Spiritual

  • Awakened mind has no prescriptions…

    Awakened mind has no prescriptions, only descriptions. But since the world at large is dualistic, we have to translate much of what we hear into non-personal terms. So doing becomes happening. And moral or spiritual injunctions become the recognition and description of our nature and tendencies rather than actions we take as autonomous individuals.   Continue reading

  • Wanting, craving, thirsting, clinging…

    Wanting, craving, thirsting, clinging. This is the way of non-acceptance, the way of misery. And so the opposite is true: Desirelessness, non-grasping, non-attachment, openness. This is the way of acceptance, the way of joy and peace.   Continue reading

  • Bliss is always here…

    Bliss is always here in our experience, but we have to surrender to it. Otherwise we experience it as suffering.   Continue reading

  • MIND THE GAP

    All intelligence is a modulation and expression of the Great Intelligence. Just as a single leaf is no less tree than the branch or the trunk or the root. All is tree, all is creative intelligence. Knowing the nature of one’s Being is sufficient to end suffering. In the light of our nature as boundless… Continue reading

  • IMAGINATION AND FEAR

    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… Continue reading

  • SELF KNOWLEDGE

    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… Continue reading

  • CONSCIENCE

    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,… Continue reading

  • Whenever desire or dissatisfaction shows up…

    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,… Continue reading

  • THE LIMITS OF WORDS

    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… Continue reading

  • THINKING ALLOWED

    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… Continue reading