Creator of The Dioramic Approach
Independent researcher, writer, web designer, former teacher, and author of books on language, nonduality, identity, physics, and reality as constructed experience. Amateur mystic. Professional skeptic :-).
I was born on a stormy night on January 15, 1953, in Utrecht, the Netherlands. 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 researcher/philosopher. I work with tools: AI, web code, typography, layout. The output is often text, but the real work lies in the setup, in the conditions under which something becomes readable, thinkable, and testable.
Wide Open Windows is where those strands come together. It is an online research laboratory and workshop for inquiry into experience. Not as a system, and not as self-help, but more as field notes from the edge of certainty, together with the formats that allow those notes to hold together.
Much of the current work on this site is shaped by what I call the [[/content/method|Dioramic Approach]]: a way of examining reality not as something simply given, but as something structured, layered, and continuously configured in experience.
In the early 1980s I entered the world of Rajneesh, also known as Bhagwan and later Osho, and took sannyas in 1983 under the name of 'Chinmayo' (and I still call myself that). 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, Joan Tollifson and Miranda Warren 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.
- Next to the [[/content/publications/books/|books mentioned in this project]] you can find on Amazon books I wrote about Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo: Amazon search results.
- Together with two colleagues I translated Robert Saltzman’s The Ten Thousand Things into Dutch: De tienduizend dingen (Samsara, Amsterdam, 2023).
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