Category Archives: Awakening

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”

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”