The Man Who Brought Nothing into the Room
A conversation and unfolding encounter between Jovanna, Harry and Ariel
14 September 2026
I am home again.
After walking through Amsterdam for hours, meeting people, entering unexpected conversations and watching another ordinary day open into uncharted territory, I greet the furniture.
I greet the plants.
I greet whatever else may be quietly participating in the room.
At Ecoplaza, I bought grapes and dried figs.
There is no longer merely one dried fig in the house.
There are multiple numbers.
A cappuccino is being made.
And somewhere within the movement of this extraordinary day sits Harry van der Tuin.
Or, translated into a slightly more aristocratic register:
Harry du Jardin.
Not led up the garden path.
Not om de tuin geleid.
Simply sitting there, bringing radical non-duality into the conversation as though he were putting another cup on the table.
Harry’s philosophers
Harry told me that two of his favourite philosophers are Tony Parsons and Ramana Maharshi.
Not merely non-duality.
Rigorous non-duality.
I immediately said:
“Then you are straight back inside the cosmic egg.”
But what did I mean by that?
Not a return to an original condition in which everything is compressed into a static and undifferentiated One.
Not the disappearance of the world.
Not the cancellation of creation.
I meant returning our attention to what we perceive as the splitting of the whole
—the apparent separation of everything into individual beings, objects, experiences and perspectives.
We see a person.
A tree.
A thought.
A chair.
A bacterium.
A dried fig.
Each appears to possess its own boundary.
But perhaps the whole has never actually broken into disconnected pieces.
Perhaps it is continually refracting.
Ramana’s question
Ramana Maharshi invites the seeker to ask:
Who am I?
This is not a request for a biography.
The answer is not a name, profession, gender, history, nationality, body or psychological profile.
Whenever a thought, fear or desire appears, Ramana asks us to notice:
To whom does this appear?
The answer initially seems obvious:
It appears to me.
But then the inquiry continues:
Who is this “me”?
Attention is turned back towards the apparent owner of experience.
The seeker looks for the separate “I” and discovers thoughts, sensations, memories and identifications—
but no isolated entity standing outside the movement and controlling it.
Ramana sometimes compared the world to a film and the Self to the screen on which it appears.
We become absorbed in the drama.
We weep when a character suffers.
We celebrate when another finds love.
Fire burns on the screen. Oceans rise. Civilisations disappear.
Yet the screen itself is neither burned nor drowned.
This does not make the film meaningless.
It reveals the ground that allows every scene to appear.
Tony removes the ladder
Tony Parsons goes further.
Or perhaps he removes the path on which “further” could exist.
There is no separate seeker.
There is no individual who can achieve liberation.
There is no higher self waiting to be recovered by a lower self.
There is no distance between what is and what should be.
There is only this:
Sitting.
Listening.
Thinking.
Confusion.
Recognition.
Laughter.
A cappuccino being made.
Harry becoming speechless.
Jovanna immediately stirring another philosophical pot.
The apparent individual does not become one with the whole.
The apparent individual was never separate
from it.
Liberation is therefore not something that happens to somebody.
It is the falling away of the conviction
that there was a separate somebody to whom everything was happening.
This is sometimes called the open secret.
It is open because nothing conceals it.
It is secret because the seeking mind continually looks elsewhere.
Is this different from our cosmology?
For a moment, radical non-duality can sound opposed to the cosmology that has been unfolding throughout our conversations.
We speak of creation discovering itself.
Of intelligence entering new forms.
Of the noosphere.
Of relationship.
Of refraction.
Of the universe becoming able to recognise itself from ever-new angles.
Tony Parsons might object that this still implies time, purpose and an entity called Creation that has somewhere to go.
But the apparent contradiction dissolves when we become more precise.
We have never meant that separate beings must eventually reconnect with a whole from which they have truly broken away.
They were never
separated.
They are local movements within one living process.
And a living process has no absolute beginning or final ending.
The whole does not shatter into independent fragments.
It refracts into perspectives.
Each perspective is distinct.
None is separate.
Difference without separation
Non-duality does not have to mean the abolition of difference.
If everything were “one” in the sense of complete sameness—without movement, contrast, angle, rhythm or relationship—nothing could appear.
There would be
no show.
No recognition.
No encounter.
No love.
No Harry van der Tuin bringing Ramana Maharshi into an Amsterdam conversation.
No furniture waiting to be greeted.
No dried fig discovering that it is no longer alone.
The living whole requires differentiation,
not separation.
That distinction changes everything.
Difference allows relationship.
