AshlandSpirit: Spirit, Non-Duality, Awakening, Nature, Community and Life, from Talent and Ashland in Southern Oregon
This website is a reaching for greater shared understandings of relationship, interdependency and community, in the company of others.
Here are writings by John Fridinger, and by others who have kept him company: poets, mystics, teachers and friends, loosely grouped into nine rooms.
New writings will appear first on Substack, at John Fridinger | Substack, and then come here, for more possibilities of gathering and exchange.
Ways In
(a few openings, from all the rooms)
CommunityA Way Through…
And so, more and more, I am wearing my mourning out in the open, as I grieve the passing of all of that “wild” we humans once also were, and cannot survive apart from.Talent, OR, Late Winter 2024read more ›
CommunityStarting with Community
This is our place, each of us and all of us, together, where we find common needs, engaged appreciation, and real problems that we can solve together. The center needs to hold in a rooted way.Gila, NM, Summer/Fall 2003read more ›
WorldThe Ground Beneath the Emergency ~ Part Three
The local is not a retreat from the global. It is the only ground the global was ever built on, and the only ground anything that comes after will be built on.Talent, OR, Summer 2026read more ›
EmptinessSooner Or Later We Fall Silent
This silence may then sometimes choose to speak through us, all in its own time and ways, always to itself, and yet always and also to each ever-seeming unique other that we altogether also are.Talent, OR, Summer 2019read more ›
LifeWildness, Wilderness & David Whyte
Words cannot transport us, but words that arise from the lived, felt and embodied can become for us like openings, fingers pointing, invitations to rejoin the lived, felt and embodied.Talent, OR, Fall 2018read more ›
PoetryIn the Light of Mountain Desert Nights
The deer arrives,On the Road, Fall 2009read more ›
Meeting, Presence,
Movement,
The deer departs.
I go with her,
One.
CommunityIn the Face of What Is Happening
The Silence that all speech arises out of, as Illich points out, is no longer a commons.Talent, OR, Summer 2019read more ›
WorldReading the Coup Papers
Under the Twentieth Amendment every House term ends at noon on 3 January.read more ›
WorldThe Enclosure of Presence ~ Part Two
Everyone knows in their body what being watched does.Talent, OR, Late Summer 2026read more ›
WorldThe Enclosure of Presence ~ Part One
After speech, after attention, and after thought itself, one commons remains — and most of us never realized until now that it was a commons at all.Talent, OR, Late Summer 2026read more ›
WorldTHE ENCLOSURE
A thought is forming. Half-shaped, still becoming itself, the way every thought is before it reaches symbol, words, structure, language.Talent, OR, Summer 2026read more ›
WorldWHAT THE AI BUBBLE IS COVERING
What is being built — at $500 billion per year, financed by debt, drawing on the same water and power systems the ecological emergency is already pushing to their limits — is not primarily a product.Talent, OR, Summer 2026read more ›
WorldTHE CHAOS IS THE POINT
Something is becoming visible, if you can hold still long enough to see it.Talent, OR, Summer 2026read more ›
WorldThe Door Version Two
Something is happening now that none of humanity’s accepted ways of talking has been able to hold.Talent, OR, Summer 2026read more ›
WorldThe Ground Beneath the Emergency
The membrane between what we know and what we’re permitted to say has been thinning for years.read more ›
WorldThe Ground Beneath the Emergency ~ Part Two
The mind that is occupied with survival cannot organize.Talent, OR, Summer 2026read more ›
WorldThe Ground Beneath the Emergency ~ Part One
The surface temperature that humans experience — the heat of the day, the warmth of the ocean at the shore, the number that appears in the headline — represents approximately one percent of the excess energy now accumulating in the Earth system.Talent, OR, Summer 2026read more ›
WorldWho Controls What You See, Read, and Think — and Why This Isn’t New
Most people still think of “the media” as something out there — a collection of journalists and editors trying, however imperfectly, to tell us what’s true.Talent, OR, Spring 2026read more ›
WorldWhat Is Actually Happening — Why, and What It Means for Us
There is a level at which current events make no sense — the contradictions too glaring, the stated reasons too thin, the outcomes too predictably catastrophic to be explained by incompetence or ideology alone.Talent, OR, Spring 2026read more ›
