This Terrible Love, a journal of nonduality

Here the story of awakening is felt like a somewhat remembered dream, or like the story of a character in a novel or a film. It’s not personal, and there’s no sense that “this happened to me so many years ago.” However, since I wrote emails about it then, I can give you a timeline for what happened in the space-time story. I was 22 and it was 2011 and I had been working on some ways of questioning beliefs using cognitive therapy, and the work of Byron Katie and Ken Keyes for over a year (I had no understanding of Byron Katie’s nondual ideas and whenever she mentioned something nondual I just assumed it was a poetic metaphor and ignored it. I had never heard of nonduality or Advaita and did not have a clue or any interest in what enlightenment or awakening were). For a while this questioning of thoughts made the “me” happier and peaceful, and after 6 months or so I joined many volunteer organizations and saw life as truly amazingly wonderful. I had friends who thought I was having a m...

I have received a dozen messages from people begging to hear the story of my awakening, as if it mattered, as if there even was such a thing. Everyone’s got a story. They’re not true. Not real. They are fun to read, but they’re just imaginary tales of what can never be actually remembered. They are only fictions, only just dreams. Without time when could anything have ever happened? Without space where could anything have taken place?  I am going to write about this in the third person, since memories  of my "past" now truly seem like I am remembering a fictional character. So, keeping in mind that this is just a story and   nonduality is the end of stories, here is the story of “Miranda’s Awakening” (and there is no belief here in either Miranda as a separate person or awakening as an event that can happen in time and space). Miranda was never a seeker of anything but a successful dance career. Trauma, assault, life and death happening all around her, romantic love, br...