Month: December 2020
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Without Fixation, How Is It For You Right Now?
In yesterday’s post, I concluded: “Without being fixated on anything right now, how is it for you?” Our untrained minds are like untrained dogs. The moment we see or desire something we bolt after it and get all tussled up in it. Or the moment we see or feel something we run away as fast…
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Contentment Roams With The Ten Thousand Things
Blue Cliff Record number 6 has this as its punch line: after enlightenment, “every day is a good day.” For someone who experiences genuine contentment, a pandemic makes no difference. Zero difference. Nothing is added to or taken away from this contentment because nothing can be. Everything–dreams about what one will do, hopes about how…
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Trying To Be Somebody Is Not The Way
Tuning in, you see that most are trying to be somebody. Trying to be somebody, they manifest dis-ease. There are two parts: trying and somebody. Trying implies effortful struggle to become what one is not. This is not the Way. Struggle cannot be struggled through or out of. Struggle is struggle. Trying is a knot…
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Everyone Is A Metaphysician–But Most Are In The Closet
The New York Times Daily Briefing includes a sentence–a telling one–about the pecking order of vaccine recipients As the virus has spread, infectious-disease experts have gained a better understanding of who among the nation’s nearly 330 million residents is the most vulnerable: nursing home residents, people with underlying conditions, and lower-income communities. While I happen…
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Spiritual Bypass vs. Insight Porn
In Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark (2018), Robert Augustus Masters defines a shadow as “a storehouse for whatever in us” that, because it once “seriously conflicted with our survival needs” (104), has been “disowned, rejected, marginalized, or otherwise denied” (113). A simple example would be sexual adventuresomeness. If someone’s conditioning tended to favor…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 