For a person of unsoddened mind, unassaulted awareness, abandoning merit and evil, wakeful, There is no danger or fear -Translated by Thanissaro Bhukkhu Awareness and Release are really the same thing. As awareness grows, we become more and more aware of our patterns and conditioning, and this helps us let go. And as we let [...]

Have you ever experienced total peace, total flow? Have you felt complete inner Silence, feeling (not thinking) completely a part of your surroundings, when time has stopped or slowed down? Open up your senses. Meet perception half-way. Listen to the sounds around you right now. See if you can meet them half-way, so that there [...]

You are born. Some stuff happens in the middle. Then you die. “May I ask just one question?” put in one of the others. “In what manner should one live one’s daily life?” As though one were living for that single day, for that single hour. “How?” If you had only one hour to live, [...]

Kantilal Chokshi, my uncle, passed away on Wednesday June 23rd, just a few days after his 71st birthday. He loved me as a son when I was growing up. He had many challenges in his life, including health and financial problems, but he handled them with dignity and courage, and I will remember him as [...]

To free the mind from all conditioning, you must see the totality of it without thought. This is not a conundrum; experiment with it and you will see. Do you ever see anything without thought? Have you ever listened, looked, without bringing in this whole process of reaction? You will say that it is impossible [...]

As awakening deepens, I notice I have a number of favorite tools. They really are all the same—they all come down to noticing. But it can help to come at this from various angles. The tool I rely on the most is releasing. Because more often than not what is between me and Truth is [...]

(In a letter to a friend who asked about letting go and depression; personal references have been removed) Dear -, Depression is the opposite of love. Depression is rage turned inward. Depression is all our hard emotions we had in the past for which we were not fully present, turned inward. I understand how you [...]

I wrote this article about the inevitable collapse of world economies in mid-2009. However, as the US government stimulus took effect, there was increasing optimism and an article like this seemed untimely. Here it is now, slightly updated. I am not an economist and I have little interest in statistics. This is an instinctive view. [...]

I was flipping through Geneen Roth’s “Women Food and God” and was struck by a story she tells of running away. She was at a meditation retreat in the desert and couldn’t stand it and was frantically trying to rent a helicopter to get her out. I fully resemble that story—a few years ago I [...]

The truth that we are not what we take ourselves to be is glaringly and painfully obvious. The ego has no answer to this simple truth, but it does a have a typically effective solution: it just obliterates the question from our consciousness. This is why most of us go through life without facing up [...]