This Terrible Love, a journal of nonduality

  Every concept and idea can be unraveled like a ball of string, leaving nothing at all. But there is no actual nothing left. The absence of self or things is not nothing, not emptiness, not some new idea that stands in for the loss of an old idea. If it is seen that the human interpretation of the story of being a person in a world of separate people and things is simply that, and has no substance or actual existence, you can’t replace it with some vague metaphysical or philosophical idea of something else or there is just one belief traded for another. This is the end of belief, even in beliefs. The end of knowing, even of unknowing. What’s funny is that no one steps outside of the mind-made world to see or know anything. Even in the tale of events, or non-events, where time seems to stop and everything is clearly seen as never having been what thoughts claimed it was, at some point the body is like a bored teenager who says, “Yep, it’s all just appearances, there’s never b...

In the middle of the night, waking up to the sound of wind and some animal howling in the distance, not one usually heard. Waking up and somehow there is this perception or awareness that even that most obvious story is made up; how could anyone be waking up, how could it be the middle of the night, how could it be anything at all? The animal call sounds plaintive, like a lonesome howl in the darkness. But no doubt, whatever it is---could it be the elusive wildcat? ---is not at all lonesome, and being nocturnal, it is quite at home in the darkness. The Miranda thingie also seems at home in the darkness; she loves the night, along with the grey “dreich” days, more than the bright sunlight. Maybe because in her story she is from a place without a lot of sunshine. I notice an email from my teenage cousin, a girl who also went mad and suspects this is genetic. But she will agree that genetics is only a story, and words can never even express what is felt and seen, especially as feeling and...

A million words float against the backdrop of an endless empty sky of dreams. The dance of life appears, and sometimes it is heartbreakingly beautiful and filled with truly inexpressible emotions that people divide and label. Unspeakable sorrow and suffering, momentous joy and euphoria, all the states of what is called “mind” that are like changing patterns of "weather," also a name that divides what is simply the inseparable flow of what could not be named unless thoughts tried to separate it into discrete pieces. The highs and lows of the life that humans seem to lead, where every day is a kind of baseline mundane boredom with hopes for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Where each action and word is filtered and interpreted and judged as if passing through some elaborate computer app with an algorithm that is called "me." My life, my love, my world. And yet life no more belongs to any “one” than an app on your phone or laptop. And what is it like when that...