The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens29 Mai

A Word I Can't Seem to Understand: Non-Duality and Our Living World | Frankly 144

In this week's Frankly, Nate discusses his long-running attempt to understand non-duality, and why this concept has remained just out of his grasp despite years of conversations with teachers, thinkers, and podcast guests. He begins with a personal reflection on the possibility that his difficulty understanding non-duality does not stem from lack of intelligence or a short attention span, but from the particular cultural operating system that Westerners seem to inherit from birth. This operating system – which appears everywhere from language to economics to institutions – reinforces separation between the subject and the object, the observer and the observed, the self and the world. It trains us to experience ourselves as isolated individuals standing apart from the living systems that sustain us.

The latter part of this episode turns toward identifying moments where this separation starts to soften: experiences with music, grief, nature, and deep presence, to name a few. Nate connects these insights to the metacrisis as a whole, suggesting that humanity's treatment of the biosphere might be rooted in the same underlying assumption of separateness. Rather than arriving at an outright definition of non-duality, Nate closes with the possibility that loosening our grip on certainty may itself be a large part of the work.

Have there been moments in your own life when the boundary between yourself and the world briefly dissolved? Why does non-duality seem so difficult to define within modern Western culture? And what does it mean to consider separation from nature to be the foundation beneath many of today's global crises?

(Recorded May 28th, 2026)

Show Notes and More

Watch this video episode on YouTube

Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.

---

Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future

Join our Substack newsletter

Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(420)

The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: The Rules of the Game Keep Us Trapped with Greg Elliott | TGS 231

Modern companies, markets, and institutions routinely behave in ways that would be diagnosed as pathological in a person: emotional detachment, strategic deception, grandiosity, and the treatment of p...

26 Aug 1h 41min

An Antidote to Despair: What Dogs Reveal About the Metacrisis | Frankly 156

This week, Nate turns a late-night emergency vet visit for one of his dogs into a broader reflection on the extraordinary relationship between dogs and humans. While dogs have been human companions fo...

21 Aug 18min

Material World: The Key Resources Underpinning Modern Economies with Ed Conway | Archive TGS 127

Current geopolitical events continue to expose just how complex and fragile our global economic system is. As such, The Great Simplification team is re-releasing this episode with Ed Conway, which cov...

19 Aug 1h 49min

The Villains We Choose and the Work They Give Us | Frankly 155

How can humans – at least those with access to the internet – ingest the same facts and data, yet arrive at radically different worldviews? That's the question Nate explores in this week's Frankly, wh...

14 Aug 29min

Your Anxiety Is Normal: A New Psychology for a World in Crisis with Richard Schwartz & Steffi Bednarek

Most of us were taught to treat emotions like distress, numbness, and burnout as private failings to manage and move past, rather than normal responses to living within a world full of crises. The uni...

12 Aug 1h 40min

Unordinary Interventions: How to Plant Seeds for a Better Future | Frankly 154

What can one person actually do about the metacrisis? In this week's Frankly, Nate explicitly outlines just a few of the countless actions we can take to actually change what's coming, rather than jus...

7 Aug 30min

The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile with Olivier Hamant

For decades, modern civilization has treated efficiency as an unquestioned good: the leaner, faster, and more optimized anything is – from supply chains to your morning routine – the better. But emerg...

5 Aug 1h 24min

When Truth Becomes Hazardous: Navigating Information Through the Metacrisis | Frankly 153

This week, Nate takes on a tension he has been navigating for years, at the heart of communicating about the metacrisis: the hazards that arise from sharing true information with a global audience. Bu...

31 Jul 24min