I’ve been getting lots of questions lately about dealing with sickness, in relation to the message I share on this site. Some of the questions seem to be coming from confusion over the distinction I make between “what you are”, and “how to be.” (I draw that distinction strongly in this video.) I’d like to [...]…
Ramana said, “Anything that is not present in the deep sleep state, is not real.” That has sat as a koan for me, for a long time. I was stuck on the Vedanta conception of the three (or, four, or five, depending on what Vedanta tradition you want to look from) states of being – [...]…
Let me just say at the get-go that I am very much anti-reductionsim of any sort. I do not believe that reality is simply a matter of interacting and inter-reacting “things.” I do believe that is what happens on the gross physical level, but I also believe that lot of what is going on is [...]…
When going for your own awakening, one of the ways to get fouled up has to do with my favorite distinction, the realm of “how to be” versus the realm of “what you are.” Namely: Going for the bonus prizes. No one can say exactly how awakening to what you actually are will unfold in [...]…
The more I look into “self as reality” rather than “self as thing in a sea other things”, the more I see that there is no action which I originate. The Buddha spoke of four imponderables, four mysteries, that were simply not answerable by the mind and warned that anyone attempting to do so would [...]…
Came across a great article from last year over at the Huffington Post: 10 Spiritually Transmitted Diseases. It’s a fun little read, and a good follow up to my last post on Setting the Bar. I would add an 11th disease, which is a subset of number 9, The Chosen-People Complex. I call it the [...]…
Here’s another common mistake folks make when seeking Awakening. Setting a bar, a measure that they hold their awakening against. Often these bars are insanely high. Some go hand-in-hand with confusing sage-hood with celebrity, in other words assuming that your awakening must result in being as articulate and revered as the Buddha. Other standards include [...]…
Another installment in the Fundamental Mistakes series. Enjoy! This is a major roadblock, and very subtle. We humans are very attached to anything we append the word, “my” to. In my opinion (see what I did there?), we do this most often with the subset of thoughts we call opinions. We hold our opinions as [...]…
It’s been my experience that being in the asleep state of believing the lie that you are a separate self leads to a few basic mistakes. So, I am writing a series of blog posts about that. I hope they’ll be useful to you. I’d love to hear what you think and if there are [...]…
Down through the ages, the peeps we recognize as Enlightened Sages and Awakened Souls keep repeating a couple of elements. One is this: The Awakened mind is your nature It’s what you already are. As Ken Wilber likes to say, “100% of the enlightened mind is already always present.” Buddhism is rife with examples of [...]…
