The Opponent Relationship Is Not A Contest
What is combat, after all, but an intense relationship? Your opponent attempts to block and counter every strike you throw as well as...
Faith Is Different Than Beliefs
Where there is faith, there are fewer beliefs. We use beliefs to shore up opinions, rather than a relationship with the cosmos. Faith is...
Three States Of Water
Imagine that you’ve never been to Earth. You visit first in winter, where someone introduces you to water. From a glass, they pour...
Error Of Perception
Q: Are names and forms real? Ramana Maharshi: You won’t find them separate from [reality]. When you try to get at name...
Garden Teaches Us To Travel
If indifference to nature leads to the machine, the indifference of nature leads to the garden. All culture has the form of gardening:...
Sweeping My Heart
For me, a dark-skinned person of African descent, cleaning the temple as Zen practice felt inappropriate and uncomfortable when I was at...
The Self Is Not A Thing, But A Process
The body and the mind are constantly changing. Nothing in us is ever really the same from one moment to the next. Yet the self represents...
Pay Attention To A Sense Of Space
Whenever there is any grasping or aversion towards something, indeed whenever any hindrances are present, the mind is, to some degree or...
Turning Survival Inside Out
You know how people will lament when they say, “Time to get back to reality,” or “…yeah, but that’s not...
Three Levels Of Happiness
The Buddha talked about three different levels of happiness. The first is happiness that can come from pleasant sense experiences:...
Opening To Greater Life
Tell the [future generations] that something new is happening, a new vision, a new energy, a new sacred story is coming into being in the...
The Exquisite Risk
At any moment, if quiet enough and open enough, we can drop into the fabric of existence in which everything, even pain, has its vivid...