Science and spirituality have something important in common: both center on the process of observation. In science, we observe nature in its concreteness and then move towards causes, abstract concepts, generalizing theories, experimental repetitions, mathematical descriptions, and statistical models. In spirituality, we too observe nature in its concreteness, and with similar curiosity, but we then move no further. Instead, we keep observing—the breath, the friend, the water flowing down … [Read more...]
What You Judge You Cannot Understand
As soon as you judge—say, a person's behavior, a political idea, or something that happened to you—you have cut yourself off from the well of understanding. For in order to understand, you need an open, observing, and questioning mind. What exactly is the person doing and why might he be acting that way? What exactly does the idea imply and where might its implementation lead to? What exactly happened and how might the event have come about? Judgments, by contrast, are closed assertions that … [Read more...]
Are You Experiencing or Experience-Chasing?
Let us read chapter forty-seven of the Tao Te Ching: Without opening your door, you may know the whole worldWithout looking out your window, you may see the way of the heavensThe farther you go, the less you knowThus the sage knows without travelingHe sees without lookingHe accomplishes without doing This is not what society tells us. Rather, what we are taught to believe is the exact opposite: that we must pursue events, culture, travel, adventure. There is always a way to expand our … [Read more...]
Catastrophizing Spiritual Teachings
For every job in the world, you will find competent and less competent people doing it. Spiritual teachers are no exception. What I particularly have in mind here are spiritual teachers who imitate the Freudians of previous generations by reducing the human psyche to a struggle of the ego that fanatically keeps building mechanisms to defend itself. Our common state, so their story goes, is one of suffering and absentmindedness. We live in pain and distraction, detached from our true nature, … [Read more...]
Political Eclecticism
In political discussions, I used to define myself as a centrist, and I did so because I thought that by not putting myself in obvious opposition to the people I talk to, I learn more about their honest opinions,a one-dimensional spectrum between left and right cannot adequately describe a phenomenon so complex as politics,my thinking would automatically be biased by tribalism were I to class myself as belonging to a specific political camp. Today, I prefer to describe myself as … [Read more...]
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