EVERY HEART TO LOVE WILL COME, BUT LIKE A REFUGEE

A million words float against the backdrop of an endless empty sky of dreams. The dance of life appears, and sometimes it is heartbreakingly beautiful and filled with truly inexpressible emotions that people divide and label. Unspeakable sorrow and suffering, momentous joy and euphoria, all the states of what is called “mind” that are like changing patterns of "weather," also a name that divides what is simply the inseparable flow of what could not be named unless thoughts tried to separate it into discrete pieces.

The highs and lows of the life that humans seem to lead, where every day is a kind of baseline mundane boredom with hopes for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Where each action and word is filtered and interpreted and judged as if passing through some elaborate computer app with an algorithm that is called "me." My life, my love, my world. And yet life no more belongs to any “one” than an app on your phone or laptop.

And what is it like when that all falls apart, when the nonduality virus overwhelms and corrupts the carefully programmed set of reactions and impressions that form the narrative of the separate self? When there is no longer a world of milestones and achievements and events that bring joy and happiness and success, and others that bring sorrow and regret or fear. When all the seemingly separate things and beings and events are somehow still perceived, yet that perceiver cannot be found; when the lines where one such pattern begins and another ends blur into a watercolor painting left out in the rain.

It is not like any thing at all. It is the way it always already is: just life itself being whatever it appears to be. And there is no way for that to be interpreted correctly or incorrectly, and there is no possibility of any sort of deeper or shallower experience of living. How can what is inseparable ever be divided? Here, what appears seems miraculous in all its terrible beauty and ineffable love. But that is not some ideal state that anyone can or needs to reach. It is already the case, and yet it is still only one more interpretation that arises.

Sometimes people write that they find my reflections beautiful but unrealistic, or they feel I am expressing some ideal world they can never know. I once wrote, after being in a land where war had raged not many years earlier, that if the bombs fell right then, I would dance, and that would be love. Someone recently wrote that they read that and felt moved, then thought it was a lie. No one would react that way.

But this is where you limit the dream of what is. Recently, there was a dance camp for young people aged about 10-15 near Kyiv, Ukraine. They had held this camp annually, and this year the teachers decided to keep it going despite the war. On the final day, they held a "white party," where the dancers dressed in white and celebrated their friendship and art with dance and music. During the party, air raid sirens went off, which everyone there knew could very well mean that missiles or drones might attack their area.

They went to a shelter, though not a place built to withstand missile attacks, just safer than being above ground. And the girls took candles and one, 13 years old, took the time to bring a battery operated music player downstairs. And, with air raid sirens and the possibility of imminent destruction overhead, they danced.

That is really all I am talking about.

Life dances.

Love dances.

It is always the very last moment, and it is also always the very first, and it is never any moment at all. This kaleidoscopic whirlwind of apparent movement and feeling and all that arises is always an inseparable collage of dreams, and yet it is filled with infinite points of unfathomable experience, even if it is not the experience of any separate person.

All the nonduality speaker who says there is ‘no one’ ever means is that there is no autonomous separate entity apart from the seamless aliveness of all that appears. They simply realize that there is no solidity, no foundation, no explanation, no separation in whatever seems to be happening. But that is not, as some seem to imagine, the end of human feeling and perception.

Even the most radical nonduality speaker will bleed the same as the seekers in the room if you cut them. They will laugh and sometimes have tears roll down their cheeks at the unknowable whirlpool of life that dances itself into being and then vanishes without a trace, leaving only an echo of a lingering note in what we call memory that too will disappear into the silence of all that was and never was at all.