This is...

From a recent Facebook Messenger chat:

Me:

Dear Miranda,

Everything you write resonates with me. Clear as a bell. Still there is no recognition, no similar experience in this life, 'my' life. To be honest, I feel jealous at yours. I know I shouldn't, but there it is. I don't understand this at all. Sometimes I suffer deeply and I don't seem to be able to help myself. Of course it passes by and the next moment I feel okay. So, what is happening? What does it mean that the stuff you write seems completely clear to me, yet has no real consequences here, or so it seems. Do I make sense to you?

Perhaps it's because I still believe there is something to get.

Love, Ton

Miranda Warren:

“Part of the "problem" is the way this is often spoken about, that makes it seem like a goal or a final destination where one is at last realized or free or enlightened.

I know a few, including my brother, who find the descriptions of this to be quite awful, and feel that what I describe is a life minus some of its most beautiful and profound aspects, which may involve suffering but also a sense of things being meaningful, at least in the moment.

I feel I have also helped foster some of this mythology. I once wrote that what is alive and resonant in nonduality must be as relevant to anyone, whether or not they seem to share the view of inseparability.

In that sense, sharing this is a way of opening up another view of life the way great art or even life shattering realizations may alter us forever.

Even in this so called enlightenment, there are many variations.
Paradoxically, the message is always that this, life as it appears, is all there is, and perhaps as Byron Katie says, it is the story we tell that makes life feel less than or unsatisfying.

Who can say what is better or truer? Who can say that having a foot in both worlds, resonating with this view while experiencing the sense of fully being human, is less than seemingly having lost a feeling of being a separate entity?”

Me, in reply:

Thank you for your reply!

When both views, separation and non-separation, are equally true and untrue, equally better or worse, then there can be no reason to even try to 'get' it, not?

Somehow I know this and that's why I can enjoy your view, indeed like a piece of art, because there appears to be no 'teaching' involved. Teaching how to 'get' the non-separation view seems to be without any purpose and gurus appear to be nothing but narcisists and con-artists, preying on the need-to-escape of their followers (been there, done that).

A little voice in my head still calls me a quitter though. I actually can't stand the fact there are no ultimate answers :-)

Miranda replied:

“I used to yearn for the ultimate answer. I now think of the line from a Nicolas Willoughby song:

"I never found an answer/
I lost the question "why".”

This made me think and I came up with the following statements:

Current thoughts: (Partly edited by ChatGPT)

November 2025

1. I do not have access to an absolute perspective. Nobody has or ever will (still, in my imagination, I can presume it and give it the name "Darkness").
   What we experience is always filtered through our way of perceiving and thinking.
2. What we call "reality" is an experienced world, not a guaranteed objective world.
   We live in a mental interface, shaped by our brain, body, biological evolution, history, language and culture.
   We do not see things-in-themselves, we see a working representation.
3. There is a shared interface, but individual variations are real.
   Most people move within a stable, shared human framework of experience.
   But other states exist: mysticism, trance states, autism in all its variations, psychosis, religious ecstasy, dissociation, non-duality, and so on.
   No experience is absolutely true from a "divine" point of view, but some fit better into the shared human playing field than others.
4. Truth is not a possession, but a usefulness in context. A belief or way of perceiving does not have to be absolutely true to have value.
   What works, works.
   What provides connection, clarity or practical orientation has operational truth.
5. Experience can suddenly jump into different configurations.
   Sometimes the experience changes radically. A change can be induced by substances, meditation techniques or happens apparently uncaused. Some configurations last an hour, some last a lifetime.
   Some transitions bring freedom and clarity.
   Others lead to confusion and suffering.
   Both are real human possibilities, but not functionally symmetrical.

So here I am, having or being this experience, typing away these sentences on my laptop, looking out into the window in front of me. It looks like it will be a sunny day.

By the way: Miranda Warren can be found here.