I have a certain perspective regarding the nature of happiness and suffering. That perspective is that one can come to see it and therefore uproot the conditions that lead to suffering. But I’m also acutely aware that someone will only be able to see it when it’s due for them. It’s a strange and frustrating…
Psychologically we all have aspects of ourselves that are contradictory and even counter-productive. Each of us is like a band of miscreants with different personalities and motivations. So getting ourselves to move in one direction requires taking our various, and sometimes conflicting, motivations and inclinations into account. I like silence and solitude, but I also…
The Global Ascension narrative is a huge distraction and deflection from the real work of Self-realization. So many seekers waiting for the world to ascend to higher consciousness, waiting to catch a ride on the Global Awakening tour bus are misguided and misdirected. Because this waiting is a hidden avoidance. Waiting for the rising waters…
Attention wants to rest somewhere, it’s always looking for an object, and so it becomes the monkey mind that endlessly jumps from tree to tree. But when we recognise our naked subjectivity, open awareness, the attention can settle back into its own source. This puts an end to the seeking mind. The easefulness of mental…
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…
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,…
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…