If I had chosen to live my idea of a normal life I would be uneducated, unemployed, and entirely dependent on a man who hates me. I would be living a miserable life. Since I chose to listen to, and learn from, Rohini, I have a great career working for one of the world’s leading rare book, manuscript, and 19th-century …
Clues….
When I was around 24 I had a dream that was so powerful, I knew it was real while I was having it. When I woke I knew I had no soul. My experience was that there was nothing inside me. There was no ground of being. Nothingness, emptiness. I was sure there was nothing there, I was a façade …
Becoming Human….
Are you a sinner? No. Is your proxy a sinner? Yes. Being truly normal is being truly human. We are made in God’s image, and we should act it. Stop thinking of God as a selfish being. We believe that, since we are made in God’s image and we are selfish, then God is, too. But to act as God …
Guest Blog by Johannes Wagner: Three Weeks at Rohini’s….
I knew many things about Rohini’s house long before I arrived – voices, faces, stories, certain parts of rooms. To be honest, I expected it to be more austere or in another way strictly ruled, which very nicely displayed a misunderstanding of mine. As it turned out, the only disappointing thing was seeing how small I had made myself internally. …
Conscious Non-resistance….
As a teenager in Boston, I participated in civil rights marches. These marches were silent and orderly, with large numbers of people coming together. Later, at Washington University, there had been protests, but these were more about venting anger than reaching resolution. After being present for some of those demonstrations, I realized what was going on and withdrew. Eventually, there …
Recent Questions….
People have all kinds of ideas about what spiritual practice is and isn’t, and even when they get an explanation they interpret what they hear or read in all sorts of ways, most of which are off the mark. In this blog post, I will be answering some questions that have recently arisen. If you read carefully, you might find …
Approaching the World….
No matter who we are, there are only four possible ways we can engage with the world: reacting, resonating, responding, and empathizing. Where we choose to land on this spectrum of action determines our degree of agency, and therefore our humanity. If I were to write nothing more than reactions to life, I would be showing you that I was …
Victimhood: the Way of the World….
This is going to be the final blog in this series. I want to address something that is going to be uncomfortable for many readers: attachment to victimhood. This subject can be raw, and it can trip a wire that may bother people who have not faced that attachment in themselves. It is crucial to recognize that I am using …
Drawing Out the Poison….
Hate is so mundane. Last week, I wrote that in order to hate we have to maintain the small self, and in order to maintain the small self we have to hate. Everyone has hate; everyone uses it and everyone is motivated by it. This hate is the first and most important distortion of Love. Everything we do comes from …
Respecting Lineage….
If we want to learn, we have to surrender to instruction. This holds true in any area, but never more so than in spiritual practice. When we submit to instruction, we have to willingly diminish our autonomy. By giving up our say, we climb out of the kiddie pool of shrunken ideas and plunge into the ocean of true knowledge. …