The Awakening Story

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, breakups, friends, family, none of that really mattered. But she was 22 and failing at the only thing that had mattered since she was 3 years old. Making it in the dance world.

Then she had the experience of being told thoughts were not hers, not real. It made no sense, but it seemed to help. It wasn’t supposed to be more than a way for her to get some peace of mind, deal with her anxiety and depression, a little cognitive therapy, the work of Byron Katie, and techniques from some old hippie dude named Ken Keyes.

At first it seemed like it was making life happier and easier. It was working. There was a fix for her life and she didn’t even need Prozac! She no longer felt like a failure, maybe for the first time since she was 5. The people who hurt her were no longer seen as abusers. The world was no longer viewed as an insane evil mess. Her mother was now understood to be simply a loving woman with a story she projected on her daughter and someone who did her best, not a deranged dance mom. And on and on. Everyone seemed so innocent and Miranda felt only love. She was a young woman filled with compassion and kindness for herself and the entire world. She forgave everyone that had hurt her. Then she forgave everyone. She even forgave Hitler. She had that kind of power!

She got involved in helping everyone and everything that needed help. She helped refugees, landmine victims, abandoned animals, homeless people, at risk youths, abused kids. She could finally become the saint she always imagined she longed to be. At this time, she realized that not only was she not going to be a great dancer but she was not a great choreographer either. She became an assistant choreographer and administrative aide at a dance company. She was competent enough, reliable, good at seeing mistakes and making corrections. What had seemed the worst possible fate, so awful she sometimes thought it would be better to be dead than not to make it big in the dance world, had happened and life was fine. She had friends, she could deal with her family in a loving way, and best of all she was really helping to make the world a better place!

And then something started happening. Her thoughts could no longer be believed, and soon it turned out that all she was were thoughts; thoughts attached to emotions and a body and a story of a world. More than anything, she was who she thought she was. And then she wasn’t. Maybe it’s impossible to explain, but having a thought arise and not thinking it’s your thought or believing what it said was the most traumatic shattering experience she ever had. More than being raped, more than breaking up with her fiancé, more than having her father all but disown her. All those things felt bad when they happened, but they happened to her and she believed her thoughts about them and the world still made sense. Then she found forgiveness with her new techniques and the worst that had ever happened was now okay. That was the point, just to undo the thoughts that caused her pain. Not all of them! She felt like someone who had put on some acne cream that started out working really well and now it was eating away at her face. Stop, she thought, I want to keep all these nice thoughts. But what she thought of as her mind was like a runaway train and she could not catch it. She was it.

Miranda then noticed thoughts had nothing to do with her, didn’t come from her, and they were all there was to the idea of her at all. Without the thoughts, nothing kept its shape, its name, its meaning. There was nothing inside of her, no person, and now there was nothing behind anything that was seen and felt, just a river of whatever happened or appeared without meaning.

Miranda started to disappear. She walked around the city and every day there was less and less of her. Not the old Miranda, not the new and improved loving and saintly Miranda. Not any Miranda at all. Not anyone else out there at all. Not even a world at all. And yet there was a dreamworld, and it was far more mysterious, wondrous, beautiful, strange, haunted and magically unfathomable than anything ever imagined. She wasn’t in it. Nor could she say she was it. But looking at clouds or people or the grass could bring her to tears.

It was only ever this, though she couldn’t have used those words quite yet, and even that hardly touched it. It was only ever life, but that was even too little to express it. It was only ever love, but she knew early on that the feelings she had felt as love, once as a personal self and later as the saintly self, were not like this feeling at all. She could call it love, and she would, others did, but it was vast and infinite and eternal and yet not any of that at all. It had no name, but what she felt and still feels is to any definition of love what a hurricane is to a summer breeze. And nothing else could be said. No words about it were true. No beliefs about it were true. All the stories told were non tales told in time, as real as last night’s dream when you wake in the morning. Not real at all. Not believed at all.

It was more beautiful than beauty, more loving than love, more alive than life. Then someone she told about this started sending her weird and bizarre videos from a woman named Lisa Cairns and a few other people who seemed to be the same kind of crazy as she was. She met this other woman online named Lynn who was going through the same kind of experience. They formed a little crazy club, she thought. At first, she and Lynn thought the only people in the world who knew about nonduality were the four or five people they watched on videos! It was the nonduality people that gave her the words to describe this, like a baby learning language, and she still has no other words.

Even now, some words seem closer than others, but none of them are true. Some words make me cry more than others, but none of them are true. Some words spin me around and dance me into space, but none of them are true. And underlying it all is a feeling of unendurable gratitude that fills the spaces where there used to be space, even if there is no one grateful and nothing to be grateful for.

And here we appear to be, my beloveds. Communicating beyond language, where we move like ghosts in a cave of dreams; figures painted in love dancing around the fire. Only shadows, reflected upon the ancient stone walls of our hearts. Only always ever this. Only always ever love. And not even that <3