Category Archives: Awakening

It can be helpful to see both history and present events not in terms of people but of currents; often the current gets a face – Jesus, say, or Buddha – but it is still a current, not an individual. And the current is merely a pattern in life, broadly defined, which is in motion,Continue reading “Beyond Jesus and History, This Love”

Helen Schucman wrote A Course in Miracles and projected responsibility for that project onto her ideal of Jesus. Because the course is so helpful to me, I am deeply grateful to her for seeing the work through, and am not especially concerned about the ethics and particulars of her writing process. You do what youContinue reading “Becoming Responsible for Happiness”

Yet ask: if stability is a “user-generated illusion that is helpful,” then what is stillness? After all, I have said and not retracted this: The you you think that you are – this body, this personality, this history – isn’t God. Rather, the stillness inside us – the deep center from which all peace springsContinue reading “A Non-Illusory Stillness”

Let’s say – more or less adopting Humberto Maturana’s phrasing – that love is the consensual coordination of doings among observers, each of whom could be the other. On this view, love is basically the embodied enacted agreement, tacit or otherwise, to cooperate with one another in the activities that are our living and giveContinue reading “Loving the One and the Other”

Stability and durability are user-generated illusions that are helpful. They facilitate happiness and happiness – like attention – can be our spiritual teacher if we want. What do I mean when I say that “stability and durability are user-generated illusions that are helpful?” Well, I don’t perceive the back stairs as clouds of atoms whichContinue reading “Letting Happiness be Our Spiritual Teacher”

I am moved by these lines from Matthew’s Gospel: You shall love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. The second commandment is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.Continue reading “Loving God Means Loving Others”