Beyond Nondual: the Way-making Approach to Philosophy and Cognitive Science

Andrea Hiott's waymaking approach to philosophy is fascinating in its potential to move beyond "nondual" terminology.

Hiott's waymaking approach emphasizes the process of path-creation itself - how meaning, understanding, and reality emerge through active engagement and movement rather than being pre-existing states we discover. Instead of positioning things as "dual" or "nondual" (which still operates within a binary frame), waymaking focuses on the dynamic unfolding of experience and the co-creation of paths between what we might traditionally separate as "subject" and "object," "self" and "world."

Waymaking doesn't claim there's "really no distinction" (the typical nondual move) or that distinctions are illusions to overcome. Instead, it seems to suggest that distinctions, separations, and connections are all part of the ongoing creative process of making ways through the world. The emphasis shifts from ontological claims about the "true nature" of reality to the living, embodied process of meaning-making and navigation.

This feels more honest to actual experience - we do make distinctions, we do navigate between things, and yet there's also a fluid, participatory quality to how boundaries form and dissolve. Waymaking honors both the differentiation and the integration without needing to collapse into a metaphysical claim about "ultimate unity" or "fundamental separation."

The approach does this through its development of three main ideas:

Orientation

Sequence

and Perspectival Trajectory

The basic idea is that all of these always have to be understood when one is trying to evaluate the validity, meaning and usefulness of just about anything.

These provide conceptual tools that release the usual scaffolds:

Orientation acknowledges that we're always ‘somewhere’, always angled toward something. This is the basic condition of being situated and it does not help us to pretend it isn’t part of any assessment we make, even if we can learn to experience the world from different positions. Unlike nonduality's promise to reach a "view from nowhere" or pure awareness without positioning, orientation says: your angle matters, your standpoint is generative, not limiting. You make your way from somewhere and you are going to somewhere and these are not always in geographical space. The question isn't "how do I escape my perspective?" but "how am I currently oriented, and what does this make possible or foreclose?" The same could be said about any statement or action one is trying to better understand or deciding whether to endorse.

Sequence brings in temporality and order - the recognition that one thing leads to another, that there's a *direction* to unfolding. This contrasts sharply with nondual frameworks that often emphasize the eternal present or simultaneity of all things. Waymaking says: the order matters. How you arrived here shapes where you can go next. Meaning emerges through succession, through the actual steps taken. It's not about collapsing time into a timeless now, but honoring that paths are made sequentially, one movement after another.

Perspectival trajectory combines both: you're not just statically positioned (orientation) or moving through generic time (sequence), but tracing a specific arc through possibilities. Your perspective isn't fixed but moving, and that movement has direction and momentum. The trajectory *is* the perspective in motion. This dissolves the subject/object split differently than nonduality does - not by claiming "there is no self" but by recognizing the self as this ongoing trajectory itself, inseparable from its waymaking.

These terms keep us in the realm of ‘difference’ and ‘movement’ in a healthy sense, without needing to either reify separations or dissolve differences into unity.

The very focus on "nondual" as a concept or goal often reinforces exactly the dualistic thinking it claims to transcend. For example:

When we make "nondual" into something to achieve or realize, we immediately create a duality between our current "dual" experience and the "nondual" state we're seeking (which is itself nondual). We split reality into "apparent/conventional" versus "ultimate/true." We create hierarchies: nondual awareness is higher, better, more real than ordinary discriminating consciousness. We end up with practitioners striving to ‘get somewhere else’ - which is quintessentially dualistic movement.

Even the language betrays this: "transcending the ego," "seeing through illusions," "realizing ultimate nature" - all of these frame ordinary experience as something wrong, false, or inferior that needs to be overcome. The very grammar creates a split between the seeker and what's sought, between delusion and awakening. It also keeps us from realizing that there are so many possible orientations, sequences and perspectival trajectories within us, and within every life we encounter. This can ultimately lead us away from the experience of meaning and connection that most of us hope for when it comes to how we imagine what our communities and societies could be.

Rgw orientation/sequence/trajectory offers something different because it starts in the awareness that we are actually not trying to reach some sort of perspectiveless perspective. Even if we can be without our thinking, we are still an oriented form of life. The point of being able to quiet our thinking is to fully feel that life and its connection with all that this thinking mind might have decided is cut off from it. WE’re exploring how different orientations open different possibilities, and how we can open to and handle more of them. There's no "correct" orientation that dissolves all others and dissolving is not what we even really want. We want to be able to handle more of them, because they already are. Focusing on the sequence aspect allows us to understand that all of this is like a path or a way we have been making and that has been being made for us, so these orintations are like paths we have been laying down while walking them, and all that we encounter and all that we are means we will have different paths necessarily but that they all make sense and are real and fit to what we have experienced. To share them is to increase our understanding and ability for movement within this landscape. And that means oftentimes a lot of what we think of as polarity or hating the other side is just coming from having been on different paths in different parts of the landscape and not having any way to understand this or share this or have communicative translations that do not try and dissolve one path into the other but allow them both. With this idea of sequence, we can see that there's no timeless state to attain. There's only the ongoing unfolding, where each step generates the next. You can't skip to "the end" because the way itself is what's real. This also means we constantly keep the Perspectival trajectory of whatever moment of assessement in mind. We are not trying to eliminate our perspective to reach pure objectivity or pure subjectivity. And we are not trying to dissolve or eliminate the perspectives of others to prove ours is right. We are recognizing that perspectives are themselves movements, paths being made, and that they can open us to new places and explorations, within ourselves and without all those lives that we encounter as part of this same ongoing happeninig.

In more meditative language, this means we are not actually trying to "dissolve the self" or "see the nondual nature," but rather to understand that this movement we have been calling self is real but that it is some oriented sequences that is a trajectory of perspective, and there are many others in that same landscape. We are many paths and we encounter many paths. We can also be with all that movement in a way that allows us to feel the life we are and its connection to all it is encountering without that ‘thinking self’ dictating a particular path.

We can be engaged with the actual texture of experience rather than trying to collapse it into an undifferentiated unity, and we can also begin to feel into what we are that is always beyond our idea of body or self.

Sifferences, distinctions, and conflicts are not to be dismissed as "just concepts" or "duality" but rather as perspectival trajectories built of sequences that have been oriented by real experiences and life. We can then begin to open beyond either/or and dualistic scaffolds into the constellation of possible paths and layers of constellations of paths that are this shared ongoing experience.