From the Avadhuta Gita of Dattatreya: "Where mind and speech can utter nothing, how can there be instruction by a teacher? To the teacher—ever united with Brahman—who has said these words, the homogeneous Truth shines out." * …
Advaita Vedanta
Only By Courtesy: Sankara’s Definition of Real
As of late, I’ve been enjoying a pair of books, toggling back-and-forth between them in a way that feels quite interesting and enriching. One of them—Insight into Emptiness by Khensur Jampa Tegchok—harkens from the Buddhist Madhamakaya tradition. The other—The Seven Great Untenables by John Grimes—expresses the view of Advaita Vedanta. So, I read a bit from one, then a bit from the other—as …
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Practice Notes: Alicorn
Was thinking of unicorns the other day—curious, in particular, about whether their one horn was also called a “unicorn.” It made sense to me that this would be the case, but I wasn’t certain, so set off to explore … A few Googles later, here’s what I had learned: The root of the word unicorn is the Latin adjective unicornis (having one horn)—from uni (one) and cornus (horn). The horn …
Two Moons
Imagine … that it’s midnight, midsummer. A full moon hovers overhead, resplendent amidst an ocean of stars, bathing the warm air and shadowy objects (houses, trees, grass, humans) in its soft light. Now, for reasons unknown, you decide to press down hard with your fingers on your eyeballs—until your vision distorts: until what you see overhead are two moons instead of one. Which Is Real? With …
Absolute Certainty & Perpetual Transformation
To begin this essay—the latest in a series exploring certainty—let’s recall some questions lingering from a previous post, having to do with the relationship between phenomenal appearances and Awareness, in terms of their certainty: * Is it actually necessary that appearances are less certain than the Awareness within which they arise and dissolve? Is there no scenario in which they are, say, …
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Practice Notes: The Serenity Prayer
There’s this thing called the serenity prayer, which you may already be familiar with. It was penned, originally, by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and goes like this: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Eckhart & The Dalai Lama, too There’s something about this that I’ve always liked. …