We have this powerful imagination and it’s mostly used for envisioning futures, and that allows us to plan, coordinate, cooperate. But when we believe our imagined scenarios to be reality we can suffer them too. I believe the great challenge of our species is to learn to manage this mental functioning, to be able to…
When all falsehood falls away, what remains is truth. What we can then say about that truth may take lifetimes to articulate, but there is, here it is, ringing loud and clear as reality itself. A big part of the truth is discovering that we are the very heart of experiencing, that we are knowingness…
Conscience is a strange thing, it’s intuitive, it’s felt. When we’re in tune with it it’s bliss even though its dictates might be difficult to follow. But when we’re not listening it nags and emits a sense of unease. It’s like a Geiger counter that makes odd erratic noises until it picks up the signal,…
Whenever desire or dissatisfaction shows up our first instinct is to try to get or change something. We’re trained to leap up and run after our impulses like show-dogs. Desire says “jump” and we say “how high?!” And since these thoughts and feelings and wants keep popping up, large and small, we’re endlessly running around,…
Use your words, they say. But recently I saw a sunset that was so sublime words couldn’t even get near it. The subtlety of colour and form of the endlessly changing expressionist painting in the sky, the deftest touch, the impossibly tender sensibility of the creator. There’s really nothing I could say that could begin…
We are opaque to ourselves. We don’t know why we do the things we do, what our deep motivations are. We just act first and explain or excuse later. It’s how it works, how we work; act first, the mind accounts for it later. Which makes sense as we were pre-verbal as living organisms for…
It’s the now that counts. It’s the present-moment that is most ‘real’. The rest is memory and imagination, which both have tremendous value of course. But THIS IS IT, this is the place of power, this is where all the action is. NOW. And so much of that power is dispersed when we miss it,…
Lately I see a big part of the spiritual scene is about a kind of ‘radical humanness’. And I’m all about owning and including our embodied nature and not denying it one bit. But this can also be the back door to re-identification and the denial of the miraculous and mystical truth of being. Yes,…