There are nominally two aspects to reality. The silent awareness and the changing relative content. In dualistic life, all that is recognised is the changing aspect of reality. But at some point the mind discovers and identifies itself as the source and ground of silent awareness, and the egoic, dualistic identity is transcended. When this…
Nothing lasts for ever, but many things persist for a long time. So if your answer to unwanted experiences is to wait them out, then you could be enduring something for a long time, and that holding-out itself becomes a source of suffering. You must find the acceptance of each moment, every moment in itself.
Nondual awakening is a jump for sure, a transition. And no matter how thin or diminished was the egoic operating system beforehand, when it’s gone it’s the establishment of a new way of being. But in practice it can take a while for the new Awareness OS to penetrate every level of being. Even after…
We live and move according to our deepest values. It’s not always clear what they are, but our actions reveal them, not our words.
We can think of the Garden of Eden story as being about a perceptual and conceptual shift that can be reversed any moment. If we’re chewing on that Forbidden Fruit then we’re all full of judgements: good, bad, right, wrong. It’s exhausting and life becomes work and misery. But if we just stop judging in…
Buddhism has this notion of Dharma Gates. It means that there are ways of entering into this primordial state of freedom and joy. And what’s important is that these gates are plentiful, diverse and always present and available in every moment. In other words, paradise is right here and now if only you’d ‘enter into…
In the course of our lives sometimes we find that we don’t really want what’s happening, we wouldn’t necessarily choose it for ourselves. But we’re called to it, it’s happening and so we have to make our peace with it. In order to stay sane and non-distressed we have to give our assent to the…
I recently sat down for a cup of virtual coffee with the delightful Maggie Gilewicz, PhD for her ORDINARY PEOPLE, ORDINARY AWAKENINGS podcast. We talked for a couple of hours about my (long) spiritual journey, both before and after awakening, and discussed some of the misconceptions and challenges facing the spiritual seeker and awakened being…
The delusion known as ‘personhood’ or ‘self-view’ persists until it starts to collapse under the weight of its own evidential unreality. At which point the true nature of self and reality, namely consciousness, becomes increasingly* and eventually* entirely self-evident. *Or: rapidly, immediately, suddenly, instantly… And of course the opposite can also occur: the consciousness-nature becomes…
The beginning and end of this whole existence and the arena of ‘The Work’ and the unfolding of the so-called ‘process of awakening’ is this present moment. The past shows up here as memory, the future as imagination. Cognition, mentation, sensory arisings, all happen here. It’s this now-ness, this such-ness that constitutes Reality. And liberation…