Furnishings In recent weeks, I’ve been browsing area rugs, with the intention of finding one that feels right for the loft space of my new condo. Happily, I did indeed find a lovely wool rug, the perfect size, reasonably priced, and convenient to pick up, which now beautifully adorns that space. Yeah! As a side-effect of thinking a lot about rugs, my mind has been inclined toward rug-related …
Nonduality
The Tenth Man
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 …
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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A Caterpillar’s Thought Experiment
Imagine ... Imagine … that you are a caterpillar. Perhaps a plain green one, or perhaps you’re sporting fancy spots or stripes: green, black, orange, white, red or yellow. Or maybe you’re a furry black and brown one -- or one with colorful spikes -- but in any case, a caterpillar. You’re one of many caterpillars. Your world is filled with caterpillars. What you notice is that the caterpillars …
Practice Notes: Same & Different
Change is a strange thing. While worldly phenomena—including human bodies and minds—seem to be in perpetual motion—transforming, modulating, modifying, adjusting, etc. pretty much all the time—change turns out to be rather slippery to actually find. The reason for this slipperiness is that to say that a particular object has “undergone change” requires that it partake, simultaneously, of …
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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