Practical Maya

In the past, I’ve written about the 3 forms of Maya, the dream of the world. When inertia (tamas) is dominant, Maya presents a covering. It hides. When activity (rajas) is dominant Maya is  the illusion. When the energy clears (sattva), Maya becomes a ladder of knowledge.
This can be applied broadly to how we experience [...]

New Years Intentions

This is the time of year when many people write New Years Resolutions, goals for the year that often soon fade.
This fading part illustrates a weakness in the resolution. We may get into blaming ourselves but perhaps the resolution came not from a heart-felt desire but rather from a should. Or perhaps we framed it [...]

Habits of Ignorance

The mind is a habit machine. That’s how we learn to ride a bike, drive a car, and read. But it’s also how we respond automatically and inappropriately to some circumstances. Like learning to spell certain words wrong. Or reacting negatively to someones presence, irrespective of circumstance.
Some cats have an uncanny tendency to associate certain [...]

Complete Forgiveness

Today, a series of articles on several blogs were posted on Forgiveness. This is a response to some of the feedback I’ve received. In no particular order.
NOTE – if you land here first, you may find reading Deep Forgiveness (above) useful first, as well as following the links to other posts on the subject. There [...]

Deep Forgiveness

Takuin and Albert (Urban Monk) decided to post on the subject of Forgiveness on the same day. They invited me and others to do the same. It’s an important subject and a good time of year to consider it.
As an experiment, I’ve done 2 versions. The usual text version follows. And I recorded an audio [...]

What’s Real?

Responses to a few questions on reality…
What’s Real?
When we answer questions about reality, we can look at it 2 ways.
Firstly, there is reality that is unchanging, absolute, omnipresent silence. That which cannot be adequately described but is everywhere present. We can never not be in this reality. But how we perceive this may vary.
Then there [...]

The Hidden Shoulds

I’ve written here before about the way the identity creates sub-conscious ‘shoulds’ and ‘needs‘, essentially fear driven resistance to what is. ie: “I should do X or Y might happen.” We end up acting from fear rather than the far more reliable intuition.
I also wrote about what has become the first in a series Tom [...]

What Leads to Awakening?

In a recent post, I spoke of how our gifts come, not from our suffering, but from the movement of life through us. This arose from the underlying idea that suffering is necessary and will lead to benefit. We notice that we suffer and then improvement comes along, so the suffering must have been the [...]

Our Gifts come from Our Suffering?

During a meeting with a friend of mine who’s a medium, we had a rather instructive conversation. She said that our pain and lessons bring us what we have to offer. Our gifts to others arise from where we have suffered. We can thus support others through that experience.
This struck me as similar to the [...]

Perspectives on the Past

Over on The End of Evil, LiberatedSelf asked about past lives. The feedback that emerged is worth sharing, edited for this scenario.
“I’m kind of interested (why wouldn’t the ego be?) in getting to know past lives, sometimes I wonder why I have chosen this scenario at this moment.”
Hi LS
It is our nature to want [...]