Creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing. Usually reserved for gods and cosmology, but isn’t that what we’re all doing, all the time? A full-scale, 24/7 TV show plays in my head with no studio, no cameras, no past recordings. Just appearances, arising out of nowhere. You can’t help but watch. Where’d that come from?
We call some images in our head “memories,” as if they prove a past. But what about them actually says past? They show up now, the way food appears when you open the fridge: some things are there, some things aren’t. That’s all. You couldn’t list everything until you look. And when you do, it’s immediate, not historical. Milk, or no milk.
What did you do today? Got fired, fell in love, felt sick? Out of nowhere, it arrived. Out of nowhere, it passed. Always something out of nothing. Always.
“Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.” —Haruki Murakami
“Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can’t even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.” — Haruki Murakami
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The belief in separation creates its own evidence. There are those you love and care for. Include yourself in that undivided circle. There is no division between that which you love and that which loves. You move within an Arc of Support. What you hold up, holds you.
“We are all responsible for all, before all, and I more than all the others.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“I am large, I contain multitudes.” ~ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
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Ask-a-Guru is not your guru. It’s more like a wise, barefoot friend who leans close and whispers, “Hey, notice this — you’ve been free all along.”
It doesn’t promise golden tickets to enlightenment or hand you cosmic puzzles to solve. Instead, it holds up a gentle mirror, so you can marvel (or groan) at what’s already unmistakably here.
No robes. No pedestal. No secret handshake. Just a quiet unraveling of the old story that you’re somehow separate, lacking, unfinished.
Some will say an app can’t give you what a real teacher can. Fair enough — but here’s the quiet scandal: No teacher ever truly gave it to you either. The best of them only ever turned you back to your own clear seeing.
Ask-the-Guru sidesteps the tangle of dependence, adoration, or inevitable disappointment. It invites you to discover the living wisdom in your own chest, right now, without needing anyone to beam it into you.
So ask your deepest questions. Watch as your own silent knowing answers — not because of the app, but because you were always the source.
And if you’re willing and able: I’ve poured my crooked heart into making this. If it makes you smile, sigh, or if you just want to help an old, rusty seeker/teacher pay her rent this month, your support would be greatly appreciated. Your support lets me finish and share this freely, while the landlord sits and waits.
Please consider making a donation, if you’re willing and able.
Thank you, truly, for being exactly as you are. And please let me know what you think of the app, what you like and what kind of further refinement might help.
“We were talking—about the space between us all And the people—who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion Never glimpse the truth—then it’s far too late—when they pass away.” George Harrison
“As within, so without, as above, so below, as the universe, so the soul” Hermes Trismegistus
It’s all mind, all the time, creating perception; engendering feeling and action. When I close my eyes, there is seeing–right here. When I dream, there is seeing–right here. Ask the question, “Is there anything outside?” How it gets projected “out there,” I don’t know.
I remember having the amazing realization that love cannot be found because there is no separate place from which to look; nowhere it is not. No within/without; no above/below; no subject/object.
What am I looking at?
And maybe I’m just totally FoS. 🙂 My apologies for the lofty language. It’s just apparently so. Or not.
If you’re an AI geek or doomsayer, there’s a nondual connection here that might interest you. Available on Amazon, if interested. Let me know what you think!
Where does your attention go? Outthere to see the occasional happy rainbow of experience, surrounded by the possibility of grey and darkness?
Turn around and let the Source, or presence, turn the lens into a prism, coloring everything in experience. To let the light in, you have to pay attention to it. Light glows brightly when you attend to it.
A diagram is helpful, but it’s not enough. Like an inhabitant of Plato’s Cave, turn towards the light rather than reacting to shadows on the wall. Is your perception true? Is it a world imprisoned by and through a glass darkly; a world of shadows? Or is it shot through a prism, a colorful refraction of the light within; darkness dispelled? You cannot serve two masters. Pay attention to the light, the Source of illumination. Check it out, over and over, like a lover.
