A Word I Can't Seem to Understand: Non-Duality and Our Living World | Frankly 144
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2026
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Greetings. |
| 0:13.0 | Today I wanted to talk about something that I don't understand. |
| 0:20.0 | For a while now, I've been asking people who come on the program and |
| 0:25.2 | others to define non-duality for me. I think at least seven podcast guests, most recently |
| 0:34.7 | this week with Andrew Holichick. |
| 0:38.3 | They're all thoughtful people. |
| 0:40.3 | Some of them have spent decades inside that paradigm. |
| 0:45.3 | And it dawned on me this morning on a bike ride, which is usually where I get these |
| 0:52.3 | realizations that every time I ask for that definition, |
| 0:57.8 | I listen closely, I nod, I feel like I'm right at the cusp of understanding it, and then |
| 1:06.0 | it's gone. And I walk away with my hands empty, which is, I guess, why I've repeated the question at least seven times to guests and others. |
| 1:21.3 | I've assumed that the problem was me. |
| 1:24.7 | I'm not still enough. |
| 1:26.6 | I have too many ADHD tendencies. I'm not still enough. I have too many ADHD tendencies. I'm not advanced enough on my |
| 1:33.5 | journey. I'm too impatient and the like. But this morning, a different thought crept in. Maybe I keep |
| 1:43.3 | failing to understand non-duality because I was raised in a way and grew up |
| 1:50.4 | in a culture that makes it almost impossible to understand. I'm sure you've heard the old |
| 1:57.8 | line about a fish that doesn't know what water is. The fish has never been dry, so wetness isn't a thing that it can point to. |
| 2:06.6 | It's just the medium. |
| 2:08.6 | To a fish, it's both everywhere and nowhere at once. |
| 2:12.4 | And I suspect a lot of us in the West are like that fish. |
| 2:17.9 | We're swimming in the very thing that makes non-duality invisible to us, and we can't see |
... |
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