Do you believe it because you see the evidence of it and also find no evidence of it’s opposite? Or do you reject non-doership because you don’t wish to accept its implications? So what does the evidence of your experience tell you about what-is? And before you come to any conclusions, have you applied your…
At the heart of matter of being human is the problem of suffering. What are we to do with it, how do we contend with it? If suffering cannot be accounted for at our current level of understanding then we might ask, as a starting point, if we can at least *admit the possibility* that…
The teachings of nonduality can sometimes seem to be somewhat abstract, or removed from one’s lived experience, or even rejecting of it. It may be that these teachings, being so uncompromising about the causes of suffering and its remedies, seem to disregard the human-ness of life in favour of a cold, relentless discrimination. But the truth…
Spiritual awakening is a lot like the creative process, because when you engage in meditation or introspection or inquiry, if you’re motivated by money or acquisition or anything like that it pollutes the process. It’s more important to be open and to play and be curious, to be intuitive and fearless rather than be wondering…
The ego constricts around a more-or-less fixed mode of being. So when the ego is transcended and the constrictions are released, then the manifest being reorients to a more natural, unconstrained mode. And we don’t have any real idea what that might look like. During the ego’s reign fundamental embodied modes of intelligence may well…
The impulse to spiritual practice is the impulse to awaken so even if practice is wrong or poor or difficult or ineffectual it’s never misguided, and in the worst cases it can be redirected or transformed to better express the core impulse. All the prayers and mantras and chants are well and good but the…
I was sitting outside a café with a friend some time ago, and we were talking about ‘consensus reality’ as he put it. He was wishing that he could be free of its influence. I sympathised with his POV but pointed out that we aren’t actually bound by it, and it’s enough to recognise one’s…
If you’re serious about self-discovery, if you’re serious about the truth, then you have to be willing to give up everything you think you know. You have to be willing to question and look at every assumption and become like a clean slate. Because untruth and suffering hides under the rocks of unexplored assumptions. Here…
It’s often the case that nondual understanding in the dualistic mind is the product of ‘secondary mind’, the logical, analytical mind, and not a wisdom emanation from Pure Mind. True wisdom is born directly from Self-nature without reference to understanding. It’s the difference between knowledge born of Self-recognition, and the cogitations of the functional mind…
I’ve been concerned with identity politics and PC culture lately. I don’t quite know why, maybe it’s that I’m seeing in the outside world, in groups, the same kind of dynamics of fear, control, and suppression that the ego uses on a personal level. I’ve been noticing that my attention has been liberated from the…