A central meaning of 'tantra' is wholeness/continuity. Tantra is a path of wholeness understanding wholeness, a vision integrating all visions. In the ancient cultures of Tibet, India, parts of southeast Asia and China, there flourished various wisdom traditions known as tantra. Today, tantra is sometimes associated with attempted mergings of spirituality and sex, but originally … Continue reading Tantra and Climate Change
To read the fully formatted PDF version, please click here. These verses are a recent arising, but they hint at contemplations that have flavoured my living for many years. As you explore with them, can you sense in the flow of your own experience, a quality of spacious hovering – scuba divers might equate this … Continue reading Mandala Offering in a Modern Key
1/9/18 Contemplating the awesomeness of surrendering into living. Life is a terminal condition. All living creatures die – 100% of them. I am living with metastatic cancer. In a week or so, I may have surgery to remove a cancerous left common iliac lymph node. There are no statistics to say that such a procedure … Continue reading Notes From The Cancer Ward
A philosophy of contemplative science can easily become a dense entanglement of language and concepts whereas a poetry of contemplative science can invite fresh ways of seeing. In this prose/verse I try to illumine some of my thinking about cognition and knowing. May the timbre of these thoughts quicken the edges and membranes we share. … Continue reading Edges, Membranes and Mystery
Samantabhadra appears as a mysterious presence in many Mahayana scriptures. Often referred to, but rarely appearing, he/she has an ephemeral quality – ubiquitous yet will-o-the-wisp – powerfully present yet difficult to define or meet with face to face. In the Tibetan Nyingma tradition, Samantabhadra is the name of the primordial Buddha. The same primordial buddha … Continue reading A Sadhana of Samantabhadra:the heart of Mahayana
In the immeasurable expanse of nature in process, In faith and trust and wonderment we give ourselves to this suchness, This seamless mystery of birthing and dying. A few months back, I received an e-mail from people in Brazil who are translating some of my writings into Portuguese. They were having difficulty with the word … Continue reading Translating Suchness
Click here to view the fully formatted article in PDF An object can always have a name. This designated thing sits in its space; sometimes a geographic space of physical linkage and relationship, sometimes an emotional or conceptual space; and we, from the perspective of our own place, can then name it. But what if … Continue reading Naming the Unnameable
Essential practice => a way of living that can be fruitfully applied in whatever situation or circumstance we find ourselves in. An 'essential practice' for the maturing of our humanness – what I have come to think of as a path of 'natural awakening' or 'contemplative science', or 'buddhadharma'– involves much more than practicing or … Continue reading Essential Practice
Changing the way we speak can encourage new dimensions of understanding. In the light of this, I'd like to invite some fresh thinking about what we mean when we use the words 'body' and 'mind'. Instead of treating them as nouns that describe seemingly familiar pre-existing objects, one being physical and the other non-physical, we … Continue reading Body/Brain/Mind/Community
Hovering, on the cusp of a new year, or should I say wobbling; It feels a bit yin-yang-ish, a bit black and whitish, though both black and white mutually embrace – a radically inclusive, utterly seamless whole. On one side, a card game where some bad dudes seem to hold all the trumps, – ecosystems … Continue reading New Look for Green Dharma Treasury
