Tweet The ego is confusing. It’s not your enemy. And you already know that very often it isn’t your friend. It can cause a lot of trouble. If you have too much of it, you may be blind to it—while it’s obvious to everyone else. If you have too little, you can’t function in this […]
Tweet The ego has two very positive aspects, the Ego of Aspiration and the Ego of the Sage. They must be used to overcome the third, the Ego of Suffering. The root cause of the ego of suffering is fundamental ignorance. It is the delusion that, “I am this body, this mortal personality. Happiness comes […]
Tweet There are countless levels of consciousness. No one lives on one level permanently, it shifts and moves, but more or less we have most of our experiences on a stage of awareness to which we are most habituated. Within this stage we strive to be happy and to avoid suffering. And we also strive […]
Tweet From a Buddhist perspective, busying ourselves with worldly activities is a form of laziness, because we’re lax in self-cultivation. Our lives are so busy in modern society: Our appointment books are completely full and we’re always running here and there. We often complain there isn’t enough time for the Dharma. However, whenever we have […]
Tweet The prominent futurist Ray Kurzweil says that in 2045 computers will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today! So what will the most important functions for human beings be if thinking is so much more effectively done by machines, knowledge is readily available and we have come to the end […]
Tweet I like checking the Skills for Awakening against a variety of other wisdom traditions. What I find, time and again, is that this thoroughly contemporary approach is really the pure practical essence of what the wisdom traditions teach. It represents the practice of the liberation from suffering without all the trappings of foreign cultures […]
Tweet You would never do this to yourself consciously. You, like everyone else, do not like to suffer. And yet, you, like everybody else, are sometimes subjected to the hidden force of self-sabotage. Committing yourself to a practice to awaken to your higher potential and to end the pain in your life is a sure […]
Tweet Three aspects of spiritual life are precious to guard and develop: devotion, enthusiasm and the focus on enlightenment. Devotion to our teacher and our highest goal is the source of all blessings. We may think that this is because when we have devotion we are good and we deserve to receive blessings, but that […]
Tweet We think of it as inevitable, but that is not true. Suffering arises in the unquestioned mind and spreads from there. It is an ingrained habit, no more. And we can change habits. Our thoughts run into the past and the future, imagining what was and could go wrong. Observe it. These regrets and […]
Tweet The Israelites showed us how it’s done. 40 years in the desert with nothing but their faith to support them – my God that was no picnic! Picture them, the whole tribe walking along. Up ahead the courageous ones, the explorers, ready to conquer the scary unknown. Then the whole mass of the people, […]
Tweet Angry and petulant is the best way I can describe it. There it sits in my inbox. How am I going to deal with it? Of course I could react now, but I can just see the repercussions. Hopeless and completely unnecessary. So: Can I see the writer as part of God? How can […]
Tweet While reading an amazing teaching by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (the main guru of the Dalai Lama, whose new incarnation is just touring the States for the 1st time) I thought of you. In a few short words: It is the teaching of clearly seeing that all the misery in our lives comes from ego-clinging, […]
Tweet One of the greatest books of the wisdom literature of this planet is the yet little known “Vasistha’s Yoga.” The following is a quote from it regarding self-inquiry and the Heart: If one has achieved even a little bit of control over the mind by self-enquiry, such a person has attained the fruit of […]
Tweet Here is an entry from my friend Jai Uttals’ blog at http://jaiuttal.com/blog/: The “Bhakti Movement” in the US these days is kind of strange to me. Wonderful, but also, weird. Wonderful because more and more people are experiencing the incredibly passionate joy of singing God’s names; and weird because, as Americans, we seem to […]
Tweet Most of us cannot even relate to this language – ‘Self-Love,’ it sounds like narcissism, like self-indulgence, somehow over the top and too much. And yet, when we look at its pure manifestation, it is the most important quality we can develop. In truth most of us are rather removed from loving ourselves much […]
