Posts by meestereric
A Question of Sentience: What is Conscious and Awake?
There is a different use of the word “sentient” than in the culture at large, one that clarifies an important distinction between consciousness and the outward behavior of a bodymind. The question comes up, what is the status of consciousness in different states, such as sleeping, or deep sleep, in dreaming, or under anesthesia? An…
Read MoreThe End of Self Help
Given that this is the last day of the calendar year, and a friend and I were discussing the notion of “eschatological” yesterday (how religions sometimes have that apocalyptic element in them), I thought it would be appropriate and fun to reflect on the paradox of self-help and the direct path (the non-dual understanding). The…
Read MoreThe Effortless Way
If there were an effort, where would it come from? In a stream, there are eddies and currents, and though some of these little eddies spin like mad, caught behind rocks, they make no effort to be what they are, effortless and free-flowing. How do we account for the paradox that an artist engaged in…
Read MoreWhy Nonduality? Or, The Last Stop (to Freedom)
As I was puttering around the place with various projects this morning I was pondering: why be into nonduality? Why be interested? Why not just let it go and forget about all this stuff? Why attend groups or listen to videos or discuss it with friends (like minded friends hopefully)? I’d been feeling a bit…
Read MoreTrue Love and Relationships, Part 2: The Yoga of Relationships
This article is the second in a series about love and relationships (the first is here). True love is never rejected. If you come from the right place, it will find the path to the heart, because the place is comes from and the place it goes to is the same place. The shooter…
Read MoreOn Beyond Depression
I was diagnosed with “clinical depression” 30 years ago or so, and told I’d be on Prozac (a popular SSRI antidepressant at the time) for the rest of my life, akin to how a diabetic needs to take insulin. Over the years I learned how what the doctors said was a lie, and the society…
Read MoreReal Identity and Effortless Living
A short dialogue about identity and practices. Hi Eric – I hope you’re doing well. I’m a 19 year old college student studying in [a city in the US]. I came upon your article on healthy ego development, and it resonated with me. I encountered Advaita Vedanta when I was 17, and I’m…
Read MoreTrue Love and Relationships, Part 1
A series about non-dual love. This article is the first in a series about love and relationships. It may challenge your ideas about love, or it may serve as a clarification of what you’ve already seen. It will serve as an introduction to this topic, and (hopefully) open a dialogue. The style or aim is…
Read MorePoem: You Are Singular (Guest Post – Thomas Stern)
It is deliciously simple: Your true identity is no identity. It is easy: You do not own a thing Nothing of what you see is yours You are not what you did You are not what you saw You are not what you thought Because there isn’t a you apart from doing A you apart…
Read MoreReal Intelligence
It is an amazing and profound predicament the Western mind has gotten itself into, using the faculties of natural intelligence and consciousness to entangle itself into a corner about the very thing it professes to want to understand, while denying its existence and nature. In fact the nature of what a human being is, is…
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