“What changes as a result of meditation is not necessarily the speed and frequency of the thoughts that appear in our inner landscape, but rather our relationship with those thoughts.”

Spot on! With 5 years of daily meditation under my belt, I say thank you for the breath of fresh air! Too many people get discouraged by thinking that they are doing it wrong when their minds keep chattering. They will! And, you will hear them more as you are turning up the volume by actually paying attention to those thoughts! That’s the point!

If when you meditate you get overwhelmed by the frequency and intensity of the “monkey mind”, congratulations! You’re doing it right!

I’ve been getting lots of questions lately about dealing with sickness, in relation to the message I share on this site.

Some of the questions seem to be coming from confusion over the distinction I make between “what you are”, and “how to be.” I’d like to clear up some of that confusion.

As I’ve brought up before, it seems to me that we live in two realms simultaneously. The “how to be” realm and the “what you are” realm. It also seems to me that it’s possible to see the world through both of those lenses.

I’ve gotten some cool questions over the past few weeks though replies to my email updates from the site, the little question box near the bottom of the sidebar, and from social media sites. I made this short film to answer one of the frequent ones that seems central to the matter at hand.

Shot a brief video, off the cuff, to explain why I do the interviews with people who have woken up.

As I explain in the video I talk about this reasoning with the people I interview, but it’s usually in the pre-interview banter and it ends up on the cutting room floor. I realized it’s probably just as important for you to know as it is for the people I am interviewing, to set the right context.

Today I have another interview with people who have woken up. This one is with Paul Hedderman, of zenbitchslap.com.

Ramana said, “Anything that is not present in the deep sleep state, is not real.”

That has sat as a koan for me, for a long time.

I was stuck on the Vedanta conception of the three (or, four, or five, depending on what Vedanta tradition you want to look from) states of being – Waking, Dreaming & Deep Sleep which correlate to the Gross, Subtle, and Causal realms of existence.

Very excited today to kick off the interviews portion of this site!

Today’s interview is with Richard Lang, from headless.org. Please give a listen and then check out Richard’s site. You won’t be disappointed!

One of the biggest issues (it seems to me) that gums up the work for people’s pursuing awakening to what they really are is a confusion that stems, in my opinion, from the “what you are” vs the “how to be” distinction. It’s a combination of thinking that working on “how to be” will make a difference in “what we are” (hint: it won’t) and a sliver of guilt that comes from feeling that we are somehow shirking our duty by taking time away from “how to be” to look honestly into “what you are.”

Let me just say at the get-go that I am very much anti-reductionsim of any sort. I do not believe that reality is simply a matter of interacting and inter-reacting “things.” I do believe that is what happens on the gross physical level, but I also believe that lot of what is going on is affected by subtle energies and thoughts in the subtle realm, as well as fundamental direction and inclinations form the causal realm.