Forget the nondual pontificators and listen to Leonard Cohen. He instinctively understood the human condition. Why? Because he was human! I can’t belabor this point enough. It is fine to start off with teachings on the intellectual level, but you have to take the elevator to the next highest floor.

There you will find Leonard “blackening pages,” as he called it. Putting down thoughts that transcended neo-advaitan hooey. And there is tons of that. I have listened to so many dry talks on awakening and they all put me to sleep.

You can only say “I am” in so many ways. Eventually you must leave the dry desert of words and descend into the flood of suppressed emotions that are keeping you from knowing who you are.

Jesus wept. And for good reason.

Yesterday I spoke with the man that helps his son maintain our yard. He buried his wife in December. A more decent man you cannot find. Old-school, he was married to his sweetheart his whole life ad now she is gone.

He will have to deal with her loss the rest of his life. But he is smart enough not to look to neo-advaita to help him. I certainly couldn’t. Back in the day, when my husband was dying, everyone was in a Yahoo Group of one kind or another. I was in the non-duality one. Here I encountered young men that treated me cruelly, saying my story was just a story. Now more compassion has arisen, thank God, but men still prevail in the online nondual scene. I no longer participate.

Call me anything you like, but call me absent from those rolls.

Leonard said we are all clinging to the wreckage of our lives. Truer words were never spoken. To know this is to be lifted up into the arms of something higher than human words.

Compassion must be tough, however. If it is not, it quickly turns to indifference.

There are no human answers that do not need to be transcended into wordlessness.

Vicki Woodyard