We wear out the shoe of samsara by walking on it, says Chogyam Trungpa. This is a very radical statement and completely contrary to mainstream Western spirituality, it is contrary to how most of us would see ‘spirituality’ because ‘wearing out the shoe of samsara…
The continued existence of the self-concept is facilitated by the turning of the wheel of illusion. If that wheel didn’t turn, and didn’t keep on turning, then there could be no self. The identity needs illusion just like a fire needs fuel. The turning of…
Everybody’s interested in the short-cut, but no one’s interested in the ‘long-cut’. So what’s the ‘long-cut’, we might ask? What is it and why on earth should we be interested in it? It doesn’t sound particularly interesting after all. Who would want to go the…
‘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…
When we strain to change our situation (when we make the mental effort to control the way that things are) then we ‘separate the opposites’. When we don’t strain to change things, then the opposites remain unseparated. When the opposites are (apparently) separated then a…