This Terrible Love, a journal of nonduality

  And one day she noticed her mind that belonged to no one--- not to her, not to God, not to some mystical force called Consciousness or Awareness or some magical sounding foreign word--- that "mind," which was something she had been told was there but had never found, well, it wandered away. And the body they called by a name to mean that wispy ghost of a girl seemed to get up and walk slowly out the door, even though up on stage some man was pontificating, though he kept saying no one was talking. And in another room that she walked out of, another man in a robe was saying you have to want the truth but had never explained exactly what that thing he called truth could be. And as she walked out, people seemed annoyed--- even if they were supposed to be in some sublime state above annoyance or know that their annoyance was simply happening to no one at all.     The girl walked outside and the birds started singing--- well, no doubt they had been singing, but how could she...

  not even this     there is just an apparent  seamless flow of experience,  it needs no one to explain or interpret it  or do anything at all,  for you are it, inseparable,  a spun web of unbroken wonderment  imagining there is a way to say  what will never be spoken.   and every beautifully futile effort  is where the heart of love  bleeds us all into being,  and words or no words  only silence remains,  echoing like a symphony into the forest  where seekers hike in search  of the never lost or found,  imagining they can feel the emptiness  they have named and turned into a thing...   and one surreal afternoon  after the birth of language, humanity invoked the world  into apparent existence  with innocent prayers,  like children playing with hand grenades,  turning shapeless forms and intangible sensations  into separate objects and concepts and people...

    It was the end of the day, the end of all the days, and there was a vague sense of fading light peeking through grey clouds. A girl slept on the rattan chair, curled up like a cat. She was dreaming, but so was I. I did not really know what she was. What I was. You will never know what is right there appearing before you. The lover who explores every inch of the body of their beloved or the serial killer who tears it apart; neither will ever find what they are looking for. The seeker will never find the no-thing the speakers hint at, as if it is waiting in the next room like an unwrapped present. And there is no present, any more than a past or future. The woods have secrets, that's what the old man who came up to do some woodwork said. He made a few repairs, then he carved an ivy covered tree in the main cabin post. The seekers will love it when the next retreat comes, though some will attribute mystical meaning to it he never intended. But no one ever intends, and...

  I don’t know if it’s the middle of the night. I don’t know if it’s night or if anything has a middle. But in the imagined middle of the night this character awakens and walks in the darkness with a lantern. It could be some medieval wilderness, no streetlights or power poles or houses anywhere to be seen. Just the symphony of the nocturnal denizens of the forest, an echo of thoughts and trails of dream stuff. Who is walking?    People write to ask me about awakening/liberation/whatever every day now it seems. Messages fill my inbox. How do they get in on it? What is it like? Who really has it and who does not? And I can't answer any of their questions.    For all that can be said here is that this is about unfathomable awe and wonderment, about indefinable beauty and an ineffable edgelessness that really has no description and cannot be reduced to concepts and beliefs. Yet words seem only capable of expressing concepts and beliefs, even non-concepts about non-...

If you could feel it, you would not believe you could ever know it. If you could feel it, you would know it is spoken as truly as it ever can be told in the echoing note of a guitar floating into the wind. If you could feel it, you would see it in the flower folding in upon itself in the photograph taken by a little girl and painted by a trick of the light inside the theater of your mind. If you could feel it, you would not know what consciousness or the brain or love or rain was,  and you would not even know that you do not even know.   If you could feel it, everything would stop and you would see that it had never even begun,  that there wasn't ever anything at all, yet nothing is also everything.   If you could feel it, the warmth and cold and light and dark and the fire glimmering in the stone fireplace across the cabin and the echo of an owl and the call of a wildcat and the luminous darkness would not be outside you or inside you, and inside and ...