‘Choices’ and ‘doing’ are the same thing - making choices is ‘a doing’ - it is, in other words, the unfolding of a plan, the acting out or copying of a mental picture. This may not sound like a particularly controversial...
Continue reading‘Choices’ and ‘doing’ are the same thing - making choices is ‘a doing’ - it is, in other words, the unfolding of a plan, the acting out or copying of a mental picture. This may not sound like a particularly controversial...
Continue readingWe are all – it could be said - taking part in a Great Experiment - the crucial point about this experiment being that we don’t realize that it’s going on. This might be called ‘an experiment unconsciousness’, therefore. The...
Continue readingEverything the ego does it does unwillingly. Even when the ego (or ‘Mind-Created Sense of Self’) enthusiastically pursues its goals (and makes a big song and dance about how great this is) it is doing so unwillingly - it's ‘unwilling’...
Continue readingReality isn't Buddhist, or Christian, or Muslim, or anything like that - reality is simply reality and it has nothing to do with whatever ideas we might have about it (and we always do have lots of ideas about it)....
Continue readingThe Extrinsic Self - which is to say, ‘the self which is based entirely on rules’ - and the State of Openness are completely incompatible with each other. Or rather, the Extrinsic Self is incompatible with Openness, since Openness doesn't...
Continue readingWe insulate ourselves from the world by labelling everything, by judging everything and then not looking any further than our judgments. This is the key to everything - to say what things are and then not look beyond whatever it...
Continue readingThe Extrinsic Self is always ‘on the outside’ - it’s always ‘on the outside, looking in’. It can’t ever partake in life, even though it longs to do so; it’s always on the wrong side of an impenetrable glass wall...
Continue readingThe generic is that for which there is precedence - no more needs to be said on the subject than this! What follows on from 'that which was already there' is the generic, and the generic is all most of...
Continue readingWe're totally familiar with the world that is made up of comparisons - we know it very well indeed but - as regards the other world, the world that isn't made up of comparisons, the world that isn't a ratio...
Continue reading‘Very few of us know the taste of authentic things’, says Ouspensky. We're given substitutes and so - therefore - we never suspect that we have been short-changed. This isn't to say that we're doing well on these substitutes of...
Continue readingNuance can only exist in reality, not in any of our man-made situations. Or if we were to put this the other way around, only real things can be nuanced. No matter how much inventiveness and cleverness we put into...
Continue readingThe concrete self which believes in the power of controlling, and which therefore puts all its money on controlling, is - unbeknownst to us - a construct of that same ‘overvalued controlling’ and nothing more. The concrete self is that...
Continue readingA rough and ready way of summarising the ‘message’ of Daoism might be to say that ‘interfering never does anyone any good’. There's no great poetry in putting it like this it's true, but it is nevertheless accurate enough. If...
Continue readingIn our everyday lives we are in flight from space - space being something that we really don't want to know anything about. The thing about fleeing from space however is that we are at the same time fleeing from...
Continue readingIn order to have the satisfaction (or dissatisfaction, if it turns out that way) of knowing what we're doing, it is necessary for us to restrict ourselves to a particular version of reality that is being created by only paying...
Continue readingThe societal domain is one of unremitting superficiality. This is inevitably the case given that it is made up of a type of meaning that is entirely nominal (or entirely ‘extrinsic’), which is to say, the type of meaning where...
Continue readingThe ego can only ever operate under the shadow of fear. It has to operate under the shadow of fear - this is always, always. always the case. If the ego is behaving in a way that is assertive and...
Continue readingWhat Buddhists call ‘the truth of anatta’ (or ‘the truth of selflessness’) isn't something dismal or terrible, and it isn't something grey, insipid and impersonal either; that's just how we imagine selflessness to be from the point of view of...
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