Thought’s ‘cover story’ (i.e. its ‘excuse for being there’) is – obviously enough – that it is actually useful! That’s how thought gets to make such a major claim on our attention, by claiming to be of actual utility. ‘Think me, I’m useful!’ the thought…
There are no effective (long-term) strategies for anxiety. If we can’t understand the truth of this simple statement then – very clearly – we just don’t understand anxiety! If we can’t understand that strategies and techniques and ‘tools’ aren’t the way to go then this…
The intelligible universe is embedded in suchness, which is in its essence profoundly unintelligible. Suchness is not something that the analytic mind can ever hope to make sense of. It is because we cannot make sense of suchness that we have no time for it…
‘What you cling to you lose’, the Buddha is reported as saying (or ‘what you don’t let go of you lose‘, which comes to the same thing). “Aah,” we might reply in all our Western sophistication, “but if we’re not holding on to it then…
What creates a sense of identity is being trapped – as soon as we cease to be trapped, we lose our identity! As Jean Baudrillard says, “It’s always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.” This is…
When we meditate one of the things we come to see is that we are not our thinking mind. We come to see that this mind is just a tool or instrument that we can utilize if we want to, but that we aren’t obliged…
Where there is attachment there is unconsciousness. Attachment means that we hope for something good to happen, and at the same time we are watching out in case something bad happens. We’re on the look-out for the favourable outcome and we’re also on the look-out…
‘Doing something’ with our thinking so as to make it go away and stop troubling us is the same as ‘doing something with an issue so the issue will not be an issue any more’. Both of these endeavours have exactly zero chance of ever…
When it comes down to it, in practice, we find that it is a very hard thing to work in a helpful way with our thoughts. What almost always happens is that we either end up fighting (in a perfectly futile way) against our thinking,…
In each of us there is something that might be called the engine of automatic reacting. Another way to explain this ‘engine’ would be to say that it is ‘force of habit’. This would be the more usual way to talk about automatic reacting, but…