Orthoceras Fossil

I like rocks, or rather, I am endlessly fascinated by rocks. While many people simply walk over rocks, kick them out of the way, skip them over calm waters, I spend a lot of time looking at, reading about, and studying rocks.

In fact, I often carry them in my pockets, so they eventually end up getting bathed in my washing machine accidentally. But that’s ok, because one thing that strikes me over and over is that rocks don’t suffer. No dukkha of any kind for rocks!

Rocks go through amazing physical changes through heat, pressure, erosion, mixing with other rocks, having their atoms rearranged, being ground down by wind and rain, washed to sea, compacted back into new rock, sucked down into the earth, reheated, liquified, then changed again numerous times over in the course of a few billion years. Through all that, the rocks don’t care. Continue reading “Rocks Don’t Suffer . . . Animals with Consciousness Do” »

Accept life on its terms and it becomes a lot more interesting. Keep believing there is more, and you are on a chase for your own tail that takes you nowhere. Yet, many of us, possibly most of us, end up on spiritual journeys that take up years, sometimes decades of our lives. Continue reading “The Selfish Circle of the Spiritual Quest” »

I studied a lot about Buddhism, in various traditions, and one of the resounding and inarguable themes addresses the big A, attachment. There is resounding agreement that attachment is at the base of craving and causes suffering. The indisputable agreement on this topic stems from the fact that personal exploration proves that attachment causes craving and suffering, and the idea is repeated throughout most Buddhist’s text. Continue reading “Attached to Buddhism?” »

As humans we apply labels to everything. It’s a nifty little language tool that helps us identify objects in our world, and to communicate about them with others. Obviously we need labels for communication sake.

But when people start living through labeling, of themselves and others, problems arise. Continue reading “Living Through Labeling” »

Me as Arlyn Pleides

Lately in my practice, I have been mindful of the many roles I play in life, and how conceptual they are. I see where I have identified through them, and how this has lead to my own suffering, how easy it is to take them as solid and real. Continue reading “Roles We Play” »

When the Buddha spoke of not-self, he literally meant that we create what appears to be self but really is not self at all. We do this selfing in a variety of ways, and then we create identity for ourselves and call it me. Continue reading “The Many Me’s” »