EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE

 

There are a million ways to talk about this and there are no ways at all. People who write me from indigenous cultures tell me they always knew separation was a lie, and someone tells me that when Native people from a tribe in northern California were asked to record their autobiography, they never even mentioned personal details as the personal self was not seen as important. They would simply describe the awe and beauty of life. When the anthropologist Knud Rasmussen asked an elderly Greenland native her life story, she recounted times of famine and storms where hunters were lost and children were born and hungry and old people died. He thought her life had been marked by tragedy, but when she was finished talking, she simply said, "yes, life was good.” Not because it had been filled with good or bad events, but because life itself was enough. My correspondents from such cultures are always a bit surprised when they hear nonduality speakers and find them obsessively pontificating on the “me” or the absence of the “me.” One Native American man tells me how strange it is that these speakers see how absurd the personal self apart from all that appears truly is, but rather than share the wonder of all that is, unfathomable and miraculous, they seem as obsessed with the “me” as those who believe in its veracity.

More and more, a lot of nonduality sounds like a psychotherapy session, albeit the most radical kind of therapy imaginable, where the realization is no self at all. But it’s still focused on the sensations and perception of the imaginary character. Perhaps that is the surreal duet most speakers and seekers are dancing, and of course that is as perfect as anything else that appears: a kiss, a fetal heartbeat, a tornado, an orgasm, a murder, a war, a gentle song echoing in the moonless night around a dying campfire. And perhaps it’s not surprising in a culture that holds the myth of the separate individual and the separation of all things as its most fundamentalist religious belief, prior to any religions or politics or spirituality. The obsession with ourselves, even if they are non-selves, is understandable. But one day it may fall away, and with it the interest in hearing people talk about me or no-me or no one or some one.

Often, when I share the kind of reflections that’s still seem to engage this Miranda Thingie, people write back that they are too poetic or wild or philosophical. They want to hear about themselves, even as non-selves, and why not? Who else is there, after all?

I would say there is often more of a feeling of no separation in music and dance than in most people simply sitting there and talking about their nonduality message. In the dream of life that appears, in a lover’s touch or a stroke of lightning, in all the appearances our brain/mind interprets and names and yet knows these named things are not what is at all, lies the very edge of what is edgeless. It is neither empty nor full, not an it or a this, not oneness or even noneness, not even love or beauty--- though my candy apple brain loves those words even as its rusty neural network can’t believe in them anymore. Just as it can no longer believe in who or what seems to have these reflections dance through her life the way the rain falls through my outstretched hands as I stand in the storm and melt away into the mud of never and forever at all.

It really doesn’t matter if you think you know you are a self or you imagine you know you are not. It really doesn’t matter if you have a cool nondual language to trap concepts that say they are not concepts, though this Miranda thingie has often delighted in such wordplay. And there is still a fondness for the concepts that are like IED’s in the road, the words that explode when you read or hear them and you are blown to infinitesimal pieces as the shrapnel of meaning and being burns away forever in an inferno that erases the very world and the very you that sees it, yet leaves behind all that ever was, is, and will be, timeless as it feels, nameless as it seems, and yet more intimate than your heartbeat pounding in the womb or on your deathbed in the imaginary fairy tale of a character written in invisible ink in the never-ending and never-beginning pages of the book of life and no thing at all.