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

Without the alignment of view, practice, and fruit, the spiritual path doesn’t accomplish anything of substance. For many people, that doesn’t really matter, since spirituality is basically a hobby for them, even if they wouldn’t say so.

yes, everything happens for a reason—and that reason is “everything

It’s possible to reach a point where there are either no self-images left or the ones that remain are so thoroughly enervated that one simply can’t be bothered to waste any energy on defending them. They become nothing more than inert thoughts floating on the ocean of consciousness like so much driftwood. With nothing left that needs justifying or

Acting on the basis of love is inherently nourishing.

(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

This inner wisdom inclines in one direction or another for the benefit of all beings, which is one key way it is different from the desires of the heart-mind, which usually tend to move toward what is beneficial for you personally. So, the inner wisdom won’t necessarily lead you toward what you most like or enjoy. (However, through spiritual practi

labeling a person (or even a place) as having “negative energy” is a way of avoiding responsibility for your own inner state. I would argue that shifting this paradigm is crucial for one’s spiritual life.

Embracing the whole of reality is an act of love that utterly transcends the mind-created dichotomy of right and wrong. We don’t need those labels to take beneficial action.

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