Spirituality
On Beyond Concepts
All Teachings are Dodos, and Tightening up what this Site is About I let my personal feelings cloud my discernment, and published a guest essay that I realized was of more of a religious or spiritual-y nature or attitude or tone than I really wanted in the site’s philosophical mosaic. This chalkboard here is…
Read MoreThe Difference Between Wanting To Feel Better and Understanding
INTRODUCTION Often on the self-help, spiritual and non-dual paths, there is the experience that one is on a rollercoaster ride of feelings, or feel like one is not progressing anymore, or very slowly. You might get into low moods, or react strongly to some situation, or in general are not as happy or at peace…
Read MoreOn Beyond False Imagination
“There appears to be a knot between the consciousness and the flesh. A knot that separates the consciousness from the flesh. This knot is called imagination. ” – Robert Adams “Our Beingness sets up a mind which imagines it’s a body” – Lester Levenson The Buddhists call it “false imagination”: the projection of a seeming objective…
Read MoreOn Beyond UG Krishnamurti
“Pathological” – Francis Lucille, quoting his teacher Jean Klein, regarding U. G. Krishnamurti Where UG Went Wrong: A Conflicted Soul ABSTRACT: UG Krishnamurti (not to be confused with Jiddu Krishnamurti, his nemesis) wanted to have his cake and eat it too: be a materialist and cynic and point out the hypocrisy and business-like nature…
Read MoreOn Beyond Beliefs: What Is Self-Realization?
When I ask myself this morning, where am I, this being on this…whatever it is: this “pathless path”, this understanding (for the benefit of the reader, I didn’t actually say that to myself but was reflecting wordlessly, but wanting to write it, as a practice)? So-called Self Realization is both the simplest thing 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 This essay starts with the assumption that there is one Truth, which I see as a true…
Read MoreBeginning and Advanced Meditation: Meditating on Meditation
Now, I’m a nobody (not a famous teacher, and don’t want to teach at all: writing is my “teaching”), but this is how I see the “game board” of meditation: We could say there are roughly three stages of meditation, three squares on the field of “spiritual progress” (it’s just a map, and they can…
Read MoreWhat Is Maya? What is Real?
POEM What is Maya? Maya is a word. A word is a sound. Sound is Maya. The real question is: what is not Maya? When I know what is deathless and without sound, I will know what Maya is. Every thing. Therefore even Maya is Maya. ESSAY What is Maya? What is illusion and…
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