Here’s another installment in a series of emails that took place between Michael and one of his senior students beginning the Summer of 2009. May you find the exchange interesting and enriching.

Here’s another installment in a series of emails that took place between Michael and one of his senior students beginning the Summer of 2009. May you find the exchange interesting and enriching.

September 1, 2010

Student: What is empathy?

Michael: An impersonal gift of seeing someone totally. We could also think of it as the opposite of greed.

Student: Makes sense. On another point, there are questions still surrounding what appears to be the separation between my experience and your experience. There is something that wants to make this separation the reality instead of seeing that it is an arising within one awareness that we share. So with that said, what is it that is stuck within experience that still sees you as apart from me?

Michael: Sounds like your small self is still fighting against the Big Self’s offering. This, of course, is understandable. Big Self is inviting the small self to recognize the fact that it is perpetually partial in its offering. Put simply, the ego hangs on to separation as a way of keeping its job.

The gift of non-separation that the Big Self sings means death to the small self’s priority, or, in Western terms, it is akin to ego death.

Student: The Big Self kills the small self?

Michael: No. There is no killing of anything as our awareness expands. We just begin to realize what is and what is not useful. We go past but bring along what we’ve always had in the same way that we’ve gone past our teenage and yet we bring it along in our experience as we mature. So we could say that the realization of the Big Self utterly diminishes the position of power that the small self has always known and has expected to maintain. And yet despite its newly diminished role, we bring the small self along as we deepen our practice.

Student: Something in me gets this intuitively but I can’t say that I understand what you’re saying. But the fact that I do not understand doesn’t negate or deny awareness.

Michael: Right. Awareness is beyond anything that you could ever consider “yours.”

Student: So I am before the “I” that thinks it understands. So who is left to want to understand what you’re saying?

Michael: Who, indeed. Awareness doesn’t want anything. Wanting can only arise from something that feels as if it is apart from the deep singularity.

Student: So this wanting comes from the mind, or the ego, or the small self that’s craving understanding?

Michael: Precisely.

In this evening’s Dharma talk, Michael presents his view on how the attention paid to the body and the breath offers us a path to an expanse beyond words. It is here we receive an invitation to the truth beyond name and form. The Holy, in other words, reveals itself in the mundane at this very moment of deep attention.

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Click on the player below, in order to listen to Michael’s talk.

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Click on the player below, in order to listen to Michael’s talk.
Get the most recent iTunes software and subscribe to this podcast from the Buddhist and/or Philosophy sections of the Religion & Spirituality list.
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In this talk, Michael asks the question: “What is it that you want from others?” In his explanation, he points out that if we find ourselves caught by the answers to this question, we discover that we are locked in suffering. The way out of this trap is to uncover our deepest sense of generosity and then express it fully in life.

ISmile240 - Being Generous [ 50:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (69)

Douglas Rushkoff writes a fascinating, and dare I say, important essay titled, Economics Is Not a Natural Science.

The marketplace in which most commerce takes place today is not a pre-existing condition of the universe. It’s not nature. It’s a game, with very particular rules, set in motion by real people with real purposes. That’s why it’s so amazing to me that scientists, and people calling themselves scientists, would propose to study the market as if it were some natural system — like the weather, or a coral reef.

Couple this stuff with Justin Fox’s recent, The Myth of the Rational Market, and you can join our EconoGeek Club.

But what does this have to do with spirituality, you ask? Everything. Looking at the footprints left by the Market’s random walk, and imbuing them God-like meaning can get in our way. The same thing applies when we attach to any of our traditions, making them special, or superior.

Our freedom arises out of our ability to let go of what we think we know.

Click on the player below, in order to listen to Michael’s talk.
Get the new iTunes software and subscribe to this podcast from the Buddhist and/or Philosophy sections of the Religion & Spirituality list.
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In this evening’s sitting, Michael reads Old Turtle and the Broken Truth by Douglas Wood. It’s an enjoyable story that, among other things, points out the spiritual hazards of ethnocentrism and how limited truth falls apart under the weight of Absolute Truth.

ISmile219 - Broken Truth, Whole Truth Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (41)

Click HERE, or on the player below, in order to listen to Michael’s talk.
Get the new iTunes software and subscribe to this podcast from the Buddhist and/or Philosophy sections of the Religion & Spirituality list.
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Where is the boundary between the finite and the Infinite; between the small self and a deep, abiding peace? In this podcast, Michael suggests ways to not only meet this boundary, but to practice a presence that can manifest in a way that has no boundary at all.

ISmile214 - The Boundary Between Self and Peace [ 23:15 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (25)

Click HERE, or on the player below, in order to listen to Michael’s talk.
Get the new iTunes software and subscribe to this podcast from the Buddhist and/or Philosophy sections of the Religion & Spirituality list.
____

In this podcast, Michael discusses the most primal of all addictions. The addiction to our sense of being a separate self defines what Buddhists call delusion. Our tendency to depend on our self-created stories about what is true and what is not true generates our suffering, according to Michael. But it is our ability to see through these stories that lets us uproot them at their source, thus allowing for us to be free of them. Freedom from our addictions to these various stories lets us source our behavior and activity from a place of depth and openness.

ISmile208 - Masters of Disaster Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (788)