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Perspective

Everything changes as the mind settles into reality. 

Everything changes as the mind settles into reality.

At the same time, nothing changes.

Of course - you wouldn’t expect this to be any other way by now surely?

Let’s look at them both.

On the one hand, of course it does. Everything changes. The whole programme running the experience, the behaviour is different. The system on which the software is running is changing from a belief in separation to the realisation of completeness, from fighting delusion to simply being.

But on the other hand, …

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Ten Ways



The human mind is a miraculous super power capable of extraordinary feats of imagination and creation.

Awesome. What’s not to love about that…?

Well, these powerful mental constructs, in the form of memories, fears, projections, anxieties, shame, insecurities and needs, can also disrupt and obscure the peace and pure potential of this present moment.

And all of them revolve around, are held and maintained, like planets around a sun, by this idea of self. The concept of who we are is like a spider a…

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Immersion

[extract from SANE, getting real with reality]

Who we are is not limited to this body and mind. In fact, the body and mind is an experience of perception, in the infinite field of awareness that we really are. With this understanding, the idea of an objective self becomes less and less believable. As we realise we are the space in which all appears, separation between self and other, between other and other begins to fade.

Hearing this can send us into a spin. After all, our entire lives so far ha…

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Learning the mind

The four stages of learning can be applied to any skill, task or competence. You might be familiar with them:
  • Unconscious incompetence - we don’t know that we don’t know
  • Conscious incompetence - we know that we don’t know
  • Conscious competence - we work at what we don’t know
  • Unconscious competence - we don’t have to think about knowing it
The question is whether they can be applied to the ultimate task of learning - the mind itself. Let’s have a look…

 1. Unconscious incompetenc…

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Troubled Genius

Creative prowess, towering intellect, the link with suffering and what to do about it…?

Pythagorus, Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Newton, Judy Garland, Robert Schumann, Lord Byron, Michelangelo, Winston Churchill, Sylvia Plath, Francis Crick….

The list of troubled geniuses goes on and on. And these are just the few who have made it through the suffering to expression and creating in recognised form… Far greater numbers, as we well know, are…

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Glass of poison anyone…? Anyone…?

It’s a well worn expression and attributed to pretty much every sage in the quotations book… ‘Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting our enemy to die.’

Dr Gabor Maté in his book, ‘When the Body Says No’ takes it a stage further with research showing again and again that resentment and the stress it causes are major factors in the occurrence of a wide range of diseases and of the toll those diseases take on the body.

The danger of this finding, as Dr Maté takes great care to point out is …

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The Secret to .....

At first, everything is an adventure.

There is so much to explore and see and listen to and do and make and learn and take apart and experience. You reach and crawl and pull yourself up and toddle, investigating your world, awed by the miracles of light and sound and texture around you.

Sometimes you cry and sometimes you laugh. Sometimes you are cross and sometimes you are not. Sometimes you are tired and you sleep and sometimes you are wide awake and ready for adventure. All of life is in you. T…

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The Game Of Life

There are two games taking place.

In the first game, the surface game, let's call it 'Drama', all the twists and turns of the game, all the other characters and events that provide such tension and excitement for the character only serve to make the character more absorbed in The Game.

In the second, hidden game (let's call this Realisation), the same characters and events have an entirely different function: to show that the character is not real, that The Game is not as it appears to be.

Like the…

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'Stress is just your thinking…’… so why can’t I change the thoughts?

An enormous liberation occurs the moment it is realised that reality is not an objective truth. That it changes in appearance, meaning, association, import with the perceiver.

This is huge.

Because up until that point it was believed that the world was exactly how it appeared. There was no space. Life was just a continual attempt to control, manage or deal with an objectively fixed reality.  Until one day, a teacher speaks in such a way that their words create a crack in the concrete and, through …

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Stress: approaching as simply as possible. But not too simply…

Today we begin our month long on-line course 'STRESS, getting real with challenge'. The challenge for me is how to do justice to such a multi-layered, enormous topic in 30 days.

Because understanding stress isn't as simple as telling ourselves 'it's just my thinking'.

There are stressors that  are humanity-wide (eg. violence, poverty, captivity, discrimination...). There are variables that which, when not right for the individual, can also create stress (eg. noise, temperature, stimulation, slee…

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