buddhism

Non-dual vision—rigpa—enlightenment—is the essence of ambiguity. It is the goal of the Buddhist path. To approach rigpa, we gradually abandon “reference points.” Those are our fixed ideas about ourselves, about others, and about the relationship between self and other.

Reality can’t be fixed, because it has no fundamental flaw. There’s just things we like, and things we don’t like, and ways we can respond to them.

I later realized that was a mistake. The power of the jhanas was not that they offered a temporary escape from our otherwise pallid lives — as we typically think of pleasurable vices — but that, with repeated practice, they somehow elevated my everyday life to be more jhana-like.

Some spiritual paths are supposed to get you close to God. I don’t like God, and want to stay as far away from him as I can. Some spiritual paths make you holy and serene. I would rather get sweaty and ecstatic.

If we take emptiness seriously, we must realize that we cannot use Buddhism to confirm our selves. There is never any way to be absolutely sure we have found the right lineage or teacher. We cannot rely on Buddhism to provide absolute certainty about anything other than the non-duality of form and emptiness.

Buddhism is pragmatic. It is a religion of methods , not of Truth. The methods are ways of approaching enlightenment.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson, classifies the jhanas as an “exotic state,” by which he means an unusual or extreme subjective experience whose properties might help us to reverse engineer consciousness. Just as black holes and plasma help us understand how matter works, jhanas or psychedelics could do the same for consciousness.

Christianity does not have yanas. It does have sects: Catholic, Baptist, Mennonite. So when Westerners first started trying to understand Buddhism, they assumed Buddhist yanas were sects. Mostly this confusion has persisted, and even many scholars still get this wrong.

“Attitude” is an interesting word. Attitudes cross the internal/external, subjective/objective boundary. An “attitude” may include an emotional or mental state; but it can also refer to a bodily posture. It may be defined as a tendency toward a particular action or response.

After we have experienced the first jhana, we have to do three things before we open our eyes. First is to recapitulate how we got there, because people have individual ways of doing it. Some get there through lovingkindness meditation, some through watching the breath, some through “sweeping,” or other methods. The second thing we have to do befor... See more