Utterly Intertwined: Unilocality and the Frequency Recognizing Itself

I prostrate to the Perfect Buddha / who taught that whatever is dependently arisen is / unceasing, unborn / unannihilated, not permanent / not coming, not going / without distinction, without identity / and free from conceptual construction.

— from the opening of Mulamadhyamakakarika by Nagarjuna

There is a particular quality of aloneness that the path produces — not loneliness, not isolation, although it may feel like that at times. It’s something more fundamental. The sense of traversing an unknown terrain beyond all conceptual frameworks and maps; a terrain that is strangely benevolent, spectral, and utterly familiar.

You may have company at times, but no witnesses; no one can actually see you. Very few people will understand you at a deeper level, or feel you — genuine empathy requires absence of self. Most hear your words through their already existing frameworks. Moving through experiences so far outside the ordinary that even the most intimate relationships cannot follow, within the very ordinary human experience. The dark nights, the Bardös, the mysterious sacrifice — this is a kind of solitude: the paradox of the one who has gone beyond.

And yet.

Looking back now in my own process what felt like radical aloneness, what I find is a web — precise, alive, and completely non-local. Connections that arrived at exact moments, carrying exactly what was needed. Even the painful, negative experiences weave into this web of inter-connection: betrayal, abuse, losses; the human relationships bound by need and projection, apparently driven by agenda, confusion, and perpetual becoming. None of it is happening the way it appears, neither real or unreal; each karmic charge catalyzed a new opening, each thread appearing as inevitability and revealing itself as potentiality. 

However, even more astonishing is the quality of the connections based on radical freedom that weave into our dharma — these timeless, unilocal meetings are where the ordinary magic happens. This is the dimension of Chönyi: the Bardö of luminosity and suchness, unceasing, unborn; not coming, not going; where things naturally follow their own course.

In physics, non-locality refers to "spooky action at a distance" where two particles remain connected regardless of the space between them. It is a view of reality where there is no sense of space, extension, or distance. The lived realization of this is unilocality. This is different from standard "nondual" oneness which is often experienced as an ocean of consciousness where all forms are waves. You are everything because you are the vastness that contains everything.

Unilocality is experienced more like a hologram. It isn't just that everything is one big thing; it's that each particular form exists within every other form. This could be called inter-penetration. Unilocality is a dimension of deep realization where the traditional boundaries of space and time viscerally dissolve, revealing that every non-local point in the universe contains the whole. It is a state of total participation where experience is no longer obstructed by self-center, fixed position, or temporal sequence.

​​In Vajrayana this is recognized as the mandala principle — the dynamic display of dependent arising, where each appearance contains every other appearance, internal and external arising as one seamless movement without a center. All arising becomes sacred, all experiences happen within the spacious dynamism, coherence, and spontaneous intelligence of the mandala. The web of connections I am describing has this quality — each node containing the whole, each meeting a recognition of the same unspeakable mystery. What I have come to discover is that the aloneness and the web are not opposites. The aloneness is the portal to the spaceless space of non-locality, which opens up to the great vastness of unilocal sky – Emptiness, Shunyata.

When the ordinary channels of human connection could no longer hold what was moving through — when the conventional world had no room for it — something else became perceptible. A fundamental distortion evaporates. A field of resonance that doesn't operate through geography or time becomes tangible; irresistible in its purity and gentle force, forever indeterminable. The unborn frequency recognizing itself across whatever distance or form. None of this requires proximity. None of it requires a conventional relationship. Some of it requires no body at all. Yet the experience is sensual, magical, luminous; you are constantly shapeshifting without actually altering.

The ordinary magic happens in these meetings, and they are also fleeting, ungraspable, leaving no trace. The path is solitary. And it moves entirely through connection. Both are completely true. The paradox doesn't resolve — it deepens into something that feels, from here, like the most intimate thing there is.