Dioramics grew out of a succession of ways of understanding reality. First came the scientific worldview, followed by the attempt to bring science and spirituality together in an all-encompassing synthesis. When that coherence ceased to feel self-evident, attention shifted towards self-inquiry, advaita and nonduality. Eventually, their promises and claims to truth also came into question.
This development was not a neatly defined sequence of stages. Different perspectives existed side by side and influenced one another. Yet, looking back, a movement can be discerned: from the search for an ultimate explanation towards attention to the different worlds in which such explanations become compelling.
The scientific worldview
The starting point was wonder at the discoveries of natural science. Atoms, molecules, evolution and the emergence of the universe opened up a reality far larger and stranger than everyday surroundings suggested. Behind familiar phenomena, structures and processes became visible that could be investigated and explained.
Along with this came the confidence that knowledge could gradually expand into an ever more complete picture. What was not yet understood might be explained later. Reality seemed, in principle, accessible to inquiry, even where the available knowledge still fell short.
This interest did not disappear. But a question grew about the place of lived experience within such a worldview. How did a description in terms of matter and processes relate to the experience of meaning, beauty, connectedness and being conscious? Could these, too, be understood within the same picture?
The promise of an overarching coherence
Encountering psychology, philosophy and spiritual ideas seemed to make a broader coherence possible. In Carl Jung and Roberto Assagioli, the psyche appeared as a world of symbols, possibilities for development and different layers of consciousness. Human existence acquired a depth that seemed difficult to recognise in an exclusively scientific description.
The work of thinkers such as Oliver Reiser, Teilhard de Chardin and Henri Bergson then encouraged the sense that matter, life and consciousness could be connected within a single encompassing perspective. The differences between them were considerable, but what drew me was the possibility of an overarching coherence.
Within this perspective, science and spirituality did not have to exclude one another. They could be seen as different approaches to the same reality. Evolution acquired a broader meaning, consciousness a central place, and individual life became part of a larger process.
The appeal was also aesthetic and existential. A synthesis turned separate insights into a whole in which everything seemed capable of finding its place. The world became more intelligible and more meaningful at the same time.
The unravelling of the synthesis
Reading Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, among others, unsettled that confidence. Their work offered different ways of attending to historical circumstances, differences, plurality and the workings of concepts. What had appeared as a universal order could also be examined as a particular ordering, with its own conditions and exclusions.
For me, this changed the question. Had I discovered a coherence that existed independently of my thinking, or had I brought disparate ideas together in such a way that they formed a compelling whole? What happened to experiences and insights that did not fit within it?
A system can explain a great deal while concealing its own assumptions. Once everything finds a place within it, every objection can also be interpreted as confirmation. The completeness that was initially so appealing can then become a form of closure.
The synthesis lost its persuasive force. The insights from which it had been built did not all disappear, but the confidence that together they would yield a single definitive picture did. This left an open question: how to go on when thought no longer offers an encompassing framework to hold on to?
From reality to the seeker
Through meditation, self-inquiry and the world of satsang, attention shifted towards the one trying to understand reality. Advaita placed a different question at the centre: who am I? What is this self that seeks, knows, desires and feels itself set against a world?
The possibility arose that the experienced separation between self and world was not as fundamental as it seemed. What was being sought would not be reached through ever more knowledge. Perhaps the search itself rested on a misunderstanding of who or what the seeker was.
This approach had a powerful appeal. Where the holistic synthesis had still tried to bring the different parts together, nonduality seemed to question the original separation itself. Perhaps unity did not need to be constructed or attained, but only recognised.
With Douglas Harding, self-inquiry also took on a concrete form: examining what can be seen in one’s own experience, rather than merely accepting statements about consciousness or reality. This kept alive the question of the difference between direct experience and its explanation.
Even ultimate insight becomes an image
Yet this search, too, could produce another ideal. Enlightenment, awakening or liberation was presented as a decisive change after which life would be lived from a fundamentally different understanding. The teacher seemed to embody what the seeker still had to discover.
One’s own experience could thus be measured against descriptions of peace, freedom and the absence of separation. An image emerged of how life really ought to be experienced. The attempt to escape fixed ideas itself took the form of a compelling image.
Gradually, questions arose here too. What exactly did it mean when someone said they experienced no separate self? What justified the move from that description to the claim that no separate self actually existed? And why should a particular way of experiencing be the destination of every human life?
Questioning the spiritual promise
The writings of Robert Saltzman, Shiv Sengupta and, to a lesser extent, Joan Tollifson helped me examine the expectation of a spiritual endpoint critically. For me, their significance lay above all in questioning the promise that ordinary life could be replaced by a definitively liberated state.
Miranda Warren then made tangible a distinction that would become important to Dioramics. Her description of living without experienced separation did not have to serve as a standard for my own experience. Different ways of experiencing could exist side by side, without one necessarily being an unfinished version of another.
This brought into view the relationship between nonduality as lived experience and nonduality as a philosophy of life. An experience can be profound and compelling. Claims about what it ultimately reveals remain to be examined in their own right.
What lost its force was the claim to a final word: the idea that a single experience or insight definitively establishes what reality is and how life must be experienced.
The opening into Dioramics
Through this development, the earlier worldviews became visible in a different way. The scientific universe, the holistic coherence and the nondual world each had their own persuasive force. Within each, different questions, possibilities and self-evident assumptions appeared.
Moreover, this involved more than ideas. A conviction could colour the entire meaning of existence: what mattered, what should be pursued and how one’s own life was judged. A worldview could become a lifeworld.
The image of the diorama gave this a simple form. In a diorama, separate elements acquire a place and meaning through their coherence. A world appears in which you can become absorbed. This also gave me a way of understanding different lifeworlds: as forms of coherence that feel self-evident from within, yet can shift, open up and change.
Dioramics emerged when attention began to turn towards this movement. How does a world become compelling? What holds it together? What happens when it ceases to feel self-evident? And how do earlier worlds remain present in what is experienced later?
No final worldview
This does not mean that the earlier perspectives have to be rejected entirely. Scientific knowledge retains its significance. Holistic ideas can help explore connections. Self-inquiry can unsettle familiar assumptions. A nondual experience can profoundly change a life. What remains in question is the move by which a perspective becomes the definitive measure of all experience.
Dioramics itself also belongs to this history. It uses concepts and images that make some things visible and may show other aspects less clearly. It could become another closed system if it were presented as the ultimate explanation of all other systems.
That is why opening up fits better here than arriving. The search for a final worldview makes room for an inquiry into lifeworlds, their differences and their changes. The world from which that inquiry takes place remains implicated in it too.