The intangible has, I discovered — as have many before me — a way of distilling how the mind thinks. It forces us to consider that things which seem absolute and certain are often relative and varied. If forces us to confront uncertainty, and to try to find stability in an utterly relativistic universe. Where anything can shape-shift, at any time.
Read MoreOne of the biggest problems we have, when it comes to explaining our existence or matters of consciousness is that it’s not been simplified, explained in ways that are simple and comprehensible to everyday guys like me. This is an issue that permeates both our sciences and our normal daily interactions.
Read MoreEventually, I came to look at regret a bit like blisters: a constant threat, painful when they happen, and part of the price that we sometimes pay to top that next mountain.
Read MoreSexual desire includes craving, cravings which can become so strong as to become overpowering to the point of creating a so-called total body experience. We get swept away.
Such an immersive experience can quickly include multiple dimensions of being — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. In this sense, the craving envelops us in every way. And we experience a form of oneness.
Read MoreThe implication of removing ourselves from desire, to become some kind of unattached, cold stone, implies that desire should not be allowed to exist. This is an immature, undeveloped perspective.
Desire exists as a force of nature, as a natural emotion, and also as a natural need. We desire food, sleep, survival, and much more. Desire is neither bad nor good. It is simply natural.
Read MoreIn my experience, suffering, in the sense that we experience it in the here and now, is left behind in the so-called deeper realm or experience. It just doesn’t matter there. At all. It has no place.
Yet, having experienced that place, I still suffer. Is that because I didn’t really have deeper experiences, that I’m just fooling myself?
Read MoreThe way Castaneda wrote was immediate and compelling, beautifully crisp and concise, yet sometimes also astonishingly poetic and resonant (we owe to him exquisite phrases like ‘unbending intent’, ‘controlled folly’, ‘dark sea of awareness’ and ‘active side of infinity’). And his mysticism was actual, not theoretical. It involved realising unimaginable possibilities, marshalling extraordinary discipline and finding considerable courage. Above all, it communicated a sense of adventure.
Read MoreIt lies beyond a veil, but the veil can be penetrated. The veil does not require perfection to pass. At least, not in the way we typically define perfection.
It requires an open mind and an open heart, a tender heart, the place within our heart that still knows and believes in and acknowledges our own innocence.
It is a perfection that puts a greater value on our beauty and our innocence than on our mistakes and sins. It is a perfection that puts a greater value on the wonder, and the increasing wonder, of the journey — versus stopping along the way and putting value on the drama.
Because anytime that we stop and look, or stop and soak, or reflect and ooze within the experience, our journey stops. At that spot. Or immediately goes back through the veil.
Read MoreThere exist certain ideals that can trigger us in powerful and often unexpected ways. Our monastery, for example, was formed out of a genuinely organic call and response. It was as though someone pulled a trigger. This triggering is often a constant refrain to the monk.
Read MoreThe attacks made on us by the rich and powerful are highly orchestrated, powerful, diverse and are occurring on many fronts. We need responses that work in pretty much any situation versus responses that are individually customized for specific or one-off attacks.
Read MoreWhat in the world, exactly, does it mean to have a body? Seems an odd question doesn’t it — because the answer seems obvious, inescapable even. I mean, my body is right here, right? Yours is right there.
Read MoreIn the last couple of decades it has become more and more commonplace to encounter — in science and popular culture — various expressions of the idea that the universe we inhabit is, in one way or another, not real. The idea being that it, of course, exists but not at all in the way we perceive it. That it’s a masquerade.
Read More“While the discoveries of modern physics, the most successful of our physical sciences, may be described using complex geometries and mathematics, the source of many important and fundamental theories in physics is mysticism.”
Read MoreWe are living in an atmosphere of climate-denial, of divisiveness and hate. Working men and women are subjected to an unrelenting pressure — to produce more for less. In such an environment, how is it realistic to consider that we have a chance to robustly improve consciousness?
Read MoreAt first glance, improvement seems simple. It’s about making something better. And viewed from that single perspective, it is simple.
It seems simple because we are restraining our focus point, limiting our perspective so that a particular level of complexity appears relatively simple unto itself. Yet, as we look at the variables listed below, the dimensionality of something as seemingly simple as improvement quickly expands.
Read MoreEveryone is trying to improve. Even people who’ve stopped trying, or who excel at being bullies, or those who encourage divisiveness. We are all are located somewhere on the continuum.
Self improvement, in a sense, is less about whether we are improving and more about how conscious and deliberate we are in the process, and what we are choosing to focus on.
Read MoreWhat if, in the pursuit of science and in the pursuit of unraveling the nature of the universe — including matter — quantum physics begins to realize the connectivity of everything? And begins to observe unseen forces that inexplicably transcend time and distance? Because this is what is occurring right now.
Read MoreIs it really all that disturbing to be uncertain? To live adrift in the tireless flux of the unknown? To no more understand the depths of our own self than the expansiveness of the universe? I think we underestimate our desire for the unknown — for the mind-expanding sense of a universe and a self without end. For the sublime rewards of a world of no clear and definitive answers.
Read MoreThere is the saying, “What goes up, must come down.” This saying is pre-disposed to gravity. Interestingly, we rarely hear, “What comes down, must go up.”
If we consider both of these sayings equally, however, we can find ourselves suspended between them. But since we do not consider both concepts equally, we find ourselves predisposed toward one of them, toward gravity, toward the direction of ‘down’.
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