Why Do We Keep Logjamming Ourselves?

There’s a really weird thing that I’m sure you’ve noticed in others, not the least because you’ve probably said it more than a few times yourself. I have.

It’s this: “Oh, I’d really love to do X, but it’s so difficult.”

I’d love to find a life companion, but it’s so difficult. I’d love to meditate first thing in the morning, but it’s so difficult. I’d love to exhibit my art, but it’s so difficult.

It’s challenging. It’s a problem. It’s tricky. It’s hard. I’ve just gotta figure it out. Sort it out. Push through.

You might be right about your assessment, but first let’s look more closely, shall we? At this point, some might point to procrastination and then will go on to investigate theories that explain why people procrastinate. Others might turn to self-help books that promise to show you how to overcome these obstacles.

Reasonable enough both, but let’s look closer still before we follow those lines.

What if you really don’t love X? For years, you’ve been telling yourself that you love X or that you really want Y, but what if you really don’t? Perhaps what you’ve been telling yourself just isn’t true.

This may be a tough pill to swallow. Why? Because, no doubt, you’ve for the longest time been committed to the identity that’s bound up with loving pickleball or AI or effective altruism or meditation or bitcoin. And–let’s go deeper–because really surrendering that identity may feel like something inside you is dying; may feel like the death of someone.

The curious thing, though, is that if you’re really willing to sacrifice this particular ego, then you’ll discover a taste of genuine freedom. But to come to that discovery, you’ll first have to let go. To really let go. To prise your fingers off of it. To surrender to not knowing. And from the vantage point of the one who’s often said that he or she “loves X but it’s difficult,” that death may seem unbearable, that leap backward unfathomable.

It’s not. It’s really not.

In truth, it’s sweet. It’s an invitation to drop the unnecessary burden and to embrace genuine clarity.

Why genuine clarity? Because “on the other side” of that ego-constructed dilemma (“I love X, but it’s difficult”) is the actuality of love: “Oh, what I really love is now present in my experience, and, like any true Daoist, I don’t find myself resisting it at all. In fact, I very quietly go along with–flow with–the Way of things.”

Here, you haven’t “fished around for something new,” haven’t discovered “your purpose” or “your calling”; instead, you’ve dropped the confusion, the logjam, the ego-induced–and thus needless, entirely fictional–dilemma.

Honestly, it’s not as if “on the other side” everything is peachy keen. There are problems–but they’re met in stride and, as such, are hardly worth speaking of. In this sense, they feel less like obstacles and more like rocks you flow around. And the biggest thing is that “on the other side” there’s no refrain, no broken record, no wishes, no fantasies, and no excuses. It’s at once powerful, natural, and easy.

If you dare to ford this river, you’ll be met not with the abyss but with a big welcome. Trust me. No, trust yourself.

If Peace Is What I Am, Then Why Does It Seem To Come And Go?

It’s commonly said, in the nondual teaching, that peace is what I am. Then why does it seem as if it comes and goes?

In the question is contained your stand or central presumption: namely, that I am a finite mind for which peace comes and goes.

From your stand as the finite mind, you experience objective experiences coming and going: sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells; bodily sensations; and thoughts and feelings.

To take this stand just is to superimpose limitations–or forms–on all experiences. Accordingly, so long as you stand as the finite mind, just so long will it seem to you, the finite mind, as if peace is like any other object in the sense that it comes and goes. (If you keep looking through orange glasses, how can you not see an orangely-colored world?)

For this reason, you must “go back” and examine the presumption: am I the finite mind?

Begin with the realization that you’re that to which all experiences are appearing. Since that’s so, how can you be the mind?

To make this point stick, look more closely. When you stay only with your own experience of your own being, do you discover that it’s thinkable? No. That it’s capable of being felt (as an emotions is)? No. Then it can’t be subject to the limitations imposed by the finite mind.

Go one step further. Staying only with your experience of your own being, do you find that it can be disturbed or perturbed in any way? No.

This imperturbability, the inability to be disturbed, is what we call “abiding peace.”

Taking your stand as awareness, you recognize, immediately, that you’re abiding peace. All that remains is to gradually stabilize in and as awareness. Then will it be very clear to you that peace is what you are, that peace is all there is.

