![Preview of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51TLO49t94L.jpg)
updated 12d ago
updated 12d ago
It often takes a moment or two for one’s reasons for being unhappy to come online.
Seeking, finding, maintaining, and safeguarding our well-being is the great project to which we all are devoted, whether or not we choose to think in these terms.
G. I. Gurdjieff
This emergence does not depend on a change of materials, for you and I are built of the same atoms as a fern or a ham sandwich. Instead, the birth of consciousness must be the result of organization: Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. This is undoubtedly one of the deepest my
... See moreAs Parfit says, “I want the person on Mars to be me in a specially intimate way in which no future person will ever be me. . . . What I fear will be missing is always missing. . . . Ordinary survival is about as bad as being destroyed and Replicated.”3 Here, Parfit does not mean “bad” in the sense that we should find these truths depressing. He is
... See moreMost of my time on retreat was extremely pleasant, but it seemed to me that I had merely been given the tools with which to contemplate the evidence of my nonenlightenment.
I was simply talking to my friend—about what, I don’t recall—and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself.
Unfortunately, to begin the practice of Dzogchen, it is generally necessary to meet a qualified teacher. There is a large literature on the topic, of course, and much of what I have written throughout this book represents my own effort to “point out” the nature of awareness.
In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.
I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being. It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering—fear, anger, shame—in an instant. At my level of practice, this freedom lasts only a few moments. But these moments can be repeated, and they can grow in duration. Punctuating ordinary experience in this way makes al
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