What is under?
How little articulation is needed to surrender? Can I ask a question that answers itself without words, functioning more like tilt than inquiry, tipping my mind out of its habitual forward lean? Can I receive what is like the water after which I am named?
Ramana Maharshi offered self-inquiry as a practice. I could not connect with it; who am I? often turned my attention back toward individualism.
One morning, in the liminal space between sleep and awakening, I ask, plainly and prosaically, What is under?
What is under? is not lyricism, not philosophy, not even technically nondual. But it is alive, and does not require interpretation. It drops attention down, and brings density, support. The body understands before thought arrives, and any attempt to answer verbally before perceiving viscerally is recognized as disingenuous.
What is under? permits the duality of above and beneath, but I am not making a metaphysical claim; I am using a working distinction in the middle of a lived life. Nonduality does not ask us to deny the world in order to inhabit it wisely.
Reality responds: My consciousness sinks under. And everything is here. And everything is welcome! And I notice: Under, things dissolve into each other. Not immediately, but eventually. Ultimately, even under and above are the same. No submerging. No emerging. Merging…
First, permeability. Then edges blur. Then distinction ceases to matter. It’s recognition without forcing, occurring only after honoring difference long enough.
Through it all, language does not explain the pool to itself. We do not move toward Union. Union stops being elsewhere, and we are received by the same silence that welcomes everything.
In undering, I feel relieved to release the need to consent to what is on the surface. In many ways our external world is troubled and troubling. But under, not only is consent present, consent is unconditional.
What shifts is not attention to the world, but the felt necessity of taking a position toward it. Protesting the surface often disguises itself as ethical vigilance, but frequently carries a contract that says I must resolve this to be at peace. Under, that contract dissolves.
Under, Reality does its own knowing. And Union, which doesn’t deepen by progress, deepens by return.
Under teaches that Love does not require agreement with form to remain unbroken.
What is under? doesn’t try to resist or outwit ego. It calls to where ego, being a surface phenomenon, cannot follow without dispersing. I am not trying to hold underness; I am trusting that it holds me along with all that is. Effort finally resigns.
There can be virtue in struggling: Struggle can mature insight, deepen humility, and strip away borrowed answers. But struggle is not proof of worthiness. It is not required as payment for insight. And it should not serve as ego’s last legitimate job.
No longer mistaking struggle for depth, or ease for shallowness, I laugh. It is refreshing to laugh while bowing. This is not disrespect; it’s practice without grimness, Union without enforcement, what happens when the need to hold the sacred “correctly” finally loosens.
What is under? doesn’t ask me to see or be anything — it only asks that I look for myself, bypassing aspiration and going straight to intimacy. What is under? does not prescribe a state to achieve, a vision to summon, or a self to become. It asks only for honesty of attention: no idealized witness or strain toward transcendence. It sets no tribunal that will judge my experience as spiritual enough or not, which is just another subtle way duality reinstates itself. I do not submit my experience for approval. I learn from within.
What is under is sense perception. Running, under the wind I smell grass and mud. Running under, the sun on my face soaks through my shirt into my skin.
What is under is ego check. Asking why am I doing or feeling this? what do I truly want? allows clarity of motivation.
What is under is Shanti: Peace even when life does not feel peaceful.
Maybe someday I will share this practice. Who will read it? Maybe no one. Nonduality is difficult and demanding. It offers no easy takeaways, no promise of enlightenment, no before-and-after story that flatters the self. But maybe because nonduality is so different, now is its time. Humanity has reached a "when all else fails" moment.
Nonduality does not bestow solution or salvation. It offers reorientation when our usual ways of orienting — control, mastery, progress narratives — show their limits. Conditions are such that the old separations are becoming visibly untenable. The sense that “we are not as separate as we thought” is no longer only a mystical insight; it’s an existential pressure. Ecologically, relationally, psychologically — everywhere, the fiction of isolation is cracking.
We respond as we can, each unique wave-particles of the whole, because this is what is asked of this life.
Some mornings what is under is exactly what is at the surface. What Is holding what is within and all around…
What is under is fidelity to the schedule, to the commitments, to the work, to the flow of days, to the rhythm of life and the deep-seated knowing that participation in it is a sacred gift, even without knowing any outcomes.
April snow covers the crocuses and hyacinths that bloomed on Easter. What is under? Memories, as if Earth is re-creating the past of winter, reminding us that even as we go forward, what has gone before remains with us. I do not believe in now exclusively. There is room for past and future. Everything unfolding simultaneously. Some of our memories teach us, some comfort us, and some are simply to be cherished.
Spring does not erase winter. It carries it, the way warmth carries the memory of cold in the body. Earth remembers itself, and invites us to do the same, without being trapped by sequence. Not then versus now, but simultaneity: the bud, the frost, the thaw all present in one breath.
So much spiritual language flattens time in a way that can feel like amnesia. The past can be companion, not obstacle; the future can be aligned direction, not fantasy. Some memories instruct, some console, some simply hold one’s hand. Their worth does not depend on usefulness.
Snow on flowers is not a mistake. It’s Earth saying, all of this is still here, held, belonging.
Today, what is under? reveals a repeating answer: Love. Love arrives in words, body, mind, and heart-feeling at once. For most of my thirty years of life with mysticism (and all my life before), Love was my reason for being, included in every mantra-prayer. We are Love, I will be Love... With Love as priority, vow, and north star, it became something to live up to — and I could not live up to my own expectations. Love did not want to be forced, and eventually refused coercion.
No longer asking, how can I be Love? I ask, what remains when nothing is imposed? And what answers is Love — not as ideal, but as fact. Love relieved of expectation; Love no longer needing to be named in advance, defended, or enacted; Love simply what is revealed when the question is clean enough.
