This Terrible Love, a journal of nonduality

   photo by Inna Darda, Odessa, Ukraine I don't have a story that there is something a few can discover that is not what already always is. Sometimes it may seem to manifest as a being that sees through illusions or beliefs, but that is the very same thing as a being with illusions and beliefs. Illusions and beliefs are just ideas, and that is also only an idea. Whatever I see is simply felt as what has always been here, just like someone walking down the same street everyday and never noticing the graffiti on the wall. Once it's seen, they realize it was always there. But the one who sees it and the one who doesn't are the very same, no separate one at all. I can't separate the world into parts. Sometimes it's sunny, sometimes there is happiness because life appears the way you imagine it should be. But sometimes it's not safe for the body, sometimes you hurt, you are hungry, and there seems to be suffering. 'What is' seems to change, but not really...

  MIRACLE MILE A few guests have arrived at the retreat, though this is not a “formal” event. The landowner invited three artists who had been here before to come and finish projects they were working on. He emailed Fiona and me saying he knew we would help create “a spiritually and creatively nurturing environment.” We both burst into laughter when we read that, because at heart we are brats and also because more and more we no longer seem to understand what anyone means by anything they say. We imagine it means not disturbing anyone and Fiona making exquisite meals they can eat when they want, as regular mealtimes might interrupt their creative flow. The artists are no doubt filled with beliefs of being inspired by the muse and the importance of art. We made sure the cabins were all set up with comfortable bedding and plenty of necessities, including bug spray for the midges, and that they have access to camping equipment and trail maps I made, though we imagine they will mostly ...

  We are over the rainbow. There only ever is over the rainbow, but when it's not seen, that's when the suffering happens. The separation.   Yet everyone is innocent, no one chooses or acts, no one is bad or good, life just happens. Sometimes something so heartbreakingly beautiful appears to happen because of something that seems so heartbreakingly tragic in this unfathomable dream of life, even though there is only what appears dancing simultaneously without cause or effect.   A little girl sings before the world and cries, and we cry with her. A little girl dies and her mother weeps, and we cry with her. A man blows himself up for the love of his god and kills people, and his mother cries and we cry with her. Tears flood the world and bathe it in love. The water rises and becomes a bittersweet symphony of life and death and love and loss with all the angels singing songs they will never finish as they have never even begun, and there are only ever angels and there are n...

People, events, and experiences seem like art in a museum I once walked through. I remember seeing an exhibition of impressionist paintings --- when you see them in apparent physical reality it is nothing like an image in a book or on a screen. The richness of the brush strokes, the vivid colors; the paintings caress you, pull you in, and yet are still a projection. Something seemed to happen between me and each painting, a communion; we were each as alive and real as the other. After all, I am nothing but a painting of impressions, as are we all. When I felt it was over, like an orgasm concluding lovemaking, I walked away from a painting. I did not feel loss, but consummation. That painting and I had never been separate and never would be. And at last, I left the museum. Filled with all the art I merged with, even as the images no longer danced before my eyes. So it is with all the apparent people, places, and things in this dream of a life. Lovers, friends, famili...

Here it seems like life sings ‘This’ in as many ways as it creates flowers. There is no correct interpretation, any more than we can say opera is more truly music than rap (and I know some might say that!). The way it seems to be seen here: Preferences. Seems as if we like to attribute intention and motivation and personal traits to everyone, the same way we do for characters on a TV show. There is a bird that alights on the third highest branch of the tree just outside my window every morning. I suppose we could say she prefers it. And the wind, on a clear day, blows from the southeast in the world of imaginary points on a pointless landscape. We could say it prefers to blow that way. I don't know. Why do I seem to sit in the morning with a cup of tea facing the east reading Nancy Neithercut’s poems rather than facing the west and reading Eckhart Tolle's New Earth book? No reason, but the very act of looking for reasons and imagining they exist if only I could ponder deeply e...

  There are a million ways to talk about this and there are no ways at all. People who write me from indigenous cultures tell me they always knew separation was a lie, and someone tells me that when Native people from a tribe in northern California were asked to record their autobiography, they never even mentioned personal details as the personal self was not seen as important. They would simply describe the awe and beauty of life. When the anthropologist Knud Rasmussen asked an elderly Greenland native her life story, she recounted times of famine and storms where hunters were lost and children were born and hungry and old people died. He thought her life had been marked by tragedy, but when she was finished talking, she simply said, "yes, life was good.” Not because it had been filled with good or bad events, but because life itself was enough. My correspondents from such cultures are always a bit surprised when they hear nonduality speakers and find them obsessively ponti...