The well-known adage—A bird in hand is worth two in the bush—is typically used to encourage being grateful for what we already have, rather than pining for something currently out of reach. Putting aside, for the moment, the usefulness of such advice, let’s utilize the imagery itself to explore the notion of separation … Experiencing & Identifying the Birds Imagine I have a bird—say, a …
Nonduality
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 …
Practice Notes: Tension, Entropy, Awareness
Question: If the essence of all phenomenal appearances is Awareness, then presumably the appearance of a corpse and the appearance of a living organism (human or otherwise) would be experienced within (what Mahamudra refers to as) the “one taste” of Awareness. So how, then, should we describe the distinction between an organism that is considered to be “alive” and an organism that is considered to …
[Read more...] about Practice Notes: Tension, Entropy, Awareness
Two Moons, part two
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 …
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 …
Practice Notes: “Made Of”
Taking A Bite Consider an apple. The Honeycrisp apples have been quite delicious, here in Colorado this year—so let’s consider a Honeycrisp apple. My first direct experience of the Honeycrisp apple is visual: shape and color. The apple is basically round, and mottled red-green-gold in color, with a small brown stem. The next experience is tactile. When I pick the Honeycrisp apple up, it …