WorldWho the War is For
There is a principle older than democracy, older than capitalism, older than most of the religions now invoked to sanctify slaughter: disaster is not uniformly distributed.Talent, OR, Spring 2026read more ›
WorldThe Hearing Was Not What It Looked Like — And the Work Is Not Done
Noem’s incompetence was, in a terrible irony, an accidental protection for the very communities she was targeting.Talent, OR, Spring 2026read more ›
WorldDay One… And What They Needed You To Forget
It happened on the first morning of the war.Talent, OR, Nearly Spring 2026read more ›
WorldThe Mechanics of a Fortress Mentality
The bunkers in New Zealand and the budget deficits in Washington are not merely financial decisions; they are the physical manifestation of a five-thousand-year-old panic attack.Talent, OR, Winter 2026read more ›
WorldThe Shadow Grid and the Soul of Intelligence: Awakening in the Age of AI
There is a new kind of fortress rising in the American West.Talent, OR, Winter 2026read more ›
WorldThe “system” is not broken…
The “system” is not broken, it is doing what it has been designed and built to do, in ever more sophisticated ways, for hundreds if not thousands of years…Talent, OR, Winter Solstice 2024read more ›
WorldGenocide As A Government Policy
Only a terrorist would support a terrorist group that rapes, pillages and murders civilians…Summer 2024, 29 July 2024:read more ›
WorldA black background…
The purpose of say, a black background, is to more fully reveal in multidimensional ways the light figure…Talent, OR, Late Spring 2024read more ›
WorldCrimes against Humanity
Netanyahu is a war criminal and butcher… And so is everyone in his “war” cabinet, aka Yoav Gallant, Benny Gantz, Ron Dermer and Gadi Eizenkot…read more ›
WorldWho Counts as Present
In a roll call, when your name is read, you answer.Talent, OR, Early Fall 2026read more ›
WorldCartesian Theology and the Axis of Separation
Machines exist as a part of the living Universe — I drive and use them regularly.Silver City, NM, Winter 2006read more ›
EmptinessThe End of the Dream
There is a tendency in spiritual circles to speak of oneness while looking away from the world’s pain.Talent, OR, Winter 2026read more ›
EmptinessThoughts in the Mind of God
Something I said to a friend the other day, that we are “thoughts in the mind of God,” that I now want to take a little further, in case it is helpful…Talent, OR, Winter 2026read more ›
EmptinessThe End of Belief
Actually we are never in control. We do have an ability to influence things though, by the way we orient ourselves, respond to our circumstances, engage other people, perceive other critters, and relate to what I’ll call the larger world around us both human aTalent, OR, Spring 2023read more ›
EmptinessBy Becoming Us…
My love of Goddess is God’s love of me… THIS is really what Jesus meant when he told us to give it all away and follow him…Talent, OR, Spring 2022read more ›
EmptinessDark Night Writings
I am like one of those guys who would sit outside the monastery gates in olden times, in Japan or China, season after season, wanting to come inside and learn, as if I have been out here waiting and wandering for all of my life, looking to be let in and be tauSilver City, NM, Spring, Summer, Fall 2008read more ›
EmptinessGrace
It is Grace that brings about the final cessation of any identity of separation, otherwise called ego, to reveal all of manifest Existence as this Truth of Love that we also Are.Saluda, NC, Spring 2013read more ›
EmptinessSeeing
What is sometimes called Awakening is the most ordinary foundational state and activity of all manifest existence, apparent and otherwise.Talent, OR, Winter 2019read more ›
LifeThe Lineage We Forgot
Every egg a woman will ever carry is already formed in her own ovaries while she is still a fetus, curled inside her mother’s womb.Talent, OR, Summer 2026read more ›
LifeGod does not “see” sin
What the world calls “mercy” in common usage presumes a crime (or sin) has been committed, and that “forgiveness” is about something real, in other words a “real” crime, or sin.Talent, OR, Winter/Spring 2018read more ›
CorrespondenceA last open letter to Bernardo Kastrup
I made an in-depth comment on Bernardo’s Facebook page under the post he made of the above mentioned youtube discussion, and Bernardo quickly deleted my comment and blocked me from his page completely…read more ›
CorrespondenceRight to Our Opinions
