MIRANDA IN WONDERLAND

A surprising number of people write me wanting to know how life is seen, how the world of apparent people and events looks to me. They’ve heard various speakers say that there is simply "no one" there, that everything that appears has no meaning, and even the judgments of good and bad no longer apply. It often sounds very detached, and speakers seem like they have a rule prohibiting them from discussing their direct perceptions and speaking to their audience as intimates.

So there’s a lot of “no one” and “nothing” language, as in "life is happening for no one" or "life happens, but is impersonal." From messages I receive, it seems that when sages speak this way, seekers imagine some detached observer sitting aloof from the swirling kaleidoscope of life, watching it all from a kind of void-like state.

I doubt very much that is how life seems to nonduality speakers, and certainly it’s not like that at all for this Miranda thingie. So I will try to address the many questions that ask how life seems if there is no meaning or separation.

I should begin by saying that nothing that appears ever seems caused, so in the world of seeming others---in so-called “person” or in the mediated forms we call internet or TV--- everything people do and say seems like something out of an outlandish Sci-Fi or fantasy film.

Nothing having meaning is hard to explain, but imagine you woke up one seeming day and everyone was debating the state of basket weaving in every country. Nations went to war over basket weaving, news stories centered on basket weaving, and basket weavers were the most revered people on Earth.
Or that marriages consisted of exactly 5 people--- two men, two women, and one nonbinary person, and any deviation from that was considered abnormal and even immoral. Or that people went nude everywhere, and those who wore clothes were ridiculed and in some countries stoned to death. Except for fingers, which were considered blasphemy to show, so everyone always wore gloves, and if you went glove-less the police would chop off your hands. And most people believed that chipmunks were gods who created the world and sent messages to the chipmunk popes who were the human religious authorities in each land.

That's how political, social, spiritual and moral "issues" of "society" seem, rooted as they are in the myth of separation.

When people talk of their “identity” and mention some imaginary category of human (which is already an imaginary category), whether nationality or race or religion, it sounds, as my friend Lynn says, like someone is saying, “I am an eggplant and I am proud of that, it defines me and eggplant culture must be heard.” Or: “My people are a bowl of soup! Soup people, that’s what we are!”

As Nancy once wrote, "The running commentary is not believed. There is no solidity to the thought stream. It's all even and equal... whether it is someone talking about purple unicorns on the moon or politics or whether it will rain on Tuesday. It has no meaning nor non meaning like the tree tops dancing in the wind."

There is simply nothing that appears that makes the slightest bit of logical sense, as the very concepts of some "thing" and "logic" and "sense" are absent.

It’s an Alice in Wonderland world:

“I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

The world that appears is a surreal carnival where no action seems to happen in relation to any other, and the appearance of continuity is as illusory as trying to find fixed variables for subatomic particles. Kaleidoscopic is my favorite term to describe it, as any pattern that appears soon seems to dissolve into another, and yet there is never any movement from, to, or back and forth or forward in time or space, as they are also only the shifting web of imaginary named patterns.

What is seen is indecipherable, as all words are like baby talk with a baby pointing this way or that. I suppose that is why some say this is nothing appearing as everything, as there is no place or source from which anything can be seen to arise or fall back into.

I do resonate with speakers who say nothing is personal, yet I would also say that everything is stunningly intimate. My family is right when they say I feel no deeper connection to them than to anyone else. I can look at a photo of my brother’s child, but it doesn’t seem like “my” nephew. I simply see a smiling human and I smile myself. But if someone online posts a picture of their child smiling, the intimacy felt is exactly the same.

I can relate to Byron Katie saying, when they told her that her family was there to see her after her awakening, that she expected to see little children and was surprised to see adults. If you say you’re my family, wonderful. Whoever you are, you are all my family, any appearing human as much as any other.

Everyone I see, in any apparent instant of perception, is my most intimate family member, from someone online to someone walking in the woods to the man who threatened to kill me. All are my lovers, all the beloved. Yet all who appear seem no more like actual separate individuals than characters in a nighttime dream.

When you write me, and I read your words, it always feels as if I am writing them. We are characters dreamed by life, but that is simply a way of trying to make it sound like what is going on is knowable, when all these analogies and descriptions are also part of a surreal carnival that makes no sense whatsoever.

And even that is one more fairy tale, as there is not even any center from which this writing seems to appear. Who is writing, what is writing, and what these words are and where they come from is impossible to answer. If thoughts come up about it and don’t go away, the neural pathways in my candy apple brain will start to short circuit and catch fire and my head will explode. That’s my theory, anyway.

The happy part, for this deranged Miranda thingie, is that there is no one here who gives a whit about what seems to happen or does not. No one who is looking for meaning or non-meaning; just a child playing in the grass and blowing dandelions in the wind. When people say they love me or hate me, it’s wonderful that there is no difference. It’s just like heavy metal and Mozart, and both are beautiful. And even beauty is made up.

And this sounds truly awful to some, because it includes all the things you love and all the things you fear; the things you call babies smiling and nuclear war, tender kisses and mass shootings, volcanoes and hurricanes and languid sunny days, playing on the beach and drowning in a tsunami.

All are loved, and yet none of those things seem like true descriptions as they are all imaginary separate movements in an inseparable dance where no one can even find a dancer. All these names and concepts about what appears are like looking at clouds and seeing shapes and naming them, which is all the entire world we seem to share consists of: names written on cloud shapes, blowing across an empty sky.

Alice said, “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”

Yes, I do indeed, Alice!

Aoetl, (always only ever this love),

...The Miranda Thingie... (words spilling out into in the middle of an apparent night in wonderland) 💓