General Blog

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Have you ever tried talking with a religious zealot who calls at your door with the intention of trying to convert you? It can be a frustrating experience because the breadth and depth of the exchange is continually restricted by the beliefs of the visiting missionary. It’s impossible for the discussion to go very far, and soon you start [...]