With each passing day, as I look inward and as I take in what is going on with the world outside, my heart opens. And the more it opens the more I understand why I have kept it shut for so long. The more my heart opens, the more I understand why the world has closed its heart.

ॐ

I find it harder and harder to criticize the world from a place of anger or disappointment. The screwed up world and the screwed up self are not only reflections of each other, they are one in the same. I am the suffering and the beauty and everything in between - not as some new philosophy but as a felt experience, moment by…

The Buddha was sitting under a tree talking to his disciples when a man came and spit on his face. He wiped it off, and he asked the man, “What next? What do you want to say next?” The man was a little puzzled because he himself never expected that when you spit on somebody’s face, he will ask, “What next?” He had no such experience in his past. He had insulted people and they had become angry and they had reacted. Or if they were cowards and weaklings, they had smiled, trying to bribe the man. But Buddha was like neither, he was not angry nor in any way offended, nor in any way cowardly. But just matter-of-factly he said, “What next?” There was no reaction on his part.

Buddha’s disciples became angry, they reacted. His closest disciple, Ananda,…

Over a long enough period of time, the survival rate for your body is zero. Contained within the body is the brain and one of the functions of the brain is the ego. The ego is the self concept of the brain-body organism and it does not like what was just said one bit.

And there are different states of consciousness than just ego. The ego is like a dog you bring with you on a journey. Untrained, it will run off, bite others and come back to bite you. But trained and disciplined it knows its place. It can sense things, warn you of danger, protect you. As the…

If you are lucky enough
in meditation,
you will come to the point
where you cannot take it anymore.


You will come right up
against your resistance
to this moment
and will feel that
you have to get up,
you have to distract yourself
from this moment.


If you don't stand
up and run to the kitchen
to eat a cookie,
you will scratch your nose.


If you do not scratch your nose,
you will wiggle around in your seat.
If you do not wiggle in your seat,
you will distract yourself with your thinking.


You will judge the meditation
as a failure,
that you did not get the bliss
that you got yesterday
and you will run away from it.
It is the natural response,
because it is not…

No religion is entirely wrong.

And no religion is entirely right.

Each faith tradition,

those that have passed on…