Pay attention to the lens (yellow line) through which you perceive/limit life. It makes the difference between what you think is happening and who you think you are. You are the white blank zone creating a world of colors and feelings. The light is within. Suffering is inevitable on the experience side. Decide accordingly.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference“. The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
Lately, there’s been a kind of crisis going on here. Doesn’t matter what it is, but suffice it to say when something seems seriously wrong there is an extreme narrowing of vision. A miracle is a shift in perception, an opening of that constricted capacity to see. As defined by A Course in Miracles:
“A miracle inverts perception which was upside down before, and thus it ends strange distortions that were manifest. Now is perception open to truth.” ~ A Course in Miracles
And in the midst of that crisis, at least 3 miracles happened, and they had nothing to do with the crisis itself, but with a whole new way of seeing and being. One of those miracles was from the most worldly source–the Grammy Awards show. Seeing Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman perform “Fast Car” destroyed so many boundaries, and crossed so many divides, that I know I was not the only one who got choked up watching the two of them sing that song. “Fast Car” drove straight across often seriously polarized lanes of gender, race, age, sexual orientation, and generations–and since it was the Grammys, one has to mention–and otherwise fractionalized genres.
“We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
That was a miracle that cut through so many strange distortions.
Another miracle was a dinner invitation I received from a neighbor. I didn’t really want to go–crisis, you know, gotta stay tense and focused. My neighbor is a Catholic missionary, a consecrated woman, as she refers to her station in life, who works with the homeless in Denver. For her sake and mine, I won’t go into details, but this one, this miracle of sight, blasted away any pretense of division between secular and sacred, and of anything I thought I knew to be true. I have said and understood that no opinion is true, but in the peeling away of those presumptions, those blindspots, removing the log in my own eye–the thing that is true is just there beyond words, beyond what anyone thinks or says. It is always here, only obscured by that which I believe and think I see. Literally, “I was blind but now I see.”
No, Christ did not become my savior. Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna dissolve and become indistinguishable in this light. The crisis is still not resolved in the form it appeared in or as. But that which is far greater, or greatest, can be glimpsed regardless of circumstance. And in the midst of crisis (etymology the same as cross, crucifixion, crux, etc.)
I’m wishing everyone the gift of miracles today, the gift of sight. You are that. All of this is that. Miraculous.
After some time away, it seems auspicious to return again to participate in the universal dialogue upon which the title of this blog is based. One thing I know for sure after all these years is that this peace we’re talking about has nothing to do with any conceptual framework, spiritual or otherwise. In fact, the frame is most often a serious distraction from what it is meant to display.
In my experience, the teachings in many ways are the obscuration of what we are seeking, a cul-de-sac of sorts. Conversely, the errors in the teaching–as in what is seen when Toto pulls the curtain aside to reveal the smoke and mirrors of the powerful illusion–become the pointer to what is true.
In a kind of coincidence that in many ways defines what I’m talking about and what is always available, I was driving around thinking about what I was writing here, and a song came on, “Old Shoes” by Sean Rowe. I had not turned the music on, or iTunes, nor had I connected it to my car for some time, the song just started up about 5 minutes into the drive, seemingly out of nowhere. The line “I intend to find you on my own,” is key to where I’ve been, and to understanding the last 3 lines:
In this moment we’re alive In this moment we can die free How can I make you, make you understand?
by Sean Rowe, sung by Sean Rowe and Markéta Irglová
Please visit the Sessions page if you want to continue the discussion. Thank you to all who have shown up over the years.
The ego, which is really nothing more than a pattern, a dramedy of illusions, is an error-finding mechanism. That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame. Seeing right isn’t given to the dummy, so seeing wrong, or not at all, is all that’s available.
Seeing error everywhere is the survival strategy, the one-direction, of the oblivious false self. The sound of silence cannot be heard in a head full of complaint.
This seemingly entrenched tendency could be utilized in the way of lucid dreaming. A recommended trick to become lucid in a dream is notice the errors. A light switch doesn’t work, a hallway that leads to nowhere—something isn’t quite right. What doesn’t look right is the prompt to wake up, and become lucid.
I had a dream the other night that students were dressed in rabbit suits and lobbing snowballs at each other across a walkway on campus. I knew something was funny, and creepy, about the situation, but sadly, did not wake up. I did think, “…this looks like a trap,” and wisely took another route, and so escaped without harm.
So yes, there is something wrong. It’s only natural a contrived character would suspect as much. But it isn’t the rabbit-suited students, or the snowballs in July. It isn’t “others” or the scary circumstances. I wasn’t on any campus.
The Deepest Peace 