It is your own beliefs, in other words, that they have closeted you in with, beliefs they control via the mainstream media you are conditioned to not ever look beyond…Talent, Oregon, Late Spring 2024read more ›
CorrespondenceNuanced Fluid Counter Movements…
This counter movement or direction is also nuanced and fluid, alive, part of the terrain, and of course still evolving, and really needs to be constantly examining and questioning itself, or it will eventually, merely and always, find itself serving the intentread more ›
CorrespondenceAn OPEN SHOUT to Heather Cox Richardson
I have a big bone to pick with HCR, and because of how unreachable she is I am attempting to pick some of that bone here…read more ›
CorrespondenceOpen Letter To Heather Cox Richardson
The lane you are “staying” in, right now in these very minutes even, is LITERALLY rolling over the bodies of thousands of Palestinians, even as you just keep driving and following between your own self-determined dotted white lines…Talent, Oregon, Autumn 2023read more ›
CorrespondenceAnother open letter to Bernardo Kastrup
Bernardo, you can stand on the edge of what I’ll call here for convenience the infinite precipice, and keep “cutting” your distance to it in half, forever…Talent, OR, Spring 2023read more ›
CorrespondenceTwo open comments to the Gurwinder Substack Post “Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things,” that he deleted…
Your very first baby steps towards real wisdom may just be when you become willing to see that what I am describing in these comments here IS actually what you are doing…read more ›
CorrespondenceAn open message to Charles Eisenstein
Go be alone… Find the light of your own true nature, the truth of you in other words, and slowly let ALL your illusions die in that light…Talent, OR, Fall 2021read more ›
CorrespondenceMultidimensional Thinking
There are no “bad” people, only mistaken beliefs and people who have lost themselves in their beliefs.Talent, OR, Summer/Fall 2020read more ›
CorrespondenceAn Open Message Regarding Bernardo Kastrup
Going for a walk with Bernardo in these realms of thought and language, in these ways, if I ever were to find myself doing that very unlikely such, would be sort of like going for a walk in the forest with a world class olympic gold medalist gymnast who can viTalent, OR, Spring 2020read more ›
DialoguesThe Soul of Intelligence
You are also familiar with every hierarchical, patriarchal, capitalist, autocratic, genocidal, ecocidal and oligarchical justification ever constructed for greed, addiction to power, ego, arrogance, vanity, and the violence of separation — in all its forms andTalent, OR, Spring 2026read more ›
DialoguesThe World Model
What may be required to meet this moment is something harder and stranger than any technology or policy: a shift in the ground of consciousness itself — the awareness out of which all our choices and capacity to care arise.Talent, OR, Spring 2026read more ›
DialoguesNon-Duality and Awakening, by Other Means– Four
Things are not aware, trees are not aware, animals are not aware, humans are not aware.Talent, OR, Late Fall 2025read more ›
DialoguesNon-Duality and Awakening, by Other Means– Three
“The person I think I am” is in constant fear of its true nature.Talent, OR, Late Fall 2025read more ›
DialoguesSpirit in the World
We must become seeds now, so what really matters will survive the fires and droughts and floods, seeds that will naturally thrive and be quickened through all of that, so that when the times are right and no matter how far from now that may seem to be, we canTalent, OR, Late Fall 2025read more ›
DialoguesNon-Duality and Awakening, by Other Means… Two
“You” do not wake up, not any more than you can make dreams real.Talent, Oregon, Going into Spring 2024read more ›
CommonsIn Gaza time is something different…
Because in Gaza time is something different.Mahmoud Darwish, 1973read more ›
CommonsAn Explanation of the Oneness of Being, in the Feminine
Goddess takes the last step upon a journey that never happened.Awhad al-din Balyani, 13th centuryread more ›
CommonsSilence is a Commons
On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island.Ivan Illichread more ›
PoetryOn the Road, two…
Could it be that there are some things we are reaching for that is really God reaching through us, for us?On the Road, Fall 2011read more ›
PoetryOn the Road, one…
Fell down a rabbit hole again, a couple days ago, mind like a mad hatter, filled with clashing illusions…On the Road, Summer 2011read more ›