A Return To Religio

In Denying and Disclosing God, the late Catholic theologian Michael Buckley argues that it wasn’t “the new science” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that led to denying God’s existence and thus to the emergence of what, in his earlier book At the Origins of Modern Atheism, he terms “modern atheism.” Instead, it was the conscious effort, in the face of the “new science,” to ground God’s existence in natural theology, or philosophy, that slowly, dialectically passed over into its antithesis.

By a slow, corrosive process, God first became the universal Architect of a highly ordered natural world, only to later become “otiose” as nineteenth century debunkers declared that the universe no longer required such a hypothesis in order to account for the emergence of organic life out of inorganic matter or the coalescing of ornate, immanent design.

I could go on, but I’ll stop this line of historical thought here. It’s enough to say that, by perhaps the latter half of the twentieth century and certainly into the twenty-first century, atheism has slowly taken root in the Western world. To say that “atheism has slowly taken root” is not to imply that it defeated all the arguments in support of God’s existence, for that never happened. Nor is it to suggest that it’s impossible to find the Presence of God in one’s heart. Instead, it is to point to the very real facts of modernity: the “sacred canopy” of our shared life just ain’t there; the turn of the mundane world–the shops opening and closing, the daily tasks completed in succession…–places no emphasis on, and seems to have no room for, the Divine Light to be felt; in essence, the basic affairs of ordinary life seem to go on, many believe with their feet, without the intimate Presence pervading these undertakings. It’s really as if God we’re here, as if God were nowhere to be found.

By my lights, then, we’re left with just two basic options. One is to embrace nihilism–but nihilism cannot be wholeheartedly embraced. Consequently, ersatz concepts of meaning will continue to get “pumped out” one after another: some on the side of entertainment; others pushing “experiences”; others clamoring loudly for everyone to have “callings.” I don’t think this development is tenable. The emperor certainly has no clothes.

The other, which I endorse, is a return to religio: the binding or rebinding of the human to the Divine. While I’m a proponent of the nondual teaching, I’m open to all kinds of “conversions” or “changes of heart”: some might feel called to return to traditional Catholicism, some to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, some to Theravada Buddhism, some to a bhakti-style Hinduism, and so on.

Rene Guenon might have argued that the farther we are from the Source, the closer we are to a “new cycle” in which a return is made possible. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps at this very moment in time as atheism and nihilism gallop feverishly on, we’re close to a volta, a turn. The more home recedes, the more our hearts are bound to miss it. Hearing the call to come back, how can we not, as the sun approaches the horizon, turn our boots around and step steadily through the hard, crunching snow?

What Is Beyond Negative Emotions?

You find that you’re all caught up in agitation, anxiety, or restlessness.

Yet something is already afoot, isn’t it?

After all, you find that you’ve been caught up in some emotion or another. To find that this is the case is to be aware of being anxious or restless. You find, in other words, that you’ve been lost in a dream.

The discovery is not that you happen to be contingently aware of this emotion; it’s rather that you’re, in fact, whatever it is that is aware of this emotion, or that one, or, indeed, of any thought or sensation.

Investigate this matter. What is the nature of this awareness that’s aware of this emotion?

Drop the emotion, open to the awareness part, and relax gently “back” into the awareness that you are. What is this? What are you?

Drop all thoughts and just be.

The second discovery is that the nature of awareness is peace itself. It’s not that you’re “in” peace; it’s instead that you are peace.

The only reason that this experiential understanding seems to “wobble” is that another thought arises, a thought with which you seem (again) to be all tangled up. From the vantage point of this thought, the discovery that awareness is peace seems fleeting and therefore cannot be true.

To reveal that awareness is, indeed, abiding peace, simply retrace your steps, opening to the awareness that you always already are. Little by little, you’ll cease feeling that you’re visiting this place, and more and more it’ll be clear that you’re living in your permanent domicile.

The Fallacy Of The All-in-One Romantic Relationship

Why are there so many dating apps today?

And why has finding a romantic partnership become so “high stakes” in recent times?

In this video, I speak of just some of the historical conditions that have given rise to what I’m terming the “all-in-one romantic relationship.” Near the end, I touch upon the deep existential significance that I see: a mistaken soteriology.