On Beyond Back-To-Nature Philosophies
Listening to a popular “animal communicator”, I realized the core issue with what she was saying. While I appreciate what they do with specific animals and species, and it touches my heart deeply (I love animals, and plants, and minerals…), there is an assumptions and an attitude about humans and the planet and Life and…
Read MoreOn Beyond Thinking – How To Be Present
How to be more loving and happy and at peace? Be more present. To what is real. How to be present? Quiet down the thinking, the mind, without introducing the doer. Don’t try and stop thinking. Just observe benevolently (with curiosity if it’s there). The doer can’t squelch (forcefully silence or suppress) the doer –…
Read MoreOn Beyond Social Media Duality
Introduction I see social media platforms like Facebook (the main platform I sometimes use and enjoy) as a place to share the love of some topic, or an event, sale, or service, and have fun conversations, or gather information or quotes. However they can be very addicting, as you may have noticed. And, they can…
Read MoreNon-Duality in Action: Compassionate Response
Non-dual teachings sometimes give people license to behave badly or not work on themselves: they can become arrogant or rude, or use it as an excuse to use drugs or do other self-centered things, saying “it doesn’t matter what we do” or “I don’t exist” and “it’s all predetermined” etc. Or they may not look…
Read MoreHow To Stop Thinking
“When you enter the silence you enter a profound peace, bliss consciousness, pure awareness. That’s what the silence is. It’s not being quiet. It’s beyond that. It’s not just quieting your mind, like I say all the time. It’s understanding that there’s no mind to quiet. When you realize there’s no mind, you automatically become…
Read MoreIs Being an Embodied Being a Fall from Grace?
I was cleaning the living room windows this morning, and noticed I could never get them perfect. They always had some kind of streaks or fog when the sunlight hit them, no matter how much I wiped them. It occurred to me the windows were metaphors of the limits of expression of clarity and the…
Read MoreOn Beyond Two Sides of Existence
The picture we are seeing here—knowing it’s just a picture (a map)—is of two sides of existence: one, the appearance, the phenomenal, the apparent material world, the mortal dream, Body, Mind, and World (BMW) which arise simultaneously to play Maya, or spacetime and matter; and two, “outside” of this world as it were, the spiritual,…
Read MoreSentience, Consciousness, and Vegetarianism
You can’t eat your way to enlightenment. But you can eat in an enlightened way. In this whole discussion about diet, a spiritual path, and health, it’s useful to make a distinction between what we can call “sentience” and Consciousness. If there is sentience, there is the potential for suffering. And while everything has consciousness…
Read MoreWhy Spiritual Teachings Can Seem Contradictory (But Really Aren’t)
“We have two eyes to see two sides of things, but there must be a third eye which will see everything at the same time and yet not see anything. That is to understand Zen.” D.T. Suzuki Preface In philosophies that delve into issues of consciousness, that try and point to consciousness, including spiritual and…
Read MoreThe Central Paradox of Meditation: Being and Doing
The central paradox of meditation is that of being and doing. Doing something in order to realize we don’t need to do anything, or in fact that the doing is taking us away from being. Q: What about programming, conditioning? Don’t we need to undo that? A: Where is it, when is it? It has…
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