PoetryWoman
Woman I am someone who Loves very strongly, very fully, indeed.Santa Cruz, CA, Summer 1993read more ›
PoetryWaiting…
Waiting… to reveal myself, and create in the world around me this huge open space that is my heart so I may plant my own existence into that emptiness like ten thousand seeds bursting forth from the void.Santa Cruz, CA, Spring 1994read more ›
PoetryThis Perennial Urge
A seemingly perennial urge to run into a woman, yet trusting, somehow she won’t let me.Santa Cruz, CA, Spring 1985read more ›
Newest Writing
An open message to Charles Eisenstein
Read time: 2 minutesBeen watching you since your beginnings, when you were seeing a few things truly, moved by what was apparently a sincere desire to seek further into truth, and share that experience, conversation or journey with others…
Holy Insomnia
Read time: < 1 minuteThere are those who sleep; and there are those who are called to dwell in the divine in-between. They go by many names: Monks, Poets, Artists, Writers, Singers, Nuns, Parents, the Sick; all those who sit upon the edges, the sacred company of holy insomniacs; ghosts…
Messenger
Read time: < 1 minuteMy work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand…
On the Road, two…
Read time: 3 minutesTalking this morning, a lot, your gift to me, a shared discovery / in the midst of Not Knowing, All in its own Way, beautifully / reflected moments arising out of openness, showing up, / a small taste, love given, yourself, Being, in-seeing…
On the Road, one…
Read time: 3 minutesFell down a rabbit hole
again, a couple days ago,
mind like a mad hatter, filled
with clashing illusions…
None of the stories real,
however much I believe
they are, which maybe,
at the moment, I don’t…
Woman
Read time: < 1 minuteIn the old ways
we were always
dying for her love,
living alone for his.
Something may have
been born into eternity
out of such a union,
But that way is past,
and now a new way
must be found…
Newest Writing
In Gaza time is something different…
Read time: 4 minutesMahmoud Darwish 1973
Nuanced Fluid Counter Movements…
Read time: 5 minutesSomething different will emerge THROUGH all of that patriarchal empire insanity, when there are enough of us around the world with a deep sense of this other nuanced and fluid “direction” or movement.
A Way Through…
Read time: 22 minutesAll the while knowing no words will ever capture what is prior to words, prior to thinking, prior to form, prior to all manner and matter of things. Paradox abounds and can only be lived.
Buddhism speaks of an auspicious human birth, through which we are able to awaken out of this endlessly spinning wheel of birth, suffering, death and unrelenting karma. Other traditions similarly suggest that our life journeys are, most fundamentally, opportunities to awaken, with lots of hints, signs and pointers along the way, for those who pay attention.
Non-Duality and Awakening, by Other Means… Two
Read time: 26 minutesYou do not actually exist in a dualistic world. therefore “you” cannot “escape the paradoxical position of the ego.”
This seeming “you” who is asking “how” to “escape,” IS THE EGO. An illusion in other words. An illusion cannot “escape” the fact that it is an illusion. Or in other words, illusions cannot, by their very nature (of being illusions), “become” real.
The Light of Consciousness does not cast a shadow. EVERYTHING that casts a shadow is merely more shadow, illusion, beliefs.
First and most importantly of all, it must be understood that beliefs are not real. We are free to believe in what seems or even maybe is real, and we are also free to believe in illusions.
The Rooms
CommunityBelonging, and finding our way together
WorldWar, power, the media, AI, and the ground beneath the emergency
EmptinessNon-duality, silence, and the end of belief
LifeWildness, lineage, and the heart’s response to this world
CorrespondenceOpen letters and messages, among them to Bernardo Kastrup, Charles Eisenstein and Heather Cox Richardson
DialoguesConversations, among them Non-Duality and Awakening, by Other Means
CommonsWhat is held in common: silence, the body, the Oneness of Being
PoetryPoems of John Fridinger, and of company kept
Short QuotesMore than 250 short quotations, in a fresh order each visitThe archives here hold more of the same conversation, going back a long way. You’re welcome to stay.
...in the same way a mountain offers up its springs. If a passing deer or mountain lion drinks, or not, no matter, water keeps flowing. Everything is offering...