Many sincere students of non-duality notice an unexpected consequence as their understanding deepens: devotion seems to fall away. What once felt like reverence, intimacy with God, or love of Truth begins to appear unnecessary, sentimental, or even dualistic. Non-duality is taken to mean the absence of relationship, the collapse of all distinctions, the end of any movement toward Another.
And yet, for many practitioners, something essential quietly goes missing.
The path may become clear—elegant, even profound—but also strangely dry. This raises a question that is rarely addressed directly: if non-duality is the highest truth, why does its realization sometimes seem to strip life of love, reverence, and devotion rather than fulfill them?
The Misunderstanding of Devotion
On the spiritual path, many familiar forms of devotion do fall away—and rightly so. Devotion rooted in emotional dependency, belief systems, ritual obligation, or personal bargaining cannot survive deep inquiry. The image of a separate self reaching toward a separate God is eventually seen through. As understanding matures, such forms of devotion often feel constricting, naïve, or false.
This collapse is frequently interpreted as evidence that devotion itself is a lower or preliminary stage of the path—something to be outgrown in favor of impersonal truth. From this view, devotion appears incompatible with non-duality. It is asserted that reverence or love necessarily imply separation.
But what is dissolving here is not devotion itself. What dissolves are emotionalized attachments to devotion.
These forms depended on a personal self who claimed to worship, seek, or relate. When that self begins to unravel, the structures built upon it must also fall. Their disappearance is not a failure of devotion, but its purification.
The Misunderstanding of Non-Duality
At the same time, non-duality itself is often misunderstood. As belief systems collapse and the sense of a separate self weakens, non-duality may be interpreted primarily as negation: no self, no world, no relationship, no meaning. Detachment is mistaken for realization. Emotional flattening is taken as transcendence. Nothingness is confused with truth.
Here, non-duality becomes an intellectual or experiential position—clean, austere, and impersonal. While such clarity may feel liberating, it often lacks warmth, radiance, or intimacy.
The deeper issue is subtle. Even when belief, emotion, and spiritual identity fall away, there can remain a quiet sense of doership—the presumption that I am still the one who understands, abides, or realizes. This is not the familiar ego of desire or ambition. It is far subtler.
Yet at its core remains the same illusion David Hawkins repeatedly identified as the foundation of the ego: the presumption of personal causality.
Negation, Doership, and the Question of the Void
When this hidden doership remains, non-duality is unconsciously pursued as negation rather than surrender. Form is dismissed. Relationship is rejected. Love is viewed with suspicion. The result is often a realization marked by stillness, emptiness, and absence.
Hawkins referred to this state as the Void.
The Void represents a genuine level of realization in which form and personal identity have been relinquished. But it is not the fullness of Truth.
Negation alone does not dissolve the illusion of personal causality. The self may no longer believe or seek, yet still quietly assumes the position of the negater. As long as this subtle sovereignty remains, realization naturally tends toward emptiness rather than Presence.
The crucial distinction is this: negation is not surrender. Letting go of beliefs is not the same as relinquishing doership. The Void marks the limit of what can be reached through negation alone.
Why Devotion Does Not Disappear—but Is Transfigured
When doership finally dissolves, devotion does not vanish.
What falls away is the devotee as a separate agent. What remains is devotion itself—no longer something one performs, but a quality of being. Love is no longer directed from someone toward something. It is impersonal, universal, and effortless. It is alignment with Reality rather than relationship with an object.
Hawkins writes, “worship is recontextualized by devotion. It is not done for the benefit of the worshipper or the imaginary benefit to God, but instead, it is merely an acknowledgement of Reality” (Discovery of the Presence of God).
At this stage, devotion is no longer dualistic, yet it is unmistakably devotional. There is reverence without a reverer, surrender without effort, love without a lover. Reality is no longer approached or contemplated—it is yielded to.
Traditional images such as the Trinity can quietly illuminate this paradox without resolving it conceptually. The unmanifest Absolute (the Father), its manifest expression (the Son), and the living movement of love or Presence between them (the Holy Spirit) are not three separate realities, but one Reality, in relationship to Itself. Devotion, at its highest, is not movement between two—it is the movement of Truth toward Itself.
In this sense, non-duality does not abolish devotion. It fulfills it.
Devotional Nonduality as a Living Orientation
Devotional Nonduality is not a synthesis of paths, nor a philosophical position, nor a spiritual stance. It is not something to be believed or adopted. It is the natural orientation that emerges when surrender becomes complete and the illusion of personal causality is relinquished.
Here, letting go is no longer an activity performed by a self. It is the recognition that there was never a doer to begin with. Life unfolds as an expression of a higher Will, and devotion is simply the willingness to no longer interfere.
In this way, non-duality reveals itself not as emptiness, but as Presence. Not as negation, but as love. Not as detachment from God, but as intimacy without separation.
This is the ground from which the practice of surrender deepens—when letting go itself becomes devotional.