.
Just as the heart beats spontaneously and lungs breathe automatically, the brain thinks and everything simply happens as it will. There's no separate individual orchestrating any of it.
The seeker I thought I was? Just another spontaneous arising in consciousness, like clouds forming in an empty sky.
Beyond Enlightenment: The Simple Recognition
What I had imagined enlightenment to be - some permanent, blissful state of consciousness - dissolved into something far simpler and more ordinary.
Enlightenment isn't a special state for a special someone. It's the recognition that there never was a separate individual to become enlightened in the first place!
The sense of being a separate self doesn't disappear forever (that's not what awakening means). Rather, it's seen as a kind of programmed appearance that comes and goes.
The profound ordinariness of this recognition was initially shocking after years of seeking something extraordinary.
It's like realising you've been looking for water while swimming in the ocean - the very thing you sought was the medium in which all the seeking was happening.
Teachers Along the Way
Along this pathless path, I found several teachers to be very helpful. Paul Smit, Cameron Reilly and Ramesh Balsekar come to mind. Other good ‘teachers’ are Wayne Liquorman and several teachers on the youtube channel Conscious TV.
The Journey That Never Was
Perhaps the most paradoxical realization was that the entire journey of seeking had been spontaneous - not something "I" had chosen to undertake.
The seeking happened, the discoveries arose, and even this sharing occurs - all without a central controller making it happen.
Right now, for example, it feels like I’m typing this, but it also feels like it’s all just happening spontaneously. I suspect this is quite a common experience.
Looking back, what seemed like a personal spiritual journey was simply life unfolding as it does, including the appearance of someone on a path toward something that was never actually absent. The cosmic joke was on me - and I was the joke!
Sharing the Pathless Path
This understanding has fundamentally altered how I engage with spiritual content and teaching mindfulness, which continues to happen.
Rather than promoting practices to achieve future states, I find myself pointing to what's already present - the backdrop of awareness that doesn't require improvement or attainment.
The beauty of this recognition is its availability. It's not dependent on years of practice, special states of consciousness, or being chosen by grace.
It's the simple seeing that what we've been seeking was never actually hidden - just overlooked in our earnest efforts to find it elsewhere.
This transformation from seeking to finding to recognizing there was never anything lost continues to inform how I approach spiritual dialogue and content creation.
The journey from conventional goals through traditional seeking to nonduality, (or call it radical nonduality, neo advaita or wow wow wow, everything just happens!) reveals the profound ordinariness of what we might call awakening - and the extraordinary freedom found in that very ordinariness.
Sometimes the most profound truths are hiding in plain sight, wearing the most ordinary clothes.
Is the desperate seeking over? It seems so. Is the journey over? I don’t think so. Everyday, there is something new to learn…which all happens by itself! As it does for you and everyone else too.
Want to learn more?
Check out my favourite nondual and advaita quotes here or some of my favourite spiritual books here.
Or message me! Would love to hear from you.
