Silence is usually understood to be something negative, something empty, an absence of sound, of noises. This misunderstanding is prevalent because very few people have ever experienced silence. All that they have experienced in the name of silence is noiselessness. But silence is a totally different phenomenon. It is utterly positive. It is existential, it …
The Indian master Osho spent most of his life seeking an unshakeable truth, in every conceivable branch and nationality of psychology or science of philosophy, following the traces of a Path walked and illuminated by spiritual teachers throughout history, following their practices with his own practice, taking their experiences and making his own experience. His methods …
As there is a category of facts to which our senses are our best available but very imperfect guides, as there is a category of truths which we seek by the keen but still imperfect light of our reason, so according to the mystic, there is a category of more subtle truths, which surpass the …
The pattern for everything in life exists — within everything that exists. The strength of modern scientific process which seeks to name all things, giving them genus, order and phylum, or physical properties which can be described by the arc of an equation, carries its own limitations: by disconnecting one object from another, we gain …
A repeated word or phrase, spoken aloud or under one's breath, is a mantra — the thought and sounds made again and again, until the sound itself empties of sound, and the sense becomes empty of sense. The boundaries of the word are broken, and the meaning of it, revealed deep within the sound and beneath your …
Just as you move into the body with awareness to free yourself from it — to no longer identify so completely with the physical body that your Self is veiled — just so with awareness you can lean into your thoughts, become intimate with the ways in which your mind works. Seeing your thoughts …
A common misperception of meditative practice is that its goal is one of disowning the body. That becoming pure consciousness — of finding this "I" which is beyond the body — is a renunciation of the physical and the sensory. The deepest and broadest result of meditation is in fact the opposite. For the years …
The practices of meditation and asana, and even the practices of work and community with which I have been involved, have all been driven together in the force of this travel. As I understood it would be, at a knowing, if not thinking, level. It has not been a pilgrimage to empty tombs — a "temple-tour", …
into the well a silent pebble falls and finds a voice a body sinks; the body's echo climbs into the light who cast the stone whose is the well who waits for the reply? The poem stands without the 3rd stanza koan, and stands as well without 2nd stanza commentary. Just as meditation stands without …
I can't leave Auroville without making mention of its spiritual and physical heart, the Matrimandir… though at the same time I feel there is almost nothing I can say that does any justice to the vision behind it, the experience of the area around it, or the power of insight and meditation it brings one. …