This Terrible Love, a journal of nonduality

    It was the end of the day, the end of all the days, and there was a vague sense of fading light peeking through grey clouds. A girl slept on the rattan chair, curled up like a cat. She was dreaming, but so was I. I did not really know what she was. What I was. You will never know what is right there appearing before you. The lover who explores every inch of the body of their beloved or the serial killer who tears it apart; neither will ever find what they are looking for. The seeker will never find the no-thing the speakers hint at, as if it is waiting in the next room like an unwrapped present. And there is no present, any more than a past or future. The woods have secrets, that's what the old man who came up to do some woodwork said. He made a few repairs, then he carved an ivy covered tree in the main cabin post. The seekers will love it when the next retreat comes, though some will attribute mystical meaning to it he never intended. But no one ever intends, and...

  I don’t know if it’s the middle of the night. I don’t know if it’s night or if anything has a middle. But in the imagined middle of the night this character awakens and walks in the darkness with a lantern. It could be some medieval wilderness, no streetlights or power poles or houses anywhere to be seen. Just the symphony of the nocturnal denizens of the forest, an echo of thoughts and trails of dream stuff. Who is walking?    People write to ask me about awakening/liberation/whatever every day now it seems. Messages fill my inbox. How do they get in on it? What is it like? Who really has it and who does not? And I can't answer any of their questions.    For all that can be said here is that this is about unfathomable awe and wonderment, about indefinable beauty and an ineffable edgelessness that really has no description and cannot be reduced to concepts and beliefs. Yet words seem only capable of expressing concepts and beliefs, even non-concepts about non-...