Category: philosophical counseling

• March 23, 2024

  Contemplating The Screen And The Image Analogy

  Step 1: The First Noble Truth The closer you look at your experience, the clearer it is that you are regularly not entirely at ease.  You must look closely, however. If not, you’ll just think, “Well, this is the way things are.” Or you’ll think: “Everyone around me is like this.” Or you’ll think: “I’m generally peaceful…
• March 21, 2024

  What Is The Actual Nature Of My Experience?

  The Direct Path Teaching In Brief 1. All I ever know, or come into contact with, is my experience. 2. But what is the actual nature of my experience? 3a. Investigating certain beliefs about my experience reveals that they do not hold up when I stick with the actual experience itself. For instance, looking for “my…
• March 20, 2024

  What If Your Very Being Is Peace Itself?

  You have been searching for peace in objects. By “objects” here is meant, for instance, certain non-ordinary experiences, certain states, certain relationships, the fulfillment of certain desires, the achievement of certain actions, and so on. You’ve been searching for peace, in short, in whatever is “not-me” but is supposed to “complete me.” This search, in…
• March 19, 2024

  What Is The True Meaning Of ‘I Slept Well’?

  1. If someone were to ask you, “How did you sleep last night?,” you’d, in an instant and without any reflection, say, “I slept really well” or else “I slept terribly.” 2. If you said, “I slept terribly,” what could this mean? It would mean either (a) that you were awake in the waking state…
• March 15, 2024

  Meditation Without Practice: Part 1

  “Meditation is not something that we do. Whether we know it or not, it is what we are.” –Rupert Spira, The Transparency of Things: Contemplating The Nature of Experience It can seem as if what Rupert Spira has just written can’t possibly be true. In this post, I begin by sketching, in a very cursory…