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THE MORNING AFTER (random reflections on nonduality on a sleepy morning following a summer solstice camping trip at the silent retreat)

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  Back from a ceremony to celebrate the Summer Solstice. Even when connected to something we seem to observe, the sun’s movements in this case, making some part of ‘what is’ special seems surreal these apparent days. It’s hard to feel connected to ideas about time, or maybe it's just my excuse for no longer acknowledging birthdays and holidays. I honestly can't even remember the imaginary days and numbers attached to "my birthday." As the legendary guru Janis Joplin once said, "if you got it today you don't want it tomorrow, man, cause you don't need it, cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered in the train, tomorrow never happens; it's all the same fucking day, man." But it seems as if humans, at least contemporary humans, often need a story of specialness to simply feel free to express the joy of life. Though that joy gets mixed in with all manner of meaning and interpretation. At the Solstice ceremony, there was dance and music, but s...
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MIRANDA IN WONDERLAND

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A surprising number of people write me wanting to know how life is seen, how the world of apparent people and events looks to me. They’ve heard various speakers say that there is simply "no one" there, that everything that appears has no meaning, and even the judgments of good and bad no longer apply. It often sounds very detached, and speakers seem like they have a rule prohibiting them from discussing their direct perceptions and speaking to their audience as intimates. So there’s a lot of “no one” and “nothing” language, as in "life is happening for no one" or "life happens, but is impersonal." From messages I receive, it seems that when sages speak this way, seekers imagine some detached observer sitting aloof from the swirling kaleidoscope of life, watching it all from a kind of void-like state. I doubt very much that is how life seems to nonduality speakers, and certainly it’s not like that at all for this Miranda thingie. So I will try to address th...
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ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART

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  I had to go to a nearby city to help one of our retreat guests arrange their travel plans home. We were in a market, and I was waiting for her to get some snacks for her trip. It was the first time I had been in a large crowd in years. Waves of people passed by, some with children, young, old, many styles of dress and cultures, some seemed anxious or upset, others laughing, some in a hurry as they looked through the aisles carrying little baskets filled with their favorite foods. I had the sense of everyone’s ephemeral dream of life and how they likely felt so real and had stories that seemed to shape their world. They all seemed to come and go like ghosts, as we all do, appearing in this unknowable dream and then vanishing as if they never were at all. It all seemed so poignant and beautiful and I can only say that here it felt like love. Love is simply the fragile dream of life, however it appears; it’s that intimate realization that there were no separate people in a sto...
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