Mood I very much appreciate philosophy--and often find myself with an appetite for such texts, via eastern and western authors alike. But every now and again I'll shift into a mood in which pretty much all I can bear to read are the Ashtavakra and Avadhuta Gitas: the most direct pointing to nondual reality. In such a mood, even Longchenpa--whom I adore--feels a bit too flowery. My appetite is for …
[Read more...] about Practice Notes: Appetite, Irritation, Ratios
Collections I guess it’s not unusual for kids to have collections. When I was growing up, there are three that I recall. The strangest – during my high school years – was beer cans. I didn’t drink beer – have never really liked it, then or now – but somehow ended up collecting beer cans, lining them up on shelves in my bedroom. Go figure. Several years before that, it was stamps: hundreds if …
There’s a lovely story – known as the parable of the tenth man – used to illustrate our propensity to overlook what’s most obvious. The inimitable Wei Wu Wei has even used it as the title of one of his books: The Tenth Man. The tale is typically attributed to the Upanishads, though I’ve yet to find a specific citation, so perhaps this part of it is apocryphal? In any case, for those who aren’t …
When the mind gives rise to language and we take language and concepts as real and settle inside them, the glory of the world becomes fixed into boxes within the three times of past, present and future. When we are able at first to relax this flow of conceptualisation, and later to understand its own natural purity, then the world remains, even in the interplay of language, open and beautiful. ~ …
In the previous post, we explored perception through the lens of western science and Buddhist Madhyamaka reasoning. We learned a bit about how the human body-mind records sensory data; and were introduced to some fascinating experiments which offer pretty convincing evidence for nonlocal communication. The Confounding Genius Of Madhyamaka Reasoning Madhyamaka reasoning can seem quite complex and …
Was burning a candle the other night -- half-beeswax, half-coconut-wax, set in a transparent plastic votive -- while watching a movie nearby. It rested on a shelf, a little bit above my eye-level. Mostly I remained focused on the movie, but every now and again would notice the candle-flame in the background: a pleasing addition to the overall ambience. On one of these occasions what I saw …
