Mindfulness Isn’t A Tool
Meditation isn’t a tool, as we often say it is in the West. It isn’t a tool but rather it is that state in which we no longer see the relevance of using tools, or the need to do so. The meditative state is that…
Control
The Devices By Which We Are Ruled
Our basic sense of security in the world comes from the formula ‘If I do X then Y will happen’ and this – of course – equals control. If we control successfully then this gives rise to euphoria (which is the good feeling that I…
Subtler Than Thought
When we’re ‘thinking all the time’ this has the effect of making us fundamentally insincere – it makes us insincere with other people and it also makes us insincere with regards to life itself. It might seem a bit much to say this but when…
Too Much Self
What we succeed at can’t add anything to who we are, and what we fail at can’t take anything away. This said, why is it that we feel so great when we succeed and so very terrible when we fail? Why is it – indeed…
Everyone We Meet We Give A Gift
Ram Dass says that we give everyone we meet a present, whether we want to or not, and that this present is ‘ourselves as we really are’, so to speak. Our ‘inner state’ is the gift we can’t help giving everyone we meet We may…
The Hell of Pure Purposefulness
Ours is a purposeful culture, and this inevitably brings a whole raft of neurotic mental health ‘conditions’ in its wake, which we then attempt to solve in a purposeful manner! The irony is lost on us, however. Purposefulness is clearly a healthy part of…
Confirming Our Biases
There’s this thing we do called ‘living’ only it isn’t living – it’s ‘bias confirmation’, which is actually a travesty of living. How do we get away with this travesty, then? How do we wangle it so that we get to believe that we are…
At The Heart of Anxiety
At the heart of anxiety there are two conflicting things, two conflicting beliefs. One belief is that we absolutely have to be ‘in control’ in order to live well and the other belief is that (for whatever reason) we personally just aren’t able to be…
The Spectre Of Anxiety
Anxiety occurs as a result of the thinking mind projecting limits on everything and the thinking mind always projects limits on everything! This is what thinking is of course, thinking is that process whereby we impose limits or boundaries on the world – if…
Counterproductivity
The main difficulty with anxiety is that we generally try to solve it in ways that make the problem worse; we use exactly same approach that was responsible for generating the anxiety in the first place. The idea that there are some ways of tackling…