Consciousness
Although what we call spirituality may have something to do with nonduality, it is obvious that nonduality has nothing to do with spirituality. It’s not even an experience, and cannot be an experience, nor item of experience. Nothing can be known about it. And yet, people go to spiritual teachers, as if something can be…
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What in the world is meant by this? It’s an outlandish and ridiculous claim, an unworldly Eastern philosophical religious bit of non-sense, New Age woo woo, right? Even spiritual folks with a lifetime of meditation, practices, study and experience under their belt would reject or resist this assertion, since this body and world are all…
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If you had no thoughts, and if your girlfriend or boyfriend asks you what you were thinking about, and you say to her or him that you were thinking how you had no thoughts, your thought would be that you had no thoughts, which is a thought. But before that, you had no thoughts. In…
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If you’re happy and not worried, and absorbed in living, you’re generally not inherently concerned with the “meaning of life” question (although one might contemplate it for fun or to share with friends, like I am doing). Still, even if happy, one can have a “glimpse”, or more glimpses of reality that reveal more of…
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Art and Freedom, The Art of Living, Love and Consciousness, True Freedom Sometimes the obvious is useful or helpful to state. I used to be an artist. That is, I identified with that sense of being one, of doing art, or, wanting to “be” an artist, as in a career or identity. Now I see…
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The mind doesn’t actually exist. While it is useful to say, such as to a student of non-duality or of a spiritual path, that “mind” is defined as external sense perceptions, bodily sensations, and thoughts (which are in fact internal visual images, sounds, and sometimes the other senses like smell, taste, kinesthetic bodily sensations) the…
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I have written before about how the non-dual understanding, or the living of it (the most or the essential thing) is the final stop on the “spiritual” journey. It’s the end of the road, because then, there is no seeker. It it the dissolution of the sense of a separate self, and the seeing through…
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I recently listened to a dialogue between a very earnest and long term meditator and spiritual teacher that went went straight to the heart of something very key on the living experience of knowing one’s true nature. It has been said that this is the last stage on the path and therefore the last pitfall…
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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…
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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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