Prologue

Thoughts on Dualism and Belonging

Before the Retreat, A Poem

This is the prologue to Light: A 5-Day Memoir Into Stillness, and it includes a poem that Falling Into Place readers may recognize. I first shared it in one of the earliest posts on that newsletter: Forgetting, Remembering, and Belonging.

What you may not know is that the poem was written months before the vipassanā retreat described in this book. In fact, it was written long before this project, or any of my newsletters, existed.

And yet, it remains one of my favorite pieces. Something in it still feels alive. It captured a shift I didn’t fully understand at the time, but one I’ve come to see as the beginning of a profound unraveling. This silent retreat would deepen that unraveling, but this poem marked the first real crack in the illusion of separateness I had long lived inside.

This special installment of Light is free to all subscribers. I’m grateful to share it again here, with a bit more context, and to welcome those reading it for the first time.

More soon,
Glenn

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Prologue

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Dualism: Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life. “I” affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; “am” denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. “I am.” Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth!

— Aldous Huxley, Island

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In the months leading up to the retreat described in this book, something subtle but important began to shift for me. I had long been curious about non-duality, and I explored the concept through reading, reflecting, and asking questions. But it always felt conceptual. Distant.

For those new to the topic, non-duality is the idea that separation is an illusion. Beneath the appearance of individual things composed of self (or subject) and other (or object), there is only one seamless reality, undivided and whole. It’s not exactly a theory. It's more like a shift in perception. To paraphrase something Alan Watts might say: it's the realization that you are not a separate observer of the universe; you are the universe, experiencing itself through a particular point of view.

While I could understand the philosophy, I couldn’t feel it directly. Not in any real or sustained way.

Then one day, something broke open.

I wasn’t seeking it. I wasn’t even sitting in meditation. But after a series of profound moments (some inner, some outer), I had the strange and disorienting sense that the boundary between “me” and everything else had suddenly vanished. It wasn’t “enlightenment” or “bliss.” It was more like a gentle unburdening. A soft rupture in the story of separateness I’d been carrying for all of my adult life.

The next day, I sat alone and wrote the poem that follows. It came quickly, fluidly. Not as something I created, but as something I caught. Like water moving through stone, it didn’t need shaping, only space to flow.

Since then, I’ve made a few adjustments to the language of the poem to reflect what I now understand more clearly. But I’ve done my best to keep the core of it intact to what originally arrived: the tone, the clarity, the strangeness of that moment.

I don’t share this poem to convince you of anything. Non-duality is not a perspective that I think everyone needs to arrive at. This is simply where I found myself in the months before my vipassanā retreat. I was still living inside the felt experience of separation, but now with an undercurrent of knowing that what I perceived as separate was beginning to look more like illusion. I was still processing it. Still wondering what it meant.

This retreat became a continuation of that unfolding.

This poem was the beginning of that sense of belonging.

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Belonging

This body – this collection of particles, bound for a moment in a fleeting pattern we call “I.”

An illusion.

A necessary one, granting a sense of self, of purpose, of meaning, of longing, of love, of fear. But these are echoes. Constructs of the mind. Ripples on the surface of an ocean that was never divided.

Shakespeare knew: nothing is good or bad until thinking makes it so.

Every particle, every form, strives to exist. Pain is a murmur, a whisper pulling us to attention, a signal that we are stuck. In its absence, relief. A path forward.

Forward toward what? Toward where?

That is the cosmic joke of it all.

There is no destination. Only the desire to be.

Everything is falling, colliding, forming, reforming. Bonds and reactions, reactions and bonds. Patterns of particles entangled in a dance so intricate we imagine ourselves separate.

You. Me. Us. Them. That thing over there.

We forget.

We forget that nothing is separate. That everything is connected to everything else.

Our pain, our joy, our hunger, our insight — is one movement, one breath, one shifting flow of existence. We mistake this brief assembly of cells, molecules, atoms, and muons for a self.

But it is only this — now.

And this, too, will change.

Some bonds weave even more complex forms — patterns of new life. New beings. Each perceiving themselves as separate, believing they have emerged from nothing. From something beyond them. Beyond comprehension.

They, too, will carry the illusion of separation.

Until they transform again.

This life — this transient flicker of perception — is a construct built by the temporary belief in individuality. It makes space for contrast, for the experience of “other.”

And yet, believing ourselves apart, we strive to connect.

We create. Houses, schools, books, business, currency, justice, right, wrong. We search for meaning. All in an effort to connect the already connected.

But what does this mean — here, now, in this moment?

It means that everything we do shapes everything that is.

It means there is no “other.” 
That every “other” is us.

When we create pain, we create it in ourselves. When we create joy, it radiates through the whole. Because the whole is all there is.

So let this temporary pattern of particles — this “I” we each inhabit — flow in a way that brings beauty into form. Let it be witnessed, shared, and reflected. And in turn, witness the beauty that emerges all around you.

For existence reveals itself through experience.

Notice it.

Pay attention.

Beauty is everywhere.

Without a witness, a thing merely is.

And yet, to notice — to marvel, to stand in awe — is to bring it into being.

To appreciate is to create.

To see beauty is to make it so.

This does not mean you must see beauty in all things.

You do not need to appreciate everything.

In fact, you do not need to do anything at all.

But when you sense even the faintest glimmer of appreciation, pause — recognizing its fleeting impermanence.

Bask in the gift of its presence.

And in that moment…

Remember your belonging.

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