What is, and what is not, enlightenment? Don't get off at the wrong stop!
Tag: meditation
Thinking, Looking, Wondering
My Midas touch: everything I see turns to thought
Silencing thinking
Be careful about equating the ability to calm thinking with being a Buddhist master. How much freedom from thinking do we need, to reach the jewel of understanding which then makes thinking not a problem? We could spend years manipulating our mind into thought-free states unnecessarily.
Meditation to question the self
In our own lives we can easily find things we thought were true which we subsequently think not to be true. So our pursuit of the truth about self can not depend upon thinking. We need another way of knowing, one more direct than our thinking.
What is the Buddhist Path?
Traditionally the path is seen as the overcoming of ignorance, not-seeing, 'avidya', where seeing means seeing our True Nature. I propose an additional way of understanding how the path consists of overcoming avidya: what is not seen is the path itself.
What could meditation offer?
We spend our precious lives hopping from temporary, dependent, partial happiness to the next temporary, dependent, partial happiness. Meditation has the potential to show us the workings of this process of seeking 'satisfaction'... It is possible to see beyond that and to open towards real fulfilment which is not dependent upon temporary conditions.
Commentary on Are You Awake?
Life is not where you think it is, The stories you act are your dreams... We're hooked on this dream, on when it brings us pleasure, when pain, when we lose or gain - we devise manipulations to skew it towards greater pleasure and gain, less loss and pain. This is the story of our life.
Space Oddity
I am the person in my thoughts. When I think of me, there I am. When my attention is elsewhere, I don’t notice I’m missing. If I were to think about it – there I’d be again, assuming I'd been there all along. I never see my absence, since I ‘look’ for me … Continue reading Space Oddity
