I want to be clear that I don’t engage in ontological claims or metaphysical absolutism. My approach is a phenomenological one – I aim to work with and describe experience as it presents itself, without overlaying a fundamentalist model or interpretation onto it.

In my own process, I went through many shifts where I became convinced that one particular state or perspective – awareness, emptiness, the divine, etc. – was the ultimate truth. But eventually I saw the pattern and realized the most skillful approach was to hold all of it very lightly – to adopt a kind of open, agnostic stance rather than clinging to any one view as the final answer.

What comes to mind is the work of the scientist Donald Hoffman. One of his key ideas is that we are biological creatures whose perceptual systems evolved to scan the environment for functional affordances, not to perceive reality as it is. He compares our perception to the icons on a computer desktop – they are representations that allow us to interact effectively, but bear no resemblance to what’s happening at the level of circuits and code.

I find this a compelling perspective. Given all the layers of conditioning that shape our experience, from the personal to the cultural to the biological, I am very hesitant to claim that any of us can know what reality is like “in itself”. And yet we can absolutely explore the many worlds that open up through practice and inquiry, understanding that they too are always perspectival, always shaped by the apparatus through which they are felt and known. In the end, the invitation is perhaps to hold it all a bit more lightly, to engage the many stories and worlds and dimensions that unfold while not mistaking any for the territory itself.