Hi Anita
“If emotions are the brushstrokes, and the canvas is what holds it all—always there – Is the canvas like a steady, unchanging parent? A presence that doesn’t leave? A super-parent? A God?”

I think the canvas can feel like a steady, unchanging parent or even like G_d but only when we’re viewing it through the lens of relationship. The temptation here might be to start thinking of the transcendent as a noun. In non-duality, though, the canvas isn’t other (or a noun). It’s not separate from the painting, or from us. It’s not watching over us; it is us, just as much as the brushstrokes are. In that sense, we are both being held and are the holder… that never leaves…

It’s hard to talk about as any attempt to describe it is already a step away from it…

Camus came to mind as the question implied that a leap to a “higher” meaning might be necessary. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus defines the absurd as the tension between our deep longing for meaning and the universe’s silence. His concept of “the leap” is the move toward religion or metaphysics to resolve that tension in order to escape the absurd by positing a higher order.

Camus refuses the leap. He insists on staying with the absurd, without appeal to transcendence. Yet in doing so, he’s still holding the tension, he’s not denying the longing, just refusing to resolve it or fix it. I might add a refusal to articulate it. In that way, even his refusal becomes a kind of reverence. It points beyond itself, not by escaping the absurd, escaping the tension, but by fully inhabiting it. Not a leap as we general understand the word leap yet could that be a experience of transcendence? Maybe…

correction – I might add a refusal to articulate it away, fix it with words.

Just a note: the serenity prayer is always good advice. One can hold the tension and take that advice but the the tension remains as it was and is.

I think I may have confused things and given the impression that the non-dual (transcendent) experience somehow resolves things. That it fixes the messiness of life. But that’s not quite it.

For me, those moments of non-dual awareness are rare, often fleeting, sometimes just a breath. They don’t erase the complexity, the frustration, the beauty, or the pain of the world. The world, as I, remains what it is: wondrous, horrific, lonely, alive…. Nothing “changes”, and yet, something does.

In those moments, I felt a deep sense of connection, like touching the web of life itself. And their is a profound compassion that arises not just for others, but for everything, including myself. And yes, I can’t stop myself from trying to name it or hold onto it so it slips away. Still a something lingers.

What lingers isn’t a solution, but a softening. My stories become lighter. The grip of identity, judgment, and striving loosens just a little. I’m still the same world, but I’m not carrying it quite the same way.

So it’s not about escaping or resolving… but remembering. And that remembering, even if brief, changes how I move through the world.

Last night I reflected on being surprised that Camus came to mind as I tried to engage in the questions asked and that the confusion I felt was similar to what I feel when engaged in conversation with family members on the topic of God.

My family would be troubled with the association of the word ‘absurd’ and the word God. Than it occurred to me that in conversation we were using the word God differently. My family relates to a personal God while I relate to a non-personal G_d. With that in mind I would rewrite what I posted about Camus:

Albert Camus famously rejected the “leap” the turn to a personal God or transcendent meaning as a response to the absurd. For Camus, the absurd arises from the tension between our deep longing for meaning and the universe’s indifferent silence. To leap toward a personal God, one who explains, redeems, or consoles, is to escape this tension. Camus called this philosophical suicide: a refusal to face the absurd honestly.

This notion of a personal God was the one I was the taught which I internalized as God as a Father who would make everything better, all I had to do was trust, follow the rules.. and above all avoid a feeling that such a God could only be a puppet master at best, a monster at worse. In the end I was not able to hold that tension or the mental gymnastics to justify such a relationship. Here I enter my ‘dark night’ of the soul.

Rejecting the personal God as Camus suggests, I feel clears a space for a different kind of relationship. Not a being who ‘watches’ over us but Being itself. Not a voice that answers, but a presence that holds. This is the realm of the non-personal G_d, the canvas beneath the painting, the silence beneath the story, the ground of being that doesn’t resolve the absurd but embraces it.

In this light, Camus’s refusal becomes a kind of spiritual integrity. He doesn’t leap, but he also doesn’t turn away. He stays with the tension. And in doing so, he points, perhaps unknowingly, toward a sacredness that doesn’t require belief, only presence.

Here the words of a ‘we must lose God to find G_d’ come to mind.

In this non-dual space, theologies of law and language begin to fade. What rises in their place is compassion, not as a commandment, but as a natural expression of being. In that compassion, “law” is not imposed but embodied. It is not followed out of fear or duty but lived from a place of deep remembering.

The absurd remains. This kind of G_d doesn’t answer the cry for meaning with a tidy explanation. Instead, it holds the questions not as a problem to be solved, but as a mystery to be lived. The world is still what it is: beautiful, brutal, unresolved. But in refusing to escape it, we may find ourselves more deeply in it. And in that, something softens. Not because the world has changed, but because we have.

Paradoxically, the refusal to leap has helped me see that the path of the leap is also valid. What I once saw as escape, I now recognize as another form of devotion. All wisdom traditions whether they speak of a personal God, an impersonal ground, or no God at all are trying to name the unnameable, to touch the mystery, and that is so very human.

Each path, in its own way, invites us to hold the tension.
Each path, in its own way, returns to the canvas – the shore beyond.
Every path, in its own way, pathless.

Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā
Into the gone, into the gone, into the gone beyond, into the gone completely beyond the other shore, awaken.
Into the gone, into the gone, into the gone beyond, into the gone completely beyond the other shore, return.