Twelve essays on the seam between a person and what they are doing — watching yourself, the doer disappearing, the other one across from you, and what is left when it ends.
These essays are about one seam: the boundary between a person and what they are doing, and what happens to that boundary under absorption, effort, pain, opposition and company. Several traditions noticed it. So did the laboratory, from a different direction and about a hundred years ago.
The traditions are not saying the same thing, and this collection does not claim they are. Advaita Vedānta holds that there is one reality and your deepest self is identical with it. Buddhist anattā denies that any such self exists — an enduring, unchanging essence, not persons or ordinary self-reference. Those are contradictory answers to the same question, argued over for roughly a thousand years. Daoist wu wei is not a claim about selfhood at all, and Sufi fanā sits inside a theism the others do not share.
“Non-duality” as a single English category gathering all of these is a twentieth-century construction, made largely by writers with a thesis, and the thesis was that the traditions agree. Each term here is used in its own language and none is treated as a synonym for another. The closing essay settles the account in full — including the strongest objection to the collection, which is that assembling it this way is itself the error.
Every essay carries a section headed The case against, in the body rather than at the end. Two of them — on pain, and on the teaching pair — put the caution before the idea, because in those two the idea can be used to talk somebody past a signal or to justify an asymmetry. The tenth essay makes a claim that is mine rather than any tradition’s, sets out what would count against it, and then reports that the test left the question open rather than settled in its favour.
Read them in order, or take whichever title describes your week.