Kenneth Madden on Radical Non-Duality
screen cap from Kenneth’s video linked below
I have a few favourites among the various ‘speakers’ about what has been called ‘radical non-duality’, who are listed on my blog’s right sidebar. One of them is Kenneth Madden, who lives in Ireland. Last March he had a meeting in Amsterdam that was recorded, and I thought he expressed the basic message of ‘radical non-duality’ very well.
But the video is an hour long, including a lot of hesitantly asked and rather unclear questions by meeting attendees, so I decided to ask ChatGPT to summarize its message in 6-8 paragraphs. The ChatGPT bot can’t ‘view’ videos but if you feed it the entire (AI-produced) transcript, it does, I think, a very creditable job of digesting and condensing what was said. Here is what it provided for this video:
Kenneth Madden’s talk explores the radical non-dual understanding that there is no separate individual self—only “what is appearing to happen.” He begins by describing the peculiar spaciousness or lightness that people often sense in his meetings. That feeling, he says, has nothing to do with him as a teacher or with any special setting; it arises from the _energy of the sharing_ itself. In everyday life people are always being addressed as individuals, “spoken to” as if they are distinct selves. His gatherings differ because the communication is impersonal—there is no “you” being spoken to. That energetic difference can momentarily loosen the habitual sense of separation, revealing a boundless ordinariness that is always present, not something produced by the meeting.
Kenneth emphasizes that there is no event called “enlightenment” and no path to reach it. What is sought has never been missing—it is simply life happening, indescribably ordinary and immediate: breathing, sitting, brushing one’s teeth. The notion of a separate “me” searching for wholeness is the only apparent obstacle, and even that is just an appearance within what already is. This boundlessness, he says, is “unconditional love,” not as a feeling but as the unqualified aliveness of everything. When this communication resonates, it is not an understanding but an energetic recognition beyond intellect.
He contrasts this to the way individuality develops in childhood. A baby initially experiences no boundary between itself and its mother. Only later does the sense of “me” emerge, reinforced by language and social conditioning—questions such as “What will you do with your life?” confirm separateness. Over time this felt individuality hardens into the story “I am this person living my life.” Yet even this developmental tale is, he says, just another story appearing within boundless aliveness. The supposed transition from unity to separation, and any later “return,” are illusory movements inside what never moved.
Kenneth and his listeners discuss how this can be confused with dissociation or “zoning out.” He insists it is the opposite: not detachment but total intimacy. When the sense of self falls away, there is not a blank state but vivid aliveness, “beyond intimacy,” because there is no distance between anything. Time, memory, and causality likewise lose solidity—they are narrative constructs arising from the illusion of a self that moves through moments. A memory, he says, is only another present appearance; the apparent continuity of “my life” is an imagined sequence within timeless aliveness.
From this standpoint, moral or practical questions—“Who will make decisions?” or “Will I become irresponsible?”—are meaningless. The individual never existed and never chose anything. Saying yes or no simply appears to happen; it was never _your_ choice. Free will and volition are energetic illusions produced by the sense of being somebody. Scientific experiments that measure decision-making only show how the brain later adds the feeling “I decided.” Yet life continues seamlessly—working, parenting, responding—without a separate doer behind it.
He uses terms such as _wholeness_ , _energy_ , and _aliveness_ as mere pointers, insisting that none capture what cannot be described. Words like “God” or “consciousness” are avoided because they carry conceptual baggage; they make people imagine an entity or higher awareness that can be known. What is being pointed to is beyond knowing—it is not a thing, quality, or state. The communication is not conceptual teaching but an energetic resonance that may dissolve the sense of separation or not; either way, nothing actually happens.
Finally, Kenneth dismantles familiar dualities—life and death, mind and body, energy and form. These opposites exist only in the story of a subject observing objects in time. In reality, he says, there was never birth or death: “You will never die because you were never born.” Form is simply energy appearing as form; the body is “life bodying.” All metaphors—wave and ocean, drop and sea—are at best poetic approximations. His own story of awakening is deliberately minimal because, in truth, _nothing happened_. What remains is indescribably simple: just aliveness appearing as everything, full and complete, without anyone living it.
Such an awesome message. After 10 years of meeting and chatting with several of the ‘radical non-duality’ speakers, reading their books, and watching countless videos, I remain captivated by this message. If there’s really a ‘grand theory or explanation of everything’, then I think this must be it. The latest theoretical physicists’ and neuroscientists’ explanations of the nature of reality and of the ‘self’ are entirely consistent with this astonishingly simple and utterly radical message.
I’ve had glimpses where the message was seen to be obviously true. But my ‘self’ keeps returning and proclaiming it incomprehensible. So ‘I’ seem to live in a kind of limbo. But I seem to be happier than I’ve ever been, so apparently ‘I’ can live with that.
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Just to reiterate what I’ve said on my previous AI-inspired posts:
1. I have a love-hate relationship with AI. When it’s used properly and carefully as a tool, as an _aid_ to learning and creativity, I believe it can be very useful, and enormous fun. But most of its large-scale applications (like replacing jobs and facilitating wars and surveillance) are ill-conceived, immoral, incompetently designed and conceived, vastly overreaching the capabilities of AI, ecologically disastrous, socially disruptive, and extremely dangerous.
2. The staggering amount that has been invested in AI has absolutely no viable business case to justify it. It represents possibly the most astounding squandering of money based purely on imagined and improbable future developments and blind faith, in history. Those who have studied this have concluded that this massive bubble will soon burst, and those who’ve invested in it will lose their shirts. At that time, the window to use AI as a learning and creativity tool will quickly close forever. Our playing with these essentially-free tools now is not going to aggravate its abusive uses, nor will it have any impact on the timing or extent of the coming AI crash. So my view is: use it, smartly and cautiously, while you can; it will soon be gone.
Kenneth Madden on Radical Non-Duality screen cap from Kenneth’s video linked below I have a few favourites among the various ‘speakers’ about what has been called ‘radical non-duality’, w...
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