It’s been a month now, at least, since I first opened this Word file, and typed in the title—Practice Notes: Untouched & Deeply Felt. I expected that (as is generally the case) I’d return, within the next day or two, to complete the essay. Yet that impulse, until today, just never arrived. Somehow, for a long time, nothing else was needed. Somehow, the title in and of itself (with fewer …
[Read more...] about Practice Notes: Untouched & Deeply Felt
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 …
[Read more...] about Only By Courtesy: Sankara’s Definition of Real
The main way to practice is to see that your disturbing emotions and concepts exist only in relative reality. They do not exist in genuine reality, and ultimately they are self-liberated. See that is is the same for all contradictions and conflicting appearances—they exist only in relative reality. Ultimately, their nature is self-liberated equality. So whatever manifests in your …
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 …
In the previous post I offered the two-moons metaphor as a way of understanding the Bon Dzogchen suggestion that the Buddhist two-truths doctrine—viz. the distinction between relative truth and absolute truth—really makes no sense. Now, in the interest of fairness, let's have a closer look at the Buddhist two-truths doctrine, which (as I understand it) proposes a progressive path in which one …
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 …
