This Terrible Love, a journal of nonduality

  This is not about any thing. This is not about some person that somehow inexplicably becomes some other person. This is not about someone becoming wise. This is not about suddenly knowing the answers to the questions you asked all your life. This is not about becoming a better person. This is not about feeling more loving. This is not about being a kinder human being. This is not about all the things we might have imagined or hoped it would be about. This is not a story of a perfect human being walking out of the ashes of an ordinary human being. This is not about seeing everything as it is, only seeing what isn't and never was. There is no one who can change or improve or understand. The very same patterns and habits of life may repeat, though some may be altered. But patterns of what we label behavior change all the time without any shift; someone quits drinking, someone turns into a murderer, someone becomes an activist, someone falls in love. There is no sage who sudden...

The world and everyone in it,  everyone I ever loved,  everyone I ever feared,  everyone I ever hated,  everyone who let me down and betrayed me,  everyone who loved me and said the gentlest words  when I was sad so that their concern made me cry,  everyone who lied to me,  everyone who tried to tell me the truth,  everyplace I had come to hold dear and call home,  everything I believed gave my life meaning,  every emotion that swept through me like a hurricane,  every story of who I was and wanted to be...   all washed away in the tsunami of love  that crashed upon the shore of illusion  where the entire universe existed---  the universe inside my brain,  the only one that had ever been-- and the universe itself vanished into a black hole... with the places and people and the girl in the mirror  who tried so hard to be  what she believed she was supposed to be    and it feels like d...

From somewhere inside of a dream she fell in love with everything. And everything seemed like Christmas morning, wrapped in shiny paper, gifts of love and joyful wonder. Then everything went away, and she went with it, until she woke up in a strange place where nothing was familiar. It was as if everything was floating in soap bubbles blown by a child, carried in the wind, bursting into nothing at all. And laughter and tears flowed without distinction. And everything that had gone came back, but the way a holographic image is projected into empty space. People emerged like pop up ads on a computer screen, explaining everything that was happening and all she had seen. But she had trouble following all their explanations. It didn’t seem to matter, as the kaleidoscope of life turned by itself and a love song was always playing on the speakers in her mind. Unknown music filled her dreams, and there was no one to awaken. They told her it was just this, but it could have been just that for a...

They send me words, and little pictures of themselves light up the screen and reflect off my face in the darkness of the wee hours. Outside, the sounds of the forest hum a lullaby. The seekers that came here the past few years called this silence. How funny that seems, for I hear a symphony--- life singing in so many voices; a choir of love carried in the wind. They want to know what they can do about something or other. Or they want to know how to escape the pain of something or other. They wonder if I have an opinion on what they say is going on. If they are not specific, I have to ask them what they think is going on. For I am aware of no thing that is going on. Just the wind and the music of the dream of life that is playing a love song in my brain's theater of everything and nothing at all. And yet it is not a song you have to go to some retreat in the woods to hear. The notes may vary, but I have heard this song everywhere it seems I have been. It sings in the heart of London...

  Everything perceived and thought to be known is an illusion constructed by the mind, a fairy tale world of beings and things that are not beings and things at all.   The quantum physicists and the neuroscientists and the nonduality speakers all tell me this, yet they are also illusions. They speak and my mind dances with them, and then they vanish into thin air, their enigmatic smiles lingering a moment like the Cheshire cat, and I run to the mirror and what do I see….? An imagined Miranda, invented by no one, a fictional character, who one day in an imagined past saw that everything seemed to be a dream I could not remember from moment to moment. It felt as if some strange surreal world was being invented each instant, but I could not find the flow of time. It was beyond disorienting, for I couldn't even locate the center of it all, and yet these made up people and a make believe world appeared. I was one of the fairy tale characters, and it was always clear it was ...