Category Archives: Awakening

Say that we go to Boston, you and I. Everybody wants to go to Boston. Boston is fun and interesting and once you’ve been there, you’re a changed person. Boston goes with you. It becomes a way of life. Say, too, that we have heard stories about a certain Boston experience – a way theContinue reading “Transcending Even Awakening: A Haibun”

I say sometimes to my students: “take what you learn and act in the world with it. Do something.” And when they ask what they should do, I tell them to help somebody in a way that makes both parties happier than they were before the encounter started. Related to this – especially when itContinue reading “Being Homo Amans: Happiness as a Spiritual Practice”

The idea there is some external purpose to life – divine or mystical or otherwise – is problematic in the sense that it tends to promote wild goose chases and inattention to what’s right here right now. We are “children of a loving God,” or we are “sleeping spiritual beings surrounded by a light whichContinue reading “Spirituality and Wild Goose Chases”

Yet it is natural to love one another. It does not take effort or discipline; we don’t have to be taught. Love arises in us as a condition of our being. You could say that we are love, and does it not feel true? Does it not feel like you did not say those wordsContinue reading “Love Comes Naturally”

When we say “undoing the self,” what is meant is not a physical or material undoing, nor a mystical revelation of heretofore unglimpsed or uncharted realities, but rather that we are simply less wrong about what it means to be a self than before. That’s all. It is a bit like when a child whoContinue reading “Undoing the Self in Love”

Josef Mitterer makes an interesting point here. Discussing the longstanding tension between constructivists and realists, and how the two groups view science, he notes the following. Whether scientists see themselves as Realists or rather as Constructivists depends above all on which philosophy (of science) is in fashion. There is no indication that realist-oriented scientists areContinue reading “Letting Go of Winning in Favor of Bread”