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

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

True meditation is nothing but the cultivation of our capacity to deeply listen in this way.** Through listening—not with the ears but with our whole being—we arrive at a quiet inner knowing of what is right for us, which is not obtainable through any amount of thinking or discussing with others (though those activities can sometimes be valuable as

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.

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

Growth is natural for a healthy human being, but it doesn’t redress some fundamental deficiency. There is no such thing as a fundamental deficiency, despite what our prevailing cultural narrative says. Each person perfectly instantiates the version of personhood that they embody.

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.

You are perfectly human, right now. Your so-called flaws do not indicate unworthiness or deficiency any more than the dark spots on the moon indicate some kind of lunar unworthiness or deficiency. Everyone has flaws, and your unique set of flaws do not uniquely vitiate your value. Flaws are just part of being human. It’s how we’re supposed to be.