THE MORNING AFTER (random reflections on nonduality on a sleepy morning following a summer solstice camping trip at the silent retreat)

 

Back from a ceremony to celebrate the Summer Solstice. Even when connected to something we seem to observe, the sun’s movements in this case, making some part of ‘what is’ special seems surreal these apparent days. It’s hard to feel connected to ideas about time, or maybe it's just my excuse for no longer acknowledging birthdays and holidays. I honestly can't even remember the imaginary days and numbers attached to "my birthday." As the legendary guru Janis Joplin once said, "if you got it today you don't want it tomorrow, man, cause you don't need it, cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered in the train, tomorrow never happens; it's all the same fucking day, man."

But it seems as if humans, at least contemporary humans, often need a story of specialness to simply feel free to express the joy of life. Though that joy gets mixed in with all manner of meaning and interpretation. At the Solstice ceremony, there was dance and music, but since it is a silent retreat there were no words. I imagine that two of the dances were about the sun or light or something like that. But who can ever say what anything means when all meaning is imagined? Still, there was a lot of laughter and some tears combined with hugs and knowing looks that created a sense of community. At least it felt as if everyone there believed they had a story they shared with everyone else. And since I am silent, they could project that shared story onto me as well.

Well, no doubt someone will write to ding me for using the word "me." Perhaps I am not sufficiently nondual. Yet, the nonduality story is a simple one, though filled with apparent contradiction and confusion if we get stuck on language, concepts, and interpretation.

All that is ever being offered here is a suggestion, not a claim of truth, that the world of solid, separate material objects and autonomous human beings is illusory; appearances that we cannot see or know beyond our interpretation. This mean that our seeming experience can never provide insight into what we call absolute truth or the nature of reality.

That's it. Not a big deal really, except that saying, as a very famous nonduality speaker recently said, "There can be the illusion of experience, and that's what almost 8 billion people refer to," suggests that virtually every human apparently alive is believing an illusory story of reality.

And as Howard Chance said, "It is the human condition that we will never know any kind of actuality....From the first human as it appears in the story of time and space to the last, none of us has ever nor will ever know if what we are experiencing is real..."

And yet, though nonduality, "not-two," seems fundamentally based on pointing out the illusion of separation and often takes the form of negation, it cannot be complete if it leaves out the undeniable commonality equally shared by those billions as well the most riveting nonduality speaker; the aliveness of apparent experience. While it may unravel into a mysterious, unknowable stream of perceptual reflections with no one at the center, or may feel very concrete and solid, this appearance is all there is. Whatever it may or may not be.

And so, as Michael Markham says, "We can never know the “thing-in-itself” as anything other than its name. Acknowledging this fundamental limitation does not diminish the beauty of our existence.”

Some very radical nondualists may say no one has any existence at all and that beauty is made up, while others who feel the world is quite "real” may say it is an ugly and horrific life for so many. And both are equally correct, as both are sharing how life seems the same way this Miranda thingie appears to be doing right now----even if it is all seemingly happening by itself.

But somehow the story of beauty remains, even if it is more the beauty the poet Rainer Maria Rilke spoke of when he wrote, “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.”

Life as it appears
if separation is ever seen as illusory
is enfolded in beauty that will destroy us;
a terrible love that consumes even itself,
leaving always only ever this,
and not even any thing
or any one at all
<3