Near Enemies of the Truth: Avoid the Pitfalls of the Spiritual Life and Become Radically Free

“Okay,” you might be thinking, “so the project of self-improvement is largely unrelated to the project of spiritual awakening, but it couldn’t possibly undermine the awakening process, could it?” Yes, it could. Let me explain. What exactly is this best version of themselves that people want to be? All too often, it’s a socially conditioned figment

However, if you glimpse that the spiritual journey inevitably unveils nothing less than the very reason for being, the truth of existence, the infinite majesty of your own innate divinity expressed in the whole of reality, you do not hesitate to walk the path presented to you in each moment. To truly follow your bliss means that you would willingly

With all my heart, I implore you to realize that judging, diagnosing, labeling, or pathologizing another person is not speaking your truth.

If you want to communicate and connect effectively, whenever you say, “I feel _______,” make sure you fill in the blank with an actual emotion, not a disguised evaluation of the other person’s

That feeling of rightness might be accompanied by some fear of the unknown because pratibhā often leads us beyond the domain of what we think we know. It’s normal to feel apprehensive when following the pull of pratibhā.

The third version of the practice of presence is the natural culmination of the first and second versions (when practiced over years). I refer to that extraordinary mode of being in which the three primary centers of embodied consciousness—head, heart, and low belly—are open and clear, free of resistance to whatever energy wants to flow through, an

A great German philosopher argued that humans are precisely those creatures who always have their past with them and are always living toward their future, and that it is awareness of mortality that gives human life meaning, an idea that classical Tantra also embraced.**

(That’s why Carl Sagan said, on his television show Cosmos, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”) So everything is the cause of everything. Including retroactively

A statement beginning with the word you (that is, an evaluation of a situation with a second-person subject), whether explicit or disguised, often presumes to characterize, label, or evaluate someone else’s actions or experience or perspective, which is not something we’re in a legitimate position to do (with the possible exception of a skilled men

So though one can certainly enter meditative states of total timelessness, there’s nothing particularly spiritual about ignoring the past and future in one’s everyday life.