Hbo’s Howling Commandos ↳photo Archive (x)

There’s something very nice about remembering fics you read years ago. Maybe you remember the plot perfectly, maybe the rest of the fic is only a blur aside from a handful of vivid scenes, but you remember the way it made you feel. And sometimes you dredge up the memory - the premise or a favourite scene or a few lines that stayed with you -  and your heart aches a little bit, the way it does when you think about books you enjoyed as a child.

To all the fanfiction writers out there: your work is beautiful and meaningful and it leaves an impact. I promise.

Nonduality is so simple, but it can never be understood by an individual, which is only a sense of being someone and therefore doesn’t understand anything at all. A sense of self can’t do anything because it’s not actually a thing with its own existence. Instead, understanding belongs to awareness, consciousness, being, or whatever you’d like to name it—literally, whatever seems to stand under all appearance of phenomena. And this “pure consciousness” is the best candidate for being our Self—not the bundle of thoughts and sensations we normally take ourselves to be.

Direct pointing can sound obtuse, like you’re holding back the punchline, asserting claims without proof, or making word salad. But direct pointing is pointing to what is always immediate, always here, always available—the you in which “you” appear and which precedes all concepts.

Conceptual thought can only produce a conceptual facsimile of understanding. Look directly. You are not and never were the self you have always believed yourself to be (or have at least believed since around the time you were two years old).

Awareness can see that it’s not the mind, not the body, and not the person. And yet the sense of being a person seems to stick around and still seems to be real even after the initial recognition of its unreality. That’s just how it seems to work.

(Sorry to use “seems” so much, but much is only seemingly so.)

But if a person persists in being exposed to concepts that point beyond the conceptual, then it seems like there’s the potential for the “body-mind system” to do something different. I.e., when the conditions are right, the mind gradually stops layering the sense of doership/ownership on everything that seems to happen.

Eventually the recognition of non-doership/non-ownership can “stabilize” and become the default mode of living for what seems to be an individual. And eventually for everyone, the person dies for good—either when the body dies or allegedly, in the case of enlightenment, before the body dies.

Nonduality is the most liberating shit on offer. Continue to go back to it and when you’re ripe for awakening, the person will be exposed as being empty and the emptiness will be exposed as being you. And that will change everything without changing a thing.

Or don’t think about nonduality at all. That’s fine too. Whatever happens, this is just this, exactly as it is.

Animal friends. Curriculum Foundation Series: Combined Guidebook for the Pre-Reading and Pre-Primer Programs. 1940.

Internet Archive

Photography by George Platt Lynes

French vintage postcard

Crow(s)

Self-Portrait on the Couch at Night - Claire Tabouret,  2025.

French , b. 1981 -

Acrylic and ink on paper, 47 ⅝ x 71 ⅝ in.

by Carl Pugh.

From Joan Aiken's book : 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase' illustrated by Pat Marriott