Truth Is All That Matters

It has been some time now …

It has been some time now since I've posted to this blog, mostly because there is so much to do in the way of practical maintenance of the material foundation of our work that little time is left for the work itself beyond the in-person and online meetings. Financial management, website maintenance and development, equipment maintenance, IRS filings, editing and publishing audio files, video files, editing and typesetting transcripts and so forth are all extremely time-consuming, but inescapable necessities with no one but Carla and I to do them.

And this is to say nothing of the thousands of wonderful emails I receive from people who express their gratitude, their progress in vichara, their problems, and their solutions. I read every single email, but I've only been able to reply to maybe ten percent of them. There are many, many more that I would love to answer, but just cannot find the time, and even the few replies that I manage to write are of use only to me and the individual person I reply to. I keep all the emails that I would like to answer in a folder, thinking that the time may come when I will be able to return to them and respond, but that never seems to happen. As I write this, the folder with unanswered emails contains 2,097 emails.

Truth is that all of these emails, and even my few responses, might be of great value to all of us if they were part of the public conversation, rather than private; if they were available to all rather than just to me and the writer. So I'm going to try something new here.

Our Work

We have been in this work for ten years now, and over that time much has changed in the way in which I speak about what I see.  From the beginning, when we started, I could see very clearly what I wanted to say, but I had no vocabulary apart from ideas from philosophy and mystical spirituality to use in communicating this that I see so clearly, and this vocabulary turns out to be too limited for the task of speaking of so simple a thing — strangely enough, I think this may actually be because of its obsession with limitlessness.  But over time, much of the spiritual and metaphysical idiom has fallen away from me, and I have come to see that there is no better way to speak of these matters than in plain English (or plain whatever language is your own).  Because of this, much of what I said in the past now seems obsolete and inadequate to me as an expression of what I actually see and wish to convey.  We have made no effort to remove this outdated material from the web, because we think it might be useful for some to see the process of evolution that has gradually shaped the way we speak about our work.

Look At Yourself

I want to invite you to enter into an ongoing conversation with us about the human predicament, its cause and its cure.  By human predicament I mean the fact that a creature with such promise as humanity should, in such a short time, bring itself to the actual brink of extinction as a result of the efforts of each and every one of us to follow the fear of individual extinction into an endless project of survival at any cost, to protect ourself, to save ourself, from life itself.