You are not reading a blog.
But the blog has taken over the Internet. In 2000, there were a few thousand blogs. As of 2021, there are around 600 million.
Before the blog, homepages had to be manually stitched together by people who knew how to code. As a result they were relatively unique and the authors came up with their own quirky ways of curating the things they thought most interesting.
Because we care, we choose to practice.
We yearn for peace, for genuine happiness. And so we come to the cushion and engage with the crux of our predicament: what does it mean to be here?
The feeling of being here is the gateway to all life’s vicissitudes, from the ever-shifting sensory landscape around us to our personal thoughts and emotions. It all arises right here.
We often neglect the fullness of presence in favour of a reliance on thought. But thought is only one small part of being here, and it tends to ride on the back of a lot of unconscious emotional conditioning that we pick up through parents, culture and complete accident.
It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, “Who are we?”
I have always been obsessed with the Big Picture. It’s why my most valued possessions are the years of notes I’ve gathered on everything from physics, to psychology, to psilocybin. They are my flags and reminders as to why the world I live in looks and acts as it does—my own take on higher education.
When you sit down to practice Vipassana meditation, you observe your moment to moment experience with the intention of seeing the three characteristics: anicca (impermanence, change), dukkha (unsatisfactoriness, suffering) and anatta (not-self).
More accurately, you are tuning into the 3Cs, as they are always already the case. This is not a philosophical exercise – the practice is to stay at the immediate sensate level of your experience, with a degree of mental calm that allows you to observe manifesting reality without getting caught up in it.