Creative process is a really interesting subject to me. All creatives seem to have one, but the only commonality is that there is one. The details vary considerably. “Find your own way,” seems to be the imperative. Find out by doing and then reflecting on the doing. Maybe then you can extract some rules or guidelines, some…
I’m musing on the idea that in principle, religion offers the appropriate instruction, practice, and experience for every level of spiritual development. The thought is that even at the most basic level of understanding and spiritual development, it offers an appropriate message to meet the person where they are. And at the highest levels of…
The mind, it just makes up a bunch of questions to bother itself with. Questions that it demands answers to before it will allow itself to rest. Which of course is never. The mind just endlessly justifies its own existence, its own primacy. But maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on the mind. It’s doing…
Question: how does one resolve the seemingly contradictory notions that on one hand, God/consciousness is everywhere in everything equally, and on the other, some places and some people are more sacred and holy than others? It’s a function of apparentness. To those who are misled and confused by false notions, the divine is variously less…
I show up to write each day but it’s sometimes hard to turn up at the page with nothing around me. The room I’m in has no interesting elements or items within eyeshot. The computer desktop on which the writing page itself sits is completely bare. All intentionally reduced. That I have a twinge of…
How does one square the circle of devotion to deities in nonduality? It’s a mystery. And I mean that in a technical sense. It’s an apparent truth that the mind can’t fathom or explain. But what’s a spiritual rationalist to do with this kind of essentially faith-based view? Loosely speaking there are at least two…
Is it more likely nowadays that a spiritual seeker will be more eclectic and varied in their sources than before the internet? Is this then a new kind of approach than the typically singular, structured traditions of instruction and knowledge? Is there some power and value in that? Good, bad, other? I know many earnest…
It’s fine to look backwards sometimes but who wants to spend their days stewing on what was? The time is now, life is now. All possibilities exist in the great unknown yawning out before us. But looking back I don’t think I was ever a great listener. I was always too occupied by my own…
Enlightenment is a function of Grace. But then so is practice. Some might say there’s a qualitative difference between the (seemingly) personal activities or practices like ‘letting go’ or ‘noticing and returning’ and the actions of Grace. But these are as much the spontaneous display of consciousness as the final dissolution of the (illusory) egoic…
Sometimes it’s hard to remain unattached. The secret is to release as you notice it and keep doing it. Patiently, repeatedly, endlessly if necessary. It’s that willingness to let go when you see you’re grasping, contracting, resisting. The practice is notice and release or notice and return. Or even notice and allow. There’s no…