Without abandoning Love, I withdrew the demand that it show itself on my terms. I gave it freedom, and it returned, not as command, but as ground.
What is under? calls. What arrives, unforced, responds — response not guaranteed in advance, not bound to preference, not obligated to repeat itself. Sometimes the response is Love. Sometimes silence. Sometimes nothing that can be held at all. All are answers.
Under the chickadee songs: my Grandpa! Not in memory pushed up from the mind, but as recognition rising from under, clear and intimate. The chickadee song calls, and beneath it — layered through it — Grandpa responds. Presence answering presence. As if the living world softens the boundary just enough for the ancestral voice to come through without words. Not as story, not as image, but as being with.
In many contemplative lineages, repetition is not ignorance; it is devotion. Returning again and again to the same question does not narrow the field, foreclose revelation, or imply lack of insight. It expresses trust that this opening is vast enough to contain every variation.
God bubbles, or the bubbles of Brahman, are what is under: utter gratitude for how unspeakably precious everything is. We are the breath of God, encased momentarily in kaleidoscopic sheaths of soap, floating, touching, falling, breaking. And the breath of God within our individual iridescent forms returns to…the breath of God.
God bubbles are not distant eminence, but effervescence, joy that cannot help but take momentary form. Each bubble is unmistakably itself, shimmering, bounded, and singular. And each is nothing other than breath, light, and film, borrowed, luminous, already returning. Form is not denied. Essence is not denied. Only the confusion that form must be permanent to be real is released.
Through it all, there is never loss of Being, for Being can never be lost. Change everywhere, but not nihilism, not disappearance into blankness.
The bubble gleams more intensely because it does not promise endurance. Love is piercing because it does not insist on possession. The preciousness is almost unbearable because it is here to return us, too.
Yet breath never stops being breath. Seeing never stops being seeing. Love never stops being Love. The particle only releases itself back into the wave.
We float. We touch. We break. We are.
What is under? Llyn. Llyn is under...
Of course: Aham Brahmāsmi. But something surprising, vulnerable, accompanies... What is under Llyn's fear, conditioning, attachment, expectation, wanting...? What is under Llyn?
What is under Llyn is Llyn.
When the layers are acknowledged and then set down, what remains is not an improved version of Llyn, nor a purified one, nor one who has gotten under successfully. Llyn is not a story that says, “I am this kind of person,” or a contemplative voice playing with the language of depth, or a watcher trying to get free of the watched.
Llyn is the capacity to be touched by a thought, a hope, a tightening, without collapsing into it and without standing apart from it. Llyn is prior to self description. Llyn is the felt sense of I am before I am ___. Llyn is what fear is afraid of losing, though it has never been lost.
There is no further cellar, no final reveal waiting beneath the floorboards. Llyn is the ground.
The question didn’t excavate me. It revealed I was already here.
What is under is absolute openness.
In classic Advaita, the question “Who am I?” (ātma–vichāra), is not designed to produce a conceptual answer. Its function is erosive, not additive. Every answer dissolves. What remains is not knowledge about an ultimate, but the Ultimate, uninterrupted.
Ramana Maharshi said, “The Self is not reached. You are the Self.”
Advaita does not give a final answer to the mind. It removes the one who needs an answer.
When the sage said, “Who am I?” he was not saying, “Become this…” or “don’t become that…” He was saying, “Look at the one who believes they are contracted.” And when the inquiry is sustained, not as effort but as honest looking, it illuminates the absence of boundaries that were only imagined.
Advaita explicitly acknowledges that teaching itself is provisional. There is a classical principle called adhyāropa–apavāda: First, a concept is introduced (seeker, practice, liberation). Then it is sublated, shown never to have been ultimately true.
Teaching exists only because misunderstanding appears to exist.
In that sense, Ramana Maharshi never taught toward something. He taught away from something mistakenly held. Not toward liberation. Toward the recognition that liberation was never absent.
Advaita teaches for as long as teaching appears necessary, while never believing its own story; in the end, its teaching points not toward openness, but toward the end of believing you are closed.
This morning, I ask What is under? and I cannot find an under. Simply, Reality is present.
When what is under? is asked and no under can be found, the question has completed its work. I am not Llyn who asks. I am not Llyn who recognizes. I am just Llyn in awe...
There is no ground beneath Reality because Reality is not layered. There is no under, behind, or beyond, only presence. In Zen terms, the shovel hits bedrock — and bedrock vanishes.
This is not a new state. Not attainment. Not even recognition anymore. This is simply what is, unopposed, without triumph or the need to extend it.
It’s not the phrase I would have chosen. It is not the Sacred is present, or Ātman is present, or even the Whole is present. Reality is present makes no claim and declares no insight. The sentence appears almost empty, yet it has no opposite.
Reality has no opposite.
This is not another precept to carry forward. It’s a quiet correction that undoes a great deal of unnecessary movement, and it is what many neo‑Advaita approaches miss. They subtly preserve an implicit dualism by setting Reality against illusion, presence against absence, awakening against sleep, truth against falsity. Even when they say “all is One,” they still smuggle in an other — something that needs to be seen through, transcended, or dismissed.
Since Reality has no opposite, however, illusion cannot stand against Reality. Ignorance cannot obscure Reality. Absence cannot threaten It.
Appearances arise. Misunderstandings arise. Narratives arise. But none qualify as an opposite. They are simply part of what appears within.
The companion question gently bows and sets itself down. Expression has reached its own completeness, and what remains is what was always present. One…
One, spacious enough for silence, syllables, schedules, stars, and flowering snow. For laughter, Grandpa, and God bubbles. For you and me and the occasional startled gasp at how strange and simple it all is.