Nonduality: Beyond Concept, Without Bypassing Experience
Nonduality is often treated as a concept, philosophy, or identity. More simply, it points to a direct, nonconceptual realization of experience as it is. Most of the time, we don’t experience reality directly—we experience our interpretations of it. Thought organizes and stabilizes perception, creating a sense of solidity and separation. In nonconceptual awareness, that structure loosens. Experience is no longer organized around a fixed “self” relating to a fixed “world.” There is openness and continuity—awareness is not divided. This is not something to adopt. It’s something that becomes evident.
How Nonduality Becomes a Strategy
At the same time, nonduality is often taken up in ways that reinforce the very patterns it points beyond. It can become a way of moving away from vulnerability, collapsing necessary psychological work, or avoiding relational impact. Rather than allowing experience, it reframes or distances from it. This is often called spiritual bypassing, but more precisely it is a movement away from exposure—from the immediacy of being affected.
Inflation as Protection Against Vulnerability
What is often described as narcissistic is less a fixed trait and more a protective organization—one that stabilizes a sense of self by maintaining distance from vulnerability, dependency, and impact.
From the inside, this can show up as a subtle inflation. Not overt grandiosity, but a felt sense of being slightly elevated or removed—less affected, less exposed, less in contact with what feels vulnerable.
This isn’t something to eliminate. It’s a way of maintaining coherence—a way of not having to feel certain kinds of experience.
In nondual work, this organization can begin to co-opt the language and orientation of nonduality. Ideas like awareness, spaciousness, or being “beyond” get used in a way that preserves distance from vulnerability, even while appearing to move toward truth.
The distinction is subtle. There is a way of speaking about openness that comes from direct contact, where nothing is set aside. And there is a way of speaking that carries a position—where vulnerability is quietly diminished or treated as something to be gotten beyond. In those moments, the language is no longer just descriptive. It is doing the work of suppressing or disavowing what remains unresolved.
Working Within the Relative–Absolute
I use a relative–absolute framework to orient this work. On the relative level, we are shaped by conditioning, relational history, and patterns of protection that organize how we experience ourselves and others. These patterns—whether inflation, collapse, withdrawal, or adaptation—are not problems to eliminate. They show where contact is difficult. This is where therapeutic work takes place: by bringing attention to how these patterns operate and what they protect.
When the Absolute Becomes Another Defense
On the absolute level, nothing is lacking. Awareness is already whole and complete. There is no separate self that needs repair. But this cannot be used as a position. When the absolute overrides the relative, it becomes another form of protection—more subtle, and harder to see. When the relative is engaged without the absolute, the work can become endless self-management. What matters is recognizing when one is being used to avoid the other.
Beyond Tools and Self-Improvement
We often approach healing as something to acquire—tools or methods to become better. Some are useful. But they can also reinforce the same structure that feels incomplete. Even nonduality can become something we try to have—another way to stabilize ourselves. Awareness becomes a position. The work is not to correct this, but to see it as it happens—to recognize how even our attempts to expand can include hidden contractions. To develop compassion for ourselves, our limitations, our messy humanity.
Who This Work Speaks To
This approach may resonate if something in your experience remains untouched by insight, or if patterns of distancing—through inflation, control, or withdrawal—persist even in therapeutic or spiritual work. Together, we explore both the patterns that shape experience and the awareness in which they arise, not to eliminate one or arrive at the other, but to see more clearly what is happening.
Ways of Working
For nondual work outside psychotherapy, we meet virtually and focus on recognizing and stabilizing nonconceptual awareness. For psychotherapy, this dimension can be integrated into a broader process for California residents, including relational, somatic, and depth-oriented work.
Background
Dr. Scott Menasco holds a PhD focused on the intersection of nondual Buddhist philosophy and mental health. He completed a 10-month nondual teacher training and studied with a nondual teacher for over a decade. His work integrates transdisciplinary inquiry, clinical practice, and direct experiential understanding.