When Boundaries Dissolve
Exploring non-duality and Advaita wisdom as Metaphysics in the Flesh
Sometimes I loose the line between myself and the world. The boundary dissipates. My skin loosens, becomes porous, continuous with the air. Space and time are no longer textured the way you know it. The environment around me seems to breathe through me. I seem to be the same as air. I am atoms. And for a moment I am no longer a self sealed inside a body, but part of a wider tide of atoms and breath. This comes on quietly and then it hits. It’s so powerful and yet so natural. As if the body were remembering some old truth. Maybe that there was never any separation to begin with. Maybe that we are not (just) this hard piece of matter. Maybe that reality lies beyond what is visible, tangible. And in this moment it is as if some veil was lifted, revealing a profound continuity underlying all things.
No drugs, no medicine, just pure experience. Deep connection. A sudden unlearning of everything we think we know, while racing thoughts and clingy emotions cease spinning and mattering. It is metaphysics in the flesh, as we seem to experience the deep fabric of the universe that many have struggled to put into words.
These experiences of momentary dissolution point toward something that mystics, philosophers and consciousness researchers have explored for millennia, which is called non-duality. The term itself suggests the absence of the fundamental divisions we typically take for granted, such as the separation between self and other, subject and object, observer and observed. Countless minds have created important frameworks to help us grasp this concept and integrate it. However, non-duality is not an intellectual concept that can be fully grasped by the reasoning mind. Rather, it can truly be understood only as a lived reality, one that occasionally breaks through our ordinary perception.
When we lose the boundaries of our being, the usual architecture of consciousness temporarily collapses. The solid sense of “I” that normally occupies the center of experience (and which is rooted in our story, starting in childhood and nurtured through the programmed actions we steer to navigate in everyday life) finally becomes transparent. As our sense of I collapses, what remains is a field of awareness that has no clear center or edge. Mind that there is no void in this experience, rather a flow of sorts. In other words, we do not experience a loss of consciousness, but an expansion of it. An expansion that reveals our fundamental nature as undivided wholeness in continuity with everything else. And it feels like coming home.
The ancient tradition of Advaita Vedanta offers perhaps the most precise map for understanding these moments of boundary dissolution. When Advaita speaks of the realization that Atman (individual consciousness) and Brahman (universal consciousness) are one, it’s pointing directly to what happens in experiences like the one I described (and that happen more often than we notice). The metaphor of ocean and wave provides a beautiful framework for grasping this recognition.
Atman isn’t just your personal awareness or everyday mind—it’s the pure consciousness that exists before thoughts, emotions or identity form. Atman is what remains when you strip away your name, your history, your preferences, your conditioning, your entire story. It is the bare fact of being aware, beyond any sense of being an “I.” In those moments when my skin became porous with air, when the body dissolved into atoms, the I-self gradually disappeared and what remained was this pure awareness, woven into a unified continuum with everything else.
Brahman, meanwhile, is consciousness understood as the very ground of existence. Think of it as the basic fabric of the universe, the flow of presence in which all phenomena arise and dissolve. It’s the ocean of awareness within which every wave of experience appears and disappears. When the boundaries between self and world become transparent, what is revealed is not that two separate things somehow merge, but that they were never separate to begin with. Your individual awareness and cosmic awareness are like a wave rolling over the ocean, made of the same water as the ocean. The wave doesn’t become the whole ocean, but it realizes it is the ocean temporarily expressing itself in wave-form.
When consciousness collapses its usual architecture of subject and object, what’s revealed is that the “I” that seems to dissolve was never the real foundation of experience anyway. We find out that there is so much more reality than what we usually encounter in everyday life. There is a fabric of existence that is accessible to us where we can experience more life, more reality, more essence. It is a place to journey to, a world to explore that is wide and expanded and beautiful and unknown, and that it feels like home in a way that is different and more intimate than ever before. We learn that we can move beyond the mechanics of ordinary consciousness by using presence, breath, intention and nothing else. We discover that if Atman and Brahman are one, thus if individual and universal awareness are one and the same, then every moment of experience is already non-dual and access to it can be easier and more immediate than we are usually led to believe.
When the veil lifts and reveals this profound continuity underlying all things, what’s being revealed is that there never was a veil at all, only consciousness playing at being divided from itself.
This is available to anyone, at any moment in time. Let’s bust the myth that undergoing dissolution and unity experiences become available to us through accumulating more knowledge or mastering complex practices or taking psychedelics (although certainly all these things may help in the mix). These experiences are come through UNLEARNING. Clearing our selves of the scaffolding we build as we grow up. They come with pausing. Through Connecting. We don’t need to become something we’re not, we don’t need to heal or to manipulate our personality to be what we never were. The path isn’t about learning to be aware, for awareness is already here. It’s about unlearning the habit of thinking we’re separate from it. It’s about staying with what there is, right now, without the constant need to fix, change, or become. In this very moment, reading these words, the same consciousness that dissolves boundaries in peak experiences is present. The wave is already ocean. We’re already home.
Reminds me of the Penrose theory of orchestrated objective collapsing of quantum realms into “conscious” moments! Keep it coming!