ton haarmans

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“From the outside, you seem mature with a philosopher's mind. But inside you're just a child lost in a sweet delusion.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky

I was born on January 15, 1953, in Utrecht. I studied philosophy in Amsterdam, and I spent most of my working life teaching and designing. For more than twenty-five years I trained people in graphic software, from CorelDRAW and PageMaker to InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. Alongside that, I built websites as a front-end developer.

These days I think of myself less as an author and more as a lab technician. I work with tools: AI, web code, typography, layout. The output is often text, but the real work is the setup: the conditions under which something becomes readable, thinkable, and testable.

Wide Open Windows is where those strands come together. It is an online laboratory and workshop for inquiry into experience. Not as a system, and not as self-help. More as field notes from the edge of certainty, plus the formats that make those notes hold together.

In the early 1980s I entered the world of Rajneesh, also known as Bhagwan and later Osho, and took sannyas in 1983. After that I wandered through various non-dual and Neo-Advaita circles. Eventually the chase for enlightenment burned out. The work of Robert Saltzman, Shiv Sengupta, and Joan Tollifson helped clarify what I could not force. These days it is mostly ordinary life, lived as it comes.

I live in Spain with my partner Asti and our dogs Angie, Sky, and Joy. I like writing, science, photography, and being outside. I also like working on the site itself: structure, typography, and the quiet satisfaction of making things readable.

ton haarmans

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