General Blog
12 – What Lies Between Good and Evil
My recent post (If You Need a Code of Ethics, You’re Not Awake) seems to rub up against a prevailing belief held by some that Awakening has no effect on behaviour – so a person will basically continue in their unconscious actions, but will simply have ‘detachment from them.’ To quote Leslie Read’s comment: ‘As long as [...]
11 – If You Need a Code of Ethics, You’re Not Awake
Bo: There was a video posted recently from a Science and Non-Duality conference; they were proposing that, because of the abuse that has gone on in the name of spirituality, there should be some sort of code of ethics for spiritual teachers. What did you think of it? Jez: My take on this is: My definition of what ‘awake’ means must be [...]
10 – Music from Beyond Personality
As a child I loved to draw and write stories; when I was about fifteen, another artistic passion entered my life. My brother had been taking guitar lessons at school and one day he brought the guitar home. I watched him strumming away to a songbook and asked what the shapes he was making with his fingers were. He told me they were called [...]
9 – If You’ve Had An Awakening, Does That Mean You Are Awakened?
It seems like every day there’s another revelation of abusive conduct within spiritual communities. This abuse from previously trusted gurus seems to happen in every tradition: Advaita, Devotional Hindu, Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism. The question naturally arises: If these gurus have Awakened, how can they act with such dishonesty, [...]
8 – Whatever Your Experience of Life Is Right Now, That Is the Starting Point
Like the lions in the eponymous book, man is born free. But the freedom this statement refers to is not dependant on habitat, wealth or social status; this freedom is of an inner nature. It is not defined by our circumstances in the world, this freedom is already the case. It is who we are. I call this freedom, in which we enter the [...]
7 – Is Christmas a Time of Love? What Does that Mean?
Christmas is often talked about as being ‘a time of Love’. It’s a nice, soothing belief for the Personality to hold onto at the end of each year. But if this is true – if these couple of weeks in December are a time when we try to bring forth the best in us – what does that tell us about our idea of what Love is? If it can be [...]
6 – Beyond Personality there Is No Idea that What You Are can be ‘Wrong’ or ‘Better.’
In these blogs I am sharing what I know. I am not sharing what I do. (I don’t think you would be very interested in that!) There is of course nothing wrong with sharing what you do, but like any activity, if we look closely at the motivation behind it, we can learn a lot about Personality. Many people use social media as a sort of [...]
5 – You Can’t Learn to Wake Up – This isn’t like a Course in Plumbing!
This is a teaching, but not all teachings are the same. There are different categories of teaching: The first category is simply the passing on of facts. That’s the easiest type of teaching to engage in; anyone with a functioning brain can put facts into their heads and store them. It’s not so much learning as memorisation. Then there’s [...]
4 – How Can Some Teachers of Awakening Be Capable of Abuse?
There’s a very basic misconception about Awakening: that it wipes out identification with Personality for good. An Awakening is a passing thing; it reveals the viewpoint beyond Personality, but only for the duration of the experience. When the Awakening passes, the Relative perspective is returned to, and that includes the arising of [...]
3 – Is It Possible to Become Enlightened?
The word ‘enlighten’ is burdened by misinformation, it’s been overlaid with all sorts of beliefs and projections, and this makes using it problematic. The general image of an enlightened person is of a guy sitting at the top of a mountain – it’s usually a guy – who’s reached a level of understanding that makes him almost superhuman. He’s [...]