Blogs From A
Modern-Day Buddha
Systemic oppression is the main thing that gets in the way of freedom and truth. It’s important that any understanding of spirituality recognises this.
I talk briefly about this in this video and transcription, with my friend James.
One common misperception in Buddhism and spirituality is that the heart states are mental constructs that we create. But they are in fact inherently there in our hearts – they are the way that we connect with the outside world. It is the part of our being that receives and consolidates all the information we are receiving.
This is the description of the process that I went through specifically to experience Universal love, which opens us up to a way of being where we are just a container for the Universe to express itself through us, rather than something that is actively doing something.
What is interdependent origination I hear you ask?
Interdependent origination is the embodied insight that comes from full tantric enlightenment. Full tantric enlightenment comes from bringing awareness to every different aspect of experience in both your individual being and the collective experience.
I explain this in more detail here.
All that practice really is is a way to connect with ourselves or the world in a different way than how we normally operate in our lives. This is an overview of all the different types of practice.
These are the different parts of experience. Having disentangled them it is very easy for me to understand and identify the different bits with a huge amount of clarity.
A short post on how altered states of consciousness can change our perspective on life.
I have been asked a few times what it’s like going mad. What I went through was indescribable in the truest sense of the word – I know that even I have completely lost touch with how awful it was and I was the one who went through it. Communicating it to other people feels almost impossible. But this is my best shot.
Suffering is such an overused and under-specific term in spirituality. It can mean so many different things.
Fixating on what you think is bad and wrong, dictating how others should behave and having high expectations of how you think the world should be is not helpful for anyone.
The powers, which are discussed in a rather erratic way in traditional Buddhism are something that aren’t talked about very often these days, so I wanted to give my take on it.
There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about what dharma is and how it can be applied to the modern world.
I’ve really wanted to write more about what I mean when I talk about raising the consciousness and what I mean when I say I have shifted my experience primarily from my mind to my heart.
The subconscious creates the baseline of our experience. Things like how worthy we believe we are, how safe we feel, how much we feel loved, how much we trust ourselves and each other – these are all the things that we build our experience on.
If awareness is the timeless, spaceless light that connects us all from the outside, then the soul is the eternal, flowing darkness that connects us all from the inside.
I wanted to talk briefly about the second arrow of suffering.
I’ve only ever heard this described as an arrow as in a bow and arrow.I wanted to talk briefly about the second arrow of suffering.
I’ve only ever heard this described as an arrow as in a bow and arrow but I have a different understanding of it that I believe is more helpful.
These are some of the most complex and difficult parts of our experience to unlock.
As human animals so much of our safety, self-worth and social standing are wrapped up in these things but it is also where our life force comes from and our deepest connection with life.
This is intended as a poetic understanding of where we are as humanity and a story to help us process the enormity of the situation we are in as a collective.
I touched on this in a previous post, but I wanted to expand on how our inner and outer worlds interact and what the implications of this are for meditations, retreats and our wider lives.
Building on my previous post I feel like it’s useful to describe the part of experience that I call spaciousness, which I think sometimes gets confused with emptiness.
It’s possible to tune in to only this part of experience in meditation, in the same way that it is possible to tune in to only energetic sensations or only love, for example.
Emptiness is not a noun. It is not a thing in itself that can be seen or understood or ‘got’ in any way. It is an adjective that is used to describe our perspectives.
This post explores how we can also use concepts like richness and magic to cultivate similar experiences.
One of the things that has come out of my awakening is the embodied realisation that there is no single source of truth.
This is very important if we want to hold nuanced and mature spiritual beliefs.
The Brahma Viharas, or the divine abodes as they are translated in English, are used in Buddhism as a way of cultivating friendly mind-states.
They weren’t invented with Buddhism, rather they were used as a tool to aid in the process of individual enlightenment that the Buddha teaches.
I want to suggest a different way of approaching them, which helps us open to actually being more in our heart space.
A lot of people get confused and think that if they listen to enough talks or media, that will help them awaken or get the thing out of meditation that they are looking for.
The opposite can actually be true. This post explores how being present with the true of your reality is the only place that dharma can really be found.
No self can lead to an experience of emptiness. This is if we look at it from the mind and an individual point of view. Minds and bodies are inherently self-interested – they are our survival mechanisms and largely interested with keeping us healthy and alive, as individuals. If you take the self out of them, there is nothing left.
However, if we look at it from the point of view of either love or the collective human story, no self becomes about being part of a greater whole. We let go of our selfishness and give our experience generously to the collective.
Heart knowing is different to mind knowing, where our perceptions, ideas and constructs live. The knowing that exists in the heart doesn’t come from an evaluation or a weighing up or a judgement, it is just what we already know to be true. It is an innate knowing in that things that we have absorbed into our the core of our being over time – the things we have learnt to trust in by heart.
All spiritual quests seem to have a big question behind them. This is what became mine.
Emptiness is a term that is, as far as I have come across, universally misunderstood and confused. I have never heard it described clearly.
This is partially because it is used to describe more than one thing.
This blog post focuses on clarifying emptiness of meaning.
The middle way, in my experience, is choosing to show up with our hearts. It is the middle as in the centre – our hearts are our centres, physically and metaphorically.
People don’t know what the dharma or awakening is anymore. And this is what this post is about. This message feels so important for the world right now. Get ready because I’m not holding back on this one.
This blog post is about the subtle narcissism that creeps into almost all spiritual teachings. Before you check out and say, ‘that’s not me, I’m not a narcissist.’ This applies to all of us.
This is what I am most passionate about and ultimately, how I would like to change the world.
One of the terms that I have found can be the most misleading for people in Buddhism, is the concept of no self.
I wanted to clarify this and offer some tools for connecting with your true self.
I am aware that I have very little credibility and lots of people prefer to listen to old white guys with decades of experience. Thus, I have collated a list of those people who I trust.
I wanted to share my experiences and perceptions of ‘what counts’ as a moment of enlightenment and what the physiological experience of Buddhahood is like.
Welcome to my map of experience and awakening. Each row shows a different element and part of our experience.
We can use this to navigate experiencing total awakening. Or just finding happiness in life. Whatever works best for you.
One of the things that really strikes me about Buddhist retreats is how serious, joyless and unfocused they can be. It just feels like everyone is there to still on a cushion, with no particular clear purpose behind it. I believe that we need to be a bit more focused with why we are practising and what we hope the intended outcome to be.
An expression doesn’t have to be something that we physically do to the world. By using our creative minds, we can express ourselves while we are in meditation through imaginal practice. May contain scenes of a sexual nature.
I wanted to talk about awakening. In the Buddhist sense of the word, this means a non-attachment to things, but I have my own definition that I would like to share.
I wanted to write about the meaning of life, but first I need to tell you the secret to life. In order to do this I am going to use my favourite ever poem.
One of the most important aspects of my awakening has been balancing the masculine and feminine inside me and of my experience of the environment. This feels like one of the most fundamentally important messages that needs to be shared with the world right now.
I went through an intense awakening that unfolded over several years and culminated in a year of ploughing through an intense amount of suffering and chaos.
The culmination of this is that I have gone through a fundamental paradigm shift, where my lived experience is completely different to how it was before. I connect with the world primarily through my heart, rather than my mind.