A Profound Radiant Stillness

K2Love wrote in a comment: I haven’t found happiness while practicing being conscious either, but I assume it is because I am not really conscious and that I am mostly lost-in-thoughts during my daily routine. And, even when I am conscious to be aware of my consciousness, I am still in the realm of thoughts […]

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Sadhana 5

Sadhana is an activity that people do in order to become enlightened. Examples: meditation, japa (chanting mantras), Self-enquiry. People sometimes think that sadhana is a step-by-step activity that we learn from a book or guru. They think there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. They think the guru is a sort of […]

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Three simple answers

Alec wrote: I know there are no simple answers to the most difficult questions of life. I’m not so sure about that. How about: Look at things from the other person’s point of view. Be conscious. Yearn to know yourself.

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How to Stay Conscious 3

Alec wrote in a commment: I keep reading How to Stay Conscious 1 and some other articles of yours over and over as they have helped me to remain conscious. I am however not able abide in that state for more than a few minutes at a time. I thanked Alec for telling me that […]

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Ramana Maharshi 2

There are many books of Ramana’s dialogs; some report his words more faithfully than others. According to David Godman, the great scholar of Ramana’s life and works, Maharshi’s Gospel is among the more reliable ones. In Chapter III of that book we find the following dialog: Devotee: There are times when persons and things take […]

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Annamalai Swami 1

Annamalai Swami once said: In the same way, mind is just a self-inflicted area of darkness in which the light of the Self has been deliberately shut out. When you see this remark, which is quoted in the wonderful book Annamalai Swami: Final Talks, you have two choices. 1. You can think, “That’s poetry. I’m […]

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It is Always Now

Somebody wrote to me a few months ago about placing his attention on the Now. He thought this was very difficult but he had worked out a method for doing it, and he was optimistic that in the near future he would finally succeed in grasping the elusive Now. His method was based on his […]

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Is the Aware State a New Concept?

K2Love left this comment a day or two ago at the bottom of my article How to Stop Thoughts: I can’t thank you enough for writing and posting this clear and detailed article! I started to meditate several months ago and I had been looking for some tangible suggestions — not philosophies or quotes or […]

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Bask in the Sun

One way to think about meditation is that it’s like a cat basking in the sun.  Gradually our minds dissolve in the sunshine.  The sun does the work.  All we do is enjoy the warmth. The sunshine is consciousness or love.  The cat is the mind. The mind basks in consciousness or love, soaks in it, […]

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How to Stop Pain and Increase Energy Flow

In 2004 a man named Robert Harry Hover published a book that almost nobody has heard of called Internal Moving Healing. It describes a dirt-simple technique for stopping pain and promoting energy flow in the body. I tried it a few months ago on back pain that had hurt for years. After one session, the […]

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