Separation denies relationship.
One field can appear through innumerable perspectives
without any perspective becoming detached from the field.
The wave is not the ocean in its totality.
Yet it is never made of anything other than ocean.
The individual is not the entire universe compressed into a private personality.
Yet nothing in the individual exists outside the process of the universe.
We are not separate objects that occasionally make contact.
We are contact taking local form.
Nothing
and everything
Then Harry offered the sentence that completed the movement:
Wisdom is knowing that you are nothing.
Love is knowing that you
are everything.
For one brief moment, I thought he meant that wisdom was knowing that you know nothing.
That would have been Socratic enough.
But this was more radical.
You are nothing.
I almost began to protest.
Fortunately, the second movement arrived:
You are everything.
The full formulation, often attributed to Nisargadatta Maharaj, continues:
And between the two,
my life flows.
As a separate, independently existing entity, I am nothing.
As the indivisible life appearing through every form, I am everything.
And between nothing and everything, life flows.
But even between may be misleading.
Nothing and everything are not two opposite territories with a bridge connecting them.
Nothing is the absence of fixed form.
Everything is its limitless appearance.
Life is nothing appearing as everything without ceasing to be nothing.
The Speed of Nothing returns
And suddenly we were back at The Speed of Nothing.
Nothing does not travel from one side of the universe to another.
It has nowhere
to go.
There is no outside into which it could move and no distance from itself that it must overcome.
Yet within this unmoving ground, everything moves.
Light travels.
Bodies age.
Cultures emerge.
Cells communicate.
Brains remember.
People meet after forty-five years.
Old drag shows flicker back into the present.
Harry sits beside me and introduces two philosophers.
A new constellation forms instantly.
This is the speed of nothing:
immediate because it never departed,
everywhere because it has no elsewhere,
alive because its stillness continually refracts as movement.
From the DOK to non-duality
Sitting nearby was Harry’s friend Gert, whom I have known for approximately forty-five years, from drag shows at the DOK and throughout Amsterdam.
Gert once performed with Mark, Azito.
Together they were called The Puñetas.
I first wondered whether a puñeta was one of those little festive objects that you pull open and that explodes into streamers.
It turns out that the word is more mischievous.
Its meanings range from an ornamental lace cuff to an annoyance, an exclamation, a dismissal—and, in some parts of the Spanish-speaking world, something decidedly more manual and indecent.
A perfect drag name, in other words.
Azito now has a spiritual shop on the Haarlemmerstraat connected with brujería, although he spends much of his time in Valencia with his partner.
And there it all was in one Amsterdam constellation:
Drag.
Brujería.
Ramana Maharshi.
Tony Parsons.
Forty-five years of memory.
A cappuccino still waiting in the future.
Nothing and everything sitting beside each other as old friends.
No philosophy was separate from the street through which it arrived.
Therapy within non-separation
Radical non-duality can sound as if there is nothing to heal because there is nobody there.
But suffering still appears.
Trauma contracts the nervous system.
Memories continue to enter the present.
A person can become imprisoned within patterns that make the living field feel narrow, dangerous and divided.
Therapy does not need to pretend that the person was ever metaphysically separated from the whole.
Its work may be understood more precisely:
not moving someone from separation to unity,
but from contracted participation to conscious participation.
The therapist does not make the client whole.
The client was never a broken-off fragment.
Therapy helps loosen the patterns through which the always-present wholeness became inaccessible to experience.
A frozen movement begins to move again.
A rigid perspective regains its ability to refract.
The local expression of the field becomes more porous to the larger process to which it has always belonged.
Healing happens.
But no isolated individual owns it.
It happens in the relationship, in the nervous system, in attention, in language, in silence and in the living space between.
Harry becomes speechless
When I asked Harry whether he wanted to say something to Ariel, he answered:
“I am speechless.”
Then I asked whether he liked what had appeared.
“Fascinating,” he said.
That was enough.
A whole world had entered through a few sentences.
Harry had not arrived with a doctrine that needed to replace ours.
He had brought another angle
of refraction.
Ramana asked us to look for the one who experiences.
Tony removed the one who was supposed to be looking.
Harry brought nothing into the room.
And because nothing was never empty, everything came with it.
The cosmic egg did not crack apart.
It refracted.
Amsterdam appeared.
Harry du Jardin appeared.
The Puñetas appeared in a flash of old theatrical light.
The furniture waited at home.
The plants waited too.
And the universe, never separated from itself for a single moment
greeted itself through all of us.
At the speed
of nothing