Excerpt~

 The separate self imagines that life is something to solve. It looks at the world and immediately begins to organize its anxieties: climate, hunger, war, collapse, illness, death, responsibility, money, work, family, history, the future. It wants to know what is coming. It wants to prepare. It wants to understand the threat before the threat arrives. It wants to be wise, calm, ethical, awake, useful, and safe.

But the one who wants safety is itself the tremor. The mind turns the world into a project. It asks what should be done, what should be avoided, what should be believed, what should be transcended. It worries about catastrophe, then worries that worry is useless. It reaches for spiritual clarity, then worries that seeking clarity is only another form of escape. It tries to meditate, tries to stop thinking, tries to rest, tries to get beyond itself. Even the desire to be free of the story becomes another story. This is the hidden comedy of seeking. The separate self wants to arrive somewhere outside the machinery of becoming. It wants a final answer, a final silence, a final proof that everything is all right. It wants God, truth, awakening, presence, emptiness, or peace. It wants to get to the place where the pressure of being a person finally ends. But there is no place outside this. The attempt to escape the moment is already the moment. Fear is this. Longing is this. Thought is this. The body is this. The sound of the sea is this. The smell of food, the movement of birds, the sun on skin, the cold in the air, the police walking by, the hotels, the restaurants, the need to go home, the need to make breakfast, the need to work, the need to call someone back: all of it is already the whole appearance. Nothing has to be removed for wholeness to be whole. This does not mean that life becomes a clean philosophy. It does not mean that suffering is denied, or that catastrophe is made imaginary in some cheap way. It means that even the thought of catastrophe arises in what is prior to the one who claims to be threatened by it. The fear of death, the fear of living, the wish to save the world, the wish to abandon the world, the wish to be useful, the wish to disappear: all appear and disappear in the same open field. There is no separate witness standing outside the scene. There is no cosmic observer untouched by life, watching from a safe distance. The watcher is part of the appearance. The watched is part of the appearance. The stage, the weather, the body, the fear, the laughter, the silence, the question, and the answer are not divided. The relief is not personal. It is not an achievement. It is not a reward for spiritual effort. It is not something the seeker finally owns. When the burden of being someone loosens, what remains is not a perfected person, but the ordinariness that was never absent. This is why the ordinary keeps returning as the deepest teaching. The bird half-caught by the camera. The shifting light. The smell of vegetation. The thought that the world may be ending. The joke that maybe it has always felt that way. The silence after a sentence collapses. The laughter when the mind reaches the end of its usefulness. The body getting hungry. The day beginning again. Meaning appears. Meaninglessness appears. Hope appears. Pessimism appears. Enlightened optimism and complete despair may look strangely similar when there is no one left at the center trying to possess either one. There is no final arrival. There is no one to arrive. There is no castle to reach, no spiritual finish line, no completed self waiting at the end of the road. And still, the road appears. Still, the body walks. Still, the mind imagines. Still, the world shines, trembles, burns, breathes, and begins again. Nothing is outside this. And still, the day begins.

The zero sum

Nothing deconstructs everything.

The sum of everything falls to zero.

It cannot be otherwise.

Spiritual practice is like paying off debt

 Spiritual practice is like paying off a large loan.

Initially,  almost all the payments are the interest with barely any dent to the principal.

It takes a very long time to see any visible dent to the principal.

But if you keep at it ceaselessly, one day you see that suddenly the loan is gone and you are debt free.

Where did it all go away?

The journey of a lifetime passes away in less than an instant.

And yet, it seems so persistent.

Consuming all our attention.

And then one wonders, where did it all go?

Nothing to say

There is no independent existence.

That means even emptiness or nothingness has no independent existence.

That means phenomena are essential, else nothingness would independently exist.

Consciousness is also dependent on other factors and has no independent existence.

There is really nothing that can be said other than this.

No independent existence.

Phenomena do not independently exist.

Emptiness does not independently exist.

Consciousness does not independently exist.

human nature and misery

 Human nature seems designed to prolong misery for all long as possible.

We keep suffering

We keep on  missing it.

How each instance of intense psychological suffering is due to the feeling of separation from the whole.

The feeling of being a separate individual stuck inside its own private hell of regret and guilt.