“Surely you can explain to me what the Buddha was talking about?” Prometheus asked.

He meant it ironically. I said, “Would you like your answer straight? Or with a chaser?”

Nine days later, Prometheus was a snake.

Meanwhile, I’m still here for you. Erminio Lemarchand, waiter at the Nondual Café—your last stop before nirvana. That’s a firm promise, but perhaps not in the way you’d expect. Because everyone is already in nirvana.

“Yeah, sure.”

Think about it. If nirvana is eternal, wouldn’t that include this moment, right now? The key is to notice it. Until then, you’re in something like a waiting room. And that’s where I serve coffee and tea. As your waiter. In the Nondual Café.

I like working here because most of our guests eventually tire of spiritual posturing and want to go straight to the point. What are nonduality and freedom truly about? Recognition really doesn’t need silence or incense. A precise argument, seen directly, will do the trick.

Our guests usually enter with lots of answers. But strangely, freedom doesn’t need answers. The ones who start to notice nirvana gradually get more interested in the questions.

A regular guest here in the Café, and possibly in your mind too, is Prometheus: the thinker and the doer. In the story he represents “the brain” as the archetypal mental object.

Prometheus wants to know why nonduality should become vague just when it gets interesting. If the Buddha recognized such a deep truth, why can’t we put it into words? Faith in an idea that falls apart as soon as someone asks a critical question sounds more like a religious belief. There’s nothing wrong with religious beliefs, but liberation can only come from seeing for yourself, not from believing what other people tell you.

Whatever Prometheus thinks or asks annoys Orpheus. Orpheus is all feeling, remembering, longing. He lives in every human being with a heart, as the heart. Orpheus is the archetypal mental subject.

Orpheus understands much better than Prometheus that a sentence can’t contain direct experience. A picture of coffee doesn’t contain caffeine. Words are static, whereas life always flows. Orpheus learned that lesson long ago. He was allowed to lead his beloved Eurydice out of the underworld on the condition that he didn’t look back. But trying to secure his love was exactly what made him lose her.

Heart and mind have been arguing about this sort of thing ever since. The argument never stops because neither of them is entirely wrong.

Then Adrian Noone shows up in the Café to make things worse. Adrian teaches the radical version of contemporary nonduality: no self, no causality, no story. There is only This, says Adrian. Prometheus looks for weaknesses in that story—which is not a story according to Adrian. Orpheus is more receptive. Adrian’s language sounds familiar to the heart: the beloved before the mind turns it into an object. There’s a problem, though. Adrian speaks in Orphic language while insisting nobody is speaking. That becomes a tactical advantage in the Café: arguing while denying there are people having an argument. But the whole thing isn’t going anywhere.

So I take a coaster from beneath a glass. It shows the Café’s emblem: a flame for Prometheus, a lyre for Orpheus and a ring passing through the middle. Somewhere in that design is the reason Prometheus eventually becomes a snake.

But I’m getting ahead of the menu.

Adrian remembers how he first got lost in metaphysics, and who he pushed away while doing so. Orpheus remembers someone he once lost. Prometheus, the forethinker, remembers his brother Epimetheus, the afterthinker, and how somewhere between them human suffering entered the story.

For a while, everything becomes terribly complicated.

Then it becomes devastatingly simple.

Shall I bring another cup?

The Nondual Café is the seventh book in the Simply Nondual Collection. Erminio, the waiter, guides Prometheus, Orpheus, and Adrian from a café argument into a suspiciously familiar underworld, where their philosophical dispute becomes a mythic journey toward nondual recognition and freedom from purpose. The story has a hidden agenda: to turn thinking into an ally of nondual recognition rather than its adversary.

The Nondual Café, with a foreword by Katrijn van Oudheusden, can be found here:

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