Wide Open Windows is not a path. It does not lead from appearance to essence, from illusion to reality, from surface to depth, or from world to source. The books, essays, and “worlds” gathered here were not conceived as steps toward something more fundamental. This project began from a refusal.
The refusal of the almost automatic assumption that some forms of experience are higher, deeper, more real, or more true than others.
That assumption runs through religion, spirituality, psychology, philosophy, and even much contemporary non-dual discourse. Again and again experience is arranged as a ladder: from ego to awareness, from fragmentation to unity, from world to ground, from confusion to awakening.
The starting point of this project is simple and uncompromising:
There is no standpoint outside experience.
Everything that can be said about experience appears within experience. Every criterion, every distinction, every
judgment of “higher” or “lower” appears as meaning inside a world that already carries itself.
Throughout this site I speak of “worlds of experience.”
Sometimes it may help to think of them more modestly, almost playfully, as kijkdozen, or dioramas: constructed viewing spaces, like the shoebox scenes we made as children, which only exist from within their own opening.
A hierarchy of experiential worlds presupposes a position from which worlds can be compared, weighed, or grounded.
Such a position never appears. It is only imagined.
Hierarchy, here, is not discovered. It is installed.
As metaphysics. As spirituality. As developmental models. As consciousness ladders. As subtle replacements of God by
Awareness.
In all these forms, hierarchy is not a description of experience, but an addition to experience: a belief structure presenting itself as insight.
This is not innocent.
The moment one world is named “higher,” others are silently demoted: less real, less conscious, less meaningful, less valuable. Normativity re-enters precisely where it claims to dissolve.
This site therefore offers no ascent. No route. No culmination. The books are not stages. The essays are not a trajectory. The worlds are not episodes in a progression. They are variations: different configurations of experience, each appearing fully as world, with its own coherence, affective texture, risks, and possibilities.
Worlds differ radically. In structure. In tone. In openness and closure. In beauty and violence. In suffering and imagination.
But difference is not hierarchy. Other is not higher.
Terms such as “origin,” “emptiness,” “before worlds,” or “darkness” appear here not as foundations beneath experience, but as names for particular experiential constellations. They do not point under experience. They function within experience, as worlds that present themselves as ground, depth, or outside.
Whenever something “deeper” seems to appear, this project treats it as what it is: another world arising within a world.
If there is one consistent gesture behind everything on this site, it lies here:
Every world that appears, appears fully as world, without higher court of appeal.
And when such a court seems to arise, it too becomes part of what must be described, not obeyed.
